Traditionally, marketers think of outcomes like they think of the weather – you sit back and see what happens.  Suffering from the lack of true and authentic knowledge of their audiences, or any provision for real-time data or analytics, they are consigned to a passive role: spend money and hope it creates the intended outcome. Well “hope” isn’t a strategy.

Not so with Social Media.  With Social, there is no passive tense.  Social media allows the marketer to jump into the fray and to CREATE outcomes instead of being a victim.

Take for instance the example of TV.  In the traditional model, media buyers would buy spots, ensure that the commercials ran, and then get feedback on their reception 3 months after the fact.  Furthermore, the feedback they got was not particularly nuanced.  So if change was in order, they had to employ their best guesswork based on 3 months of retroactive data to tweak and hone.  Then, another “Hail Mary” pass resulting in hope becoming the marketer’s best friend.

Today, the opportunity to make the switch from hope to strategy abounds.  With over a billion people offering opinions and discussing their likes and dislikes on the social web, marketers have an incredible opportunity to understand their audiences in real-time and to use this data to make instantaneous data-driven decisions across a host of areas from; new product development, creative messaging, campaign development, TV buying, digital media buying, keyword buying, content creation and the list goes on and on.  With the data, smart marketers can make mid-stream changes to the expressed interests and attitudes of their target audience.  At the heart of this is technology and an interpretation methodology that offers deep insights and takes the guesswork out of marketing.

Passivity is anathema to today’s marketer, brand manager, media buyer/planner, advertiser, and content creator.  Real time-data-driven decisions allow for the industry to get on its front foot and create more engagement and dynamic outcomes.

Want to start winning with social media? Start listening. When I say listening I don’t mean reading the posts on your Facebook wall. I mean start monitoring and measuring the social web to see what people are saying about your TV show, advertising, brand, or products. Today, top companies are using social media for more than broadcasting brand messages. They’re beginning to incorporate the predictive capabilities inherent to “big data” by putting the voice of the consumer as expressed in social data, at the center of their decision making. Why? Social data allows marketing professionals to collect real-time intelligence on their audience – be that viewers or consumers – and make less data-free decisions.

Social Data Makes Media Buying Decisions a No Brainer
The power of social data as applied to marketing decisions is perhaps most impressive in the areas of media planning and buying. During the advertising sales season known as the Upfronts, Networked Insights advises broadcasters, brands, and media agencies on how to best align audiences and media. We explore this in greater detail in the eBook: New Audience Insights from SocialTV.

Conversations viewers are having across the social web about TV shows, advertising, brands, and products can be segmented and mined to uncover some remarkable insights. For networks that are announcing new television shows and securing advertisers we help:

• Identify brand affinity by TV Show
• Uncover hidden audience segments
• Isolate risky advertising decisions before brands buy
•  Understand program rankings and maximize the value of all dayparts

Media fragmentation and targeting technologies are changing how companies are growing audiences. Creating scalable hyper-segmented strategies is becoming increasingly challenging if you’re not tapped into real-time data. The good news is analytic tools are catching up to meet the demands of consumers and brands in today’s demand economy. SocialSense is Networked Insights analytic platform that allows companies to stay in-sync with their audiences through a dashboard view of the real-time data that matters most.

Read more in the eBook: New Audience Insights from SocialTV to see just how Networked Insights works to make broadcasters more efficient and brands more effective with their advertising investments.

Let’s be clear.  Most people who write on social media outlets don’t do so just for the sake of doing it.  Some might, but the vast majority of people who share content, post comments, or offer sentiments and opinions online do so because they are in what Andrew Jeavons of Survey Analytics calls “the point of emotion.”  In other words, they are emotionally invested in the product, service or experience about which they are opining.

As Jeavons points out, most feedback is conducted via traditional methods that suffer from huge structural deficits.

1. Surveys – break-down for four reasons:  they are episodic, have limited sample-sizes, the answers are effected by the way the questions are posed, and because they rely on the concept of “recall.”  And recall is imperfect because it asks a person to offer information on a past event outside of the context and situation in which he or she experienced it.
2. Focus Groups – are skewed in three ways:  small sample sizes, self-selection population, and the dreaded “decibel rule’ – the loudest person in the room wins.  They are not real-time or data driven and they don’t parse their findings with the objective use of technology.

It appears to us that companies that make million-dollar decisions on this kind of “static” data are doing themselves a disservice.  We believe they should be using more authentic and real-time data in order to make data-driven decisions.

