Social Lift can be considered online word-of-mouth. It’s a way to measure the ripple effect in media after an event either in conversations or the sharing of content. Download the Social Intelligence Report – Kim Kardashian Wedding to learn if brands like Vera Wang, People Magazine and Perrier-Jouet received social lift from their association with Kim Kardashian.

In this report you will discover:

• The earned brand value from celebrity endorsement
• Why branded conversations in social media are important
• Which brand received the most ROI for their sponsorship

While brands may still be uncertain about their optimal balance of paid, owned and earned media, the value of celebrity endorsement and how it impacts branded conversations is clear. All that is left to uncover for marketers is the right celebrity for your brand and target audience as explored in our Lady Gaga Social Intelligence Report.

What do you think about celebrities and their role in branded conversations online? Submit your comments and let us know if you’d associate your brand with a reality TV star.

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When I first saw the way in which Facebook data could combine with Twitter data, blog, forum, search and web data to make a rich profile of your consumer – I was blown away by the possibilities of knowing your customer better and knowing what really makes them tick.

Check out me and Dr Manuel Aparicio from Saffron Technology discuss the possibilities of harnessing the power of Social Data on yBCtv!

Special thanks to George Barker, the man behind the video magic, over at yourBusinessChannel the people who love “telling business stories and getting them out via a network of networks” for producing this video. See yourBusinessChannel for more videos with key thought leaders on the topic of social media and beyond.

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I presented at Advertising Week and that is the exact topic I wanted to drill into – How to be relevant by using real-time data about your audience!

So to illustrate this, I decided to run a research experiment to show at IAB MIXX. This was research that was exclusive to IAB MIXX, but you can now see below. The idea focused on how I could show the IAB MIXX audience how to target marketers like themselves with real-time data.

To do this, I asked our research analysts at Networked Insights to study what marketers talk about. We created a custom audience based on social data from blogs, microblogs, social networks, and forums. We then added to that with web information from Google, comScore, and Quantcast. Together, this information tracked what topics were important to marketers over the last 4 weeks.

As a seasoned marketer, I came to the table with my own ideas of what topics marketers discuss, what media they consume, and what popular culture they talk about. The results were different than I thought (see below).

It proved to me that even though you think you know your audience, you can never know them well enough! Real-time data can give you incredible Intelligence and can make marketing decisions like sponsorships, product placements, advertising, and content development much easier!

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“Adapt or Die” – Billy Beane

Moneyball, a book by Michael Lewis and now a movie starring Brad Pitt, is an amazing story of how Billy Beane, the then Oakland Athletics General Manager, chose to abandon baseball’s collective wisdom and applied what many considered to be “outsider” thinking to develop a winning team. Hindered by a small market budget, Beane embraced alternative statistics, or what marketers might call “KPIs”, to find undervalued players.

The parallels between the almost ten year old book and the experience of marketing in today’s digital world didn’t escape me. Now more than ever marketers are asked to achieve increased performance (usually this quarter), prove ROI, and demonstrate how a throng of marketing activities generate sales. Linear thinking applied to what is often emotional human behavior seems to unnecessarily complicate things to me, but I digress. As brands adapt to keep pace with the changes brought on by today’s demand economy, the budgets and line items need to demonstrate the same agility in order to stay in sync with consumer trends in our growing social and mobile world.

When everyone’s way isn’t working for you, find your own path

Social media technologies, along with rich internet enabled mobile devices, have catalyzed a decade long trend of evolving digital behaviors by consumers. But when you look at the methods brands use to understand consumer behavior, develop marketing strategies, plan fully integrated campaigns, evaluate activation tactics, and measure performance, they are sometimes processes that are 50 years old. The technology and techniques marketers frequently use are outdated, broken, or unscalable. When making marketing decisions, how many of them gather information from the mountains of data that surround us about the consumer and our performance?

When you are choosing the same activity and seeing diminishing returns, it is time to embrace change. As brands shift from advertising to engagement marketing, the models to measure performance will change. Rather than looking for new standards to develop around engagement, or methodologies to build digital word of mouth, brands must develop models that work for them and their customers. You need to tailor this evolving media world to work for you and employ social and targeting technologies to deliver marketing messages that inspire action and loyalty.

