SocialBowl 2012

Each year the Super Bowl generates a staggering amount of viewers, leading brands to shell out millions of dollars for as little as a 30 second commercial slot. Is the high price tag of Super Bowl commercials worth the return?  Let’s take a look at some of the numbers:

Some Staggering Statistics

• Super Bowl XLV (2011) between the Steelers and the Packers broke the U.S. record for number of viewers of a TV program:  111 million people watched the game (Nielsen).
• UPDATE: Super Bowl XLVI (2012) between the Giants and the Patriots broke last years record for number of viewers of a TV program: 111.3 million.
• The cost of a 30 second commercial in the first Super Bowl (January 15^th, 1967) between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs was $37,500 via NBC (trendski.com)
• Companies shelled out as much as $3.5 million for a 30 second slot at this year’s Super Bowl XLVI (NBC).
• The price for a 30 second slot in 2011 was $3 million.
  
• In the last 14 years, the price of a Super Bowl ad has increased by an average of 5.7% annually. (forbes.com)
• Despite NBC’s record-high asking price, the network was able to sell out all 70 ad slots for Sunday’s game by THANKSGIVING (news.yahoo.com).
• Super Bowl ads are an estimated 58% more memorable than regular TV ads (Nielsen)
• Volkswagen’s 2011 Darth Vader commercial has been viewed 48 million times on YouTube, on top of the millions of impressions it made during last year’s Super Bowl telecast. The campaign had an estimated value of $100 million!
  

Which Brands Will Win?

With so much money on the line, there are bound to be winners and losers. The Social Bowl is a cutting-edge project from McKinney using EvoApp data (over 30 disparate data sets using brand and social metrics with integrated analytics) that sets out to answer many questions on the minds of marketers before, during, and after Super Bowl XLVI. Which of the many (30+) companies in this year’s Brand Bowl will come out victorious?

What is Social Bowl 2012?

More than a Super Bowl ad buzz-o-meter, Social Bowl analyzes the lasting social and brand value of multimillion-dollar spots aired between touchdowns and tackles. By partnering with and using the revolutionary technology of EvoApp to pull a variety of media metrics, McKinney’s Social Bowl tells marketers which brands best leveraged their Super Bowl time slot for lasting brand and social traction. And which brands failed.

Here’s how it works.  Social Bowl will report on the pre-game playing field (who’s got maximum social momentum going into the game) and establish a scouting card for each brand player. One week after the game, Social Bowl will share preliminary findings and scouting cards for all advertised brands. Until the final report is available in April, Social Bowl will blog about insights gleaned during the research and analysis process on Tumblr.

Marketers who visit socialbowl.tv will find answers to these tough questions:

• Who are the winners and losers in terms of netting the most social value? What did they do that I should do as a marketer?
  
• Does size matter? Should I have bought one spot with a compelling call to action instead of three with none?
  
• Does debuting a spot before the big game help gain social traction?
• What effect does the creativity of the ad have?
• Do ads that foster co-viewing (using social and mobile and/or tablets while viewing the game) have a greater effect?

Check it out at socialbowl.tv and follow it on Twitter at @SocialBowl.

What questions or suggestions do you have for this year’s Social Bowl? Ask questions and join the conversation on Twitter with #SocialBowl.

Find me on twitter @Sdolukhanov

Of all the smart things Thomas Edison is supposed to have said, this must be one of the smartest: “Never invent anything nobody wants.”

He has also been quoted as saying this: “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others. I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”

Simple enough isn’t it? Simple, yet brilliant; just like the light bulb itself.

Why Thomas Edison Would Use Social Media Business Intelligence Were He Alive Today

I would safely wager that Thomas Edison would be using social media business intelligence were he alive today.

Why?

Because if you are in the business of innovation, it only makes sense to listen in to the conversations of your potential customers as they are discussing what they want to buy and using this valuable information to develop your amazing ideas.

Your customers are out there on the web every second—telling you exactly what they want, like and don’t like about your products or services and the products and services of your competitors.

You may as well take advantage.

