Polygraph Media Blog

What Lance Armstrong and Facebook Have in Common

Today's blog post comes to you from our Business Development Manager, Craig Carter, who had a little fun speculating about Lance Armstrong and Facebook. I thought it was pretty amusing, so here goes...

(Preface—Except for the Facts and Figures charted below, all statements are pure speculation and have not been confirmed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.)

What do Lance Armstrong and Facebook have in common?

The short answer is they have both given their teammates Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs).   Now before you go running off to the mountain top, screaming that Mark Zuckerberg is peddling concentration steroids to his coders, let me explain.  Large brand pages and Facebook are all on the same team.  In one way or the other, they are working together to improve marketing performance, brand image, and make a profit.   So WHEN, HOW, and WHY did Facebook, not only begin to give brands PEDs, but dare I say, try to get them addicted?

It all started around June 6 (conveniently after the FB stock price declined 30 percent in 20 days) when all engagement metrics on large brands and company pages started to track upwards faster than the Cliffhangers Game on “The Price is Right.” 

 

I am sure this is partly because of some great new content, more posts, insights from Facebook Ninjas/Gurus/Rock Stars, and increased ad spending on Facebook, but more so, Facebook hooked up the engagement IV to all its pages and started pumping them full of likes, comments, and shares. Just imagine Lance secretly giving his racing team wondrous enhancers, and then the team started winning!

Ahh the glory days!  Little did brands know Facebook was giving them a PED better than Michael Jordan’s Special Stuff in Space Jam. 

As Social Rock Stars became the one direction of the office, Facebook took the hit as their stock “plummeted.”  I even heard rumors that “Zuck” was selling his couches on Craigslist to pay for dinner.  But just as Lance was the genius behind the doping of his many Tour de France wins, Facebook had a plan—give away marketing, get brands hooked on engagement, and then slowly stop trickling the drug through the IV. 

 

What happened next … just ask any local drug dealer. 
Give away the drug, get ’em addicted, then start charging for it.  Low and behold, right around the time when massive free engagement stopped, Facebook’s stock value started going up!  I feel this really started happening around mid-November—actually after the Facebook pundits started yelling from the rooftops about EdgeRank changes.  

As we are now over a month into 2013, it will be interesting to see what happens with these two pieces of data.  All I can say is ask Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds if PEDs are just like Pringles, “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”  Meaning these brands are going to be pulling out their pocketbooks to get back to their former glory. 

Data Note: All data presented came from Polygraph Media’s Facebook Data Analytics Engine. The 62,682 posts analyzed were from 125 large brand and company pages from Jan 1, 2012, to Jan 28, 2013.  In order to remove outliers and smooth the data, I removed 599 posts for being 3-standard deviations greater than average and opted to use a 7-day rolling average of the total likes received on all the pages. Give me a shout if you want to see some of this data and analysis first hand!

Polygraph: Solving & more importantly Explaining Big Social Data, Facebook

Howdy everyone -- it's been awhile since I've posted here.  Lots of work on Polygraph and a new addition to my family in the form of a baby.  Margot Ellen Treadaway was born on December 14th and is our first child.  Lots of life changes -- all good.  But the blog has taken a bit of a back seat recently.

That's a-changin'.  Regular blogging is back for us as we bring Polygraph v2 to market.  I'll tell you more about that later.

But for now, I thought I'd better explain how our business has evolved and where it is going.  For those of you who have followed the Notice Technologies ride, you know that we've had quite the journey.

We started in 2009 with a couponing platform for local businesses.  We hit the streets and talked with as many local businesses as possible -- in an effort to build something perhaps a little less one-sided than Groupon in terms of who benefits from the transaction.  Local businesses were tough to work with because they demanded immediate results -- and didn't have the time or energy for anything that failed to generate immediate, incremental revenue.  Hence Groupon.  Groupon built tremendous value for itself, at least early... but much of it was at the *expense* instead of the *benefit* of the local business.  That's why Groupon remains a largely unsustainable business model -- and why we didn't (right or wrong) pursue group purchasing aggressively.  It's also why local businesses haven't gotten a revolutionary marketing platform yet.  It takes iteration, which local businesses simply aren't willing/able to do unlike other classes of customers.

