If you only saw one movie this summer, we hope it was Inception. OK, not really ; but seeing as the level of buzz around the movie was just too great not to dig a little deeper, we thought we’d do just that…

At the first level of dreams, we found out that Warner used a multichannel marketing campaign to launch the initial Inception buzz and maintain it throughout the summer. They launched a Facebook page which not only asked for movie-goers’ reviews but also included a ‘must read’ online comic book prequel, The Cobol Job. Even earlier, they had launched the official movie site at the same time as an online video game Mind Crime. Players could unlock various hints and pieces of information about the film as they went further, creating a “drip feed” for fans.

Unfortunately we can only go back 6 months for social media monitoring data, so we decided to look at the breakdown of online buzz starting on the very first launch date – July 8, 2010 in the UK.

If we look at blogs, forums and mainstream media from July 8 to today, August 30, we can see that the buzz created via social media has paid off.

79.1% of all conversations around Inception have taken place on social media – - not counting Facebook and Twitter!**

Winning the war of social media buzz

Where, exactly though, were these conversations taking place ? If we dig a bit deeper into where people were talking, we can see that

A major part of the Inception buzz has been happening on forums :

Makes sense for a movie that launched much of its buzz through an online video game. Forums allow visitors to ask each other questions that others can find answers to later. Skilled gamers can equally share their expertise with others by being the first to leave acceptable answers about unlocking secret codes, finding hidden paths, etc.

Which forums, then, were the most popular ?

If we limit the scope to just forums, still in 25 countries and 50 languages,

The most influential forums for Inception have been :

1. The SuperHero Hype! Boards (USA)
2. Rotten Tomatoes (USA)
3. Fan Forum (USA)
4. Inthemix Forums (Australia)
5. Naruto Forums (USA)
6. Forum Cinema em Cena (Brazil)
7. Comics in Leipzig Forum (Germany)
8. Forum Blue Ray en Français (France)
9. Forum Allo Cine (France)
10. Project COVO Global Forum (USA)

Quite an international mix of forums, wouldn’t you say ?

What do you think ? Does this look like a healthy mix of forums? Which types of sites would you have targeted for a film like Inception?

AND

If you still haven’t seen the movie – - what are you waiting for ?

**Facebook groups and pages would only lead to higher levels of social media buzz, as well as Twitter ; Twitter only allows 10 days of backdata, however.

NB : Inception still has a few more premiers to make – so may the buzz continue!

This case study is a submission for the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards.

Orange is a leading telecommunications company in Europe that has partnered with Synthesio, an international web monitoring and research company, to actively listen to and engage consumers online.

The problem

Orange telecommunications initially started out on the web by implementing a FAQ on their site, allowing customers to find answers to any number of problems or questions they might have had. Online for a dozen years or so, the objective was to respond to the larger number of questions posed by their clients. All in all, the FAQ was a rich resource for Internet users when it was first put into place. It had about 2,000 different cases and several topics like cell phones, Internet, TV, VoIP, etc.

The FAQ was a traditional web service that seemed to work well. Divided into several sections, it sent site visitors to the right answers via a questionnaire – and averaged 6 million visits per month !

However, the problems faced by Orange were multiple, according to Thomas Le Gac, Project Manager 2.0 for Orange :

• a FAQ doesn’t allow visitors to ask their own questions
• there were “so many different client requests” that it was impossible to answer every question
• clients and corporations don’t use the same language – so customers spent time searching for their answer or left unsatisfied
• you had to actually go to the official Orange site to use the FAQ ! Not very user-friendly for customers searching for a response – any response – where they could find it

Solution #1 :  the Orange forum

Orange decided to put into place a much more interactive system that would allow visitors to pose their own questions and find the responses they were looking for much more easily.

They started working with Synthesio one year ago, at the same time when they put into place their own official Orange forum. The official forum allowed visitors to ask questions in their own phraseology and get answers from others just like them. Instead of being sent to the “right” answers, visitors to the Orange FAQ were sent to the forum thread that corresponded to their question.

The forum was self-regulated, meaning that only non-corporate web users were allowed to leave questions and answers. Orange, however, took it upon themselves to “certify” certain answers by placing a Stamp of Certification on those they felt were the best answers to user questions.

The results

The forum receives about 15,000 visits per day – meaning about 15,000 service calls per day that Orange doesn’t have to answer themselves. They started to save money in their Hotline department almost immediately. As opposed to having only 2,000 answers available via their FAQ, they had now Certified over 1,000 forum responses and estimate that over 100,000 people have viewed them.

That’s 100,000 fewer Hotline calls.

What’s more, the Stamp of Certification recognized certain forum members as experts and leaders in that community, energizing them to contribute more and more often.

