Collective Intellect’s President Tim Lefkowicz kicked off the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics by appearing on the Fox Business Network (FBN) Money for Breakfast Show anchored by Alexis Glick which follows pre-market business headlines. FBN sought Collective Intellect’s opinion on the results of the pre-Olympic Sentiment around the major brands that are advertising at the Olympics, and we are expecting to return later in August with more interesting insights.

Referring to CI’s latest report, Glick, asked about how the traditional Big 3 of VISA , Coca-Cola and McDonald’s were doing heading into the Beijing games. Joining Lefkowicz and Glick was Mark Sunshine from First Capital to discuss these three big sponsors from the financial market perspective. Sentiment calculations list positive sentiment for VISA, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds. The other brands mentioned as part of this pool are GE, Kodak and Panasonic.

Lefkowicz predicted that “VISA was the Brand to beat running up to the opening ceremonies” based upon CI’s reporting.

A few highlights from the conversation are summarized below:

Visa had a positive sentiment of 67%, the largest share out of the Big 3, which can be contributed to VISAs campaign with the “Come Together” Olympics narrated by Morgan Freeman as well as another AD which features US Olympic team swimmer and gold medal contender Michael Phelps.

McDonald’s themes are much focused media campaigns on Olympic China advertising like “I love it when China wins.” Mr. Sunshine mentioned that McDonalds is actually down playing their Olympic involvement in the U.K. to avoid possible boycotts over alleged human rights violations by China.

Coca-Cola’s “Bird’s Nest” campaign does well with their theme of cooperation, and their embracement of social media and the younger demographics. Coca-Cola is a mainstay of the Olympics.

For the complete version of FBN’s “Gold Medal Marketing Show”, watch the following clip: http://snurl.com/3cw7y

Tags: Blog Analysis, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Insights, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring by Michael Conti
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As the 2008 Summer Olympics approaches, Collective Intellect slices down the analysis to the even more granular level of Brands and their Olympic-specific marketing composition. By doing this and sampling the two weeks directly prior to the start of the Olympics (7/25 to 8/7/2008).

Our results:

The traditional Big 3 of Visa, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s still lead heading into the Beijing games. And to their credit, they seem to be taking advantage of their lead. Sentiment calculations list positive sentiment as 67%, 51% and 48% for Visa, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s respectively.

UPS, Panasonic, Lenovo, and Kodak make up less than 10% combined.

And given the controversy surrounding the Olympics this year we also wanted to drill a bit deeper into any of the themes associated with negative posts.  As it turns out these mostly were associated with censorship and politics with pollution also being a major concern.

Our results:

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Blog Analysis, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring by Justin Wyman
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The 2008 Olympics in China are already generating a great deal of buzz in the Social Media world, particularly around certain Olympic Sponsors. Collective Intellect is actively tracking the buzz around Visa, McDonald’s, UPS, General Electric, Coca-Cola, Panasonic and Kodak. By comparing all sponsors and evaluating each sponsors lift through increase in online conversation, CI will be able to measure the success of each Olympic campaign and ultimately the value of Olympic spending.

Activity and sentiment analysis will play a large roll in online Olympic tracking. For example, although Visa currently has the largest share-of-voice at 42% (see chart below) of the seven selected sponsors, they also have the largest amount of negative sentiment. As the Olympics approach and we continue to dig deeper, it will be interesting to see if this trend changes over time and if negative themes emerge in the Visa Olympic sponsorship conversations that occur.

Throughout the Olympic Games, CI will continue to track and analyze data trends for these major sponsors and release findings along the way. Stay tuned; the Olympics kick-off Friday.

Tags: Blog Analysis, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Best Practice, Social Media Insights, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Organization by Jackie
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Well it’s been a while since someone has done a really in-depth analysis of social media companies and here is a real killer. Philip Sheldrake, Director at RacePoint Group has broken the silence with an incredibly detailed analysis of the current players in the social media world. Download the full 99 pages of sweetness and make sure to subscribe to the RSS at Marcom Professional.

The eBook had the 6 pages about Collective Intellect including the following excerpts (that I liked) :

“Collective Intellect describes their last year as one focused on adding millions of new social media sources and improving data quality with highly automated categorisation and analytic tools. Quite rightly, they point out that analysis is pointless if you don’t start with accurate and comprehensive data. Collective Intellect must be doing something right to have attracted customers from the likes of Microsoft, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Dell, Yahoo!, Viacom, Verizon, Levi’s and Adobe.”

