Polygraph Media Blog

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.

Social, the Salesforce acquisition of Buddy Media, and Real Value

Tonight, this blog post summarizing year 1 of the Salesforce acquisition of Buddy Media.  The numbers, if taken on face value, are brutal as the endeavor is a big money loser so far.

The picture painted is probably a tad on the pessimistic side.  If your Salesforce, you don't buy a Buddy Media to harvest but rather capture market share.  I'm sure a conscious decision was made to spend whatever necessary to win share asap -- so costs are going to be higher in the short-term than revenue.  This is why people invest in Salesforce.com, for the prospect of future cash flows and the benefit of capturing share now at the expense of optimizing short-term financial results.

Remember also that this particular business is super competitive with Salesforce, Adobe, Google, and Oracle all competing in the SMMS space against a few independents (Sprinklr, Spredfast).  Keep in mind also that a lot of SMMS work is still being done manually by service businesses from IBM to digital agencies to traditional agencies now competing aggressively in social marketing.

But I do think there is a lesson lurking in here -- that social is still an unproven commodity in the short-term.  Folks like us and others are doing what we can to find value in social media.  Investors who get into social media plays, whether through publicly traded companies or those selling privately held stock, do so on the belief that their picks will help the marketing ecosystem in some way.  But it's still the wild west when it comes to delivering real value.

Whether it's Buddy Media struggling or Facebook ads struggling or folks like Mark Cuban questioning whether or not he should pay for Facebook News Feed visibility, it all comes down to one critical and unanswered question -- what is the value of social marketing for marketers?

When the answer to this question is as simple as it is for search... i.e. Google Adwords... billions of dollars of new shareholder value will be unlocked.  Now where exactly will that be, and when?

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

Guest Blog Posts

I thought I'd share some guest blog posts that I've published over the past few months on the Windmill Networking blog.  It is run by Neal Schaffer, who is one of the world's leading experts on B2B marketing and social media.  Neal is a great guy and friend.

How Can Facebook Get Its Mojo Back

The Unlikely Newest Member of Your Social Media Team

I've committed to Neal that I'll publish there every other month, which means I'm due a third submission there later this month.  :)

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.

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.

"Old Media" Learning from New, Explosive Growth Companies?

Over the last five years, a number of companies have emerged seemingly out of thin air to dominate in a "three screen", computerized world (mobile, tablet, computer) and grow explosively. Think Facebook and Groupon in the publicly traded realm... in Austin we have Chaotic Moon Studios, Mutual Mobile, and AppSumo.  Of this group, only Facebook existed in 2007.  Yet all are growing like a weed.

They all have one thing in common -- they saw opportunities, a market need, and a clear path to monetization that was also capable of scale.  In each case, once they found success, they hit the accelerator rapidly.  And none of them have debilitating geographic limitations that can't easily be overcome.

A number of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in traditional media want to capture that lightning in a bottle -- and are now putting plans in place to do just that.  What will they need to do to succeed?

Fill the toolbox with relevant products -- think about what the target market wants and offer it to them.  There is a revolution going on in mobile and social media.  Hop aboard!  For mobile, that might mean offering apps, mobile advertising, and mobile optimized web sites.  For social, it means helping people keep their sites & social properties up to date, social advertising, how-to webinars, and metrics to be the ultimate scorekeeper of what is working and what is not.

Modernize the sales force & think creatively about the sales process -- Your sales force is perhaps one of your biggest assets, and a huge differentiator from other entrants who have no sales force.  But all too often, they're not motivated to modernize.  Progress means selling new things *and* maintaining cash flows from the old cash cow businesses.  Sometimes your sales force can be a part of this transition, but in other cases they just need to be disrupted.  Broaden your thinking of what a sales process is -- it might make sense for your reps to change, and/or future product sales may not even require a sales rep after all.

Invest in true innovation -- they say in technology that you have to skate to where the puck is going to make good bets for the future.  What pain points will your customers endure in a few years?  That's where they're likely to spend money.  Give thought to it, and plant seeds there alongside existing opportunities.  Some of those new things are tomorrow's stars, if you commit to them as the examples above did.  But they also will never graduate if you don't give it a real chance.

