amazon sample report

Ecairn conversation industry influencer report amazon.com amazon

La Amazon.com Industry Influencer ReportP a g e | 1 [email protected]

Table of ContentsBackground.............................................................................................................................3Scope...................................................................................................................................... 41 – Community Map & Influencer Identification.......................................................................5

Top Influencers................................................................................................................5Influencers Map...............................................................................................................7

2 - Share of Voice....................................................................................................................8Number of Mentions........................................................................................................8Message Pick-Up..............................................................................................................9Sentiment Analysis........................................................................................................10

3 - Share of Mind...................................................................................................................11People mentioning Amazon.com the most.....................................................................13Promoters and Detractors:.............................................................................................14

4 – Share of Conversation of Security Topics.........................................................................15Number of Mentions within the Security Topic...............................................................15Breakdown of the Security Topic...................................................................................16Presence of Amazon.com’s Influencers in the Security Topic........................................17

About eCairn.........................................................................................................................18


Background

The advent of social media has seen the creation of more than 180 million blogs as well as the birth of countless social networking sites and message boards. Individuals in these communities increasingly depend on each another to share information. This shift in emphasis from mainstream media to consumer communities gives rise to a form of marketing called influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is defined as a form of marketing which focuses on specific key individuals or types of individuals who substantially affect the market. The difference today, is that these influencers can be anyone from potential buyers, and industry experts, to independent reviewers and celebrities.

Smart marketers understand the critical role influencers have in their industry. Influencers are highly networked within their community and between each other. They are the people prospective customers listen to because they are respected, trusted and usually independent. Influencers are often conduits of a brand’s image, and the best ROI comes from communicating with these movers and shakers.

Understanding who they are, how they relate to your brand and working to establish a relationship with any of them is a critical task. eCairn's Industry Influencer Report provides a wealth of data and intelligence coming from those influencers regarding your brand’s, such as:

Share of Voice (How much a brand is mentioned compared to competitors) Share of Mind (How many influencers mention a brand compared to competitors) Share of Conversation (How often a brand is referred to along with key industry

topics)


Scope

The focus of this analysis is the attention experienced by the Amazon.com brand in the cloud computing community in the US during the period of March 2009 to September 2009. It offers a comparison to the Microsoft brand in general and more particularly, on the topic of security. The cloud computing community referred to in this document is a collection of 550 experts & enthusiast bloggers who have ongoing conversations on cloud computing and complementary internet services.

Twitter, Youtube and other forms of social media were not included in this study.

Blog Feeds 550 Represents over 32k+ relevant conversations over six months

Twitter Feeds No

Yahoo Q&A No

Youtube No

Amazon.com Industry Influencer ReportP a g e | 4 [email protected]

1 – Community Map & Influencer Identification

Influence ranking is determined by cross referencing nodes in target communities and determining how frequently they communicate between one another. This is the first step towards effective influencer marketing. By identifying the influencers and gaining a better understanding of them, marketers can better plan for more purposeful interactions.

Top InfluencersThe table below shows the top 25 influencers in the cloud computing community (550 total).

Blog Descriptionhttp://www.datacenterknowledge.com Data Center Knowledge: Data centers, design, power, cooling

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS Software as Services | ZDNet

http://www.cloudave.com CloudAve

http://www.roughtype.com Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com All Things Distributed

http://www.highscalability.com High Scalability - High Scalability

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com Cloud Computing Journal

http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman Thomas Bittman: A member of the Gartner Blog Network

http://blog.softwareinsider.org A Software Insider's Point of View

http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog Rational Survivability - THE Cloud & Virtualization Security Blog

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor James Governor's Monkchips

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com deal architect

http://stage.vambenepe.com William Vambenepe

http://www.elasticvapor.com ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud

http://www.biske.com/blog Todd Biske: Outside the Box

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com SmoothSpan Blog

http://gevaperry.typepad.com Thinking Out Cloud

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com Perspectives

http://blogs.gartner.com/david_m_smith David M Smith: A member of the Gartner Blog Network

http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio Andrea DiMaio: A member of the Gartner Blog Network

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet

http://blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley Anthony Bradley: A member of the Gartner Blog Network

http://blogs.gartner.com/cameron_haight Cameron Haight: A member of the Gartner Blog Network

http://www.redmonk.com/cote People Over Process

http://blogs.gartner.com/michael_blechar Michael Blechar: A Member of the Gartner Blog Network


This graph displays the current community influencer profile for the cloud computing community. Each dot on the graph represents a single blog source, with high influencers in dark blue, medium or magic middle* influencers in royal blue and the long tail of influencers in light blue/grey. There are many more long tail sources which share fewer connections than magic middle and high influencers. It’s possible to locate a specific brand’s blog influence by plugging it into the chart. Notice that Amazon’s Web Services blog is not networked with other cloud computing blogs and thus has very little influence in the community at the time of this study.