The Quickest Path to Innovation

One of the services that our customers are increasingly asking for can be described as these “pathway to innovation” type services.

That is, they know our business intelligence platform helps our clients develop their products and services based upon feedback from consumers in their marketplace. In a way, we become part of their product development team. This development partnership ranges from marketing tools, to risk management and surveillance tools, to medical devices in the making.

After all, “never invent anything nobody wants”.

Mitigating the Heartache of Failure In Entrepreneurship

As a leader in the entrepreneurial community eloquently put it in a meeting with us one afternoon:

“There are a lot of brilliant young people we work with who have ingenuous ideas and who are borrowing money, or seeking investment and who are working themselves to the bone. But some of them have forgotten to ask the most important question: How do I know anyone wants to buy what I am inventing? Some of them need to take a look at what people do want to buy and are likely to still be buying years from now before they put a lot of money and effort into their entrepreneurial ideas.”

The mobile gaming industry is a classic example of why one must apply Edison’s golden rule.

Let’s say that you’ve invented a video game with the greatest graphics in the history of the planet. You spend loads of money on creating it, but you end up going bankrupt because you don’t sell enough copies in the app store.

The buying community is fickle, and they may not actually be looking for high quality graphics.  It turns out your potential clients were actually looking for something more simple, more crass, or even more mundane than the great product you just dreamed up. Your Tetris-like competitor grows like a champion, while you were left thinking about why your perfect rendering of a dragon to the very last scale appealed little to your target market.

Remember what the great journalist H.L. Mencken had to say on the subject: “No one in this world ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses.”

P.T Barnum lived by that rule and did quite well for himself.

The Golden Conclusion

Be like Thomas Edison.  Before you start inventing, study what people want to buy. Then make what they are asking for.

Also be a little like H.L. Mencken.

Realize that while your most sophisticated idea may be worth millions, your tackiest idea just might be worth a few billion more.

______________________________________________________

Written by David Snyder

David Snyder is Consulting Solutions Architect for EvoApp and the author of How to Mind Read Your Customers, an internationally published classic on consumer psychology.

It’s been three weeks since the video of the now infamous “Fedex Delivery” went viral. At the time, I commented that if anyone was interested in the dynamics of Social Media, they should be watching this story closely. While the story has died down, the dynamics of social media and the implications are just beginning to become visible. It’s even more fascinating than I anticipated.

What has happened in those three weeks? A Lot! I want to follow up my original blog with this summary so you can gain some insight into the collective wisdom (and I use that term very loosely).

First, here’s how the conversation looks visually.

Notice a couple of things – the length of the conversation. First, three weeks after the event, people are still talking about it. Second, notice the sentiment line – it still hasn’t yet reached the levels it was before the event. There’s been some lingering damage to the public perception of FedEx as a company. Nothing major to be sure, but it’s a noticeable difference.

From a social engagement perspective, this is the most interesting part. I was pretty well taken to task by (via Twitter, mostly) many “social media experts” for my position that FedEx should do more than what they did in terms of making a public apology. Many people felt it was totally impossible/impractical for them to respond to each comment.

I stand by that position, and I’m even more entrenched in my mindset today. Here are 7 reasons why:

1) Social is a new, emerging field. Nobody yet has it “down”. Responding to all followers (they only had 11k at this time), is new and unique.

2) If Social is all about “engagement” – why be passive when you have a PR Crisis like this on your hands? Doesn’t seem like the right time to duck and cover, and yet that’s exactly what they did.

3) By taking my approach, they’re on the offensive, instead of the defensive and letting the public re-shape the opinion of FedEx. Think of all the people out there pushing their opinion into the general -and very public – conversation based on what they saw. FedEx has so much brand equity and respect that the conversation wouldn’t be bad. I suspect more people would be talking about how FedEx is known for their quality, and clearly that delivery was an aberration. I suspect that the public would circle around FDX and the company would have more defenders than detractors. They would criticize the action, defend the company, and then comment on the resolution strategy employed by the company. You can see this has already occurred by the sentiment line moving up.