That is exactly why Social Media is so special, so different.  Because with Social Media, people become “micro-authors” when and where it matters.  Instead of a laborious production process, Social Media reduces the distance between the production and consumption of opinions; in fact, it even obliterates it.

In some contexts emotions are considered bad.  But if you truly want to know what consumers really think and want to be able to predict how they might behave, find them at the point of emotion.  Very likely that means you’ll find them on Social Media.

The opportunity is yours for the taking!  What you really need is real-time data, gathered and interpreted by smart technology and then put into practice by a team who now understands your customers’ REAL attitudes and interests.

No doubt about it. If you want to use the Internet to find something very specific, keyword search is a great place to start. But if you want to learn what you don’t know about customers and use that newfound customer intelligence to improve your company’s marketing efforts, I can promise you that keyword search falls flat. Why?

In Networked Insights latest report, “Thematic discovery: What every marketer — and marketing technologist — should know,” we explore three key reasons (pun intended) why search isn’t all things to all marketers. Then we introduce an alternative: thematic discovery.

Thematic discovery is an exciting new approach to social media data analysis — a marketer’s dream. It provides a highly accurate, authentic view of topics that people are engaged in through social media. It helps identify relationships between themes that may not have an obvious connection, how the themes correlate, and where people are likely to be talking about them simultaneously.

Learn more about how this information can help you develop media plans, choose celebrities to endorse products, and tap into the diverse interests of their target markets. Take a look at our report for a revolutionary new approach to social media data analysis.

It’s with great pride that we announce Networked Insights has been recognized as having an “unrivaled advantage for socially informed media planning and buying.” in Forrester Research’s “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q2 2012.” Furthermore, we’re humbled that our SocialSense product and related value added services have been recognized as a “Strong Performer” by Forrester.

Listening platforms continue to evolve from volume centric tools to multi-dimensional dashboards that influence major marketing and business results. Today’s report marks Forrester’s fourth Wave evaluation in the listening platform landscape. Forrester notes in its report that “listening platforms are part of the way through their evolution – and are currently at a point between the social media monitoring tools they started as and the critical enterprise business analytics tools they must become.”

Networked Insights’ focus is around extracting business insights from social data – with a specialization in informing media planning. Our SocialSense platform directs all aspects of the media buying and planning process, including campaign development, TV buying and selling, digital and search buying, message and creative development, product and brand development post-buy analysis, social media engagement, and campaign attribution and ROI.

Networked Insights’ unique and differential placement within this collection of today’s top nine listening platforms underscores the work of the company and the importance of using social media for real-time decision making in marketing. We believe the demand for data-driven marketing decisions will continue to grow. Companies are no longer looking for just a monitoring platform, they rely on our technology and services to help them successfully navigate the volume of conversations their audience has to make smarter media planning and buying decisions.

Forrester’s latest report evaluated the SocialSense platform, which includes SocialSense Dashboard, SocialSense Analytics and our Sync Suite. We’re thrilled this marketing decision platform is being used by some of today’s top brands and their agencies like Samsung, MTV, Kraft, MillerCoors, Starcom, MediaBrands and more.

See what happens when you embed social data analytics at the center of marketing decisions by watching our recent webinar with Elizabeth Shaw from Forrester Research to learn How to Use Social Data to Make Smarter Media Decisions and to read more about what makes Networked Insights unique download a FREE copy of the 2012 Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms report.

The era of big data is a two-sided coin. Companies are collecting more information about their consumers than ever before to make more data-driven decisions. Additionally, consumers are creating and sharing data at unprecedented levels. And advanced brands are combining data layers to inform advertising decisions as we’ve discussed in our popular Media Optimization Guide.

Inspired by this week’s Ad Age Article “What’s Your CMO Watching?”, we thought we’d take a look at one featured brand to see how well their media choices aligned to the TV Shows brand advocates discussions in social media.

As outlined in our How-to Guide for Revolutionizing Media Planning, analyzing social data allows you to understand what’s trending with your audience and apply that insight to media planning and buying decisions. Networked Insights helps brands and their media agencies move away from intuition and broad demographics information to identify where audiences are consuming media with strong brand or product category affinity.

Using our marketing decision platform SocialSense, TV analysts from Networked Insights were able to create a custom audience for Weight Watchers from across the social web. This custom audience is an assortment of public data combining information from blogs, forums, comments from websites, and social networks where the brand Weight Watchers is mentioned. Ad Age published that Weight Watchers is buying American Idol, Desperate Housewives, and Glee. We wanted to look at other TV shows brand advocates of Weight Watchers were discussing and list the Top 20.