Make geography irrelevant -- Geographical constraints are expensive -- forcing you to invest in on-site salespeople and/or support staff.  Try to make geography less relevant over time to both generate new leads and to find sources of revenue that are not necessarily in your specific locale. This may force you to do some things differently, but that's OK if you can be truly geographically agnostic.

Embrace the potential of a services organization -- For bigger businesses, non-profits, and other customers, you may find that you can make more money providing support or fulfilling maintenance contracts than you would selling your core product.  A services organization, built and integrated into the sales process in the right way, can be a highly profitable yet valuable part of your product offering.

Interestingly, many services organizations and agencies are aggressively moving in the direction of offering products.  They're reinvesting cash flows to compete.  It's a smart move, but it means that old media is getting another round of competitors -- probably the last thing it really needs to stay on top.

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.

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!

The Origins of Polygraph Facebook Data Mining Analytics

First a quick thanks to all of you who visited the blog yesterday.  Our blog traffic exploded yesterday, which means I'll be writing here frequently. :-)

Today, I thought I'd talk about where we got the idea for Polygraph and the feedback we heard from the marketplace in the 9 months preceding our launch.

As some of you may know, our company's origins came from the couponing world.  Our first product was a couponing system that businesses could use to publish coupons on the Web, Facebook, Twitter, and to e-mail lists.  We built this as a DIY system for local businesses and brands, and as such talked with a bunch of customers.

The feedback we got was that couponing really needed to be conditional for businesses to get really fired up about it.  Businesses pay significant $$ for new customers, but treat existing customers as people from which the ARPU (average revenue per user) must be raised.  So if you offer say a 20% coupon to anyone who would take it, the business might get some new customers but it is much more likely to be giving a discount to the very people who will be a customer anyway. 

Businesses market to existing customers differently than they market to new customers, and so if couponing is going to deliver a real ROI, as a tactic it has to become "intelligent".  (Incidentally, I think this is a problem that Groupon and LivingSocial have today.)

So we went back to the drawing board and asked "are there any ways for us to get an idea of if someone is a customer?"  And we turned to Facebook and said "well, Facebook Pages might be an interesting proxy for loyalty."  If someone is associated with a Facebook Page, they are probably a customer of that business in some way.  And hence, Polygraph was born.

We took our core technology to brands and agencies, and surprisingly (to us at least) heard a number of other related requests.  The core of the feedback was that Facebook Insights (or any existing analytics provider) did not adequately explain cause & effect on Facebook.  For example,

• I post something, what happens?
• I don't post something today or for a week, what are the implications?
• I use a particular agency to manage my pages, are they doing what I want?
• I think my competitor is beating me, how can I tell?
• What goals should I set for my team/consultant/self?
• What are the right metrics?
• Are we winning?
• Are we getting closer to something resembling a ROI?

The problem was that social metrics had not "grown up" to answer basic questions about marketing and the competitive landscape.  The ones that had existed were almost all built using Facebook Insights data, which is incomplete, confusing, and does not give you any information on your competitors.

So we applied the same data mining techniques we used to determine Fan activity to all the analytics a marketer would/should care about.  This is probably our #1 differentiator.  We record every social interaction on a page and discard absolutely nothing.

Take for example the illustration below, from the Healthy Choice Facebook Page.  This one User Post was written by Julez, liked by Jennifer, responded to by the Healthy Choice Page 4 hours later, commented on by Tim, and both the comments were liked by someone.  Apply this rigor to any Facebook Page, and you can learn some truly insightful things.  Apply it across multiple pages, and you can learn a lot about a competitive market, an industry, or how people are interacting with Pages on Facebook as a whole.

Polygraph is the only product that dives deep into the available data and makes sense of it for marketers.  We think there is a ton of knowledge trapped in this publicly available data, and we're unlocking it using data mining, data science, and world-class analytics.

More to come as we go along -- examples, how people are using the information we provide, creative uses of Polygraph, and where we're going in the future -- but now you know how we conceived of Polygraph!