Polygraph Media Blog

Twitter and Gnip - A match made in data heaven

Last week, Twitter announced the acquisition of Gnip in what will certainly amount to be a key milestone in the evolution of social media.

2008-2010 Young social media managers emerge at brands to help them navigate new social media tools.

2011-2013 Social media turns increasingly from an earned/owned media channel to a paid media channel.

2014-2016 Old skills become obsolete. Brands, who are now spending a lot of money on the now-mature social media channel, need to optimize their spend. Young social media managers are replaced by data-oriented internet marketers.

If you believe this framework -- IMO you should as it's entirely what we've seen across consumer brands -- you understand there are a few implications:

1. Old skills and first-generation tools become obsolete if there is no commitment to innovation.
2. New innovations can emerge quickly and solve major pain points in consumer brands.
3. Access to data, at scale, becomes very important.
4. Whereas all this UGC (user-generated content) is a massive collection of Facebook comments, Tweets, ratings/reviews, chat logs, forum discussions, words become gold for the data miner.
5. What's being said, when, how, and by whom becomes something we can solve with technology -- and something much more desirable than say reading a hundred thousand comments/day manually.

Without going into too much detail about my own company or Twitter (I was there three weeks ago and am under NDA), I think I can say that Twitter realizes just how important data and scalable APIs really are. I was very impressed with the vision that I heard from a wide range of personnel at the meetings I attended, all the way to the top.

We do for Facebook pretty much exactly what Gnip does for Twitter. Increasingly, our ability to help brands get access to Facebook feedback at scale is sparking great conversations and projects with consumer brands.

Everyone is moving in the direction of big, scalable social data for a range of scenarios.

• Combine with CRM
• Understand customer feedback
• Help inform community management strategy and tactics
• Conduct competitive intelligence
• Better informing advertising spend and algorithmically running ads specifically to defeat or out-message a competitor
• Using social data to target individuals most likely to transmit a marketing message, visit a retailer, try a new product/service

We live in very exciting times, as I believe the next 5 years will bring us some remarkable marketing innovations that tap into the millions upon millions of pieces of social feedback that are generated worldwide every day. I am just glad to see one of the major players both acknowledge this and act upon it in a meaningful way. Kudos to the Twitter team for moving the industry forward!

Polygraph Moroch Partnership -- Actionable Social Data for Brands

Today, we're happy to announce our partnership with Moroch to bring actionable social data to brands.

Over the last year to 18 months, we've talked with a lot of consumer brands about how they can harness Facebook data to better react to customer feedback, make data-driven decisions, and significantly improve the efficiency of media buys.

Most companies know that the data is rich and prime for investigation, but they don't know how to get started. That's where we come in. We bring hard data to help inform decisions that are often made today by feel or by subjective criteria.

We have established a great working relationship with Moroch around big data and have a few victories under our belts with some of the top brands in the world. We're excited to continue innovating with them as a partner. Moroch understands the value of data and how to make it pop for its clients.

More to come as we continue to innovate and help consumer marketers turn big, social data into a meaningful part of the marketing mix.

Data Proliferation and the rise of the Chief Data Officer

Quick update today -- the "data proliferation problem" is just a theme I've heard from a lot of conversations recently.

A fellow "data" startup CEO mentioned to me the other day that he lamented just how hard it is to sell "data" and "data services" to people in brands and the enterprise.  Marketing departments have millions of dollars to spend on print advertising that they know does not work... but a modest $100,000 investment to help people understand their data opportunity requires significant explanation and is often met with blank stares.

We're in an odd point in time kinda like we were in with social media in 2007. Evolved enough for people to recognize the promise, but too early for budgets and organizational alignment to have taken place. This does not frustrate me all that much -- but it is a growth opportunity for small companies such as ours and a chance or visionary bigger companies to jump out to a quick, early lead.

I have a lot to say on this subject and will follow up here and in some of my guest blogging on how business is evolving. Suffice it to say that winners will be data-driven decision makers. They'll have context about what is important and what is not, and they'll execute well. They will know statistics, business goals/metrics, and they'll understand the interplay between operations, customer data, and their own systems.

