Our office here in Cambridge, MA is blessed with talent from all parts of the country.  As a result of our mixed geographical heritage, few topics are as hotly debated in the office this time of year as pro football and coffee chains.  After a recent debate on the latter topic in which every side claimed that ‘most people’ agreed with them, we decided to take a peek at the online conversation and see if our assumptions were reflected in reality.

Deciding to limit ourselves for the time-being to Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, we analyzed over 230,000 blog and forum posts from June 1 to yesterday in an attempt to settle the debate whether internet’s perceptions of these brands matched our own.   We analyzed content every day, but summarized the results as the conversation was fairly stable  over that time.  Dunkin’ Donuts, as a mainly regional player had about 10%  of the volume of its much larger peer.

As those who have grown up in the Northeast know, DD is much-beloved local institution and 14% of the conversation were  general exclamations of love.   Those who had moved away from the region and missed their local shop were especially passionate in their praise for the chain.    Matching our own experience in the office, a large number of people (17%) mentioned Dunkin’ as a regular fixture of their daily routine;  particularly for morning coffee runs.

A number of Dunkin’ customers weren’t as satisfied with the experience of grabbing their coffee – complaints about sloppy service emerged quickly as a theme.  However, the regional devotion to DD’s syrupy take on coffee far outweighed the complaints.   We knew about the coffee but in training our analysis algorithm we were surprised at the amount of love for DD’s low-cal flatbread sandwiches and praise for their taste / calorie ratio.

Not everyone was impressed by DD’s commitment to their health, with 18% complaining about the caloric content of their baked goods.

Starbucks managed to avoid major health complaints despite Starbucks’ fattening drinks, which owned the cravings of many posters.   Their regular coffee, on the other hand, did not feature nearly as prominently or as well, with a category of negative posts specifically about the coffee and only a scattered few posts in praise of it (we rolled these compliments into the ‘Other Positive’ category.)  Despite the lack of enthusiasm about the basic coffee, a significant slice of the conversation mentioned Starbucks as part of daily routine as well.   For us, its position less than a block away trumps any concerns for pleasing our taste buds during our caffeine fixes.

Commenters also complained somewhat about the price of Starbucks’ offerings, long a symbol of casual decadence, but perhaps not as much as we expected.  An equivalent number of people felt that Starbucks was ‘evil’ on account of their scale, competitiveness with local business, and homogeneity. (The company is addressing this)  Not exactly shocking for us, as the DD proponents usually bring up the Austin Powers reference at least once an argument.

These complaints were minor compared to the biggest surprise to come out of the analysis:  that such a large number of Starbucks customers are vocal and satisfied with the shops’ ambiance (Good Experience.)  We read a number of posts by students who appreciated Starbucks as a study space and stressed out moms who sought it as a daily sanctuary.  The Seattle-based company has long emphasized this component of their brand, and it appears that their attention to the details of everything from the furniture to the music continues to pay dividends.

We haven’t managed to settle any internal debates here with this analysis, and no money changed hands on the side bets, but at least next time we’ll have proper statistics to hurl at one another.  Or possibly just stick to debating whether the Vikings are overrated.

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, data, research by edward
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Crimson Hexagon’s battle of the brands series highlights how consumers feel about the brands they interact with on a regular basis.  Applying this lens to social media content is intriguing because it provides unique access to the ever-elusive “voice of the customer.”  While conventional social media monitoring tools can’t focus on this level of detail, Crimson Hexagon’s underlying science can quantify abstract concepts without keywords.

For our second head-to-head match-up, we looked at two brands of pain reliever that are in most household medicine cabinets: Tylenol and Advil.  With the FDA announcement about the risks of acetaminophen earlier this summer and the widespread discussion about the H1N1 virus (Swine Flu), there is no shortage of conversation, advice, and opinion about these brands online.

