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. 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 Synthesio, Loic Moisand, CEO, set out its vision of Social Listening.
About Synthesio
Synthesio was founded in 2006 by Loic Moisand and Thibault Hanin, and acquired by Ipsos in 2018. It continues to operate as a standalone Ipsos technology company with Loic as CEO. The company has main offices in New York, Paris, London, Singapore, and Brussels, plus twelve satellite offices around the world. 150 employees are dedicated to Synthesio tech, and there are 300 total across the Ipsos social intelligence unit. The majority of Synthesio employees are in R&D and Product.
Since its founding, Synthesio has been focused on enabling brands with the best technology to understand their consumers and their online conversations. The problems that customers face range from relatively simple content performance measurement to complex global research projects. Because of the variability of data and users relying on social data, Synthesio is built for users at all levels of social maturity. Synthesio believes that social & online data should not live in a silo, and works with customers to leverage this data across all business units, not just marketing.
Synthesio has hundreds of customers, mostly large global brands across all industries. Examples include Abbott, Cigna, Emaar, Facebook, Honeywell, Michelin, Microsoft, and Shell.
Martech Challenges – Synthesio’s Vision
Synthesio believes that the landscape of social listening vendors has reached a level of maturity, and that the future of social intelligence — truly understanding consumers — is faced with two challenges:
1. Adapting to the rapidly-evolving data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As GDPR and similar privacy regulations make data access more difficult and less comprehensive, users are diversifying their social behaviors. Twitter doesn’t reflect the depth and richness of online communities like forums. Reddit is great for users in the United States, but it’s not where users in China spend their time.
Being adaptable to this doesn’t simply mean complying with new laws or tracking down more social networks to crawl — everyone should be doing this. It means rethinking the types of data needed to provide a full customer view — all while ensuring consumer privacy by design.
2. Providing true insights on consumer behavior. Social listening has been about taking data and putting visualizations on top of them. This is no longer sufficient for marketers and consumer insight professionals who need to answer « why » and « so what » with these massive volumes of data. True insight means moving beyond the flashy buzzwords — to proven methodologies and AI, in order to tease out the signal from the noise and put those signals in-context.
Synthesio’s market vision is not about building a better social listening tool — it’s about providing the best consumer intelligence technology and all perspectives of data, so that brands can have a total understanding of their consumers’ behavior.
Martech Challenges – Synthesio’s Product Roadmap
In Synthesio’s conversations with Customer Advisory Boards (CABs), customers are increasingly seeing the landscape as Synthesio does. In addition, customers are faced with the pressure to do more, better, faster, and with less budget. The Synthesio roadmap reflects this vision of the future while trying to answer the pain points of the present — focused on applying the rigor of market research to the speed of social data.
With major investments in R&D from Ipsos, Synthesio has already begun executing on the vision. The latest innovation from Synthesio & Ipsos is automated trend detection & insights. This new section of Synthesio surfaces insights that customers can’t find on their own, including:
- Shifts – Significant changes in relevant online conversations over a sustained period of time
- Correlations – Topics from online conversations that have similar evolutions
- Co-mentions – Topics that are mentioned together online
- Peaks – Sudden increases or decreases in relevant online conversation
- Daily Patterns – Days of the week on which relevant online conversations take place
- Media – Images or videos that are becoming viral
This latest innovation doesn’t simply detect trends, it uses AI to detect insights worth acting on. Synthesio also continues to build a stronger link between the Social Listening Platform and audience insights tool — enabling the learnings from one to inform the design of the other, and vice-versa.
The Synthesio vision & roadmap reflect core values that Synthesio has been committed to since the beginning. For example, the belief that data is only useful when liberated, combined, and connected. While the Synthesio API reflects this, the next phase of development will enrich the platform by ingesting survey data, by enhancing visual listening to link themes in images and videos to themes in text, and by developing more « thoughtful » AI alongside Ipsos experts who have been working with this type of data and technology for decades.
Because Synthesio is an agile development company, the vision and roadmap are not just ideas or plans. They are being realized today — including deep audience analysis, and automated trend detection & insights — and will continue with the rapid development of new AI capabilities powered by proven Ipsos methodologies and expertise.
Synthesio – Products & Capabilities
Synthesio’s offering was built with the idea that social data — while immense — is just one piece of the data pie that customers use to answer business questions. As a result, the Synthesio Social Media Intelligence Suite consists of three core offerings, integrated and assessed in the Martech Challenges:
1. Social Listening Platform
Built with business questions in mind, the Social Listening Platform (SLP) immediately gets customers focused on the most relevant of 40 metrics and KPIs that help measure return on investment. Recognized as being the easiest-to-use to find answers quickly, the SLP allows users of all levels of maturity to quickly understand their key metrics. Because the SLP is focused on answers, Synthesio has introduced the new automated trend detection & insights section of the platform, which is changing the way that customers work by reducing time-to-insights and providing insights they can’t find on their own.
Pricing of the SLP is based on dashboards (projects), not volumes, users or queries, so that customers have budget certainty to easily scale their social intelligence program across the enterprise.
2. Social Media Command Center
A Synthesio social media command center can be added on to any project. Command centers are used by social teams to highlight the impact of social at a company headquarters, in office lobbies, and at events. For example, Michelin showcased their social impact at the Paris Motor Show.
3. Audience Insights Tool
Monitoring conversations online only provides one piece of the story. Tracking behaviors — by listening to digital body language — provides another very important perspective. Synthesio’s unique audience insights tool is powered by the Facebook interests graph, and gets behind the spoken activity to reveal unspoken behaviors. The tool includes over 15,000 interests around demographics, media preferences, brand affinities, hobbies, entertainment, and more for any audience persona. This completes a true social intelligence program since most online behaviors are silent. For example, Pernod Ricard used the tool to understand the countless personas of buyers and their evolving interests, and tailored their content strategy accordingly.
To bring these technologies together, Synthesio has always believed that connected data is powerful data. To support this model, Synthesio has an active partner ecosystem and robust open API, allowing social intelligence to be blended with other forms. Customers, consultancies and agencies get huge value out of Synthesio today by running mixed models on data from Synthesio and other sources.
Synthesio understands that the only tools that are useful are the tools that are used. The onboarding process is designed with the busy business customer in mind. Onboarding begins with a dedicated team working closely with customers to understand business questions and use cases, and map those use cases to the most relevant social data KPIs. Then, tailored social listening programs are built, tested, and launched with users « in the passenger seat » to learn how to use the tool as an expert.
After onboarding, customers continue the relationship with a dedicated Account Manager. They also have access to the wide array of Ipsos experts (industry analysts, researchers, consultants, etc.), allowing Synthesio to be a true partner in solving business problems.
Together, Synthesio & Ipsos are using the speed of social intelligence and the rigor of market research, to provide their customers with a total understanding of their consumers and their online conversions.
Thank you Loic 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 : Les Résultats ! (FR)
