With the rise of big data, companies have been inundated with dashboards to “see into the market.” There’s social dashboards, search and web analytics dashboards, and even dashboards built to help read dashboards. Drowning in data, many are overwhelmed with dashboard fatigue, “too much data, not enough analysis.”

Drill Social is a tool that we built here at Vest to fill a knowledge gap we saw between traditional marketing data and social media tools like Oracle and Radian6. The unforeseen effect was that we uncovered a hidden power in social media data to fuel campaign elements across print, digital, interactive, PR and media planning and buying. With this newfound data power, Vest is pushing into new territory in an attempt to alleviate client dashboard fatigue and bring useful data insights in the place of books of unrefined “data.”

Market Data Sources

Drill Social’s main objective is to identify common qualities within market segments across client and competitor fan bases. So, we started mining our data from the biggest source of behavioral data on the web, Facebook.

Using Facebook data, Vest is able to identify how many fans of a given brand are also fans of a competing brand. Additionally, we can discover fan affinities for other products, artists, foods, etc., within a given fan base. This creates a network of interlocking likes and interests within certain market segments.

With this information, we can then break down those affinities down into geographic regions, as broad as international statistics, or as granular as ZIP codes. Put simply, we can see how many women between 24 and 26 years old that like Coca-Cola also like P!nk and live in the 40207 ZIP code. Or we can even identify fans by name, whether client or competitor fans, and target them with ad campaigns.

We then triangulate competitive data as we mine for information through Twitter and YouTube, and look for correlated trends in traffic and engagement. The end result from all of this social media analysis is a view into the digital behavior of target markets, strengthened by multiple overlying layers of corroborating data.

Market Data Analysis

Still, the real magic isn’t in the tool as we see it. It is a unique data set, but the biggest need among corporate marketing departments is not more data to swim through, but actionable insights based upon reliable data. That’s the magic.

So, with the data, Vest begins to make connections within the data, and check, re-check, and re-run data numbers in light of market connections. We do this in an effort to verify hypotheses and destroy false assumptions. It can take a a while, but once market hypotheses begin to stick, the backing data begins to build a supportive infrastructure and a hypothesis becomes an insight.

With this, our research team at Vest drafts our Insights, a brief detailing our findings, and identifies strategic openings in the marketplace.

Examples of Market Data Analysis

If you check out our new Drill Social informational site, you will see much of this data in action. From Jack Daniel’s to Humana, the social insights are fueling campaign elements that get results. Go ahead, and take a look. Or give us a call and we’ll take you through your brand’s own data.

The changes in the newsfeed are going to be revolutionary to brand content strategies. Specifically, I see three tools brands are gonna wish they already had in place when the new newsfeed goes live.

1) Pinterest

As mentioned in the Hubspot publication, Facebook is placing even more emphasis on photos in the newsfeed. Not only will photos have more real estate and a killer redesign that is downright artistic in many ways, but photos will even have their own feed.

If you keep up with Pinterest and its powerful toolset, you know where this is going. Pinterest boasts the ability to sell products in-app. The inevitable conclusion: Pinterest is about to get a shot in the arm. And, it’s gonna become the brand’s best friend.

By tying Pinterest and Facebook together in brand strategy, the prepared brands will be able to share their Pinterest items using Facebook’s unbeatable sharing capability, turning that into sales through Pinterest itself.

Even non-retail brands will benefit from the move. Pinterest has always been a bit limited because sharing within the app itself does not always drive board views. I see this changing with the new Facebook overhaul. This makes the board and individual pins more shareable and shippable. Bottom-line, Pinterest just got a whole lot more interesting.

2) Brand Evangelist Data

As mentioned by Hubspot, now that ads and photos are being boosted in size, the power of ad visuals will grow as well. This means that content-wise brands will want to focus on matching visuals with short, pointed copy. On the flip side, encouraging brand evangelism is going to be crucial in getting the message pushed out and multiplied.

Most of our readers know that Vest’s proprietary social drill tool already does identified those brand evangelists, and that’s why we’re so pumped about the Facebook overhaul. Basically, it means Facebook is putting more and more resources toward brand empowerment, and our data-gathering apps will only become more powerful. For that, we are thankful. But, we also think it’s pretty much inevitable that what we once offered as a brand perk is going to become a Facebook brand necessity. You need to know your fans, inside and out, and by name.

