Social game-changer? Measuring how content behaves with online audiences

It’s not easy to earn acknowledgment for being the most significant and innovative social media technology of the year given the plethora of offerings out there, but TrueAnthem and its publishing partner Fox Broadcasting company managed just that in the US.

TrueAnthem’s patent-pending technology, which enables multi-generational tracking of social sharing, won the prestigious 2012 Next Gen Market Research Innovation Award as the most disruptive technology in social media measurement.

The company’s approach allows marketers to track a piece of content as it passes one from individual to another, with no outer limit to such a capability. TrueAnthem also provides a social sharing metrics tool which works independently of other technology platforms and owners and allows publishers to compare engagement across multiple channels such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The tools allowed Fox Broadcasting to find out that its content engagement rate was 15 per cent higher among its new earned audience, with each share resulting in 15X new video impressions. The conclusion reached? That social content distribution drives not only new earned impressions, but also supports the acquisition of new viewers.

TrueAnthem was founded by CEO Chris Hart four years ago and has a team of 10 but only debuted last June through the Fox partnership.

“While the concept of earned media and influencers are not new to our industry, instantaneous measurement of social interactions and the right way to define social KPIs have largely been in a pioneering phase,” said Fox Broadcasting Company SVP Audience Innovation, Research and Strategy Melva Benoit.

According to a report by <i>Pandodaily’s</i> Michael Carney TrueAnthem and Fox’s early insights could well prove a game-changer for the way industries measure and understand how their content behaves with an online audience.

The NGMR Innovation Award aims to recognise companies and individuals that have demonstrated outstanding leadership as change agents and made significant contributions to harnessing disruptive innovation to drive research industry progress. The networking group for market research and insights said it chose trueAnthem and FOX for their joint efforts in developing and testing new social media key performance indicators (KPIs) that can potentially serve as industry standard measurement metrics.

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