More than a tool, Mass Relevance is a wish many media companies and brands turned publishers express: That of scaling their conversation strategy to the point where the best content from participants is embedded right into the TV program and live digital cast in real time.
Next generation CEO Sam Decker, a veteran in digital marketing, word of mouth, and user generated content, gave me a tour of the platform recently. Sam previously grew Dell.com (consumer) to $3.5B and was founding CMO at Bazaarvoice, the leader in social commerce.
From its beginning brainstorming sessions to build the first tool, TweetRiver, Austin-based Mass Relevance currently serves media organizations and brands like NBC Sports, Cisco, Samsung, and Xbox.
With a 14-people team and 40 clients, the company is a preferred partner of Twitter media and is working on adding more services and custom technology around the TweetRiver platform.
Curation, strategy, visual rendering
The deep curation capabilities available on TweetRiver are employed to make sense of existing content volume around an event or program - for example, the Oscars, The Voice [depicted in the image here], or a sports match.
The tool allows you to filter comments, in this case tweets, by choosing from a robust set of variables, identifying the most relevant based upon the combination, and posting it to the event site and screen choosing from a series of interesting visualization templates.
All in real time, and with the ability to provide the final manual approvals. Human curation happens after the automatic filtering.
The filtering rules are very granular on purpose - to map to the proper engagement with the business. The goal is to lead to real business results. Some of the key performance indicators and measurements include time on site, page views, ad views, traffic, and conversion.
Done well, curation shows what the audience is experiencing right there and then.
A very powerful proposition.
Social content is more valuable outside the network
Which brings me to a consideration about online commenting and activity - social is non media.
It's the connective tissue, the glue that unifies, unites, and integrates digital, virtual, and physical worlds. Owned Web properties, earned commentary and coverage, and paid media - events, entertainment, etc. Its value increases when it is more closely associated with the topic it is about.
I've always maintained that a business should plan to organize its Website to reflect editorial impact, community building, and marketing principles. Curation of social content sits at the middle of a brands' digital presence.
You can see more examples of curated content from TweetRiver here.
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Pricing is based upon a couple of variables. Subscriptions for the platform, which a production company could log in and use itself, for example, are based on number of users, number of streams, and volume of content hosted at Mass Relevance.
Applications can get really creative: From mobile displays, TV, mobile applications, retail endcaps, etc. This is where we're just getting started. There is opportunity to really pay off the promise of brand as publisher.
I like the idea of bridging virtual or digital with physical worlds to extend experiences. What gets your attention?
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I'm starting to think that the tools for measuring and controlling social media have outgrown the original social media widgets themselves. But while the monitoring tools offer a myriad of settings and options, the social platforms these things are built around are probably still bigger, in a more metaphysical sense. They're beginning to control how we think and react and feel and approach a number of situations, and that's a type of mass societal permeation that can't be hammered down to filters and drop-down menus.
Posted by: Emma | August 24, 2011 at 12:38 PM
In the end, these are tools. We will learn to design better tools yet - these are early days. Knowing Sam Decker (and Ze Frank as adviser) are behind this effort helps me frame the intent of this execution, at least vis-a-vis its utility. Tools reflect, people control.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | August 24, 2011 at 06:20 PM