WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com Next Generation Social Media Monitoring: Canadian Technology Solves The Social Media Riddle For Retailers WHITEPAPER Document produced by InfoTrellis Inc. and Missing Links Insights Ltd. September/October 2013 1|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com Why is social media important? The world of marketing has significantly shifted over the last five years, both as it relates to understanding the customer and as it relates to advertising and promotion best practices. Traditionally, companies used market research reports, internally conducted research, customer surveys, and focus groups to understand what their customers liked or disliked, how they reacted to brands, products, and promotions, and what demand there was for new potential brands and products. To promote or advertise, companies largely used channels like TV, radio, catalogs, posters, flyers or email advertisements to deliver their message. In the last few years new approaches have become possible with which to both understand the customer and to reach them with promotional materials. These changes are due to the widespread adoption of social media channels, platforms ranging from Twitter to Facebook to Pinterest which allow customers to exchange information and to communicate with each other or with retailers in real time. The same channels can be used by retailers; they can monitor what customers talk about and how they talk about it, both related to their own brands and products and related to their competitors’. This gives retailers insight into customer preference and sentiment with a speed and frankness which was not possible a few years ago. Over 80% of North American consumers use some kind of social media input for purchase decisions. Retailers can no longer afford not to monitor what customers are saying. Studies have shown that many customers today actually expect retailers to be monitoring social media. Rather than call customer service, they put their questions or concerns on social media channels and expect retailers to be pro-active and react, often in as little time as a matter of hours. In addition to monitoring and communicating, social media is a powerful promotional channel. Research suggests that social media lead conversion rates are 13% higher than traditional marketing conversion rates. Companies themselves are reporting in increasing numbers that Twitter and Facebook directly generate leads and sales for them. As a result, retailers who do not carefully monitor, learn from and use social media promotion is at high risk of lagging behind. The 2013 – 2015 period will show a very significant shift: adoption rates of social media strategy among retailers will grow, and these companies that start to listen and to communicate with their customers online will stand to benefit from increased visibility and positive brand recognition. As more companies become adept at social media connectivity, those that are slower to incorporate social media into their overall strategy may see a significant drop in sales and customer loyalty. 2|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com What are the different social media channels and what role do they play? Channel Twitter Facebook Google+ Pinterest Tumblr LinkedIn Others Key Features (users, profile) Short messages (140 characters or less); very fast reaction; messages can spread very quickly due to easy re-tweets; customers often use twitter as a substitute for customer service; people will often use Twitter to subscribe to strangers like celebrities, comedians, or pundits Status updates; photo albums; tagging of friends; “like” button to subscribe to pages or show approval for individual posts; share button to repost and spread links; used to connect to people primarily known in real life relationships like family and friends; usernames tend to be peoples’ real names Is not self-contained – interacts with all other Google products and services; stream that displays updates from followed users; “circles” that allow grouping of friends; video and audio chat functionality; “like” button represented as “+1”; requires users to use their real name Focused on images; image collecting and sharing; feed of new images from people a user follows; images can be sorted by hobby, event, interest, etc; can “re-pin” someone else’s image to your board; can “like” an image; also supports video sharing. Microblogging; like Twitter, intended for shorter posts; not limited by character length; can post images, text, video, audio; very frequently used reblog button Targeted at professionals; contains resume; shows job experience; has a job board type functionality for jobseekers and employers; people link to colleagues and business associates; features a “like” button for individual posts; allows users to subscribe to company pages and other users; users can “endorse” another user’s specific business skill, which accumulate on a user’s profile; features interest-based groups; requires users to use their real names Wordpress and other blog hosting sites Reddit : News sharing MySpace: Pre-Facebook, similar Comments Twitter is a public social media channel used by over 500 million users. Due to the large number of tweets per day (nearly 60 million), many of which have no relevance to retailers, it requires advanced technology to extract all the relevant information and to exclude the noise. Twitter is the most “Social Media analytics friendly” channel Facebook is a social media channel that experienced massive growth in the last decade and has over 1 billion users – it features banner ads on the sides of the screen but also can promote corporate content into a user’s main feed, which they see when they login on the home page. Because people tend to have close friends and family on Facebook, often they will use it to solicit advice on an upcoming purchase decision Slower growth than Facebook but has reached 500 million users as of 2013. Having lots of Google+ followers boosts SEO for Google search engine. Similar to Facebook in functionality but is more connected to a user’s other internet usage, such as YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, etc. G+ appeals to more mature users than Facebook but is less formal than LinkedIn. Pinterest users are about 70% women; popular topics include cars, fashion, food, travel and design. Pinterest drives sales primarily for the retail industry and