In Category: Converseon News

2011 was a whirlwind here at Converseon. After more than doubling in size in 2010, our mission in 2011 was to focus on stabilizing and evolving new “socially-intelligent” solutions — products and services — that will come to market in 2012. In fact, we nearly doubled our technology spend in 2011 purposefully to build the robust infrastructure and technologies needed to help brands leverage social media to meet business objectives. Some of these are now in beta and others will be coming soon. On the services side, we doubled down on our talent and solutions — and expanded our offerings especially in the area of creative and social CRM consulting. In short, it was a time of great metamorphosis as we again challenged ourselves to evolve ahead of the marketplace and meet the needs of market as we move into 2012.

In fact, while we celebrated our ten year anniversary — and was cited by Shel Israel as the industry’s first pure play social media agency — we believe 2011 represented some of our most significant evolution internally. We did so because we see 2012 as the year of “social rigor” and have evolved our technologies and solutions in a manner to uniquely meet these market demands.

What is “social rigor?” In our experience, 2007-2011 represented a time significant experimentation at brands in social. The approach was often to seed the garden, see what took root, and let it grow, pilot, evolve and do so again. The result for some is messy gardens and far too unclear, in many cases, impact on business outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as it mirrors very much the earlier days of digital. But those days are coming to an end, quickly.

As we move into 2012 though, we predict brands will adopt an approach that applies social with much more rigor. This approach will be characterized by:

Converseon recently launched a collaborative research project with comScore, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), Communispace, and Firefly Millward Brown to explore the roles of social media in the purchase process.  The project brings together a range of research techniques to understand how and when people turn to social media as they make purchase decisions.

Converseon will provide insights based on social intelligence for the project, helping the ARF to establish an expanded understanding of online conversations around purchase decisions for items in the CPG and other categories.  Converseon analysis will uncover where in the purchase process social media conversation is taking place, who is taking part in that discussion and where it’s happening.

Our research will include psychographic and demographic analysis, in addition to a range of other metrics based on Converseon’ unique technology + human methodology, giving the ARF the opportunity to cross-tab the analysis and extract the most meaningful information to support its research goals.

We all look forward to the results of the joint project.

• May 14: Converseon’s CEO Rob Key will speak at Mashable Connect on Scaling Social Across the Enterprise
• May 16: Rob Key will speak on trends in social media at a panel discussion for top communication experts in the insurance industry, as part of the IPRC Annual Meeting, organized in New York
• May 16: Senior Strategist Mike Moran will speak at Philadelphia’s MENG Chapter meeting on why Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing
• June 9: Mike Kovscek, SVP of Enterprise Analytics, will speak at New York OMMA Social on a panel discussing how to link social media to ROI

It’s been an exciting two weeks for Converseon. We’ve had the opportunity to speak at conferences, meet partners, and talk to major brands from Indonesia to Singapore to Copenhagen.

At the iBrand Summit, Asia, we met with a wide range of leading brands who are looking to get serious about social media, while speaking about the “Brutal Truth of Social Media.” There we met folks from Microsoft, Nokia APAC, Indonesian social properties, and more.

Then, just this week, we launched Converseon Nordics to expand our offerings in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland while keynoting the FDIH conference with the topic of Scaling Social Across the Enterprise.

Throughout it all, I was struck by how similar and substantial the conversations we had were, whether it was with Asian telecoms or Scandinavian insurance companies. Across all these markets there was a clear and evident thirst to strongly embrace frameworks that scale social across the enterprise to drive competitive advantage. The conversations were quite sophisticated; diving deep into issues like governance, and policies, infrastructure, advanced social intelligence and the best social strategic approaches across multiple use cases. It’s become quite clear, not only is social conversation a global phenomena with broad adoption, but following close behind is the desire for brands to “do it right,” from APAC to Europe, and a recognition that it takes some new thinking and capabilities to do so.

Rob Key, Converseon CEO, was recently interviewed by Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director at ARF at the Advertising Research Foundation 2011 Re:think conference. In the embedded video, Rob and Steve discuss Converseon’s 10 year anniversary and the future of social intelligence.

Converseon at the ARF Re:think Conference

Converseon will again be supporting, presenting and attending the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think conference on March 20-23. For 75 years,the ARF has been a strong driver of innovation and ethics. Over the last three years, they have been especially focused on social and social intelligence, and an important advocate for transformation of the industry.