3) Brand Overlap Analysis

The Facebook algorithm that factors Edgerank is not changing, but the visuals and content strategy are changing dramatically. This means that the brands that win in the new era of Facebook will be those that tap into their customers’ interests the best, and become the most relevant content producers.

That said, once again, we’re pretty excited. I’m always talking about how between the Facebook graph and ads APIs, brands can know how their fans overlap with the fans of other brands on Facebook. For instance, we can know of the surprising overlap between certain pizza delivery chains, and certain sub shops (I’m keeping it on the down-low but you know who I’m talking about, right?). We can know what charities brand fans already support. We can tell you how mobile-ready your digital audience is. Etc. etc.

Bottom line: in the new Facebook era, knowing your fans will be rewarded with sharing and commenting, and sharing and commenting will be rewarded with greater edge rank. Bank on it: if you serve your fans what you know they like, you will see a massive boost across your visual social channels.

Recently I tackled not one, but two bad microphone channel strips. Let me give you some perspective on this. Without an entirely modular console, we’d have to send the whole console off for repair and replace it with something during the interim. This would mean a lengthy rewire of the studio (taking at least a day). We’d lose this day to rewire not once, but twice: once when removing the console for repair and installing its replacement, and again when replacing the original after repair. Not to mention the huge shipping costs for an entire console.

Instead, because we do have an entirely modular console, the process went more like this: remove slots, channel swaps, chop, chop. Our D&R Stylyx console was down for just 15 minutes, not days.

1] One of this board’s advantages is the removable / interchangeable channel strips. If one needs maintenance, swap it out. The others remain intact. Here’s the console fully loaded with channels.

2] Moments later, the console with the bad channels (3 & 7) removed. All other channels work perfectly.

3] Two working microphone channels from the end are substituted in the slots for 3 & 7.

4] Two channel blanks replace the holes at the end and voila! In 15 minutes the console looks fine and works perfectly. I can still run 24 of my 26 microphones while the two bad microphone channels are out for repair.

The whole process, including climbing behind the console to adjust wiring, took about 15 minutes. Downtime minimal. Client never inconvenienced.

As an old analog guy, I still love having a console at the heart of my studio, even if only for the quality of the mic pres. How about you?

Cinematography: Bethany Billick and Andrea Kiefer

Concept: Erin McMahon

It did bother me at first, but after a good, deep, 10-minute reflection I realized being a KIA isn’t so bad. It just means I have more knowledge than most. I kid, I kid. In all seriousness, my background has set me up to take on my role as an account manager here at Vest. In my post-college, 10-year career, I’ve served as an office manager, public relations coordinator, media buyer and now an account manager. From learning to manage people, to the basics of public relations, to fully engaging myself in media buying and planning, I’ve unknowingly been preparing myself to be a pretty good account manager. (Editor’s Note: Whitney is too modest to say it, but she’s a fantastic account manager.)

Account managers do so much more than manage accounts. Or at least in my eyes, they should be doing way more than that. If all they do is manage accounts, then they are just skating by. You have to get your hands involved in absolutely everything you can. Period. You need to learn as much about every aspect of the advertising world as possible. Period. Media planning, buying, public relations, social media, strategy, creative, production… I think you get the point. By doing this you arm yourself with the most valuable resource of all: knowledge. It not only helps you with client strategy, but it also helps to establish trust between co-workers.

All it takes is a simple conversation. Get to know the people you work with. Establish a rapport. Ask them questions about their job. Geez, take a genuine interest in what they actually do everyday at work, not just what their title says. Figure out what they do, what makes them tick and see how that jives with your work. The best teaching moment for me is to get in a room and talk about a project with three people when I have no idea what their jobs actually entail.

The end result is a win-win for everyone. I walk away feeling good about finding a solution for my client, being prepared with milestones set, and knowing everyone’s on board and ready to execute their part of the plan. My team walks away feeling prepared with any information they need and knowing what expectations are set for them. There are no secrets or fuzzy lines.

If a strong case of curiosity, asking 20 questions and liking to talk make you a Know-It-All, then who has two thumbs and is writing this blog post? This girl!

