I met  Marshall Toplansky, Wise Window founder, at the AIMRI conference on April 27. We both got there early and had a few minutes to chat, along with Greenbook blog’s Lenny Murphy.

I’ve posted elsewhere that Lenny moderated a panel I was on, where I argued that for measurement to be meaningful, the measures had to derive from an underlying framework, model or theory. That line of discussion never meets with much success. In fact, when interviewing leading listening researchers for Listen First! I led with a question about which theory, model or framework they used. No one said they used one, insisting on practicality.

But Marshall had news: he had just sold Wise Window to KPMG. Why? Because KPMG sees an opportunity – to measure business results using social measurement in a disciplined way. And that means having a framework, theory or model.

It’s time to move away from “beauty contest” metrics to those that reflect meaningful business performance. What will you do?

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Highlights:

• Privacy is not a one-size fits all proposition, yet this is the way it has been approached.
• There are 3 different mindsets towards privacy: “I’m in Control,” “Collect My Data, but with Integrity,” and “Protect my Privacy.”
• Each mindset has different turn-ons and turn-offs. People in the I’m in Control mindset treasure their ability to set preferences and conditions. Those in the “Collect My Data, but with Integrity” are turned off by those capabilities.
• Privacy policies can be tuned to each different mindset, making it possible for researchers to convey their practices in ways that resonate with all types of consumers.
• Tuning can be accomplished easily, using a segmentation wizard that assigns people to mindsets and then presents them with tailored content.

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- Charlie Rader, Digital Insights Tools Leader, Procter & Gamble
- Steve Rappaport, ARF Knowledge Solutions Director
- Andrew Jeavons, President, Survey Analytics

We explored a wide variety of topics including:

· What is SoLoMo? … . SoLoMo convergence and impact on brands … Measurement, Skills, and the Need for Frameworks and Theory … Implications of convergence for marketing and insight generation

Transcript is here, which includes slides and webinar video. Thanks to Dana Staley for posting.

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2. Social Media Monitoring is Not Research By Tom O’Brien (CMO) & David Rabjohns (CEO); MotiveQuest LLC...
3. Social Media Monitoring – A Brazilian View Tarcizio Silva is a Brazilian practitioner and authority on social...

Paul Mabray, CSO, Vintank

Startup Vintank created a new “varietal” in social media listening, focusing their company’s offerings exclusively on the wine industry. They aim to provide an integrated social commerce platform with listening at its center. A wine lover myself, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask Paul a few questions about their business, business model, social intelligence, commerce, measurement, social CRM and opportunities. Details of his company’s software and service levels are available here.

Steve: Vin Tank was new to me until recently, and is probably new to many of our readers. Tell us about the company.

Paul: VinTank is the wine industry’s predominant social listening and social CRM platform. We power over 4000 wine brands and listen to about 1 million to 1.5 million conversations a day. So far we have analyzed over 330 million conversations and profiled over 10.5 million social wine customers.

Steve: Many companies develop social media monitoring tools and market them to the general market. You took a different approach, which was to go vertical and market narrowly to the wine industry. What was the thinking behind the strategy?

Paul: We believe that listening to a category (especially an experiential one) yields better insights and really allows you to profile social customers based on their conversations. Wine is one of those categories. By doing so we get to push the envelope in social CRM which will be one of the future foundations of companies for customer service, marketing, BI, and more.

Steve: The wine industry is like many artisan or craft-based sectors, where there is a segment of big players with global portfolios and a large segment of many small, more local businesses. Where are you getting the most traction, and why?

Paul: Ironically on both ends of the spectrum. Small wineries want tight, intimate relationships with their customers and large brands want macro understanding to consumers they would never have access to. We provide this to both.

Steve: What are Vin Tank customers using your services and analytics for most commonly? Which services are emerging and becoming more important?

Paul: It falls into three categories: customer service, measuring results of earned media from campaigns, competitive analysis. In terms of social platforms there are only a handful that the wine industry is fully adopting. The two largest are Facebook and Twitter. However Yelp, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, Youtube, Flickr, and Linkedin are also very important. Up and comer’s for the wine industry include Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Steve: As popular as social listening, engagement and social CRM are, we’re still at an early stage. What do you think will increase adoption and the value social approaches have the potential to deliver?

Paul: I think one of the key mistakes people are making with social is trying to take commerce to social. Yes it works, but it is intrusive. However, by taking social to commerce you can build better context about your customer (direct and indirect). The customer is more in control than they have ever been in history and we have the ability to work with the unlimited information customers provide us through social media to do a better job servicing them. Even as we talk about how SCRM is still early stages, I think basic CRM is still nascent. As I like to say CRM is not a tool, it is a culture. Once companies understand this, social listening, social engagement, and social CRM will be a rudimentary exercise.

