Diageo Taps Networked Insights For Qualitative Social Media Analysis

Adults ages 21-24 living in the northeastern U.S. generally have a "positive brand relationship" with Hennessy, a cognac brand marketed* by Diageo, according to Networked Insights.

The beverage behemoth itself didn't have a handle on this helpful marketing statistic until it tapped the Madison, Wis.-based company to mine social networks like MySpace and Twitter for qualitative data on factors like brand engagement and affinity.

Networked Insights helps marketers harness the power of social media before, after and even without running ads, by developing and supporting white-label communities, and analyzing the customer interactions within them. Using member profile content, as well as natural language analysis of their comments and actions, the company's platform delivers insights on five factors: customer needs, content, competition, brand and product/service.

And now Networked Insights has expanded its service to analyze interactions across third-party social networks--giving the firm the ability, for example, to show Diageo that in terms of customer needs, their 21- to 24-year-old and 35- to 44-year old clientele need help figuring out "how to buy scotch."

According to Dan Neely, Networked Insight's CEO and founder, the value of the platform is that Diageo can take that "Customer Intelligence" and use it for more than just figuring out which Web sites to run ads on. "They could choose to run scotch ads on MySpace, but they can also come up with something cool like a 'how to buy scotch' video," Neely said. The beverage giant could also further mine the data to find out where to run those videos both on- and offline, he added.

In terms of competitive insights, the firm found that one of Diageo's top competitors in terms of engagement was Brown-Forman's Jack Daniels brand--but that the 21- to 24-year-olds analyzed had mostly negative opinions of the whiskey. Armed with that info, Diageo could choose to create a campaign for its Crown Royal whiskey that centered on how it stacked up against Jack Daniels, as well as find the non-beverage related Web sites to run the ads on. "It's like clairvoyance for ad spend. At least that's what one of the media buyers we've worked with has said," Neely said.

The platform analyzes more than 3.5 million posts and interactions per day, both on third-party and white-label social networks. So it doesn't take a year's worth of monitoring to deliver actionable data. "We piloted the new capability with Diageo for about two months and were able to come up with guidance," Neely said.

*Updated after publishing.

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