Social Intelligence in the Age of Infobesity - A Verifeed White Paper

Marketing with
Social Intelligence
in the
Age of „Infobesity‟ A White Paper
August 19, 2013

What is the “gold
standard” of information?
Think about what makes information
valuable to you, your brand or business.
If you want to improve your bottom line you
need access to data that is
trustworthy, accurate, and from credible
sources. It also needs to be
relevant, contextual, and timely. You also
want to be able to access it before anyone
else so you can act faster and more
confidently than your competitors.
Verifeed White Paper | August 19, 2013 | w.ww.verifeed.com

Mining for „information gold‟
in the age of Big Data is as
big a challenge as the
exponential bigness of the
data itself. There are 300
billion gigabytes out there at
any moment – that‟s three
times the grains of sand on
earth. Now apply Moore‟s
Law: The data is doubling
every two years.
How and where you find those tiny grains of insight and
actionable intelligence is being turned on its head by social
networking, mobile and the processing power of the cloud. If
you‟re not harnessing social media to gain insights into
customer preferences, motivations and behaviors you‟re
ignoring a goldmine of information.

Social Data comes from real-time large-scale interactions and
conversations across social networks, search, e-commerce, and
media.
It‟s put the customer in the drivers‟ seat.
There‟s tremendous value in the billions of social conversations to
help CMOs, brand managers, sales and customer service reps
maintain and grow margins by better understanding and
anticipating the needs and motivations of consumers. Facebook‟s
influence on buying decisions has doubled in the past year, reports
Edison Research‟s “The Social Habit”. Every day, there are 2.7
million „likes‟ on Facebook and one million new Twitter accounts
created.
People are talking and their influence is powerful.

Many companies are overwhelmed
by the challenge of clear signals
accurate, actionable information
amid all the
repetition, irrelevancies, and
rumors on Twitter, Facebook, other
social networks, blogs, online
comments and reviews.
The good news is that social data
is being put to use in
innovative, profit-making, and
automated cost-saving ways.
Yet so many valuable insights
get lost in the deafening noise.

Google can predict flu outbreaks by cross-referencing where
people search for information on symptoms, Dell was alerted
to strong negative sentiment on social media to a published
price and as a result changed the global price within 24 hours
to avert an adverse financial impact, and the NFL uses social
login technology to deliver personal emails based around
individuals birthday‟s and favorite teams with a call to action to
buy a personalized jerseys.
The good news is that social data is
being put to use in innovative, profit-
making, and automated cost-saving
ways.

.
Social Intelligence in the
Age of „Infobesity‟
The brands and businesses that will win hearts
and minds in the „Age of Infobesity‟ will be those
that excel at unearthing and analyzing real-
time relevant insights their customers and
would-be customers already provide minute-by-
minute across all social networks and social
media as they talk about products, issues, news
events and each other.

.
Top brands and many businesses have
gotten good at pushing out their
messages on social networks. Many
now also generate contextual content
to drive engagement with Facebook
likes, Pinterest pins, Twitter followers,
and favorable blog post mentions.
Many have been aided by social media
management platforms, analytics and
technologies that enable them to track
mentions, quantify the impact of their
messaging, and identify the
„influencers‟ they can target to amplify
their messages. Some of the savvier
companies have integrated social data
into their CRM to tie social marketing
efforts directly to sales results.
Social is not
only about
pushing out
your brand
message…
…It‟s about
pulling in
your
customers‟
insights

Now there‟s an added imperative to pull in social data to provide
valuable insights into how a campaign, product or price point is
being perceived, what people think about a brand (or a competitor‟s
brand), or events and developments people are talking about that
may impact sales, improve a marketing campaign, or effect a
product.
Social data can also help identify the people who may be interested
in purchasing a new product or service, or may influence others‟
purchasing habits. It can also drive consumer loyalty and viral „word
of mouth‟ through the development of deeper personal, authentic
relationships with targeted consumers.
The companies doing it best integrate social data in a „push‟ and
„pull‟ strategy across all marketing channels with a „customer-first‟
ethic it becomes that necessitates combining real-time engagement,
content creation, data management, and real time actionable

But how trustworthy and useful is the social data
they rely upon?
A 2012 online survey of the CMO Club, an organization of 600+
leading B2B and B2C companies, found that almost half (47.3%) of
all CMOs have used social data to make predictions and
forecasts, and nearly 9 in 10 say the social analytics have
influenced their decision-making. Most analyze trends and
sentiment to help their teams craft more effective consumer
messaging. Many also say they use data to inform product
development (35%), brand management (59.6%), sales strategies
(36.8%) and customer service (36%).
The same survey found that CMOs believe social intelligence
is “at least somewhat effective” in indicating trends or patterns
that may impact the overall business, consumer demographics
and psychographics, consumer sentiment towards products,
product lines and brands and companies themselves, as well
as the influence of individuals on purchase decisions.

The phrase “at least somewhat effective” highlights a key problem: as any
executive who has interacted with social data knows, the challenge is
finding – instantaneously – relevant information you can bank on as fact.
Who wants to make a multimillion dollar
decision on unreliable information?

