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20 August 2012

The Summer in Weekly Insights

by Rachel Serpa

This summer, Compass Labs has been focused on showcasing our deep, impactful social media insights. Each week, we have posted and tweeted one intriguing tidbit gleaned from all of our social media research – and there’s plenty more where these came from! Be sure to continue to keep an eye out for these fun facts, but in case you've missed any, here is a recap of this summer’s weekly insights:

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17 August 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Kabir Chandrasekher

by Rachel Serpa

Kabir Chandrasekher is a senior at Saratoga High School, and joins Compass Labs’ summer intern team as a web developer.

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14 August 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Trisha Guchait

by Rachel Serpa

Trisha Guchait has spent her summer at Compass Labs as an insights intern, helping to validate and analyze social media data. She is a junior at Caltech, where she recently switched her major from chemical engineering to mechanical engineering and business economics management.

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9 August 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Nandita Krishna

by Rachel Serpa

Nandita Krishna joins Compass Labs’ 2012 summer web development team after graduating from Harker High School and before attending Oberlin College. This is her second summer interning at Compass Labs.

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8 August 2012

Jones or Esparza?

by Rachel Serpa

If asked whether a man is more likely to be a fan of a professional boxer or track and field star, you would probably choose the professional boxer with very little hesitance and a whole lot of certainty. However, if Facebook Fans of 2012 US Olympic athletes Marlen Esparza and Lolo Jones are any indicator, this answer couldn’t be further from the truth.

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7 August 2012

Compass Labs Intern Guest Blog: Where Search Becomes Social

by Hari Srinivasan

Circa 2000, a keyword typed into a search engine returned results that were a product of character-match algorithms. The user was left sorting through a dizzying array of links, whether relevant, inappropriate or nonsensical.  It was a far cry from the social experience that is becoming the search of 2012 – where the worlds of Social and Search are merging! This is a natural transition in a world heavily connected by social networks and influenced by social media. The basic premise is that users are also interested in the opinions of real people, in addition to mere string-matches.  “Social + Search” potentially impacts both users as well as companies seeking to optimize advertisement dollars in the online space.

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6 August 2012

Phelps vs. Lochte

by Rachel Serpa

As the dynamic duo of the US Olympic swim team, champions Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte are forced to be teammates one day and rivals the next. They even went up against each other last week as the number one and two most talked about 2012 US Olympic athletes on Facebook. But while they shake hands, smile, and share gold for the cameras, who knows what’s being said during their private poolside chats? In the spirit of friendly competition, let’s take a look at how their Facebook Fans stack up against each other.

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3 August 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Ronny Mukherjee

by Rachel Serpa

Ronny Mukherjee joins Compass Labs as a summer intern on the data insights team. After summer he will be starting his senior year of high school. He is currently focused on working toward a degree in computer science from a top university.

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2 August 2012

Top 2012 US Olympic Athletes Facebook Infographic

by Rachel Serpa

Our new infographic shows the top 5 most mentioned 2012 US Olympic athletes for 10 different sports: boxing, cycling, diving, fencing, gymnastics, soccer, swimming, tennis, volleyball and water polo. The rankings are based on real-time unique athlete mentions in Facebook users' status updates and comments from the Opening Ceremony to August 1st. Stay tuned for more interesting Olympic insights from Compass Labs!

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30 July 2012

2012 Olympics Facebook Fan Factoids Infographic

by Rachel Serpa

Let the Social Media Olympics begin! Compass Labs will be providing interesting stats and insights around Facebook users’ 2012 Olympic chatter and activities. This infographic reveals the Top 10 Athletes, Sports, Brands, Movies, TV Shows and Activities for Fans of the official US Olympic Team and Olympic Games Facebook pages. Rankings are based on Fans' page Likes and profile interests.

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27 July 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Kelvin Low

by Rachel Serpa

Kelvin Low is helping to lead Compass Labs’ summer team of data analysis interns. After graduating with a degree in quantitative economics from Duke University, he returned to Singapore to work for Singapore Airlines in strategy and marketing for 4 years as part of a merit scholarship. He is currently enrolled in a two-year, full-time MBA program at Harvard Business School. 

