The Spiritual Beauty of Physical Things; or The Way You Make Me Feel

I read this deep-meaning phrase in a short story yesterday:

'...the spiritual beauty of physical things...'

It was as if a light-bulb went off. Here in the Pacific NorthWest, and on the West Coast in general, we learn that spirituality is more important than material possessions. We should be aloof from temporal desires. We should be rational and know that we only desire luxuries because wicked advertisers create the demand in our minds.

That's fine. But what about the way you feel when you sink into the plush leather of your 5-Series loaner or slip your toes into a soft and supple new pair of Cole-Haans or strap on a Cartier on vacation in Vegas?

Just to see how it feels, you know?

Slip me on. Feel fabulous.

It can feel pretty spiritual.
Physical objects (commercial products?) can create a spiritual feeling.

Your senses are assaulted by all kinds of feelings and you're taken out of your everyday existence to, yes, a higher plane. It's very hard to quantify these feelings, just as it's hard to explain the more typically expressed feeling of bliss people get from being part of a religious gathering, drum circle or meditation group.

Many of the feelings we get from consumer goods have been carefully crafted to produce a certain effect. These effects are a key part of a company's brand. So why do we, as web analysts, focus so much on the numbers? We talk about volume of traffic to a web experience and think that engagement can be summed up with trite metrics like dwell time.

What really matters is how visitors feel when they're engaged with us. We digital marketers have spent the last fifteen years insisting that digital will be or is the primary way that our customers engage with us. Now that it's actually true, we don't close the loop and ask them what they think of the experience. We think we can guess by 'interpreting' the data and, at best, sticking a survey on a website.

It's truly astounding - and I can't stress this enough - what you can learn from speaking to users of your websites. We analysts have a terrible tendency to hide behind cubicle walls and Excel reports but it truly is our responsibility to mine every source of information we can. And spending time with site users is so, so much more valuable than cranking out that weekly dashboard that nobody will read.

Just stop producing it for one week, or automate the sh*t out of it and go speak to some real people. You'll blow your bosses' boss away with the insights you find. I know it's hard to get out of the comfort zone but this weekend I chatted with a friend about a site I've been working on. In the space of ten minutes she came up with two top notch ideas that could improve real engagement by a huge (not-yet-calculated-how-much) amount. Amazing stuff.

Get with your users. Mine them and mind them.

Bye-bye cube.
Hello 5-Series bliss.

Plushness wonderland

What marketers want. Or, If you’re an analyst, here’s how to RULE. Part 1.

Welcome to Dreamland

We asked thirty or so marketers at the top of their games, from founders of global agencies and senior management to digital producers in the trenches the following question:

‘What is the one piece of information you’d like to be able to get from a web/social/community/ecommerce analyst that you don’t currently receive?’

We phrased the question in an open-ended (not multiple-choice) but limited (a line or two) scope way in order to not restrict respondents’ ideas and  to avoid getting them caught up in thinking too deeply about how their wishes could be met. We also tweeted the question and placed it on our Facebook page.

The answers were instructive and, if you’re a marketing analyst or a manager of such creatures, you should sit up and listen to the wise words of some sage marketers. In later blog posts we’re going to dig into how to make these wishes come true.

The bad news is that you might be completely missing the mark.

The good news is that we’re going to tell you how to totally RULE!

High level: What marketers want

The responses to our survey fell into three high-level buckets. 

1. Cross-channel impact. Many people wanted to understand the impact of their brand across all channels, not just the silo that their analyst feels most comfortable pulling data from. 
2. Interpretation and Recommendations. Many respondents felt that they needed analysts to take the data they pull and slim it down with much more concise interpretation. ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘Where does all of this fit in the context of my industry or vs. my competitors?’ They also wanted analysts to go the extra mile and make recommendations for how to act on the analysis. 
3. Wild cards. We also heard from some free-thinkers with some ideas on how to use some of the more arcane, difficult-to-get data in interesting ways. More on that later.

We’ll include some of the actual responses so you get a feel for exactly what people are looking for, without a filter.

Let’s break it down.

1.       Cross-channel impact.

Here’s an example of what we mean here. 

In the words of the chairman of a giant agency, he wants to see:

 ‘Accurate installed base and demographics across all digital platforms, devices and services globally’

Definitely feeling this one. 

It’s sort of the million dollar question. To paraphrase, ‘How many actual living, breathing people actually see my actual content across every actual platform?’ Your web analysts can tell you how that a million people visited your website and that a million looked at your mobile site and a million people viewed content on YouTube or another channel and a million fans looked at your Facebook page. But is your community four million people or is it the same million engaging on every platform. Unless they’re logged in (and it’s pretty hard to tie users together across multiple platforms) it’s hard to tell.

