November 2016

External Amplification, Earning the Attention of Your Market

In our last post you heard more about the evils of Corporate Bias and how our metrics help identify and then mitigate the risk of being a LOUD brand through Social Narcissism. In this post we will shift from an inner focus on how much brands and their advocates reference themselves to an external focus on how the brand content resonates with the market. External Amplification is a metric of how much your content is being shared outside of your brand advocates and employees. Because we track the brand advocates for a given brand, we can determine which of the retweets and other forms of amplification are from the those external to the brand.

For example, if a brand like Cisco tweeted out an announcement regarding a new strategy targeting Autonomous Vehicles, naturally several brand advocates would echo this message out to their networks. In this example, let’s say this tweet attracts 125 retweets by Cisco employees and other advocates we’ve identified as being part of their “Circle of Trust.” At first glance, this looks like a great result. Issue is that the total retweets of this announcement is only 130, which means that while the ratio of tweet to retweet looks awesome(130:1), the actual ratio is 5:1, meaning that only 5 people/accounts outside of your existing advocates found your content to be compelling enough to retweet. Typically we average this metric across all mentions authored by a brand for a given time period to understand, in general, if their message is being picked up and shared out beyond their ‘Circle of Trust.’

Again, pulling data from the Network Function Virtualization market, we see some real results to analyze together:

Brand	Mentions	Corporate Bias	External Retweets	External Amplification
Brocade	16	93.80%	15	0.938
HPE	23	60.90%	21	0.913
Cisco	15	53.30%	27	1.8
Juniper	23	17.40%	14	0.609

Notice that our Corporate Bias culprit, Juniper, also has the worst External Amplification. So not only are they behaving as a LOUD brand, just crowing their own name, but they are also crowing a message that is being amplified at almost half the rate of the competition in this market.

That is another important feature of this metric. This is based on amplification WITHIN the target market. Having people/accounts outside of your market amplify your message is interesting but not useful in advancing your dominance. Knowing that the cousins of all of your employees are helping broadcast your message to their neighbors does not help you grow your awareness within the target market Network Function Virtualization. That is why we pull all these metrics from conversations related to your market instead of your brand. This let’s you see the growing influence your content is gaining for you within the market and, at times more importantly, against your competition.

In the example above, HPE might have a lower Corporate Bias than Brocade, but their content is performing almost as well. Cisco is the only brand with an External Amplification greater than one, showing a multiplying effect of their NFV content, especially relative to their chief competitors. You would only know this if you had the entire market conversation captured, not just the branded ones. You can see how External Amplification is an actionable metric, you can immediately see how your content is resonating relative to the competition, tracking the impact of your campaigns on growing awareness outside of your advocates in real time. This helps you bypass being LOUD and go straight to being effective.

This is what we do at Argus Insights, we focus on metrics that matter, metrics that help our clients move markets. External Amplification is just one of many metrics we have developed to help our clients craft the right actions to drive growth and engagement. let us know if you’d like to learn more! You can also sign up for our free market analysis newsletter.

Corporate Bias, A Metric of Social Narcissism

We’ve all seen it, the eruption of buzz around a launch event, a scandal, a contest or some other drastic shift in the conversation around a brand. Since we started looking at Social Media as another data source to help clients make sense of the market, we have helped several clients make sense of these volatile phenomena. Our clients worried endlessly when their competition had these volcanic explosions of interest, especially in B2B markets where mindshare was so jealously guarded. Our forensic analysis of these events found they fell into three buckets:

Legitimate market interest in what the brand had to say and sustained engagement (Yeah!)
Bot-Storms flooding a brand because someone ‘bought’ followers or attention (Shame on you!)
Lift generated almost entirely by employees and brand advocates like agencies

Those legitimate lifts are gold for the market and for the brands. It means they are contributing to the narrative in a way that drives overall growth and adoption.(Or a huge scandal was just exposed and heads will roll.) The Bot Storms are more prevalent in B2C but are being used less and less as social media properties do more to filter their impact. The one that is most difficult is where the employees and agencies relentlessly promote the parent brand. There are even tools to make this simpler. The minute any product is launched, press release embargo lifted, memo from the CEO ‘leaked’, swarms of employees and brand affiliates take to the social mediawaves (not quite airwaves) to immediately share how excited they are by X. In past blog post, we have described this as a Loud brand, one so intent on broadcasting their message that they drown out any actual dialogue with the market they are attempting to impact.