4) FDX is known as a Corporate Leader – in Operations (Baldridge award winner), Technology (Rob Carter was CIO of the Year), and People (Fortune Top 25 for developing talent). Why wouldn’t they want to lead in Social? By remaining silent, they’re missing an opportunity to grab a definitive leading position in social as well.

5) From a cost perspective, it’s cheap. They can “write once, publish many”. Drop it into a scheduler, and push the message to the people that follow them on Twitter. Those people already have requested information from FDX, so it’s not spam. Is it a 1:1 response match? Not really, but it’s an extra step.

6) They already monitor the FDX conversation on Twitter, so the incremental cost there is nothing. As a result of this article and its subsequent publicity, FDX is now following ME on Twitter. Many people supported my position, many people disagreed with me. Bottom line here is that FDX saw the conversation, and engaged me. They’re already there….

7) Last reason. I’m not ignorant of how FDX and UPS operate. UPS Sales reps are using this video in every sales call they make right now trying to convert FDX customers to become UPS customers. It’s powerful. FedEx has to respond in a very public way, so that they can help minimize the local impact of that future sales call. It’s not really about Samsung as a FedEx customer. It’s the little guys – where all the shipping profits are made – that are most easily influenced by videos like this.

I think overall, FedEx did just “fine”. However, I believe it was an opportunity missed. Leaders don’t do “fine”. Leaders take chances. Leaders seize opportunities.

Maybe FedEx can make a social media KO by creating a quirky commercial making fun of the whole incident. My guess is that they won’t.

Written by Keith Karczewski

It’s that time of year again, namely the beginning of one. Some people celebrate the occasion by reflecting upon the past year. Others mark the New Year by making promises to themselves or others; if you’re near a gym this time of year you might think they’re offering free money inside . The world of social media analytics calls for a different type of New Year’s activity: it’s time to make predictions.

We’ve isolated what we think will be a few game-changing shifts in social media analytics this coming year. Who will take advantage and who will be left in the dust?

1. The Return of the Customer

Many social media analytics companies are glorified hard drives. They’re great at gathering a piles of tweets, status updates or blog posts, but many companies are starting to realize that disorganized pack rats do not create value. It’s what you do with those tweets that matter. There are a number of ways out there to do something with the data. With the development of influence and reach metrics we think an important shift is going to be the evolution of social media platforms from exclusively marketing platforms to customer service platforms. Identify a crucial customer for your company and develop a sustained relationship with the individual, instead of storing his name in a list somewhere among thousands of other Twitter followers. 2012 will be less about getting people to listen to you in the social media conversation as it will be about responding and engaging in genuine, meaningful and creative ways.

2. Increased Mathematical Challenges

Along with the growing locus of customer service and social media engagement tools comes more math and strategy. Companies with millions of tweets to analyze need advanced statistical inference techniques to sift through the data. We see this going two directions, either social media companies package their tool with a statistics course book and a product manual or they automate it. While most seem to be heading towards the first option, we’re more interested in the latter. Companies will need to develop platforms that have the engine to understand the complexity of human relationships.

3. Natural Language Processing

As features like sentiment analysis become more understood by the consumer, social media companies will need to justify their results. Lexicon contextualization capabilities (having your sentiment analysis engine understand that thin is good for cell phones and bad for bed sheets) and other advanced natural language processing utilities will become crucial as social media analysis companies work to justify their relationship with a company’s ROI. A good friend is one who can listen; social media will have to prove itself a valuable friend to companies, which will only happen by paying closer attention to what consumers actually say.

4. Behavioral Analysis

As social media analysis continues to prove itself the most accurate and timely method of public opinion, companies will begin to anticipate public reception of key products, ideas and opinions. Social media analytics will prove itself necessary in designing a political campaign that aligns with popular opinion or to market a product launch or environmental campaign. Understanding what consumers are scared of or are asking for from your industry will become necessary to appropriately brand campaigns. Look for companies to start realizing that you’ve got to look for more than just the pulse of your company’s image online; you’ve got the tool to give the public a check-up as well.