There are definitely technical and process solutions to this one and we’ll go into them in a later blog post.

Another really smart consumer and retail client-side digital director, phrased it this way:

‘I want to see my index score for my overall digital connections, how this relates to industry, how this relates to my past performance.’

A really important point to glean here is that he looking for normalized measures across his whole brand, not just within individual channels. What’s the brand’s overall digital strength? It’s relatively straightforward to measure performance (engagement, conversion, etc.) within one channel but how to normalize and compare performance cross-channel? How do you compare the impact of Content Like or Comment to the value of time spent watching a video? [Self-promotion alert – we think we have cracked this with the concept of the DigitalBrand Minute but it’s not to everybody’s taste].

What he’s also saying here is that he wants to understand how his brand is connecting across all digital connections, and that includes de-duping between channels or explaining how people interact differently depending on connection point. 

Another really important point – and it sort of bleeds into the next big bucket – is that there has to be context. Marketers want to know how they’re performing comparatively – how am I doing compared to previous time periods and/or within my industry and compared to other verticals.

Next up, we’ll talk Interpretation.

What marketers want. Or, If you’re an analyst, here’s how to RULE. Part 2.

Intro

Last time we introduced the three high-level dreams of marketers. What they want from analysts. 

As a reminder, they were:

1. Cross-channel impact 
2. Interpretation and Recommendations
3. Wild cards

In this post, we’re focusing on #2, Interpretation.

2.       Interpretation and Recommendations.

Let’s start out with the meat.

Building on a previous quote that a senior digital marketing leader wants to see interpretation of his brand’s performance as it ‘…relates to industry, how this relates to my past performance’, context was a point brought up several times. 

A senior digital brand producer focused on context:

‘…when Paul Rodriguez posts something how far is his reach compared to Julian Wilson or compared to Ronaldo?’

Information means nothing unless it’s given context by being compared to something else.

The ability to interpret data and, most importantly of all, make recommendations was something that came up with more than half of respondents. Here are some quotes:

North America Digital Marketing Leader said:

‘Where are we most successful in terms of engagement?

Where are we least successful in terms of engagement?

What's an easy opportunity for me to take action to get better in engagement this week?

What's a big opportunity for me to take action to get better in engagement over the next year?’

To me this means that an analyst needs to sift through the data before presenting it. This means not presenting the data but, instead, answering specific questions. Second, take that information and use it to make recommendations. Analysts have the advantage that they’re usually not wedded to a particular way of doing things so we can recommend unusual solutions. 

Our ideas may (and should!) be impractical or outlandish sometimes but you may just come up with something that nobody on the ‘conventional’ marketing side would have imagined. The moment when you see your reco implemented should be something you live for.

Conciseness is really key here. Sifting. One agency SVP put it this way:

‘I'd like relevant insights - too often we are inundated with so much information, and keeping information concise and relevant is helpful to me.’

You’ll notice that nobody asks for more information. Insights and recommendations are what matter. 

Another agency biz dev director said:

‘If I am engaging an analyst I want an interpretation of the data that leads to some sort of conclusion’

We’re getting the picture but here’s one more for the road.

A global digital brand leader said:

‘My answer: Actionable Recommendations.’

Bam.

Next up, we’ll talk about some of those wild cards we hadn’t even considered.

Video Speech Analysis – The New Brand Metric

There's no bull in marketing

Last blogtime, we looked at how automated video text analysis painted a nuanced and objective view of the recent GOP debates. 

This time around, we’re discussing how all of this applies to brands’ analytics toolset. As a tool for sentiment analysis within video content, technologies like Cisco’s Video Pulse could produce brand impact measurement metrics for marketers on the same scale as the textual analysis crawler tools currently being used. 

In the same way that you can track hash-tag mentions on Twitter, you could one day do the same thing for any term anybody actually said on video, and without needing a PLA-sized deployment of interns to transcribe video.

Many interns

This is where it’s going…

Pulse and ‘Web Analytics’

Since this is primarily a web analytics (whatever that means) blog, let’s tie this back to ol' school web analytics. Oh yeah! In the last four years, as social and micro-blogging have exploded, so have the tools that allow us predatory marketers to monitor and react to the conversations. Radian6 (recently acquired by Saleforce), and Crimson Hexagon seem to have emerged as the leading tools that let marketers digest and analyze what’s being written on the web; and Adobe announced a new socialmonitoring module that is integrated with SiteCatalyst and the rest of the digital marketing suite last week at their Summit. It’s mainstream now, baby.