Solution #2 :  a team of Web Consultants

However, Orange realized that they could – and should – go a step further. Instead of making clients come to them, Orange decided to go “fishing where the fish are” according to Thomas Le Gac. Also one year ago, Orange began listening to forums online with Synthesio, watching and learning how people interacted on forums and what they were talking about.

“One of our main challenges was to collect millions of opinions on a brand that has the same name as a fruit,” says Synthesio CEO & Co-Founder Loic Moisand. Le Gac and his team worked with Synthesio to identify the 5 top forums for Orange discussions. ”They were able to listen to forum conversations for a year before joining in on the conversations,” says Moisand.

Orange and Synthesio worked to analyze and engage in conversations with customers in real or near-real time. Synthesio’s analysts filtered through comments to identify them for positive or negative sentiment and assign them to pre-chosen categories, while Le Gac put into place a team of “web consultants” to respond to comments. After listening to conversations on the web, they were able to develop a chart of guidelines for intervening (or not) in forum discussions.

For example even before intervening, the Orange team asks permission from forum administrators so as not to intrude. They also identified certain moderator-like particiapnts that Le Gac refers to as “super contributors.” They are community participants that regularly post good answers to visitors’ questions. ”There are certain members of every forum that respond more often than others that should be identified,” says Loic Moisand.

Le Gac adds that “the rule of thumb is to let the ’super contributors’ answer questions first. We don’t want to seem like competition to them, so our web consultants only answer when these ’super contributors’ don’t have an answer.”

The response :

Since the implementation of Synthesio’s monitoring, Orange has been able to identify and solve  numerous “collective problems”. Recently, for example, 40,000 clients signed up for a specific package complained of not receiving the amount of memory they had signed up for.

The customer service hotline answered questions from clients that called in, but the web team was able to detect the problem as a “collective problem” as the number of thread posts grew quickly. “Identifying weak signals is key to avoiding a major communications crisis,” says Loic Moisand. Orange rapidly corrected the problem and alerted clients to the correction. This information allowed them to realize an immediate savings on clients that did not call the support center and possible PR expenses.

Orange has estimated “a few million euros” in savings just through this installation of listening, and are expecting several more millions in ROI. According to Le Gac, the ROI they have seen has been “extremely quick”.

Added benefits – - monitoring competitors’ conversations :

In addition to the ROI realized by listening to third-party forums and positive image constructed through the encouragement of influential forum members, Orange has also been able to work with Synthesio to listen to conversations about competitors.

In one case, they were able to spot a problem in a direct competitor’s offer that was complained about by a number of forum visitors, and avoided making the same mistake, themselves.

They have also been able to spot offers from their competitors that their customers wanted in their own plans. Family calling, for example, is now part of the Orange Open calling plan. It gives customers unlimited calling capability for a certain number of their contacts.

Next Steps :

Orange is always seeking to go further in their response to customer needs and is planning on growing their team of web consultants, says Thomas Le Gac. He aims to turn the team of 7 web consultants into a powerhouse of 30 by the end of the year.

Orange is also planning on expanding their web listening and interaction via their involvement in more social networks and more countries. While a seemingly “must” for northern American companies, Twitter has been slowly growing their presence in France in terms of the number of users. Orange therefore plans to take advantage of this tool by opening their own B2C account, as well as using Facebook forums.

They realize the potential of these spaces to attract younger customers and to find them where they are.

There is also a number of international branches that are interested in Orange’s innovative steps in France, and they are currently working to use Synthesio’s monitoring services to expand their social media efforts to Switzerland, Spain, Romania, Poland, and the UK, to name a few.

Finally, Synthesio’s analysts identify sentiment surrounding the Orange brand and various offerings. Each comment in a thread is flagged as positive, negative, or neutral, and assigned to one of the topics Orange is monitoring in online forums.

“There are certain characteristics that we would like to see around our brand,” says Thomas Le Gac. “Transparency and honesty aren’t easy to measure, but they are clearly an objective for us. We are comparing Synthesio’s sentiment analysis from month to month to see where there are changes and why. This is a question we are going to keep looking at.”

If you like this entry, please vote, review, or share it! And see you soon

A warm thank you to Thomas Le Gac, Project Manager 2.0 for Orange, and Loic Moisand, CEO & Co-Founder of Synthesio for their testimonies

Social media monitoring is a field that is rapidly expanding as different tools enter the space. According to Forrester Research, “social media is the fastest-growing segment in the interactive marketing category” (AdAge).

And we’d have to say that we agree! A number of our clients started with free or do-it-yourself tools to monitor their online reputation, but soon realized that they wanted to dig deeper into information on the web, including forums, mainstream media, social networking sites, and sites in multiple countries and languages.

As a result we’ve recently doubled our offices in Paris and are excited to give you a glimpse of what they look like :

Monitoring social media in style

But what is monitoring social media without a little fun?

We couldn’t say no to a foosball table to join the Wii in our Synthesio game room

If you haven’t yet visited Synthesio and are looking for multilingual social and mainstream web monitoring, get in touch, or send us a message on Twitter to see how we can help.

