California Apparel News

It’s a given that a Facebook or Twitter page can raise the profile of a business, but retailers are still trying to figure out exactly what’s to be learned from all those followers.

Brands are looking to social-media analytics to go beyond re-tweets and “likes” to drill down and decipher which products are successful, where there’s room for improvement, what customers want to see more of—and, of course, how to create a loyal following.

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, Tumblr, Pininterest, Four Square, StumbleUpon, Digg and You Tube are just some of the social-media sites that can be scoured for keywords, comments, impressions, conversations and click-thrus.

The massive amount of unstructured data from so many social-media sites is hard to measure and requires a variety of sophisticated data-analytic tools that include everything from Web crawlers to linguistic algorithms to measure user interactions.

This has many chief marketing officers worried, according to John Squire, director of digital marketing and analytics for IBM. In a recent IBM survey of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers worldwide, the No. 1 concern was data explosion, and their No. 2 concern was social media.

“They feel the least prepared for this, but it will have the most impact on their brand,” he explained. “They’re trying to get their hands on what does social media mean to their brand and how do they put a series of repeated steps in place to make decisions on what they’re given.”

IBM has developed several analytic tools—including technology that analyzes semantics such as “likes” or negative comments or that measures volume activity with clicks, tweets and re-tweets—but the company’s new Cognos Consumer Insight software takes a much broader look at the Web by using Web crawlers to examine multiple social-media sites, blogs and websites to see whether conversation about products is positive or negative.

Last fall, as an experiment, the company used Cognos to examine 1.2 million online conversations over a 90-day period to look at how consumers were talking about six large sporting-goods retailers. Cognos examined how consumers were speaking about the stores in terms of the product, value, quality, service and return policy.

“Retailers might not have a good understanding of how they market themselves versus how consumers talk about the brand and the company,” Squire said.

What they found was that some stores were known for certain sports, such as baseball or football—even though the stores had not marketed themselves that way. Given this new information, the retailer could spend more time making sure it is known as the only place to come for baseball or football needs and persuade the public that it’s a market leader in this area, Squire said.

Shop Igniter is a Portland, Ore.–based start-up that both creates social-media programs and measures the results. The company started a little more than two years ago and has helped brands such as Nike, Levi’s and Target build social-commerce experiences to generate revenue.

“In order to be effective, the social-commerce experiences need to be compelling and inspire the social customer to discover, buy or share a product,” said Kevin Tate, Shop Igniter’s chief marketing officer.

The company provides retailers with flash sales, competitions and online games to apply to their social media, as well as analysis of feedback from the sites.

“The brands we’re working with are already using tools around conversation management,” Tate explained. “What we’re getting from our social-commerce platform is more commerce-focused—what’s the average order size, what did they buy, what colors—then, also, new metrics more specifically wrapped around the social customer, such as sharing and rewards.”

Looking for brand advocates

Shop Igniter analyzes data to see which customers are earning reward points through a retailer’s Facebook page, which ones are sharing links through other social media and which ones are influencing others with their shares. Brands can wind up with customers who actively advocate for them online and influence others to purchase from them, which can all be discovered through analytics, Tate said.

Nike is one such example.

“We found there were 187 customers who were really acting like brand advocates on their behalf, and people were responding to them,” Tate said, referring to one of the company’s golf product launches.

Alexandra Swanson, a marketing coordinator for Billabong’s Eden brand, said she focuses on social-media analytics more on the women’s side because the company primarily uses its Facebook page to engage with young women in conversations about Element Eden Advocates and inspiration to help create its brand identity and potential long-term customers.

Although Element Eden has a Tumblr blog and Twitter page, Swanson primarily relies on Facebook Insights and Google Analytics for her analysis of social media.

“I’ll look at the traffic drive coming from the post that relates to it, and where we spiked on impressions, and how many people are talking about a specific topic, and then I will relate it back to Google Analytics on our own Element Eden site and look at our unique-visitor count, what pages are people most clicking to and where, specifically, the traffic drives are coming from—are they organic visitors versus banner clickers from ads.”

She said she doesn’t feel an additional third-party service is necessary at this point, but she isn’t ruling it out for the future.

Measuring feedback

Cameron Glass, a retail strategist for consulting firm Kurt Salmon, noted that more than 80 percent of retailers don’t measure the impact of their social media.

“It’s a large group but not surprising given the difficulty measurement can pose,” Glass explained.

“Retailers are at the very infancy stages of using analytics, let alone social-media analytics,” explained Rick Dutta, chief executive officer of Infovisionix, a business intelligence and retail analytics company based in Irvine, Calif.

One of Infovisionix’s goals is to try to help retailers predict how a new product will sell. Endeca is one of the technology platforms the company uses to mine unstructured data, primarily from Facebook, and convert it into a form that can help retailers predict a product’s success.

A retailer can post photos on its Facebook page of a new line or of a product in two different colors and then invite users to make comments. Endeca then searches for keywords with assigned attributes, such as light colors versus dark colors, and determines if the language associated with the attributes is positive or negative.

The negative and positive impacts are then measured, and a prediction, based on the analysis, can be made as to how a product will fare. Based on the results, a retailer could decide to hold back a product line, only release certain colors or even release different products for different areas depending on the geographical response.

“Analytics is the only way to monetize data,” Dutta said.