‘Video is the new social¹’

YouTube, among others, is getting into analytics in a big way with a stronger Insights tool.

YouTube Insights Analytics

Airtime, the new ‘live social video company founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’ is in the works. Video is fast becoming the expressive medium of choice. 

But video text analysis is way behind. Nobody has yet cracked how a company should monitor what is being said or filmed inside video content on the web, That's a big gap. While the ability to digest internal and corporate meetings without having to actually listen to every mind-numbing minute is going to be phenomenal for making business process slicker and cube-monkeys more productive, a truly game-changing application could be in analyzing consumer video that’s out there on web. 

Radian6 and the others don’t currently allow you to deploy technology (rather than people) to automatically digest and monitor the conversation out there in the video-sphere.

News and other communications organizations actively solicit video feedback from the public with those cool video trucks that you see at ball-games. The way we see technologies like Cisco Pulse developing is in allowing companies to quickly digest and analyze consumer video and rapidly develop a point of view and response. This could be an amazing trending tool to, for example, track the volume of video chatter related to the topic du jour or to quickly analyze video responses to a new product release. 

Information gathering services like news bureaus could allow Everyday Joes to upload video responses to polling questions through their website or those nifty video trucks and could analyze the response in real-time without using a transcription monkey.

Video- or chicken-truck

A note on Big Video, Big Data and The Cloud

A lot of these capabilities are probably a little way off, mainly because the ability to consume and process this much gigantic volume of video is not quite feasible yet. Just setting up a social text analysis tool to monitor a particular hash tag can take a day of processing for large volume terms.   

It remains to be seen whether the hardware exists to process a ton of videos on a topic, let alone spidering the whole video web or even reacting in real-time. No doubt companies like Cisco are working on how to leverage the cloud to manage this volume of data transactions but there might be some catch-up needed for the computing infrastructure to be able to deal with this stratospheric volume.

Tarantino: ‘I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.’

Well Quentin, in analytics it’s all about storytelling too. And every story is made or broken by the characters. The next, next step could be to think about not only what is being said but who is saying it. 

You know how Pandora allows you to identify people in photos? What if products like Pulse could analyze the contents of a video and also tell you who said what. Basic conversation tracking tools like Viral Heat do this with text in this way. Video conversation analysis tools could do the same thing – the video quote, who said it, and maybe some indicator of that person’s influencer weight out on the Web.

Publicly available Viral Heat social text analysis

Need to get with the program

Whether you’re a brand or a political entity or an information-gathering organization, being able to objectively analyze the video conversation in an automated way is going to be an important tool in your box. The ability to add personality and texture to that analysis is what makes the story compelling.

This kind of analysis is important in the policy vs. news debate and also applies to the ‘I feel’ vs. ‘I observed’ debate within analytics. Ultimately, in the same way that marketing is (and often should be) creatively-driven, politics is all about personality. 

Back to Jules.

‘We' have to be talkin' 'bout one charmin' m**********n’ pig.'

We know what you’re saying, Jules.


-Robert Sandler

¹You heard it here first!

What marketers want. Or, If you’re an analyst, here’s how to RULE. Part 3.

Intro

We've introduced the three high-level dreams of marketers. What they want from analysts. 

As a reminder, they were:

1. Cross-channel impact 
2. Interpretation and Recommendations
3. Wild cards

3.       Wild Cards

In this post, we’re focusing on the odds and ends that can change the marketing analytics world. Those amazing wild cards.

A medium-sized agency CEO put it like this. She wants to see:

‘Pinterest and Tumblr influence metrics, but that is a limitation of those platforms right now. It's killing me!’

We analysts are often adept at figuring out ways of getting information and joining that information together. Being resourceful is a key part of the job description. If you want somebody stalked online, ask and analyst. So we need to figure out ways to get access to information that is not readily available or at all. 

If you work for a big brand, a phone call can work wonders. Try this ‘Hey dude, this is Geeq McAnalyst. I work for General Motors/Sony/etc./etc and I wonder if you could help me answer some questions.’

If I was a start-up guy, I’d fall over myself to help you out and it’s amazing what kind of data the Pinterests of the world have, even if they’re not publishing it yet.

There are so many ways to get information – from clever tagging to simple surveys to just begging. Be moley, get the info that nobody else has and impress somebody so, so, so much.

Saving the best til last

This, out of all the quotes, is the one we liked best. It’s brilliant when you think about it.