Top 20 TV Shows by fans of Weight Watchers
1. WWE Smack Down
2. Game of Thrones
3. Once Upon a Time
4. My 600-lb Life
5. Curb Appeal
6. Dexter
7. Puppy Bowl
8. True Blood
9. Shameless
10. Teen Mom
11. The Biggest Loser
12. The Walking Dead
13. Too Cute!
14. American Horror Story
15. House Hunters
16. Boardwalk Empire
17. I Used To Be Fat
18. Mad Men
19. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
20. Fat Chef

It’s interesting to see shows like Glee and American Idol as top TV shows that Weight Watchers buys when there are clearly more brand aligned and less expensive shows such as I Used To Be Fat and Biggest Loser that their very audience watches and where they would get higher sell through.

Smart brands and media agencies are all working to optimize media purchases, and reach what we call the minimal effective amount of investment for advertising. Identifying the media choices of your target audience is just one step in determining value because the truth is all GRPs are not the same. The good news is once you commit to the iterative processes of optimizing media choices – plan, activate, measure, optimize and repeat – you’re on a path to improve efficiency and maximize effectiveness. Now that’s something worth watching!

Quarterly and annual reviews provide some idea of how the money is being spent, and frequency, reach, target rating points, media impressions and clip counting are among the longstanding measures of marketing effectiveness. But these are becoming less and less informative as the world moves at Internet speed.

Now CMOs can create the same level of visibility into their marketing spend that other operational areas have done for years. The efficiency of marketing – especially spending on advertising – can be improved by analyzing customer “conversations” carried out across social networks and other channels. Advanced techniques and capabilities are available now to capture the pulse of the marketplace as never before.

Armed with this information, CMOs can work with their CFOs more closely to identify — really, for the first time — the minimal effective amount of spending needed to drive the greatest market awareness. This new form of “marketing intelligence” can dramatically reduce “spray and pray” spending and contribute more effectively to earnings per share improvement. In this way, both CMOs and CFOs will understand and track — with far greater accuracy — marketing’s accretive value to the enterprise and shareholders.

Download our new report to learn about the emerging role of social media analysis.

Food lovers everywhere are drooling with delight that Hidden Valley Ranch, America’s best-selling salad dressing, has released a “new thicker, creamier version” of its popular dressing. In an attempt to dominate our tables and take market share away from Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Hidden Valley has launched a new campaign calling the condiment “the new ketchup”, a topping and dip for everything.

With 15% of ranch dressing used on foods other than salad and vegetables we thought we’d take a deeper dive and examine the expressions of ranch dressing lovers from across the social web. We put our conclusions together in two fun lists, 10 food items people like to dip in ranch dressing, and five ranch flavored foods people love.

Top 10 Foods to use Ranch Dressing

1. Pizza
2. Buffalo Wings
3. Salad
4. Fried Chicken and Chicken Fingers
5. Hot Dogs
6. Chicken Wraps
7. Carrots
8. Pizza Rolls
9. Celery Stick
10. Broccoli

Top 5 Ranch Flavored Foods

1. Doritos Cool Ranch
2. Baked Lays
3. Ranch Sunflower Seeds
4. Pringles
5. Corn Nuts

Finally, we can’t talk about Ranch Dressing without thinking about Melissa McCarthy’s Saturday Night Live skit where she plays a disturbingly obsessive fan of Hidden Valley products.

Returning in ABC’s latest comedy, Don’t Trust the B— in Apt. 23, James Van Der Beek is finally returning to TV as a meta version of himself – a post-modern Dawson to be exact, one who is challenged at actually being James. Confusing? Yes, but no less confusing than the title of the show that has undergone several transformations and successfully shares its Twitter handle “@Apt23” with frequent  instructions of where to find a house party.

However with that aside, Apartment 23 represents the last of the new shows promised at the 2011 Upfronts. It also represents the latest socialTV experiment, having released the first two episodes of the series early online. While there have been numerous shows this season (Awake, Smash, and Once Upon a Time to name a few) that have premiered early online, they have all performed with mixed results. As we saw with these other shows (namely Awake), early pilot releases garner lots of positive buzz, new Facebook Fans, and Twitter followers for the show, but rarely guarantee long-term success. This is partially due to the lack of sync between the live-TV consumer and the digital-consumer which is often apparent when using traditional GRPs as a performance metric instead of social alternatives (like the Social Index, # of Twitter followers, etc.). Still according to pre-premiere conversations, Apartment 23 seems doomed to being marginally successful with social viewers, due to its placement at the end of a lackluster TV season, and right before the summer, it’s going to struggle with GRPs regardless of fans.

