1. Marshall Sponder
Analytics Expert & Author
January 31, 2012
© 2012 Venuelabs™ | Interpreting Social Media for Retailers | January 31, 2012 |

2. Venuelabs Retail & Storefront Analytics
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3. About our Guest
Marshall Sponder
Analytics Expert & Author
Blog: http://WebMetricsGuru.com
Booksite: http://www.smabook.com
Writing
AllAnalytics.com, InternetEvolution.com, MyCustomer.com
Recent Speaking Engagements
• Social Media Monitoring – ROI Metrics Forum
• Social Media World Forum
• Social CRM 2011
Clients & Companies
IBM, Prudential, Citibank, Monster Worldwide, Porter Novelli,
WCG, Barclays, Reuters, Digital Backpack, and may others.
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4. Brand Monitoring Overview
• Broad listening across the
Blogs Forums Press internet
News • Focused on keyword matches
Social Sites Trade Sites
Networks
– Mentions of
• Brand name “Starbucks”
• Product names “Frappuccino”
• Produces valuable insights,
but is exploratory in
nature, as a result, it can
not answer tactical questions
and is not scalable.
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5. Brand Monitoring Providers
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6. 8 Brand Monitoring Challenges
1. Signal to Noise Ratio 7. Correspondence between Online
2. Not Scalable, too manual chatter vs. Offline Word of Mouth is
3. Insightful vs. Actionable Industry dependent
4. Poor Geography / Location 8. No established, universally
acceptable standards for conducting
5. Local Data Gap / Blind Spot
social listening
6. Lack segmentation capabilities
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7. Signal to Noise Ratio in LBS
• 5% of content were
legitimate generated by
real customers
• January 2012
• 95% was spam, spoofs, • Study impact of
social on retail
coupons &
• 11.5 million posts
miscellaneous
reviewed
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8. Not Scalable – Too Manual
A lot of work is required to
turn real time exploratory
data from Social Media into
actionable insights
(although LBS is a little
easier since it has context).
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9. Insightful vs. Actionable
• Traditional “exploratory” SMM Insights and
outputs don’t match business goals or outcomes
– Share of voice
– Sentiment
– Trends
– Topics and Themes
• And … they don’t match critical needs of retail
– What customer experiences need attention?
– Where are my most critical issues?
– Which of my locations are leaders & laggards?
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10. Geography & Location
Existing SMM providers treat location as
country, region, or city and usually fail to
capture LBS data from Facebook, Foursquare and
other geo-local data.
This gap makes existing SMM providers next to
useless for retailers.
© 2012 Venuelabs™ | Interpreting Social Media for Retailers | January 31, 2012 |

11. Retail is about distinct location
Your customers are at your storefronts!
© 2012 Venuelabs™ | Interpreting Social Media for Retailers | January 31, 2012 |

12. Local Data Gap for Retailers
Local Content Surfaced Local Content Blind Spot
32% 68% Blind Spot
24% 76% Blind Spot
37% 63% Blind Spot
38% 62% Blind Spot
18% 82% Blind Spot
August 2011
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13. Local Data Gap Example
They mess up here A LOT! If I wasn’t in a rush
nor a coffee addict I would go somewhere else!
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14. Platforms lack segmentation capabilities
Most existing SMM (and
some LBS) platforms can
not segment and bucket
the data in a customized,
useful way, so it can
become insightful.
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15. Correspondence between Online chatter vs.
Offline Word of Mouth is Industry dependent
While SMM platforms
typically have poor,
uncontrolled sampling bias,
geo-location and LBS
platforms such as Venuelabs
don’t suffer, as much, from
the same issues (poor
sampling) because their
data is generated at the
storefront, via check-ins and
direct store references, and
is therefore, more relevant
and authentic.
Read more:
http://www.webmetricsg
uru.com/page/4/#ixzz1ew
WAjXpj
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16. No established, universally acceptable
standards for conducting online social listening
Almost no data
consistency
or interoperability
between platforms and a
clear sense that under
the hood, all of the them
are different.
As a result, there are no
standards in how to go
about, clean and
structure social data,
which makes it harder to
take seriously.
Read more:
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/page/4/#ixzz1ewWAjXpj
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17. Retail Storefronts
Going Local
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18. Critical Value of Local
• Actual Customer Insights
• Actionable Intelligence
• Location specific
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19. Actual Customer Insights are much
better than SMM for Retailers
• 80% content
from customers
• 15% local staff
• 5% spam
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20. Actionable Intelligence gleamed from LBS
instead of exploratory insights from SMM
They mess up here A LOT! If I wasn’t in a rush
nor a coffee addict I would go somewhere else!
Traditional Insights New Insights
Topic Location Date /Time
Sentiment Staff Working Managers
Influence Local Context Unit Sales
Engagement Nearby Competitors
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21. Advice: Start thinking of LBS Tactically
• What Measures in your stores do you want to
track (that can be integrated into LBS)?
• What Decisions would you make differently if
the one of the retails measures was surprisingly
high or low?
• What is the threshold of the measure? In other
words, at what point, if the value was exceeded
or dipped, would an alternative action take place?
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22. Q&A Session
Marshall Sponder
© 2012 Venuelabs™ | Interpreting Social Media for Retailers | January 31, 2012 |