White Paper: on Influence and Online Behavior

Report:

Pénte Offers New Way to Measure Social Media Marketing

Lucule New York, NY 10011 T 800-991-5741 F 646-530-8509 [email protected] www.luculeconsulting.com

http://www.luculeconsulting.com

http://www.luculeconsulting.com

Summary

A research study from Lucule, New York, has determined that in the absence of effec-tive traditional measurement tools (TRPs or reach/frequency) for social media, a new model, its Social Media Pénte, which examines the time, form, message, device used, and level of engagement of the recipient of the message, meaningfully fulfills this role. Lucule developed Pénte to show how brands can modulate these factors to reap greater audience affinity. As a result the Pénte provides metrics that enable brands to design and measure their social media programs effectively.

Pénte allows a brand to model and effectively exert influence with better results than trying to do so through the so-called “influential” everyman (a popular person with a high influence score). This is important because Lucule’s findings reveal that the tradi-tional model of “influence” doesn’t work in social media. The top-down approach of looking for someone well known to spread the word about a brand, which previously worked well with celebrities, “authorities” or via word-of-mouth between and among peers, doesn’t have the same impact in social media. Even new influence measure-ment systems (Klout, Kred, etc.), that identify individuals who are “broadcasters”, do not translate into a way to engage consumers, sway attitudes, change behaviors or create new brand users or accelerate brand loyalty.

Pente Offers New Way To Measure Social Media Marketing - Copyright © Luclue LLC 2013 1

Key Research Findings

● In the absence of traditional measure tools (TRPs reach/frequency), a new model, the Social Media Pénte, which examines the time, form, message, device used and level of engagement of the recipient of the message has shown to provide clearer, more meaningful metrics that enable a brand to design and measure social media programs effectively.

● Using the Social Media Pénte, brands can, for the first time, create social media schedules that generate measurable behavioral response.

● This new social media model is a far more effective tool to create behavioral change in the marketplace than existing “influence” measurement tools (e.g. Klout, Kred).

● Pénte shows how brands can modulate time, message and device to compare and change effectiveness of social media activities to reap greater audience af-finity. In fact, a brand can actually model and effectively exert influence with better results than trying to do so through the so-called “influential” social media everyman.

● The traditional model of “influence” doesn’t work in social media. In other words, consumers with a high Klout score do not perform and carry the credibil-ity of a celebrity who is well known. The top-down approach of looking for someone well known to spread the word about a brand, which previously worked well with celebrities or via word-of-mouth with peers doesn’t have the same impact in social media.

● Existing influence measurement systems (Klout, Kred, etc.) may identify indi-viduals who are “broadcasters”, but this awareness does not translate into the ability to engage others, influence or sway attitudes, change behaviors or create new brand users in others.


Background: The Power of Social Media

Social media is experiencing explosive growth. Its use has become pervasive as con-sumers enjoy new ways and ease with which to keep in constant touch with each other. 1According to Nielson’s latest social media report: ● one out of every seven people in the world now has a Facebook page;

● nearly four out of every in five active internet users visit social networks and

blogs; and ● one-third of the world’s population is online, an increase of 528 percent over the

past 10 years. Marketers want to find a reliable way to capitalize on this apparent boundless opportu-nity, but despite their enthusiasm, they lack digital measurement tools comparable with other media. As a result they are uneasy about their ever-increasing social media spending commitment. They are also continuing to question social media efforts’ return on investment (ROI). Meanwhile, consumers are adapting to the social media universe with apparent aban-don – but within that seeming chaos is great purpose. Consumers are intent on refin-ing social media to meet their own communication needs.


1 Nielsen: State of the Media: The 2012 Social Media Report

Social Media LandscapeSocial media rising part of all communications

Personal communication technologies such as smart phones mean the end of mass communications, as we know it. TV no longer commands the viewer’s full attention as 77% of its viewers are using another device at the same time as they are watching TV.

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A mobile phone is in the possession of its user for an average of 5,840 hours per year, while the average time spent watching television is only 1,865 hours per year. Online time is spread over four media devices: smart phones, tablets, PCs/laptops, and television. Consumers have mastered the ability to use more than one media screen at a time, so it’s evident that these smaller screens and social networks require a different approach and focus than a 30 second TV spot.


