Influential launches IBM Watson-powered platform to analyze a brand’s social audience
That analysis generates an overall marketing strategy about how the brand can best reach its consumers.
It’s not every day that one of my past stories played a role in the story I’m writing.
But that’s the case here. In 2015, while working for another publication, I wrote a story about a startup influencer company landing its first major investment through a matchmaker funding site.
That story, Influential CEO and co-founder Ryan Detert told me this week, attracted the attention of someone at IBM, who called to see if there was interest in working with the computing giant’s new Watson supercomputer.
There was, and they did, becoming the first — and, so far, the only — influencer network to employ Watson’s multitalented intelligence.
Which brings us to the current story.
In addition to its existing Watson-informed platform that matches influencers with brands, the Los Angeles-based firm is now launching a new Watson-powered platform called Social Intelligence.
The new platform analyzes past comments on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube about a brand or a product in order to understand the audience that follows this brand.
Detert said that Social Intelligence determines “what they care about most,” such as TV shows, publications, themes of conversation, events they attend, the music they listen to, the liquor they drink, their outdoor activities, celebrities they have an affinity with and retailers they frequent.
It then generates a go-to-market strategy for how to reach that audience across various channels, such as recommending the characteristics for micro-segments or the kind of positioning the brand might want. Here’s a sample screen of affinities for a given microsegment:
The report is delivered as a PDF, although Detert said it can also be sent as data to, say, a data management platform.
While social listening platforms like Brandwatch also analyze social users’ comments, Detert said those kinds of tools are focused on “what others are saying about your brand.”
“We’re taking a deeper dive,” he said, “describing insights that go beyond social.” He added that his company is “the only one doing it at this level.”
By analyzing what appeals to the brand’s audience, he said, “you can predict the future.”
Which prediction might, for instance, forecast any phone calls to Influential that will result from this story.
About The Author
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.
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