This struggle, however life threatening to the show’s renewal, still offers many opportunities for brands and networks to unlock the hidden value within this program. As noted in the image below, we can see that the show’s audience skews older, female, and more affluent. This aligns a bit with the fact that it has been over 10 years since Dawson’s Creek was first on the air and those original fans have aged and matured in their lifestyles.

Another thing to note in this slide is that while all social channels are active when new episodes premiere, Twitter is the real connective tissue that keeps conversations flowing from one episode to the next. While some reports may have you believe that this is a normal behavior, Twitter conversations don’t always flow between episodes. Tweeters demand constant stimuli to keep them interested in a particular topic so more often than not slow-burning forums and blogs tend to be the connective tissue. If we’re seeing Twitter as the dominant consistent channel, then that means there is somebody stoking the fires on Twitter between episodes. As far as the overall conversation goes, the discussions trend positively and in favor of the show in general:

What is more fascinating are the visualizations of these conversations:

The illustration above identifies that James Van Der Beek has the largest single cluster of conversation. It also indicates that within the Apartment 23 conversations there are those who watched the episodes online early and enjoyed them (top right hand corner), and those who are just mentioning the show’s name within a larger discussion of ABC’s show lineup (bottom left hand corner). Minus the Krysten Ritter conversations that are helping to connect the two conversation clusters together, it appears at this point there are still more conversations originating from people that have yet to watch the pilot.

From all of this information (the demographics, the location of where these conversations are occurring and the level of interest behind them) we are able to craft a unique image of the Apartment 23 audience. Through this image we are then able to analyze and ascertain what content (outside of Dawson clearly) that they engage with and what kind of content they resonate with. Examples of this content can range from celebrities, to musicians, brands, and even other TV shows. For this particular audience we discovered that over the last 30 days, some of the top content that resonated with them included actor James Franco, listening to the new The Black Keys album, shopping at Target, and being  fans of Modern Family.

Yesterday was a rough day for the avid supporters of Rick Santorum as he officially announced the end of his presidential campaign. While he certainly had his fair share of social supporters, the majority of conversations involving Santorum, particularly on Twitter, skewed negatively and sarcastically (mind you this is of course not a new observation). So even though political topics are not our primary interest here at Networked Insights, since a lot of our clients don’t build political campaigns into their media plans, we can’t say no when asked to use our tools and expertise to present some real-time insights behind cultural events and social trends.

Below is a quick summary of Twitter’s reaction to Santorum’s announcement:

One of the more interesting insights to take away from this is that while the conversation built up and then directly collapsed following the official televised speech, the majority of tweeters did not indicate any interest in actually watching the presentation.

To read more about these social reactions check out Emily Steel’s article at the Wall Street Journal.

With the first of the three Social TV Summits occurring this year having just wrapped itself up, this is a great point in which to reflect upon the atmosphere of the eco-system and the highlights from this particular experience.

While occurring simultaneously with NBCUniversal’s Social TV Symposium, Social TV Summit San Francisco clearly adapted a certain culture from its surroundings as it was by far the tech-heaviest SocialTV event of the year. This was clearly due to the proximity of the tech-driven valley next to the classic Bentley Reserve building that the event was being held in. This particular Social TV Summit was also unique in the wide-diversity of individuals with 20+ years of experience in television content, to hardened road warriors of the SocialTV circuit, to serial entrepreneurs, and to first-timers eagerly trying to sell their product.  The common factor found in all of these individuals is abundant positivism that this space will continue to grow and evolve in a unique and fascinating. This of course is not to say that there wasn’t a palatable undertone that if some of these companies (particularly those in the ever-expanding second screen space) disappeared before the end of the year, we should not be surprised. However I’ve never seen a SocialTV space with so many deals and partnerships being completed in the quiet corners of the conference.

Led by conference veterans Andy Batkin and Jack Myers, this particular Social TV Summit did manage to have a unique panel for almost every facet of what falls under the greater SocialTV umbrella. The following is the key takeaways from each segment:

Keynote with Erik Martin from Reddit.com

While the topline discussion was about his own role in helping Reddit.com oppose the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, Erik is at the same time passionately arguing for the validity and strength of the Reddit.com community. A public space that was frequently overshadowed in the media by communities like Facebook and Twitter until these recent protests. Their success in helping to suppress the SOPA act should indicate to the larger SocialTV eco-system the importance of non-Twitter communities when understanding the overall social viewpoint on topics.