We are continually working with more native analysts in foreign languages to help you monitor your international brand’s online reputation.

Thanks for stopping by and talk to you soon !

]]> http://www.synthesio.com/blog/en/2010/08/27/synthesio-keeps-growing/feed/ 4 http://www.synthesio.com/blog/en/2010/08/06/maybe-apple-doesnt-need-interactive-marketing/ http://www.synthesio.com/blog/en/2010/08/06/maybe-apple-doesnt-need-interactive-marketing/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:48:47 +0000 michelle http://www.synthesio.com/blog/en/?p=1122

Less than 1 month ago Apple seemed to have a little problem with a little something called the iPhone 4 antenna.

Except we’re still not really sure there even was a problem. But we’re sure that you’ve heard of it, maybe sang along about it, but you may have missed the gracefulness with which Steve Jobs responded.

Apple is a class example of a company chronically criticized for their lack of disclosure. It’s even been overheard that in order to work for Apple you have to sign a non-disclosure contract the size of 8 iPads put together.

They’ve therefore classically been criticized for not marketing interactively, ie putting free things into peoples’ hands to try and say that they’re cool.

We decided to investigate the legitimacy (or lack thereof) behind these claims.

Is Apple actually able to still use “push” marketing? ARE they using “push” marketing?

Or are they listening? Very, very closely and know you better than you even know yourself..

The rise and fall of Antennagate

We looked at the buzz around the iphone4 and its antenna uber-non-problem, from July 7th (one week before Steve Jobs’s press conference) and August 6th (today), we can see the build-up of people becoming increasingly worried and not understanding zwhat was going on with their iPhones…

even if theirs were still working..

So Steve Jobs held a last-minute press conference

He gave reporters 24 hours to get to him

Lest there be one reporter that get the entire juicy story all by himself.

And…

The buzz died happily ever after

And we never really heard from it again

In fact…

The buzz was way more prolonged on social media than mainstream

blogs and forums killed the radio star (and this doesn't even take Facebook and Twitter into account)

So..

Steve Jobs has discovered the new model of marketing

Unintrusive marketing

He only enters into the circle when there really does seem to be a problem, even if there’s not. He perhaps recognized the growing levels of concern and realized that if he reached that Tipping Point of a critical mass of terrified customers, he would lose the war forever.

So he took the stage.

The masses were calmed.

Listening and knowing how to react to buzz online is far more important than having your social media in place. Listening can help you learn how to respond to different situations quickly and effectively.

And, well, if you can’t think of a strategy to go with the listening, you could always take Mike Phillip’s and Stedmeister’s advice

Just kidding

It’s been a bit since our community manager has hosted a chat about social media monitoring on Twitter, and it’s time to start them back up !

Of course there are conversations constantly circulating the web about web monitoring, online reputation, e-reputation, monitoring in real-time, etc. but numerous Twitterers have asked where the #monitoring chat has gone.

And so, without further ado, we’d like to reintroduce it with your help

#Monitorchat this Thursday, July 8 2010 at 11am ET / 3pm UTC

Doug Konare (@Dougoukolo on Twitter), a specialist in Business Intelligence, will be joining to help us chat about web monitoring and business intelligence. Please bring your questions and thoughts and follow the hashtag #monitorchat on Twitter Search, TweetDeck, Hootsuite, or on What the Hashtag, etc.

We’ve changed the hashtag to make it a unique one that is specific to this chat.

What are you listening to?

We don’t believe in creating social media monitoring solutions that are the same for every company because we know that we are all different. You need something that someone else might not. It’s OK. What’s great about the Internet is the ease with which you can find the information you need and the speed at which you can share it with a friend.

Where we come in is helping to focus on specific information that can help you monitor your company’s online reputation, stay on top of conversations in case of warning signs of a crisis, identify influential people online with respect to your topics, and identify key sites for your digital strategies.

Different solutions for different digital strategies.

See you Thursday!

Continuing with our series of posts on how to measure the virality of an online buzz, we’d like to present you with a second type of brand profile on social media:

The functional brand

There are certain brands that while we are willing to share about them on the social web and tell whether we loved them or hated them, do not necessarily generate loads of conversation.

They are the basic hotel chains, certain cell phone providers, delivery services. You just want them to work.

Case in point:

You want your delivery on time, your hotel room clean, the service to be acceptable, and not necessarily anything more.

For brands like these, for which customers don’t necessarily write pages and pages about their feelings about the brands and their offerings, it can be difficult to tease out what it is that brands can offer beyond what they already are. If customers just want something to work and aren’t asking for anything beyond on-time delivery, say, it’s not obvious to want to try to go above and beyond a customer’s expectations, right? After all, the law of diminishing returns ensuers that even if you were to spend more and more and more, they may not even notice. So my mail shows up in a shiny red car instead of an ugly brown car? Why do I care?

