The Impact & Effectiveness of Media

Through Earned Social MediaHow Earned Social Media Amplifies the Impact of

Traditional and Other Digital Media

Overview• Brand conversations on social media channels represent a large and rich source of

customer expression about daily experiences with brands and products. These conversations are frequently referred to as “earned media”, i.e. the value of those conversations are earned by the brand.

• Understanding the role and value of this information source is essential for companies aspiring to become more “customer centric” in their marketing and general operations. It is direct feedback on the quality of the customer-brand experience.

• With many questioning the value and timeliness of conventional surveys and tracking studies, social media is often cited as the future of business research.

• This white paper will explore these issues and provide a framework for measuring how these brand conversations affect business performance and why that matters in terms of understanding how marketing works across all channels.

• The fundamental insights that this paper will expose include:– That social media brand conversations are representative of the ongoing customer-brand

experience.– That measuring this experience via analytic modeling reveals this phenomena is often the

largest single driver of brand sales and performance.– That there is a defined and measureable “interaction or synergy” between this measure of the

customer experience and all media channels. In other words, social brand conversations actually increase the overall sales effect of these media and we will demonstrate this in this paper.

It All Starts with a Powerful Metric• The current state of social media metrics finds that the number of

likes, fans, retweets and sentiment metrics have little connection to actual behavior or sales for brands

• Bottom Line Analytics and Partners have developed a special metric called the Semantic Engagement Index or SEItm. Based on rules of language and linguistics, this metric has been proven to be significantly more correlated to brand sales and behavior than other metrics.

• The SEItm therefore forms a significantly more valuable tool for the purpose of predicting and monetizing earned social media brand conversations

• This SEItm has been extensively validated across 20 diverse brands and a dozen categories and generates an average 75% statistical correlation to brand sales

The strong correlation* to sales over time shows the SEI™ has Predictive Power

SEI validation - four examplesStrong linkages and correlations of SEI to sales

Correlation = 86%

Correlation = 84%

Correlation = 81%

Correlation = 83%Correlation = 83%

*Lead lag analysis has confirmed that causation is only one way – the SEI™ to a large degree is able to drive hard commercial metrics.

5Copyright 2015

Quantifying Digital ImpactOur modeling approach enables us to measure both the direct effect of marketing on

sales and also its impact on SEI, which in turn has a direct effect on sales.

Offline Media

Online Media

Environment

ConsumerExperience &Engagement

• TV• Radio• OOH• Print

• Digital display• Paid search• Mobile• Social media ads

• Seasonality• Weather• Macro economic

Retail• Distribution• Price• Competitive price• Competitive media

• Brand SEI ™• Competitor SEI ™

Weekly Retail Sales

Model Decomposition of Sales

BLA adds the customer experience via SEI into the models. SEI, which often represents the largest single driver, is partially

influenced by media, partially independent. SEI also incorporates diagnostic consumer feedback into a model

without the need for separate research.

5

SEI

Millions of social media comments, all reflecting real brand-customer experiences. As Jeff Bezos said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

United Airlines is never on-time and their service sucks

I love drinkingCoke with pizza!

My iPhone is an essentialpart of my life!

Progressive has thecheapest insurance

but their claims serviceIs terrible!

I bought a Maytag at Lowe’s and it

cleans like no other

My Honda CRV isgreat on gaseconomy!

For health reasonsI have cut backon Diet Coke

The Porsche 911Is the sexiest

car on the planet!

I keep getting dropped calls on the

Sprint network!

I love how my son plays with his Lego

blocks

Recent Marketing-Mix Model casesCustomer experience (SEI™ earned media) as the largest sales driver

44.9%

9.1%4.0%2.2%1.8%2.3%5.9%

29.8%

Brand Gamma Decomposition of SalesBaseline

TV

Print

Radio

Owned Digital SEO

Paid Digital Mobile

Paid Digital Search

Customer Experience EarnedDigital Social SEI

54.1%

5.5%1.5%4.4%2.1%2.8%

5.9%

23.7%

Brand Beta Decomposition of SalesBaseline

TV

Print

Radio

Owned Digital SEO

Paid Digital Mobile

Paid Digital Search

Customer Experience EarnedDigital Social SEI

60.4%

4.5%2.1%

3.3%1.1%2.1%5.3%

21.2%

Brand Alpha Decomposition of SalesBaseline

TV

Print

Radio

Owned Digital SEO

Paid Digital Mobile

Paid Digital Search

Customer Experience EarnedDigital Social SEI

64.8%1.5%0.2%0.3%3.6%0.1%1.8%

27.8%

Brand Omega Decomposition of SalesBaseline

TV

Print

Radio

Owned Digital SEO

Paid Digital Mobile

Paid Digital Search

Customer Experience EarnedDigital Social SEI

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The Retail Sales Contributions from earned social media (as represented by the SEITM)

The Semantic Engagement Index has contributed 3.6% of the incremental sales revenue. This metric has no

spend component which makes it impossible for us to apply the usual ROI formulae. However, as the SEI

represents the social voice of customer it amplifies other effective media channels. The impact of this

amplification is shown below.

The amplification due to earned social ranges from 12-41% of media channel conversions, with a higher rate on digital over traditional media.

In this case, this effectively increased marketing ROI by +36%

Lessons Learned• The SEI is a powerful metric with strong predictive

capabilities for understanding the impact of earned social media

• This metric, which quantifies the impact of social media brand conversations represents a measure of the customer-brand experience

• Within the context of predictive models, this SEI or customer experience effect often represents the single largest brand driver of sales

• Likewise, evidence also shows that this metric represents a key enhancer, enabler and multiplier of the measured impact and volume contributions of mass and digital media across all channels. In part, it, itself, is a success indicator for brand marketing