Archive

New Business Week (December 3, 2007) has an interesting article about big changes in the advertising business. The article focuses especially on Saatchi & Saatchi’s challenges to keep their revenue and find a new growth. They have won new customers (like J. C. Penney) and marketing professionals love many of their campaigns. But their clients have not got concrete commercial results from the campaigns. As Business Week says: “Yes, most clients still believe in creating an emotional bond with consumers. But Roberts had come to the conclusion that many companies are desperate for an über-consultant-a ‘brand navigator’-who, in a fragmented media universe, can help them to make that connection across multiple media.”

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Dr. Juha Vesanto from Xtract held a guest lecture at Helsinki University of Technology about the data analytics process and how to turn data into solutions to business problems. Other guest lectures were Jyrki Alakuijala from Google.

I was with the engagement marketing guru Alan Moore in Library House’s Media Tech event in London this week. Alan presented Xtract and Social Marketing Intelligence to the audience, which included many people from the leading media and investment companies. Advertising and social networks were the main topics in most of presentations this year. Antti Örling from Blyk (Xtract’s customer) especially emphasized the value of targeting and relevance in mobile advertising. He mentioned that Blyk achieved 12% to 43% response rate in their mobile campaigns, compared to the norm of 3% to 6% in mobile and 0.2% in the internet.

People still have a lot of questions, e.g. “how will social network, mobile advertising and business models be like in the future?”. But people see the value of targeting and relevance in digital advertising, and understand the “hot media” needs social marketing intelligence.

You can also read more from Alan’s blog.

One interesting problem in social networks is to identify the various roles of people. Some people forward information between communities, others are the central players in communities and some are peripheral persons with only a small social network.

At Xtract, we have studied the roles in social networks for a long time. Our Alpha User concept is directly related to finding the central players in networks. During the years, also other network roles have been analyzed by us.

In the academics, there is also same interesting research being done on the topic of finding network roles. One interesting paper is Classes of complex networks defined by role-to-role connectivity profiles (pdf) by Roger Guimerà et al. They separate the roles in networks into six groups.

Another interesting paper with quite similar aims is Node Roles and Community Structure in Networks (pdf) by Jerry Scripps et al. They have given descriptive names to the different types of people found in social networks. Big fish are the persons who have many friends but belong to only one community. Ambassadors have many friends and belong to multiple communities. Bridges connect communities and loners have only a few friends and participate in just one community.

The scientific work done on finding network roles provides both inspiration and directly applicable methods that can be used to help clients understand their social neighborhoods.

“the main point of information visualization is not to decorate, nor to show-off but, to help in making the right conclusions on unexplored data”

I recently googled for information on visualization, or casually, “infovis”. I ran into a weblog on Information Aesthtics (”infosthetics”). Visualizing social networks seems to be one of the leading topics in this blog, too. Network visualization is, as Janne recently pointed out, technically difficult as such, but also conceptually problematic. And network visualization is only one visualization task in our work.
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Blog was not invented in China, but it has been hugely popular in this country. Nowadays, almost everybody has a blog, presenting whatever he/she feels like to. Its users range from Nintendo DSL gamers to pop stars, and its hosts range from Windows Live Spaces to the Chinese native blog host www.bokee.com. And nonetheless, many of these hosts are reported to have attracted a large number of users.

This popularity can be probably attributed to the common Chinese character of being self-contained. Many Chinese prefer to keep their opinions to themselves rather than speaking out aloud. However, they do have a desire to share their experiences and knowledge, if the communications channel is right. Blogs are clearly one of those. Very often, the Chinese simply exchange their blog addresses, and then, when sitting back at home, they talk to each other over the blog. Blogs have obviously facilitated information flow and the construction of social networks in this country and particularly among the youth.
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Solution combines Greenplum’s efficiency to collect, store and manage large amounts of data with Xtract’s expertise in social network and behavior analytics for marketing

Helsinki, Finland and San Mateo, Calif., November 8, 2007 - Greenplum and Xtract have entered a partnership program to offer an advanced and comprehensive solution for social intelligence, the analysis of detailed data from social networks and other communities to enable greater insight into user preferences, relationships, and behavior. The partnership includes cooperation in research and development as well as sales and marketing.

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Xtract’s community marketing intelligence solution enables mobile operators, retail, media and online companies to benefit from their rich customer data and include deep customer insight in their marketing efforts.

Helsinki, Finland and London, UK, 12 November 2007 - Xtract announced today that it is a Principal Partner in the Sun(SM) Partner Advantage Program, for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Xtract qualified for this level by meeting Sun’s stringent criteria for excellence as a supplier of community marketing intelligence solutions, and by committing to tight strategic and technical alignment with Sun.
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Why all the hype around social networks? Facebook’s astronomical valuation and Microsoft’s investment in it; Google’s acquisition of Youtube and their OpenSocial concept; The popularity of MySpace and their plans to offer targeted advertising… Why the hype? Because it is finally recognized that word of mouth is in fact much more powerful than all brand advertising schemes put together! As a matter of fact, in most cases, word of mouth accounts for over 70% of marketing pull!

But where is the word of mouth most powerful? In the various internet communities or in real life? Will you turn to your so-called “friends” on Facebook if you need advise on buying a new car? Maybe. At least for the fun of it. But, most likely, it is the people that you know well and trust, your “real” friends, whose advice you will follow. When I look at the list of my friends on Facebook – how many of them are my “real” friends? 10% at the most!

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Google has published their mobile and social network platform plans during the last week. Not so many surprises.

OpenSocial is quite natural next move from a company that wants to collect a lot of data. Social networking platform is a valuable source of behavior and social network data. And it is much more than have one or two social sites. The main concept with mobile has similar objectives. Who will dominate mobile usage and social data in the future. And finally who will prevail in digital media marketing.

But is it so simple that one company can prevail all relevant data in the future. Is it even possible that one company can collect all data when there will be more and more data all the time everywhere? I believe they can collect a lot of data. But on the other hand I believe that the services and data will be much more de-centralized in the future.

Intelligence comes nearer users and user devices. Smart analytics, customer profiling, and social intelligence come also to terminals (PC or mobile). The best solution to challenge Google is not to try to collect more data, but to have more intelligence to utilize the data. And this kind of analytics and advertising solutions help media and mobile companies to challenge Google.