“We’re card counters. We’re going to turn the odds against the casino.” – Billy Beane

The effectiveness of mass marketing methods is fading in proportion to the shrinking signal strength of media in these “social” times of the internet age. The story of Billy Beane and his Oakland Athletics inspires me to follow my heart instead of my head as I track my target consumer across digital platforms to deliver timely and relevant marketing messages. I encourage you to find your brand’s optimal marketing mix from the voice of the consumer in explicit and implicit digital data that is all around us.

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Does that sound like your job? I know it sounded like plenty of roles I had within major companies!

But as a Social media marketer, we believe in the power of a world where consumers are more connected to friends and brands, but when it comes to convincing the C-suite how and why, oftentimes they find themselves pointing to indeterminate measures of success such as Facebook Likes. In fact, 68 percent of companies don’t know or can’t measure social media ROI or worse 62 percent of CMO believe that social media will pay off … eventually!

Well that day is already here for the enlightened CMO which is exactly what I want to talk about at this years SXSW event. In my session I will elaborate on over a dozen proven social media strategies from brands like Dell, Jive, Avaya, SAP and the NCAA to establish targeted social media programs that delivered real results. My session will explain how to combine social monitoring with analytical firepower to go from reactive social media—such as customer support and crisis management—to proactive social strategies that lead to product innovation, lead generation and interactive buying.

But I need your help to vote for my session! So if this sounds good to you I would appreciate it if you would click here and vote for my session!

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The first episode of a new TV season needs to grab the audience, and social media campaigns have become an integral part of doing just that. But counting the number of conversations won’t by itself tell a producer or network executive that a show is going to continue to attract viewers and remain popular. Instead, deeper analysis of social data is needed to gain insights into which promotional elements are working and which topics are creating buzz among viewers, including featured characters, plotlines and featured actors.

So in our latest Social Intelligence report, Networked Insights set out to analyze the social media conversation surrounding the Season 4 premiere of HBO’s hit series True Blood. Our research provided insights into who is watching the show (moms!), what they care about (the relationship between main characters Sookie and Eric), and the channels they use to follow the action and communicate their feelings (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, HBO.com and mom-focused websites).

Our methodology for analyzing the True Blood social media conversation comprised four key elements: audience definition developed from discussions on social media sites; impressions, which provide an estimate of how the media is consumed and account for the many users who do not actually create posts; sentiment, which captures conversation volume and whether posts are positive, negative or neutral; and topic discovery, which uses advanced clustering technology to extract key sub-themes and reveal engagement drivers.

Engaging fans across the social web serves as a catalyst enabling advocates to promote your brand or television show. Through social media, broadcasters and brand marketers can capture awareness, which builds an audience and then inspires them to take action – whether to watch a premiere or purchase a product. With the added dimension of a shared, digitally connected viewing experience, fans can now have social interactions with your show and its viewers, everywhere. Learn more about the growing importance of the social conversation in building and maintaining an audience in Networked Insights’ Social Intelligence Report: True Blood.

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Recently a client of Networked Insights approached us about exploring a celebrity endorsement and/or a product placement with the pop music star Lady Gaga. So we deployed our social data analysts to look at the Lady Gaga audience and our client’s audience to see if indeed there was a good fit for this brand. As a result we thought this data was so worthwhile that we had to share it with a broader audience in our new Social Intelligence Report on Lady Gaga.

Marketers are aware that for decades celebrity endorsements has proven to be a successful tactic for brands to influence consumer preference. And marketers have also recently seen growth in brands using product placement to influence consumers such as in the upcoming James Bond film, which contains over $45 million worth of product placement. Music videos too have grown to be about a $15 million product placement industry, allowing brands to align their products with artist that appeal to their target consumer.

So we explored the question of; Is Lady Gaga right for your Brand In our most recent Social Intelligence Report on Lady Gaga. In it you will learn more about product placements while a growing trend there are many potentially pitfalls as well. Also with the unprecedented amount of media coverage, access to information and levels of social sharing, there is an increased need for visibility in real-time around celebrities and their associations with a brand.