But if we look at brands that have gone the extra step, it’s easy to see the returns they’ve received.

Who hasn’t heard rave reviews of Zappos customer service or Best Buy’s Twelpforce?

By providing above-and-beyond service and allowing employees to express their individual characters, Zappos has enabled customers to become part of their community. They have allowed their customers to spread the word for them and develop the strong online reputation that they have today. Zappos managed to change a “functional” brand into an exceptional brand, both online and offline.

Best Buy allowed its internal force to help spread the word of mouth about an otherwise “functional brand” or store. By allowing employees from all operations to tweet from the Best Buy @Twelpforce account, they harnessed their internal intelligence to provide quick, reliable answers to consumers simply looking for an answer they could trust. Wading through forums for opinions can be confusing and often not yield the results that people are looking for. What better way, then, to encourage word-of-mouth by immediately answering people’s needs in an easily accessible, highly visible manner.

As the world prepared itself for the World Cup, brands prepared themselves for their own world cup with the notable viral videos from Nike with their Write the Future campaign

and Adidas with their Cantinas Originals video

A recent post on the 10 Yetis blog compared the PR behind the two campaigns and mentioned a Nielsen study that looked at the buzz online surrounding the two brands. We decided to do a couple of tests of our own to see which brand, when tied to the phrase “world cup”, really has been getting more buzz.  around Nike and Adidas, but we decided to do a couple of tests of our own, including the phrase “world cup” to see which brand has really been the king of online buzz.

We chose to use the same parameters as Nielsen for language and date in order to be able to compare our results – Who says you can’t measure social media? – but expand the search to 25 countries.

Our parameters, then:

• social media sites only (Video and Photo Sharing, Forums, Consumer opinions, Comments, social networks, Blogs, and Micro-Blogging sites)
• English language posts/mentions/comments
• 25 countries
• May 7th to June 22nd
• using Video and Photo Sharing, Forums, Consumer opinions, Comments, social networks, Blogs, and Micro-Blogging sites (like Twitter)
  

The result?

Nike wins , just like the 10 Yetis declare – but the margin is so close!

However, one source that the Nielsen study didn’t talk about was forums. This was certainly surprising, given the percentage of online conversations surrounding Nike and Adidas and the World Cup that take place on forums vs. Blogs and social networks (excluding Twitter):

Because while Nike clearly wins in the forums in English:

Most of that buzz was only over the space of about 5 day immediately following the launch of the “Write the Future” video May 17th:

Even if we look at all of social media (forums, blogs, micro-blogging, video and photo-sharing, comments, social networks), and not just forums in English, it was by and large the one viral video that gave Nike a boost in buzz before things quickly settled back to direct rivalry between the two brands.

So did Nike really win the battle of the buzz?

Leave your comments below.

The LinkedIn conversation : We’ve got the tool .. now how do we make sense of the tsunami of information? has given way to a number of various responses, but William Benn published one of the most in-depth responses. Some of the highlights from his response for dealing with social media monitoring :

You can run, but you can't hide from the tsunami of social media info

Solutions

The data can be collated by a free or paid-for web monitoring provider, and largely depending on what you pay will determine the thoroughness of the search and the completeness of the data.

Having established that your web crawling activity has produced literally millions of ‘Clips’ of data – the Tsunami, you need intelligent analysis to make sense of the data and provide tactical and strategic marketing insights. This is where Solutions come in. My suggestion would be to work with a solutions provider who can provide intelligent marketing analysis and insight. These providers provide web monitoring but also data anaysis and interpretation. Such firms will employ statisticians (to check that the reporting is statistically relevant and draw conclusions from the data), mathematicians (to write the algorithms used in the semantic analysis phase of checking data quality, accuracy and relevance), as well as experienced data analysts and marketers (who are able to provide marketing insight from the results data) and even experts in Semiotics to better understand context.

Time

I write this specifically in relation to large brands who typically do not want Tools but instead require Solutions. Most large corporates have been very successful in cutting costs in the last two years, often in their marketing department. So we tend to see an experienced Marketing Director with a vacuum beneath her or him supported by perhaps a much less experienced marcoms exec or junior product manager. In this scenario an avalanche of data provided by a web crawling tool is the last thing they need. This Tsunami as you put it is not helpful because the commodity the marketing team are most lacking in is Time. They lack the time, and often the requisite skills, to analyse and interpret large volumes of data. Nor often do they have time to learn to use a ‘Dashboard’ that purports to tell them everything being said about their brand on the Social Web.