Steve: Anything else you’d like to comment on or add?

Paul: I think we are all still used to the days of push marketing. As our BOA member and good friend says: Content will be the future of advertising, people distributing and creating content for your brand will be the barometer of your advertising success. Barry Schuler – former CEO AOL/Time Warner/CEO Meteor Vineyards

Social media has empowered customers like never before in history. If your company does not have a customer centric strategy, you are not in tune with the new reality.

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Tarcizio Silva

Tarcizio Silva is a Brazilian practitioner and authority on social media monitoring and listening, organizer of several e-books and a curator of the upcoming conference, Social Media Brazil.  We recently had an email conversation that touched on several topics of interest to all listeners – basic knowledge, communication, engagement and financial metrics, and movements towards establishing listening as a discipline.

Steve: Your e-book -To Understand Social Media Monitoring published this past January. What are the trends and key business issues contributors discuss in the book?

Tarcizio: The e-book, which was released in January, is part of a collective series of  publications on Internet and Social Media. Throughout the articles, the authors attempted to define the 22 main topics and questions for the reader to obtain a basic knowledge of social media monitoring. Among these topics are: Information; ROI, Sentiment Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Classification, Softwares, Public Opinion, Convergence and many others.

We achieved the goal of introducing beginners to the subject matter and to bring further discussions. To Understand Social Media Monitoring (Para Entender o Monitoramento de Mídias Sociais) is the first Brazilian publication entirely focused on the subject and distributed free, with a creative commons license, so I think it is a good contribution to the market.

Steve: What is your view on social media metrics? Which ones are helpful? Where is improvement needed?

Tarcizio: There is yet a great confusion regarding the definition of metrics for social media. You can tell by the market, both the Brazilian and international, that there are dozens of methodologies that were proven effective for some needs, but there is little standardization. Actually, I think that each agency should produce their own methodologies, but from universally accepted criteria.

Particularly, I find it interesting to establish metrics for communication and financial metrics. Three groups of metrics of communication are basic for a good social media monitoring aimed at analysis and performance optimization. The first, Reach, is also the one most valued by brands accustomed with traditional media metrics. The total number of people actually or potentially reached by the messages is important to understand how the brand can achieve touch points with consumers.

Engagement allows us to assess what is driving the actions of audience interaction and fans. Through engagement metrics, you can optimize content, know better the audience. Sentiment metrics, coupled with good classification and tagging planning, makes possible to identify how aspects, products, stages of communication and stages of sale are performing. The sentiment analysis has been the bastion of social media monitoring and is used until its exhaustion, but it is still essential when associated with intelligence information.

The financial metrics are more varied, but you must set them in an integrated manner with those responsible for the business, sales teams, customer service, HR, knowledge management, BI etc…

I think that more than the metrics improvement, we need better professionals and their ability to develop and apply qualitative methodologies. And this involves the understanding that social media monitoring is not a new and isolated discipline, on the contrary, it is related and should be better integrated with the marketing research, competitive intelligence and business.

Steve: How are companies learning to run and use social media monitoring research? 

Tarcizio: In previous years, much has been accomplished through initiatives based on international benchmarking and some market innovations. However, insofar as the market for social media marketing grew, companies and developers began to emerge and specialize. Some of them started to produce corporative content to help develop the market and today we can say that the Brazilian social media agencies and tools can compete on equal footing with the American and European agencies. In fact, some are in the process of internationalization.

In the more strictly educational area, it is a trend to launch courses and disciplines of high level in several colleges and universities nationwide. Examples to support this are extension and postgraduate courses at FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas) and ESPM (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing), two of the leading business schools in the country, designed by professionals and researchers as Nino Carvalho (@ninocarvalho) and Martha Gabriel (@marthagabriel).

Very recently some initiatives are noteworthy. One is the Social Media Cycle Project, created by a Brazilian software/tool, which aims to establish methodologies for the area, especially social media monitoring. This project is producing the first Brazilian event totally focused on monitoring and metrics, the Call2Social, which happens on April 20. Events already established, such as Social Media Brazil, also present focus on monitoring and measuring this year. Another good news is the future establishment of a social media monitoring committee on ABRADI, the Brazilian association of digital agencies.

Steve: Tarcizio, thank you. This was a fascinating conversation and I look forward to more exchanges.

