Social Media Spotlight: Guilhem Fouetillou, CEO of Linkfluence

 

Guilhem Fouetillou (@gfouetil) is the CEO and co-founder of Linkfluence,  a French pioneer in the creation and development of social media research and monitoring services for brands, agencies and public institutions. Founded in 2005, the company based in Paris recently raised €2 million to accelerate its growth internationally in the UK, Germany and North America. As he describes himself on LinkedIn, Guilhem enjoys making ambitious projects combining web mining, semiology, big data, social media, anthropology, curation, monitoring, analytics... and he has been very successful so far. At Influence On, we are very excited to get his opinion and insights on various topics related to the social media monitoring space.
  

• Can you briefly tell us about Linkfluence - what's unique about your social media listening capabilities compared to a Radian6?

Radian6 is a social media monitoring technology. It's a tool with powerful algorithm and huge data capabilities but it's only a tool. At linkfluence, we're a social media intelligence company. It means we're staffed half with engineers focusing on R&D (15 people, one of the biggest R&D team in Europe in this field) and half with monitoring experts and market analysts using our proprietary technology to provide quantitative and qualitative analysis to our clients. Technology is not enough today, algorithm can't fully understand conversations and if you want to move from huge amount of agregated data carrying a lot of noise to real consumer or opinion insights, you need to fill the gap and hire firms like ours. We bring in both technological and methodological expertise.

• If you had to rate your clients' understanding of social media from 1-10, what would it be? Explain.

There is a great heterogeneity between clients but one thing is sure, it's not people that are the most reticent to social media that have the worst understanding. By that, I mean that companies that don't always run after the "next big thing" on social media dedicate more time to align their social media strategy with their business goals which is fundamental.

 

• Does your platform monitor Facebook interactions (likes, comments etc)?

Our monitoring solution includes all public conversation spaces including facebook public pages.

 

• When you see major brands like Dell or Gatorade building internal social media command centers, does it make you dream or is it happening in France as well?

I don't think it's a real trend. Understanding weak signals coming from social media, being able to translate them in an actionable way across departments in a global organization is a real expertise and I think most companies will outsource it. It's not only a question of technology and tool, it's also a matter of people skills. Companies will need more and more market research firms or business intelligence solution providers as the amount of conversations is getting bigger.

 

• Linkfluence is partnering with the well-respected french daily paper LeMonde.fr to cover the French presidential campaign through the spectrum of social media conversations. Can you tell us more about it?

We are working with Le Monde since 2006 so it's a long story. At linkfluence, we developped an important expertise in terms of opinion mining. We worked in 2007 for Segolene Royal's presidential race and had the opportunity to work with different ministries since then. So it was almost natural to work with Le Monde for this new term. We created politicosphere which is not only a blog (http://politicosphere.blog.lemonde.fr/) but also a partnership with political journalists at LeMonde.fr. They use our technology to analyse social media conversations about the presidential race. Coming up in the next months, we will be launching more tools analyzing the online political debates... stay tuned!

 

• What's your take on Klout and the notion of influence?

First of all, influence didn't wait for Klout to exist on social media. The genius of Google was to try to measure the influence of each page and not its relevance. Secondly, measuring influence is relevant only if it doesn't become a game or a competition. The main problem with Klout is that it's public so people try to boost their Klout score. At the end, their score is completely disconnected from their actual influence, it's only strategies to fool the algorithm. At linkfluence, we measure influence since 2005 but we don't publish these scores so no one tries to hack them.

 

• Would you recommend 4-5 people to follow on Twitter?

The strength of Twitter is not in the people you follow but in the agregation of their recommendations that's why I won't recommend to your readers 5 twitter accounts but services like tweetedtimes.com that agregate all your twitter following links in a social media "newspaper" based on what they like most. Twitter is mainly a curation service and I'm sure this kind of service will become the norm in a near future.

Connect with Guilhem Fouetillou on Influence On or on Twitter @gfouetil