‘But in answer to your question let's say insightful behavior trends which can be internalized to develop a new product or feature.’

You get that?

Pretty cool, right!

You as the analyst have so much information at your fingertips that you can influence product direction. We’re not just talking about where to place a button on a page. Part of your job should be digesting users’ behavior patterns and interpreting it and supplementing it to feed back insights about the market’s reaction to your products back to business managers. 

You probably have access to web site navigation data, sentiment analysis tools, survey tools. Go crazy, come up with your company’s next big product or product feature.

If you can do that, you really will RULE.

 

Like a speeding train. Mobile advertising on the big scream.

White Shoe Rulers

In an article Tuesday 'Riches in Mobile Ads, Just No Profits', the Wall Street Journal described the immaturity of the mobile advertising industry. In standard white-shoe manner, the Journal scoffed at the inflated valuation of companies specializing in mobile ad placement - advertising that appears on your smartphone when you use an app or web-site - hinting that companies such as Millennial Media, Pandora and (yes) Instagram are riding some kind of a bubble.

While the billion dollars Facebook paid for Instagram was truly astounding, we believe that forward-thinking media companies like Millennial have true value built into their stock prices, albeit value that is a year or two down the line. The data appears to bear this out.

Killer Ads

Mobile advertising is the new frontier. Perhaps a better analogy is that it is homesteading prime agricultural land. It still has astonishingly high click through rates, that 'traditional' web platforms would kill for. 

For example, in a recent marketing spend optimization program we ran for a major computer chip manufacturer, we saw mobile CTRs outperform more than 200x.

Consider the breakdown below.

It's pretty clear that mobile placement outperforms all others and at no greater cost.

The Journal asserts that:

One problem is that small screens aren't a great stage for ads, and users tend to interact with their phones in short bursts, which makes it tougher to draw attention. Many consumers find ad pitches on those devices "irritating,".

This was said for many years about standard online advertising, email marketing, and is becoming the mantra about social and community marketing. The only thing problematic with this assertion is that it's wrong. All of those channels still work.

To take the argument to its natural conclusion. 

As the cross-channel analytics agency we also observed that users who clicked through to the mobile experience converted (in this case registered) at a higher rate than the PC-based audience. Mobile users did not just click through and abandon.

With numbers like these, mobile advertisers will soon be able to charge much higher rates for their inventory and will find themselves in an enviable and rare position of being a premier placement.

When the Screens Get Bigger, the Tough Get Going

Source: digitaltrends.com

It's no gold-plated insight to observe that the size and intensity of mobile penetration is increasing. What augers well for the mobile ad industry though is that the quality of mobile interaction is improving too. Google Glasses and iPads aside, smart-phone screens are getting bigger and as a result user experience is becoming more immersive. According to several reports, the next iPhone will have an even bigger screen. A report on Tuesday suggested that a 4.6-inch screen is on the cards - a significant jump from the current 3.5-inch display.

Mobile-Only Experiences Please

There are some caveats here. For mobile advertising to be effective, there must be a mobile-optimized or, even better, a mobile-specific experience to direct users to. 

CSX, the train company recent ran a campaign that led users to a cool immersive experience just for the iPad. Just sending clickers to the standard web site is a sure way to lose them and even HTML5 automatic conversion to mobile is not going to cut it for anybody but the most patient user.

Mobile advertising is only going to grow and those screaming billion-dollar valuations will start to look very sensible indeed.

- Robert Sandler

Wolves, Bears, Dogs and Bull. Using video speech analysis to debunk 'reality'.

A Bear of a tool

There have been thousands, if not millions, of words written about the Republican presidential primary debates. Social media and the web are bristling with commentary and analysis; the mainstream news services manage to create exciting stories out of the most mundane and unimportant details.

We often focus heavily on personalities and debating styles. 

In the immortal words of Jules in Pulp Fiction,

’I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but it's definitely dirty. 

But dogs got personality, personality goes a long way.’

When you move beyond the personality and try to use an analytics-driven approach to understand the debates, you start to see some differences between what is being said, how the media reports on the debates, and the public’s resulting perception. It also helps to apply some nifty information design to help understand the textual analysis.

Thanks to some personal connections*, we were able to use Cisco’s Pulse Video Analytics Tool, a feature of the CiscoMedia Experience Engine (MXE) 3500 to analyze what was actually said during one of the debates and then compared what we found with the media reports. The MXE 5000 lets you see a breakdown of who spoke and when as well as a summary of topics without having to transcribe a video first. So if you want to know who had more speaking time or who spoke most about ‘education’, you just use pull the data out of the Analytics Tool. 

