The Power of Social Intelligence What do male grooming, dark rum and shredding have in common ? These are just some of the many different sectors that Gravity Thinking have been working in recently to demonstrate to our Clients the huge potential that use of Social Intelligence can deliver.

This presentation will demonstrate how we transform unstructured social data into meaningful conversations, allowing us to understand how consumers are engaging with brands, their competitors and the category at large. It will illustrate how we then interpret these conversations to deliver actionable strategies and campaigns focused on developing the right message, to the right people through the right channel in line with specific brand objectives.

Manscaping, tattoos and identity theft

It’s been a tricky place for brands to get involved.Social media use has grown exponentially over the last few years and more and more companies have been excitedly experimenting with different ways to take advantage of the multitude of opportunities that it offers.

However many companies have been left disappointed by the results for a plethora of different reasons and this has lead to a confusion as to what to do next, how to get involved and, in some cases, whether it is worthwhile at all.

We’re going to provide you with the knowledge to start or restart your social media approach.

Social media is like teen sex, everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.Avinash Kaushik - Analytics Evangelist Google

“Social media is like teen “Social media is like teen “surprise it’s not better.

“surprise it’s not better.

Has the teenager finally grown up?We believe that 2011 is the year that the teenager in social media finally grows up. Why? Well the stats speak for themselves, from a sixfold increase in content sharing on Facebook to a 900% increase in daily tweets. For us the most significant statistic is that 25% of the top search results from the top 20 companies in the UK have come from User Generated Content! And this is only going to increase as search engines increasingly integrate social content and relevance within search rankings.

So if social is now so big and so important the real challenge is how do brands develop strategies and outreach to consumers in order to encourage engagement within social media and UGC?

It isn’t a case of ‘whether’ it is now a case of ‘how.’

In the past 12 months...

25% of search results for the worlds top 20 brands are now linked to User Generated Content.

Source: eConsultancy: 20+ Mind-blowing social media statistics: One year later.

4bn 25bn

Content shared each month

12hrs 24hrs

Video uploaded every minute

3m 27m

Tweets per day

3bn 4bn

Photos

381m

Check ins

112k

Social Media is the place where we live.For us the answer lies in the simplest place – social media itself! After all social media is the place where we work, play, learn, share, discover, create, complain, celebrate, mourn, applaud, influence, collaborate, investigate… and most of all LIVE!

What is most interesting about our living in social media is that not only are all the conversations and content generally honest, opinionated and natural, they are also high volume and niche. What’s more it’s always ‘on’ and continually changing, growing and evolving.

In essence, social media represents the most sophisticated and largest research group in the world.

However it’s vast and chaotic.Most marketers know that it is possible to eavesdrop in on social media however the difficulty is knowing where to listen, how to listen and then how to make sense of the output. The main reason for this is that social media is vast and inherently chaotic, after all how do you differentiate between a 140 character tweet, a 600 word blog or a forum post with over 200 replies?

There are lots of listening tools out there promising to do this to varying degrees (there is even a wiki that features 145 of these tools) so how do you choose between them and how do you ensure that your selection is not redundant or unusable in a few years or even months?

Most importantly how do you find and use tools to make the outputs intelligent and actionable?

Leveraging the world’s largest focus group. As we see it there are essentially 3 different types of listening tools; The free/near free require a lot of work to understand and although the tools cover many social channels they do not cover them all. The end to end solutions are the most comprehensive and consequently most expensive. We have also found that they are inflexible and lack responsiveness. Enterprise Solutions are both dynamic and responsive and provide the flexibility to alter requirements inline with the evolving social media landscape.

For us Enterprise Solutions represent the greatest opportunity to listen, learn and assimilate. However they do require knowledge, expertise and time to be able to know which of the tools to use, what to monitor and most importantly how to get what you want out of it.

Gravity Thinking have conducted over 20 social intelligence reports for Clients such as Philips, William Grant & Sons, Maximuscle and Imedeen. All resulted in different, fascinating and genuinely actionable outputs informing messaging, targeting and channel selection. Here are a selection...