2 The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior - Google August 2012

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Social media budgets are accelerating. A recent survey of 460 chief marketing officers in the U.S. by the Duke University Fuqua School of Business indicates that current so-cial media spend is about 8% of marketing budgets. However, this share of spend is expected to increase to 12% by next year and to 22% within five years. This finding is consistent with results from a Nielsen survey of 500 digital marketing and media pro-fessionals in the U.S., which reported that nearly two/thirds of marketers plan to in-crease their social media spending this year.

Yet the concern continues to plague about the productivity of social media spending. Only about one in four marketers in the Nielsen survey are convinced that social media advertising is effective and has a quantifiable ROI. A key issue with regard to ROI of course is the lack of measurement and analytic tools in social media, such as TRP’s and reach/frequency models, which are “standard equipment” in traditional marketing.


3 The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior - Google August 2012

The Rise of the Online Influencer

New “state-of-the-art” tools for social media have arisen….or have they? The social media universe has introduced the online influencer. Marketers are now being led to believe that some almost mythical creature has the capability to effortlessly spread the news about their product or service throughout the social media world. All that needs to be done is to identify this influencer and it is almost as good as finding the goose with the golden eggs.

The Fallacy of Measuring Influence

The only problem with this assumption is that there seems to be some confusion with definition of the meaning of influence. In this online context, it seems that influence came to be thought of as being almost synonymous with popularity, or awareness of a consumer’s existence because he has a large personal network; there didn’t seem to be a lot of questions whether this consumer was actually “influential” in changing someone else’s behavior.

Despite this lack of a solid definition, and whether a person’s “popularity” can move others in a desirable direction, the influence bandwagon is growing with the erroneous belief that this is a measurement that accurately predicts someone’s capacity to moti-vate others toward a given brand.

The first supposed online influence measurement tool, “Klout,” was founded in 2008. By the end of 2012 another twelve additional vendors had started offering services which revolved around influence marketing.

The problem, however, is that there are three major faults with what these online influ-ence measuring tools are doing:

1 There doesn’t seem to be a broad perspective of what true online influence really is.


2 As a result of this lack of understanding, the current measurement services are retrofitting their existing awareness data to form a pseudo-definition of influence.

3 Their measurement tools, which are subject to easy manipulation, are lacking in validity and conceptual rigor.

What is most troubling with these current measurement tools is that the traditional model of “influence” does not work in social media. The old-fashioned, top-down ap-proach of looking for someone who is well known to promote a brand doesn’t have the same impact in social media. Yet these services persist in identifying individuals who are “broadcasters,” even though this awareness (people with high influence scores) does not translate into a capacity to engage others or the ability to influence or sway attitudes and change behaviors.

Instead of measuring popularity, marketers need to measure the person's "affect" and "effect" on others -- how they motivate others to do things and what that's worth to a brand or business. This takes an understanding of the bifurcated nature of influence (influencer and receiver) as well as how culture drives people's behavior and actions.


Cultural Perspective

Television, radio, and film moved us into a mass age, what we know today as mass communication. During that time communication became more one-way, broadcast from the media to the public. Media consumption during the mass age involved very little personalized content. All of the communication technologies available today – par-ticularly mobile phones, smart phones and notepads - are personal in nature. They are often worn on the body. They are highly individualized and are regarded as extensions of the self. They make us individually addressable, regardless of where we are. Personal communication technologies such as smart phones mean the end of mass communications as we know it. This huge cultural shift is well noted by the mass me-diums themselves but still hardly heeded by businesses and marketers. The mass me-diums themselves have adapted their reporting. News outlets increasingly see the per-sonal as more interesting fodder for their stories, reporting sentiment from Twitter chat-ter or Facebook “likes” as news to their audiences. More and more social media is the real lens through which news is increasingly received, commented on, and understood. Twitter often leads the news cycle, cueing the mainstream media into what people are interested in and illuminating what their take on a particular story is.

‘News’ is being defined differently because of the game of and participation in social media. Social media drives popular culture news and increasingly ‘hard news.’” What this means is the old influence models of traditional media where brands were almost synonymous with the broadcaster as part of a one-way pattern of communica-tion are not the same models that can be applied in social media. Certainly there are rappers, rock stars, and celebrities influencing people. Music and Hollywood provide an identity idiom as they give expression to life concerns for people – those who create the imagery influence them. But that is the old model. Today, understanding the cultural nature of social, people are not passive recipients of information. People create places and spaces – these places represent connectedness and that’s how they embody them. We are all influencing and drawing influence from others in social media spaces.


