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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every year the Super Bowl draws millions of viewers to what is arguably America’s grandest event. Along with the game itself, the spectacle encompasses both pre-game programming and the “lead-out” show that airs immediately following the post-game festivities. Media sellers promote the before and after slots to advertisers as valuable brand opportunities. However, for media buyers and brand managers, the benefits gained have to justify the costs.

One factor in determining whether such buys are worth it is knowing that you’re reaching your desired audience. But gathering audience intelligence beyond traditional demographics is an expensive and time-consuming process – an exercise that only adds cost to what is already the largest ad spend of the year.

One way to save money and still achieve optimum reach is to advertise on the lead-out show. While trending toward family-friendly programming, lead-out shows have historically retained a good share of viewers from the Super Bowl. Last year, the lead-out show was “Glee.” Two years ago, it was “Undercover Boss.” This year, it will be the first episode of a new season of “The Voice.”

“The Voice” was last summer’s breakout hit, largely because of its social TV integrations that connected all the judges, performers and viewers in a real-time feedback loop. This real-time conversation enabled many second-screen experiences for viewer interaction, on Twitter and beyond. At the same time, these experiences opened up even more opportunities for brands to integrate with and obtain significant reach.

Both in raw numbers and from a social media perspective, “The Voice” shows promise as a cost-effective opportunity. But is it in sync with your desired audience? Networked Insights’ Audience Sync uses proprietary real-time analytics and topic discovery tools to show you who is talking about your product or service across the entire social web. Audience Sync can also slice those same conversations in real time based on consumer traits, hobbies and behaviors, breaking audiences into segments such as “extreme gamers,” “moms” and “millennials.”

To demonstrate some of the counterintuitive insights this process can discover, we put “The Voice” through Audience Sync. The top results were predictable. TV fans identified as millennials and moms, particularly those who watch “American Idol,” contributed the largest share of conversations. Expectedly, both groups are target fans for “The Voice.” However, surprising conversations came from sports fans, not only of football but also tennis and NASCAR, as well as gamers. All of them like Cee Lo Green, one of the show’s judges.

Audience Sync offers many other opportunities to increase your knowledge in real time of how your audience behaves and interacts socially. This capability also allows you to optimize your strategies for buying (are you truly reaching who you want?) or selling (are there unexpected audiences that open the door to nonconventional brand sponsorships?). You can use this rich data to understand your online consumers. Or, if you don’t, your competitors will.

Download our Media Optimization Guide >>
Make Every Ad Perform Like a Super Bowl Ad

Many people consider the National Football League’s choice of Madonna to headline the 2012 Super Bowl Halftime Show as, well, curious. It’s been more than 20 years since the artist released her landmark albums “Like A Virgin,” “True Blue” and “Like a Prayer.” Of course, a lot of music fans think artists from the 80s are timeless. Just the same, we thought we’d explore which acts sports fans talk about most in social media to see if there might have been a better fit.

Audience analysis is a key, unique aspect of Networked Insights social media analytics. In this case, we created an audience based on the people talking about the Super Bowl across all social channels. By analyzing their comments, we were able to uncover the musical acts they most discussed. We also looked at conversations around Madonna to see how well sports fans received the news of her appearance.

Using our proprietary real-time analytics and topic discovery engine, we learned that the most desired halftime acts are performers famous for rocking the stadium, especially bands with a front man. The Foo Fighters were the unanimous top choice, with Hank Williams Jr., Tom Petty and Peter Frampton also mentioned.

Super Bowl fans were less than kind toward the Material Girl, however. Many feel Madonna is past her prime, and showcasing her is a desperate attempt to appeal to an older female audience. Of the posts we uncovered, the measurable sentiment was 41 percent negative in nature, while only 3 percent positive.

To avoid such blowback, Networked Insights uses Content Sync to help networks, brands and agencies leverage real-time data to better understand their target audiences. Staying in sync with your audience allows you to uncover trends and insights that can improve marketing decisions. Content Sync helps eliminate guesswork or gut-based decisions on product placement and celebrity endorsement by allowing your audience to drive decision making.

Had the NFL tapped its audience for insight into who should perform at halftime, the result would have been a halftime show that increased social buzz and viewership – in other words, a can’t miss, must-watch Super Bowl experience aligned with the desires of its target audience.

