To celebrate SXSW (otherwise known as Geek Spring Break), we are doing a huge sale on our social media monitoring product, Biz360 Community, because we want to thank our users, the social media community!

Here’s how it works:

Tweet us your choice of the hottest SXSW company that you think will generate the most buzz (see our earlier prediction here and post-event recap to come later!).  Your tweet must contain the link to this blogpost, @biz360’s name and hashtags #sxsw and #biz360promo. Example: “I want my 25% off @biz360’s Community SM monitoring product! http://bit.ly/biz360sxsw #sxsw #biz360promo”. You must also follow @biz360 to receive a link to your promotion code via DM.

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

It’s almost that time again – you guessed it, ladies and gents – it’s time for South By Southwest (or SXSW) Interactive Festival, otherwise known as “geek spring break”. Year after year, SXSW has been a launching pad for cutting edge technology, in addition to great events, panels, networking and parties. Twitter launched at SXSW, and last year Foursquare, a geo-location heavyweight, launched there too. We can’t help but wonder who will be the new SXSW superstar this year. Mashable published this article exploring the same question.

Sounds like a challenge for a data geek! Using Biz360 data, I tracked startup names that were most often associated with the term “SXSW” in social media, and came up with the following list of contenders for top buzz (see below):

The three terms most heavily associated with SXSW were: Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter’s expected announcement about its ad model. The context around the Foursqure and Gowalla buzz has been primarily driven by their expected duel over SXSW geo-location supremacy. MG Siegler of TechCrunch ruminates that “location” will be the “new Twitter” of SXSW. An Austin local, Gowalla is endorsed by SXSW and got written up in the official SXSW News. Gowalla is also throwing a very popular party at SXSW, with admittance to VIP only donned upon those who uncover special badges via the check-in service. The context around Twitter’s popularity at this year’s SXSW is its expected announcement of an advertising model.

Foursquare, Gowalla and Twitter, although having generated significant buzz, are not launching at this year’s SXSW, however. As far as younger startups go, Plancast has generated the most buzz (see the chart below with Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla removed) – with a whopping 49% share of voice amongst these companies!

Lokast came in as a distant second at 12%. A lot of the other startups listed below are debuting at the Microsoft Bizspark Accelerator event. Of those presenting at the event, Collecta seems to have the most buzz. I will be measuring the buzz and sentiment around these companies as the festival wears on, and invite you to follow  and comment on my findings.

Are there companies that you are tracking that you expect to make a splash this year? Leave a comment, and I’ll add them to my radar.

Note: I did not measure all the companies presenting at Accelerator – only the ones that were mentioned the most in various social media sources.

At Biz360 we love our users. We listen to feedback from those who use our product, and those who for some reason decided to not use it after trying it (our goal is to make that number zero!). Sometimes the feedback from non-users can be just as valuable as feedback from users. We have some extremely exciting things in the pipeline that we can not wait to unleash throughout this year. We will be keeping you updated on new features via this blog, so check back often!

Today we are proud to announce that the Biz360 Community platform has launched a new Account Setup Wizard, which improves the first-time user experience, and an improved Account Home Page, which helps any user see everything at a glance. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

Account Setup Wizard:

If you are a new user and have not created any topics in your account, the first thing you will see is the account setup wizard, which conveniently walks you through how to set up your topics. It walks you through creating a topic for your product, your competitors’ products and industry keywords.

After completing the topics, you can select which dashboards you want auto-created. The choices are: Acquire, Retain and Promote. You can also create a custom dashboard  (more on dashboards later).

Why you should care:

This step-by-step process allows you to get started immediately, without much training upfront. Our tool is already one of the easier to use on the market. Additionally, we have wonderful training demos and getting started guides for our professional clients (our enterprise level clients get dedicated support), and our online community-based support system is chock full of great information. Even so, we recognize that a lot of clients are simply too busy to take the time to understand how to use the application. This new first-time user experience provides an easy starting point, from which the user can continue to build.

Account Home Page:

After you walk through the first user setup, you are taken to an improved home page screen, which is broken up into four main parts: Dashboard management, Actions, Reports, and Account Management. The home page screen has been redesigned to provide a better jumping-off point for users when they log into the Biz360 Community tool.

