ListenLogic EVP Kevin Glacken was recently featured in Smart Data Collective with a guest column entitled ‘Big Social Data Can Unlock the Power of Engaged Viewers’ which reviews how the intersection of television and social media is creating multidimensional value for programs.

We sat down with Kevin to understand more about how advanced social intelligence is impacting the entertainment industry by revealing the power of engaged viewers.

Q: You talk about the value of ‘engaged viewers,’ how do these viewers help save shows that networks would traditionally cut?

A: The sheer number of viewers a show has will always be a measurement of programming value because it conveys good old fashioned reach. However today, with open social media that allows audience members to interact and promote programs, there’s an important quality component aside from the traditional quantity component to measure the value of programming.

Up until even recently shows were getting canceled because of their relative small audience sizes. A few years ago a show like Jericho, which struggled to surpass three million viewers ended up getting slashed. Today, that dynamic has changed and a show such as Community, which draws about the same audience size, gets a longer run simply because the viewers are engaged, giving the show a Top 15 Involved Viewer Rating (IVR). They are discussing and promoting the show, but more importantly revealing a wealth of insight on themselves that delivers incredible value to advertisers – their likes, dislikes, interests, tastes, behaviors. This understanding provides an entirely new dimension of value, which extends the show’s life.

The IVR can actually predict a shows success in many cases better than the traditional Nielson ratings, simply because of the depth of insight, volume of audience and span across demographics that our platform measures. With traditional audience rankings shows like Glee, Sons of Anarchy or The Daily Show would likely not make beyond a season or two. Yet, the social intelligence derived from the “cult” audience delivers incredible value to advertisers.

Q: Do you see entertainment relying more heavily on the engaged viewer to measure a show’s value?

A: There is certainly a segment of the industry embracing this given the clients we deliver solutions for across media, sports and entertainment. Not every media outlet is adopting this approach yet, but the ones that are able to leverage audience insights with IVR to not only drive advertising dollars, but also shape the show’s storyline are delivering powerful, engaging programming. The ability to gain actionable, multidimensional insight on a program is impressive.

ListenLogic’s Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Langsfeld, and Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Harrington, sit down to discuss the recent Business2Community feature entitled How Smart Brands Are Succeeding in the ‘Age of the Consumer’ which reviews how companies are using consumer social insight to intelligently compete in the ‘Age of the Consumer.’

Q: There’s been much discussion on the ‘Age of the Consumer,’ what’s the bottom line impact of this on brands?

Langsfeld: Consumers are much more empowered today with information – price engines, product comparisons, brand reviews – allowing faster, better-educated purchase decisions. It’s only logical for companies to address this by taking advantage of advanced intelligence from across social networks on how the consumer thinks, decides and acts to best develop, position and align their product to fulfill those consumer needs.

Harrington: We have so many clients come to us with the mission to discover as much insight as possible on their prospects, consumers and influencers. Social networks and open-source channels provide an incredible wealth of understanding that has never been available in such an unbiased, widespread and immediate manner. We’re helping brands gain insight across millions of consumers in a fraction of the time it takes for a traditional survey or focus group to be conducted and without the inherent bias, which can easily misdirect strategic decisions.

Q: What are some of the most important aspects of social intelligence that drives this consumer understanding for companies?

Harrington: When you look at consumers today, the purchase cycle for many products, even large-ticket items like cars, has compressed because buyers have so much available information on products and pricing, as Mark said. This is why ListenLogic’s ability to process billions of social conversations in seconds is critical to brands. It allows intelligence to be extracted at unprecedented speed across millions of consumers. So, instead of taking weeks to conduct and compile a focus group of say 40 participants the brand can quickly, deeply understand demand moments and decision points across millions of consumers.

Langsfeld: Aside from speed, a lot of it is around the depth of view we deliver. We construct the path-to-purchase for a product and its competitors to understand the consumer decision points Mark mentioned. This helps brands see what they need to do strategically at each demand moment, which could be educational, positional or promotional in nature. We also develop robust, multidimensional consumer personas so brands understand how to effectively reach and message different buyer segments. We also deliver aspects like unmet needs, market influencers, consumer behaviors and activities and so much more, to drive everything from media plans to product innovation to package messaging all to effectively compete in this ‘Age of the Consumer.’

Recently our EVP, Kevin Glacken, wrote a piece titled ‘5 Social Business Intelligence Myths Holding Businesses Back’ which was featured in Social Media Today. In the feature he states, “With questionable accuracy and a lack of related actionable insight related to “buzz,” many companies have thrown up their hands assuming that this “thumbs up / thumbs down” gauge is the best they can do when it comes to [social business intelligence].”

