Customer Engagement

1) Following the money.
Brands rely on campaigns targeting bloggers and influencers to organically build buzz among followers on image-based social networks, and it’s a tactic that works incredibly well. But now, Pinterest and Instagram are introducing advertising with the goal of dramatically monetizing their currently-bare bottom lines. There are several recent reports that show Pinterest is pricing CPMs at $30-40 and that Instagram’s CPMs will also be on the high-end, with month-long campaigns starting at $350,000 and up. In 2015, you can expect to see major brands diverting advertising spends from traditional channels like TV into image-based social networks to up their game and stand apart from the competition. After all, glossy and gorgeous imagery is easily transferred to digital and social campaigns. Where there’s money spent, there is always the need for analytics and measurement in order to optimize and prove ROI.

2) Brand protection
Brands have enormous vested interest in knowing where and how their images are being used and shared – deliberately or otherwise — and to glean insights about people’s relationships with, and reactions to, their content. Equally important, visual listening will help brands ensure that other parties are not misusing their images.

3) Serendipitous insights
Visual listening will open up a world of insights and new business opportunities by discovering more about the moments in which branded images are used in relation to other images, content, and social markers. Using visual listening, you’ll be able to spot patterns and correlations that could lead to serendipitous discoveries, fuel new under-the-surface campaigns, reveal untapped audiences and stimulate product development ideas. For example, imagine the type of campaigns a sneaker brand can create after discovering that consumers are frequently sharing photos of their latest kicks while drinking coffee at Starbucks.

4) Tech innovation
Data science has come a long way. I believe that in 2015 the industry will innovate to make it possible to train a computer to recognize the difference between an image of a dog and a cat. It could even be sophisticated and powerful enough to discern a highly nuanced brand signal, like the crown within the Starbucks logo or the leaf at the top of Apple’s logo. Word on the street is that Facebook is already using some pretty advanced image recognition technology to identify faces in photos and images posted. These kinds of leaps in technology will unleash the potential and sophistication of visual listening.

5) Emotions front and center
Emojis, emoticons, and stickers are an integral part of our social vernacular as well as everyday conversations on text and chat. Earlier this year, the Unicode Consortium introduced approximately 250 brand new “pictographic symbols,” including such recognizable additions as the middle finger and the Vulcan salute. In 2015, more racially diverse emojis will be released. Since emojis are technically code, not images, they can today be measured through standard textual tools but for brands, the visual listening (and learning) opportunity lies in understanding how emojis are used contextually, alongside their logos and images.

6) Command centers as real-time visual listening sources
As the social environment matures in 2015, I anticipate that command centers will spread as a mainstream business tool. By tapping into unified views of textual and visual listening in a totally engaging way, marketers will create a compelling source of social intelligence and action.

Via Eric_Determined / Eric Silverstein