All posts tagged brand affinity

Measuring Social Sentiment: Part Art, Part Science

Posted by Jackie Kmetz on February 8, 2011

Businesses want to extract value—relevant and actionable data—from the expansive pool of content that the social sphere provides. By evaluating the opinions that have been expressed—from the very positive to the very negative to every other relevant feeling or statement in-between businesses can identify trends and specific examples that can be turned into insight for decision-making. The aspect of opinion mining that has received the most attention is sentiment analysis, which is primarily used to track user attitudes about a specific topic or the opinions of a certain population.

Using technology to derive a “sentiment score” from the opinions expressed through user-generated content online can be extremely useful for organizations in evaluating a large data set of social brand mentions. It also can provide a straightforward way to segment and filter content based on positive or negative commentary. Sentiment scoring allows businesses to isolate the themes or issues driving consumer sentiment, and enables dynamic and illustrative reporting of trends and market reactions—or time-sensitive and reputation-threatening situations such as product recalls.

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Businesses to Get Serious About Getting Social in 2011

Posted by Debbie DeGabrielle on December 20, 2010

Social media reached an inflection point in 2010, with the volume and speed of social conversations reaching unprecedented levels – and showing no signs of abating. More enterprises embraced the business value of social media, coming to view it as Social Intelligence, a necessary competitive tool. We saw many well-known brands – including FedEx and Pepsi – working hard to make a meaningful impact in the social sphere and find ways to connect with their customers on a one-to-one level never before possible. This shift in attitude toward social media by many businesses led to increased demand for serious analytics to enable informed decision-making.

With 2011 on the horizon, here are a few of the trends Visible Technologies foresees in the next 12 months for the social media landscape:

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Social Intelligence Webcasts Recap

Posted by Ellen Enrico on November 22, 2010

Last week we hosted two live Social Intelligence Webcasts:
Understanding Sentiment Evaluation, and The Evolution of Enterprise Social Intelligence.

Understanding Sentiment Evaluation, hosted by Visible’s own Shawn Rutledge, Director of Core Technology and Jackie Kmetz, Director of Data Strategy & Product Training, presented their experiences about how understanding consumers’ attitudes, opinions, and emotional connections via the social Web can help improve your business.

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Brand Affinity vs. Brand Loyalty in a Social Media World

Posted by Debbie DeGabrielle on October 27, 2010

The social sphere, with its vast pool of micro-content, offers advertisers and businesses an entirely new way to generate positive feelings from consumers toward their brands. The idea is not to focus solely on building brand loyalty, or convincing consumers to buy something immediately, but to foster brand affinity by providing those engaging in online social communities with meaningful information that helps them form a personal connection with your brand.

Brand affinity goes way beyond brand loyalty. Brand loyalty, in essence, is about buying a product because it stands for something, such as purity, or because it is a known quantity (e.g., familiar to you). The consumer thinks, “It works, I like it, I buy it.” However, while it can help to shorten the sales cycle and heighten adoption rates for future products, brand loyalty has its limitations. Often, there is no strong personal connection tying the consumer to the brand. So, while the consumer perceives that a brand has value, their loyalty may have little or no impact on a company’s ability to enhance its line extensions or grow its customer base and business more rapidly. All too often brands mistake apathy for loyalty. In this case a consumer has formed a habit, and as a rule buys the same product week-in and week-out, or even year-in and year-out. What could be construed as loyalty is in fact habit. Yet those habits can be broken, by something as small as a merchandising change in a store, new packaging design, or even price promotion by a competitor. Because there is not as strong a personal or emotional connection when talking about loyalty as there is with affinity, the barrier to change is a bit lower. And when the barriers to change are lower, lifetime customer value can easily become compromised.

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