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Here are three of the best lists that recommend Listen First:

• Neil Gilliatt, Net-Savvy Executive, “The Social Media Analyst’s Bookshelf“
• KD Paine, The Measurement Standard, “The Measurement Standard Summer Reading List: 5 Measurement Books You Could, Sure, Take to the Beach
• Tarcizio Silva, 12 Social Media Books to Read in 2012, Part 4. (In Portugese, use Google Translate; many of the books are US)

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1. What concerns people about having their conversations collected?
2. Which practices do people consider ethical or not ethical?

Answering these questions empirically provides data that moves industry conversation from concepts and legal considerations to understanding the positions people hold towards data collection. Knowing that gives us a scientific basis to develop collection practices that enable us researchers to continue gathering data while respecting and protecting consumer’s interests.

To pursue these questions, I designed and fielded a study for consumers with two collaborators, Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz, a researcher interested in ethics and creator of an experimental method for uncovering people’s mindsets towards products, services, people, issues and experiences, and Tom Woodnutt, who runs UK-based social media consultancy Conversations Strategist, and for many years associated with Hall & Partners.

Here’s what we did:

• Designed the study using the methodology of Rule Developing Experimentation, which is built into a survey product called IdeaMap.
• IdeaMap exposes survey takers to scenarios constructed of statements or elements. For this study, the statements were derived by deconstructing the research guidelines and privacy policies of market research societies/associations, governments, and market research companies. By doing this, our research reflects the practices that are codified today, not ones that might be nice-to-have or that reflect an agenda for change. That can come in a succeeding study.
• Fielded the consumer study on April 2 and closed fielding on April 3, as response quota was reached.
• Processed the consumer data, which will be available for analysis on or before April 6.

The consumer data will be analyzed shortly. Preliminary results will be presented at the AIMRI conference in NY City on April 27.

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May 8, 2012

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium returns to NYC on May 8, 2012. This edition focuses on “what your customers are thinking, tweeting, blogging or posting.”

I had the opportunity, once again, to pose a few questions to Seth Grimes, the organizer and well known text- and sentiment analysis authority.  Here they are:

These conferences keep growing. Have the topics and audience changed? How?

Seth> The symposium has grown quite nicely. That’s a testament to great speakers, a hot topic, and an engaged community. The symposium has grown because the business value of sentiment is clear and because we’ve been able to make the case that the symposium is the place to learn and network.

To recap: The baseline is that a) the attitudes, opinions, and emotions that people express, whether online/on-social or in enterprise interactions, have immediate business implications, and b) sentiment matters for marketing and market research, customer engagement, financial markets, and in meeting a slew of other needs.

We’re devoting more sessions to business applications and adopter experiences, and we’re doing a better job cross-pollinating the agency, marketing, media, and analytics worlds. We’re also looking at innovative methods, not just natural-language processing but also crowd-sourcing and ways to bridge from social and online sentiment to behavior models, profiles, and transactional records.

We’ve built a solid business audience and attract strong technologist and researcher representation. We’re starting to get more of the finance crowd. It’s a great mix.

How are companies using sentiment analysis to grow their businesses?

Seth> First step is to monitor and measure your online and on-social presence, including how the market views your (and your competitors’) brands. Your goal is to contain risk, boost loyalty and reach, and discover opportunity.

Beyond the basics, you want to get down to a “feature” level. What do customers (and prospects and influencers) think about particular aspects of your products and services? Elements include price, quality, value, and also, taking a hotel as an example, cleanliness, noise, location, room size, and potentially dozens of other factors. You can’t list all the potential factors in a survey; you have to listen to the customers’ own voices, wherever they’re expressed. This feature-level analysis will help you identify and fix problems, to improve customer experience and messaging. It will help you understand how your products, services, and image are perceived. It will help you build competitive advantage.

Link sentiment to customer profiles and transactional records to take the process a step further, into the realm of predictive analytics, where sentiment is used to model and forecast intent and behavior. Better targeting means happier, more profitable customers.

What new knowledge will attendees take away and be able to apply?

Seth > I’ll keep my response to 3 key points:

1) An understanding how to benefit from state-of-the-art methods and solutions.

2) Ideas and guidance on (better) integrating sentiment into audience-measurement, CRM, marketing, customer service, and media initiatives.

3) A sense of the opportunities (and risks) — current day and emerging — and how best to win advantage.

Steve, thanks for the opportunity to respond to these questions, and it’ll be great to see you moderating again at the May 8 symposium.

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Details to follow.

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