*The magic middle: while they lack the connections of higher influencers, they often write about niche or topical content and are radically influential to larger communities.


Influencers Map

Influencer mapping shows the interconnections within the community. This makes it easier to identify particular influencers who occupy strategic places in the network. The map below displays the connections between the top 25 influencers in three main clusters grouped in red, blue and green. These clusters show increased affinity between bloggers of like colors rather than “sub specialization” or network affiliation.


2 - Share of Voice

Share of voice is defined as the ratio of mentions of a brand in conversations taking place in the greater community. It can be calculated by taking the # of brand mentions divided by the total # of conversations. Share of voice allows marketers to understand how frequently a brand is brought up through conversations within the community. This statistic allows marketers to benchmark their presence against competitors and observe the effectiveness of buzz marketing campaigns.

Number of Mentions

The following graphs illustrate the volume of conversations with mentions of the Amazon, Google and Microsoft brands during the period of March 2009 to September 2009. Graph1 shows the “share of conversation” for these three brands and graph2 displays trend over time.

Graph1 Graph2

Amazon’s share of voice during September 2009 was above Microsoft and Google’s (2510 to 1102 and 950, respectively*). This only represents approximately 3% of the overall cloud computing community discussions in up until September 2009 but was about 10% back in April 2009

(*)Amazon’s and Microsoft’s own blogs are not included in this study


Message Pick-Up

Message pick-ups indicate what marketing activities and programs caused an increase in volume of conversations between influencers. This helps determine if news or marketing efforts cause influencers to distribute the intended information or message to their community.

Amazon: May 21st: Launch of the new Import/Export Feature:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/send-us-that-data.html Aug 25th: Announcement of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/introducing-amazon-virtual-private-cloud-vpc.html July 12th-19th: Microsoft Azure pricing announced, generating comparisons with

Amazon's pricing. BMC leverages AWS to deploy and manage cloud environment.

Microsoft: May 17th–May 24th: Ray Ozzie talks about Microsoft and Cloud Computing at the JP

Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom conference. Multiple product announcements and previews.

July 12th: Microsoft announced pricing for its Azure cloud computing services : http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/07/14/confirming-commercial-availability-and-announcing-business-model.aspx

Google: Conversations about Google Buzz have been in decline since its high during April

2009. Sept 20th-Sept 27th: Google announced the release of its site’s APIs which

generated a small buzz in the community.


Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is the process of examining individual conversations from influencers and categorizing the content as positive, negative or neutral perspectives on the brand. Note that this applies to all Amazon.com cloud computing topics concerning the brand, services, corporate image and representatives.

Amazon.com displayed a sentiment distribution which is quite common to industry competitors. The majority of conversations in the cloud computing community, which mention Amazon, lean towards neutral sentiment. Amazon also shows a healthy ratio of positive to negative sentiment (7:4)**

Notable points of sentiment: Rise of positive and neutral

sentiment towards the end of May due to launch of Service XYZ.**

Short spike of negative sentiment about services such as Automated Service ABC’s inefficiency.**

**Disclaimer: For the purposes of confidentiality on behalf of Amazon.com, several figures and names under the section “Sentiment Analysis” have been changed and/or fabricated to protect the privacy of the company.


3 - Share of Mind

Share of mind is defined by the percentage of influencers who have talked about a brand in a certain time period. It can be calculated by taking the # of sources that mentioned the brand at least once divided by the total # of sources. This metric allows marketers to compare a brand’s visibility in the market to its competitors.

Amazon.com’s SoM is 64% (352 divided by 550). The graph below depicts the SoM breakdown by influence tiers and benchmarks Amazon against Microsoft.