Naturally, there was no total consensus on any one ad, but the lists below represent, more or less, where the group mind settled.

Best in Show

• Budweiser “Brotherhood” (the Clydesdale one)

Best Entertainment Value

• Doritos “Goat 4 Sale”
• Go Daddy “YourBigIdea.CO”
• Kia “Space Babies”
• Audi “Prom”

On-Target

• Ram Trucks “Farmer”
• Old Spice “Irresistible”
• Samsung “The Next Big Thing”
• Volkswagen “Get Happy”
• Jeep “America Will Be Whole Again”

Weak

• Beck’s Sapphire “No Diggity”
• Prudential “Stickers”

Just Wrong

• Wonderful Pistachios “PSY – Wonderful Pistachios Get Crackin’”
• Go Daddy “Perfect Match”

I also had to include a special category for a couple brands that did great things with social. Oreo’s fantastic real-time response to the blackout at the Superdome was widely shared and applauded, while Pepsi NEXT had one of the best promoted Tweets I’ve seen.

Social

• Oreo Blackout Tweet (scroll down a little for the Oreo reference)
• Pepsi NEXT “Behind the Scenes at #CokeChase”

So how did our choices stack up against yours? What were your favorite spots?

Pretty spiffy, right?

Four Vesties comprised the core team that created this site: Jeremy Williams, interactive project lead; Damon Westenhofer, lead designer and illustrator; Stevie Starosciak, front-end developer; and Amber Stanton, designer. I caught up with Stevie to talk more about bringing this site to life.

We knew that we wanted to do something special to support the event and the American Heart Association’s important mission. We focused efforts for the invitation website on Alice’s transformative journey down the rabbit hole which would then bring them to Wonderland at the event.

This website was the first of its kind that Stevie had worked on – specifically, a scrolling parallax site. What does that mean? The scrolling refers to the way you navigate the site – scrolling down. Parallax refers to the 3D-type effect that you experience when visual elements move at different rates as you scroll, giving the appearance of depth. (Notice how Alice falls in relation to a teacup – they move at different speeds.)

Stevie’s work on the site started with coding the parallax motion. In order to achieve this effect, you have to detect a user’s scrolling on the page, which can be done using JavaScript. Additionally, you have to coordinate the position and speed of the visual bits and pieces that move around on the website. In short, what I learned is that once you’ve determined the speeds at which you want things to move and their positions relative to the screen, you do the fancy math and use JavaScript to put it all in action. It is, of course, a much more detailed process than what I’ve described, so if you’re hankerin’ for a technical explanation, let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can’t get Stevie to whip something up.

Thinking back on the project, Stevie told me, “It wasn’t just the parallax – it was also getting Alice to float, start and stop at the right moments. Alice was the hardest part.”

Stevie and Damon worked hard to find the right way to animate Alice’s motion. They ended up using sprite files, which are single-image files made up of numerous smaller images. Look at Alice’s dress in the image above – the differences in width and length. This is just one image file, but using JavaScript, Stevie can specify which part of this image – namely, which version of Alice – to display depending on what point she’s at in her fall. It’s an excellent solution for optimizing the website in terms of both form and function.

When I asked Stevie what he learned from this project, what thoughts he might have for the next website, he answered simply and with a smile, “Oh, I have ideas.”

I’m standing outside the heated tent, manning a table in the service corridor that runs behind the red carpet, surrounded by stacks of papers and checklists that I’m keeping anchored from the wind with my phone, radio, clutch, whatever I can find.

My hands are shaking with nerves and anticipation at working my first red carpet event.

It’s the January 10th Derby Prelude Party in Los Angeles, an event designed to drum up celebrity interest and attendance for the Unbridled Eve Derby Eve Gala, taking place the day before the world famous Kentucky Derby. (Pictured above, left: the event logo was projected on the rooftop of The London Hotel.)

I’ve been coordinating the local and regional media for the gala and flew out to Los Angeles to meet with the PR group handling the national media, to learn how red carpet events work, as well as how to effectively manage media and keep everything flowing.

The head of the LA agency we’re working with, Alex Lippin, explains the conveyer belt system we will be using to keep everything from bottlenecking.

On TV and in the press photos everything seems to move so smoothly, you just assume everyone’s been through this dozens of times and knows what to do and it just magically happens. Not so.

