Predicting the outcome of a game between two teams is certainly not something that social media intelligence can do as Zach Hofer-Shall is quoted “”Unlike voting shows like American Idol, where fans can influence the outcome,” popular opinion doesn’t determine how players perform”.

This was a lighthearted attempt to explore the “fans” reaction and prediction to the super bowl and we certainly spent the majority of the time in the segment focusing on the fans reactions excited vs. confidence, etc… (plus it was a chance to be on TV) but at the end of the day we should have drawn more attention to the fact that it was fans relationships with the teams not predicting the outcome of the game that we were measuring.

Zach’s post on the misuse of social intelligence speaks volumes to how seriously he takes the rising importance of social intelligence. MotiveQuest is also focused on providing deeper insights into consumers using social media, so we stand corrected and will continue to focus our efforts on getting deep, meaningful insights on consumers using social media rather than taking chances on less serious PR opportunities.

Yesterday we were also featured in an AdAge article on how brands can use social media specifically Facebook to get more insights into consumers and this is where social intelligence really can help companies understand and predict the responses of consumers.

“Research company MotiveQuest monitors Facebook conversations and other online forums for Group M’s automotive clients to identify brand advocates. It layers its findings on sales numbers, and looks for the correlation between advocacy and higher sales.”

If you’d like to learn more about how social media can be tied to understanding and predicting changes in sales or market share, check out this post.

An innovative approach to research helped Sprint reverse the customer defections plaguing the company. The research revealed that the secret was to understand, not what features attract customers but instead, which ones make them loyal. As a result, Sprint added 644,000 net subscribers in Q3 2010, a dramatic turn around from losing 565,000 during the same period in 2009. This corresponded with a drop in defections from 2.78% in Q3 2009 to 1.81% in Q1 2011, an impressive 35% decrease and Sprint’s lowest churn rate ever.

What is the correlation between online advocacy and offline sales

It’s the dirtiest secret in marketing today: as marketers, we know social networks and engagement have revolutionized the way individuals evaluate and engage with brands – and ultimately choose what to buy. And as marketers, we’re terrified.

Social media—from blogs and forums to networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—have inserted a very powerful force into the buying process: peer-to-peer dialogue on a network scale. While shoppers always have been able to talk with a few friends and family members to seek out a product recommendation, today they can talk with experts on a specific product or service anywhere in the world. They can find reviews of their prospective purchase in just seconds online and rapidly compare features and prices for competing brands.

So where does the terror enter the mix? How to measure and quantify these discussions? Where are the most important conversations taking place within the social grid, and how can marketers keep on top – let along activate – the same? The sheer pace of digital innovation has made it difficult for marketers to feel proactively confident about how to measure and what really matters to their brand portfolio.

Furthering the fear factor is the matter of the discussions that may not be on the new marketing radar. MotiveQuest’s analysis finds that as many as 90 percent of online conversations are not about brands at all—they are about categories and the motivations that drive people within those categories. Dashboards and other numerical ways of measuring favor in social media may help in calculating a brand’s reach, but marketers must dig deeper to learn what consumers actually are thinking and what really will persuade consumers to buy. Marketers then need to try to connect their brands to those specific motivations. Dashboards won’t provide the intelligence marketers need to capitalize on motivations in the marketplace—only listening where the conversations are really happening and analyzing the motivations behind the words — will do that.

Stop Asking and Start Listening

The best and only valid way to measure what is driving the market is to stop asking questions and start listening to conversations. In this new social environment, we can actually observe the buying behavior of consumers, rather than merely ask them about their behavior. We can measure if, how and why people are talking about a product. Instead of asking them if they like it, we can measure the positive or negative words and context they are using. Perhaps of greatest importance, we can observe individuals as they make recommendations to friends, acquaintances or even strangers in a group or forum.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the sorts of things that people talk about around the kitchen table are the same sorts of things they talk about online. Of course, social media conversations are just a sample of all conversations, but online forums enable us to overhear those networked conversations, which were already happening but to which we had no way of listening in on before.

A Stunning Discovery

We have previously noted that the motivations that drive conversations in social networks are the real treasure to be mined by marketers, because the more we explore online conversations to reveal the motivations that are common to all of us, the more effectively we can position our brand and ourselves to be unique. But the consequences of examining motivations extend beyond brand positioning—they can be a precise and predictable indicator of future sales.

To understand the correlation between social media and sales, we must first determine which aspects of online conversations we should measure. Five years ago, MotiveQuest began working with statisticians at Northwestern University to examine all the components of these conversations to attempt to find the most impactful elements.

This data can be further broken down into broad categories – see the pie chart.

We see that marketing people most often are focused on comparing themselves to the competition (37%) and then exploring what their customers care about most in the category (27%).  This is followed by interest in media planning (24%), questions about communications strategy (i.e. how should I position my brand) and new product development (3%).

I was particularly interested in this analysis because it is at the heart of our own innovation process.  We have always designed software tools to answer marketing questions.  It is fundamental to our DNA.  We always start with a simple question like “How can I better engage my customers on Facebook” and then explore the best ways to use data, software and analytical frameworks in order to answer that question.

It is my beef with much of the “big data” software development taking place in the category right now that seems to focus more on the question “How can I wrangle big data into a pretty chart?”.  I see it causing a lot of marketplace frustration when people are looking for answers to marketing questions.  In fact, I was talking to a dashboard using friend yesterday who opined, “I wish they would lead me by the hand through the steps that I need to take to answer my question, there are so many tools and choices!”.

They are right of course.  Great social software should be like great photo developing software.  It should already understand the steps you need to take and then lead you by the hand through the process to get the best end result.  My photo software feels like I have an expert developer at my side showing me the way.  Social software, at least social software that wants to answer marketing questions, should do the same.

Cows, like the eight we purchased, are delivered around the world to help people like the Hernandezes in Honduras, the people of Zambia and Tamta Gogoladze of Georgia. We appreciate the business we work with and are glad to have the opportunity to share some of our good fortune through support of organizations like Heifer International.

Honduras: An Opportunity for the Hernandez Family
The Hernandezes in Ojo de Agua, a community in western Honduras, were selected to receive a cow and training in its care that have created new opportunities. “Thank God our family was selected (for the project). We are very happy with the support we have received. . ” said Beto Hernandez. Beto’s wife, Maria, explains a simple life-changing benefit of the new cow that exemplifies the importance of giving Heifer participants the ability to Pass on the Gift, “We don’t eat just beans any more. And we share with the families who don’t have any.”

Zambia: Making Poverty a Thing of the Past
Mchinji District in Zambia celebrated a milk collection and cooling center that launched in their community to facilitate marketing of the raw milk produced by smallholder dairy farmers that are supported by Heifer Malawi.The climax of this excitement was witnessed as 17 new families who came to the function with their family members and neighbors celebrated owning a dairy heifer each. “We have no doubt that very soon poverty will be a thing of the past,” said Mr. Gaciano Simango, the group’s chair person.

Georgia: Heifer makes girl’s “best day”
Tamta Gogoladze, an 8-year-old girl, lives in the village of Khashmi, the Kakheti region of Georgia. She shares the house with her father and mother, a 90-year-old grandmother and two adult brothers. The main activity of the family is selling piglets, but they provide just enough money for buying medication for their aged grandmother and covering utilities expenses, and minimal needs of the family’s daily life. In spite of the diligent work and joint efforts of the family, purchasing a cow, a long time dream, seemed unfulfilled and impossible to realize. But with the gift of a heifer the situation of the family has radically changed. They maintain a stable high-calorie diet.

To learn more about the good work being done by Heifer International, check out their website at: Heifer International.

Thanks,

The Team here at MotiveQuest

Have you ever tried to fix your own car?