has demonstrated conversion effectiveness equal to or greater than bigger platforms like Facebook etc. Tumblr tends to be less about the user’s personal life and more about hobbies and interests; some users, rather than generate content, use the “reblog” function to collect content they enjoyed onto their dashboard, allowing other users to scroll through and see their collection of reblogged items, which may or may not be of their own creation. This platform is often used to talk about pop culture and entertainment, but also covers things like politics and activism – things can spread very fast if they evoke strong emotion like anger or delight. LinkedIn is a highly professional networking platform that also functions as a hiring and job seeking platform. It has a higher lead conversion rate and a user’s connections on LinkedIn will often be very different from their connections on platforms like Facebook or Twitter because the emphasis is on professional and not personal relationships. Has 225 million users, is smaller and more targeted than Facebook. Instagram & Flickr: Photos DeviantArt: Artist networking Other small niche networks catering to specific interests 3|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com What and how can we learn from Twitter? First we begin with a brief overview of terminology specific to Twitter. Tweet: Twitter is a platform for publishing posts that are under 140 characters of text; this is also known as “microblogging”. One of these single posts is called a Tweet. When a user Tweets something, it appears both on their twitter account (or “timeline”) and in the subscription feed of those users who follow them. All Tweets are publicly accessible unless a user changes their privacy settings. Username or Handle: When a person or company signs up for Twitter, they select a username. Anywhere that a username appears on Twitter, it will be preceded by the “@” symbol to indicate that the following characters represent a user. This is the same for both corporate accounts and personal accounts. Example: @HoltRenfrew is a username, Holt Renfrew is not. When someone posts a Tweet that contains a username, as demarcated by the “@” symbol, the owner of that account is notified by Twitter that someone has mentioned them. This is an easy way for a retailer with a corporate account to monitor Tweets that mention or are directed at their corporate account. It is important to point out, however, that as in the example above, “@HoltRenfrew”, which uses the “@” symbol and references an actual Twitter account, will trigger a default Twitter notification, where the plain text “Holt Renfrew” will not trigger any sort of notification. Follower: By “following” a Twitter user (this can be anybody from a corporate Twitter account to a celebrity to a close friend) you subscribe to any Tweets they post in the future. If somebody is your follower, it means all your Tweets appear in a live feed on their Twitter home page or application along with the Tweets of the other users they follow. A user’s number of followers is a useful and easy to find metric which indicates how many people have subscribed to see the content that user posts. Retweet or RT: If a Twitter user encounters a Tweet by another user they find noteworthy, they may choose to Retweet the message. This reposts it on their own timeline while identifying the original author, and will cause it to appear in the subscription feeds of their followers. When a person or company posts a message, Retweets can allow it to reach a significantly broader audience by passing it through the network of its followers, such that a person that does not follow the original author of the Tweet may be exposed to the Tweet via one or many intermediaries who felt the message worth passing on. Opinion Leaders: Some users have a large number of followers and are Retweeted often; those who tend to Tweet about specific subjects in particular tend to be regarded as having greater expertise, but influential users need only a large, devoted following to have an impact. Some examples of opinion leaders in the retail space include celebrities, fashion magazines, and prolific blog authors. 4|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com It is very beneficial for retailers to have good relationships with opinion leaders, as opinion leaders by definition have a very large follower base. If an opinion leader retweets a message from a retailer it can exponentially increase the reach of that tweet. (The number of opinion leaders following a company is a very useful metric – but to get this metric a Social Media monitoring tool is required) With this understanding, we can assert that if a person or company wants to achieve the broadest possible reach with their Twitter marketing messages, they should focus on:  Maximizing the number of their followers and  Developing good relationships with opinion leaders, to ensure that they retweet their messages Before we review what we can learn from Twitter, we need to discuss who we are learning from. We can identify three large groups as it relates to Twitter activities: Group Corporate (retailer) Twitter Account Description This is the twitter account of a retailer. A retailer can use it to share news about products, promotions etc. A retailer can also use it for customer service by responding to customer concerns. Opinion Leader Accounts Opinion leaders are important, as they are followed by many Twitter users and have the power to influence their opinions and reach many with just one Tweet. Casual User Accounts Individual accounts belonging to casual users who are not opinion leaders but may be following opinion leaders. Comments A simple view of corporate Twitter activities can be achieved by anybody; Twitter is free to access and participate in. Metrics like topic trending, sentiment monitoring, and changes over time require more advanced tools than Twitter’s default interface. Many leading organization actually have multiple accounts, with one dedicated specifically to customer service. (e.g. @Username vs @Username_Support) Social media monitoring tools can easily identify activities of opinion leaders, as long as they mention the company account using the @Username format. If the “@” sign is not used and the company name just mentioned in passing as part of discussion, more advanced tools are required to identify when an opinion leader is talking about the company. Social media monitoring tools can easily identify activities of casual users, as long as they mention the company account using the @Username format. If the “@” sign is not used and the company name just mentioned in passing as part of discussion, more advanced tools are required to identify when a casual user is talking about the company. 