Perspectives on the Digital Marketplace

Today, Visible Technologies is pleased to announce that we have secured $22 Million in funding led Investor Growth Capital. IGC is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Investor AB, a Nordic-based publicly traded investment holding company with investment activities in North America, Europe and Asia. Existing investors Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP also participated in the round. The new funding will be used to accelerate our technology development and establish international operations.

Our new funding builds upon our previous achievements and this strategic investment demonstrates the strong confidence in the company’s market leadership and overall trend of social media integration into the lifeblood of Global 2000 firms. Our plan is to continue expanding the unique and comprehensive solutions we offer for online reputation management and social media engagement via SaaS products and service to serve companies as they determine best practices and discover new ways of using social media.

Our new investor commented that “Global brands continue to increase their social media budgets as they realize the need to tap into valuable customer feedback as well as holistically manage their online brand reputation,” said Matt Krna, vice president at Investor Growth Capital. “Many solution sets give the ability to listen but fail to provide what’s really needed—the power to transform social data into strategic programs and tactical plans. Visible Technologies has defined itself as a clear category leader through its strong technology solution set, best-in-class customer service and proven success delivering actionable social media intelligence.”

As validated by today’s funding announcement, the market for social media monitoring and engagement platforms is growing exponentially. Savvy brands are listening and engaging with their customers online. To learn more, watch Visible Technologies’ video, “Starting the Social Media Conversation” here: http://bit.ly/6AW0n0

Exciting news toady for @visible_tech and please check out the video above.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

We often speak with clients and prospects about the impacts that social conversations are having on their search engine results and how nowadays consumer perceptions of their reputation are increasingly influenced by online postings. As these worlds are becoming more and more intertwined the fear that negative comments are shaping consumer impressions is making brands wake up and drive the need to engage directly with their customers and prospects.

A recent report from Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia explored ways marketers can tackle brand bashing and turn negatives into positives. The survey asked what companies had done to minimize negative comments in the past and nearly one-half reported having executed a direct engagement with the consumer. I was pleased to see that so many companies were listening and engaging, but pitied that other 50% that saw their complaint or piece of feedback go unanswered.  Imagine if firms had rolling black-outs on the 800 numbers 50% of the time. Now that would get some CEO’s attention.

The next point that I found compelling and encouraging from the study was that firms are taking the feedback and actually trying to improve products and services. In many cases negative feedback is due to poor product, service quality or design and negative feedback may not have been there in the 1st place if fixes had been in place. Leveraging that consumer feedback is a huge positive and giant leap for many firms. The public nature of social conversations is likely driving the speed at which issues are being resolved; this is due to a fear that the issues or concerns will spread into a full blown crisis (i.e. United Breaks Guitars, comes to mind).

The table below from the study highlights the various methods companies are using to manage negative online conversations:

One of the more interesting tactics on this chart is companies that have tried to get offending content removed. While sounding like a good idea, this tactic can backfire and cause further negative remarks against the brand. Econsultancy noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results which I think highlights the lack of brands fully understanding and leveraging how both the search and social world are increasing coming together.

So where does one get started? The practice of “Brand Monitoring” is one the most important places to start and the rise and growth of Twitter usage has certainly aided with companies adopting some basic forms of listening and engagement practices. The study revealed that publicizing new content was the top activity verses using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.” I am not sure what “systematically” means but social engagement is not a templated process. At minimum brands should continue to build on a basic framework of listening via free or paid tools/technologies and in parallel build engagement teams and best practices within their organizations to deal with consumer feedback - both good and bad - just like they do in the contact centers, product feedback groups or executive complaints departments.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

As 2009 comes to a close we have seen that brands and marketers have become more than willing to start conversations in social media, but that’s only the beginning of truly leveraging the social channel for customer and marketing interactions.

A MarketingSherpa survey of social media marketers revealed how brands are leveraging social media and the effectiveness of their practices today. The study revealed that a large majority rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.

My question is where is customer service in this study.  I think one of the most effective use cases for leveraging the social channel is responding and acknowledging customer issues - both good and bad to improve customer experience. A happy and loyal customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one - right? But, since this study was conducted with social media marketers perhaps the customer service topic was overlooked.

Some of the specific tactics that marketers favored for achieving results in the social channel were user reviews, relationships with bloggers and discussion groups. But many continued to be challenged with best practices for measuring effectiveness of the investments —only around 10% of respondents thought they were “very accurately measured.”

Can you measure the effectiveness though when many companies still don’t have a formal or even informal strategy in place for leveraging and interacting with consumers in the social channel?  Many of the best ways to measure social success is to ensure that it is connected with other programs, existing initiatives and is simply an extension of what marketers, customer service, research teams, or public relations are already doing.  While one-third of larger businesses had a written policy to manage brand communications, only 13% of smaller business did. Having a “formal policy” is great but more important is setting up cross-functional groups, collaboration, and resources across an organization (big or small) to be fully invested in interacting and learning from your customers.