I have, because I have the tools. Even with the tools it ended with innumerable parts spread across the garage floor and a call for help to my uncle the mechanic. Social listening research is much more complex than fixing your own car – but this doesn’t stop people from amassing a toolkit and embarking on a self-guided listening project.

Thankfully over the last 18 months there has been a mainstreaming of social media ideas, marketing, monitoring and research among the big brand owners of the Fortune 500. Along with this mainstreaming comes increased understanding of the different kinds of tools and expertise available for hire.

In particular, as this market matures, companies are beginning to understand the distinction between “social monitoring” and “social research”. Increasingly clients are setting up a dashboard for daily activities and partnering with an expert for more in depth analysis.

Right now, we are asked almost daily by new and existing clients to discuss the distinction between social monitoring and social research.

Definitions:

Social Monitoring: Tracking online brand mentions on a daily basis for PR, brand protection, operations and customer service outreach & engagement.

Social Research: Analyzing naturally occurring online categories of conversation to better understand why people do what they do, the role of brands in their lives and the product, branding and communications implications for brand owners.

Social Monitoring: Social monitoring is the clipping service, 800-number and suggestion box of the 21st century all rolled into one. Powerful software tools to track online mentions of your brand score, then for influence, relevance, sentiment and necessary action and feed all of that into a workflow for PR, Operations and Customer Service. We believe that every major brand should be using these tools aggressively.
Marshall Sponder over at WebMetricsGuru and Nathan Gilliatt over at the The Net-Savvy Executive are doing a great job of covering the brand monitoring/dashboard space. Minor brands should be monitoring too, but perhaps by using the free services– more on that at the Net savvy Executive.

Monitoring Commentary: The best companies in the social monitoring business have put together very powerful tools for monitoring, scoring, outreach and reporting. As with most powerful tools, they are non-trivial to implement. There are a couple of dimensions of complexity to consider including:

Brand Mentions: Including the data you want and excluding the data you don’t want ranges from easy (simple, unambiguous name like MotiveQuest) to extremely hard. Consider the rental car category. The leading brands are Dollar, National, Budget, Enterprise and Hertz. 4 of the 5 are very challenging terms to disambiguate.
Context: Sometimes the brand mentions are a very small part of the overall conversation. Food brand mentions tend to be less than 5% of the conversation. In cars it is about 40%. In both cases you lose half or more of all the relevant category conversation by just collecting brand mentions.

Linguistic Coding: We did a project for Visa looking at the Beijing Olympics. We had to build a linguistic string with more than 250 arguments to include Visa the credit card brand and exclude Visa the travel document, both of which were highly co-related with the Beijing Olympics.
Data Sources: There appears to be significant discrepancies in data coverage for the different tools. Also, you need to consider the data source to know what to do. Twitter is different from a blog which is also different from a forum.

Scoring: There also seems to be significant discrepancies in sentiment scoring across the tools.

Implementation: If you are going to maximize the benefit of implementing a social monitoring tool, you are going to need to have cross-departmental involvement from your marketing, PR, customer service, operations, legal and product teams. This is a very significant challenge.
Social research: Is purely observational. Gather and analyze millions of online conversations from the web to build a model of how the world works. Dig well beyond buzz, topics & sentiment and look for the underlying human issues, motivations, needs and drivers within a category. Then analyze the competitive dynamics within the category among competing brands. The goal is to help clients understand what to do next by having a deeper understanding of what matters most within their category and how their brand can relate to or own that.

Research Commentary: This type of research is hard to do without a broad sophisticated toolkit and a team of experienced strategists. One of the fundamental challenges in analyzing large amounts of unstructured text data is that you simply can’t make sense of it in any sort of manual fashion. Sophisticated software tools are the answer, but how those tools are developed and deployed makes a difference.