5|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com The following table summarizes some of the insights we can gain: What can we learn? How much discussion of the company is there on social media? What topics do the company’s customers or target markets talk about? What is the reaction to marketing campaigns? Who are the opinion leaders? What sentiments do consumers express about the company? How The simplest way is to track mentions of the company handle using the format @Username; these mentions will appear on the standard Twitter profile page of an account. Achieving a more advanced view (capturing discussions about the company without Twitter’s @Username flagging, or sorting by opinion leader vs. casual user) requires more advanced tools. Understanding what product categories or brands customers talk about and how those topics change day to day, week to week or month to month gives insight to what is important to customers. Examination of topics over time related to the retailer can reflect seasonal patterns or indicate noteworthy instances of change in a specific time period. Identification of local trends (by looking at where people are talking) can add further detail. Retailers can measure the results of their campaign both in real time to tweak their approach and retrospectively to help gather metrics on success. Real time monitoring allows retails to react fast if those results are not aligned with their expectations. Measuring the number of followers a user has is valuable for indicating a possible opinion leader, but a strong monitoring tool also incorporates more sophisticated grading. Some tools, like Klout, offer a less focused social media influence score. Consumers do not just talk about topics, but they also often express likes or dislikes. Twitter does not come with any inherent measure of positive or negative sentiment, but many social media analytics tools come with build in sentiment analysis that uses technologies like natural language processing to determine where a Tweet lies on a scale of positive, neutral, or negative. What is the profile of opinion leaders? Detailed leader profiling is offered only by very few advanced social media monitoring tools. The impact of such an understanding can be significant but is difficult to accomplish. What are the activities of competitors? Tracking the above metrics for the market of a competing retailer allows the advantage of learning from their mistakes or successes without any risk. A social media monitoring tool is needed to do this comprehensively. Comments In many cases users refer to companies without using the standard twitter handle (“@Username”). Filtering out the relevant mentions can be very challenging; for example, the recording artist “Gucci Mane” has nothing to do with the Gucci Brand, and “The Bay” could refer to the retailer or to the San Francisco Bay Area. Most social media analytics tools do not provide a broad list of topics and topics categories. Having a predefined (and, ideally, easy to customize) list can make identification of trending topics fast and insightful. Customers react very quickly to marketing campaigns. The reaction (or lack of it) can allow companies to adjust their campaign as soon as hours after it has started, which helps to ensure an optimal outcome. Opinion leaders are an important part of the Twitter ecosystem and how a message spreads. Companies can benefit significantly by having good relationships with a large number of opinion leaders Sentiment analysis can add great additional insights to topics and topics trends, offering a way to compare overall perception between a company and its competitors, different brands, and different products. Retailers may want to identify opinion leaders with negative sentiment, as they can easily spread a dislike of a company to their followers. Targeted communication can lead to a positive boost in sentiment. Building a relationship with opinion leaders is made easier by understanding what the opinion leader is interested in or passionate about. Understanding, for example, that a fashion commentator is also interested in golf and that she has two teenaged daughters can enable a better connection. The learning gained about competitors can lead to clearly measurable improvements or savings. 6|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com What are some of the challenges related to using social media analytics? Tweets to the company username vs. all tweets: While some of the social activity related to a retailer makes direct reference to the Twitter account of the retailer, the majority of discussions about a company must be actively collected, not passively observed. Most comments about a company, product, or service do not reference the Twitter handle (“@Username” format) – so basic name searches, which look for the “@” sign, fail to capture them. Research indicates that up to 97% of retailer related tweets are posted without using the “@” sign, which means most social media monitoring tools are missing up to 97% of the relevant discussion. (Source) Qualification of tweets: Twitter and social media in general is a very “noisy” environment. There are many discussions going on but only a small percentage are relevant or meaningful. Many social media tools try to overcome the limitation of the missing “@” sign by allowing for text search. Users could search all tweets to collect all mentions of “The Bay”. These search results tend to return a very low percentage of relevant activity. Only the most advanced tools in this space have the ability to track all company mentions in all formats without also including “dirty data”, i.e. irrelevant or meaningless posts that happened to include the right keyword. Specific topics (pre-defined) vs. the need to identify topics at each time: Social media provides millions and millions of data points. Presenting those data points in a way which is easy to read for a retailer can be a challenge. Tools which provide a predefined (and customizable) list of topics make it easy to see quickly what brands, apparel types etc. are trending without the need to do one by one topic