The new model is to understand the character of creativity and sharing on social media and fit that with a brand. What are the forms and character of digital, non-commercial communications? The device? The timing?

Brands trying to maintain a rigid message and not understanding the intertwining of each of the social media components will not be winners in the new social media flow and dollars spent will be ineffective.

Consider the results of an intensive ethnographic study by Lucule, which shows how deeply ingrained social media has already become in our culture:

● most people are seeking a certain emotional experience as they turn on their

mobile devices, stemming from a sense of energy, engagement and being in touch;

● it feels as though the user is included and participating in events of the world, not just having the world swirl around him or her;

● people feel disengaged without their mobile device, and feel compelled to re-engage, even with their favorite brands; and

● a social media contact from a favored brand with a desirable message at just the right moment can cause a person to take immediate action, and even alter existing plans.

The Pénte Social Media model takes this consumer participation in social media into account, understanding the greater personal nature of communications. For example, when a consumer receives a message in an email, her response and how she feels about it is very different than the immediate response she may give to a text message or to a Twitter tweet. Consumers accord more emotional meaning and reciprocity to text messaging that email simply doesn’t have. Timing, device with which message is received, and other factors all play a role in the new personal age.


Modeling Behavioral Response to Social Media

Lucule has developed a social media-planning framework informed by a cultural per-spective that assists marketers in understanding how to use social media to change consumer behavior. This model was developed with Lucule’s understanding of the im-portance of taking a cultural perspective in marketing and was shared with a panel at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. We have developed the requisite theoretical underpinnings, delivery technology, performance measurement and report-ing systems in our model to assist clients optimize their social media activities. The Pénte model is a multi-dimensional representation of the cultural context in which so-cial media operate. Pénte identifies five factors that shape audience receptivity to marketing communica-tions, and can therefore favorably impact the desired behavioral response to these communications. Depending on the specific cultural context of the marketing objec-tives, these factors play shifting roles in driving the desired behavioral response:

● Message Type● Form of Message● Device● Time● Level of Audience Engagement

Lucule discovered that by specifically targeting five factors that shape receptivity to marketing communications – message type; form of message; device; timing; and level of audience engagement – social media marketing could measurably affect behavioral responses to communications.


In developing the Pénte model, Lucule asked whether communications from people with more social influence, that is those with higher influence scores, drove more re-sponse than people with less social influence. “The answer to this question was a re-sounding ‘no’,” says Lucule partner and chief scientist Keith P. Sentis Ph.D.

Statistical analyses indicate that the influence score accounted for only 3% of the variation in engagement. That is, 97% of the differences in behavioral response were driven by factors other than social influence.

Instead, consumers are more prone to react positively if a relevant message is received in a certain format (“news you can use” for example), at certain times of day when the level of engagement with a particular device is optimal. The Pénte model can help de-termine these factors, and as a result, help businesses spend marketing dollars more efficiently.


Research ObjectivesThe goal of this research was to examine the impact of several of the Pénte factors on the effectiveness of social media. Specifically, Lucule wanted to quantify the relative effectiveness of these social media factors in driving the desired behavioral response in a promotional campaign. We also wanted to examine the extent to which an “online influence” metric had an impact on the desired behavioral response. The research was conducted within a promotional campaign for a “virgin” product, that is, a brand new product with no awareness in the marketplace.

Research MethodologyIndependent Measures

To test the relative impact of the elements in the Pénte model as well as a “social influ-ence” metric, Lucule used an experimental design with six factors to develop the con-tent and structure of the promotional campaign for the new product launch. The six factors in the design were:

“Online influence” score of the communicators ranged from 42 to 83 on a well-known “social online influence” measure. Message Type● Tweet● Post

Topic: Different aspects of the new product● Topic 1● Topic 2

Timing: Day part when the messages were delivered● Time 1● Time 2


Graphics: Presence or absence of graphics in the message● Graphics● No Graphics

Theme: Content streams in the messages● Theme 1● Theme 2

NOTE: In this experimental design, the last five factors were blocked.