Companies will increasingly hire or appoint Chief Data Officers -- and not just those in data-intensive businesses either.  A single person and/or office will handle issues related to making data useful and actionable for a business but will also be careful to not expose private data to people who should not see it. It's a tough problem, but a fascinating opportunity.

Deloitte discussed this recently in a fantastic brief paper. I think it was interesting that Alibaba just appointed their former Chief Data Officer as CEO of the entire business. Expect that trend to continue.

The folly of analytics and value of big data analytics

Analytics has become a hot topic over the last 12 months as middle-managers are asked tough questions by their executive stakeholders.

For all the insanity around social marketing, mobile apps, and "conversations", many CMOs, CIOs, and CFOs want to know exactly what they're getting for their money.  Budgets are growing and advertising spend is fluid.  People want to know the impact of strategy changes and tactics tweaks. But don't worry.  This pattern is not just familiar to you in your business, it's happening everywhere.

Middle managers have turned to analytics to rationalize what has happened -- to measure success and failure.  But I'd contend that some of the early analtyics offerings are doing a bit of a disservice to the very clients who rely upon them.  Charts, graphs, and data visualizations are compelling -- so they must be authoritative.

But are they really?

The one question you should ask of any analytics offering is simple:

Do I truly understand the metrics presented in this chart?
As a marketer, do I understand how to improve the metrics presented in this chart?
And finally, do I understand clearly how these metrics impact my company's ability to make more money, save money, and generate a return on investment (ROI)?

As I talk with corporate marketers about social marketing, content, and advertising measurement, I'd say that at least half the people do not understand the data presented to them by Facebook Insights.  Few, if any people, understand what Facebook's Reach and PTAT (People Talking About This) metrics really mean.  Almost none understand how those metrics should be used and interpreted.  And fewer know exactly how they'd improve upon those numbers.  The same goes for abstractions on hard metrics provided by third-party analytics providers.

The only way to get a true understanding of your performance is for your metrics to match the things you know how to do.  On Facebook, it's simple:

• Page Likes -- how many Fans do you have, and is that number growing?
• Posts -- how often do you post?
• Post Type -- how often do you post different types of content to keep your Page fresh?
• Shares -- how often are people inspired to share content with their friends?
• Comments -- how often do people comment on your Page?
• Likes -- how often do people like content that you post?
• Engagement Rate -- by time period or post, how well does your content truly perform?
• Clicks -- how do your ads and/or Page Posts generate clicks to a web site?

Facebook is the top of the funnel for many consumer marketers -- it's an awareness vehicle that can help you create a better conversion rate for other online activities.  It can also identify your top fans and people who advocate for you online and offline.

But (and I'll pick on Facebook Insights for a moment) if you're using metrics such as Reach and PTAT as religious metrics that you watch feverishly, I think you're missing the point.  You're succumbing to the folly of analytics as opposed to the data-driven answers that big data analytics can provide.

If you go to the effort of measurement, you're ahead of the game.  But you're really ahead of the game if you take a data-driven approach.  Be sure to measure the very things you know you can affect.  Otherwise, you're just guessing.

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.

Social Media Measurement & ROI - the next big thing

According to The Center for Marketing Research at The University of Massachusetts.

We agree.  Link below:

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/social_media_measurement_and_roi_next_focus_of_inc_500_fortune_500

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.

How Facebook can inform a Presidential Race

Today, we thought we'd use Facebook data to tackle one of the most anticipated decisions of 2012. Who will Mitt Romney choose as his running mate?  And can Facebook data be used to help make the decision?

Data is great and all, but what good is data if you can't make decisions with it?

First, a little context.  A number of studies have already shown that social media data is helpful to gauge voter sentiment:

• Crimson Hexagon analyzed Twitter data in 2010 to accurately predict a victory for Harry Reid.
• Social data (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) was also used to accurately predict Boris Johnson's victory in the London mayoral race last month (June 2012)
• Facebook themselves pointed out some correlations in the data as well following the 2010 US mid-term election.  Candidates with more fans won Congressional races 74% of the time and Senate races 81% of the time.  Not bad!

Now this field is not without detractors -- some academics have focused on the flaws in using social data to predict the future.  We agree that Twitter data is dirty relative to Facebook data, as it's easier to create dummy accounts for Twitter and many people use Twitter primarily for marketing purposes and not to share what they're really doing/saying/thinking.