Balance

And lastly Balance. By Balance I mean to just stop and check that we are listening in a Balanced way to what is being said about the brand. When I referred to the web monitoring activity producing literally millions of ‘Clips’ of data – I mean clips of data from across the full spectrum of the web not just the social web. There is no point from a brand perspective in only monitoring the social space – Blog and Forum entries, comments on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and videos on Viadeo, YouTube et al. To have a statistically relevant worldview of what is being said about the brand we need to go old school and look also at traditional media such as online editorial and corporate sites. It’s important to measure by source type i.e. by Blog, by Forum as well as by corporate web to understand where a campaign is being successful and the message is getting through but also where more work is required to engage with the audience.

Join in the conversation ; how do you deal with the mass of social and mainstream information?

Do you focus on influential sites and people? Identify communities that are already talking about your key words?

Photo thanks to MïK

How do you measure the virality of a buzz? Is there such a possibility? Of course we can look at the number of times a video on YouTube was viewed, the number of times a sponsored tweet was retweeted, or a sponsored blog post commented and shared, but how can you truly measure that a viral campaign’s outcomes aligned with your objectives?

You’re probably expecting a Top 10 list detailing the list of top questions to ask yourself when evaluating a viral social media campaign, right? A one-size-fits-all, viral marketing for dummies.

But if it were that easy, why wouldn’t all videos on YouTube be top viral videos? Why wouldn’t all social media campaigns catch on like wildfire?

We’d like to present, then, a series of 4 different possible brand profiles. Four different ways of using social media, according to how the brands viewed themselves and their goals. While this is meant in no way to be an end-all guide to brands and how they should use social media, we prefer it remain as a reference of best practices for brands that could have seen themselves in their place.

To kick the series off, we present to you brand profile number one:

The Boring Brand

i.e. We’re sure you can’t wait to get home to share pictures of your new blender with your friends on Flickr. Oh wait. That’s right. There’s nothing inherently exciting or sexy or cool about a blender, so why would you evenr want to share with your friends that you got a new blender.

Blendtech

Blendtech changed how we saw “boring” brands by making the ordinary blender into a buzzable, sharable, and resendable “social item”. Some of the most popular Will it Blend videos, like the iPhone have received over 8.5 million views!

Compare the Meerkat

Compare the Market is a well-known company  in the UK that allows Internet users to compare cheap car assurance policies. They noticed a stagnation in visitor rates, however, and decided to investigate into what the problem was. They quickly discovered that people were often typing compare the meerkat into Google to find them. That’s right.

Compare the market became… Compare the meerkat.

By paying attention to what people were saying about them instead of how they wanted to be found, a car insurance company – not very buzzworthy, at first glance – became a company that was fun for people to look for. They invented a meerkat character Alexandre Orlov Now known not only for his very own Facebook page but also for his videos on YouTube, including a most recent “bloopers” version.

One question that often reoccurs is : What do I do if no one is talking about my brand?

Find out what they are talking about. Find out what people are saying about your competitors, your sector, or your industry.

Brands can be what you make of them.

If Volvo can prove to us that it’s fun to recycle and to take the stairs, all in an effort to promote environmentally-healthy living, then brands have a new challenge to create fun social media campaigns and listen to the results.

Part 2 : to be continued

Privacy on social networks is increasingly of concern as Facebook changes its policies again and again and again

Your tweets on Twitter are public unless you choose to hide them

Conversations on blogs are referenced by Google and other search engines on a regular basis

YouTube has become the second largest search engine online

Time Magazine recently wrote about how Facebook is redefining privacy

Since mid-April we’ve known that the US Library of Congress will be archiving all public tweets

How, then, did the MailOnline post an article accusing brands that monitor the web of spying on their customers?

We joked just last week about the French coming to London and following everything you say, but we are fairly certain that everyone reading knew that the comment was tongue-in-cheek. Synthesio’s first listening service, Consumer, was launched in June of 2006, and we have been increasingly adding new features and customization possibilites since then to allow our clients to monitor the web in coordination with their digital strategies, desires to know more about their online reputation, crisis monitoring, digital campaigns, etc.

While we cannot comment on the practices of other social media monitoring firms, Synthesio only collects information that is already publicly available. These conversations are available to anyone willing to search for them. Our technology simply provides a more accessible manner of surveying online word-of-mouth and categorizing it into user-friendly reports and dashboards that can be used by any number of departments.

An Etailing survey of 117 companies published in September 2009 showed that customer reviews are the most effective social tactic for driving sales, followed by question-and-answer features and a Facebook fan page where companies post information. Why wouldn’t a company want to listen to what their customers are saying online?

We’ve seen positive examples of social media monitoring being used for:

• customer service
• product innovation
• safer products (crises alerts due to faulty products)
• customer engagement
• etc.

What is especially interesting is that the article in question points out, itself, positive feedback that certain brands have had because they are listening to conversations online.

Internet users should be wary of information that they decide to share online, but equating online monitoring to Big Brother is a bit outdated, don’t you think?

In any case, check out Alex Brown’s reponse (part of  the customer experience team at Virgin Media) to MailOnline and leave us your thoughts and reactions below.