1. Language is fluid over time and across categories. Tools must be too. In our opinion, tools need to be parameter driven allowing the strategist to adjust the linguistic model and other parameters for the category and project at hand.
2. Buzz, topics, and sentiment are not useful for understanding why people do what they do
3. Understanding requires more sophisticated tools. For example, it is helpful to be able to identify what are the biggest, naturally occurring peaks of passion in a category, explore the natural word associations in the dialog, measure the motivations beneath the dialog and understand which conversation drives recommendations in the real world.
4. There are many tools available, but the tools used and the order of use is very project dependent.
5. The tools are just tools and the work is only as good as the person using the tools. The team doing the work, just as in any other field of research, gets better the more they explore the universe of data they are working with. They also need to connect the business needs to the data in order to solve real business problems.
6. The output must have specific actionable ideas, insights and recommendations for the clients against the business problem. These tend to be in the area of branding, communication, innovation and measurement.

So what is next?

As the world of listening research matures, we believe that it will begin to more and more closely resemble the world of traditional research. There will, of course, still be listening dashboards (that complement the traditional clipping services and quick online research tools), there will be social listening specialists that provide full service answers to tough business questions, and there will be sophisticated listening segmentation companies that are a mirror to the old world asking segmentation companies.

Agencies and clients will continue to try to do a lot of the listening themselves but will increasingly realize, just as with more traditional research, a specialized area with specialized tools and expertise, listening research is often better outsourced to experts than DIY.

OK has anybody got a wrench?

Mining motivations, in addition to data, as a way to understand consumers is an entirely new approach to social analysis, but it is one that is proving to be exceptionally powerful for companies in sectors ranging from automobiles to chewing gum.

Too often, marketers have relied only on the numbers surrounding social media to determine the success of their efforts—some aggregation of the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, the number of comments and re-tweets, the number of click-throughs and blog links. These can be shallow indicators, however; hundreds of comments will not persuade people to buy a product—more often than not, they’ll just generate more comments.

Detecting the motivations beneath the numbers allows marketers to discover the most expedient path to the consumer’s heart and mind. Marketers motivate consumers to make small decisions every day—choose a movie, pick a breakfast cereal, replace a battery. These day-to-day choices, however, are made in the context of much more comprehensive, universal influences. Human motivations on a larger scale, in fact, are surprisingly similar all over the world. Our own research and studies by the academic community have identified the same 12 primal motivations that drive consumers in Columbus, buyers in Beirut and shoppers in Shanghai. These desires have existed since humans began to interact with each other and their environment; and as man has evolved, his motivations have never changed. He has simply invented or discovered new ways to satisfy his needs to feel:

- Accomplished – Adventurous – Connected – Creative – Important – Playful -
– Rebellious – Responsible – Sensual – Transformed – Wise – Youthful -

These desires—to connect with others, to play and explore, to create and achieve—find an ideal outlet in social networks, where connections are the common currency, exploration is encouraged and creativity is applauded.

The motivations that drive conversations in social networks are the real treasure to be mined by marketers, because the more we explore online conversations to reveal the motivations that are common to all of us, the more effectively we can position our brand and ourselves to be unique. Knowing how many people are talking about a brand and what they are saying is not nearly enough to support the creation of a brand that stands out from competitors. We must understand why people are talking about products or services and why they are supportive, upset, confused or just inquisitive. In short, we must examine the specific motivations that drive online conversations.

For example, if Nike believes that its target market is motivated by the need to feel accomplished (i.e. “just do it”), the company can align its brand with that driver to create online advocates. Mercedes-Benz on the other hand might find that its prospective customers often want to feel important, and everything about the Mercedes brand could revolve around a sense of power and importance. Obviously a subtle executional touch is needed here.

Archetypes and Recommendations

Often, consumers gravitate toward an archetype of a particular motivation to gain emotional satisfaction. In fairy tales, TV shows, movies and comic books, the archetype may be a hero who possesses the characteristics that the consumer seeks. Marketers have helped their brands succeed by embracing heroes from Tony the Tiger and Luke Skywalker to the Marlboro Man and
Spider-Man. In social networks, the archetype often is an expert with particular knowledge about a product category.