5. Even more applications

Look for social media analysis techniques to be applied outside of their normal context. As natural language processing improves, look for digital data analysis techniques to be used in fields such as psychological research, historical analysis, sociology, anthropology and political science. We’ve been communicating for a long time; once all that chatter is digitized we’ve got the tools to listen to the whole of human history, and that’s exciting!

We’ve got a big year ahead of us: stocks to predict, presidential election campaigns to design and company images to build, all while attempting to make the process painless yet insightful. Oh, and we’ve got new gym memberships too.

Written by Sam Zimmerman

What do you think we’ll see in social media and text analytics in 2012? Let us know in the comments.

If you’re not watching what is happening with FedEx this week, you’re not interested in the dynamics of social media and how business is trying to adapt the changing social landscape. Brief recap: A FedEx Express driver walks up to a fence with a flat screen TV and “delivers” it over the fence. (video link here)

In less than 2 days, this video went from zero to over 3 MILLION views and social posts, and made a David Letterman “Top Ten” list. FedEx issued two distinct apologies (links here andhere). The best part of the apology is where FedEx states that the delivery driver is “no longer working with customers”.

This delivery incident will likely fade away, and FedEx has enough Brand Equity to survive the actual incident. However, what’s most perplexing to me is the FedEx response. FedEx responded quickly, they get high marks for that. Thus far, the reviews are mixed on sincerity, words and tone of the apology. However, consider this: they responded with a link on their home page to a blog post, and a video on their YouTube channel.

How social is that – really? FedEx is getting “mildly hammered” in social channels and they don’t respond in those very same channels where the conversation is happening. That’s what is so perplexing about their response.

We used EvoApp MX to gather and analyze a sample of the chatter and see how things are playing out in the social web with one of the most respected Brands in the world. The chart below is a graphic of how fast things changed, and gives you some idea of how fast public sentiment can turn on a negative event.

Pictures truly are worth a thousand words. When you see a graphic of something like this it really drives a point home. Normal ebb and flow of a social conversation, then a spike in volume and a plunge in sentiment when something happens. Notice the downward spike in sentiment – and this is AFTER FedEx has already issued its apology. And this is only a sampling of what is happening.

To get this data, we programmed in only 9 of the +100 video links where this video resides. Think about this from a social engagement perspective: we used video links from sites like CNN, Huffington Post, Daily Mail (UK) etc. as our keywords. When people went to CNN, copied the link and pushed into Twitter, Facebook and other digital media, that’s when we picked up the conversation. By definition, we also started late – there was already a social conversation before sites like CNN published their link. The speed of the spread is overwhelming, and we didn’t even try to capture the overall conversation, only the times when people linked the video in their response.

Another thing – Social chatter is nothing if not amusing. Nothing is sacred or off limits in the social sphere. As someone who makes a living reading, interpreting and analyzing social media posts, take it from me – the American Public is hilarious. Here are some sample comments about this delivery:

“I guess the sender shipped it no signature required”
“Non-Union labor at its best – ship #UPS this holiday”
“He even walked on the grass!”
Over 150 people stated it was “my TV being delivered”

Social media provides access for everyone to express their opinions. It’s a marketers dream and in cases like this, a corporate PR nightmare. Why shouldn’t companies try to capture and leverage those conversations? They’ll pay thousands to third party firms to conduct a “study”, and get an out of date upon delivery flat report at the end of it all. Why not leverage technology to capture the same information at a fraction of the cost and improve the timeliness of the data?

It happens. Corporate PR disasters caused by the reckless actions of an individual happen all the time (10 worst here). What’s fascinating about the incident is how viral the video went (speed and breadth), the social chatter, and the FedEx response. Think about the number of people who have put their social handles out there discussing FedEx.

Wouldn’t it be a better social response strategy to personally send those commenting an apology? From a technical perspective it’s easy. From a cost perspective, it’s inexpensive. So why not do it? Personally, I’m left wanting more from a company that touts itself as a business leader in technology and social media.