Here's what the user interface looks like. 

Debate data being Pauled

 

After some configuration, it’s very user-friendly. You process a super-set of videos which produces a data dictionary. The Tool then shows on the timeline, who spoke when, using a color code. In the example above, the little red scrubber marks show when Ron Paul was speaking. The data is quite fascinating and you can see how it would be useful in a corporate setting if, for example, you posted meetings to this tool and then allowed people to search for keywords that were relevant to them rather than sitting through a whole boring meeting [yawwwn].

We love the idea of using technology to make our lives less boring.

But back to the debates Wolf

The kind people at Cisco also provided a big data dump for us to work our analysis magic with raw data.

Fairly big data

 

We took all of the terms and speakers from the Arizona debate on 22nd February and ran them through our patented Information Design ProcessMonkey tool. We then thought about how to present the information in a way that lets you see the story without eating 10,000 rows of Excel. As part of the process, Cisco excluded some irrelevant terms such as ‘question’ so you start to get a pretty interesting picture. 

Click to get an interactive demo of debate terms by speaker.

Click for Interactive Version

You can immediately see that the most-uttered terms were Program and Programs. You'd expect that for a GOP debate when all candidates' focus has been on deficit reduction. Where it starts to get really interesting though is

that one of the other most used phrases was ‘Governor Romney’. The hypothesis would be that, since Romney is the front-runner, the other candidates were probably attacking him. Using the Pulse tool, we were able to go back and test the theory and figure out what each candidate was saying when he used that phrase. 

Here’s a breakdown of how many times each candidate said ‘Governor Romney’.

Speaker	Tag	Count
John King	Governor Romney	10
Rick Santorum	Governor Romney	7
Newt Gingrich	Governor Romney	3

 

John King was the moderator but you can see that Rick Santorum was all over Governor Romney. Let’s dig into the tool and get some actual quotes. 

• Senator Santorum’s first mention of ‘Governor Romney’ is at Minute 13:32. He says ‘…Governor Romney voted to raise taxes. Even today….’
• Next up is at 25:48. ‘…Governor Romney asked for that earmark…’
• At 34:49, it’s ‘…destructive capital…limited government’
• At 35:08, Governor Romney ‘…supported the folks on Wall Street...’

 

You have to sort of love the evolution of Gov. Romney’s expression as the debate goes on.

• And Sen. Santorum continues to attack at 56:07 ‘…the bill you drafted in Massachusetts, Romneycare…’ 
• He rounds out an enjoyable evening at by describing Gov. Romney as ‘…the model for Obamacare…’ at 57:10.

 

Phew. You get a pretty clear flavor of what a large portion of the debate was about from this one small piece of analysis. So how does this compare to the media analysis on 23^rd Feb?

The view from the media

The key message from ABC’s post-debate report was

‘It generated a lot of light, but very little heat. And, it did produce one sure loser: Rick Santorum.’

Based on the analysis of that one debate, that's quite a stretch.

Even if you ignore the weird grammar, the following quote does not seem to be in line with the reality of the text: 

‘WINNERS: Mitt Romney: As he did in the Florida debates when he relentless attacked Newt Gingrich, Romney came to Mesa loaded for bear. Just a few minutes into the first question, Romney was already turning his sites on Rick Santorum. And, it worked as he kept Santorum on his heels for the entire evening…LOSERS:  Rick Santorum: Whatever momentum Santorum had came to a screeching halt in tonight’s debate [our italics]’ 

Not sure we were watching the same debate here!

We could definitely dig deeper into the perceptions (or biases) that the press analysis showed but even with this brief look, it’s pretty clear that some of the more subjective analysis is not always based on reality.

Of course, in the end, Santorum did drop out but February 22nd was a high point, not a low.

What does all of this mean for brands?

From a marketing perspective, you can see where this is going. 

Using automated video content analysis we’re able to very quickly figure out both the message contained in the content and the sentiment. 

The automation point here is the key. A tool like this digests gigabytes of video content and allows an analyst to quickly gain a sense of the meaning, tone and content of the speakers.

Tune in for next week’s analysis to hear the really interesting news – how this approach will affect web, social and sentiment analytics for Marketing.

- Robert Sandler

Check out how next-gen video speech analysis will change the world of marketing buzz analytics.

*Full disclosure: Irene Sandler, Senior Manager, Enterprise Video Solutions Marketing at Cisco Systems is married to Robert Sandler, Managing Partner at Action Nugget.