If “tomorrow” is the most popular day to go on a diet, Friday seems to be the day to start monitoring social media! For several weeks now it seems as though the entire week is full of appointments, meetings, phone calls, etc. but Friday, FRIDAY is the day that our clients have been choosing to sign contracts with us. What is it about Fridays?

Who’s monitoring your company’s online reputation this weekend?

Perhaps it’s the thought of setting something constructive in motion before heading out for the weekend, or the buildup of information throughout the week about the growing importance of social media. Not a bad idea, apparently, as info from Dan Zarella recently showed that Facebook activity more than doubles over the weekend!

Weekend Facebook shares - are you monitoring them?

But what does this have to do with your online reputation?

Weekend buzz and your e-reputation

Although the suggestion is based on US data only, one of the reasons suggested for the surge in weekend activity is that over 50% of companies (possibly more in Europe) ban the use of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while they’re on the time clock. This doesn’t stop employees, however, from sharing their opinions about your company, its practices, or its ins and outs with friends and colleagues over the weekend. Even during the week, 3G phones allow people to share their opinions in uncontrolled, highly visible conversations.

Private conversations aside (though not always), social media monitoring can allow you to stay on top of what’s being said about your company and respond quickly. So whether you decide to start monitoring on a Monday or a Friday is all up to you!

Talk with you soon then? (Have a great weekend) ;)

Synthesio is coming to (London) town. Specialized in online monitoring and research,

we are expanding our research services to the UK!

Come visit our new office June 21^st to 25^th at One Alfred Place to present you with our social media monitoring service and answer any and all questions about how your agency or brand can monitor the web.

Synthesio is an agency originally based in Paris that is undergoing considerable growth and continues to develop as the need for international monitoring grows. A company or brand’s online reputation has become intertwined with what consumers are talking about online, providing both risks and opportunities for any business owner.

As a prelude to our move, Synthesio will be sponsoring Our Social Time’s Social Media Marketing Conference 2010 in London June 17^th, a conference designed to help agencies and marketers design and measure viral campaigns.

We would like to invite you to visit us during the week of June 21^st we to discover how we can help you:

-       measure online word-of-mouth

-       carry out research studies online

-       establish barometers for essentially any industry

-       set a crisis monitoring in motion

-       evaluate a campaign online

-       use social media to evaluate your online reputation over time

For more information, please contact Michelle at michelle@synthesio.com

Company Name
Synthesio

Industry
Internet

Place of work
US (no relocation package)

Job Type
Full time position

Contacts
Send CV and cover letter to  hr@synthesio.com

About us

Synthesio is a Europe-based company established in 2006 that offers innovative online monitoring and analysis services to businesses in the European, American, and Asian markets.

Evolving amidst a continually growing social media monitoring market, Synthesio has rapidly positioned itself as a leader in providing high-end, high-quality technology and service.

As a result, we have worked with numerous prestigious clients such as Orange, Accor, Nissan, Sanofi, Orangina, L’Oréal, Nike and Adidas, among others.

Your role

In coordination with a fellow business developer, you will lead business development initiatives in the US and will be in constant contact with the Communications, Marketing, and Production teams.

You will work together with head management to define short- and long-term priorities on the following tasks:

Stage 1 – Business development in the US target market

• Proactively develop, maintain, and grow key accounts

You will be in charge of identifying and developing key accounts in the US. You will establish and maintain strong client relationships in order to define our clients’ needs accurately and precisely and develop appropriate business proposals for them in response to pitches and tenders. You will be in charge of negotiations and finalization of client prospecting. You will be in regular contact with your fellow business developer, clients and partners to maintain customer relations and present them with Synthesio innovations when pertinent.

• Implementation and monitoring of strategic partnerships

Synthesio has established strategic partnerships with key actors (agencies, educational institutions, etc) since its inception. You will be in charge of developing and maintaining one or more of these partnerships established in the US.

Stage 2 – Recruitment and management of sales team for your region

Once necessary, you will be in charge of assembling a sales team to meet your clients’ and partners’ needs in the US and to grow sales in this market. You will lead and train your teams independently in order to obtain the best results possible.

Requirements

• Must have US work permit
• 3 years+ experiences in business development, capable of making business decisions (entrepreneurial profiles appreciated)
• Previous experiences in marketing at an agency, social media company or research institute would be a plus
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Must have a well-developed online network, and ideally have strong contacts in the industry
• Must be tenacious, skilled in negotiations and exceeding sales targets
• Must be highly self-motivated and independent
• Fluency in a European language is desirable

Working with us means

• A position of high responsibility with a highly entrepreneurial aspect
• A young (average age is 28 y.o.), driven, international team
• A project at the forefront of new technologies
• A fast-growing industry

Compensation
Salary + commission; commensurate with experience

To learn more about our company, please visit www.synthesio.com

French Office : 8 rue Lemercier 75017 Paris

US Office : 130 7th Avenue New York, NY 10011

The Internet was also selected as the most reliable source of news by nearly 40 percent of adults, compared to 17 percent who opted for television and 16 percent who selected newspapers and 13 percent for listened to the radio.The latest online reputation crisis has come from a global giant that is seeking to clean up the massive oil spill in the Gulf Coast, and has meanwhile been bombarded online by Internet users furious with the lack of resolution from BP.