For FedEx’s sake, I hope their response isn’t finished. While it’s good enough to get through the event, it’s such a missed opportunity to further their cause and gain brand evangelists.

Written by Keith Karczewski

Follow me on twitter @k2businessviews

What do you think about Fedex’s response? Leave us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.

The world of marketing has fundamentally changed. As Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot constantly remind us, we’re living a revolution in the way people communicate. Gone are the old days of massive marketing budgets to slam prospects with unwanted ads and email blasts. Rather than spending large quantities of money to find customers, your customers want to find you. Welcome to the world of “inbound marketing”. One of the best ways to get your customers to find you and understand what you offer is get them to your website, your inbound marketing hub.

On to the Steps

There are many ways to do this. Here are 6 steps for using a digital intelligence tool such as EvoApp MX (you can use any high quality social media monitoring or social media business intelligence tool for this) to get more high-quality leads to your website! Note: once they get there, it’s up to you to have the proper content and conversion forms in place to get your prospects to take the next step and contact you!

1. Add your keywords – Add keywords depending on your industry. Any monitoring or intelligence product will have some sort of Boolean keyword search and tagging system in place. Add your keywords and tag them how you see fit. If you sell boating and outdoor equipment, you’ll want to add each of your competitors as separate keywords, as well as the top keywords for the industry. These may include words like “Speed boats”, “Fishing gear”, “Hiking gear” etc. For us, we use words like “social media business intelligence”, “social media monitoring” etc. You’ll need to do research on who your competitors are, and what words people would use to seek out products or services for your industry.

2. Add quality RSS feeds, twitter handles, and Facebook handles – Your social media monitoring or digital intelligence tool should include options to add RSS feeds, twitter handles, or Facebook handles. If it doesn’t you may need a new tool. Once again add each of your competitors, and pick five of the best blogs about your industry. A simple Google search will help you find them. Any time a blog is updated or new content is posted, it will show up in your domain’s feed.

3. Parse your domain for mentions of your industry, brand, or potential customers – This is the fun part! Your domain should start pulling in mentions of everything you specified. Read through it and locate when people post about best practices or how to guides on your industry. Locate people who are looking for products or recommendations, whether in tweets, blogs, forums or on Facebook. Engage them. Get a good feel for what people talk about and who the experts in the field are. Read their content and keep in mind any key themes or topics. This will help you develop your own opinions to bring to the table for future posts.

4. Click through each mention, read the author’s content, comment if available - On each blog or forum post you locate and read, digest the author’s content and leave a comment at the bottom adding to the conversation. Add your own input and include some advice about the industry or highlight some best practices.

5. Leave a signature (preferably Twitter handle) without hard-selling your product – Don’t hard sell your product or company. Instead, leave your name and twitter handle at the bottom of your comment. You’ll be surprised how many people add you on Twitter! On your Twitter profile, put a link to your company’s website. When they follow you, they’ll see your website link and more often than not, click on it. Bam! You’ve not only added to your organic followers, but you’ve also attracted another prospect to your website. And you know they are already engaged and looking for your high quality products because the only reason they found you in the first place is they read your comment on an industry-specific blog, and liked what you had to say!

6. Rinse, repeat! - By parsing your domain, you’ll not only have access to your Twitter and Facebook feeds, but the vast world of blogs, forums, and message boards as well. You’ll be able to keep up to date on what’s happening in your industry and engage with the experts. By mastering this system, you’ll notice a significant boost to your website and twitter traffic, and overall increase in engagement with experts in your industry. Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Social Media provides you and your company a unique opportunity to find leads and drive traffic to your website. It’s up to you to go out and find people who have problems that only your company can solve! If you are currently using a digital intelligence tool, you can significantly boost website traffic by following these simple steps. It helps us, but let us know what you think of this system and if it helps you in the comments below! If you’d like more information about EvoApp MX or how you can improve website traffic and ultimately generate high-quality leads, shoot me an email at sergei (at) evoapp (dot) com.