We created the Corporate Bias metric for our clients as a way to mute the impact of the advocate driven bursts in buzz. It’s a way to weed out the extra mentions in a conversation driven by those closest to the brand. It’s also a way to hold a brand accountable for how much they speak of themselves. (How many brands do you know that mention themselves in every single tweet?) This metric helps our clients not only separate the market driven buzz from the brand driven buzz, but also helps them manage their own brand advocates, encouraging dialogue over monologue. One of our clients also used this metric to ensure their lift was outside their brand, demonstrating to their leadership the impact of their outbound efforts.
For example, looking at the Network Function Virtualization Market for the last two weeks we see the following results:

Brand	Posts	Corporate Bias
Brocade	16	93.80%
HPE	23	60.90%
Cisco	15	53.30%
Juniper	23	17.40%

You can see that HPE and Juniper had the most Posts during the last two weeks but their Corporate Bias numbers tell a very different story. Of Juniper’s 23 outbound posts, only 17% did not mention Juniper, meaning that the Juniper is acting as a LOUD brand within the NFV market whereas Brocade, even though they have fewer posts, is behaving more as a LISTENING brand, which, in the face of the recent acquisition rumors is admirable. You can quickly see where using Corporate Bias can help manage your engagement with the market narrative, see the impact of social strategies, and identify which eruptions of interest are real, imagined or manufactured…
This is what we do at Argus Insights, we focus on metrics that matter, metrics that help our clients move markets. Corporate Bias is just one of many metrics we have developed to help our clients craft the right actions to drive growth and engagement. let us know if you’d like to learn more! You can also sign up for our free market analysis newsletter.

Smart Home Trending: Investing in the Smart Home

Popular Smart Home Links Shared (Week of 30 October – 05 November)

Summary – With 5.3K shares this past week, traffic was down from the 7.9K shares of the week before. In addition to a red herring regarding makeup that uses the title of “Smart House” there are four pieces that surround either funding or the launch of solutions for the Smart Home space. As a result, let’s call the theme of the week “Investing in the Smart Home.” Whether through internal or external funding, there is no doubt that plenty of money has been, and will continue to be, funneled into the Smart Home space.

Sevenhugs Remote – What do you name a company when your founders have seven children among you? It appears that you name the company “Sevenhugs.” This company has been focusing on sleep sensors, but received 391 shares of their soon-to-be-released one-touch remote. Either Sevenhugs is executing a very clever marketing move to keep customers guessing, or my observation skills are poor (perhaps both). You can register on the web to get 50% off the remote, but I can’t seem to find either the price or the release date of this product. Regardless, I like the family emphasis and look forward to seeing the product come out.

Sunflower Labs Funding – Would you like to have drones patrolling your house, as shown above? In an article with 357 shares, T echcrunch writes about startup Sunflower Labs receiving funding for a security system whose motion sensors activate a quadcopter that is dispatched to investigate unusual disturbances on your property. The exact release date is a bit vague, but for $25, feel free to reserve yours online if you like.

Ernest Funding – Just like my previous newsletter, Arturs Pumpurs crowdfunding idea for “Ernest, your first mobile butler” made it into the top shared stories. As I type this, it has received roughly $17.3K from 48 backers and has 28 days to go. With an additional 276 shares (after 277 the previous week), it is clear that there is always interest is funding a startup with an interesting idea.

Ecobee Thermostat – Ecobee launched their new Ecobee3 Lite thermostat on the 21st of October. They have done a great job of continued activity to promote the new product, giving it life for a sustained two week period with 223 additional shares of the product page on their website.

With a “tweener” price-point of $169 (roughly midway between low-end and high-end smart thermostats), and support of five major Smart Home platforms, this product is aiming to be the Goldilocks of thermostats. As consumer reviews roll-in over the coming days and weeks, the Argus team will be checking to see delivery on that brand promise.

Make up Red Herring – Although the most highly shared link with 466 last week, the lead story was only marginally Smart Home. There were two virtually identical twitter postings, for Makeup with Laura and a different Makeup oriented handle, that both used the “Smart House” tagline and made it into the Smart Home social media listings. It goes to show you that raw numbers don’t tell the whole story and it is important to analyze the stories behind the numbers to separate the signal from the noise.

If you trust the future of your business to surveys, the election should terrify you!

If you are currently trusting the future of your enterprise to market intelligence gained from polls and surveys, the results of this election should terrify you. Not for the outcome but for the failure of polls to deliver their promised certainty of the outcome. The 2016 election will go down as the day that polls failed us, or at least failed to represent what was actually happening in the population. FiveThirtyEight and the wunderkind Nate Silver, for literally years the most trusted analyst in politics because of his big data approach to predicting outcomes, published this prediction ahead of the polls opening Tuesday:

FiveThirtyEight.org's Prediction of The 2016 Election Outcome as polls opened on Tuesday
FiveThirtyEight.org’s Prediction of The 2016 Election Outcome as polls opened on Tuesday based on analysis of polls. Remember this is a likelihood measurement, not a guaranteed prediction.

The final electoral map from the New York Times showing where key states flipped in directions options of what the polls were indicating. Much of the momentum behind the polling activity missed the actual votes completely.

