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When Twitter user @abbeemonster writes about @nokia, she says nice things and she says them often.
If Nokia wants to know who its most passionate brand advocates on social media are, the Dachis Group can help. When CEO Jeff Dachis and CTO Erik Huddleston explained their new product in an interview earlier this week, they used Nokia as an example, even though Nokia is not a customer of the firm's new Advocate Insight service. Dachis said the service is constantly watching trends for all sorts of companies as it refines its Big Data social analytics.
"We're helping companies and brands identify their most passionate brand advocates," Dachis said. "If you're Coffee-mate, how do you know which working mom is the most passionate about cafe mocha or hazelnut latte? It's not going to be Guy Kawasaki, or Robert Scoble, or someone like that. The real advocates share photos of it, they Pinterest it, they're active in discussing or engaging about the brand of Coffee-mate."
Dachis is a social business consulting, advisory, and online services company that publishes the Social Business Index and sells a related service for monitoring the health of a brand's social media presence.
[ How do you measure social success? See 5 Social Media Metrics That Matter Now.]
During a demo, Huddleston explained that he produced the Nokia analysis showing @abbiemonster as that brand's #1 advocate for a recent breakfast presentation in the U.K. (when we looked again, she had dropped to #7)."If you look at her followers, she is amazing. She's consistent in her support for the Nokia brand, articulate in her interpretation for her audience, and passionate when she defends the brand against Android and iPhone attacks. She posts hundreds of positive Nokia-related tweets a month. Now, Nokia has a best-in-class, amazing social program, but when we presented this, no one in the room [had] ever heard of or seen her on Twitter," he said.
In addition to identifying advocates, Advocate Insights makes it possible to track their sentiment over time--for example, to see in @abbiemonster's tweets "one dip and then a save--looks like she got a little perturbed about the brand" for one bad day, Huddleston said.
Knowing who their top fans are gives a company options to recognize and reward them and keep them on the brand's side. Figuring out the right way to do that is another question. Dachis said, "There are a ton of advocate strategies brands employ. For example, Red Bull uses random acts of kindness as a motivational campaign."
A relatively small business may get by with informal, anecdotal analyses of its best advocates, according to Dachis, but major corporations are drowning in so much social media data that they need an automated approach. Advocate Insights also makes it possible to filter results by product, country, or any other dimension.
Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard
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