Dashboards:

A dashboard is a collection of dynamic reports displayed on one page for easy viewing and tracking. You can now group dashboards into groups. If you create the Acquire / Retain / Promote default dashboards for several products, for example, they will be auto-assigned to Acquire / Retain / Promote dashboard groups. You can group and name dashboards and dashboard groups however you wish. You can also choose to share (via the platform or via email) your dashboards and dashboard groups with others: coworkers, clients, etc. You can always create custom dashboards, just like you could in the past, by simply arranging various reports on the screen of the dashboard and setting their parameters.

Reports:

The building blocks of the Biz360 dashboards are reports. The reports that Biz360 Community provides have not changed in this release (you can read about the types of reports we offer here); however they are now more prominently featured on the home page.

Actions:

So you have been monitoring social media for mentions of yourself and your competitors, measuring competitive buzz and sentiment. What’s next? Engagement of course! With each of our reports, you can drill down to the article level, and when you get there, you can choose to engage with the person who wrote that blog, comment or tweet. Alternatively, with the help of our workflow tools, you can assign the article for follow up to another person on your team or even in another department. Actions that have been created for you are still highlighted in the upper right-hand corner of the home page.

Account Management:

Account management simply brings a little more administrative control to your fingertips. From this section, right in the home page, you can manage your profile, dashboards, topics and topic groups.

Why you should care:

Similar to the more intuitive first-time user experience, the new home page is designed to be your one-stop shop within the Biz360 Community application. From here, you can create your topics, which are the building blocks for your reports. Once you have your topics, you can then create reports and design dashboards, all from the same place. You can also manage your workflow and alerts as well as manage your account. Isn’t it comforting to know that if you are ever lost within the application, you can always “Go Home”?

This post was inspired by Tuesday’s #SM48 Twitter chat led by Ken Burbary. This particular chat, hosted by Hashtag Media is a weekly gathering of likeminded social media practitioners who discuss a particular topic within social media. This week’s topic was “segmentation”, which fascinated me right off the bat, due to my background in both: traditional and “new media” marketing. During the Twitter chat, we discussed the differences between traditional segmentation vs. segmentation in and via social media channels. The discussion really made me think, as it put an interesting spin on the traditional notion of segmentation.

Traditional marketers have always segmented their users based on a set of common characteristics, thereby creating a customer profile with distinct needs, wants, beliefs, demographics, psychographics, etc. Each segment was assigned its own marketing strategy, with “the 4Ps of marketing” as the underlying framework. Each segment got its own promotional message, through the appropriate media channel (Promotion), sold via an appropriate channel (Place), and sometimes got its own version of the product or product extension (Product) at its own Price. Collecting data to power these insights via traditional market research methods was expensive, and could only be done every so often. Yet, segmentation was the best attempt that we as marketers had to give our customers what they needed, when and where they needed it.

Enter social media. Brands no longer need to ask us what we need, we tell what we want to whoever is listening, and it is my hope that most brands are starting to understand how important listening and engaging is (if you don’t, contact me straight away!). But instead of 10 major customer segments, a brand now has 10 million individuals who have disparate and pronounced needs. How do we segment now? Should we segment down to the individual, or a slightly larger cluster? I believe there’s room for both. We should be listening and analyzing larger trends in our target market’s social media conversations. This will fuel our pricing, product and corporate messaging decisions. Additionally, due to the one-on-one nature of social media, we have the ability to tell our story to the individual in a conversational format. This becomes less about marketing and more about a conversation. Imagine if your friend had a problem, and you offered him / her a solution. Well, this is just like that.

