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Some of the Best Kept for Last?

11/12/2013 by Cdr. Bud Slabbaert

Jan Rezab

When the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others will be discussed in the Marketing Session, Jan Rezab will be the expert to listen to. He was speaker at more than 75 international conferences including speaking engage­ments at Harvard Business School and Stanford University. He just returned from the USA where Socialbakers, a worldwide leader in social media analytics and the company of which Jan Rezab is CEO and Co-Founder, held its third annual confer­ence “Engage NYC 2013” at the Manhat­tan Center. During the event digital lead­ers from global brands like Intel, L’Oreal, Pernod Ricard and other global innova­tors in social advertising, customer care and content creation revealed how they turn analytics-driven insights into action to deliver some of the greatest social me­dia campaigns anywhere. At the meeting, Socialbakers released its 2013 Trends Re­port that is based on a major new survey of over 1400 brands into their social me­dia marketing.

If you assumed after reading this, that Jan Rezab is an American, you are mis­taken; Jan is Czech and Socialbakers a.s. is a Czech company that was set up as a so­cial media consulting operator in 2008 by Jan Rezab and two co-founders. It quickly morphed into a fast-growing analytics firm and now Socialbakers has offices in Prague, London, San Francisco, Paris, Munich, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Dubai and Istanbul with a team of 190 people. The company counts 30 of the Fortune 500 as customers, includ­ing Lufthansa, Danone, Vodafone, Sam­sung, GE Money, Kraft, and Peugeot. For the most part, Socialbakers bring to place an end-to-end platform that provides social media network statistics and analyses help­ing customers to build social media cam­paigns. For example, it measures engage­ment of the visitors of the social media sites by taking things like “Comments”, “Likes” and “Posts” into consideration. Socialbak­ers enables the creation of Facebook apps to boost performance. “We are a “customer developed” company,” says Jan Rezab, “Our customers kept telling us the metrics they wanted to see.”

And so, Socialbakers offers the analytic tools and services needed to give custom­ers insights and enable them to monitor social media profiles, by using perfor­mance indicators to track key influencers, analyze engagement rates, measure fan growth, follow competitors, benchmark performance against industry standards, optimize social media presence and gen­erate graphical reports.

People who have worked closely to­gether with Jan Rezab in the past com­mented:

“He practices what he preaches, and truly understands the dynamics of today’s marketing and digital environment. What he does and what he says has substance.”

“Jan is a bundle of energy, enthusi­asm, ideas and determination. I think of Jan as “the digital native who creates and conducts his business with his creativity, vision and insights”. He finds different ap­proaches to doing business and gets peo­ple on board with facts, diligence, tenac­ity and charm.”

“Open to challenging opportunities, Jan has two traits which I highly appre­ciate; a strong personal drive and a pro­found knowledge of and belief in what he is doing. He manages to combine expertise with a very approachable per­sonality which makes him a true profes­sional.”

“He has a huge passion for social me­dia, wonderfully engaging and knowl­edgeable.”

“He likes people who are not afraid to disagree and he is not afraid to disagree either, through a constructive debate you will come.”

How does Jan Rezab, as Chief Execu­tive of one of the world’s fastest growing social media and digital analytics compa­ny see social media advertising becoming mainstream?

“I think Facebook is the best channel for a full-scale global marketing cam­paign. Facebook has 600 million people accessing its homepage every day. Show me a television station that has that any­where in the world. There are more peo­ple browsing their News Feed on Face­book right now than people watching any single TV station. Facebook and Twitter have evolved to become an extension of human communication. But what’s it to advertisers? They can tap into social media by purchasing sponsored content and push­ing it to the top of Facebook and Twitter feeds, as high as they can. With that said, I don’t think advertisers have come to this realization yet. Eighty to 90% of brands are not ready to take the leap into this new world of social advertising.”

Of course we will be interested to hear about Jan Rezab’s views on how social me­dia may be used in the aviation industry.

“We recently conducted a study on social media categories and their natural engagement. One of the industries that was most affected and benefitted the most was the airline industry. There are some brands that excel at social media custom­er service. From surveying our clients, we found that 70% considered it a cost-saver, but even more considered it a ROI-driver. KLM or Royal Dutch Airlines sells their customers a better seat via social media, which drives customer satisfaction. Air France also does a stunning job on social customer service.”

How does Jan Rezab know all this and what makes him a specialist on social media measurement, social media ap­plications, mobile business, mobile mar­keting, geo-local social search, Facebook applications, and Facebook strategy? The answer may lay in some the products that his company has developed.

“Analytics PRO” measures, compares and maximize social media performance. It offers analysis of key performance in­dicators such as: Fan Growth, Social In­teractions, Engagement Rates, Question Response Rate, Industry Benchmarking, Post Response Rate, Competitive Analysis, Monitor Response Time, and Key Influ­encers. Then there is “Listening”, a tool that mediates monitoring conversations across Facebook and Twitter in real time. Its us­ers can set up alerts that notify them when conversations about their brand occur and assess their successes and failings on Face­book and Twitter. “CheerMeter” is one of the features of the Listening product that tracks and analyses Twitter buzz. The first CheerMeter was used for the 2012 Lon­don Olympics and followed which sports, athletes and languages were trending on Twitter per specific time intervals. Cheer­Meter was also used for the 2012 US Presi­dential election following Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. It has live Twitter and Instagram feeds assessing the sentiment in addition to the raw numbers of mentions.

Socialbakers may be considered a Czech success story. To originate a start­up from Europe was hard for Jan Rezab and his partners. “It was bootstrapping pure. We had to make some money from the start and for almost a year we had to eat rats to survive, so to say.” He believes that startups originating in Europe need to focus on building a company with a solid business model that will be profit­able, simply because many US investors don’t invest in certain areas of Europe. Now, Socialbakers is getting a significant number of investment offers from impor­tant industry players in the US, because of the level of relevance in the world that the company has reached. In September 2011, Socialbakers raised $2 million in funding from Early Bird Venture, funding that was used for acquisitions of companies like Checkfacebook.com and Social RSS, a feed reader for Facebook. Last November, the company raised $6 million from Index Ventures, with additional follow-on fund­ing from first-round in­vestors. Jan believes that for companies looking for a global market, the key is to think globally from the start. “Build everything like you were physically in San Fran­cisco. Just half of the day imagine you were there and act as if you were there,” he says. “But we don’t make it secret that we’re European either. No way, we’re proud of it!” He believes the Czech Republic just needs a “big exit” to put it on the map. “We hope to give it to the coun­try,” he says, “and to support more entre­preneurship in a global way.”

Jan Rezab believes that social media is not just one platform anymore.” It’s not just a Facebook, or a Google+, or a LinkedIn, it’s a use case,” he says. “We’ve all learned to be social, regardless of what. And that use case will never change.” He foresees a future where “social” is not a feature, it’s everything and adds: “It is also becoming a time where content is king, time for really exciting copy, really excit­ing pictures and really exciting videos. That is why for instance airlines can per­form so well: these companies are content houses, they know how to produce it, and they know how to present their products in a beautiful way with great content.”

CEPA delegates will look forward to find out during Thursdays Marketing Ses­sion (15:30-16:30) how they can benefit from using Social Media for their mar­keting and customer relations and have an opportunity to meet Jan Rezab.