J.D. Power and Associates acquired brand monitoring firm Umbria, combining industry-focused consumer satisfaction and rankings with consumer-generated media (CGM) insights. The deal highlights the use of brand monitoring as a key input to formulating marketing, brand, and product strategy. Interactive marketers and social media strategists interested in using brand monitoring must choose a tool based on business objectives, recognizing that the market now addresses three distinct applications:

1) mining customer insight to formulate strategy
2) quantifying social media to compare with other metrics and
3) identifying influencers in order to participate in online conversations.

On April 2, 2008, J.D. Power and Associates announced that it had acquired brand monitoring firm Umbria, combining industry-focused consumer satisfaction and rankings with CGM insights. This deal marks the third acquisition of a brand monitoring firm in the past three years. However, in this case the acquirer is not a media measurement firm, signaling a new direction for brand monitoring output. Over the past two years, brand monitoringofferings have evolved into three primary applications, which marketers need to realize when selecting a brand monitoring tool:

Mining consumer insight as an input into strategy formulation. Social media contains a wealth of valuable, unsolicited feedback to inform brand strategy — but in an unstructured format dispersed widely across the internet. Umbria provides a natural fit to J.D. Power’s traditional customer satisfaction research; the acquisition promises to help interactive marketers and social strategists to cull actionable insights from CGM based on speaker age, gender, and sentiment — employing an automated system. Other examples of firms competing in this space include MotiveQuest’s work to link MINI enthusiasts to sales and VML’s SEER applied to Adidas product development.

Quantifying CGM for combination with other enterprise-level metrics. Marketers can use brand monitoring to understand the impact of social media discussions with regard to other more familiar metrics like page views, brand recall, and campaign impressions. While the newly formed J.D. Power/Umbria offering won’t squarely support this application, plenty of other vendors provide solutions to help meet this goal: Nielsen Online combined its BuzzMetricsTraffic and NetRatings groups to form an online measurement product and has run pilots to incorporate ACNielsen ScanTrack data with CGM metrics as well. TNS Media Intelligence has combined Cymfony and Compete with TNS business units focused on advertising and audience measurement. Other firms operate with the specific intention of evolving traditional public relations measurement to include CGM metrics. Biz360 and Factiva primarily target this space of online traffic, and traditional PR monitoring giants Vocus and Cision have extended their offerings into CGM as well.

Monitoring CGM to help brands engage in consumer discussions. Many marketers have traditional media measurement squared away in the short term and need a solution specifically for social media. Brand monitoring helps identify influential social media voices, and client-side dashboards give social strategists turning words into traffic a path to engage in conversation. Companies offering engagement-focused brand monitoring include BrandIntel, BuzzLogic, Collective Intellect, and Visible Technologies.

Marketers must define clear objectives for their Social Computing programs before selecting technologies to implement.(see endnote 2) Doing so will help narrow the range of potential technology solutions and give your social media strategy a better shot at implementation success. In particular, changes in the brand monitoring market have exposed multiple uses for these “listening” technologies, which should be selected based on your business objectives rather than cost or other isolated factors. Specifically, interactive marketers and social strategists should:

Use strategy-focused brand monitoring to take a seat at the main table. The majority of today’s interactive marketing organizations are tactically focused.(see endnote 3) Owning and sharing insights from brand monitoring can help interactive marketers claim their fair share of organizational visibility as budgets and influence shift to digital channels.

Use CGM-quantifying brand monitoring to justify social media investments. Calculating ROI of social media initiatives is difficult, operating outside the closed loop of other interactive tactics like email and search words for traffic. Brand monitoring can help social media managers determine program effectiveness by measuring consumer engagement — specifically, brand intimacy or lack thereof.(see endnote 4)

Use tactically focused brand monitoring to converse effectively. Brands getting involved in social media are often tempted to react immediately to every mention of their products and services in the world of blogs, discussion boards, and social networks make money online. Brand monitoring can help make sense of conversations in aggregate and help identify what deserves attention and what doesn’t — driving program efficiency in social influence marketing

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