Music Ally

This week we have been investigating how the internet can be used to measure the effectiveness of music marketing and provide insights into fan opinions. Today, in part four of a five part series (read parts 1, 2 and 3), we speak to Brad Little, leader of Nielsen BuzzMetrics EMEA. Founded in 1999, BuzzMetrics has been monitoring word-of-mouth on the internet since long before buzzwords like social networking and blogging were common parlance.

Brad’s comments can be found as part of a full feature in the latest Music Ally Report in which we interview numerous key players in the world of metrics.  To read the magazine, log inor sign up for a free trial.

And continue reading after the jump for our illuminating interview with Brad Little of Nielsen BuzzMetric.

How did Buzzmetrics get started?

Buzzmetrics is a conglomeration of three or four other businesses operating in this area. It started in the States. We saw that the internet was going to be an important piece of the metrics puzzle.

We invented social media measurement eleven years ago – before the likes of MySpace even existed. It is phenomenal to think that we were working with the Sonys and Toyotas before anyone could recognise what a blog was.

Where do you get the data from?

There’s a massive amount of investment to build technologies to collect data with spiders and robots and grabbers and people and engineers to collect this content. Nielsen collects our own content – we’re not buying data from third parties. This gives us a lot of control over what we do. We’ve amassed a massive amount of data – 125 million blogs, tens of thousands of forums, social networking content, microblog content and YouTube among them.

How does the process work?

Our business takes about three our four steps.

The key one is collecting content, then cleaning it up, then we slice it up by different demographics – moms, gamers, tech fans. The last thing we do is analyse data. We do that in two major ways. We push it out to tools and services like dashboards and we give that to clients.

We analyse content via vertically-focused research teams in local markets. We analyse the content and use proprietary techniques to take qualitative data, code it, analyse it, score it and come back to the client with quantitative results.

And what services or tools do you offer based on your data?

We have a free online tool called BlogPulse that measures our blog content – people have been using that for years. When people mention the free online tools they’ll mention Icerocket, Technorati and Blogpulse but they might not know that Blogpulse is by Nielsen.

We have a buzz monitoring tool called My Buzzmetrics – it’s a paid-for tool that lets clients use it for research projects. So we have free tools, paid for tools and we do bespoke projects.

How much of your data comes through in real time?

We have a fascinatingly large suite of services. Some of it feels “realtime” such as threat tracking or reputation monitoring. We have our people looking at issues as well as looking at content to find issues happening so we can alert our clients that they are happening.

In terms of bespoke customised research we have projects designed around a launch – so if Toyota does a new car we can measure buzz to give instant feedback after a launch showing the initial reaction of people online.

How does something like Twitter fit in?

In a simple statement Twitter becomes another source of data.

In a more complex statement I think it has taken the industry time to figure out where it fits. People are trying to measure some key things like influence or advocacy but the problem is that the industry is reacting on data at their fingertips.

Knowing the number of links to a blogger or number of messages mentioning a brand or a label those are good and helpful useful but they don’t measure influence – you have to read the content to judge it for trust and authenticity.

If I’m following 1000 people there’s no way I follow it all – it’s an artificial metric.

And if you’re just looking at number of followers or messages – these quantitative metrics don’t give you the smoking gun you need.

What do you make of the other measurement services out there?

To say it has exploded is an understatement. There are about 150 in London alone. We get about three calls a day from different software developers pumping in APIs. That’s not to say it’s bad but it’s different to what we do.

There’s a huge downside to some of these other tools. For example with a client of ours in the gaming space,  they sad they were using various other tools including a third party board reader that can be bought off the shelf with existing boards pumped in. But one of the major gaming forums wasn’t in it so we couldn’t see how much their game was getting mentioned on one of the key gaming forums. We recoded our technology to cover the missing games forum and popped it in. Within a week 52% of the discussion in the UK relating to the game concerned was happening on the one games forum we had added.

Where does metrics fit in with marketing?

People equate social media as a marketing activity. Companies don’t understand the impact social media has – the impact on consumers perceptions of advertisers

People understand it as marketing, but that’s still a one way conversation – brands screaming at consumers. What is changing that consumers want a two way conversation – part of a process, part of something bigger.

The scary part for brands is they’ve never been that close. They’ve used comms or PR or customer service as a buffer between brand and consumer. But the buffer is going away.

You can’t have a bad product – you’ve got to fix it.

I’d rather create an advocate rather than target an influencer. Those are the core things that are going to become more important.

The other concept is companies have been saying we want a 360 degree view of the customer, saying they are a consumer centric organization – but they haven’t really acted on it.

I think this medium is making them rethink that. I’m not a consumer – I’m a husband, I surf on holiday, I ride a cycle to work, I live in London, I’m a business executive. I’m not a consumer, don’t market to me as a consumer.

Word of mouth is not a new phenomenon but it’s our ability to listen and learn and leverage that knowledge that is new.

If anyone benefits it’s the consumer. One of the metrics people should care about is advocacy rather than influence: can you amplify advocacy rather than just marketing to people.

Tags: buzzmetrics, marketing effectiveness, measurements, measuring, metrics, nielsen buzzmetrics

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.