We analyzed opinions about Tylenol and Advil from April 1^st to September 6^th of this year.  Using our technology, we focused on customers’ experiences with the medications, drawing from blogs, forums, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Themes in Online Conversation: Tylenol & Advil

Brand Focus: Tylenol

Brand Focus: Advil

• Advil is primarily associated with strong pain relief, especially for headaches (60% combined), while Tylenol has more varied discussion.
• Overall people seem to think that Tylenol is safer.  More people (18% vs. 9%) trust Tylenol enough to give it to their children.  While there is conversation about the risks associated with each product, only Tylenol also inspires discussion about its safety and gentleness (8%).  6% of people talk about Tylenol as the brand their doctor recommends while no detectable proportion of the Advil conversation points to a doctor’s recommendation.

Trends over time: Tylenol

NOTE: Spike corresponds to FDA recommendation on lower maximum dosage for acetaminophen (June 30, 2009)

• When the FDA announced a recommendation to lower dosages of acetaminophen, the main active ingredient in Tylenol, conversation briefly spiked as people became concerned about Tylenol and liver damage, then fell back to its original levels.

Tags: brand, brand monitoring by Megan Costello
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Among the many uses of Crimson Hexagon’s technology, analyzing how consumers feel about a particular brand is one of the most interesting to us. Part of the appeal is how hard such sentiment is to measure through conventional means; part of it is how social media provides a window on what consumers really think in their day-to-day conversations.  It’s also that this application makes particular use of one feature of our technology – the ability to quantify abstract concepts instead of just keywords – that is entirely unique to our underlying science.

To spotlight this we’re starting an occasional blog series called “The Battle of the Brands”.  We’ll choose two (and sometimes maybe three) competing brands and analyze how they’re discussed in the online conversation, quantifying the range of opinions and perceptions that shape the online brand identity.

Our first head-to-head will be none other than Walmart versus Target.   With the recent news of Target’s planned increase in marketing spend , we started thinking: are the online perceptions of each brand consistent with the concerns expressed by Target?  And how will this increase in marketing spending impact those opinions?

We analyzed online opinions about Walmart and Target from July 15^th to September 3rd. Using our technology, we focused on customers’ opinion about the shopping experience, drawing from blogs, forums, Tweets, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Target (all opinions)

Walmart (all opinions)

• Overall, the online conversation about Walmart was chiefly critical, breaking down into 61% negative and 39% positive.  Target enjoyed 75% positive reactions with only 25% negative opinions.

• People talk about the social implications of shopping at Walmart (Bad for Local Business, Treats Employees Poorly categories), but when talking about Target focus on their actual shopping experience.

Walmart (shopping conversation only)

• The motivations for shopping at each retailer are vastly different:   People shop at Walmart because they’re looking for cheap staples.   At Target they feel that can get great stuff (Love this Product, Awesome Clothes categories) for a low price.  Customers get more excited about shopping at Target, but, a larger percentage finds Walmart to be a better bet for low prices.

Walmart is currently seen as the brand delivering the basics at low prices, but price comes at a cost in quality of products and services. Fortunately for Walmart, being seen as the low cost provider buoys the brand during tough economic times.  Target, on the other hand, is the brand that delivers a more enjoyable shopping experience, with more excitement expressed for products and deals.  However, this may not be the best attribute to reinforce when consumers are “tightening their belts” and “getting back to basics”.  The interesting aspect of this battle will come when the economy and consumer confidence starts to pick up.  Will the tables turn for Target and Walmart?  How can these two brand giants balance their core brand attributes to win over consumers in the good times and bad?  And as Target executes expensive marketing campaigns, how will they measure whether their investment is having the intended impact?

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, product by Megan Costello
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The Twitterverse was decidedly more positive than negative on the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, with 14% citing the ongoing battle with Google, and 13% calling it some variant of a great match. Only 8% of tweets were neutral or negative on the announcement.

The largest single share of the Tweet volume (47%) was the ripple of the news itself as it proliferated through the network.

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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Microsoft. The Borg, right?

Not anymore, at least according to Vox Twitter on a host of recent issues.

