The use of information about communities and social networks has proved the higher effectiveness of the SNA techniques as compared to traditional marketing models. The results have in fact tripled the predictive capability of customer churn models.

Madrid, March 26, 2008.- The consulting company Neo Metrics, specialized in analytic intelligence has presented successful results from their innovative solution based on Social Network Analysis (SNA). This is leading project worldwide launched last year, which has already been joined by the majority of Spanish companies in the telecommunications, banking and insurance sectors.

As a consequence of these results, Neo Metrics expects the SNA solution to contribute over 25% of the company's total revenue by the end of 2008.

Social Network Analysis provides knowledge about the influence that relationships have on people.  This tool gives us great insight into the various roles and groupings in a network -- who are the leaders, connectors, followers, etc. It then becomes possible to identify who is at the core of the network and how leaders affect opinions within the group in order to predict the future behavior of consumers. SNA has proved to be an efficient tool that allows companies to gain deeper knowledge of their customers by analyzing the spread of opinions and information related to their products and services in a consumer network.

SNA is hardly a new concept. It has been used in the past, for example, in the field of medicine to understand the propagation of diseases and avoid epidemics, as well as in the field of intelligence as an approach to combat terrorism. The main innovative aspect of the SNA solution presented by Neo Metrics is the use of these techniques in the business world, more specifically in marketing, in a scenario where consumers trust opinions and information received from their social networks far more than advertising. A recent Forrester study shows that more than 60% of the American consumers do not trust at all the publicity and 90% follow recommendations from other users.

Neo Metrics has developed a unique and leading technique for SNA, which reached the analytics market on April 2007. Just one year after, its application to business strategies has proved to provide companies with significant competitive advantage, as it allows them to make better decisions now that will impact future results of their businesses. After an efficient analysis of great volumes of information on thousands of clients and their relations, some simulation and predictions are performed with a level of precision otherwise impossible to attain.

One of the greatest achievements of the Neo Metrics SNA solution is in the field of marketing and customer management, where it can triple the results of the traditional models, which disregard the existent social relationships between the customers of a company.

SNA has succeeded with greater effectiveness in the areas of customer loyalty and customer acquisition strategies, as well as at accelerating the spread of new products and services in the marketplace.

In Spain, the sectors leading the use of this innovative tool are telecommunications, banking and insurance. In the telecommunications sector, one of the Spanish leaders in the area of Internet and cable TV was able to triple its ability to detect customer churn, thereby improving its ability to sharpen retention and loyalty strategies.

In the insurance sector, application of SNA has been based on the analysis of the information about communities (shared policies and homes, recommendations, etc.) and has resulted in more than doubling predictive powers of churn models.

"Social network analysis represents a qualitative improvement in customer analysis and is setting a turning point in marketing. Organizations are barely paying attention to information on social networks which is already present in their systems. They still have not discovered that it is not always necessary to gather information from external sources or buy consumer databases, as it often suffices to apply a SNA methodology to data they already have", explains José Luis Flórez, CEO of Neo Metrics.


The value of social relations

The use of SNA can also have a direct impact on sales. Traditional power held by brand names is gradually migrating to the hands of the consumers, who can influence the behavior of other consumers through exchange of opinions and recommendations within their social group.

Knowing these communities, the profiles of the individuals who belong to them and the existing relationships among them, it is possible to simulate the spread of product purchase decisions by identifying who are the most influential people, who buy first and who follow, as well as how to stimulate innovation and product recommendation.

Besides the marketing and customer management front, Neo Metrics is also working on the application of SNA techniques to product recommendations on the Internet, organized fraud identification, money laundering, and other areas.

In the words of Flórez, "Our SNA solution has been a leading solution worldwide, thanks to the precision and effectiveness of the algorithms developed by our R&D+i department. Our success is based on scientific excellence combined with business-specific knowledge".

Neo Metrics is strongly committed to innovation by devoting 15% of company's human resources and 10% of net profit to R&D+I.