Cheers,

Sergei Dolukhanov

Find me on:

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The 2012 presidential race is heating up in dramatic fashion, and Herman Cain is a lead actor. The former businessman, radio host, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has endured a rollercoaster rise and fall in his run for the White House, and it may be only the beginning. Using EvoApp MX software, we tracked, analyzed and compared social media conversations regarding Cain and his political campaign with Gallup Poll data to better understand the correlation between Gallup numbers – traditional metrics that measure a candidate’s popularity – and social media. The results of our findings pictured in the infographic prove the increased value of mining social media data and how these two data sources together will help determine the next president of the United States of America in 2012 and the advantages of accessing and analyzing this information (speed, efficiency, detail) compared to traditional polling methods.

The baseline results align in a very extraordinary way – as Gallup’s Name Recognition metric increases, so does the volume of social media conversation recorded by EvoApp. Additionally, Gallup’s Positive Intensity metric and EvoApp’s Cumulative Sentiment metric correlate very strongly. As we look deeper at the data, some very interesting direct relationships become apparent. As new events occur, the public instantly reveals their sentiment in real-time via social media; this correlates strongly with polling data revealed days or weeks later.

Cain begins as a virtually unknown Republican candidate. Surpassing expectations in the Iowa Straw Poll in August, Cain continues to push his 9-9-9 tax plan and gains momentum in name recognition, sentiment, and volume through September and early October. Cain continues to rise to national prominence as he secures surprise victories in the Florida, TeaCon MidWest, and National Federation of Women Straw Polls, as you can see with the spike in conversation volume in early October.

Through the month of October, Cain does well in straw polls, debates, and speaking engagements. Social media conversations reflect positively on the conservative businessman earlier in the month, with cumulative social media sentiment peaking alongside (but ahead of) Gallup’s positive intensity measure. There are frequent mentions of his tax plan and business-centric mindset. A Fox News poll late in the month shows Cain as the front-runner, with 24% of the votes and Mitt Romney coming in at second place with 20%.

However, Cain’s ride as front-runner is short-lived. In early November, allegations surface of sexual misconduct and America’s social web erupts, and formerly positive sentiment turns to general disapproval. Over 8000 mentions on November 8th alone, including terms like “sexual”, “harassment”, and “women”, bombard blogs, forums, news sites, and other social networks. As the floodgates open, other women step forward and claim sexual harassment against Herman Cain. Overall conversation volume spikes and leads to increased name recognition in the Gallup and other national polls. Cumulative sentiment drops dramatically (and again, ahead of Gallup’s numbers), leading Cain’s positive intensity to plummet on a national scale. While Cain continues to deal with negative publicity and the associated fall in sentiment from his alleged sexual affairs, other Republican candidates like Romney and Gingrich have gained ground.

Understanding the correlation between real-time conversations in social media and traditional channels like polls and focus groups provides opportunities to analyze presidential elections like never before; in real-time. The goals are the same; the means by which we arrive at them are rapidly evolving and must be actively pursued. Faster and less expensive than traditional channels of communication, social media contains a wealth of real-time data waiting to be tapped. As we found out from Obama’s 2008 strategy, social media is a game-changing channel of engagement for a candidate and effectively leveraging the potential of this channel goes a long way in determining election winners and losers.

Can Herman Cain recover his battered campaign and reclaim his former popularity? We will have to wait and see. What we do know is that the way we communicate and understand the world around us has fundamentally changed, especially in politics. Social media channels have given everyone access and a platform to have their voice heard on an international scale. As information is available to us in massive quantities and in real-time, understanding how this information impacts the outcomes important to us, whether a business or presidential campaign, is the key to success for everyone from CEOs to presidential candidates. Herman Cain is learning this the hard way.

Written by Sergei Dolukhanov
Infographic by Pete Green

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What are your thoughts on the role of social media in politics? Let us know in the comments below.

According to Jaime, there are several pain points of “legacy” BI vendors; non-flexible data integrations, slow delivery speeds, unapproachable complexity, lack of actionable data and alerts, and monolithic pricing structures. Their static foundations don’t allow you to selectively chose your data sources for maximum flexibility, and their traditional, hadoop-based solutions could never deliver results to meet the speeds and needs of today’s data-consuming monsters. Many traditional BI solutions don’t even take unstructured data in to account, a necessary component if one desires to discover trends previously left unacknowledged and maximize the benefits of predictive analytics.