Now in Nate’s defense, this wasn’t a zero chance of Trump’s win. 538 did suggest that Trump had a 28.6% chance of getting at least the necessary 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency. But what the polls were telling us along with this analysis is that it was unlikely that Trump would win. As it turned out, the polls were not an accurate reflection of the population. Polls have become the buggy whips of Market Intelligence, useful during their time but if you’ve ever tried to whip your Prius to make it go faster, that’s equivalent to using a survey to instrument your market. While this has been spoken of in dark (and light) corners for years, this was a complete breakdown of our ability to instrument populations with any appreciable accuracy. And since many survey companies stake their ability to represent populations based on their success in predicting election outcomes, we have a problem.

We have spent decades trusting our politics, our products, our marketing, our movies, our futures to the results of surveys and polls. Companies and political action committees alike spend billions every year on constant surveys of their target populations of customers/voters. Tuesday’s outcome indicated what a colossal waste of time and money that is. That these methods no longer reflect, with any useful accuracy, what is actually happening in the market place. With all the talk of voter fraud, we should spend more time looking at the fraud perpetuated by polls and surveys. These methods lead to a blindness on the part of the organizations that commission them. Nokia was blinded by their own surveys to the threat of Apple and the iPhone. Axe Body Spray was blind to the misogyny their ad campaigns rained down on half the population when they tried to launch their first odor (scent) for women. And now we have evidence that polls contributed to the blindness the media and the Clinton campaign had to the real strength of Trump’s support.

From the beginning Argus Insights has focused on building metrics based on “Should” rather than “Could.” Heavily influenced by my time at IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, we have always centered on observation over stimulation, listening over asking, because, like Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle (not meth recipe), the very act of taking a poll changes the validity of the answers given to a pollster. We do not prove our performance by showing our ability to predict elections, but showing how our metrics align with consumer acceptance. Companies need to open their eyes to their actual consumers, across the entire market, not just those willing to reflect your opinion foisted on them through constant surveys. Polls have proven to be a waste of resources, both time and money. Now we risk our future if we continue to rely on these inaccurate methods of instrumenting populations. Instrumenting the actions consumers take across the entire market is the key to avoiding brand blindness and it is something we have spent the last seven years perfecting here at Argus Insights. How else have we been able to beat Wall Street analyst estimates of iPhone sales almost every quarter for the last five years? We listen and observe, we don’t poke and frustrate. And as a result, we have a pretty accurate crystal ball.

If you want to join the post poll movement or just ask questions about how we whip up our secret sauce, let me know. Our goal from the beginning has been to put into the hands of decision makers the best evidence for driving innovation and growth. With our new Argus Analyzer toolset, we’ve made taking that first step even easier.

What Happens When Our Smart Homes Start to Threaten Others Instead of Being Threatened?

Hackers and Drones and Insurance, Oh My! Protecting Others From My Smart Home

While there as has been a ton of coverage about how the Smart Home is susceptible to hackers from the outside, we are seeing increasing a growing risk of our homes becoming threats to others. For some, that is preferred, for others a concern, for all, a liability to be understood and addressed. Even in a market where insurance companies are looking at the coming flood of autonomous vehicles with valid concerns that their consumer vehicle revenues will drop substantially, homeowners will need additional coverage on their smart homes given their ability to act as micro rogue states in the growing cyber warfare battlefield. I know it sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, mixing Jason Bourne with Big Bang Theory, but when you see companies like Sunflower Labs and their new Home Awareness System and it does not take much to leap from drones with lights to drones with lasers. While Sunflower Labs is just getting off the ground (see what I did there?) their notion of a system acting on behalf of consumers is where Smart Home needs to evolve, towards a collection of hardware and software that acts on behalf of consumers, not creating additional gadgets and apps we have to juggle to perform our daily routine with the dexterity of a fire eating, chainsaw tossing, joke telling, baby kissing circus performer.

But what happens when things go awry? When we forget to update the firmware to that latest security patch and our home lashes out at the Domino’s delivery wagon, leaving a smoking crater of pepperoni, plastic and burnt cheese? Who holds that liability? What if our smart home unwillingly becomes part of a rogue state’s gang of bots to take out the smart grid, change the election results to favor evil movie robots, or order six years of Cheetos to be delivered by Amazon drone to the local high school principal. Who bears the liability? Who bears the cost? Is it your aging grandmother who hasn’t touched the router since you installed it six years ago to allow her to Facetime with the grandkids? Is it the Smart Home Service Provider that installed that smart thermostat and charges you a monthly fee for monitoring? Or will we find a way to make the consumer liable and ultimately create a new market for insurance companies. Corporate insurance today includes policies for Errors and Omissions, a blanket policy for “ooops, we didn’t see that”. Will we create products like that for consumers, “ooops, we didn’t update that” policies? This is an opportunity for the insurance companies to chase and for the smart home companies to prevent. My guess is that they will both find ways to win in the effort to stay relevant, solvent, and important to consumers.

This is just one of many of the concepts we bat around here at Argus Insights as we build the tools that let you comb through millions of consumer bread crumbs (insights) of what is driving the Smart Home market. We’d love to put those tools into your hands so you can wield the power of tomorrow, today. Check out our enterprise grade, start-up friendly tool subscriptions or sign up for our free Smart Home Newsletter.

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