We must realize, however, that the archetype is not the motivator—it is only the expression of the motivation and a clue to what is really driving a set of consumers. In our work with Fortune 500 brands, we have verified that not only do people buy because of underlying motivations, but also, by understanding the motivations, we can understand why they buy. Furthermore, we have determined that the single best indicator of support for a brand is the willingness of a consumer to recommend the brand to someone else. If we can follow the recommendations, we can correlate them with an increase in sales. Conversely, if we deconstruct the reasons that people are making those recommendations, we can understand their motivations.

*Companies represented  in this graphic reflect the findings of MotiveQuest research and are not necessarily MotiveQuest clients.

Implicit in this approach is the fact that as many as 90 percent of online conversations are not about brands at all they are about categories of products and the motivations that drive people within those categories. The BMW owned brand Mini realized this principle in seeking to identify a way to distinguish its tiny, iconic car from an emerging flock of competing small-size, fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S. market. The Mini served as an archetype for people who loved not fuel efficiency or economic prudence, but creative self expression. With this understanding of Mini fans’ motivations, the brand devoted its marketing efforts to leading a movement and creating programming for existing Mini owners in the form of road rallies, games, and venues that allowed them to show off their customized cars. The brand celebrated drivers’ creativity and uniqueness, rather than the technology of the vehicle.

The result was growth in advocacy (or recommendations) for the brand and this directly correlated with sales

Notes:

1. The R^2 is 54% and the p value of the coefficient is 3.7%, so we can be 96% certain that the positive relationship is not spurious.

2.The bars are calculated by looking at the average magnitude of the monthly changes.  The shortest bars are changes in the middle 50% of changes, the tallest bars represent the middle 80% of changes and the tallest bars (not visible in this date range are the top or bottom 10% of changes.

Shifting our Thinking

In one business arena after another—packaged goods, financial services, publishing, food, entertainment, and many more—MotiveQuest’s approach to identifying motivations has helped clients transform their marketing efforts into highly successful campaigns. For each of these businesses, the behavior that has been most important to change is the creation of advocates—social supporters whose motivations are recognized and addressed by the brand and who recommend a product to others. The daily motivations of these advocates are grounded in the larger motivations that move all human beings toward fulfilling their needs. As a result, these advocates invariably drive sales. This process is not just marketing theory—it’s a research framework that MotiveQuest has validated consistently through its work for major global brands.

Marketers can gain a true competitive edge by shifting their relationship to social media in three ways:
1. Think outside of the conventional category. Online conversations may reveal that your product is
competing in a much larger arena than you have initially considered. For example, in working with
Wrigley, we discovered that its products were not so much competing with other gums than with other
snacks, as a way to cope with stress. That revelation opened significant new opportunities to gain online
advocates.
2. Listen closely not just to what people are saying in the broader category but also to why they are saying
it. What are the needs they seek to fulfill, what is behind the buzz, what are the underlying motivations?
3. Take the time to tie motivations back to advocacy and sales. Shape your campaign or even your product development to capitalize on ways you can use motivations to drive advocacy for your brand.

The impact of listening in social networks, rather than broadcasting, cannot be overstated. The biggest gap in the marketplace currently is the capacity for really deep listening—listening to what people care about most. Successful marketing pursues those factors about which people already are passionate—whether it’s Barack Obama’s focus on change or Apple’s development of creative user interfaces and devices, evolved from its “Think Different” mantra.

Of course Social Media is a huge space, so I am focused on what we (MotiveQuest) do around here – which is listen. (We collect millions of topic-specific consumer conversations from blogs, forums and newsgroups and then analyze them to develop an understanding of the core human motivations & drivers and competitive dynamics within a category. Results used for branding, communication, product development and issue management)

Anyway, in conjunction with Northwestern University, MotiveQuest has been developing something called the Online Promoter Score. This is a measure of the frequency and willingness of consumers to advocate strongly for and recommend your brand or product.

