Viacom Velocity Unlocks Emotional Analysis for Marketing Campaigns and Identifies True Social Influencers

Viacom’s Lydia Daly, Vice President of Social Media for Velocity, spent most of her career to date in agencies. Two years ago she joined Viacom Velocity, the award-winning integrated marketing and creative content team and her work looks at the amplification, measurement and distribution of digital and social media for marketing campaigns.  Her focus on social media research has led to a range of groundbreaking projects and a recent collaboration with Canvs in emotion-based research. How does Velocity track emotions in campaigns and how does Viacom use that to help their clients? Lydia explains it all here.

Charlene Weisler: What is the Echo Social Graph?

Lydia Daly: The Echo Social Graph is our proprietary custom analytics dashboard that measures the effectiveness of our social marketing campaigns which was created in partnership with Spredfast which is based in Austin, Texas. Before this dashboard was created, we tracked social campaign performance very manually using excel spreadsheets. With the Echo Social Graph we created a sophisticated tool that allows us to automate measurement of the entire social conversation including and beyond our owned content across multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and more.

The data visualization has three sections. The first focuses on Campaign Metrics and how the audience evolves over the lifetime of a campaign in terms of impressions and engagement. The second section takes a deeper look at Content and identifies the most engaged pieces of social media content and the most influential influencers. Finally the third section looks at Demographics, identifying hot spots for engagement around the country and delivering directional insights about demos that can help our marketers further customize campaigns for clients.

Charlene: What are the demos that you use? Are they the standard ones?

Lydia: We look at all demos depending on the client and the campaign. In terms of social influencers, Viacom Velocity uses a casting process that matches social talent, the target audience, our brand voice with that of our advertising partners. Demos like age are a factor here but it’s also important to look deeply at the audience they appeal to and the kind of content that they create to ensure a good fit. You can have someone older who attracts Millennials and they could be a good influencer target for us even though they themselves fit outside of our target demo.

Charlene: What are the most important metrics in social media research?

Lydia: Reach and engagement are the perennial favorites. However, the Echo Social Graph tool allows us to delve much deeper than that. It enables us to track campaigns that are social by design and includes components that give us insight into the top performing posts as well as an hour by hour deep dive into how those campaigns played out. 

Charlene: Who are the influencers of today?

Lydia: In the past, they were predominately celebrities but that has changed massively. Now, social media influencers are breaking through and generate a lot of buzz across  specific social media channels like Vine, YouTube, Instagram and more. They influence all types of genres and industries and there are so many different types of social talent for partners to tap into. Every clients’ brand is different and the explosion of social talent in recent years gives advertisers more ways than ever before to customize and tailor one-of-a-kind campaigns.

Charlene: How do you match influencers with brands?

Lydia: It is both an art and a science. Some data helps in identifying certain types of influencers as it pertains to the demographics of the audience but we have an in-house team that is specifically charged with casting social influencers and identifying the players in the space who add that layer of art to the data science.

Charlene: Can you talk about your work with Canvs?

Lydia: The Echo Social Graph launched over a year ago  and we have always wanted to add a layer of sentiment analysis to deepen our audience insights, especially around millennials. However, Millennials use nuance, slang, irony, jargon, misspellings and more in their social conversations – this was always a hurdle for traditional sentiment analysis. Our partnership with Canvs expands our campaign measurement capabilities to incorporate emotional analysis. This means we can now interpret reactions to marketing campaigns and then qualify them into 56 emotions. This allows us to decode that conversation for our clients and understand how these audiences are responding to content.  

Charlene: Is it really possible to measure emotional responses to marketing campaigns?

Lydia: Yes. Canvs has developed a methodology to measure emotionality and this offers us a way to look at social conversations quantitatively to understand the feelings behind them. We can do this with marketing campaigns because we are already pulling all of the relevant campaign data as qualified by hashtags, phrases and keywords through our Echo Social Graph. The Canvs tool then analyzes that pool of data. This integration means that we have the ability to measure emotional reactions to our campaign content and that’s what our partners are looking for. 

Charlene: What do you consider to be engagement?

Lydia: There are so many ways that our fans engage with our content but for measurement purposes we have a way to group these. Our Echo Social Graph measures social engagement in three ways by Action, Creation and Shares. Actions include likes and favorites, Creation includes the physical creation of a social post and Shares represents shares and retweets. This gives us a good overview on a campaign and how content is igniting on social.

Charlene: Where do you see all of this new and ground breaking research going in the next five years?

Lydia: Social media measurement will continue to grow and evolve. Engagement will remain a key metric as everyone wants to understand the actions taken on their content. Tied to this will be more widespread emotionality research since this adds such a compelling layer to engagement numbers.

