TechFaster

TechFaster.com is a venue for technology startups to highlight and promote the tech startup culture including the people, events, and jobs that make those organizations great. Interactive lists rank these elements based on an algorithmic score and a popular vote.

The interview covered

TechFaster: Who are you, and what is Social Strategy1?

Dennis: My name is Dennis Stoutenburgh and I’m the president and cofounder of Social Strategy1. We work with clients along all industries to basically mine and develop insights though social media channels. Our companies are startups and small companies that are looking to utilize social media to promote the brands and create social media presence for the first time. To large fortune 500 companies who are looking to take advantage of insights that are derived through social media.

We combine technology that mines and portrays a visual landscape from social and digital media, pulls from a situated platform and uses business intelligence semantic analytics technology, with human analysts to create insights that our companies use to help them grow, recruit and gain competitive insights for things as far reaching as corporate governance. We have law firms, accounting firms, and many professional services in addition to direct consumer operations.

A lot of our BtoB clients actually utilize it for lead generations. Identifying either problem areas of their competitors that create lead opportunities or in some instances we find areas of conversation that lead to direct lead generations. Our objective in putting this together is social media is more than a buzz analytic play and we look to bring insights to our clients to help them grow their business.

Clearly social media is here to stay, and the demographics of the people that are using it are broadening every day, we feel like it’s going to have fundamental changes, we already know there are fundamental changes for brands in terms of two-way communications, but we think there are a bunch of industries that are going to be fundamentally changed. Market research, market analytics firms, and we intend to be right in the middle of helping companies take advantage of how people are communicating on the line, how what they say can help them grow and drive their businesses.

TechFaster: What kind of metrics do you monitor?

Dennis: In terms of what we monitor, basically every social application that has a direct API. We have direct APIs, we have contract with a number of data aggregators.

We talk about all digital media, so forward to Facebook is the discussion we use, the analytics are driven by, obviously we have technologies that can give you the traditional analytics if that’s what you’re looking for. Positive, negative and neutral sentiment and influencers and how influential they are.

And did certain areas of conversation resonate, what kind of reach did they have, how much velocity did that reach have? Did a large host turn into a news article and a news article turn into another media article and how many people that touched. That’s all kind of the traditional analytics. But really where we stand out is trying to dig a little deeper into those and take seemingly despair pieces of information and have our analysts use out sematic technologies to uncover insights.

Anything from reputation management  to product development insights to customer sentiment insights to competitive insights to compliance issues about either products or industries.

We talked to work with these professional services firms, at least once quarter we’re asked by one of them to research a given area or a topic of interest and figure out if there can be a business developed around this topic. We got to four and try to identify the people that would likely buy these types of services. What are they talking about, is this product important, what are the types of companies they are looking for.

So it’s past the traditional metrics that most people think about when they think about social media exclusively measuring brand affinity.

TechFaster: Tell us about the new Jacksonville Jaguars logo.

Justin: On February 5th, the Jags launched a new logo and it had a press release event announcing the logo and a stand united campaign. So what we did is engage conversations all across the web and from mainstream media, social media, and networks in a sense of what people thought of the new logo what the broad sentiment of it was.

Across all of the mentions that we indexed the reach was 1.7 million people. We reached through conversation of the new logo and the majority of that was through negative mentions, so people who were more negative about the new logo ended up having a further reach than those who were positive about the logo.

Our research also found that 1.7 in 10 males were positive about the logo whereas 4.5 in 10 males were negative. For women, 2 in 10 were positive about the logo, so this in a broad sense can give businesses, BtoB and BtoC the insight into who is talking about their business, what’s relevant to them and how to use this type of data to make decisions.

One of the most impacted areas of online sentiment is retail, so it’ll be really interesting to watch how this sentiment initially affects retail sales as the season begins in August and beforehand. Continuing on that we found Twitter was more active than Facebook and it stirred more conversation, a lot of retweets. Much more active in the sporting community than Facebook. And one of the coolest thing was the WordCloud, when we looked at some of the conversations, the theme that one of which was the stand united theme that the Jaguars were pushing, but due to the negative sentiment, some of the themes that came out were cartoonish and female.

We’re not stating an opinion of the logo this is just a WordCloud based on the frequency of use when discussing the logo, so it can give businesses a really good understanding of what a lot of the market bears for their products, their brand and their competitors.

TechFaster: Are your clients from one industry, or are they all across the board?

Dennis: It is across the board I’m a bit amazed, thankfully we have a lot of our existing clients once we start with them especially the larger ones will have other divisions that work with us.

We were with one client today who turns diversity of the offering that holds an annual entrepreneur competition and were helping them find candidates they wouldn’t otherwise see.

Their traditional methods of identifying high growth, stable prospects has historically been through PE firms and local competitions like here in Dallas we have the Dallas 100. But that wouldn’t catch a company that is fast growing and doing great things in West Texas.

And so, we by utilizing our technology and not just looking for brand affinity, you know everything that you can see online.

Who’s hiring, who’s growing in terms of footprint. Either number of locations or square footage in a given location.

We then pull that data together, then go and qualify that candidate cause it makes sense it’s someone you want to be associated with. Serve them up as our partner and then try and get these entrepreneurs to engage with them. Once they engage we will go through the process of qualifying the candidates. So measure these candidates against their own competitors, are their customers having positive experiences with them, are they managers or have senior leadership, are there skeletons in the closet that you’d want to know about.

All these things happen through our data polls and through our analysts’ polls. When this started, obviously it started as brand engagement and we’re now working with this company’s security team and their marketing team with some special things they are doing related to the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016.

TechFaster: How important is YouTube in your approach?

Dennis: It’s a meaningful, meaningful player. We’re platform agnostic, we don’t care where the data comes from. Depending on the product, we do work with luxury car brands, YouTube’s a huge player.

It is very important not only for us but for other people getting an understanding of what their putting their product out there for. There’s a how to about everything on YouTube. And to ways people are utilizing different products.

Utilizing video to expose it. As a matter of fact, one of our clients, one of their competitors, YouTube turned out to be a big problem for them where a drunken daughter of a partner was videoed about talking about her dad and how much money he made and how he would never hire the losers that are videoing her right now and she just went on and on talking about this brand that got published in five minutes and it went worldwide, this thing went viral past that people took snippets of it and created other pieces of social media content and went just as viral as the original. And I guarantee that company will use it in training for the next 20 years.

Read How Social Media Monitoring Can Benefit Your Business