Social Media Case Studies

From Visible Technologies www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/case-studies

Using Social Media to Promote an Event

Patrick O'Neill Executive Creative Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day\Los Angeles

http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/case-studies/social-buzz/

Bring Fan Buzz to Life for the GRAMMY Awards

Few subjects excite social media users more than popular music. Passionate opinions abound on Twitter, Facebook, and across the blogosphere, while multimedia communities like YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace allow people to engage with artists like never before. With social media tools at their fingertips, today's fans are fast shifting the paradigm of how music is consumed and presented, as well as how fans and artists connect.

How to harness this groundswell was the question facing TBWA\Chiat\Day, advertising agency for the The Recording Academy®'s GRAMMY® awards. Recognizing that this new environment represents the future of their industry, the The Recording Academy wanted to leverage social media to promote the 52nd GRAMMY Awards on Jan. 31, 2010. Rising to the challenge, TBWA\Chiat\Day developed an innovative multimedia campaign called We're All Fans (http://www.wereallfans.com/) that featured portraits of GRAMMY-nominated artists composed entirely of real-time, fan-generated content from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.

As part of this campaign, TBWA\Chiat\Day wanted a visible way to recognize artists who invested time connecting with their fans through social networks, while also motivating fans to generate online talk in support of their favorite artists. Their solution: The FanBuzz Visualizer—a real-time data visualization tool that acted as a “barometer of fandom” on the Web.

The Problem

To bring the FanBuzz Visualizer to life, the team at TBWA\Chiat\Day needed a sophisticated approach to source data. How could they get accurate, relevant information, delivered in such a way as to be easily integrated into the campaign's online infrastructure and quickly updated on a regular basis?

The SolutionVisible Intelligence™ from Visible Technologies™, provided an ideal solution. Visible Intelligence's flexibility allowed the agency to collect, refine, and share only what they wanted—and to do it quickly and easily.

First, the agency identified 20 artists to track. To ensure that the data represented just the active fan base and not news or PR material, they worked with the experts at Visible Technologies to develop a carefully selected universe of text, photo, and video postings from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, photo sharing sites, and blogs. They then needed to filter data for relevant content, and since some artist names were also common words (such as “P!nk” or “Common”), they needed to be exceptionally careful. To address this concern, the Visible Technologies team developed sophisticated custom data filtering mechanisms and search terms that delivered only artist related discussions.

TBWA\Chiat\Day was then able to easily integrate the data delivered by Visible Intelligence into the FanBuzz Visualizer on the campaign Web site.

The ResultsThe FanBuzz Visualizer was a successful component of the We're All Fans campaign, encouraging engagement by fans and garnering notice in the press for its creativity.

In just over 1 month, Visible Intelligence was able to collect nearly 2M relevant posts for display. Visible Technologies' expertise in optimizing the Visible Intelligence platform gave the TBWA\Chiat\Day team confidence that the information was truly representative of fan's online engagement, while the tool's friendly interface made daily updates easy for busy agency employees. The data also provided valuable insights into the online popularity of different artists and opportunities for driving fan engagement in the future.

“It's not just radio spins, concert ticket sales and digital downloads that determine the popularity of an artist. The FanBuzz Visualizer lets music fans know where their favorite artists stand, across social media, in real time. While this is just the first initiative in which we're using Visible Intelligence. it'll be a great tool to engage consumers in other campaigns.”

Social Media Engagement for Product Adoption

Stephen Rose Sr. Community Manager, Microsoft Corporation

http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/case-studies/social-media-engagement/

Listening and Engaging the IT Community

In the fast moving world of social media, listening and learning are the critical first steps for any organization. But they aren’t enough. Translating those hard-earned insights into real time engagement by filtering and responding to influential voices and highly relevant posts is an even greater challenge. Doing it all for a community of over 20 million IT professionals, without swamping your team, is the situation Microsoft's Springboard team found themselves in. Microsoft took on the challenge by turning to Visible Technologies™ and their Social Intelligence solutions.

The ProblemThe social media challenge facing Springboard was a daunting one: Listen to, engage with, and rapidly deliver relevant content for a global community of tens of millions of IT professionals in order to help drive adoption of Windows 7. With thousands of potentially relevant blog posts and forum comments generated each day from sites scattered across the Web and limited staff time available, Microsoft needed a solution which would help them have the broadest impact while focusing on the most influential voices and content.