Amazon has a higher share of mind in the Magic Middle and Long Tail compared to Microsoft. Its overall coverage of the rest of the cloud computing community is fairly strong from an industry standpoint. Both brands have plenty of opportunities to foster awareness in long tail communities.

Below is a complete map of all influencers in the community. In this particular case, influencers who have mentioned Amazon.com at once in six months are represented by nodes in blue. Nodes in red have not mentioned Amazon in the past six months. It is clear that Amazon’s presence in the community is not limited to particular blog clusters and permeates throughout.


People mentioning Amazon.com the most

eCairn Conversation™ has the ability to identify promoters and detractors and sort their influence level by ranking. Taking this further, analysts can compare a brand to its competitors within the marketplace by calculating the number of posts related to each brand and then rating the sentiment of conversations from positive to negative. The table below shows the influencers who have spoken about Amazon.com the most. Influencers have square icons in dark blue, Magic Middle in blue and Long Tail in light blue/grey.


Influencers

Magic Middle and Long Tail bloggers

Promoters and Detractors:

Promoters/Detractors are defined as influencers who have mentioned a brand at least five times in a six month period and have left positive/negative sentiment towards the brand in each case.

Here is the breakdown of Amazon.com’s Promoters and Detractors**

*Ratio is Promoters:Detractors (Approx.)

Amazon’s promoters outweigh its detractors.

**Disclaimer: For the purposes of confidentiality on behalf of Amazon.com, several figures under the section “Promoters and Detractors” have been changed/fabricated to protect the privacy of the company.


Influence

rs

Magic M

iddle

Long T

ail

Promoters 6 24 55Detrac-

tors 1 9 24

Ratio* 6:1 8:3 2:1

4 – Share of Conversation of Security Topics

Ownership of a topic (the outcome of positioning) is defined by how many times your brand is mentioned along with the target topic. It can be calculated by taking the # of brand mentions associated with the topic divided by the total # of conversations associated with the topic.

So how does Amazon perform in the security topic?

Number of Mentions within the Security Topic

(Period of March 2009 – September 2009)

Both Amazon and Microsoft owned a fair equal share of the “Security” topic. Amazon had a significant dominance of the topic in mid August and but did not sustain its ownership after September.

The spike for Amazon at the end of August is a consequence of the introduction of their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service. This offering was considered a response to the security challenge in cloud computing


Breakdown of the Security Topic

Expression clouds allow you to understand the key expressions encountered in security discussions from the community. This knowledge should be leveraged in marketing collaterals and digital properties. Note, that eCairn Conversation™ is capable of creating expression clouds in multiple languages. Below is an 'expression cloud' (created by our Expression Explorer) of the most frequent expressions encountered in “security” discussions in the cloud computing community:

Marketers should analyze the complete list of expressions and look for highly relevant words. Below is a more extensive list of the top 100 expressions on security from Conversation™. The words are ranked from most frequently used to least:

Presence of Amazon.com’s Influencers in the Security Topic

Below is a map of all influencers who mentioned “security” in conversations at least five times in a six month period. Blogs that did not mention Amazon are shown in blue. Blogs that mentioned Amazon in the context of security topics are shown in green. This sort of overlay allows marketers to see that Amazon’s presence is still quite diffuse across the sub community and not limited to clusters.


About eCairn

eCairn Inc. is a software technology company, founded in October 2006. We specialize in community and influencer marketing and differentiate by focusing on the question: “Who matters?”. Our motto is: “You can monitor billions of conversations, or listen and engage with people who matter”. eCairn Conversation™ is the best platform for enterprises and marketing/public relations firms that want to map communities, listen and engage with influencers and measure the impact of their engagement.

Our headquarters are located in Los Gatos, California; in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our founders have a background in collaborative filtering, linguistics, software development and software engineering at well known companies such as Hewlett Packard, Sun, Xerox, eBay and Motorola.

Detailed customized reports specific to your brand(s) and competitor(s) that also include relevant consumer posts and expert analysis are available.

Weekly live demos of Conversation™ are available from our website at http://www.ecairn.com

Contact us at, [email protected] or call (650)388-8962 for more info.

Additional acknowledgements: Data comes from eCairn Conversation™, Graphs are built with Touchgraph, Tag clouds are built with Wordle.


http://www.wordle.net/

http://touchgraph.com/navigator.html

http://ecairn.com/

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.ecairn.com/

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