This ARF Re:think conference will convene the largest gathering of insights and research executives in the history of the industry.

Converseon will be participating throughout:

• On Sunday March 20, Converseon (along with Harris Interactive) will be participating in a private workshop on “Learning by Not Asking: Listening to Social Media Conversations”  with Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director at ARF and author of the forthcoming book, “Listen First.” This hands-on session will provide a balance of strategic perspective on social listening, its impact on market research transformation and some hands-on, practical applications. Copies of his books will be handed to attendees. If you’re interested in attending, some spots remain, just visit http://rethink.thearf.org/talks/17265
• On Monday and Tuesday, Converseon will be active in The ARF Insights Zone, which features learning sessions, product demonstrations, book signings and valuable networking opportunities. We will have a booth and demonstrating our industry leading Conversation Mining social intelligence technologies and solutions. Please come by.  You can register for the Listening Zone here http://rethink.thearf.org/pages/register
• On Monday afternoon at 2:30–3:30pm, Converseon will be presenting on “Overcoming Social Media Paralysis.”

Austin during SXSW can feel a little unreal. Music, culture, technology and parties, all in that Texan landscape, can make one feel a little transported.

So it is apropos to those looking to reconnect with the real world that on Sunday, March 13 our Lead Scientist, Dr. Philip Resnick, will be speaking on a panel on “Using Text Analytics to Predict the Real World.” Text analytics is one component of how Converseon tackles the next generation of Social Intelligence — finding deep levels of meaning and insight in socially-driven conversation. Here is the description of Dr. Resnick’s session:

How can we use text to tell us what is happening in the real world? Text-driven forecasting is the challenge of making concrete, testable predictions about future events and trends from publicly available text data. Text-based modeling methods make it possible to discover the agendas and attitudes behind the words people use. In this panel, we consider some recent success stories that use various kinds of text (expert-written analysis, blog posts, tweets) to tell us interesting things about the future and about the people behind the texts in various domains (finance, political discourse, and public opinion polls). Session co-organized by the McCombs School of Business and the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC).

For a deeper discourse on our view of the evolution of Social Intelligence, you can read my interview published recently by Digiday Data.

Social listening is a hot topic, but despite the large volume of information and chatter about it we find that many companies are still not really sure what is it, how it is done, how it is used and where it’s going. That’s why we are happy to support the Advertising Research Foundation in its effort to provide research-based answers to these questions and equip business leaders to use listening better or become listening champions in their own companies.

This comprehensive webinar series is presented by Stephen Rappaport, author of Listen First! Turning Social Media Conversations into Business Advantage, and is held over 10 weeks. Any or all sessions can be attended; they’re short and to the point, 30-minutes each from start to finish, including Q&A. This series is designed to “teach, learn and apply,” not merely “tell and sell.”

The webinar schedule is outlined below. To register for this series please head over to http://my.thearf.org and log in with your credentials. If you don’t have them yet, you can register for free on the site.

Webinar Schedule (webinars scheduled for 12 pm ET)
Part 1 – What is Listening and How is it Done

• February 28: Listening – What it is and it’s strategic value.
• March 7: Listening Tools: The 4 Types
• March14: How to plan and run a listening initiative
• March 28: Creating Organizational Frameworks to Scale Social Intelligence (Converseon co-presentation)

Social intelligence and digital media metrics are becoming more and more critical to the success of any marketing strategy — not just something to measure at the end of a campaign. In fact, the right metrics can help a brand to define when and where to start planning, who to target and even the messages and conversations that will have the best chance of resonating over time.

Last week, Converseon hosted a panel during Social Media Week, wherein our SVP of Enterprise Analytics, Mark Kovscek explained that many marketers use social media analytics to measure the very basics of social media programs, such as Facebook fan counts or the volume of brand mentions across the social graph.

Instead, brands should understand that significantly more meaningful and actionable metrics are available to inform social media strategies and to optimize marketing performance.

Take the example of Hennessy Cognac, presented by Steve Rappaport of ARF Knowledge Solutions. “Hennessy was able to revamp their entire marketing strategy based on the insights provided to them through basic SEO analysis.”

Years ago, it was SEO that taught the CEO of Hennessy the brand’s old fashioned French values and branding was not transcending the American Market. They saw that their website traffic in the US was suddenly originating from urban music websites and communities. The American customer was very different. That finding sparked more research and eventually an entire rebranding effort for the American market.