Developing “policies” or a best practices for your company can be particularly valuable when it comes to responding to consumer feedback. Social media marketing is a conversation, and brands must be ready to respond to consumers whether its for promotion or service related issues. Interestingly enough, around  one-quarter of businesses of all sizes reported that participated in the study are still not monitoring social media commentary at all. While, nearly one-half of large businesses are keeping an eye on discussions without responding publicly. The amount of brands that are engaging when a negative comment is made is around 25%.

Business should at a minimum be investing in:

• Listening to what their customers or potential customers are saying
• Developing best practices across support, marketing and public relations for monitoring and interacting with customers that are having favorable or unfavorable interactions
• Integrating the social channel into the mix of existing channels that are being used for marketing and customer interaction

As we head into 2010, brands and marketers must take the next steps to fully exploit the social channel and the power of positive and negative feedback about their brands.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Most brands and marketers invest lots of time and energy into customer segmentation programs in order to develop unique offers or programs based on demographics or buying behavior of their customers. I would propose that understanding where your customers and prospects are “hanging out” is an equally important data point if a brand or marketer wants to maximize exposure to existing or target segments. One such group that appears to be ripe with opportunity is boomers and seniors.  Recent data highlights the massive uptick in online time and social networking participation among them.

According to the NielsenWire Online, while people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of the active Internet universe, in the last five years their number has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the increase of women online in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11% in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

88.6% of seniors, check personal e-mail as the No. 1 online activity performed in the last 30 days. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities.

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

Overall, the number of unique visitors who are 65 or older on social networking and blog sites has increased 53% in the last two years alone. 8.2% of all social network and blog visitors are over 65, just 0.1 percentage points less than the number of teenagers who frequent these sites.

Marketers would be wise to do more than test online marketing programs with seniors as we head in ‘10.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

I am frequently involved in discussions with brands about measuring the impact of conversations in social media and networks and frequently point out that one of the key metrics to understanding and measuring a baseline or ongoing change is tracking the sentiment of what is being said by consumers about your brand, products and services. Here at Visible Technologies we have always believed this to be one of the key ingredients of any successful social media measurement technology or program and why we have always provided it since even the early beta’s of our truCAST products. Recently, I had a great discussion with David Burcham, one of our EVP’s and thought the perspective was worth sharing.

Blake Cahill
Why is sentiment important and how do you define and measure it?

David Burcham
Sentiment is just one measure in the overall work of keeping track of your customer’s perspective online – but we have always believed that it’s an important one. When you’re spending millions of marketing and service dollars based on information, we believe that it should be as accurate and actionable as possible and not just a measure of the general tone of discussion.

Measuring the sentiment of crowds online is no simple task with over a billion people who might post information every day. False-positives, false negatives, sarcasm and irony are just a few of the problems that make it difficult. If you’re looking for the overall tone of the messages, then relatively simple measures can be used that count the positive and negative uses of words.

At Visible, we’ve chosen the hard path, but the one that we believe delivers the most value and the most actionable information. For definition, we consider tone to be the measurement of the overall tenor of a piece of content, and sentiment to be the specific measure of the Positives, Negatives, Mixed emotions related to a specific topic of interest.

Our systems first topically decompose a blog post or article so that we understand the subjects of conversation and particularly the ones that our clients are interested in studying. This is an area that is not talked about as often, but just as important to the overall measurement. The capacity to understand sentiment is most critical when you can be sure that the sentiment you are measuring is related to your product/company/issue.

BC
So how does Visible Technologies do this?

DB
Well, once we have broken down the post so that we can understand the multiple areas of discussion, we use a combination of automation and human-based analysis to understand the true sentiment related to that issue, NOT just the overall tone of the message. While a post might be really positive overall, the part where they mention your company or product might in fact be negative, mixed, or just neutral.

It’s also important to understand the sentiments that the post drives. When someone comments, is it positive or negative? When someone from your organization participated in the conversation, did they change the sentiment? Did they riot the emotions of the crowd or soothe them? Did they cause more people to talk or change the subject?

Because truCAST data is built up from a granular crawl of the web, with comments included in the thread of conversation, and with the multiple topics discussed in each post broken down, we can assess the level of sentiment – AND its IMPACT – in unique and powerful ways.

We can also help you understand the sentiment on the topic overall, the authors who are positive and negative on the subject, and the relative authority level of the sites and authors involved – again, on that topic, not just in a broad-reaching assessment of the post overall.

BC
Is their a right way or wrong way to be measuring sentiment?

DB
There are lots of ongoing debates about how much automation and how much human analysis gets applied and they will probably continue for a long time. Our answer is simple, though. We believe that there are advantages in both and we will continue to develop and apply unique and distinctive methodologies that deliver the most consistent and accurate possible data to our clients.

Thank you David for the insight on the topic of Sentiment measurement.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies