social genome white paper2010 52610

Homophily

Meets Social

Commerce

Social Brand Genome

trueAnthem

Spring 10

For more information please contact Brian@trueAnthem or Chris@trueAnthem

Executive Summary

Online virality is predicated on Homophily, a sociological principle

from the 1950‟s that explains our inexorable tendency to link up

with one another in ways that confirm our core beliefs. Those who

liked Ike, in other words, liked each other.

People who travel in social circles tend to behave similarly. A social circle, also called a

“social graph” can be as innocuous as members of a website or just as simple as

lifetime friends. As examples: Long time friends, Brad and David have the same silver

Land Rover, whereas Corey and Emaleigh, clicked on the same Gilt Group email.

Homophily is especially intriguing where social graphs and ecommerce meet. Can we

someday statistically predict the likelihood that friends will make the same purchase?

Today, we all have friends who are active on online social networks. Eric, for example,

updates his Facebook status three times daily, each time notifying his 450 friends of his

current mood, a thought he had, or something as simple as what he‟s eating for lunch.

We also have friends who share more targeted opinions within specific topics. Brian is a

recognized cycling expert, he passes advice to novices constantly though his twitter

feed. Both of these people are influencers. Their immediate social circle is often

persuaded by their opinions and actions.

trueAnthem finds individuals like Eric and Brian, identifies the links to their 200+ friends,

and tracks individual purchase behavior on ecommerce sites.

trueAnthem‟s social commerce occurs in four key steps:

1. Establish links between online individuals and create a social map.

2. Determine who the dominant influencers are.

3. Link individuals to shopping and commerce behavior.

4. Leverage influencers to market products to their friends.

Homophily

This is the heart of trueAnthem…


The purpose of this

document is to explain

the technology

behind this predictive

mapping, known as

the Social Brand

Genome

SBG 0.0


The Social Player is the Lynchpin For consumers, trueAnthem is simply a way to get free music.

Today there is rampant music piracy; but through trueAnthem, the bands involved with

our brand programs for companies like adidas, Skullcandy, Rocawear or Nestle, give

their music away for free, and are paid for it. This is an alternative business model to

iTunes, where emerging bands get lost in the overwhelming noise. Moreover,

trueAnthem monetizes a world where 40 billion tracks were downloaded for free in

2008, and only 4 billion tracks were actually paid for.

trueAnthem works on the simple principle of Fair Value Exchange. In return for valuable,

free content, consumers listen to an audio “trueAd” accompanying each free track. A

trueAd is an 8-second endorsement, done by the artist, creatively mentioning the

brand. Additionally artists film 45-second trueVideos that authentically integrate the

brand into the artist‟s lives. Consumer “fans” of a band get a glimpse into the personal

lives of the musicians they adore, with a message sponsored by the brand.

We call this “socially responsible downloading.” Over 10 million people have bought-in

to the trueAnthem concept, making the business viable as it scales long term.

An important leverage point for trueAnthem is that the bands already have online fans.

As a demonstration, Shaolin Temple of Boom (SToB), an Industrial Rock band, has

124,931 “friends” on MySpace and 12,000 on Facebook. This fan base creates an instant

audience for any advertiser that supports this band.

The free music and video assets are ingrained in a dedicated “Social Media Player”

(SMP) for each band. (Exhibit 1)

Exhibit 1

SBG 1.0


This is a Flash-based media player, compatible across over thirty-eight social networking

sites including: MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo and dozens of lesser sites. It

is also embeddable for bloggers and savvy HTML programmers. (Exhibit 2)

Exhibit 2

When we design a program for a client, the Social Media Player begins its life as a

“seed” on trueAnthem.com, the client‟s sites and social media pages and most

importantly the band‟s social media pages. Shaolin Temple of Boom‟s (SToB‟s) social

player (Exhibit 3) begins its life at his social pages.


Exhibit 3

Within hours, SToB‟s 124,931 friends are alerted that there is something fresh on the

band‟s page. More often than not, the music released with trueAnthem is new material,

and free for the taking, to stream or download.

Of the 124,931 SToB friends, a certain portion will “grab” the social player and install it on

their own MySpace page. In the SToB example; 4,541 people grabbed the social

player. These 4,541 fans placed the Social Player on their own pages, for their own

friends to see. This action is a visible badge of fandom, a digital expression similar to

bumper stickers or concert t-shirts.

We call this sharing order of fan‟s friends, and their friends‟-of-friends (FOAF). In one

promotional campaign, the depth of FOAF was thirty levels of people deep. Ultimately,

SToB had 45,287 grab installations of the Social Player.

The Social Player itself is a simple UI (Exhibit 4), with the following options: listen to or

download audio files, view or download videos, click banners, stream social media

content, import RSS feeds, shop, etc.