Silicon Valley Executive Roundtable

Introducing a dynamic representation of individuals representing some of the biggest names in tech over the last decade (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, and AOL), it is always interesting to see where these guys are heading. Pete Thompson at Microsoft, represented their recent plan to reposition the Xbox away from being a gaming console and into a full content delivery platform. Janet Balis at AOL candidly discussed how their Huffington Post is about to become their own streaming digital video news platform, and Adam Cahan formally of Into_Now and currently representing Yahoo! made sure to lace the conversation with some intriguing directional thoughts.

The Second Screen Panel

Showcasing their products to the audience one by one, the conversation finally got interesting once they all had to discuss their viewpoint on the direction of the second screen experience and consolidation of that marketplace. Who’ll be returning for the next summit, and especially for next year, is always an interesting debate.

SocialTV Data

Led by the charming Mashable executive, Stacy Green who inquired how many of us had actually watched Downton Abbey on PBS, the most competitive panel of the day challenged many preconceptions of the role of the brand, fan, and network in the future of TV. This is for many reasons the space to continue to watch evolve.

Keynote with Christy Tanner, TVGuide.com

While this is the second time (the first being at TVNEXT) I’ve seen Christy present her research on TV fan behavior, I think she gets better and looks like she’s having more fun with each appearance.

Hanging out with Venture Capitalists

This was one of the more unusual panels to see, and definitely made sense to hold with the strong VC-supported tech scene in San Francisco. This was also the panel that you could tell everyone was listening to in hopes that they can one day use those learning’s to unlock some funding.

The Media Industry’s Viewpoint

Hosted by a digital spiritualist, Khris Loux of Echo, this panel was passionate to the core. Jason Hoch, the current SVP of digital at World Wrestling Entertainment (and formally of Discovery Communications), read off examples of recent campaigns that though simply listening he was able to harness the WWE fans and double the activity on their owned properties. Laurel Bernard, EVP at FOX Broadcasting, also walked us through their various examples of enriching their fan experiences, which tended to be fairly Facebook heavy. Elizabeth Shaw, analyst at Forrester Research, rounded out the panel by bringing the debate around creating ROI back to a common level for the entire room.

The Brands and Agencies Roundtable

Andrea Harrison, the Director of digital engagement for Pepsico, was the stand out star on this panel. She clearly proved how having a strong passion for digital and loving to adapt frequently to the newest technologies can help drive successful engagements with fans, particularly with creating spaces that they feel comfortable participating within.

Don’t have a Don Draper? No problem. Social data can inform you on who’s your real star.

It’s incredibly common with TV shows, particularly comedies, to have one of the supporting characters be more popular than the lead. A classic example of this would be Kramer (Michael Richards) from Seinfeld, and a contemporary example would be Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) from How I Met Your Mother. Using social data we can see that on average every episode Barney has 20-30% more social conversations about him than the lead character Ted (played by Josh Radner). Insights like that can help direct creative decisions to highlight which stars to bring out and which ones to possibly bury in order to please fans. These insights would also traditionally be costly and slow to gather (through focus groups and surveys), and the decisions were often times made upon gut feelings. Through a product we call Content Sync, we’re able to inform in real-time using social data how to better align with your show’s audiences in order to better retain and grow them. In the meantime Don Draper needs to watch out for Roger Sterling, because in the recent premiere of the fifth season of Mad Men, Roger was considered by many as the humorous anchor of the episode.

Got Community? NBC does, and social data can help better monetize SocialTV fans.

Recently ending its forced hiatus, NBC’s Community is back on the air and social fans could not be more excited. A lot of the buzz can be attributed to the cast and crew (particularly Alison Brie) actively participating in social channels in order to galvanize fans in to action with the message “#6SeasonsAndAMovie.” Now while Community might not last as long as fans would love it to there are many current opportunities to use real-time data to better leverage the socialness of these fans. With Audience Sync we’re able to inform networks on what other content those fans are engaging with and what kind of content is resonating with them. For example fans of Alison Brie trends towards being predominately male and are also primarily comprised of gamers, comic book collectors, UFC and NCAA fans, and anti-SOPA supporters. Some of the brands important to them are Bioware, Image Comics, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Real-time social data and a product we call Audience Sync also allow for opportunities to unlock audiences on more ad/brand restricted programming like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones by allowing marketers to reach those fans through other overlapping content (hint: like Community).

New show with a small budget? How social data can get you HBO quality marketing without HBO’s budget.