But it's also sour grapes in our opinion.  Anything short of asking every single man, woman, and child is in essence a shortcut.  There are going to be flaws in using data to make assumptions about the behavior of a large audience.  There are flaws in traditional market research, statistical analysis, etc.  This is no different -- in fact, it may be better.

With social data, we have the largest self-contributed data sets the world has ever seen... on par with the financial and personal data owned by major credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, etc.) and marketing companies (Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, and Harte Hanks). Additionally, people don't really have the motivation to falsify information here as they would perhaps when talking with a market research professional.  Facebook is capturing the unvarnished truth of who everyone is.

As such, we think that Facebook data is the most accurate data set in the world.  And it's relatively unmined at present.

-- 

Anyhow, we wanted to show an example of how reactions on Facebook can give decision-makers in politics a clear sense of who is "known", what they've done, and how they've managed to keep their supporters engaged.  In that sense, politics is not that unlike what social marketers do all the time -- keep the brand front & center and something worth rallying around.

In this admittedly simplistic example, we looked at a number of factors in an attempt to narrow down the Field from a large number (8) to a top-priority running mate.  We collected data on the following:

• Current Facebook Fan count
• Percentage of “Likes” over 5 quarters of posts
• Pro or negative “Romney” in page posts
• Pace of new Facebook fan acquisitions predicted between now and election day based on previous pace (how many new Friends per day)
• Polarization – the activity of each candidate on “pro” or “against” 3^rd party Fan pages

Each of these things was selected in order to test something relevant for a national election.  Is a candidate a national or regional candidate?  Is a candidate doing a good job of keeping the base engaged?  Is the candidate extending his/her reach to a broader base of enthusiastic supporters? Does the candidate create controversy or negative passion in other voters that might improve the prospects of the other political party?

The infographic is below.  We'd love to know what you think.  Also check out our YouTube video where we walk through the findings and explain the numbers in more detail.

Social Marketing & The Quantified Self

The "Quantified Self" movement is something you've probably heard of over the last few years -- the idea that you can quantify previously mundane activities that you've otherwise ignored to attach a number to the things that you do.  There's plenty of reading about it on Wikipedia if you'd like to dig deeper.

In real life, the movement has manifested itself in successful consumer products in/around the fitness industry, such as the FitBit, numberous nutrition apps on the iPad, Garmin products, and the Nike+ line of products.  

In fact, Nike is releasing a product specifically for basketball so you can quantify your vital stats on the basketball court.  Allow me to let the expert, LeBron James, explain it.  

 

Sidebar -- but as a 38 year old, aging weekend warrior, I just don't want to know how bad my numbers are and especially as they compare to friends... but I digress.

Others have added a social element to tap into how we respond to peer pressure and/or social humiliation -- such as Strava and the Withings Scale that tweets out your weight.  Yikes!  

Why do people quantify themselves?

• People quantify themselves when something is wrong and they want to fix it.
• People quantify themselves when they're doing something right, and want to make sure they continue to do things right.  
• People quantify themselves when they want discipline to do the right thing, even though their natural inclination is to not do the right thing.
• People quantify themselves when they want an objective measurement of how they are performing at something, relative to peers or competitors.
• People quantify others when they want to use data & milestones to understand things they cannot understand, or as a proxy for heavy-handed, micro-management.

Numbers have a way of cutting through the clutter and capturing only what really matters... outcomes.  Combining numbers from different sources can give you a quick, objective look at everything that really matters to you.

If you take numbers the next step to analysis, you can begin to draw conclusions based on the data but also including human judgment where it's appropriate.  Leave analysis to others, and you're getting their interpretation of the data.

We found it interesting that Jeff Ma, formerly of the famed MIT Blackjack team, recently ventured into this space to quantify what people are doing in the workplace with his new startup, TenXer.  Right place, right time -- like Facebook, this would've never flown even a decade ago.  But times change and now it's a brilliant idea.

We're seeing it in social marketing and we're seeing it move into other areas of marketing that were thought to be a "black hole" previously.

We're at the beginning of a bigger trend where the "Quantified Self" moves into areas beyond personal improvement, fitness, etc.  People are learning the value of numbers, metrics, and how to apply them to make better decisions.  We're happy to be here at this critical time.

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!