Martech Challenges – Linkfluence Manifesto

At Saas Advisor, we aim to clarify the complex and constantly evolving MarTech market. That’s why we created the Martech Challenges. The Martech Challenge is a contest which compare the best Marketing Technologies under actual conditions of use. This competition will be judged by a panel of experts from global brands and agencies and the results are expected at the beginning of october. For more information about the Martech Challenges, click here. 
On this 1st Edition we address the Social Listening segment. We interviewed each software company participating in the contest. For Linkfluence, Guillaume Decugis CEO & Guilhem Fouetillou co-founder set out its vision of Social Listening.

Martech Challenges – Linkfluence’s Vision

In a digitized world where consumers change at the speed of the Web, the social listening industry made a broad promise to understand customers and markets better, but failed to articulate the concrete actionable benefits of collecting millions of posts on social media platforms on a daily basis. 

Indeed, this broad promise is noble, bold and ambitious.

However, much of the talk has been about the “what” (social content / social data) and the “how” (big data / AI) rather than detailing the “why” beyond that initial promise.

After discussions with many brands using various social listening tools, we heard that a piece was missing: the actionable use cases of social listening. Maybe it’s because most of the AI development has been driven by engineers based on what they could do, rather than what the market needed, e.g. XXIst century tools to grasp and understand the XXIst century consumer expectations and preferences. Share of voice and tone of the posts are not actionable KPIs, we had to, therefore, find a way to make social listening a source of business value for global brands.
Forget about the toolbox approach, what social listening desperately needed to fulfill its original promise, is data structuration.

Thanks to our hybrid model “Software suite + Human research expertise + Global services”, we had the unique opportunity to operate our own technology for our clients and identify the most valuable and actionable use cases of social data. Having worked on hundreds of briefs over the past years, we’ve been able to explore advanced usages of social data to answer key questions for our clients. Whether they had to make decisions around their marketing strategy, their advertising budgets, their choices of influencers, their media mix, their brand positioning or product innovation, structured social data is leveraged as the voice of the consumer.

We then crafted 3 solutions, to structure and turn Big data into smart data : 

• Tribe tracking, to identify, understand and monitor tribes and influencers that brands should rely on to build their advocacy.
• Trend tracking, to know the next specific trends in a market before anyone else.
• Brand tracking, to measure in real time how social conversations build brand equity and verify if the equity is aligned with what the brand wants to communicate. 

The benefits of this solution-based approach for our clients are multiple as our social intelligence solutions are:

• Actionable: these solutions are designed with a clear purpose. Whether it’s optimizing a mix of influencers to work with, allocating a marketing budget, designing a new campaign or creating specific messaging, Linkfluence’s social intelligence solutions correspond to specific actions across the marketing cycle.
• Predictable: while it’s tempting to think social data will answer any question, our social intelligence solutions set clear expectations on what they address and how they address it.
• Turnkey: from acquiring the right type and amount of social data (and yes, they work with current social network API’s), to leveraging the right type of AI models and combining the right type of human expertise, everything is designed upfront and included. This eliminates the risk of slower adoption or missing a piece of the equation and not getting ROI from social listening technology.

This wouldn’t have been possible without a viable, sustainable and regulated access to data – that is still much richer than what the industry can actually leverage – we benefit from our official partnerships with the most used social media platforms (including Social media Chinese landscape) to feed in to our powerful social listening tools.

From San Francisco to Shanghai, through NYC, London, Paris, Dusseldorf and Singapore; it is now part of our mission to make our customers earn maturity on the usage of social data. How? Starting with providing help on how to instill social data within every strategical corner of their highly complex organisations. Empowerment is key, so we launched the Linkfluence Academy to complete our value proposition.

Our offer then became even more unique in the social listening industry, giving sense to the very expression of “Social media intelligence”: 

• 2 state-of-the-art softwares – Radarly & Search -, 
• localized and verticalized human expertise to highlight insights within the data, 
• project management teams and an academy, to help our customers make the most out of our tools and social insights. 
• Linkfluence Tribes, last infant of the Linkfluence family, is an influencer identification & qualification software that is currently being alpha-tested by our customers, soon to be released in its ultimate version, to complete our offer.          

This organizational model makes us much closer to market needs. It allows us to identify patterns in client needs: repeatable, high-value questions, and drive our technology roadmap accordingly. 

Real-time alerting times are not over, business intelligence fed with structured, smart, social data is just ahead. Let us welcome you to the Social Media Intelligence world!

Thank you Guillaume, Guilhem for answering our questions for the Martech Challenges. 

Want to learn more about the Martech Challenges?

To go further

Martech Challenges – Brandwatch Interview (EN)

Martech Challenges – Digimind Interview (EN)