News Release: RIPPLE6 LAUNCHES FIRST INTEGRATED SOCIAL MEDIA BASED CONSUMER RESEARCH.

Social Insights™ enables marketers to tap into existing social networks for digital ethnographies.

Ripple6, www.ripple6.com, a leading provider of social media services to enterprise class marketers and web publishers, announced today the launch of Ripple6 Social Insights™, the first service that enables marketers to tap into online communities for consumer insights and conduct ongoing research within existing social networks.

With Social Insights, a company establishes a space that’s available across multiple community sites. Members of these sites are recruited to the space, where there are multiple levels of interaction and insight potential. Added learning is enabled by an overlay with Ripple Analytics, the industry’s only embedded word-of-mouth analytics tool.

Marketers are searching for a better way to gather consumer insights,” said Sang Kim, Ripple6 CEO. “Social networks create tremendous opportunities and we’re inviting marketers into them. This service is at the forefront of a transformation in research, from artificial settings to more natural and authentic environments presented by online communities.”

Each implementation of the program allows researchers and members to communicate in a private setting that’s integrated with the member’s social network. They can post and comment upon messages, photos and video, as well as with one-to-one private messages. In addition, a separate “Observation Room” is created for the research team to privately share opinions and suggest deeper probes for the moderator.

“This is a smaller, faster, and nimbler research model than the community interaction methods otherwise available today,” said Ned Hickok, President and Founder of N3 Research & Consulting. “It expedites the functions of a focus group and then extends their benefits by drawing on groups in their ordinary surroundings and using the technology to generate a deep understanding of what they’re saying and doing.”
Social Insights is a component of Ripple6’s enterprise social media platform, a set of solutions that help companies implement their business strategy in social media.The software utilizes the company’s patent-pending Ripple technology to develop consumer engagements and relationships, deploy social marketing and generate consumer insights.

Social Insights programs run for a minimum of one month, but can run much longer. The pilot program is available now, including the company’s MomJunction.com property and it taps into all of Gannett’s 80 local MomsLikeMe.com properties. For more information, visit http://www.ripple6.com/platform/socialInsights.aspx