Download our Media Optimization Guide >>
Make Every Ad Perform Like a Super Bowl Ad

The largest advertising spend for most brands usually focuses on TV. Companies expend tremendous effort and risk large chunks of their marketing budget to make sure their on-air advertising buys deliver the most reach for the dollar. Networks, meanwhile, are staking their reputation, and putting viewer patience on the line, every time they greenlight a new show.
This process is risky for both advertisers and networks because the current decision-cycle model (pre-informing, optimizing and measuring) relies on traditional metrics (like gross rating points) and studies (such as focus groups) that are expensive, time consuming and not always unbiased. In short, TV placement decisions haven’t been made in real time.

With the emergence of social media we now have access to the world’s largest focus group. Through real-time audience analysis, marketers and content creators can understand the audience around a TV show before it premieres. This data provides insights into audience members’ state of mind, discovers their interests, and measures their sentiments regarding various topics. All this knowledge allows marketers to make smarter advertising decisions and reduce the risk associated with traditional media buying during the upfront purchasing process.

Last May, TV analysts at Networked Insights helped several clients leverage real-time data in both buying and selling negotiations. We started the process by using synonyms, or look-a-likes, to the proposed TV shows to understand what it was about a show’s content that the clients liked, how involved they were with that content, and, most importantly, who was engaging with that content. Because this data was collected in real time, our clients had access to information the same day the new shows were officially announced. This data allowed media planners and buyers to instantly know which new shows to avoid and which ones would guarantee them the largest reach with their desired audiences. Sellers were able to understand which shows had more social capital, allowing them to sell more dayparts on nontraditional shows.

For example, last year, using our Audience Sync for brand, trend and audience discovery, we predicted that “The Playboy Club” and “Allen Gregory” would fail and that “New Girl” and “Revenge” were on the road to success. As a result, our planner and buyer clients achieved more reach in fall 2011 with their same spend, and our sellers had higher profit margins.

With the next upfront season rapidly approaching, and the economic downturn still a factor, the need for more efficient media spending – and higher sales – has never been greater. Real-time analytics, Audience Sync and Networked Insights are here to help innovators gain a competitive edge and improve performance during their next negotiation process.

Download our Media Optimization Guide >>
Make Every Ad Perform Like a Super Bowl Ad

Now that we have the most boring sports weekend of 2012 out of the way (come on, who could stay awake for the Australian Open, and the Pro Bowl – really?), it’s time to crank up the Super Bowl hype. Advertisers are certainly obliging. Some are already previewing the game spots that they’ll be spending $3 million to air.

Feeling left out of the action because you can’t spring for that kind of scratch? Not to worry. Just a couple of clicks will take you to Networked Insights’ Media Optimization Guide, Super Bowl XLVI Edition, a treasure chest of ideas that can help you make every ad perform like a Super Bowl ad

Topics the guide covers include using real-time social data to understand your audiences and deliver them relevant content. We reveal how you can reach NFL fans without an NFL budget, and how you can overcome a media lockout. The guide also has tips on leveraging social data to understand a TV show’s audience before it airs. And, it takes a look at how you can improve your TV marketing with real-time audience intelligence.

The guide has some entertaining information on two aspects of the big event – the halftime show and the program that NBC airs immediately after the game – that are stories unto themselves. All I’ll say is with what we’ve been hearing ahead of Madonna’s appearance, I can’t wait for the social chatter as her performance grows nearer and once she hits the stage (prediction: it isn’t going to be all bouquets). And, if you’re doubting that The Voice is going to keep football fans tuned in postgame, you might be surprised by who’ll be rooting for Team Adam, Team Blake, Team Cee Lo and Team Christina.

Finally, throughout the guide you’ll find examples of how Networked Insights tools make all these insights possible – Audience Sync, to discover who is talking about your product or service across the entire social web; Content Sync, which taps real-time data to better understand target audiences; and Media Sync, which enables networks, brands and agencies to leverage real-time data to uncover where their audience is consuming media. Together, they provide a playbook for you to unleash Super Bowl-power advertising.

Download our media optimization guide >>
Make Every Ad Perform Like a Super Bowl Ad

Last night we saw over 700k Tweets that had mentioned the Golden Globes, but this was just a drop in the hat for the overall social conversation related to these awards.

