• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 22, 2013

Next time you are in a mind to share with your Twitter feed a desire for pizza, a hankering for a donut, or an intent to buy a house, don’t be surprised if you get a direct tweet from Papa John’s, Dunkin' Donuts or Coldwell Banker. Using the HipLogiq SocialCompass engine, Papa John’s may well respond to anyone’s “feel like a pizza” tweet with “We got what you need! Here’s a pizza on us” and a link to an offer landing page plus sharing tools. The coupon comes to them via email, and “we reach the consumer with a real -time need and offer them a reward,” says Lindsey Madison, chief product officer and co-founder, HipLogiq. “We filter through millions of conversations and posts based on what they are saying, where they are and how influential they are. We send people an offer that gets them to share.”  

Bernard Perrine, CEO and co-founder, says his company is not only responding to user intent as it is voiced, but compounding the effect with automated tools that share that with the influential users’ networks. “There are on average 533 social views when influencers post the offer on their network.” The company claims impressive effectiveness. “For every conversation we respond to, 25% of people are providing a name and email to download the coupon,” Perrine claims. Papa John’s is seeing a 52% conversion and The New Yorker Hotel a 40% conversion. The email entry is providing the marketer with a persistent line of contact with the users who are raising their hands. Hundreds more then see that same offer when the recipient retweets it, and so conversions off of direct messages can sometimes exceed 100%.

Responsiveness varies greatly by product category, they say, and the brand or agency running this white-label solution needs to be smart about keywords. “People don’t talk about their car brands,” says Perrine. “BMW might not be an ideal brand for this.” But people do mention they just changed jobs or have a family. “It tends to find new customers,” adds Madison. “It works best with broader categories.”

In any event, it requires human capital. The system is not designed for automated responses, but a real person talking to another. Perrine says a person focusing on the dashboard, which indexes and offers up the relevant tweets, can send about a direct response each minute. At a larger business this can be an admin or junior-level job. For a local business owner, it is a task that can be done from behind the counter ten minutes a day. The scale comes from the sharing.

The idea of responding to public messages with offers is not new, of course. LocalResponse had a similar technique in its first iterations, although now it is more broadly retargeting social expressions with display ads. And on some level we know (but often forget) just how public social media is. There is a kind of benign NSA quality to all of this -- brands listening to and responding to keywords. And if it ever becomes commonplace, one can only imagine how consumers might game it with eccentric public displays of intent and desire crafted to attract offers.

And how about a public social media bidding war? After all, aren’t advertisers already bidding against one another for that banner ad every time you load a page? This other model allows the consumer to sell himself. Express a desire for a pizza and let multiple manufacturers vie for your business with competing offers.

Now that is RTB consumers can get behind.