It all started May 19th with the launch of a fake Twitter account @BPGlobalPR and has since progressed to:

• a response from a BP spokesperson on AdAge that admits BP is aware of the Twitter account but “I’m not aware of whether BP has made any calls to have it taken down or addressed. People are entitled to their views on what we’re doing and we have to live with those. We are doing the best we can to deal with the current situation and to try to stop the oil from flowing and to then clean it up.”
• an article on MSNBC that calls the account “one big joke”
• a troll video ranting about the goings-on of BP
• the Wall Street Journal picked up on it
• a YouTube video spoof

In sum, in just one week after the launch of the fake Twitter account, both @BPGlobalPR and @BP_America saw an increase in activity not only on the web but also on several international TV channels, regional news, international news, and radio.

The good news? The fake account and satire tee-shirts have so far helped the Gulf Restoration Network official put $US10,000 into the organisation’s PayPal account.

Maintaining your Online Reputation

The Internet is a place of highly visible conversations that are not owned by the company in any way. However, social media monitoring allows brands to stay on top of online word-of-mouth and respond quickly to crises, questions, and concerns. Fake buzz can go viral in a matter of hours and you may need to set in place a crisis monitoring.

According to a poll carried out by Reuters just last year,

The Internet was selected as the most reliable source of news by nearly 40 percent of adults, compared to 17 percent who opted for television and 16 percent who selected newspapers and 13 percent for listened to the radio.

Social Media Crisis Monitoring

Any business should be aware by now of the importance of the Internet in the maintenance of their brand image and have plans in place in case of a PR crisis to monitor online conversations. A good crisis monitoring strategy should:

• set the monitoring into motion within an hour or less
• send regular updates and digests of the conversations
• identify influential blogs, sites, and people online that are discussing your situation
• send regular reports that analyze the location of conversations and the speed at which they are being republished elsewhere on the web
• be flexible to your demands and your situation

What are your thoughts on the situation? Is BP monitoring the situation or not taking it as seriously as they should?

Explore the viral power of social networks

Thursday, June 17th in London, Our Social Times will be rolling out the red carpet again for some major names in the field of social media to educate brands and marketers about the ins and outs of viral marketing. There will be some noteworthy speakers such as Chris Brogan and Brian Solis attending via live video, Mat Morrison, Philip Sheldrake, Andrew Walker, Richard Sedley, Murray Newlands, and others.

For a pre-conference sneak peek, check out Luke’s video interviewers of some of the speakers here.

Panels, Q&As, and case studies will abound to discuss:

• Insights into the Latest High Profile Viral Marketing Campaigns
• The Psychology of Persuasion: Next Generation Marketing
• How to use Social Networking Theory to Tune your Campaigns
• Innovations in Location-Based Marketing (Foursquare & beyond)
• Tweets that Travel: The Essential Skill of Viral Writing
• Using B2B Social Media to Connect with C-level Execs
• Creating a Bespoke Community vs Starting a Group

Measure your viral campaign efforts

The world of viral is continually changing, but measurement is a solid way of tracking the success of your campaigns. Synthesio CEO Loic Moisand will be presenting a short demonstration of how social media monitoring can be used to monitor and measure viral campaigns. If you have questions you’d like him to answer in regards to monitoring a campaign online, leave us a comment below, tweet us, or send us an e-mail to let us know your thoughts.

For more information about the Cavendish Centre, tickets, etc, visit the Social Media Marketing 2010 site.

See you there!

Company Name
Synthesio

Industry
Internet

Place of work
London, United Kingdom (no relocation package)

Job Type
Full time position

Contacts
Send CV and cover letter to  hr@synthesio.com

About us

Synthesio is a Europe-based company established in 2006 that offers innovative online monitoring and analysis services to businesses in the European, American, and Asian markets.

Evolving amidst a continually growing social media monitoring market, Synthesio has rapidly positioned itself as a leader in providing high-end, high-quality technology and service.

As a result, it has worked with numerous prestigious clients such as Orange, Accor, Nissan, Sanofi, Orangina, L’Oréal, Nike and Adidas, among others.

Your role

Under the direction of head management, you will lead business development initiatives in the UK, and will be in constant contact with the Communications, Marketing, and Production teams.