searches. Person vs. account: Social media users almost always have multiple accounts across various channels. They may have an account on Twitter, one on Facebook, two on Tumblr, and a blog on Wordpress. To understand the person (matching and combining the comments and activities across social platforms) can be challenging. It is not always evident that the different accounts belong to the same person, and most monitoring tools are unable to account for this. Looking at each separate account as a self-contained individual is inaccurate in many ways: it can skew the numbers of sentiment if one person, represented by three accounts, has the impact on the data of three people; it makes for incomplete datasets such that the tool provides three semi-completed profiles rather than one consolidated profile. Profile vs. lack of profile: Social media allows for profiling of the customer / user / opinion leader. Profiling enables retailers to better connect by understanding a user’s preferences and passions. Profiling can be a very powerful component of a social media tool, but it lacks accuracy without the view of the person (not just the view of the account) as mentioned earlier. Profiling can also provide interesting insights that can lead to smarter advertising on traditional channels, for example what TV shows a particular target market talks about the most on social media. Transparency in methodology: Social Media monitoring is not an exact science. There are no clear definitions to many aspects of it, and the various tools use their own approaches. One example of this is the way an opinion leader is identified. Different tools use different ways to determine who is an opinion leader, and how important that opinion leader is. Before any analysis is conducted it is important to make sure that the retailer knows what the data means and how it was determined. Are Klout scores used to determine who a leader is? How do those scores work? Are other formulas / scores applied? What are those formulas? How are they calculated? Having a clear view on such aspects allows for better insights and therefore better business decisions. 7|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com Changes in Social Media Channels: Social Media is evolving very rapidly. New social media channels emerge; old ones decline or introduce controls (related to third party analytics). Tools that focus only on the current set of Social Media channels can quickly become obsolete. How is Social Cue™ solving the Social Media Analytics Challenges? st Social Cue™ was created with a vision different from 1 generation tools. The vision for Social Cue™ was to provide a tool that answers retailers’ questions about their customers in a simple, easy to understand and accurate way. Social Cue™ was built to speak the same language as the retailers using it. Social Cue™ overcomes the challenges faced by first generation social media tools with the targeted goal of focusing on what retailers need out of the tool and not what metrics around social media are easiest to gather. This is a tool build for business; after only a brief introduction, business users have found they are able to not only navigate it easily but get information that is immediately advantageous to the company. Social media is only useful if it is easy to use and if the data is accurate: this is why Social Cue™ was created. Social Cue™ is a Next Generation tool using patented machine learning and contextual pattern matching technologies that offers the following advanced features: Tweets referencing the company username vs. all tweets: Social Cue™ captures all tweets about a retailer. Social Cue™ tracks every mention of the retailer, whether it references the company account (@Username) or not. Qualification of tweets: Social Cue™ uses a sophisticated qualification engine that “knows” the difference between “#TheBay” when mentioned in the context of the San Francisco Bay area and “#TheBay” in the context of Canadian department stores or “Gucci” when mentioned as a fashion brand vs. “Gucci Mane” the recording artist. As a result, the tweets analyzed are relevant and accurate. Specific topics (pre-defined): Social Cue™ has a very broad list of predefined topics. The default list provides insights to what brands, apparel types, jewelry type etc. people mention. The list is just a starting point – used to create a list which exactly reflects the product categories (and related products), brands etc. the retailer using the tool would be interested in monitoring. That customized list (which can be changed very easily any time) ensures that the retailer can see discussion in and around its more important topics at a glance. Person vs. account: Social Cue™ compares the different accounts (be it on Twitter, Facebook, blogs or other social media sites) and profiles them in great detail. Using this profile, Social Cue™ can predict if a Twitter account and Facebook account belong to the same person by matching a wide variety of complex variables. As a result the tool provides a true view on the number of people interested in a retailer and a consolidated profile of those people. Profile vs. lack of profile: Connecting to opinion leaders is very important in social media. Social Cue™ profiles opinion leaders in a level of detail that allow for a view of not just which companies do they talk about, but also what in general is of interest to them. Do they like to make pasta? Or do they have two 8|P a g e WWW.INFOTRELLIS.COM – info@infotrellis.com amazing grandchildren they care about? Knowing such personal details allows for connecting on a much deeper level. Transparency vs. not clearly communicated methodology: Social Cue™ is 100% transparent in its methodologies. Clients can learn how scoring and profiling is done to ensure that any analytics they collect and decisions they therefore make are based on a solid understanding of how the tool works. Changes in Social Media Channels: Social Cue™ is built on the solid foundations of a powerful Big Data Insights engine that InfoTrellis has branded as AllSight. The AllSight platform is the driving force behind the data quality, relevance filtering and contextual pattern matching of Social Cue™. AllSight is capable of gathering and qualifying insights from any current or future Social Media channel. Social Cue™ is futureproof – ready and able to adapt to any emerging and receding Social Media phenomenon. Graphical Summary 9|P a g e