Frequently asked questions
1. What is Channel Signal?
2. What information does Channel Signal deliver?
3. Why is this information important to a company?
4. What does Channel Signal reporting look like?
5. How is Channel Signal different from competitors?
6. Who will use the Channel Signal data and analysis?
7. How does the Channel Signal system work?
8. How is Channel Signal reporting and analysis priced?
9. What companies are Channel Signal currently working with?
10. Who is behind Channel Signal?
1. What is Channel Signal?
We are a social media reporting and analytics platform that delivers insight and analysis on what consumers are saying about your brand and products online.
2. What information does Channel Signal deliver?
We collect, organize and analyze online consumer conversations.
Consumers are writing online, right now, about what they want, what they bought, and how it’s working. They’re praising and complaining about brands, products, events and causes, including yours, on Twitter, blogs, product reviews, chat rooms and Facebook.
This creates an opportunity to gather these direct, unefiltered opinions and learn what your customers want.
Channel Signal collects these opinions, sorts them, tags them, identifies their source and notes whether the consumer comment is positive, negative or neutral. Then, we analyze the trends in easily understandable briefs that outline what’s driving the consumer buying decision.
3. Why is this information important to a company?
These conversations are far more revealing than traditional focus groups or consumer surveys, because the consumers don’t know that we’re listening. It’s widely known that people respond differently when they know that their answers are being measured. The online conversations we record, however, are completely candid customer opinions shared with the consumer’s social group.
These conversations are full of valuable information for departments throughout your organization: sales, marketing, product development, customer service, research and strategic planning, but until now, gathering and especially analyzing those conversations has been difficult and expensive for companies.
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4. What does Channel Signal reporting look like?
We have four separate reporting products.
1. Our monthly Corporate Report is for companies with multiple brands. The report tracks consumer reaction to each brand’s activity and reports on the same metrics, letting management make “apples-to-apples” comparisons between the brands.
2. Our monthly Brand Report dives deeper into an individual brand. Beginning with an executive summary that reviews the prior month and highlights current trends, the Brand Report breaks down the trends in consumer conversation topics and reports on what’s causing the spikes or drops in activity. Critically, and unlike competitive platforms, this report contains comprehensive data on consumer-generated product reviews, which we consider to be some of the most important (and least tracked) data available.
3. The Customer Review Report tracks only the consumer-generated product reviews mentioned above. We’ve found it’s a good way for companies to get started with consumer reporting.
4. At the suggestion of some key customers, we’re currently finalizing our ability to generate Category Reports. These reports will track consumer online conversations across a specific category. like barefoot running, stand- up paddleboarding, or 29er mountain bikes. We’ll issue a monthly report on what companies are generating the most positive and negative consumer buzz and what trends, events and athletes in the category are attracting the most consumer attention.
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Companies receiving a Corporate Report or individual Brand Report also have 24/7 access to a real-time Channel Signal Dashboard. The dashboard provides a snapshot of what’s happening right now, in terms of consumer conversations about your brand. The pie chart shows where comments are coming from: Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, etc. Each of those channels is broken out in its own box, with a term cloud to show you what words and phrases are turning up most frequently and a line graph tracking activity and sentiment levels. Clicking on a term in the cloud, or a point along the graph lines will open boxes with greater detail and individual consumer comments.
The dashboard also has a search function that lets you look for specific keywords and a button to access previous monthly briefs.
The dashboard layout can be customized to reflect information sources that are of particular concern, for example consumer product reviews, or Twitter.
5. How is Channel Signal different from competitors?
In several ways. For one, we’re concentrated on the outdoor, snowsports, cycling and sporting goods/recreational markets, in which our management and analyst teams have decades of experience. This means our monthly analysis reports go much deeper than simply rehashing the data.
Other platforms deliver raw or semi-sorted data that someone at your company has to make sense of - tagging it, sorting it, analyzing it and spotting trends. There are some very important needles in that haystack, but finding them is tedious and time-consuming. You’re paying for that time and it really adds up.
Another problem is that sifting this data inevitably becomes the job of a junior employee, due to the sheer amount of time involved. This creates a barrier between time-sensitive information and the people who make the decisions. Instead of saving time, this actually adds to your workload.