Not every program has the advantage of a big marketing budget like Game of Thrones does behind its launch, but every program does have the opportunity to make their marketing spend more efficient and their launch just as successful. Through Media Sync we’re able to tap into real-time consumer data to evaluate and validate current media buys, brand integrations, celebrity endorsements, and digital ad placement. In regards to launching a new program, a product we call Media Sync is able to identify the programming that best syncs with your target audience and can discern between programming that may have the same baseline GRPs, but have much higher social value. On the digital side, social data can also provide insights into communities and can inform, for example, whether gamifying exclusive access to a show’s pilot (like the “Decryption Lab” for Showtime’s Homeland) will be more successful than just distributing it early to a digital content distributor like Hulu (recent examples of this would be NBC’s early release of Smash and Awake). Bottom-line is if your budget is small use social data to pre-inform decisions to avoid spending money on mass-marketed content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

Marketers inspired by the movie Moneyball are looking for ways to leverage trends, mitigate risk, and drive marketing programs that perform. As the cost of mass marketing techniques focused on reach continues to grow, finding an advantage when evaluating your media spend is more important than ever.

On Thursday, April 5, 2012, Elizabeth Shaw, Social & Emerging Media Analyst at Forrester Research, and Paul Dunay, Chief Marketing Officer at Networked Insights, hosted a live online presentation on the growing role of social data as a source of consumer information and how brands are leveraging it to make smarter media decisions.

For many brands, finding the right balance between paid, owned, and earned media is difficult. Savvy marketers have discovered how to blend in social data to guide these major advertising investments and align their choices with their target consumers’ digital behavior. Attending this live event will help you better understand how marketers can identify and track emerging consumer trends through real-time data, and, by staying in-sync with your audiences, how you can make the right media choices based on data instead of agency recommendations or gut feelings.

If you can no longer afford wasteful media choices (and let’s face it, who can?), we encourage you to watch the on-demand webinar for How to Use Social Data to Make Smarter Media Decisions. Discover how you can ensure your broadcast and digital advertising decisions are aligned with your audience for the minimal effective investment.

Click here to watch the on-demand webinar and download the presentation slides.

For marketers, developers, designers and entrepreneurs, the annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive is a highlight in the digital world and this year didn’t disappoint. With surprise visits from Jay-Z, to well hyped app launches and star studded panel conversations, the week amongst the world’s best and brightest was inspiring so I thought I’d share my takeaways for those who didn’t participate.

Marketing Trends

Celebrities draw crowds
In today’s increasingly fragmented media world, with short attention spans and diminishing brand timbre, it’s kind of refreshing to see that some things never change. This was illustrated by the many high profile speakers who were both keynote speakers and panelists.

Launching an app at SXSW is hard
Highlight, a mobile networking app, seemed to grab everyone’s attention well before SXSW even started. It may have fizzled once users experienced the battery drain it caused while running in the background. Win or lose, what’s clear is the competition for new companies is fierce and the breakout apps of years past are proving tough acts to follow.

Seamless integrated brand experiences are critical
With the growth rate of mobile devices and tablets, we’ve entered a time where the consumer’s expectations for consistent experiences with brands and networks are higher than they’ve ever been. Maintaining a constant high quality presence is quickly becoming the standard.

In an always-on world, everything is old news in digital marketing
The thirst for knowledge, answers, tips and insights remains high amongst marketers at SXSW. I often wonder if in today’s hyper connected world, when information finds me at every digital touch point, if one can really learn anything new at a conference. While I still believe you can learn from unique perspectives, what’s clear is the rate at which we consume media and information has changed us and made us smarter. Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate how we interact at these conferences and look for new ways to connect, discover and explore.

Technology Trends

Marketers are talking more than ever
Digital professionals are connecting offline unlike ever before and I believe this is due to the powerful combination of social networking tools, the rate of change/evolution, and the need to stay on top of trends to uncover what’s working and what’s not.

The future is small screen experiences
Next generation products will be mainly on tablets and mobile phones. That’s the world to design apps and technologies for if you’re building tomorrow’s next big thing. For now, marketers are faced with asking themselves how long they can afford to not look at a 360 degree digital experience. The clock is ticking.

Leverage technology to keep today’s real-time consumer at the center
Social media listen, monitoring, and analytics is a game changer for marketers who need to track the pulse of the modern consumer. While a brand’s audience might be armed with social media and mobile devices, today brands are building bridges and accelerating business processes with social data and real-time analytics.

Consumer Trends

Social accelerates pop culture trends
Social media is proving to be an incredible cultural engine driving trends, memes, and messages further and faster than ever imagined. We’re just beginning to see the impact and understand how it happens. We’re establishing new rules and new norms as we adapt to a more connected and digital world.