The orange “Share” button enhances the person-to-person virality and is one of the

keys to the rapid viral spread of the SMP.


Exhibit 4

The Social Player also has the capability of administering a questionnaire (lower portion

of Exhibit 4), which brands can customize for their strategic targeting purposes. This self-

selecting media has proven to be a competitive advantage for advertisers, especially

as they attain higher levels of precision in their message delivery.

Beneath this simple UI is tremendous consumer reporting intelligence… the “prize”

found within the beautifully wrapped present.


Flash Technology Facilitates Tracking As the Social Player is loaded within a web browser, an applet gets deposited on the

end-user‟s computer. This applet installation happens whenever someone encounters

the trueAnthem network: trueanthem.com, Social Players on any web domain, social

network, a client‟s websites, etc. There is no manual download process required.

Similar to a browser “cookie”, this applet, called Social Brand Genome Applet or

“SBGApplet”, provides a conduit for information to pass between the client‟s machine

and the server. It resides in the User Profile settings on the end user‟s machine. However,

unlike a website-deposited Javascript cookie, this SBGApplet is not deleted with the

same frequency as browser cookies. Moreover, it doesn‟t suffer from the same

unfortunate reputation as a Javascript cookie. Adobe‟s Flash reputation is much

stronger within the technical community.

At the instant of install, the SBGApplet pings trueAnthem‟s database, and determines

whether the computer is new to trueAnthem or a previously enabled machine. In the

former event, a new database record is created, where each computer is assigned a

sequential Global Unique Identifier, called a “MachineID.”

The following fact will be repeated throughout this document- All end-user Social Player

interactions are recorded by the SBGApplet. Every action is captured: song listens, file

downloads, video views, grabs, shares, banner displays, completed questionnaires, etc.

Every time the Social Player is loaded with new content, the SBGApplet checks-in with

the server and transmits the new data. The information is passed to the database (see

Section 3.0 below) and added to the MachineID associated with the action.

For an increasing number of trueAnthem clients, trueAnthem‟s Flash tracking tags reside

on key website pages, such as product information and ecommerce pages (Exhibit 5).

These 1-pixel-by-1-pixel trueAnthem Flash tracking tags recognize when a trueAnthem

registered machine is visiting the webpage. Webpage information and MachineID are

passed back to the trueAnthem database, and added to the record associated with

that MachineID. The benefit of this is intelligence for banner clicks, product shopping,

and ecommerce transactions, is that the information is gathered at the individual level.

Exhibit 5

SBG 2.0


trueAnthem Database All of the end-user actions generated through the Social Player are deposited into a

core transactional database. The database environment utilizes SQL Server 2005, using

tSQL language. This enables data to be written to the physical database and extracted

from the database for reporting and exporting purposes.

WebOrb de-serializes, or translates, Flash ActionScript client-side code to .Net server-

side code. This allows the Social Player to speak to the database; essentially a facilitator

between Adobe and Microsoft. As an added precaution, a log-server maintains hourly

data dumps for failsafe purposes.

All actions associated with a specific MachineID are added to the individual record in

real time. Theoretically, the maximum of fields is unlimited, however, a typical record

has about 120 fields of information.

Some of the Social Player‟s recorded actions include: band name, songs listened to,

downloads, clicks, video views, banners displayed, email registration, opt-in data, etc.

(Exhibit 6)

Exhibit 6

The breadth of the individual information gathered creates tremendous cross-

tabulation capabilities. Promotional activity is then combined with shopping and

commerce.

SBG 3.0


Below (Exhibit 7) illustrates trueAnthem‟s analytic process at a high level. The end-user‟s

experience of getting free music and video persuades them pass the player along

virally, while trueAnthem collects analytical data on them.

Exhibit 7


Information is added to the database at three levels:

1. Individual Information:

a. The Social Player interaction (outlined above)

b. Geographic Data: Such as IP address, State, and ZIP code (when

available from a social network‟s API)

c. Marketing Information: Answers to marketing questions (Section 1.0), opt-

in information, email address, coupon download and redemption, etc.

2. Commerce Data from client websites (Section 2.5).

a. This data begins when banners are presented and clicked/not clicked.

b. Landing pages, product pages, cart pages, abandonments, etc.

c. For the first time, we can determine “which half of my advertising works.”

(Exhibit 8)

3. The person-to-person data

a. Limited to two very important fields, MachineID and ParentMachineID.

(further explained in Section 4.0).

Exhibit 8

trueAnthem

Viral Media Player

tA Consumer Analytics

Website

tA Consumer Analytics

CRM

Visitor 1234

Consumer

The main trueAnthem transactional database writes nightly to a SQL reporting server

based on criteria set forth in scripted queries. Within these queries are algorithms based

on graph theory.

In the graph theory lexicon, each record is a “node” where it can be plotted in relation

to other nodes.