Specifically, the Springboard team identified three distinct needs:– Find and engage the most influential voices from within the community,

going beyond the easy to find mainstream media and high profile bloggers– Respond rapidly and effectively to questions, concerns, and criticisms– Develop or collect highly targeted content on Springboard in response to

the rapidly evolving needs and interests of the community

The SolutionMicrosoft turned to Visible Intelligence™ as an effective solution to all three needs. Microsoft also valued Visible's direct engagement functionality, excellent support, and availability of project management and engagement expertise.

The Springboard team quickly expanded their use of Visible Intelligence from listening to management of their social media engagements. Visible worked closely with Microsoft to develop a scalable process to identify, filter, and score a targeted list of highly relevant blog and forum posts for consideration each day. Visible Intelligence started with keyword-based searches to identify roughly 3,000 candidate posts daily. These in turn were scored for sentiment based on criteria set by Microsoft, narrowing the list down to 400 posts, which were then passed along to the Springboard engagement team. Each post received a score of Red (negative sentiment), Green (positive), Orange (mixed), or Grey (neutral). The filtering and scoring process enabled Springboard engagement specialists to daily review 100-150 posts and respond to 30-60 on average.

To further increase the volume of engagements the Springboard team could handle, Visible Intelligence eliminated the need for each team member to create individual user profiles and login credentials on the myriad of sites, blogs, and forums that anchor the IT professional community. A team member quickly created a single profile within the Visible Intelligence application, which in turn handled profile creation automatically on each site.

The ResultsBy working with Visible Technologies, the Springboard team has:– Scaled their community engagements from dozens to hundreds each week– Reduced the time needed to identify and respond to highly relevant posts

from hours to minutes– Identified 250 influential subject matter experts in 29 countries– Received positive feedback from within the IT professional community about

the breadth and quality of their participation and responsiveness

“Visible Intelligence is a powerful engagement tool, allowing us to quickly find the posts we're most interested in, and then use the same tool to directly respond to and track conversations. What would have taken us hours before can be accomplished in minutes. We've also found Visible Intelligence is a valuable tool for finding a wide range of influential community members we wouldn't otherwise see.”

Traditional Research & Social Intelligence

Chris Rethore Director, Entertainment Research, Penn Schoen Berland

http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/case-studies/traditional-research/

Predicting Box Office Results Using Twitter

Every day, more and more people use social media to share opinions and recommendations about movies. This is particularly true on Twitter, where users are often quite passionate about expressing their thoughts in the moments before, during, and after a screening. Movie fans are so active on Twitter, in fact, that recent research has demonstrated that Tweets can predict the performance of upcoming movie releases better than any market-based predictors to date.

Penn Schoen Berland, a market research and consulting firm whose clients include major movie studios, is keenly aware of this trend. Their business uses cutting-edge box office forecasting techniques to help clients maximize the reach and effectiveness of their marketing investments, and they were looking for a way to help movie studios make better decisions about allocating marketing dollars during the critical final week leading up to a movie's release. They were also looking for a way to increase their own competitive edge by significantly improving the accuracy and relevance of their predictions.

The Problem

The team at Penn Schoen Berland knew that Twitter, with the rich context and detail provided in millions of Tweets, had the potential to help them achieve these goals. But their existing market research model was already very sophisticated; how could they capture Twitter conversations in a manner that significantly improved their predictions, while also being scalable and easy to use?

The SolutionIn Visible Intelligence™ from Visible Technologies™, they found the ideal combination of value-added data gathering, ease of use, and forecast model integration capability for these needs. Working with Visible's experts, the team at Penn Schoen Berland uses Visible Intelligence to track both volume and sentiment in discussion of movies slated to release each weekend. Visible Intelligence's ability to track millions of conversations in real time ensures that actionable information on many topics is easily gathered, while its sophisticated approach to scoring sentiment provides a detailed understanding of how the audience is feeling as the release date approaches. Because Visible Intelligence presents all this information in one place, the team is always able to quickly and easily access the data they need to provide up-to-the-minute predictions for their clients. In addition, Penn Schoen Berland uses Visible Intelligence's Twitter data to incorporate valuable additional insights into existing forecast models. For example, by identifying audience subgroups for each film and scoring sentiment for those groups, the team is now able to track the effectiveness of a film's marketing campaigns, showing the client how well the campaigns are (or are not) working. And because Visible Intelligence's data represents actual individuals, clients can be assured that this picture of the information is real, and can make millions of dollars' worth of marketing decisions with greater confidence.