Jaime goes on to discuss suggestions for improving the accessibility of BI tools for mid and small size businesses, and what types of improvements could be added to new-age BI tools. Some of the needs include: lowering costs, easy to set up and use, automatic data integrations (no doubt via API), focused, industry-specific solutions for end-users, predictive analytics, real-time alerts, and pro-active, not reactive, technology. Lower costs will attract smaller as well as larger scale businesses, broadening the range of potential buyers. However, with traditional methods of storing and retrieving data, lowering costs is impossible. The only way to create a platform flexible enough to handle varying forms of data with low costs and record retrieval / storage speeds is to lose the traditional methods of storing and retrieving data; a fully cloud based platform.

Jaime’s “dream BI” suite would be a solution completely native to the cloud, one that never had to rely on hard-storage or traditional loading / retrieving methods. For many years this type of technology was not feasible. However, thanks to recent technological breakthroughs, a big data and BI solution fully native to the cloud is not only possible, but realistic. By 2020, it is said that all the information in the digital universe will either live in or pass through the cloud. IDC estimates that 45gb of data currently exists for each person on the planet – 2801 Billion Gigabytes in total (281 Exabytes). If the problem is the data, and the data lives in the cloud, put trust in a solution that lives where the data is.

Thanks for reading! You can find cloud-basedbusiness intelligence software reviews on the Software Advice site, and check out Jaime’s blog here.

What are your thoughts on Business Intelligence products in today’s marketplace? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Sergei Dolukhanov

Find me on:

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About EvoApp

EvoApp makes analyzing big data easy by finding the patterns in relevant conversations that impact your business.

Our real-time data mining and analysis platform gives big data meaning by correlating with metrics that drive your business. We’ve helped customers quadruple lead generation, dramatically improve customer service, find the language that makes them six times more relevant to their target audience, and accelerate product launches.

Connecting big data with business metrics provides new and better ways to answer the questions critical to your success. EvoApp makes big data actionable with a scalable analysis platform previously only available to the largest institutions. We make big data approachable with solutions for every day users.

Two words send shivers up the spines of Bank of America executives, haunting their dreams, causing them to break out in cold sweat. Those words?

Molly Katchpole.

You see, Molly has gone viral. Very exciting, isn’t it? Not if you’re Bank of America.

On October 1st, Molly entered the following update to a petition she had recently posted to change.org, letting BoA know she wasn’t happy with the fee hike:

Molly Katchpole

 

 

 

100 signatures reached!

Awesome work, everyone! We reached our first milestone of 100 signatures… and now we’re on to 200! Spread the word: stop Bank of America’s debit card fee profiteering!

While I have no intention of diminishing her accomplishment, it pales in comparison to the attention she’s drawn in the days since, appearing in TV news interviews, print and online. When the petition was complete it had achieved over 300,000 signatures. On Wednesday, Bank of America flip-flopped on their fee position, saying that they “listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee.” Molly is now a hero, the 22 year old that slayed Goliath. BoA stock is down 50% year to date.

Bank of America’s backtrack was clearly not soon enough for the public and investors, so what went wrong? Did BoA have opportunities to correct course along the way? Was customer feedback present and clear enough for them to work with?

It turns out that Bank of America had both the feedback it needed and key opportunities to control the damage, indicated redundantly from a variety of data sources, in a manner so clear it seems to line up nicely with future stock prices.

Social media analytics become powerful when multiple sources of data are analyzed, a process only available to the most robust big data platforms. Seemingly disparate layers of information whose units don’t line up start to look amazingly insightful when those units are abandoned and we start to look at relationships on a temporal basis. The data we see here show that the sentiment of public feedback is in line with stock price and is often a day or two ahead. The feedback cycle now occurs in real-time, so response time must be measured in minutes, not days.