Using Networked Insights’s advanced topic discover engine we are to organically take everyone who discussed or commented on the Golden Globes last night and collect all the posts, tweets, and comments they’ve made over the last month and cluster them in order to understand in real-time what kind of topics, products, and content is interesting to fans of the Golden Globes. Listed below are the top themes and products for this audience as well as their demographic make-up:

Golden Globes Thematic Analysis:

• 62% of the conversation was about who won/the winners
• 48% of the conversation was about the Red Carpet
• 12% were about the upsets – Viola Davis not winning best actress, Damien Lewis losing to Kelsey Grammer
• 9% of the conversation was about Ricky Gervais being the host
• 4% of the conversation was related to Madonna

Ricky Gervais Thematic Analysis:

• Last night Gervais was set-up in a position where there was very little middle-ground – he would either succeed at being entertaining, or fail to be funny. Leading up to the Golden Globes 24% of his conversation was about people being excited to watch him host.
• His opening monologue was only 4% of the conversation, but was very well received with +20% positive sentiment
• However after that the pacing of the show and the direction made many feel like he was absent from the stage for long periods of time and that when he was on he wasn’t nearly tossing out as many jokes as he should have been (32%)
• 9% of his conversation was about his jokes with Madonna
• His Kim Kardashian joke (2%) and his Jodie Foster/Beaver  joke (5%) were also fan favorites

Red Carpet Analysis

Top 5 brands:

1. Prada – 42% (Zooey Deschanel’s dress represented 20% of the overall Prada-related conversation)
2. Dior – 22% (Charlize Theron contributed the largest share of the discussion at 34%, but Milla Kunis was close at 29%)
3. Gucci – 15% (Jessica Alba [23%] and Selma Hayek [36%] contributed the largest shares to the overall brand conversation)
4. Vera Wang – 4% (Sofia Vergara was discussed 55% of Vera Wang’s brand conversations while Naya Rivera was only discussed 36% of the time)
5. Marchesa – 3% (Lea Michele’s outfit represented 62% of the overall brand conversation)

What Received the Most Attention on the Red Carpet:

1. The Dresses – 71%
2. The Hair-dos – 25%
3. The Tuxes and Suits – 4%

Top 10 Celebrities – Share of Voice

1. Madonna – 10.5% (While Madonna did win an award for best original song – the social conversation around her was largely not in her favor. Many commenters were first off surprised by her victory (32%), then how inconsistent her accent was between being British or not (21%), how long-winded her conversation was (12%), and finally her tiff with fellow nominee Elton John (42%)
2. Meryl Streep – 5.3% (While Meryl did clinch an award for herself her night was up and down between forgetting to wear her glasses (22%), to talking too long (9%), and getting censored for her language (15%))
3. George Clooney – 5.1% (People enjoyed the fact that he made a lewd joke (39%), but questioned why Meryl was bleeped, and he was ok)
4. Octavia Spencer – 4.7% (“Pretty in pink” was used to describe Octavia several times (12%), but when she won the award for her role in The Help the online conversation exploded in celebration for her (72%))
5. Michelle Williams – 3.8% (while not everyone was a fan of My Week with Marilyn (14%), people were still mostly congratulated her for winning (57%))
6. Angelina Jolie – 3.4% (Angelina was the only celebrity in the top 10 that did not win, or was even nominated for an award, people just loved gossiping about her, Brad (22%), and what she wore (60%))
7. Claire Danes – 3.2% (Won for her role in Homeland – which lately has been one of the most positively discussed shows in social media. Claire also received additional attention for this being her 5^th Golden Globe win (28%))
8. Jessica Lange – 2.9% (Won for her role in American Horror Story, a show she’s no longer a part of (23%), but she was she was considered the highlight by many (10%))
9. Kate Winslet – 2.7% (Won for her role in Mildred Pierce, and the response was largely congratulatory (65%))
10. And a special award goes to Matt Leblanc (2.6%) for winning an award for playing “Matt Leblanc”. In fact after it was announced that he won “Yay Joey” started trending on Twitter

Millions of people use keyword searches every day to find what they’re looking for online. New cars, Italian restaurants, definitions of unfamiliar words, competitors’ views on various issues. But when it comes to social media, keyword searches can send you off into the wilderness if you’re using traditional monitoring tools to discover conversations and trends.