I hope you will enjoy this report. The world of social media analytics is opening up new vistas for marketers like never before to truly gauge the effectiveness of their marketing and optimize their spending so they can know more about their audience and sell more to their audience.  Indeed we live in exciting times as marketers!

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Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever heard of – but hear me out – its time we really changed a few things in the marketing organization.

So its easy to see that today’s marketing teams are not that well equipped to handle “real time marketing” as David Meerman Scott defined it. We need better systems to take in data and analytics in order to make smarter better business decisions.

I would argue that you have to have several sensing mechanisms in place – one that is a data set that is always looking backward (like a rear view mirror) so see what has been said and is always listening and watching the conversations, in addition to that you need a forward looking data set (like a windshield) to help drive decision making on what new products or services to launch, what will be the effectiveness of this campaign, what new hyper customer segments can we go after, and then of course you need a dashboard that pulls all this together in one place so you can see across multiple forms of media.

With today’s fragmented media landscape no single individual can pull together all these media channels to orchestrate and master them. And as a result you get silos of sub-optimized media.

In a real time marketing world speed will be key. So how can you even think of making a yearlong media plan? But that’s what some media planners are doing when it comes to TV and Print. As marketers we need to be optimized for speed and rapidly effective decision-making. Having said that I know we have a long way to go but anything is better than making gut level decisions or worse taking advice from your CEO on a media plan!

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So let me ask you a question – if you could get more mileage out of your existing car – would you do it? Of course you would! So if I could show you how to improve the “gas mileage of your existing marketing budget – would you do it? Same dollars just more effective. Of course you would!

Years ago John Wanamaker once said – 50% of my marketing budget is wasted I just don’t know which 50% – I would argue that right now that dynamic is even worse – with the fragmentation and choices available in media these days that has to be more like 75% of my budget is wasted!

So how do you make a marketing budget more effective without changing the dollar amount, it sounds almost like a magic trick. Well you take the program budget (non compensation dollars) and you rank order them by spending level. What you get is a list of media type, sponsorships, and events.

The kingpin of the spend is usually some sort of TV ad spend (if you are B2C) and print/online media spend (if you are B2B). It’s easy to see how social media data can be used to optimize major media spending like TV ad for B2C by aligning the shows you buy with the best fit for the audience you are trying to reach. Easily done now with the mounds of social data out there.

For B2B you certainly can use social data to optimize the effectiveness of your search spending by mining what words your ideal customers use to describe your products or services. Again easily done now with the reams of social data out there. You can also look at what sites your ideal customers go to online to better inform where you deploy your display ad budget and perhaps even what sites and events you sponsor.

With all this great data on what your ideal customer are actually doing online, saying online and spending time online, you can make better more informed and more effective decisions on ad spending. Now that’s how to make a Small Budget have Big Impact!

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Few marketers today have the luxury of being about to combine all forms of media under one umbrella. It takes a certain size company to be able to take one individual and let them control all forms of media. If your company is too big then you get owners of each media and the silos they create – minimizing your chance to optimize across them all. If your firm is too small then the paid media budget is meaningless and you’re really just maximizing your earned and owned media mostly.

I got a chance a few years back to be the Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint where I had all 3 forms of media under me – Paid advertising and sponsorships (like our sponsorship of Phil Mickelson and the PGA), plus Earned media (both traditional and social) and our Owned media (meaning our interactive and email lists). I would like to say it was a very “enlightened” leader who asked me to take on that role but in reality it was born out of necessity to ensure we got the maximum benefit of every dollar we spent. So the big goal was optimization of message across all channels.

The business objective was simple – make our $10 million dollars in media spend feel like our competitors (who by the way were spending $65 and $100 million on media). Simple task but hard to deliver in reality since there is no way to buy bargain basement priced media and get Madison Avenue results. There was also no way to gauge just how effective that media was with our target audience. I remember buying media on the Golf Channel because that’s what the CEO told me his friends’ watch. Talk about gut level media planning!

But today is a different day. Today you can use the world’s largest focus group (ie all the social data from the last 2+ years) to find your audience online and model them to predict how effective your media purchases would be. With a bulk of my media purchase going toward TV, Print and Radio – it would have been great to be able to say to the CEO that I found a way to make his media spend feel like so much more instead of wasting it on golf to please a few friends.

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