We tried salvaging those couponing assets by offering them to newspaper groups.  But that became its own set of problems as you can imagine, and local media didn't prove to be much of a gainful opportunity for us.

All the while, we'd been hearing from people in agencies, brands, and other larger companies that measurement of social media was a huge pain point.  Facebook Insights didn't do the job well and still doesn't.  We saw an opportunity with our v1 of Polygraph to jump into the analytics fray.  And that's been a very positive move for us.

But we see a bigger trend and a bigger pain point in a lot of companies.  Businesses large and small are trying to better understand what value they're driving from social media.  It isn't enough for the world's leading companies to conduct best practices, adopt a social media management system, hire a consultant, or outsource social media to an agency.  The C-Suite really wants to know a few things:

• What business metrics are being affected by good social media execution?
• Is there a statistical relationship between social data and revenue or other mission-critical business outcomes?
• Do Facebook Ads and the like really work?
• How are competitors grappling with Facebook for customer outreach, customer service, and other marketing purposes?
• Is the social channel truly worthwhile?
• Should social earn a greater or lesser investment moving forward?

Who do CEOs and CMOs turn to for clear, data-driven answers to these questions?  They certainly can't turn to existing agencies of record -- they're too invested in a positive answer.  C-suite execs need a BS detector to tell them what the data says, and we're increasingly that BS detector.

Polygraph does an inventory of available data and collects it from Facebook for a company, its brands, its competitors, and its portfolio of Facebook assets.  We cache it, analyze it, and find relationships in the data.  Companies will sometimes give us other data sets that we'll add to our analysis -- such as web metrics, e-commerce results, or other mission-critical data.  We look at it all holistically to understand the customer engagement system -- how people discover the brand and make decisions to engage, interact, and make purchases (where applicable).  We seek understanding of the customer walk and conflict resolution -- are people using the brand's social assets as a customer service vehicle.

Ultimately, all of this data tells us a compelling story that can drive next steps.  Should you keep your existing agency or find a new one?  Does your portfolio of assets provide a return on investment?  Does social data correlate to real-world business metrics that matter to you?  Can we find evidence of causation?  Does social data move the needle or vice versa?

Understanding is what the C-suite craves today.  But the C-suite doesn't have it today. Agencies aren't independent arbiters aligned with the interests of a C-suite exec responsible for driving revenue and profit.  Unfortunately, very few marketers are equipped with the analysis chops necessary to make the case effectively also.  Sometimes, a marketer is equipped but isn't viewed as an independent, disinterested judge.

We're doing some fascinating projects right now in several major consumer industries that I wish we could talk more about -- but we're under NDA.  It's admittedly a little frustrating in that regard.  But you should know that the data unlocks fascinating insights that leading brands are beginning to uncover today. Truth lies in the social data. That's what we do -- collect, analyze, and drive insights from social data.

Big Social Data -- Explaining Offline Behavior

Over the past six months or more, you've probably heard the term "big data" floating around as if it is supposed to solve all your problems in business, marketing, operations, etc.  Just "access the data" and you'll be smarter than your competition.  You'll react to customer feedback.  You'll be a visionary.  Blah blah blah

All of this creates a situation where they hype is through the roof, but few people can really speak to real-world scenarios and useful applications of big data.  That's probably why "Big Data" is high on Gartner's Hype Cycle 2012 Chart.  Lots of possibilities, but not a lot of answers just yet.

We work primarily in the social data realm at the moment, although we have been getting more & more requests to integrate offline data with social data to understand patterns.  Alongside first-cousin ROI (return on investment), the big question today is whether or not social media is a scorecard for how you're doing or if it can influence offline behaviors, purchase patterns, etc.

The takeaway for us so far is that different businesses certainly have different dynamics.  Only with full access to the data can you really draw any firm conclusions.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help harness big data for your company or brand.

Interview in Texas Tech Pulse

Here's a recently published interview in Texas Tech Pulse about Polygraph and its origins.  

http://www.texastechpulse.com/interview_with_chris_treadaway_polygraph/s-0043095.html

The Next Phase of Social Software -- Measurement

A few quotes from Deloitte's recent study, Social Business: What are Companies Really Doing?