VA

LU

E

BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

HIGH

LOW

LOW HIGH

Free / Near-free

Enterprise

End-to-End

Informs Measures Executes

Informs Measures Executes

Informs Measures Executes

Joining the male grooming debate.Philips have been leader in the shaving market for the last 50+ years, however with huge increases in the male grooming market they were keen to understand the content of the conversations and how they could take advantage of these.

A number of themes emerged from the social intelligence including ‘disasters’ and ‘advice seeking’ however we found a specific popularity of discussion around two areas “designer stubble” and the concept of “manscaping”. The debate centered around whether it was best to retain stubble or be clean shaven and whether it was a good idea to “manscape” or leave it natural. Girls and boys were equally active and fervant in their views and opinions.

Our strategy was to tap into and activate these discussions within social media in order to fuel the debate and establish Philips as a major player in this area.

The man, tattoos, music, clothes or rum?Sailor Jerry (aka Norman Collins) was the father of old school US tattooing. He also wrote and played music, has a clothing brand based on his tattoo designs and he developed the recipe of a classic dark rum which is now owned by William Grant & Sons.

Through our Enterprise Platforms we listened to conversations surrounding Sailor Jerry and found that they were varied but most alarmingly that rum was the least mentioned theme across the portfolio of Sailor Jerry associations. To many brands this could have been viewed as a disaster however we saw this as an opportunity and presented a strategy that would take advantage of the situation.

Link the rum to the man, the music, and the tattoos creating a rich platform for future global brand strategy and activity.

Overcoming price and efficacy issues.Maximuscle was created in 1995 as the first UK sports nutrition brand. The market has since grown massively (30% YOY growth) which has resulted in new competitors within the market who provide more choice and have actively challenged Maximuscle’s supremacy, especially within social media. Gravity Thinking were asked to review all these conversations and develop a social media strategy and campaign.

We quickly established that conversations were focused on two core areas ‘price’ and ‘efficacy’. To combat this cynicism we developed a social media campaign that overcame these barriers. The 30 day Cyclone Challenge offered consumers the chance to challenge themselves to get bigger muscles (using our online exercise, diet and tracking tools to assess their progress) and if they weren’t happy with the results they could claim their money back, no questions asked.

The campaign was briefed to influencers, seeded with bloggers, advertised in centers of influence and supported by piggy backing more traditional media. It resulted in a 200% ROI with 5k+ registering for the challenge and has been rolled out as an annual campaign.

Segmenting the audience.Gaggia have been synonymous with great coffee since they filed the first coffee machine patent in 1938. This global popularity however did not necessarily translate to the UK where they had experienced distribution issues. As such they wanted to know the state of the UK coffee machine market – who was winning, who was trying and what were the key themes of conversations.

Our Social Intelligence report examined the Gaggia brand, its main competitors and the general conversations surrounding coffee machines. We found an interesting correlation to the whisky market in that consumers could be segmented along their coffee journey from “newbie’s” to “curious” and from “skeptics” to “connoisseurs” all of whom were interested to learn more from both brands and their peers.

The output from the listening is a focused strategy and the development of specific digital activity (i.e. a mobile application) that allows people to assess their level of knowledge and then provides relevant information and education ultimately leading to a specific Gaggia product recommendation.

Opening up a new audience.The Airfryer is not only the latest must-have kitchen gadget it is also the perfect example of how social media can help launch a new product. In essence it is a product that cooks food in a relatively healthy way (with very little oil) and is perfect for mums wanting to cook healthier food that their kids actually want to eat.

So prior to launch we examined the conversations involving their direct competitor (Actifry) and examined the themes surrounding frying. We found lots of general conversations as expected however we also identified a huge swathe of conversations around frying within slimming communities. In short, slimmer’s love the taste of fried food but hate the calories.

This presented a huge opportunity for the product to target an audience over and above mums and resulted in the development of a new segment within their marketing plans including sponsorship of a slimming club and targeting of a new range of online influencers.

Unifying health and beauty.Imedeen is the World’s leading cosmoceutical product (in essence the combination of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals to help reduce wrinkles) that had historically rigidly conformed to the rules of beauty marketing – beautiful model, product shot and plenty of technical descriptive copy. Their issue was that they did not have the budget to compete with the likes of L’Oreal and Clinique so they asked us to consider ways to “zig” while the others “zagged”.