Engaging more than ever before with TV and brands
Consumers want to talk back. They want to interact. And they want to share. Next generation winners and losers for both brands and networks will be defined not by quality of experience or branding alone, but how well you engage your audience. Making your brand the signal in the noise for consumers is the new mission in media.

Using social media tools to share, broadcast, and curate
Much of what marketers are experimenting with is about enabling advocates to carry your message for you. While lots of lip service is paid to the concept of influencers, the truth is a brand can’t know who and how to spread their marketing most effectively without a lot of cost. It’s cheaper to build an army of fanatics through inspiration, content and platforms that make viral possible.

Event Highlights

HBO’s Girls – Incredible launch and presence with blended offline and online marketing activities. Clearly stood out despite the noise.

American Express – Bold, daring, and dominant marketing. Innovative team that’s pushing technology to redefine the brand and company positioning.

Samsung – Well executed events and marketing campaigns for their target consumer. If your challenge is to take on the coolest brand in the world, these guys are quickly becoming formidable.

How helpful are social media conversations in identifying a TV program’s brand affinity and audience segments? Judging from what we’re reporting in Networked Insights’ Social TV Insights Spring 2012 eBook, I’d say the answer is “very.”

The eBook, Maximize Advertising Campaigns with Social TV Audience Insights, provides a look at the themes and interests that are generating social media conversation around some of TV’s top shows. For example, fans of “The Voice” are sharing wedding plans and discussing which retailers offer the best wedding registries. “Revenge” fans are escaping the high intrigue of The Hamptons with family-friendly trips to Disneyland and Disney World. Home ownership and furniture shopping have captured the attention of viewers tuning into the angst and antics of the 30-somethings on “How I Met Your Mother.”

The eBook highlights how using social data can unlock the potential of ad campaigns, maximize the performance of ad inventory, and uncover hidden value in dayparts. Sound interesting? Download the eBook today.

As fans of the movie Talladega Nights would know, stock car racing in the United States has its origins in bootlegging during Prohibition, when drivers ran bootleg whiskey made primarily in the Appalachian region of the United States. Bootleggers needed to distribute their illicit products, and they typically used small, fast vehicles to better evade the police. Many of the drivers would modify their cars for speed and handling, as well as increased cargo capacity, and some of them came to love the fast-paced driving down twisty mountain roads.

The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 largely dried up their business and today NASCAR is the largest sanctioning body of stock car racing in the United States.

The audience that follows NASCAR racing is a very loyal bunch of followers that average over 30 Million, which is on par with many sporting events such as the Stanley Cup, the World Series, and the NBA Championship.

But when we think about the advertisers to that audience its mostly CPG brands: Skoal, Budweiser, MillerCoors and M&Ms or more Retailer brands such as: Home Depot, DuPont, Caterpillar, BF Goodwrench and Lowes.

So we thought it would be interesting to track and analyze the social data surrounding NASCAR over the last 30 days in order to reveal audiences segments that are under loved by brands. And then we took it a step further to suggest brands that should be advertising that aren’t on NASCAR by looking at what else that exact audience talks about.

As expected what we found in the social data was quite interesting. The audience beyond the NASCAR sports fans actually ranked well with one of our audiences that we call “Fashionistas” this audience has a great interest in fashion and they love finding ways to get fashionable brands for less. Next most popular audience was the TV Fanatics, which seems reasonable to us, perhaps MTV or USA Networks could have their own car. Home Owners was obvious since may home owner brands already advertise on NASCAR. However the Consumer Electronics audience was a bit of a surprise to us. Our thoughts ran wild thinking of the Samsung Galaxy II car or an Apple iPhone car. And then Millenials and Gamers were the next most popular audiences. And brands like Monster headphones and World of Warcraft we big with those audiences.

The point being for a brand like NASCAR that has such broad appeal – using a stereotype for an audience description can be inaccurate. Pockets of highly engaged fans that could make great targets for some brands will be overlooked. For NASCAR this is a lost revenue opportunity and for brands this is a lost awareness opportunity.

February has been a stellar month for Networked Insights. Our success has only been achievable through the support of marketers who are uncovering the value of social media data analytics. This month’s highlights include:

• Networked Insights named one of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company
• CEO Dan Neely spoke at Social Media Week 2012 >> Watch it now!
  