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26 July 2012

Facebook View Tags Supported in CLIQ

by Rachel Serpa

Compass Labs is proud to support Facebook’s new view tag feature! View tags add value to Facebook ads by allowing advertisers to attribute conversions beyond clicks to user impressions. Since not all clicks result in a conversion, and not all conversions are a product of clicks, view tags allow advertisers to further understand the source of their conversions, even if the impressions never resulted in a click.  They are particularly effective for products and services that require customers to engage in a longer decision making process, such as financial services.

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25 July 2012

The Social Media ROI Cookbook

by Molly Glover Gallatin

Compass Labs has been featured in Altimeter Group’s latest report “The Social Media ROI Cookbook: Six Ingredients Top Brands Use to Measure the Revenue Impact of Social Media.”  In this new research report authored by Susan Etlinger, along with Jeremiah Owyang and Andrew Jones, the challenges of social media measurement are explored and recommendations are provided for both qualitative and quantitative approaches to measuring social’s impact.  With the majority of organizations – 75% – still lacking a measurement strategy, this report highlights how brands like SAP, EventBrite and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) are determining ROI for their social efforts.  In addition, six ways to measure the revenue impact of social media are outlined.

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16 July 2012

Compass Labs Now Supports Facebook Premium

by Rachel Serpa

Facebook announced this week that it will now allow its Ads API partners to buy and sell its premium ads. These ads appear on the right-hand side and desktop and mobile newsfeeds of users’ Facebook homepages. These are the most noticeable, memorable, and engaging placements on Facebook.

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10 July 2012

Compass Labs Recognized as an AlwaysOn Top 250 Company

by Rachel Serpa

Compass Labs is proud to be a winner of the 2012 AlwaysOn Global Top 250 Private Companies! Compass Labs was chosen from a pool of promising technology companies from across the globe, nominated by the AlwaysOn team and leading technology industry insiders. Nominees were judged according to their innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz, and selected after an intensive 3-month evaluation process. The Top 250 are being recognized as key revolutionary players in the Global Silicon Valley and for displaying unprecedented innovation in the Internet-based sphere. Compass Labs is honored to be recognized as an influential thought-leader in the global technology community.

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26 June 2012

Compass Labs Intern Profile: Ishita Arora

by Rachel Serpa

Ishita Arora joins Compass Labs as a data analysis intern for Summer 2012. She is currently a sophomore at UC Berkeley, where she studies quantitative economics. 

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14 June 2012

Facebook Releases Ad Exchange: Provides Real-Time Bidding

by Molly Glover Gallatin

Facebook’s announcement about the launch of a real-time ad exchange, which enables advertisers to now target audiences using their own data and data from third parties is a significant event for direct response advertisers. The value here goes beyond merely adding Facebook inventory to retargeting lists. By combining socially derived audience insights with re-targeting, advertisers will now have a powerful tool at their disposal. For example, in addition to knowing that this user attempted to buy something on Amazon (which the re-targeting cookie provides), knowing that the user is a mother of two who likes several baby-related items and is a fitness enthusiast (which our socially derived insights provides), will allow an e-commerce merchant to serve highly relevant ads suited to this person and their current purchase intent. This level of relevance is far superior to that provided by search ads because it combines the "what the user wants" with "who the user is."

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1 June 2012

Facebook Moves from “Connections” to “Actions”

by Rachel Serpa

Facebook recently phased out its “Connections” metric in favor of a richer, full-bodied “Actions” metric. The connections metric has functioned mostly to track user “Likes,” as well as basic initial actions such as app installs. In addition to these traditional insights, the new action metric allows marketers to understand users’ post-click behavior through more action-based analytics, and measure beyond clicks and downloads with daily, weekly and 28-day view-through and click-through conversion reports. These insights will make it easier for marketers to boost page post presence, increase viral exposure, and to target users based on behavioral patterns leveraged from these insights – compulsive coupon clippers, event frequenters, game players, etc. Metrics and optimization are now available for the following actions:

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15 May 2012

Internet Week: Compass Labs Presents at OMMA Social in NYC

by Molly Glover Gallatin

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20 April 2012

Compass Labs Joins Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program

by Rachel Serpa

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31 March 2012

Building a Digital Bridge - The Mobile Social Connection

by Molly Glover Gallatin

With the rise in smartphone adoption and mobile usage, it’s clear that the mobile device will become the dominant entry point for social media. Given the growth in Facebook, Twitter and other social environments, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to hear that comScore says 91% of mobile Internet access is to socialize. Still, I find this number staggering. With social interactions playing such a large role in mobile use, it’s time for marketers to prepare a “mobile social” strategy.

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