UNDER THE RADAR:Joseph Kelly Loopthing  Interview:Peter Cluskey

Essentially, the survey showed that companies were simply allocating staff to social media initiatives and integrating social media applications with their corporate websites in the desperate hope that they wouldn’t miss the next big internet “boat”.

This is why a young Cork company run by Joseph Kelly, a master’s graduate of Cass Business School in London, has created something of a stir by developing an application which finally allows businesses to analyse their social media performance.

There are two strings to Kelly’s bow: last October, after more than 18 months in gestation, he launched Loopthing, a new social network aimed specifically at businesses which want to mine the social media marketplace.

While you may wonder if the world really needs another social media network, what makes Loopthing different is that it also introduced OpenScore – an application which aims to translate social media expenditure into hardcore “return on investment”.

“At its most basic,” says Kelly, “if you’ve spent several thousand euro on a promotional video to put out on various networks, including YouTube, for example, you’ll want to know how many people viewed it; that’s the key to whether or not it’s been successful.

“So what happens with Open- Score is that once you sign into Loopthing, confirm your YouTube account and enter your user name and password, we can see through the API [application programming interface] everything to do with that account – all the activity it has attracted and the nature of that activity.

“We can do that across all the different social media you use and we then present that information in the form of a series of up to 10 graphs for each network, showing the number of mentions, the number of your followers, how many times your videos have been viewed, your ratings and reviews and the backlinks to your corporate website.

“We can also go deeper than that. We can benchmark your social media activity against top industry performers in Ireland and the UK, for example companies in the Deloitte Fast 50, so you can see exactly where you’re making a real impact – or not doing well enough.

“And because that analysis is over a period up to a year, you can also see whether or not activity peaked in line with a particular advertising campaign or which networks haven’t really been working out for you.”

So social media activity can be monitored and comparisons drawn, but the difficulty arises when a business attempts to gauge what percentage of that frantic activity actually translates into new business – the most hardcore investment return measurement of all.

“That’s something that depends on the type of business,” Kelly acknowledges. “If it’s a company that’s selling online, they should be able to measure that additional business themselves. But if they’re not, that’s always going to be difficult ...

“However, I think that if a business accepts in principle that social media are important, then it will naturally want to use the most effective networks. And what OpenScore does for the first time is compare how effective different networks are for different companies – which certainly ensures that money invested is well spent.”

Loopthing itself is free and aims to have 100,000 users by the end of 2010. The business will generate revenue from customers who use its various applications, OpenScore and currently two others, a recruitment app for third-party developers and an e-commerce app, which will allow users to sell their products directly through their profiles.

Kelly expects Loopthing to go into profit in its fourth year, 2013, with a turnover that year of €550,000 increasing to €1.3 million the following year. “We’re currently seeking investment in the UK. In Ireland, we found a lot of risk-aversion still going on.”

petercluskey@ireland.com