Some of the results we see are to be expected: as Bank of America continues to make mistakes, cumulative sentiment declines and the volume of negative conversation goes up. The most insightful patterns reveal themselves when comparing disparate data trends, and in this case the picture became clear when average sentiment, stock price and news events are aligned. We now see the most interesting pattern: a news event occurs, the public responds immediately yielding an average sentiment which appears to influence stock price within 48 hours.

So, each participant in the Bank of America feedback cycle, regardless of the extremity or whether they are even a customer, contributes relevant data points to a whole which seems to factor into a variety of insightful metrics. You don’t even need a math degree, I simply plugged “Bank of America” into EvoApp and lined the graphs up by date. This is the kind of exciting discovery within the data we need to curb the talk of social media monitoring entirely and move the discussion to true social media business intelligence.

As a side note, having achieved fame as an activist, Molly is currently seeking a full-time job.

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Social media has changed the world of business. People have gained access to so much information in so little time that it changed the way companies look (or don’t look) at their brand reputations. In the new social media ecosphere, not implementing a sound strategy for listening to customers is a recipe for disaster. For the companies that chose not to listen, they risk the possibility of losing customers or even worse, viral PR nightmares. On the flip side, there are also companies who represent the best of the best when it comes to understanding and listening to their customers. Below are three examples of companies that “do it right” when it comes to listening, understanding, and engaging their customers online.

Dell

The first company we have to list is Dell. They also get both the ‘worst’ and ‘best’ awards, because back in 2005, their reputation was terrible. They have since gone through significant priority shifts, internal company changes, and revamped their social media policy to the point where they actually have some of the highest customer service rankings of any company. “Listening and responding to customers is so basic and fundamental. The emergence of social media elevates how companies can act on the feedback they get from customers,” said Karen Quintos, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at Dell. “As companies embark on social media, the key is to embed it throughout every facet of the organization—from sales to marketing to engineering to customer service to HR to finance. For Dell, this approach ensures that our customers connect with the experts who can address their unique issues and ultimately help them do and achieve more.” Dell now has a full blow command center for listening to customer feedback and improving their company based on the opinions of their consumers. They’ve come a long way from exploding laptop batteries and “My Dell Hell”! They certainly take the gold medal in “best comeback story”.

Zappos

www.Zappos.com is the gold standard for customer service, and a big part of that is how they communicate with their customers online. Since this online shoe company emerged, its main goal was create the best atmosphere to work for its employees and have top-notch customer service. They won best customer service in 2011, and the reason is simple: they listen to their customers. Any small issues get fixed, all major issues are avoided, and everybody wins. They have a fantastic social media presence, an incredibly high amount of twitter followers, and incredibly fast reaction times. For example, a customer sent a return back to Zappos.com via USPS and they never got it. He tweeted it, and within 24 minutes someone from their @Zappos_Service twitter account responded. The issue was resolved soon after. Zappos is the perfect example of a company that fixes small issues before they become big problems.

American Express

In the last couple of years, American Express as a company decided to invest more time and resources on social media both in B2C and B2B. They came up with an interactive, small-business initiative to engage directly with small businesses and give them say in American Expresses policies. This type of digital engagement won them the hearts of many online followers and Facebook fans, and rocketed their customer service to #2 behind Zappos in 2011. They gave fans on their Facebook page initiatives to shop with small businesses and reasons to engage with American Express, with frequent giveaways and fan-based contests. This leveraging of social media is a perfect example of American Express engaging with people via social media and putting the power in the hands of the consumer. The feedback is mostly positive towards American Express and its social media policies, so in a sense they eliminate the small issues simply by creating great content and leveraging social media. They completely avoid big problems by thinking ahead and staying on top of their customer service and social media presence.

Listen to your Customers!

All of the companies above implement social media listening campaigns to actively listen and engage with their customers online. In return, they boast the best of the best in customer service year after year. Loyal fans praise their proactive policies and ability to turn feedback in to actionable insight and more importantly, better products and services.

Written by Sergei Dolukhanov

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What are your favorite social media success stories? Let us know in the comments below!