Dependent Measure

The dependent measure was the behavioral response that the campaign was designed to stimulate. Thus, this experiment was designed to systematically test the extent to which each of the six independent measures drove the desired behavioral response. In the analyses and graphs that follow, the number of clicks that were generated by the communications is referred to as the “behavioral response.”


ResultsThe first analysis examined the extent to which “online influence” had an effect on the desired behavioral response:

● Lucule asked whether communications from people with more “online influ-ence”, that is with higher influence scores, drove more response than people with less “online influence.”

Figure 1 illustrates that the answer to this question was a resounding “no” within the context of this launch campaign. Statistical analyses indicate that the “influence” score accounted for only 3% of the variation in engagements. That is, 97% of the differences in behavioral response to this campaign were driven by factors other than “social influ-ence”.


Having determined that “online influence” did not affect the desired behavioral re-sponse in this campaign, the next analyses examine the extent to which the other fac-tors in the Pénte model did drive the behavioral response sought by the campaign.

As mentioned above, a key element in the Pénte model is the Message Type. Apart from cultural variation in response to tweets and posts, we expected the two message types to generate different levels of behavioral response because the constrained length of tweets limits the communicators’ ability to incite interest in a brand new, un-known product. For these reasons among others, we expected behavioral response to vary considerably as a function of the message type.

As expected and as illustrated in Figure 2, posts are much more effective at driving the desired behavioral response than are tweets. It is interesting to note the impact of Time in modulating the effectiveness of posts. To wit, while we expected that posts would work harder for us than tweets, we were surprised to learn that the posts drove even better behavioral response at Time 1 than at Time 2.

The learning from this interaction between Message Type and Time is clear:For this campaign, posting was most effective at Time 1


Following on the finding of an interaction between Message Type and Time, the next analyses illustrate how the behavioral response to a given topic also varies dramatically depending on Time. Figure 3 shows that while the overall behavioral response to the two topics was com-parable (no main effect for Topic), there is a strong interaction between Topic and Time. This interaction is such that the pattern of response to the two topics was com-pletely reversed when Time is taken into account.

This analysis further strengthened the lessons learned about this campaign, namely that optimizing the desired behavioral response requires an understanding of the com-plex interaction patterns on the Pénte model.


The next analysis examined the impact on behavioral response of including graphics in the communications. Based on previous experience with marketing communications, we assumed that there would be a positive effect on the response when the communi-cations included a topic-related graphic. This assumption was not borne out in the analyses.

As can be seen in Figure 4, the presence or absence of graphics did not, in and of it-self, have an effect on behavioral response. As was seen previously with Topic, the analyses revealed that there was no main effect for an individual factor in the Pénte model. Rather, there was an interaction between the Graphics and Time factors for this campaign.

Thus, a common thread of learning about this campaign emerged from these analyses:

● To optimize the desired behavioral response to the new product launch cam-paign, social media planning must take into account the interaction of Time and several other factors in the Pénte model.


ConclusionsThis research provided valuable guidance for optimizing the social media plan for launching the new product. While specific brand/client information makes other pro-ject learning from this research confidential, this report illustrates some key insights about the drivers of behavioral response that are revealed by the Pénte model:

● the “online influence” score was not a factor in driving behavioral response for this campaign;

● “time” is a key factor in determining audience receptivity to the communications

and behavior;

● the complexity of behavioral response to social media was demonstrated by the presence of interactions among the factors in the Pénte model; and

● for this campaign, posts were much more effective at driving behavioral re-sponse than were tweets.

As social media take on a larger role within the broader marketing mix, models of be-havioral response such as Lucule’s Pénte will prove valuable to marketers.


Final Thoughts● The pervasive use of personal devices such as smart phones and tablets and

social networks means that consumer use of social media will continue to grow stronger bringing to an end the age of mass communications as experienced during the end of the 20th century.

● Given this great cultural change, the traditional models of influence are chang-

ing. ● The current definition of online influencers does not include those with any ac-

tual ability to influence behavior. ● Pénte identifies five factors that shape audience receptivity to marketing com-

munications, and can therefore favorably impact the desired behavioral re-sponse to these communications: Message Type, Form of Message, Device, Time, and Level of Audience Engagement.

Models of behavioral response such as Lucule’s Pénte, which optimize program ef-fectiveness, will become indispensible to marketers as social media continues to grow.