Strong Predictive Relationship to Sales

MotiveQuest worked with MINI and their agency BSSP to measure the impact of online promoters to sales. The analysis covered 16 months of data from January 2006 through April of 2007. The graph to the right shows the correlation the monthly change in online promoters for the previous month versus the change in sales. For example the point in the upper right is MINI’s monthly change in sales from April to May 2006 and the change in online promoters from March to April 2006. Statistical analysis gives 99.8% confidence that the metrics are positively correlated.

So, if your marketing activities (social media and otherwise) can drive your online promoter score – then we have ROI!

Brilliant!

Originally posted on BarryMoltz.com

Anyone who’s ever jumped in the middle of a conversation at a cocktail party knows they run the risk of making a huge social gaffe – so why don’t brands understand the importance of hearing the whole conversation?

While you may be listening to your customers through social media, to truly hear them, you must dig deeper. Traditional social listening tools collect brand mentions, but only about 5-10 percent of conversations in most product categories actually include a brand mention. That means that 90 percent of the most valuable online conversations are happening without a brand attached to them. So while you may be listening, you probably don’t hear the whole conversation severely limiting your ability to make sense of the consumer’s real motivations.

Brand mentions are a fraction of overall consumer conversations.

The real value for marketers is not necessarily what is being said about your brand online, but what isn’t. This is where the real understanding of what motivates your customers resides. With this knowledge, marketers can understand how to lasso what really matters in order to turn brand associates into brand advocates – passionate, motivated, believers. Listening to consumer-to-consumer conversations allows marketers to directly observe consumer behaviors and develop a deep understanding of not only what they care about, but also why. We call this “online anthropology.”

Consumers’ social discussions revolve around passions. Instead of making up stories and pounding them into people’s heads; we believe you should first figure out what people are passionate about – and then connect to those passions in credible, authentic and compelling ways.

Details are persuasive, but, in the marketplace of ideas, context is King. Without seeing how details relate to the big picture you won’t know the difference between the thoughts that are fleeting and the ones forming the next big thing. Great Social Media Research digs more deeply into conversations that make no mention of brands or products.

It is critical to remember that consumers go online to talk about what matters to them; their kids, their cars and their waistlines. Typically, brands are mentioned in a small fraction of these conversations because the brand itself is rarely a key part of the social interaction between two (albeit digitally enhanced) human beings. Brands that are willing to explore the full landscape of consumer conversations are able to better understand the true depths of human motivation and behavior and attract more people to the brand cause that they truly believe in it. Just like the socialites at the party that started this article, we like to cluster around the people with something interesting to say.

There are lots of ways of looking at historical buzz and being smart after the fact but we thought it would be interesting to create an algorithm that didn’t just look at buzz but looked at momentum, exaggerating the effect of growth visually.  After playing for a while, a new tool was born that we christened “ThemeSteam”,  A tool that indeed could have predicted the Ice Tea Vodka Craze.  ThemeStream is now a tool that we use almost daily to see what is hot in the categories we care about.

ThemeStream determines the words most correlated with the category conversations for each period and then highlights (through exponential comparison of deviation from the average value) those words that are most dynamic.  This allows us to see emerging, waning, and seasonal trends.

For example recently a client was interested in seeing the impact of Jamie Oliver on the food conversation among parents.  Here is the chart.

Source: Data comes from looking at a combination of food and parenting datasets focused on discussion of kids lunches N=10,995

In this chart we see when the impact of Jamie Oliver begun to have an effect on moms’ lunch decisions and discussions as he is putting focus on nutrition education out-of-home.  Note that we see the Jamie Oliver conversations growing rapidly as soon as the show – Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution begins to air.

This was flagged as a issue for our client well before they would otherwise have been paying attention to it.  We are using this new tool for early trend identification across many projects from food to pharma to consumer electronics.