Graph Theory Put to Work When a Social Player gets grabbed from a webpage, the MachineID associated with

that initial Social Player is written to the database as a ParentID (Exhibit 9)

Exhibit 9

This is the single most important element in tracking web virality. trueAnthem has filed for

provisional patent protection under Patent Application #61142881: “A method of

reporting data to a party, a method of assembling the data, a method of reformulating

the assembled data, and a method of presenting the reformulated data to the party.”

A relationship is cemented in the database that permanently links a parent to a child.

With the exception of a band‟s first Social Player that originates on trueAnthem.com, all

consumer end user Social Players have a parent.

Through this unique process, we are able to follow content as it travels throughout its

viral life, and monitor it at each stop along the way. A “tree” is constructed within the

database where “parents” beget “children” who beget “grandchildren” etc. Each

node maintains an association with other family nodes. Some nodes are dead-ends,

where individuals grab from parents yet have no children of their own, while others

prolifically spread across multiple generations.

For each node, all down-stream activity below the individual on the tree is rolled-up

and tallied for the individual in a “Roll Up.” Though an individual‟s Social Player may

only be directly responsible for 68 song listens, his children, grandchildren, etc. are

responsible for 94 listens. Therefore, this individual is indirectly responsible for a total of

162 listens. (Exhibit 10)

SBG 4.0


Exhibit 10

One element in which advertisers find deep value is the Banner Click RollUp. This is

important because advertisers gain visibility into which individuals influence commerce

behavior (Exhibit 11).

Exhibit 11

To build the most meaningful tree, we prune all Social Player posts which have never

loaded, hence our tree load/post ratio will always be greater than 1.

For all nodes that a PersonId can be associated with, we group these nodes by the

PersonId and the statistics are rolled up. This enables individuals to install more than one

Social Player on their pages. Naturally, an individual can be a fan of more than one

band.


Exhibit 12 shows the beginning of a tree; a visualization of the data structure. Every

node below is parentally related to the node above it.

Exhibit 12

This visualization is a hint of the Social Brand Genome, which is outlined in more detail in

Section 5.0.


Social Brand Genome Visualizes Everything Based on the strong underpinnings of the data structure, we have the ability to sort the

data in multitude of ways. Advertising partners have the ability to hone-in on what they

deem strategically important. In the example below, Wonka valued pure virality and

recognized those individuals who spread the campaign message most. In this case,

installments or “grabs” was the measured variable.

Exhibit 13 charts the 13 most influential individuals out of a program where 2.4 million

uniques engaged with the brand‟s message.

Exhibit 13

If a brand values listens, downloads, etc. this is all possible to track. Increasingly, brands

most strongly value their own criteria. As shown in Exhibit 4 in Section 1, “Do you wear

contacts” is a simple criteria to determine influence, and track appropriately.

SBG 5.0


In Exhibit 14, we see virality as broken out by the client‟s age groupings; 13-15; 16-17

and 18-20. The individuals listed are actual, and are the actual quantity of Social Player

(Widget) Installs.

Exhibit 14


How Do Brands Take Action? Identifying individual influencers is an academic exercise unless there is an actionable

plan for the brand.

sCRM is trueAnthem‟s answer.

sCRM enables a brand to nurture a relationship over time. Of course not all consumers

are “in-market” at any given point in time. This principle becomes a fallacy within

current direct marketing, which is much more “snapshot” oriented.

trueAnthem‟s content, which is constantly refreshed, allows brands to keep their

message in front of the consumer. Thus, enabling the brand‟s message to turn into

action throughout the consumer‟s consideration and shopping phase. When the

consumer is truly in-market, there is a logical action to take.

trueAnthem recommends cultivating heavy influencers with special attention. In the

Wonka examples above, trueAnthem identified 450 individuals who influenced over

5,000 interactions each. This group of trueInfluencers can then be enrolled in further on

and offline influencer programs, empanelled or simply recognized by the brand to

increase their loyalty and effectiveness.

Generally our programs focus on what we call „Performance Branding‟, a combination

of awareness and image generation and direct call to action, such as click-throughs

and engagements.

Currently, trueAnthem and several key clients are building profiling technology to

determine the relationship between content consumption, viral influence, shopping

behavior and actual ecommerce behavior.

The field of social commerce through consumer behavior profiling, is emerging as a

new phase of internet marketing. Previously, the companies that changed the way

internet marketing targeted consumers were companies such as Claritas that

enhanced targeting through clusters; Omniture pioneered web profiling; and Google

increased contextual relevance. The field of social commerce will have similar

dominant winners.

Fundamental consumer behavior has been recognized. The information is readily

available. The winner will be the first to market, with the best tools for analysis.

SBG 6.0

social genome white paper2010 52610

Documents

social pages

social graphs

social map

social networks

social circles

social brand genomefor

bands social media pages

trueanthem concept