Our Social Intelligence Report found an intrinsic link between health and beauty – the better your lifestyle (exercise, water, good food, no sun etc.) the better your skin. This opened up a new opportunity to talk to people interested in health and present Imedeen as a complementary product to help enhance their skin.

To achieve this we created an application called the “Lifestyle Skin Assessment” which asked a number of questions about your lifestyle and assessed the effect on your skin, providing hints and tips along the way. We seeded this within health and lifestyle sites and blogs reaching a new audience of over 200k and resulting in a 8.5% YOY sales increase.

Use the issue to create relevance in the trade. ACCO is one of the largest suppliers of branded office products marketed in over 100 countries. One of their products, Rexel Shredders, had a huge opportunity to steal a march on their main competitor Fellowes’ distribution issues and were interested in how Social Intelligence could help them.

Our research found that the majority of conversations surrounding shredders were in fact focused on the huge growing issue of identity theft. This provided the perfect platform for them to turn what was otherwise seen as a dull utility purchase into an identity saving solution.

This not only gave them a fantastic activation platform for their owned channels but also provided their resellers with a compelling reason to help them sell shredders to consumers.

Creating a valuable relationship. Every year 45% of all children in the UK take an AQA exam which equates to over 1.5m candidates per year and 10.5m papers to mark. AQA’s challenge was that schools have the right to change exam boards as they wish. As such they were losing some schools and wanted to know why this was happening and what they could do about it.

We found through Social Intelligence that there was approximately an 18 month lead time between teachers starting to think about moving exam boards and actually moving – time to change people’s minds – and that nearly all of the discussion in social media (95%) took place on TES.co.uk (the Times Educational Supplement online community).

Although AQA had an existing media relationship with TES it was clear that they needed to establish a strategic relationship with them. Through an initial meeting where we presented some of the findings from our research, a partnership was established based on a bought, owned and earned media strategy.

Creating empathy with our audience within Social Media Avent have been making baby products since 1984 and were firmly established as the market leader. Recently however they were coming under fire from their biggest competitor Tommee Tippee. They wanted to know how their products were viewed in social media and what they could learn to counter this threat.

Pregnancy and early parenthood is an exciting and challenging time and mothers are keen to talk, share and take advice - we found most of this chat took place on message boards and forums where we listened and observed that there was a disconnect between the pragmatic messaging approach that Avent were taking with their communications and the hugely emotional subject they were dealing with.

Avent embraced this and have altered their brand strategy using all of their owned and earned media channels to develop the emotional, listening side to the brand and create empathy with the consumer.

The output has multiple purposes. These examples demonstrate just some of the diverse findings, associated strategies and campaigns that we have developed using Social Intelligence as our guide. We have yet to see a client who is not interested, surprised and impressed with the results. The outputs are extremely varied from more general marketing findings such as insight, media planning, SEO and NPD to social specific strategies and campaigns that Gravity Thinking develop including;

Content Strategy and CreationOutreach planning and activityNetwork and community managementCampaigns and activation

At the centre of all these solutions is Social Intelligence helping inform, analyse, dictate and develop effective marketing strategy and campaigns.

Social Media Intelligenceand Insight

Product Innovation and NPD

SEM and SEOOptimisation

Customer and Market Insight

Media Planningand Targeting

Social MediaCampaigns and

Activation

Network / Community

Management

Social Content Strategy and

Creation

Social OutreachPlanning and

Activity

One final thought.In his number 1 best selling book Socialnomics, Erik Qualman stresses the key to making the most of social media is how well you do it.

We firmly believe that the basis for this is Social Intelligence and every brand should be listening to the World’s biggest research group and using the findings to help drive the brand forward.

If you are interested in how Social Intelligence can help your brand:

Andrew Roberts, Gravity Thinking, 185 Park Street, London SE1 9DYE andrew@gravitythinking.com DL (0207) 654 7693M 07775 612853

We don’t have a choice in whether we DO social media the question is how well we DO it.Erik Qualman - Author Socialnomics

“We don’t have a choice “We don’t have a choice “how well we DO it.

“how well we DO it.

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