In terms of the world of talent, I think that the idea of social influencers and celebrities will converge as online influencers move to linear and the big screen thereby increasing their fame. Mainstream celebrities will get more sophisticated when it comes to promoting themselves via social media channels.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

This is No Fleak. Q&A Interview with Jared Feldman

As the Founder and CEO of Canvs, a technology platform created to measure and interpret emotions, Jared Feldman understands and champions how emotional investment is valuable within the marketplace. New York City-based Canvs, which launched in public beta in April 2014 and officially into the marketplace in December 2014, has, according to Feldman, “become the industry standard for measuring audience reactions at scale through analysis of real-time Twitter data.” 

He got his start in the industry as a NYU student and while there met his now-partner Dr. Sam Hui. Upon graduation, the two formed Mashwork, which culled actionable insights for media clients. Canvs which grew out of Mashwork, has been experiencing great strides in recent months, including announcing their Series A funding and their recent partnership with Viacom. 

In this interview, Feldman talks about the impact of certain emotions on content success and by genre and the future of traditional research in an age of emotion tech.

Charlene Weisler: What social media data do you use in Canvs?

Jared Feldman:  Canvs receives its Twitter data from Nielsen, which captures relevant Tweets about original video programming from TV and over-the-top streaming providers for linear airtimes as well as on a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week basis. Analyzing those Twitter feeds from Nielsen, Canvs maps the emotional resonance of audience reactions online to first-run TV shows. Canvs then displays unique qualitative views showing the emotionality surrounding specific characters, plotlines and moments — mapping the emotionally charged reactions to 56 unique emotion categories including “love,” “dislike,” “annoying,” “beautiful,” “boring” and more. We just launched our own Facebook analysis capabilities where we summarized on an emotional basis all comments on video and the reaction to content. It is not a matter of measuring, for example, the number of tweets. We function to show what those tweets are all about – why emotions behind the social activity are so important. An emotional audience has greater recall and engagement. We can measure, by the use of emotional measurement, which ads were most engaging. 

Charlene: This is different from traditional research methodologies.

Jared: Yes. The only way to measure engagement and attention historically has been through focus groups. But it is time consuming and expensive and difficult to measure the emotional tenor of the audience.

Charlene: How do you measure an emotion like irony?

Jared: Irony falls into a bucket of emotions that require humans to review and measure. The methodology we use to measure emotions requires both science and judgement. You can’t rely on computers alone. But having a room of people judging doesn’t work either. We do not measure on sentiment – there are no positive or negative metrics. We have identified 56 common ways to express how people feel including love, shocked and crazy. But there is a lot of unstructured text, text that is not grammatically correct. Sometimes people do not use real words — words like ‘on fleak’ or ‘bae’ are commonly used by Millennials. These words are not picked or properly categorized by sentiment research. We built words and phrases that denote emotions. And we have recently included amplifiers and emojis. In the case of irony or sarcasm, a post like, “Man, I looove that show” with a thumbs down emoji can trip up algorithms. This is way we use a combination of efforts including machine learning with state-of-the-art language processing. We use humans to calibrate irony, sarcasm, jargon and misspelling, etc.

Charlene: Collecting audiences by emotions instead of demo groups is a departure from standard media measurement. 

Jared: Yes. We organize the world by common feeling – if we feel the same, we are the same beyond the demographics. How we feel affects what we do.

Charlene: What are the most predictive or important emotions?

Jared: It varies by genre. Any emotion in comedy means that the audience will come back next week. In Reality shows, it is ‘excitement.’ Our methodology was used by MAGNA to predict programs that would be renewed or picked up for a full season. We had an 85% accuracy rate in predicting shows that would be renewed or picked up. This is extremely exciting to us because it means that the reactions on Canvs are representative of the overall audience. 

Charlene: You mentioned the emotion “crazy”. What is that?

Jared: It is part of the colorful language that exists on social media and is neither positive nor negative. It includes exasperation and implicit excitement – OMG or That Is So Nuts. What’s interesting is that within drama programs, ‘crazy’ and ‘love’ are the two emotions that had the strongest correlation within loyal Tweeting behaviors. More specifically, a 10% increase in the share of ‘crazy’ among the total numbers of reactions which could reflect a jump from low to high ‘crazy’ for a  given program. It’s important to understand why this is. In scripted drama, “crazy” is an indication of ratings because there is a heightened sense of investment. It is a strong indicator for us. 

Charlene: Does emotional measurement replace the standard demographic measures?

Jared: There is still a place for demographics, but demographics as we know them will evolve. They’ll become more actionable over time. For example, rather than prioritizing where a person lives or what income bracket they’re in, researchers will ask: What do they find funny or crazy? Aligning viewers to core emotions will take precedence.

Charlene: Will a service like Canvs replace traditional research?

Jared: Traditional research will continue to bleed but will never go away. Soliciting responses will always have a place. However, we’ve always been bound by what people are willing to speak about and speak freely about. That’s one of the main reasons why traditional research can’t continue to compete with a qualitative technology platform like Canvs. Because, we’re capturing how people feel when they’re less inclined to be as guarded as they would in focus groups. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that innovation has never been more important. Social media will become more of a social science. It has never been actionable before on the qualitative side but as deeper and more sophisticated technologies in this space continue to evolve Canvs will definitely be at the forefront of this space.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com