How Can Brands Best Understand Their Consumers: Social Listening How Can Brands Best Understand Their Consumers: Social Listening? Traditional Brand Tracking? Or Both? Market Research Council September 21, 2018 Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Our View of the World Structured Unprompted Prompted Authentic, direct Voice of customer (in real-time) Social Unstructured 80-90% of all potentially usable business information may originate in unstructured form Merrill Lynch

But…it Has Been Messy Challenges of Disambiguating Words, Meanings and Context, Slang, Sarcasm. Companies only processing 21% of their unstructured data (Forrester)

Case in Point Common Boolean-based approaches tend to only find and classify 15-30% relevant documents

So Not a Surprise…. “Far from being unfixable, however, miscalculations in social-media analyses can already be fixed using methods developed to fix similar problems in studies in epidemiology, statistics and machine learning.” - ComputerWorld

ML-as-a-Service for NLP 60 Years into Computation Linguistics, AI is Changing the Game Micro World Statistical Models Grammars Ontologies Georgetown Experiment 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Deep Learning ML-as-a-Service for NLP Computers just don’t have the brains to solve some basic problems – unless we lend them ours.” - Dr. Philip Resnik

With Training, AI Can Outperform Individual Humans for Precision Accuracy Recall Relevancy Standard Rules Based Conversus Baseline Source: Converseon 2018

And Classify Data Like Humans Do, Unlocking Higher-Level Variables Purchase Intent Advocacy Motives Emotion Customer Journey Brand Attributes Unmet Needs Intensity Sentiment

Multiple Studies Have Shown High Quality Social Data Has Strong Predictive Qualities Smoothed time series Key Variables that explain Sales *correlation Topic + Sentiment / Emotion + Motive = .86 Topic + Sentiment / Emotion = .57 Conducted with Converseon/i4i

It’s Critically Important for Comprehensive Measurement Frameworks Source: Converseon/ Joel Rubinson Business Outcomes Brand Equity (Brand Preference & Advocacy) Sales / Share Outcomes Meaning & Engagement Meaning (Language, Attributes, Culture, Consumer Interest Profiles) Engagement Behaviors (Community Size & Behavior Toward Brand) Purchase Disposition (Path to purchase) Marketing Effectiveness Spending Impressions (Amplification via Paid, Owned vs. Earned) Return (Marketing Return on Investment) Brand Equity: Consumer preference + advocacy; Social NPS (actual advocating versus intent) Brand Meaning: language, topics, emotions, imagery, opinions, perceptions Engagement Behaviors: Interacting with brand beyond functional purpose. (likes, retweets, etc.) Purchase: Purchase funnel analysis; intent to buy Social Inputs/ Classifiers

Why Social? Where? Pervasive and growing Customer Satisfaction Real-time Precise* Predictive Cost-effective Time-Travel Actionable Authentic Customer Satisfaction Customer Experience Brand Tracking Campaign Analysis Targeting Trend Analysis …And More.

Thanks rkey@converseon.com Twitter: @robkey, @converseon