We need to get all of the celebrities identified in the lobby, then up to the hotel roof where the party is taking place. Next they must go down the service hallway and finally onto the red carpet, all while we make sure no one crashes the carpet and everyone goes through the appropriate checkpoints. We’re armed with sheets and checklists, pens and radios.

I’m stationed halfway down the back hall with a stack of letter paper printed with the names of the celebrities walking the carpet and a radio wired directly into my ear.

In the lobby, two people are armed with clipboards, checklists and face sheets (center photo, above), greeting celebrities and directing them to the bank of elevators to send them to the roof. There the celebrity is met by another representative who walks them down the hallway to my table, where I pull the card with their name on it. The celebrity and name card are both then handed off to an escort who takes them down the red carpet in front of the press, allowing the press to photograph the card to make sure name spelling is correct. Escorts make sure the carpet keeps moving and that press members get the interviews and photos they need (see photo above, right, of Louisville native Julie Smith smiling for photographers and acting as red carpet host).

It’s nerve-wracking, riffling through a large stack of papers with Gene Simmons standing behind you. It makes it difficult to stay calm and remember the alphabet to find the name card, while THE Gene Simmons is literally standing right behind you, watching you with eyes obscured by his trademark sunglasses.

It’s equally challenging to make sure everyone, from soap opera stars to movie stars, is treated with equal respect. I suppose it seems obvious, but it’s difficult to stand between an actress from One Life to Live and Colin Egglesfield from Something Borrowed and act as if you don’t know who either of them are.

You also can’t fangirl over Colin Egglesfield. It’s unprofessional. No matter how much you want to let it slip that you’re … you know, single.You also have to be cognizant of people crashing the red carpet, not that there’s much you can do if they decide to, beyond hoping they go through quickly. In a lull, a couple slipped past our multiple check points, onto the carpet. But at the same time, if we don’t know who they are, the press aren’t likely to know either, or care.

It’s also important to keep the photographers happy, and let them know what’s going on, especially if you have stars running late.

In all, the red carpet was a success, giving me the opportunity to gawk at some of the silver screen’s finest, but most importantly, learn how to manage and run a red carpet.

While most of life doesn’t take place in the limelight of Hollywood or on the red carpet, the organization and management skills seen in the situation are useful everywhere in public relations.

Public relations, while most often thought of for press releases and media management, is also about interfacing with the public and your clients, and often that’s just as much a delicate balance as keeping all the press and celebrities happy on the red carpet.

In both traditional and digital advertising the metrics set to measure success are notoriously creative.  Measuring brand awareness or organic search ratings, rather than the actual numbers that determine whether CEOs or CFOs get raises or get fired.  When the ad men come in and sell the marketing department on these secondary metrics, they leave the marketing department with the problem that while “marketing” numbers will go up, the correlation to bottom-line is up in the air.  This means that the marketing department is missing the bridge necessary to get the CEO or CFO from one side of the chasm to the other.  This forces the marketing team head to take his career into his hands to insist that “more Facebook fans, will convert to sales…I hope.”

The key for us ad guys is to help our partners in marketing to the fullest extent, and that means tying our plans, not to the immediate metrics we want to see most, but to the metrics that the boss of our client partners need to see most.  That means bottom-line.

Social Media has been notoriously difficult in this arena of late.  Everyone knows they have to be on Facebook, but almost no one knows what to do when they get there, how fans fit in the overall marketing picture, and especially how fans translate to sales.  So lets tackle the killer question first, and maybe in future blog posts we can discuss the other two.  Translating fans to sales.

Step 1: Define Goals

The first step in achieving the ROI you desire is to define in detail what “return” you are expecting.  For the CEO or CFO this is often bottom-line growth.  The importance of this first stage can’t be over-emphasized though.

It is possible to work backwards from any goal to find an appropriate content, ad, or app strategy to reach that point.  The biggest issues here are getting a clear sense of what its going to take to move that needle.  How many people have to buy to reach the sales goals for the quarter?  How many people would you like to lead from social channels into a user? What is the optimal cost per acquisition?  These clear parameters set the stage for step 2.