This is what community managers like me do. We scour the social web to find mentions of our brands, our competitors’ brands and product categories. We listen for customers with good brand experiences, bad experiences, and non-customers (these non-customers can be new to the category or just new to your brand). We listen, digest and engage appropriately. What does it mean to engage appropriately? Simply having a conversation within the context of a person’s situation or need. For example, if I hear someone on Twitter saying “I am looking for a an affordable professional social media monitoring solution, competitor X is too expensive”, I can start a conversation with this person about how to get the most out of our tool with the least money. If someone says “I’m looking for a solution that measures sentiment in Portuguese”, I can talk to this person about our foreign language capability. I wouldn’t talk to either person about something that they have no interest in, such as workflow and alerts. Not to say that other features are unimportant; however, when you have 140 characters to make a first impression, it has to be relevant to that person’s expressed needs. Don’t “show up and throw up” and start reciting your company’s top 5 differentiators. Mold your message to the situation and the person. That’s segmentation at its best.

How do you segment your customers? Do you use social media for one-on-one engagement? Do you also let larger trends drive your larger product and strategy decisions? The comments are yours!

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2671532954/

This fascinating dynamic business we are in moves so fast, it is amazing to think that we have been doing it for 10 years.     It is quite a balancing act to be both solidly grounded in what has proven to work while constantly interating towards start-up-like reinvention.   I believe it is one of the factors that makes this company special.

As part of  the celebration, we thought it would be a good time reflect back before we continue bounding forward — and you are invited to join us.    Maria Ogneva, our social media director has put together series of interviews with long time employees as well one of the Biz360 Founders.   The series includes a retrospective on how media monitoring and measurement has evolved, the impact of social media, how client needs have changed, what has not changed, how Biz360 was started, and even tips for startup entrepreneurs.  You can view the related announcement here and the series below:

Building Technology for Social Media Monitoring, Gavin Das, Technology – 10 years

Lessons from the Entrepreneurial Battlefield, Co-Founder You Mon Tsang – 10 years

What Clients Need in the Age of Social Media “Firehose”, Eric Israel, Sales  – almost 7 years

Marketing in the Web 2.0 World, Tamairah Boleyn, Marketing – almost 6 years

Client Service in a Web 2.0 World, Danielle Sherman, Account Services – 6 years

Client Services in a Social Media Age, Pat Keegan, Global Services – 5 years

Here’s to Ten Years More! Founder speaks at anniversary party…

If you have no idea what has been going on between Southwest Airlines and actor / director Kevin Smith, you have probably been living under a rock. The purpose of this post is not to give a recap of what happened. You can find that by going to CNN.com, ABC.com, Kevin’s Twitter account and Southwest’s Twitter account and blog. The purpose of this post is not to take sides, or ruminate about what this incident means for airlines and airline customers of all sizes and shapes, either. The purpose of this post is to measure the buzz created by this situation across all social media sources, as well as to address the impact on sentiment towards both parties involved: Mr. Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.

I scoured the social web and found close to 45,000 relevant mentions of Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines within the relevant time period, across blogs, microblogs, discussion boards / forums, and online news. On the trend graph below, you can clearly see that the event occurred on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, garnering 14,000 mentions that very day. The next day, even more discussion ensued, with 16,000 conversations taking place on the 15th. At this point, however, this topic has pretty much run its course, as interest waned after the 16th.

Judging by the chart below, the incident was discussed in microblogs more  than in any other medium (66% of total conversations). This makes sense, because Twitter became the hub of all activity, as this is where Kevin Smith voiced his strong opinions against Southwest, quickly mobilizing his followers.

The key issue that SWA and Kevin Smith should be concerned about in the aftermath of this proverbial storm, is the impact that the whole ordeal may leave on their respective brands. Yes, Kevin Smith is a personal brand, and, just like SWA, he should be concerned about what happens to it. Perhaps he is even monitoring social media with a monitoring and engagement solution? Hey, Kevin, we can help you with that! Southwest, we would be very happy to help you too!

So how does the public feel? Let’s take a look. For this type of discussion, I like to use sentiment trend graphs to understand how sentiment ebbed and flowed each day. For the purposes of this discussion, I did not analyze neutral sentiment, as it adds less value to the discussion. Looking at sentiment towards Kevin Smith (below), it becomes obvious that this incident has hurt his brand in the short term. Whereas negative was a bit above positive even prior to the incident, the gap between the two was never as large as it became during the 14th and 15th of this month. The day after the story broke on Twitter, negative sentiment soared high above positive, returning to a lower level, albeit still higher than positive, on the 16th and 17th.