Finally, Channel Signal assigns an editor and an analyst to your brand. Unlike fully automated competitors, we have a person you can call to corroborate information and clarify questions.
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6. Who will use the Channel Signal data and analysis?
- Sales gets insight into why products are selling and what features and benefits are resonating with consumers. They’re leveraging that insight into shop clinics, trade show presentations and sales communications.
If you have QC problems of your own, you’ll know right away.
You typically don’t find out about a problem until consumers complain to their retailer, who complains to his rep, who remembers to tell the Sales Manager.
That can take weeks. Channel Signal alerts you that day.
Marketing gets a real metric for everything from social media to promotions and sponsorships. We provide the back-end measurement that tells you whether their social media, PR and advertising campaigns are creating the buzz they seek.
Are people talking about your marketing campaigns? Is the talk positive? Are your key messages turning up in consumer conversations? Are consumers sharing your cause-related content and is your brand attached to that sharing? Which campaigns need to be tweaked? Which ones are producing and deserve more resources?
This reporting and analysis leaves marketing free to concentrate on what they do best: the creative, front-end fun work like content creation, sponsorship, events, etc.
Product Development will get much more rapid insight into which product features and benefits consumers are responding to - positively and negatively. Currently, this feedback is almost completely anecdotal - coming via dealers and reps - and not very reliable. Channel Signal will deliver reporting and analysis as soon as your new line hits retail, which means that consumer input can be implemented into the next product development cycle.
Customer Service can use ChannelSignal data to more quickly identify consumers who are posting highly positive or negative things about your brand. Together with Marketing, Customer Service can develop an ongoing communication program with highly positive fans. Sales and Customer Service can work out a program to quickly mollify complainers. Rather than relying only on Twitter, Channel Signal will deliver the data from a variety of online sources, including consumer-generated product reviews.
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7. How does the Channel Signal system work?
First, we work with you to create what you want to see in your social media reports. How is your company structured? How do you measure now?
Second, we work with you to establish the key words that will make the reporting sing. These search terms would include your brand name, key products, events, promotions, sponsored activities, people and possibly some terms related to your competition.
Third, we build you a customized tag structure,to organize the information and let you go back and access it more easily. For example, say you’re considering renewing an event sponsorship. To measure consumer reaction to last year’s event, you would go back and review the information under that tag, to figure out whether people were talking about it and whether that talk was positive or negative. Knowing that will help inform your decision on re-upping, or maybe increasing your involvement.
We put together a customized set of data collectors, to search where you and your customer base are most active. Then, we begin to sweep, 24/7.
The raw data we collect, the actual online consumer posts about your brand, are run through the Natural Language Processing system, which:
a. Filters out junk, like associated marketing sites, or posts that don’t directly pertain to you.
b. Sets channel type to tell you where the traffic originates, like Twitter, blogs, traditional media YouTube, etc.
c. Assigns a positive, neutral and/or negative sentiment rating
d. Assigns a tag to each post, based on the architecture we built together.
The cleaned, prepared data is then available to you, via the customized dashboard and the monthly analysis report detailed in question #4. You can also access a csv report that lets you create your own searches and crunch your data any way you choose.
8. How is Channel Signal reporting and analysis priced?
Channel Signal pricing depends on the amount of clean, prepared data delivered. We do not charge clients for data that is sorted out as junk.
Corporate Reporting is approximately $10,000 per month, depending on
the number of individual brands involved.
Brand Reporting averages between $7,000-8,000/month, depending on the amount of data delivered data collected.
Customer Review Reports are $1,500/month (this information is included in Brand and Corporate Reports).
9. What companies are Channel Signal currently working with?
At the request of some of our original clients, we don’t make our client list public.
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10. Who is behind Channel Signal?
- The company was founded by our CEO, Paul Kirwin,who also founded and developed Kirwin Communications and eXperticity.
- Our COO is Carson Stanwood,who founded,ran and sold Stanwood& Partners Public Relations.
- Our analysts and editors come from various sources in the outdoor business, most recently from retail management and sales rep force management.