By definition, the intent of search is to uncover the best responses to a query. A search engine retrieves hundreds of thousands of posts that match the word or phrase programmed into the query. It attempts to rank them in order of relevance. Its goal is to put the post most likely to be the one you’re looking for at the top of the list.

But what if the goal is to analyze millions of posts to identify trends that can inform marketing decisions or uncover insights that can reveal business opportunities? With social data analysis, more data points are sometimes much better than a few. In these cases, search will undermine your efforts as explored in the recently published Search vs Text Classification Report by Networked Insights. The first 20, or even 200, posts might be great matches. But the last 20 or 200 might not match at all.

Worse yet, search cannot contemplate the context of how words and phrases are used in relationship to one another. It simply identifies whether or not that word or phrase is present. In social media data analysis for marketing purposes, this is a huge limitation.

Text classification is an alternative to search that may be more appropriate for social media data analysis. Text classification is the task of assigning predefined categories to free-text documents. It can provide conceptual views of document collections and has important applications in the real world.

In contrast to search, text classification uses machine-learning algorithms to learn from a set of examples how to separate posts into topics. If an algorithm, or program, is presented with examples of how a human would separate posts based on topic, it can learn to mimic that person’s process on new, previously unseen posts. One major advantage of this approach is that the program can scale up to perform its process on millions of documents. As a result, classification offers the potential to produce a dataset in which all of the posts are relevant to the topics being analyzed. The last 20 are as valuable to the analysis as the first 20.

So stop searching. Instead, start asking how real-time data can support your existing decision-making processes and then use classification techniques to cut through the noise and sharpen your social analysis.

Interested in learning more? Download the Search vs Text Classification Report today!

You have a killer piece of original content that starts rippling out from its source. The two things social lift analysis can tell you are how far and how fast those ripples move. If the content ripples 900 times, but that takes 10 years, you won’t see much benefit. If it ripples 900 times in 28 days, that can be really valuable information. Those rapid ripples are an indicator of what’s happening to the things that you’re doing. They help identify valuable, highly efficient venues in which to place your brand.

Celebrities can be one good source of social lift. In using celebrities, it’s not just about the number of followers or fans someone has. That’s just a point in time.

Instead, you want to know how likely that number is to grow. The best celebrities for delivering social lift are those whose following has increased and will continue to do so over a period of time. In thinking about whether to select a celebrity, a key indicator of his or her potential is, when other types of content feature this person, how far does it reach and how fast does it get there?

Another source of social lift is TV shows. There are two types that exist today, those that are currently on the air and those that are in development. For the ones on the air today, you have to determine what happens when certain types of content, celebrities and advertising appear on that show. What does the overall social lift look like?

In considering shows that are yet to air, you should assess the overall reach of the show concept by finding corollaries to it. What is the overall reach of this type of content? What is the overall reach of celebrities that appear in those shows?

Want to learn more? Read our point of view: “Social Lift: How to make your media plan go further.” Then let’s talk!

Let’s say you’re an auto insurance company. You want to target micro-segments where people think about buying auto insurance. We know that people buy auto insurance when they buy a car. But where else can we find people who intend to purchase insurance?

Using social data, we have discovered that people tend to think about auto insurance when their kids are going to prom. They think about it then because they’re worried about whether they have enough insurance. A risk mitigation scenario is taking place that you can target with your media plan.

Another “decision intersection” might be when men have had a mid-life crisis and they’ve just bought a big, fast car. If you can learn where those men congregate in the social media arena and how you can place your media in those areas, you can improve the efficiency of your media buys. To answer that, you need to discover where men go to have those conversations and then place your media there. And that media could be in the form of an advertisement or in the form of paid content.

By using social data analysis, including topic discovery, you’re likely to have a much more efficient media plan.

To read about more clever ways to strategically plan media, check out our FREE eBook on the 5 new tricks for media planning.

A small relatively un-noticed posting on the Facebook blog gave marketers who use social media one of the greatest gifts I have seen in marketing in quite a while.

