Scenario

• In December 2010 Japanese athletic equipment manufacturer ASICS appointed social media monitoring service Social360 to track conversations chiefly around its Onitsuka Tiger brand on the social web, prior to a concerted marketing push.
• ASICS’ marketing team wanted to gain an insight into key topics and trends of conversation about the brand amongst bloggers, tweeters and other social media influencers.
• As a global brand based in Japan a key challenge for Social360 was to manage multilingual monitoring, encompassing Japanese as well as a broad range of European languages.

Strategy

• The volume of brand mentions for Onitsuka Tiger online meant that a straight listing of discussions would not be manageable. As well as valid conversations by individuals, huge volumes of content are made up of sales offers, spam, irrelevant mentions and SEO content.

• To overcome this issue Social360 deployed its two-stage approach to social media monitoring. Its proprietary technology searches the social web for relevant content which is then filtered and analyzed by a team of expert human editors.
• The ASICS reporting took the form of thematic summaries of social media conversation broken down by brand and by theme within each brand, for example ‘new designs’ or advertising campaigns.
• The approach and design of the reporting process gave ASICS a comprehensive but manageable window into social media sentiment towards their brand. The reports enable the marketing team to quickly review relevant content without the need to use complex analysis tools or proprietary interfaces.

Results

• ASICS continue to retain Social360 for its social media monitoring activity, with social media reports posted on the ASICS internal marketing blog. Key drivers for the continued success of the relationship include Social360′s ability to support multiple languages, including multiple alphabets.
• A further benefit for ASICS has been the flexibility of reporting and monitoring enabled by Social360′s approach. Through ongoing interface with ASICS and its editorial team, Social360 has been able to adapt the monitoring based on developments within the business and the developing requirements of the marketing team.