The ResultsBy adding so much additional detail to the existing information, Visible Intelligence's Twitter data have made a measurable impact in the accuracy of Penn Schoen Berland's prediction model. For example: Two horror films were being released at the same time. Other market research firms were predicting that film A would beat fi lm B at the box office, but Visible Intelligence's Twitter data showed poor volume and negative word of mouth for film A, so Penn Schoen Berland predicted fi lm B would win—and they were right. In addition to improving prediction accuracy, Visible Intelligence has also increased the context available for analysis, giving clients a better picture of why the audience holds certain opinions. This kind of well-rounded picture helps clients make smarter business decisions, and has helped Penn Schoen Berland build credibility in the marketplace. By enabling Penn Schoen Berland to be innovative and providing services that other research firms do not, Visible Intelligence has also helped them build a strong competitive edge in a fast-moving marketplace.

“We've found that Visible Intelligence's Twitter data makes our prediction model just that much more accurate, providing context that gives us the 'why' behind the numbers. With Visible Intelligence data, we can tap into the mood of the moment around each fi lm and identify and quantify the impact of Late Deciders that traditional box office tracking measures can miss out on.”

Product Launch Campaign Design & Analysis

Jason Bartlett Senior Advertising Manager, Xerox

http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/case-studies/product-launch/

Making Sense of Community Buzz Surrounding the Launch of the ColorQube

With the widespread adoption of social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and countless alternatives, online conversations swirl around brands and organizations of all sizes. Sitting just outside of traditional media and customer feedback channels, these conversations can often go unnoticed, with golden opportunities to participate missed. In order to better understand this landscape and come to grips with reactions from across the Web to their products and brands, savvy organizations are turning to social intelligence solutions such as Visible Intelligence from Visible Technologies™.

The need to monitor social media is especially pronounced when an iconic brand launches a game-changing new product. That's the position the team at Xerox found themselves in with the release of the ColorQube, “the world's first high-speed solid ink multifunction printer.”

The ChallengeThe launch of the ColorQube presented both an opportunity and challenge for the Xerox office business group team. They knew there would be a high volume of reactions from users, reviewers, and commentators from across the social media landscape and decided to embark on a monitoring effort as a pilot project.

They realized they needed a platform to monitor Twitter and the blogosphere for mentions of the ColorQube, one they could get up and running quickly and without a major investment of staff time. It also needed sufficient

flexibility and functionality to potentially scale across the enterprise and support a push into active engagement. Finally, the Xerox team needed to be able to easily generate compelling data and reports to help them sell the value of social media across the marketing and product groups at Xerox.

The SolutionTo meet these varied needs, Xerox turned to Visible Intelligence™ solutions, working with the experienced team from Visible to get up and running quickly. With a monitoring and reporting platform in place, a product launch looming, and initial buzz starting to build around the ColorQube, the team set out to filter and make sense of the high volume of chatter fl owing from multiple social media channels.

By selecting keywords related to the ColorQube and defining sentiment scoring and related filter values, Xerox was able to quickly process a vast array of posts, comments and tweets relevant to the product launch. The Visible Intelligence enabled the Xerox team to measure overall sentiment, calculate the volume, pull, and reach of each online mention of the product, and identify high traffic source domains as well as influential individual authors, which will be particularly useful for later use during engagement efforts.

Auto-generated aggregate data, charts, and spreadsheet exports could then be quickly assembled into useful and compelling reports for distribution across the marketing and product organizations.

The ResultsThe high-quality Visible Intelligence reports generated interest elsewhere within Xerox, helping the team quickly gain traction around the value of social media monitoring and lay the groundwork for a possible future investment in engagement. The initial pilot team has since grown to include a broad group spanning corporate communication, advertising, Xerox.com, and representatives from each of the business groups. In addition to continuing the initial monitoring project, the new team is charged with evaluating corporate-wide adoption of social media monitoring and engagement tools.

“We knew there would be a lot of chatter happening around the ColorQube, and we looked to Visible Intelligence to help us both monitor and understand it. Visible Intelligence was a great platform for our small team to get started with, and it has the capabilities to grow with us as we move towards engagement.””