MADISON, WI -- 11/19/08 --
Networked Insights, a provider
of customer intelligence across social media, today released the second
Measuring the Social report
detailing the top 10 songs among the online audience as compared to
Billboard's weekly Hot 100 chart. While traditional music charts like
Billboard determine song rankings based on sales and airplay, Networked
Insights' report offers a new take on music audience measurement by
analyzing the millions of interactions occurring online everyday around the
most popular songs.
Similar to Networked Insights' first Measuring the Social report that focused on television
ratings, the music report shows significant differences between the
Networked Insights and Billboard rankings. Once again, the research
indicates that the online population represents a unique audience and
should be measured and marketed to differently than traditional methods.
Key findings of the second Measuring the Social report include:
-- Seven of the songs on Networked Insights' top 10 list do not appear in
Billboard's top 10 songs, indicating a large discrepancy between song
purchase/airplay and audience interactions online
-- While both lists consist mostly of pop and hip-hop/R&B songs,
Networked Insights' chart shows a different genre with two songs in the
"alternative" category: Secondhand Serenade -- "Fall For You" (5) and
Coldplay -- "Viva La Vida" (7)
-- Secondhand Serenade's lyrics are popular among social network users as
they lend themselves well to posting as comments and on friends' pages as
evidenced by "Fall For You" taking the fifth spot on the Networked Insights
chart
-- During this timeframe, R&B group Brutha released an a capella version
of Kanye West's song "Love Lockdown" online, generating interest from the
online audience, and boosting the rank of the original song on the
Networked Insights chart to number 9. "Love Lockdown" does not appear on
the Billboard top 10
-- American Idol winner David Archuleta's "Crush" is third on Networked
Insights' list due to the strong interactive component of the show
transferring to online interactions
"The second Measuring the Social report proves that across many industries,
marketers need to fully understand their online audiences and not just rely
on traditional forms of measurement that leave out this massive,
influential group of people," said Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked
Insights. "The way people interact with music now goes far beyond just
buying it or listening to it on the radio, and the music industry needs to
update the traditional ways they analyze and understand their target
audience."
Today, online measurement generally involves listening to the 15% of people
that post content online. While this section of the audience is important,
the other 85%, which Networked Insights uncovers, is interacting in other ways equally as valuable when analyzing
audience behavior online -- reading, rating, sharing, linking and inviting.
In the early days of the Web, when sites were one-way and static, audience
measurement was based on eyeballs, then shifted to transactions as the Web
became more complex, which painted a more accurate picture of online
behavior. Now, understanding true online behavior is about understanding
the social, measuring all the different ways people are interacting online.
This also includes the important metric of influence for each interaction
-- for example, Tiger Woods sharing a golf video carries far
more weight than an everyday golf enthusiast taking the same action.
To gather data for this Measuring the Social report, Networked Insights
tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which
included 3.5 million conversations per day and over 120 million unique
users. The Networked Insights top 10 chart is compared to Billboard's Hot
100 list for the week of October 28 to November 4, 2008.
For continued insights and access to the full Measuring the Social report,
subscribe to the Measuring the Social feed at www.socialsights.com.
About Networked Insights
Networked Insights measures the social to drive more effective marketing,
by determining who to target and how to convert them. We tell you where
they are, the influence they carry and the language they use. Networked
Insights gives companies the ability to discover and act upon real-time
Customer Intelligence from a wide variety of social media sources,
providing truly customer-driven insight based on both content and social
behavior generated from customer-to-customer interactions. Previously,
companies gained customer information by asking predetermined questions or
proving company-generated hypotheses. Networked Insights puts the customer
at the center of the intelligence process so that companies can let the
customer decide what's important. Networked Insights is privately held and
based in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information, go to
www.networkedinsights.com.
Contact:
LaunchSquad
Jeremy Frank or Gavin Skillman
insights@launchsquad.com
212-564-3665