"To capture this value, however, companies will need to more systematically assess the operating metrics that have the greatest potential to move the needle and then strategically deploy social software to ensure near-term performance impact with modest investment."

"Social business depends on leadership.  Metrics may not be critical when companies are experimenting with social software, but as it becomes more important to an organization, having metrics in place can help managers assess and reward related behaviors."

We agree!

Social business is increasing in popularity -- but as it does, executives will want to know just how they are performing in both absolute terms and contextually against competitors and within an industry.

The best managers will need to get beyond what they're told and use a "left-brained", numbers-driven approach to augment the "right-brained" work necessary to creatively engage with new and existing customers.

Social ROI Wiki

I thought I'd post a list of good articles on Social ROI.  If you'd like me to add one of your favorites to this list, please either e-mail me or submit in the comments below.  We'll update this list as people share their great thoughts & ideas.

• Biserka Anderson - Social ROI, A Tough Nut to Crack
• Mark Henry - A New & Simple Way to Measure Social ROI
• Neal Schaffer - There’s No Such Thing as Social Media ROI – It’s Called Business ROI
• Scot Wheeler - The 4 Principles of Social ROI Measurement

 

Las Vegas Casinos on Facebook (INFOGRAPHIC)

Here's a fun infographic we did to analyze the performance of Las Vegas Casinos on Facebook.  We also analyzed just a few of the available data points on a blog post at Social Colleague.  Enjoy!!

 

The Parent-Child Relationship that begins with Big Social Data

We're wrapping up about a 10 day blitz of different press, analyst, customer, and partner calls -- and the feedback has been great.  We're tired, but glad to be out there.  The side effect of talking to that many people in such a compressed time is that it tends to hone a pitch pretty well.  I suppose there is a lot to be said for repetition.

Polygraph is big social data... packaged today as analytics.

The emphasis and order of that statement is entirely intentional.  We're big social data first and foremost.

The philosophy behind our business is that most problems communicated by our early customers and partners are all solved by data -- a systematic commitment to collecting and analyzing big data in order to find "small data" intelligence.

Many people understand the power of data, but are powerless to act upon it.  That's where Polygraph comes in.

Our first release is an analytics product that is based on having all the data available on Pages and Subscriber-enabled Profiles.  Most of our competitors use or repackage Facebook Insights.  But we've always found that relying on Facebook Insights was a curious approach.  Repackaging Facebook's interpretation of data interesting to marketers is a far cry from getting the source data itself, then building a tool for marketers on top of that.  It's kinda like the difference between tools in the video clip below.

 

But we're excited for the future beyond Facebook analytics.  Based on where we are as a business, we can quickly go wider by covering other social networks... and deeper by covering more scenarios beyond just analytics.  Big social data is the parent -- the enabling platform -- and various applications will excite corporate marketers and consumers.

But at the end of the day, we're a data mining company.  We take the latent, available data and do exciting things with it.  The future is bright, and we're excited!

Polygraph - Microsoft Featured Startup of the Day

Just a quick pointer over to our interview on Technet -- Microsoft named us Startup of the Day last week.

They interviewed me and had me answer a few questions in the Q&A.  It's probably one of the few times I've had the opportunity to tell our story in detail.  The interview is about 10 minutes long and was taken as we prepared for our launch earlier in 2012.  Take a look:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/bizspark_featured_startups/archive/2012/05/24/being-a-thesis-that-is-yet-to-be-proven-startup-advice-from-polygraph-media-ceo-chris-treadway.aspx

Looking for a few good sales executives

Quick plug today for some staffing needs that we have at Polygraph Media.  We are building out our sales force and want to talk to you if you're interested in selling big social data!

Preference given to self-starters and people who are not afraid to hustle.  Ideal candidates will have a demonstrated, strong work ethic, a record of success, and will have connections in major brands, agencies, etc.

These are commission only positions to start and to give us a chance to know you while you get a feel for Polygraph, the product & the company.

Send an e-mail with your resume' and qualifications to christreadaway@gmail.com for more information.