• Unprecedented media coverage of our brand analysis of Super Bowl XLVI commercials

Sitting on the precipice is SocialTV, where viewers are no longer passive, and openly share and discuss online who they think deserves to win. While these discussions have no impact on the outcome of the awards, viewers can’t help but dive into the conversation and express their point-of-view on the broadcast, celebrities, and advertisers. We decided to perform social data analytics with a twistto compare and contrast three different audiences – Moms, Millennials, and Film Buffs- to uncover whom they think deserves to win.

Below are the top predictions by audience from conversations measured over the last three months (11/24/11-2/24/12):

These audiences are defined by users across all social media channels and are compiled by their behaviors, conversations, and interests. The predictions were then ascertained by using our proprietary real-time analytics to not only measure the volume of conversation, but to really understand what’s driving those conversations. A taste of what some of those conversations were like is included below:

Oscar Social Highlights:

• George Clooney always draws a lot of conversation, but his recent role in The Descendants was met with a lukewarm reception by the three audiences analyzed.
• Out of the three audiences, he actually draws the largest amount of conversation from Millennials, which is 4xtimes larger than the Moms audience These Clooney conversations are the reason that The Descendants is discussed more frequently than any of the other films.
• The Descendants also has the highest amount of negative sentiment with Moms (-18%).
• War Horse was also not a big hit with Millennials (-16%), who are not as big into melodramas as inspirational dramas like Moneyball (+25%)
• What is also interesting is that Moneyball’s conversation would have trended more positively if Jonah Hill had not been attached. In fact most of his projects (like his failed TV show Allen Gregory) are typically received by Millennials with very polarizing opinions (+22%, -16%)
• Contrary to Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt is very well received by all audiences for his role in Moneyball (+34% Moms, +38% Millennials, +26% Film Buffs)
• Over all though, all three audiences really want to see The Help bring home some more awards, especially Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer – this is interesting because there were a few commenters that felt that racism was still an issue when it comes down to The Academy selecting winners
• Hugo was a film that has been acclaimed by film critics, but was weakly received by the audiences we analyzed
• In the Best Actress category, the audiences we analyzed are really hoping that Viola Davis doesn’t get “snubbed” again like she was during the Golden Globes
• Not to disregard the other actresses competing with Viola Davis – Glenn Close has done a great job rebuilding her personal brand with these audiences through her recurring role in Damages. Rooney Mara’s hardcore role in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo also receiver a lot of respect
• As far as Best Supporting Actresses go, Bérénice Bejo received a lot of positive attention from all three audiences, though Octavia Spencer is the one that they hope will take home the Oscar

This week Jason Kapler and Sean Reckwerdt are representing Networked Insights at the Gravity Summit and TV Goes Social Conference in Los Angeles. Our resident social TV team is excited to share how networks and content creators are using social data to open a real-time window into audiences. The voice of the viewer as expressed in social media is informing development, production, and marketing around long-form content for broadcast.

Before they headed to the airport, we asked Jason and Sean to each share a shortlist of thought leaders they’re most excited to connect with at this year’s event.

Sean Reckwerdt’s Top 5 at Gravity Summit

1. Ann Glenn, Social Media Manager, Sony Imageworks

2. Matt Meeks, VP Audience Engagement, Warner Bros Television

3. Derek I. Smith, VP Operations, Fox Filmed Entertainment

4. Shira Lazar, Creator and Host of What’s Trending

5. Joel Price, Social Media Manager, San Diego Chargers

Jason Kapler’s Top 5 at TV Goes Social

1. Jacob Shwirtz, Social Viewing, MTV Networks

2. Hardie Tankersley, Vice President, Online Content, Fox Broadcasting

3. Rick Liebling, Creative Culturalist, Young & Rubicam

4. Nick Demartino, Nick Demartino Consulting

5. Andrew Wallenstein, TV Editor, Variety

Want to see more of Networked Insights talking Social TV?

Watch CEO Dan Neely’s presentation at this year’s Social Media Week.

Dan Neely at SMW12

Last week Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely spoke at KIT Digital’s “My Social TV App Thinks I’m My Dad: Privacy Issues In The Age of Convergence” during February’s Social Media Week in New York. Moderated by Digiday writer Jack Marshall, the panel also included Alan Wolk from KIT Digital, Mike Sommers of Viggle, Jim Spare represented GoMiso and Mike Monello of Campfire.

The lively conversation covered topics such as social TV, second screen apps, content creation, and social data. With strong points of view expressed on behalf of networks, advertisers, and audience no clear consensus was expressed which underscores the exciting ambiguity that comes with disruptive technologies and consumer behaviors.

Watch the Social Media Week panel on-demand now >>