How-to Guide for Revolutionizing Media PlanningAt Networked Insights, clients often ask us, “How do your capabilities fit into our media planning process? Where can your expertise inform us, broaden our view and help us influence buyer behavior?”

With the increasing amount of content people are generating through all the unstructured data available on the Internet — via blogs, micro blogs, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, user forums, and other places — there’s a whole new realm of information that can be mined to inform the media planning process. The challenge isn’t necessarily accessing this data — there are plenty of ways to do that. It’s figuring out what to do with it once you have it and, in the case of media planners, using it to inform the strategic planning process.

Traditional media planning is a five-step process, wherein you 1) set your media objectives, 2) develop a media strategy and then 3) design media tactics. From there you 4) optimize the plan to include any adjustments for improvement and then 5) evaluate it by measuring the results against your goals.

It’s a cycle that calls for adjustments throughout, and Networked Insights can help inform every stage of that cycle.

Media Objectives and StrategyThe first step in setting your media objectives is defining your target audience. This is traditionally approached by using demographics and psychographics based on values and lifestyle segments.

Networked Insights can help define your primary and secondary audiences based on topics they discuss and their brand-related conversations. This information can also be used to determine generational cohorts (Baby Boomers, Gen-X-ers, etc.) — data that can be leveraged to identify TV, digital and other properties that resonate with the target audience.

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Networked Insights can help inform every stage of the cycle.

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Next, we can get an excellent pulse on your target audience’s product and brand usage by looking at where, when and how they discuss these topics.

As you begin defining your communication goals, you’ll start posing specific questions. How many people do we hope to reach? How many gross rating points do we want? These are the things you’ll measure against after a campaign is complete, or gauge for optimizing while a campaign is running.

We can provide clear benefits in this area, producing data for metrics like brand lift, to show how brand or category-related conversations have changed throughout a campaign. We can also monitor your campaign’s effect on earned media, specifically the added PR that’s generated in articles, on sites and blogs, and through social media streams.

Time to plan your media strategy? Based on when and where your target is engaging in conversation, we can help you determine effective flighting, aka the best times and places to deliver your content. We refer to this as sequencing of paid, owned and earned media, and done with the added insights provided by social data analysis, it can help extend the value of your media buys. (Download our CFO report)

Should you advertise on one TV network or choose a variety of different programs across the spectrum? Do you heavy-up content on a few websites, or go wide because the topic is being discussed broadly? We can help you formulate a media calendar for when to communicate what.

As you can see, the capabilities we provide go far beyond the traditional “set it and forget it” mentality. We can give you immediate insight into what’s relevant to your target audience, allowing you to adjust messaging at any time to get the results you want.

Media TacticsSome organizations think of designing specific media tactics simply as buying media. However, we like to take a more holistic view of this step, expanding the definition of media beyond traditional TV, radio and print to include other opportunities.

Maximizing paid, owned and earned media is all about sequencing. One of our clients was ready to launch a next-generation gaming product.

We analyzed the $30 million launch me-dia plan for their previous generation product and discovered that once they stopped spending, awareness plateaued — but shortly afterward awareness numbers took off again on their own. Based on this insight, we modeled a media plan for the new product that shifted the order and emphasis of paid, owned and earned media.

The result? Greater awareness and a savings of $12 million media spend.

For example, a media tactic could include selecting the best celebrity to represent your product. It could include identifying content that you can acquire and leverageacross various forms of media.

Buying media is not something Networked Insights does, but the insights that come from our social data analysis can help make this step more strategic for those who do buy media.

Optimization

The next step of the media planning process, optimization, occurs after you begin measuring performance against your media objectives. Customary methods are surveys, tracking, observation and feedback. The latter two are distinct capabilities of Networked Insights. By capturing and analyzing consumer feedback on your brand or category, we can help evaluate your campaign effectiveness and make recommendations that “tweak” your strategy.

At this stage, much of our value comes from how fast we can respond and help you benefit from either shifts in the conversation, or unexpected or breaking news-type occurrences. For example, we can quickly identify a distinct spike in online discussions on a subject your audience cares about. What’s being said? Is it relevant to your messaging? You’ll know almost immediately.

In addition to identifying these events, we can measure how fast and far the discussions are occurring. For optimiz-ing your media plan, this gives you a timely opportunity to place content in strategic places. It can also equip you with informed predictions of what will happen with that infor-mation. In short, we can help you be much more nimble when it comes to adjusting and optimizing your plan.

Evaluating EffectivenessAt the final stage of the media planning process, you begin measuring your performance against your objectives. This is similar to what you did at the optimization stage, but now the campaign is over.

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How can you increase the certainty that you’ll capture the target rating points you’re going after — and more? The television networks say they have great “social reach,” but they have no proof. We do. As an agency or as a corporate brand, you can take advantage of our social intelligence today. Being the first to have this data will give you solid first-mover advantage over your competition.

Were your goals met? For instance, if you wanted to see a shift in brand conversation, did you have that impact? Did brand awareness grow in social media? Did you have a presence on more sites? Was there an increase in discussion about your brand?

Networked Insights provides innumerable opportunities to measure and evaluate your success, using data to make adjustments for greater results.

A Summary of Our Benefits

Networked Insights can help you target an audience by providing unbiased, unfiltered access to the minds of consumers. Where we differ from other social media analytics companies is through an ability to bring together a vast spectrum of sources compiling widely dispersed con-versations. We can provide a unique combination of content and demographics to give greater focus to your audience.

Most companies today use social media monitoring tools to draw from the same data pool of Twitter, Facebook and Boardreader, which is used for searching forums. We go beyond these to also leverage tools like BigBoards and Technorati. And unlike other data analysts, we build target audiences using demographics from sources like comScore, Quantcast, Alexa and Google Adplanner. Taking the extra time to define an audience so precisely means you get deep, accurate data, while eliminating the bulk of social media “noise” that generally exists surrounding any given topic.

Having access to this immense wealth of data gives you the ability to approach problems in a different way. You can identify and predict trends quickly, and gain a powerful advantage over your competition.

And ultimately, you can gain the results you want, at the minimum effective investment. Or in other words, you get much, much more bang for your buck.

Questions about this report? Want a free consultation on how social data can improve your media planning and other marketing? Contact us.

Email: info@networkedinsights.com

Web: www.networkedinsights.com

Phone: 608.237.1867

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Gone are the days of static segmen-tation and changing segmentation every 18 months. In the social media age, you don’t need to conduct tens of thousands of surveys requiring months of waiting. Instead, we use the information and knowledge-sharing among your customers’ social media interactions to drive a set of demographics and that show how and where relevant social media conversations are happening.

We overlay data from Comcast, Google and comScore, looking at different segments. In this emerging era of dynamic segmentation or hyper- segmentation, you can reach premium viewers without paying premium pricing.