The Fortune Global 100 companies are mentioned 5.6 million times a month, and that’s just on Twitter. And this doesn’t include all of the conversations in which customers are talking about your product category or your competitors. But how do you figure out which of those millions of tweets and online conversations are important enough to engage with–and manage that engagement in a way that’s scalable and measurable?
This is the problem that Salorix is trying to solve with a new social media management platform called Amplfy 2.0, which it launched today. Created by a team of former NASA, Yahoo! and AOL data analytics brainiacs, the company says it has created the first social media system that uses AI to understand and analyze millions of social conversations in realtime, and then convert them into campaigns that can be tracked and measured.
Amplfy goes way beyond using a one-dimensional Klout score to rank influencers. It even goes beyond what contextual influence scoring tools like Appinions can do. The platform monitors millions of conversations and uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to make smart predictions based on who is talking about a specific brand, the context of the conversation and how likely it is for someone to engage. And the more you use the tool, the more it learns about the sets of influencers talking about your brand–to a point where it can even make recommendations for the type of content that a given influencer is most likely to engage with, in a given context.
The Salorix mission, according to CEO and co-founder Dr. Santanu Bhattacharya, is to “provide brands with a relevant audience in realtime.” Just because someone mentioned you last month, doesn’t mean they’re relevant today. Step one is obviously to monitor the conversations–Amplfy monitors Twitter (via Gnip), Facebook (public posts) and blogs. It then identifies the “golden 3%”–the people who are starting conversations and filters out the top 500 conversations that you should engage with.
Focus on Conversations, not Influencers
Amply does not score influencers, it scores conversations. Every conversation has its own score, calculated in realtime, that is based on who’s involved, the context, and–over time–the history of brand interaction with the people involved in the conversation. The scores you see in the screenshot below are not personal influence scores–they are scores for that particular conversation, at that given point in time.
Brands or agencies can filter the conversations based on brand mention or topic, and then engage with the conversation–either selecting from a series of pre-loaded (and pre-approved) messages, or creating a custom message. Over time, the system learns what types of messages a given type of individual is most likely to respond to–and will suggest messages that fit that criteria.
Bhattacharya says that this predictive behavior begins to kick in after about 3 months of using the platform for a given brand. It “brings direct marketing discipline” into social media, and enables scale.
And of course there are analytics. You can track everything from engagement, top influencers over time, sentiment, topics, competitors and more.
In effect, Amplfy combines monitoring, management and analytics into one end-to-end platform. Unlike some of the other big data analytics tools I’ve seen, which require quite a bit of expertise to define useful searches, Amplfy’s strategy is to pre-model and test the most relevant categories. To date, the company has defined the taxonomy for two industry verticals: automotive and insurance. It is currently working on building a taxonomy for the consumer electronics category, and has plans to add financial services and certain food and beverage categories.
Clients that have signed on include companies such as Berkshire Hathaway, and agencies such as WPP and Universal McCann. At a price tag that starts at $2,000 a month and up (pricing is based partly on the data consumed; some categories generate higher volumes of data), Amplfy is not for everyone. But if you’re looking to manage influencer marketing and social media outreach programs around high-ticket purchases such as cars or financial products, this is a product you or your agency need to take for a test drive.