It started with Bing, which a slim majority of Twitter-ers between June 29 and July 13 – but a majority nonetheless – generally liked:

Bing Opinion Monitor Chart

Next came Google’s Chrome OS announcement, which as discussed in a prior post, yielded an almost audible “meh” from vox Twitter. 19% of topical tweets between June 29 and July 13 were generally unimpressed, and the largest single theme of the conversation conveyed the sense that Chrome was no threat to the OS powers that be, foremost among which is Microsoft:

Chrome OS Opinion Monitor

Yesterday’s response to Office 2010 is the clincher. A combined 71% of twitter traffic was positive for Microsoft. The nature of that positive response is interesting… 14% cited the free and online character of the offering, and 16% Microsoft’s innovation in the cloud. 1 in 5 expressed a variant of excitement and/or love for it, and 21% cited it, specifically, as a threat to Google:

If Twitter is, as some feel, a leading indicator of the fickle flows of sentiment among the influential digerati, the last few weeks may have witnessed a sea change with far reaching implications… both in Redmond, and in Mountain View.

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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Boatloads of Twitter chatter on Google’s launch of the Chrome OS… Curious how it all breaks down?

We were too:

It’s probably fair to assume some pro-Google bias in the Twittersphere, but those expressing an opinion were more strongly in the ‘Unimpressed’ / ‘No Threat’ camp (at a combined 44% of the postings) than the ‘Excited’ / ‘Threat’ camp (at 35% combined.)

We’re inclined to agree with the 15% expressing some variant of ‘The OS War has begun.’

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Tags: brand monitoring, data, opinosphere, social web by mike
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Ad Age Top 20 Blogger Jason Falls interviews our own Mike Troiano on Social Media Explorer. Great stuff, thanks, Jason!

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Tags: brand monitoring, company, events, marketing, social web by mike
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100 Million viewers tuned in on Sunday evening to view a classic clash of the titans. They were treated to a record-setting interception by James Harrison, a heated 4^th quarter rally by both teams, and a flood of new commercials with animals. Priced at $3M per 30-second spot, NBC sold a record $206M in advertising for the big game. In this economy that kind of spending reminds me of Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary pass – go for broke! Who says traditional channels are dead?

Some advertisers, such as Pedigree, have embraced the multi-channel experience of today’s consumers coordinating campaigns across traditional and digital domains. But even for those that haven’t explicitly gone digital yet, many consumers are taking them there anyway. Thousands of viewers were already blogging and tweeting about the new flock of commercials before the Steelers finished their Dom Perignon. At Crimson Hexagon, we wanted to know who successfully made the leap from mainstream to digital buzz. A look at both beverages and foods shows that results were mixed.

Running with the Clydesdales

Online Buzz for Beverage Brands

Anheuser-Busch once again led the pack in buying eight spots (four for Bud and four for BudLight). Given its long history of Super Bowl advertising, it’s no wonder that the buzz for Bud actually started ahead of the game, and has risen to nearly eight times the pre-game level.

In the standing battle between Coke and Pepsi (each invested in three spots), Pepsi appears to have made the bigger splash. Pepsi more than doubled online buzz, bringing it even (and heading higher) than Coke, which has seen minimal lift over its already strong buzz presence.

But the real winner within the drinks category so far has been Sobe Life Water. In the first two days, Sobe’s one commercial (featuring cameos by NFL players dancing with lizards in a 3D variant on Swan Lake) netted them buzz roughly five times their pre-game level. As if NFL players in tutus weren’t enough, Sobe’s choice to make this ad 3D generated extra anticipatory buzz the entire week leading into the Super Bowl.

Running for the Border

Online Buzz for Food & Snack Brands

Now perhaps it was because Taco Bell ignored the rule about including animals, but I find it pretty surprising that their Speed Date commercial hasn’t noticeably moved the needle. Maybe the offline buzz simply moved too fast to be caught online… Or maybe Draft FCB will be rethinking its approach to digital this week.