You will work together with head management to define short- and long-term priorities on the following tasks:

Stage 1 – Business development in the UK target market

• Proactively develop, maintain, and grow key accounts

You will be in charge of identifying and developing key accounts in the UK. You will establish and maintain strong client relationships in order to define our clients’ needs accurately and precisely and develop appropriate business proposals for them in response to pitches and tenders. You will be in charge of negotiations and finalization of client prospecting. You will be in regular contact with clients and partners to maintain customer relations and present them with Synthesio innovations when pertinent.

• Implementation and monitoring of strategic partnerships

Synthesio has established strategic partnerships with key actors (agencies, educational institutions, etc) since its inception. You will be in charge of developing and maintaining one or more of these partnerships established in the UK.

Stage 2 – Recruitment and management of sales team for your region

Once necessary, you will be in charge of assembling a sales team to meet your clients’ and partners’ needs in the UK and to grow sales in this market. You will lead and train your teams independently in order to obtain the best results possible.

Requirements

• Must have UK work permit
• 3 years+ experiences in business development, capable of making business decisions (entrepreneurial profiles appreciated)
• Previous experiences in marketing at an agency, social media company or research institute would be a plus
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Must have a well-developed online network, and ideally have strong contacts in the industry
• Must be tenacious, skilled in negotiations and exceeding sales targets
• Must be highly self-motivated and independent
• Fluency in a second European language is desirable

Working with us means

• A position of high responsibility with a highly entrepreneurial aspect
• A young (average age is 28 y.o.), driven, international team
• A project at the forefront of new technologies
• A fast growing industry

Compensation
Salary + commission; commensurate with experience

To learn more about our company, please visit www.synthesio.com

French Office : 8 rue Lemercier 75017 Paris

US Office : 130 7th Avenue New York, NY 10011

In case you haven’t seen yet, Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group just recently published a report detailing Social Marketing Analytics. It provides a framework for companies new and old to social media to help :

Learn from online conversations

Many of our clients have specific conversations that they are trying to listen to, or specific groups, but others have instructed us that they want to find key conversations. A company with a new product or service, for example, can find out how people are really using it. A brand that’s been in business for years can find new ways to position themselves. Social media monitoring is one more tool that businesses have at their disposal to increase their flexibility and potentially market share.

While this is more complicated than composing queries around specific key words, it can lead to much richer insights for future developments as well as for improvements.

Create benchmarks for analysis

The tagline for this blog IS “social media is the new marketing”, but it doesn’t mean that we’ve changed our ideas about how business processes need to be carried out. Before carrying out any social media monitoring project, there must be a strategy in place with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that we can use to compare trends from one period to the next and detect changes in sentiment or customer involvement.

The report does highlight that KPIs will be different from one industry to the next, and we have also found from one business to the next. We have often created new widgets for our clients in order to help them better address these issues and understand the conversations surrounding their brand and sector. One client, for example, wanted to look at conversations about cosmetics online and use a barometer to gauge which topics were garnering the most buzz. Don’t let a platform dictate what you should be listening to. Tell us how we can help. Add or delete features that help you better visualize the analyses.

Use metrics that matter to your customers – not you

The area of web metrics is known for its proliferation of “traditional” web analytics that looked at the number of eyeballs on a page, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc that, while still being used, do not necessarily translate to today’s social web.

The report suggests 4 key business objectives for the social web:

• Foster Dialog
• Promote Advocacy
• Facilitate Support
• Spur Innovation

Promote advocacy

There seems to be one KPI missing for brands wishing to promote advocacy online, which is to identify brand detractors, not just advocates. Social media is a two-sided coin that can open a business up to risks and opportunities, depending on how you look at the situation. Brand detractors may be just as if not more influential than some of your advocates, and we look at both as being important for a brand’s online reputation. This seems to have been grouped into responding to negative comments found during monitoring, but perhaps may need a bit more attention than that, depending on the degree of influence of said site, post, or person.

Domino’s Pizza, for example, went so far as to develop a new pizza that would appeal to their “harshest critics” and deliver it directly to their homes. Whether or not the stunt worked is up for debate and certainly criticized, but it shows how one brand has tried to reach out to naysayers and show that they are listening.

Southwest recently had an incident with a celebrity traveller, as well, that they immediately reached out to in an attempt to correct the situation and maintain their reputation.

It’s great to see this report undertaken in the spirit of openness and collaboration, which is what  we strive for with our clients and partners.

Check out the rest of Altimeter’s report below, and let us know what you think.

• Great article by @jowyang: Matrix: Building and Managing Your Online Career Reputation http://bit.ly/ckajNp #ereputation #
• Passionate bandana fans and @MaddenKim made the bandana cool again using #social media http://bit.ly/a3GhFi #monitoring #
• RT @MikeFraietta: Watching Mark Zuckerberg talking live about Facebook's new features at F8: http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/ #
• Social media #monitoring chat with @MiChmski of @Synthesio tomorrow at 1600 UTC – Topic: Tools vs. Service #