Sentiment engines can
only tell you so much
More and more companies are mining the entire Twitter fire-hose
to discern customer sentiment from the 500 million+ Tweets a day.
But algorithmic-driven sentiment analysis has been notoriously
unreliable: It is near impossible for a computer to discern the
intent of the post, catch slang, put a comment in context of a
longer evolving thread of a conversation, or even catch a double
negative.
There are so many unpredictable variables. As Francis D‟Orazio,
CIO of social analytics firm FACE Group, put it, “the sentiment of a
sentence only rarely lies in the sentence itself and is instead
rooted in the cultural context around that sentence.”

That‟s why so many social data platforms and
providers still need to rely on humans as a critical
part of the fact-checking equation. For instance,
Datasift, the world‟s largest reseller of the Twitter
fire-hose, uses the crowd-sourcing marketplace
Amazon Mechanical Turk to test results and three
people per tweet/comment to help improve their
sentiment algorithms.
“Even with humans you only get an 85% accuracy
rating because views differ on whether a word is
positive or negative, and one person‟s view of a
subject may be different to that of a specialist,”
Datasift CTO Nick Halstead recently told the
Guardian newspaper.
Data without context is worthless.

Though algorithmic and computing processes
such as unstructured data search, unsupervised
machine learning and natural language
processing (NLP) text analytics techniques are
improving steadily, none has yet come close to
replicating the intuitive pattern recognition
capability of the human brain.
How well can algorithms „fact
check‟ social data?
The need for real people to augment automated
analysis of social data stands in the way of more
effective and efficient filtering of social
intelligence. It‟s also expensive to invest in labor-
intensive solutions, assuming you can even find
all the good data scientists you need.

A recent survey by the Direct Marketing Association
found that many CMOs, brand managers, customer
service reps, and market researchers say they‟re unable
to handle the vast amount of data their businesses
are now collecting, and agreed they needed to hire data
scientists to make better use of social data.
Yet a Big Data Executive survey found 64% of
respondents said it was „very difficult to find or hire
data scientists‟, while a report from the McKinsey
Global Institute projects the U.S. needs up to 190,000
more workers with „deep analytical‟ expertise and 1.5
million more data-literate managers.

Automating Actionable Information:
Why the sum of the parts is greater
than the whole
The more accurate the information, the better the business
decision a company can make.
Assuring accuracy with automated
processes is the Holy Grail. The
quality and trustworthiness of the
„what‟ is only as good as the
credibility and honesty of the „who‟.
Discerning what is accurate is a
complex process of qualifying
sources for expertise and credibility,
and exposing hidden agendas.
Only 58% of
people trust
brands

Identifying the right „influencers‟ to target is a no-brainer for any
brand, business or cause seeking to amplify their message and
expand audiences, followers and customers.
Developing effective and efficient automated systems to do so is
not as easy.
Everyone wants to know with accurate specificity whom may be
their best social ambassador to drive word of mouth marketing.
Study after study shows that people are more likely to trust
information that comes from their own social circle, from a
trusted source.
A 2010 survey by eMarketer found that consumers trust people
“like them” who have used a product or service, nearly 12 times
more than information direct from the brand or service provider.
Only 58% of people trust brands and businesses, and for the
financial services industry, the pain is even more acute: Only
50% of people trust banks and other financial firms, according to
the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer.

Qualifying the right „trusted‟ influencers depends on what behaviors
you want to influence. Assuming you know the demographic and
psychographic attributes you want to pursue.
A Klout score can tell you how active someone is on social networks,
how many followers and friends they have, and how often their posts
get re-tweeted, liked or commented on. Useful information, but it
does not give you the whole picture. Is an individual with a high Klout
score really influencing anyone or just posting a lot? What is the
targeted ambassador‟s expertise, their credibility over time? Are their
posts accurate, helpful, do they have a pre-ordained or hidden
agenda? You need to know this information, but the systems that
process this information in real time are still in their infancy.
The „who‟ needs to be weighed against the „what‟, cross-referenced
with multiple sources with varying perspectives, and analyzed in the
context of the cumulative knowledge only an expert can provide.

Data must be put in context to
ascertain its meaning and its
trustworthiness.
Think about what an investigative journalist has
to do to be first – and right – about something
that is truly „new‟ or previously undisclosed.
A journalist talks to multiple sources, ideally in person so they can
discern whether or not the source is being „economical‟ with the
truth. They have to talk to people of all different viewpoints and
persuasions, and weigh their comments against agendas they must
expose. They have to question each of these sources in an
uncompromising way, they have to have the cumulative knowledge
and research to read between the lines and know what questions to
ask. And to discern what is truly important and new.
It‟s not easy. A lot of time, a lot of worn shoe leather, and a big price
tag because its labor intensive.

The massive computing power of the cloud is giving anyone the ability
to filter social conversations in real time to enable sourcing of virtually
unlimited amounts of information, but automated verification of the
accuracy and truthfulness of the is a tough code to crack.
And assuming you know what you‟re looking for, you can find it, to a
point – but not as efficiently as you should be able to.
It‟s even harder to automate discovery of new information you want at
your fingertips in the moment … before you even know you need to
search for it.