It’s quite timely that a mere few days after Kevin’s piece was published Coca-Cola tells Ad Age, that they “didn’t see any statistically significant relationship between our buzz and our short-term sales.”  This is despite their brand having over 61 million followers on Facebook.

What’s even more interesting is that Coca-Cola validates Kevin’s commentary that the basic accuracy and trustworthiness of “buzz” is largely lacking. As Coca-Cola stated, simply determining whether buzz is actually positive or negative in the first place is a challenge. Beyond this, relying on buzz is often futile since it’s typically not insightful or actionable.

As more and more businesses realize that the general “buzz” social media monitoring tools deliver is inadequate, many leading corporations, including several in the food and beverage industry, are going way beyond “buzz” to achieve advanced social intelligence. This is largely why companies are relying on ListenLogic, and it’s advanced streaming big data and concept modeling technology in place of traditional keywords, to gain deep understanding of markets, products, consumers and competitors, and also to gain powerful, actionable insight to make business decisions, set strategy and drive innovation.

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ListenLogic Co-Founder and CEO, Vince Schiavone, recently presented to MBA students at Villanova University. During the session he presented how big data processing of social media now delivers advanced social intelligence to leading corporations. Aside from providing an overview of the technology platform, he also explained how this intelligence gleaned from millions of online sources and social networks is making an enterprise-wide impact on groups from Marketing, Brand, and Product to Risk, Legal and Corporate Communications.

Vince also explained how delivering insight is an intersection of both art and science on a quantitative and qualitative basis. “The actionability of intelligence largely defines its value,” he explained. “Corporations don’t just want to know what is happening with a market, consumer segment or competitor, they need to know how they should act with the intelligence to benefit their organization.”

Vince gave students a live look-in of ListenLogic’s Social Listening Intelligence Center (pictured) and reviewed how the combination technology and team deliver insight on a multidimensional level most corporations have never seen before.

Vince also illustrated the application of this advanced intelligence with a wide array of case studies spanning some of the largest corporations within the food and beverage, media, automotive, entertainment, financial and technology sectors.

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ListenLogic CMO, Mark Harrington, was recently in Social Media Today with a feature piece titled ‘Surpassing Surveys with Social Insight’ where he reviews the widespread bias issues with traditional surveying and explains how unsolicited, unbiased insight from millions of consumers is changing the strategic decision-making process across a variety of industries.

Here the veteran marketer expounds on traditional surveying versus social insight and the growing strategic impact advanced social intelligence is having on businesses today.

Q: What is the biggest issue surveying poses to corporations?

A: “It’s all about bias flawing your results, giving you the wrong answers and ultimately leading you in the wrong direction. That is incredibly dangerous for those in Marketing, Product Management and Development, Brand and Innovation. The main issue is that because you’re essentially manufacturing the research there is bias in the approach, technique, results and measurement. That is difficult to overcome and can be incredibly costly.”

Observation is an incredibly powerful tool, and doing so across millions and millions of individuals gives businesses deep understanding into the needs, issues, likes, dislikes, gaps and concerns within a market. Businesses need streaming big data processing at a level to handle the hundreds of millions of relevant daily consumer comments across online channels and social networks. Now that this technology is accessible, the ability to gain a true understanding of prospects, consumers and competitors on multidimensional levels is possible and powerful to companies that leverage it.

Q: How challenging is it for a business to leverage social insight?

A: “The biggest challenge is typically one of understanding that the technology advancements that are available today. There is so many wishes regarding big data. What ListenLogic has built is an ability to process over one billion data operations per second. That is hard to wrap your head around, but it allows tremendous amounts of incredibly complex questions to be asked against the massive flow of social data to get highly-specific answers.

“Social listening has traditionally been about “buzz,” or high-level sentiment, which is often not actionable or even accurate. Companies are realizing that technology advancements now deliver deeper understanding of valuable, sophisticated concepts the path to product purchase, unmet market needs, consumer personas and strong and weak points of your competition. This is a major competitive advantage to the companies leveraging it. Personally, I wish this had been possible when I was with Citi and eBay. We constantly dealt with the bias issues of surveys and focus groups in both organizations.”

Q: What does social insight ultimately provide to a business?

A: “On the most basic level, social insight provides a business with market truths. Bias is absent due to the nature of consumer social commentary – it’s unsolicited, genuine and direct from the consumer with no prompts or questions. This is a relatively new frontier for corporations.

“Many businesses are still trying to figure out how to simply use social networks effectively with most focused on broadcasting and maybe basic inquiry response, so truly “listening” these networks of consumers for deeper understanding is a new concept. There are many companies that ListenLogic is partnered with that are gaining unprecedented understanding of their prospects, consumers, products and even competitors. This facilitates understanding of not just how consumers feel, but how and why they make decisions and take actions related to your markets and products. It’s actionable insight that can revolutionize an organization’s strategy.”

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