Finding True North in the Forest and not Trip over the Trees

How many social networks are you on? It depends on where you are from, and the answer could be Facebook plus LinkedIn/Quora/Pinterest/Twitter/Instagram…. not to mention native forum popular in your region, or ultra-niche like expat networks. Being active on multiple social networks is common, almost a standard as having a cell phone and emails. Despite all the new social networks that keep popping up, most of us still open Facebook on our phones, check our friends’ status, and then leave massive digital footprint on Facebook, either directly, or through one of the other services, which is connected to Facebook anyway.

It’s incredible how deeply we are attached to Facebook. This degree of umbilical linkage was unimaginable when Facebook launched 10 years ago. While Facebook is no longer cool and exciting, and may not be the one generating the buzz these days, it is still the place where all the viral content goes in the end, no matter where those viral content came from. When a technology no longer excites, that’s when it has taken root in our life. No one is excited about emails, but no one can deny email’s power in our work life.

Like the gold/blue/white costume post came from Buzzfeed, or the release of Apple Watch and the New Macbook, we can eventually find something regarding those on Facebook. Thus, for marketing people restricted with time and resources to monitor all social networks, choosing Facebook is the most reasonable and effective option. If a piece of news can’t be found on a platform which serves 1.4 billion users, it can hardly be called viral to be honest.

Moreover, Facebook has the most robust audience response system (a workable balance between the depth of an email and the shallowness of a tweet). It is this audience feedback that makes Facebook such a valuable tool for marketers, politicians, and virtually everyone who seeks to understand and influence the world.

To help organize those fire hydrant of information into usable drinking fountain, QSearch helps users monitor, analyze, and determine a course of action. When Ben Crox of Hong Kong wanted to understand his digital world of HK media, he used QSearch to search for pattern to investigate. In this report, Ben thoroughly analyzed influences of each news media in HK over Facebook with ease. With visually comprehensible chart and intuitive user interface, every one can visualize the footprint in the digital snow and find their own path.

Written by Tien-Yu Lee & Roger Do

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What Gets Measured Gets Managed

“What gets measured gets managed.”

~Peter Drucker, Management Guru

Every organization uses KPI to measure progress. For sales people, KPI can mean anything from hard numbers such as revenue to soft numbers such as number of customers met in a given time. For marketing, it’s even harder to establish a KPI that measures awareness and response. How do you measure awareness? 

Traditional measurements, like surveys and polls, are ineffective and broken. We either over-valued certain portion of the demographics or underestimated hidden opinions. Even the gold standard such as ACNielsen are not much better. A few years ago, a Taiwanese TV network got a 0.25% market share (ie. 50,000 viewers) in the ratings. This was a very “impressive” KPI, except that the TV network was shut down for half an hour because of its temporary malfunction during the period ACNelsen surveyed the market. Not that it stopped managers from purchasing ACNelsen data to justify their performances.

With the world living out their life on a globe spanning social networks, and content would be digitized, mashed up, and reframed into any format possible, this drives more and more marketing campaigns to come on the Internet, especially on social networks. Along with this trend, we now have more accurate and reliable services to measure awareness, response, and attitude.

However, with the internet producing one DVD worth of data every second, finding the content might be the biggest challenge. QSearch is powerful search and analysis tool focusing on Facebook content. It ranks the issues by the number of like, comment, and reshares each issue received, and display the information in an easily comprehendible way. Even for those without marketing training background can pick up the service immediately.

Don’t believe me? Email me something you’re interested in finding, and I’ll dig it up for you. Keep Calm and QSearch.

Written by: Tien-Yu Lee

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