Take a look at the original posting below …

Improving Facebook Page Insights
by Facebook Pages on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 7:48pm

Facebook Pages are a great way for admins to learn about their audience and view Facebook Insights about people connected to your Page. We are launching a new feature for all Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers that will provide additional metrics around your Page content. All Page admins will now be able to see per post impression counts for each story posted on your Page after June 25, 2010. Per post impressions will be collected in raw format and all impressions will be counted toward the impression total. Unique impressions are not available at this time.

The true meaning of this post is Facebook has given us the ability to track the impression count of an individual piece of content posted on your Facebook Page. This was previously only allowed for Pages with more than 10,000 fans/likes.

This is significant because now you can measure impressions across all your “earned” social media such as your Facebook Page postings, YouTube Views, Twitter, Blog Impressions etc. And if you can officially measure impression data across all of these forms of media then you can attach a CPM to that number and define the Media Equivalent Value (MEV) you can get by participating in Social Media.

Some clever firms saw this and immediately launched Social Media dashboards that can derive a MEV for you such as SocialEye by Overdrive Interactive and SocialSenseFB by Networked Insights. Which means you can now truly measure your progress daily, weekly, monthly in social media. And better than that you can report back to your executive team how much media value you were able to drive for your company by using social media, giving you a nice tidy way sum up all your media value backout the cost of your social media program and show an ROI.

Marketers have been typically looking for a tool to measure ROI in social media but because the metrics were so different (fan, followers, views of videos etc) it was impossible to “normalize” those metrics to create a single measurable metric which was why it was so hard to measure the ROI in social media. Ultimately all marketers will be heading to a place where we can monitor spending across all forms of media – Paid, Earned and Owned in order to know where to place our very next dollar of media spending. Furthermore I think you will see this type of media analysis emerge more this year. So little did we know in the quiet of an evening in November just 2 days before Thanksgiving, Facebook gave marketers something really to be thankful for on Thanksgiving!

Today there is no competitive advantage between Coca Cola and Pepsi when it comes to planning media. They both use the same data, whether it’s Nielsen data, transaction data or other research they’ve commissioned.

Social insights or social analysis around television audiences is the obvious next big competitive advantage. It is the next layer that you’ll put on top of your Nielsen data to compliment your decision making!

How would you use it? Here are four examples.

The first way is to identify a different segment watching TV. Traditional target ratings suggest that “Two and a Half Men” skews mostly male when, in fact, it skews mostly female. We know this to be true because of content fans create about the show online — content we’ve identified through topic discovery. Such insight allows media planners to think about planning and targeting that audience in a completely different way. Perhaps that show then becomes a better fit for your brand or perhaps there is a different 30-second spot you might want to run because you know that the audience is really mostly female.

The second is to identify the actual vs. estimated size of an audience. Nielsen data, for example, might suggest that the “Tonight Show” has 3 million viewers. In fact, we may see 5 million viewers engage around the show during a specific time of the year or when certain topics are discussed or guests appear on a given episode. Based on that topic discovery process, we now know that if you buy a rating point on that show, you’re actually getting 5 million viewers instead of 3 million. That’s a huge arbitrage efficiency play, and at Networked Insights we love to make those kinds of finds to recommend to our clients.

The third example is when we take a company’s media plan and show you all the earned media value you received from it. We can show you the “social lift” you got from buying that media. For instance, with this year’s Super Bowl, we found the “extra efficiencies” that earned media got for media planners (see “The Lambeau Leap Into Social Lift”).

Final example: “Gossip Girl” is given a 0.9 rating by Nielsen. Technically, no show with a 0.9 rating should still be on TV. Eight years ago, a 7.0 or a 9.0 would stay on TV. Now a 4.5 or a 5.5 will stay on TV, but a 0.9 would never stay on TV. However, “Gossip Girl” is a very successful show in social media with Millennial viewers, so it has stuck around. Through the use of social data analysis, you can find these types of “diamonds in the rough” before they become big hits.

The counterargument can happen as well. For example, “Dancing with the Stars” is thought to have a huge following when, in reality, we know it does not. An opportunity exists to optimize there to ensure you are getting the most efficient media buy possible for your brand.

To read about more clever ways to strategically plan media, check out our FREE eBook on the 5 new tricks for media planning.