Step 2: Quantify results

One of the biggest issues for corporate social programs is defining where in the funnel social fits.  Many have relegated social simply to customer service, and other post-purchases activities.  This is something of a cop out, in my estimation.

Social media is certainly a powerful tool for customer loyalty, but it is far more than that.  If an ad man tried to justify the ad spend of a billboard as “driving customer loyalty” he’d be laughed out of the room for trying to rely on false metrics for his ad spend.  Same for Social.

The key to quantifying social results is understanding where in the funnel various Social strategies fit, what actions are necessary to move them down the funnel, and lastly, what action must be taken to complete the sell-through process.  In other words, we can project future results only in so far as we understand how many leads we need to generate, how leaky the sales funnel is, and finally how much revenue is gained by sell-through.  These are hard numbers, and can be discovered with a little digging.  And the digging leads to digital gold.  It leads to quantifiable results that can be both forecasted, and verified.

Step 3: Set Social Spend

Another common issue with social programs is they are often working with a general budget, as opposed to a budget tied directly to Key Performance Indicators tied to points in the sales funnel.  This leads to the inevitable position of ad spend being viewed in a haphazard manner, spent in spurts and squirts.

A clear sense of where the fans fit in the ultimate sales funnel helps the social department allocate spend toward the hard goals set in step 2.  It’s all science.  The problem often times is not that the marketing team does not know its ultimate goals, the problem often times is not realizing that social media can in fact be measured and analyzed, and that analysis can, in fact, be acted upon when they know what they need their fans to do next in the sales pipeline.

Step4: Content. Content. Content.

We have been doing a fair number of fan overlap reports for our brands where we show them what their fans like, what they talk about, and where they hang out on Facebook.  We get the data through the ads tool in Facebook, but I always find that funny.  Knowing what your fans are interested in certainly helps you send ads to the right people, but perhaps most importantly…it helps you create relevant content.

Content is king on the net, and in social in particular.  With Facebook the best ads are those driven by page content or activity.  Why? Because it is a downpayment on what the user can actually expect to receive if they become a fan. Whether the ad says “so and so just liked this page,” or promotes an actual post, the power of the ad is found in its relevance to the audience.

This makes your actual social activity your ad copy.

Step 5: Ad Creation

Depending on where your brand is positioned in relation to its Facebook fans determines what you want the ads (and content) to accomplish.  In social we can boost fan numbers, drive fan engagement, or drive conversion, and these three form a funnel of sorts.

It is easier to get fans, than to engage them.  As such the largest portion of the funnel is your fan base, and this of course, needs to be set to grow consistently over time.  We do not want this to spike to quickly though, because we want to attract fans that will engage.  Why?  Because you aren’t going to get into anyone’s timelines without fan engagement.  Massive numbers of inactive fans create huge problems for the ultimate goal of conversion.  Steady growth of users who are likely to engage needs to be a consistent priority.

Fan numbers form the foundation upon which to build engagement.  This is a consistent priority and the part that takes the most time and talent.  This is largely a content issue, but your ads need to be geared to both attract new fans who want to engage, and current fans who perhaps have engaged in the past, but have gone inactive.  Engaged fans provide you two crucial power centers: 1) They are most likely to convert to sales, and 2) They will help convert others into users. Which brings us to point 3.

With a decent fan base, and a strong engagement rate, ads can be geared toward conversions into sales.  This is where development of Facebook Apps, driving people to your website, or into the store comes in.  It can’t be done without a concerted effort on fan numbers and engagement, but becomes very powerful when put together.

Step 6: Ad Optimization

From there, we begin to optimize ads based upon the return we are getting.  Different creative, different copy, different audiences, different affinities, different workplaces etc. allow your Facebook ad team to tweak ads to perform their best.  This takes a strong analytics tool, a lot of curiosity, and a hacker’s mindset.  Its a process of locating strong points of correlation, asking the right questions, and pushing the ads at any point waiting for an opening to show itself.

Testing is a huge part of this.  Using a small budget, focus on small target audiences, and see where things resonate.  Expand as necessary.

Step 7: Return to step 4

There is more to this process of course, and I will continue to expand on what we’ve started here in this blog for the next few weeks. But, it can’t be stressed enough…the key to success in social is setting those sales goals hard and fast.  Go ahead, ask more of your social.