About yours truly: “Collective Intellect’s Nick Sowden is the only staff member of the SWA vendors described here to let me know he’s on Twitter and to have subscribed to my Twitter. He’s also one of two to have invited me to link up on LinkedIn. To me, ‘being’ social inspires confidence that they truly ‘think’ and ‘live’ social.”

“I recall telling a colleague that Collective Intellect has “the magic dust”. Here are a few more things, additional to those above, that led me to make such an exclamation…. ”

Phillip closes with more praise: “In fact, the only other criticism I can muster up is the plainly visible fact that their reports aren’t as pretty as the competions’; not a critical desideratum and easily fixed… come on Collective Intellect!” Good point Phillip. We pride ourselves on data and we’re working on making our reports ‘prettier’.

To be somewhat balanced I should talk about Philip’s main criticism: “Interestingly, Collective Intellect dismisses social networking pages as “highly off topic and generally unhelpful”, and instead prefers to focus on the group / community pages within such networks. They also write off micro-blogs such as Twitter and Jaiku as “highly irrelevant”. That’s one perspective I can’t agree with.” Erroneous! I sent Philip some bad data (what was I think??), as we’re all about twitter. I twitter more than I eat… and I’m a hungry man. We’re already incorporating twitter into our data, in fact.

Thanks for the write up guys!

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring by Nick Sowden
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Paul Gillin’s recent thought-provoking comments on whether and if a negative sentiment “floor” exists for Dell obscures a larger point - never give up! Using social media tools to further understand the negative sentiment associated with the “floor” helps build a business case (for or against) further marketing strategy and outreach. My response:

—-

A natural floor for social media tonality certainly exists, and no doubt varies by industry topics. However, as an employee for a company whose mission is to both interpret and effect change within the social media arena , I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Dell has a unique opportunity to dive deeply into the negative commentary that constitutes the “floor”. Put another way, understanding tonality sets the stage, understanding content provides further opportunity for outreach. If the themes around negative content are inconsistent from month-to-month, a case can be made for a “floor” of constantly churning negative activity that it doesn’t pay to try and influence. However, if the themes emerging from negative social media activity are consistent, and no outreach has been attempted that leverages “the message” of this consistent negativity, the case could be made to further reduce the floor by testing different types of social media outreach. Dell may certainly have recognized this and have attempted the outreach (or decided that an ROI case can’t be made for it) – but it’s worth mentioning!

—–

Collective Insight helps marketers understand the “face” behind the social media buzz and can use that knowledge to connect in a relevant and timely fashion.

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics by Dean Westervelt
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As the CEO of Collective Intellect, I have the pleasure of interacting with dozens of companies, agencies and technology vendors every month who are at the forefront of social media engagement. These interactions are confirming that the importance of social media is real. I wanted to share some of my perspective on how companies gain strategic advantage through social media engagement, and to do a plug for why Collective Intellect should be a key component in your approach.

As a serial entrepreneur, I have been at the frontline of customer relationships many times. Through these start-up experiences, I have discovered that new business services exist on a continuum from tactical operational improvements to services of truly strategic import. The good news for investors and users is that services everywhere along this continuum have the potential to create value. The dynamics of the value provided have a significant impact on the client’s (i.e. users) underlying business models.
From my perspective, it is clear that many earlier adopters of Collective Intellect’s services are adopting them in ways that deliver strategic advantage. I would like to highlight some the strategic potentials associated with social media engagement.

• First, social media engagement is being used to increase revenue and market share. More and more consumers trust web sites for recommendations and advice than ever before. Several weeks ago, General Motors announced that it was shifting 50% of its marketing spend to digital. The reason was that traditional media was primarily valuable for building up awareness for new vehicle models, but digital media is where consumers made consideration and preference decisions on which cars to purchase based on their own online research and conversations.

• Second, social media engagement is being used to optimize messaging delivered through social media and through traditional media. Identifying the key issues and concerns of authentic voices found in blogs and other social media allows companies to deliver the messages most important. Coca-Cola recently opted to encourage and recognize user-generated mash-ups of creative advertisements rather than continue to try to enforce trademark protection. Now, if you create a cool Coke commercial, you could get sponsored to create the next one.