In other junk food news… chips appear to be highly bloggable. Cheetos has seen five times more buzz than before the Super Bowl. But Doritos’ two commercials led the pack with a 10 times jump in online chatter. How’d they do it? Well, they tapped into both the traditional Power of Creative Crunch and the wisdom of their chip-eating crowd. Who could have predicted such success would come from actively engaging your customers?

Booth Review

All this leads to some tough questions for agencies and brand managers who participated in this year’s Super Ad Bowl. Brows are furrowed as they digest the results of their commercials and turn their eyes towards managing the ongoing campaigns.

For the majority of brands that saw a big boost in buzz, kudos are warranted. But now that consumers are talking, the questions become:

• What are they talking about? (Was it “funny”, “same as last year”, or “better than Apple’s 1984 commercial”?)
• Are the topics discussed consistent with our goals for the brand? (Are our brand attributes performing as expected? How’s our positive share of voice vs. our competitors?)
• Who was talking and in which channels? (Was it bloggers, or were tweets flying around like paper airplanes in front of a substitute teacher?)

For those left in the dust, the question is “Where’s the buzz”? Perhaps their target audience somehow hasn’t heard about this whole social media thing yet (I give Frosted Flakes a little more leeway on this than Taco Bell). Or perhaps there’s only so much buzz a brand can take – had Coke already reached an optimal amount of ongoing buzz?

For the few standing on the sidelines, the question is whether it was worth saving the $3M per spot. Did you miss a chance to Steel the show?

Tags: advertising, brand, brand monitoring, customer voice, events, marketing, measurement, social web by admin
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Lately Google has been adding features, such as its Preferred Sites or SearchWiki, that enable users to narrow in on the one result they want even better, or to promote or demote sites in their own future searches. These features will clearly help users find the needle in the haystack, but as they get better for this purpose, we should not expect them to also improve our ability to characterize a whole set of web documents. Here’s an example where searching for the needle can be limiting:  Academics are in the business of pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge. But if you don’t know where the boundaries of knowledge are, its easy to spend a great deal of time reinventing wheels and all manner of other existing technology.

So you’d think that the advent of search engines (including academic search engines like Google Scholar) would make our jobs much easier — and they undoubtedly do in some ways. But here’s the risk: there’s been some evidence lately that these search engines have caused academics to read and cite fewer articles (i.e., only those that appear at the top of search results) and for our articles to be less comprehensive overall.  There’s an ongoing debate about this evidence in academic and technology circles, but you can see how it might happen.  Search engines are about searching for one item; we shouldn’t expect them to be as good at describing the haystack as they are at serving up needles.

Photo credit: pierreyves0

Tags: brand monitoring, research by Gary King
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With a big chunk of the country getting hammered by snow, it’s definitely sinking in that the holidays have arrived. And along with all the joy and happiness the next few weeks entail, there’s the inevitable sneezing, sniffling, and general misery that more than a few of us will experience with the flu.  Luckily, last month researchers at Google, after some testing with the Center for Disease Control, have provided an online tool called Google FluTrends that can quickly and accurately detect flu outbreaks in different geographies.

Traditionally, flu outbreaks have been identified by polling doctors at local clinics and hospitals. This data is then aggregated across the country and analyzed. If there is an unusually high number of people with flu-like symptoms in any one area, then there was probably a flu outbreak … one or two weeks ago. That might be nice to know, but it provides little solace for those of us who wind up suffering.

Google’s novel approach is to monitor real-time search engine queries for people seeking cures for flu-like symptoms. When certain areas have a higher than usual number of queries, it’s likely the first sign of an outbreak. That means we can all wash our hands a little longer, take extra care when sneezing, and even avoid busy areas in hopes of dodging the flu this year.

At Crimson Hexagon, we take a similar approach to brand monitoring.  If a product or PR campaign has gone wrong, there’s no sense in waiting until it shows up in your bottom line.  Instead, by monitoring the opinion of your brand online, you can act at the earliest signs of a problem. With this type of real-time, actionable information maybe both we and our brands can stay healthy this holiday season. And that’s something we can all celebrate.

Tags: brand monitoring, research by John Thomas
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