The unknown unknowns
Assume for a moment you are the CMO for a company.
Variously you want to know:
:: Who‟s tweeting about my brand? My competitors‟
brands?
:: What do they think about my brand and my competitors‟
brands?
:: What are people saying about organic dog food, specific
ingredients and other topics that may influence my
marketing strategy or product?
:: How many people are interested or passionate about the
space I am in?
:: Who are the „influencers‟ or thought leaders, and who are
the followers?
:: What are the things they care about most?

97% of relevant social posts
and conversations are missed
by brand marketers
All good questions, and if you are relying on Twitter‟s API, here
are a few things you need to know about the limitations on what
you will find:
:: You won‟t have access to the entire Twitter “fire-hose”
(Twitter‟s API provides 5%)
:: You‟ll only be able to search by one #hashtag or @handle
Assuming you use a platform that allows you access to 100% of
the fire-hose, you will still miss 97% of all relevant Tweets. Why? A
recent study by Datasift shows that only 3% of people remember
to include a #hashtag, let along the right #hashtag.
Think of all the conversations you are missing!

You need to be able to search100% of the fire-hose with multiple
search terms, phrases, keywords, #hashtags, @handles, all with with
geo-location. Then you need the system to weed out all the re-tweets
and repetition, and filtered out any spam, viruses, porn or worse from
your search. Finally you need to be able to easily publish contextual
conversations, know only the most reliable and relevant posts will be
included, and recognize and reward those users with the most
compelling tweets via special offers and coupons, with calls to action
to invite their friends.
Engaging people in relevant and informative
conversations about issues and developments
contextually relevant to their brand is a value-add
for your customers who want to more easily find
„facts and friends‟ relevant to them. It also inspires
the sort of brand loyalty that drives word of mouth
referrals and revenue. Meantime they are also
giving you valuable insights for the bargain.

Add to that a layer that lets you analyze the
reputation and expertise of the people posting each
Tweet. How much influence they have with other
influencers and people in general? How much a
Tweet has influenced a buying decision? Or caused
an adverse reaction to a brand or company? Add to
that demographic and psychographic information.
Tie it all up with an integrated customer-centric
solution.
Now add the ability to assure the probability of what is
being said is either accurate or inaccurate.
That‟s rocket science, but the rocket is being primed for launch.

Why it‟s all about trusted
content and connection.
Actionable information is only as good as your willingness to act
on it in real time to make a decision that could impact your
bottom line.
Think about what it would take to put $100 of your own money
down on the accuracy of a Tweet.
If you could replicate that „shoe-leather‟ investigative and
analytical process of a journalist with analytical algorithms and
massive computer power to unearth valuable insights in real
time, your brand or business benefit would benefit.

:: You would know faster and
earlier than your competitors about
the events, sentiments and issues
that affect purchasing decisions.
:: You would know faster and
earlier than your competitors who
can most credibly and authentically
proselytize your message.
:: You would be able to target and
engage those „credible influencers‟
faster than your competitors to
persuade others to try and buy your
product, or join your cause.
:: You would be able to improve your
messaging to core constituencies by
understanding, via the social data,
how best to connect and
communicate with them.

:: You would gain valuable
„intelligence‟ about your product (its
strengths and limitations) to guide
product development and
enhancement, as well as sales and
marketing strategies.
:: You would drive more traffic and
„word of mouth‟ network effects on
your site and social media by
publishing relevant and reliable
real-time content streams that
engage your users in meaningful
and informative conversation.
:: You would be able to identify your
biggest „opponents‟ and engage with
them in real time about your product,
correcting misunderstandings and
honestly asking for suggestions.
:: You could reward and recognize
your (would-be) ambassadors with
special call outs, rewards, discounts,
trial offers, and more.

As social intelligence systems become more
advanced, our ability to parse and verify
important information from social networks will
expand tremendously.
The ability of brands to “gear-up” their social
data mining capabilities to assure real-time
actionable information and connection will soon
differentiate those who strike it rich, and those
who miss the gold rush.

Author Melinda Wittstock is the founder and CEO of
Verifeed. She is a serial media-tech entrepreneur, a media
and content marketing executive, and an award-winning
journalist (London Times, BBC, ABC, Financial
Times/CNBC, Capitol News Connection). At Verifeed she
brings together her social media, brand journalism and
technology know-how to innovate the way we process, fact-
check and utilize social data. Her vision is to replicate - with
algorithms and automated processes – what an investigative
and analytical journalist does intuitively to be first and right:
Look for patterns, qualify sources and put data in context.
Twitter @Veriate, @NewsiTnews
LinkedIn.com/in/MelindaWittstock | Facebook.com/Verifeed
About Verifeed
Verifeed filters and validates social
streams in real time to provide
enterprises with actionable and
trusted social intelligence, contextual
real time interactive content, and
real-time targeted engagement.

Find out how to
become a Verifeed
partner at
Info @ verifeed. com
Thank you!

Social Intelligence in the Age of Infobesity - A Verifeed White Paper

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