• Third, early adopters have less competition for the attention of creators and users of social media. Thus, the odds of meaningful engagement will never be higher than now. We have clients that are creating meaningful relationships with the key influencers in social media around topics that are associated with their brands and companies. These relationships form a foundation for future interactions that start to integrate these companies and citizens in valuable communities.

• Fourth, innovators are striving to harness the value of the social media content in their web properties to engage clients. We are working with several clients to build next generation publishing models that integrate social media influencers together in ways that support specialized vertical topics. These early models, if successful, will provide enormous first mover advantage for these clients.

If you’re an adopter of social media engagement, I encourage you to contact Collective Intellect today; so you can take advantage of this outstanding opportunity.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management, Social Media Metrics by Don Springer
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Robin did an interview with the Wallstreet Journal regarding coca-cola and superbowl advertising. You can check it out here, and I’ve included a short excerpt below.

Questions for Hal Curtis
And Pio Schunker
By SUZANNE VRANICA
March 11, 2008 3:36 p.m.
Super Bowl Sunday may have been five weeks ago, but marketers are still trying to evaluate just how well their commercials preformed during the game.

A new study released this week shows Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl ad staring Charlie Brown was the most talked about ad online two weeks after the gridiron matchup, according to Collective Intellect, a company that analyzes blogs to see what people are posting online about products and brands.

The Coke spot, set at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, features Stewie and Underdog balloons fighting over a huge Coke balloon. The two characters bounce around the New York skyline bumping up against office and apartment buildings. The twist: the two are outdone by Charlie Brown, who swoops in and grabs the beverage. The spot cost about $2.3million to create, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Robin Seidner, the director of marketing for Collective Intellect, says Coke’s ad had 350 blog post the day after the game, while Pepsi’s ads had 250 posts. Some ad executives believe the spot has a good shot of winning an award at the Cannes Lions festival, which is the most prestigious honor in the industry. It’s something new for the Atlanta beverage giant, which has been hampered by a lack of sizzle when it comes to its advertising in the past few years. Coke has struggled to create ads that please the younger set and at the same time don’t turn off older consumers.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Social Media Metrics by Tim Wolters
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On Friday afternoon, I sat down to speak with Ron Morris of American Entrepreneur Radio, to talk about social media measurement and the after-buzz of Super Bowl advertising. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Tags: Brand Management, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics by Robin Seidner
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It seems like just as I wrote a post about the WSJ article, I see another article in the New York Times adding to the flames of publishers and vendors squaring off on measurement.

Along the lines of the what I wrote before, every vendor (ComScore, Nielsen) does measurement in their own way. Publisher server data doesn’t remotely match. Vendors who use panels do have problems with measurement because they are extrapolating based on the small number of hits their panelists make. and, since these are consumer panelists — not business panelists working behind a company firewall — they really can’t be getting all the data they need to extrapolate well.

The rub is that online advertising will grow more slowly if measurement isn’t standardized in some way.

Tags: Social Media Metrics by Robin Seidner
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It is a “Big Day” for anyone who makes investment decisions for a living. Why? As of today there is a service available that will allow traders, PM’s and researchers to efficiently search ALL media. Not just news stories. Not just press releases. Not just websites.

As you might have heard, there is this thing called “New Media” out there. The blogosphere is a big part of it. But there are hundreds of message boards that are an important component of it as well. These new information sources (labeled “user-generated content” by the traditional journalists who are rightfully scared as Hell about the whole genre) contain a treasure-trove of information that traders-of-old only dreamed about. Patients discussing their drug therapies. Regional newspapers interviewing local executives. Former executives airing dirty corporate laundry. Industry pundits breaking news long before the Wall Street Journal starts running the presses. Sure it is noisy, but now with a bit of fancy technology all this content is filtered, categorized and ranked for relevance. And best of all, the technology “learns” what you consider relevant over time, so the filtering gets better and better and better. No more page-forward-page-forward-page-forward on Bloomberg. No more endless searching throught the big search-engines, hoping to find a nugget.

Media Intelligence, truly, is here. Email your friends at Collective Intellect and join the trading revolution.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring by cimovable
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