Now let’s take a look at sentiment towards Southwest Air. During the days prior to the big event, SWA tended to have mostly positive sentiment. However, between the 14th and the 17th, positive and negative sentiment were both elevated and went pretty much neck in neck. Of note is that although fairly evenly split, negative sentiment never exceeded positive.

Based on sentiment data presented above, I would say that both brands suffered in the process with increased negative sentiment; however Southwest Airlines has netted out ahead of Kevin Smith (in terms of sentiment) by garnering more positive support than Smith did. It’s important to realize that these are short term effects only; the real key would be to understand the long-term effect, if any, that the episode has had on public perception of both brands.  I am going to do a follow-up post on this, to track sentiment in a couple of weeks and maybe even further out.

Last week, all of the web was abuzz with a new social product from Google, called Buzz. Buzz is an interesting beast, because it’s in that space between a blogpost, discussion forum and a tweet. It allows you to aggregate some of your social media feeds into one stream (much like Friendfeed), while taking advantage of your combined social graphs between Gmail, Twitter and others. Personally, I am still exploring how useful this is for me, and where this fits into my daily communication routines. However, its importance for businesses as an extra channel to connect with potential customers and build communities, can not be underestimated.

Because Buzz was so front and center for all of us last week, I think it makes sense to look at social media coverage and sentiment numbers in greater detail. Looking at the trendline of coverage (number of mentions), Google Buzz exploded on the day of the announcement (2.09.2010) and grew even more the day after (2.10.2010), with a cumulative 60K mentions during both days. After that, the Buzz buzz subsided somewhat, until it experienced a second, smaller bump over the weekend, when Google announced in its blog that it was fixing some of the issues that concerned users.

Looking at the sentiment trend (see below), it was a bit of a mixed bag for Buzz, with both positive and negative sentiment present, although negative trailed positive throughout the week. Sunday’s announcement brought the largest relative gap between the positive and negative.

Overall, there was close to twice as much positive sentiment as there was negative across all media (see below).

What happens when we take Twitter out of consideration? Looking at sentiment across all channels, excluding Twitter, we get an overwhelmingly positive result (see below). Looks like Google Buzz, although not without serious issues (example: privacy flaw), is well received by the social media community.

While sentiment gives a broad snapshot in time, it’s worth our while to understand specifically what but what people are saying. To that end, I like to take stock of the most frequently occurring conversations around this topic. Tag clouds are a great way to visualize and understand the relative importance (in terms of volume) of these conversations. Judging by the largest tag listed below (”Where’s my buzz”), seems that a lot of people were looking for and couldn’t find their Buzz, as Google was rolling it out in phases after the announcement. In several conversations, Buzz is described as a way to make Gmail social. Moreover, lots of conversations refer to Buzz as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. One of the largest tag clouds literally states “Google Twitter”. As far as emotions are concerned, the strongest two I observed were “Buzz Kill” and “Like Google [Buzz]”

Our new VP of Marketing, Ryan Kuder will be attending the 2/16 San Diego Blogwell next week, along with David Bolhorst,  a long time National Accounts Director.  We are looking forward to hearing  the social media case studies from companies like State Farm Insurance, Starbucks, Turbo Tax, USAA, Clorax, Community Medical Centers among others.  Stop by the Biz360 table to say hello and ask them what makes Biz360 different. 

Measuring sentiment and social media coverage is a fantastic way to figure out who is saying what about your product, and where they are saying it. But what if you don’t know where to start?

This is where tools like the Biz360 Topic Discovery (part of Biz360 Community platform) can prove extremely useful. For example, if you had heard of a massive Toyota recall and wanted to wrap your head around it from the perspective of social media conversations, you could use it to uncover prominent topics that occur alongside key phrases like: “Toyota recall” and “Prius recall.” You end up with a clickable tag cloud, with the ability to drill into each tag. If we look into the Toyota Recall tag cloud (based on keywords “Toyota” and “recall”), this is what we get:

Clearly Toyota is in quite a bit of trouble, with Congress probing it, and this being an “unprecedented recall”, with 5.3 million affected cars to be exact. Furthermore, there is something about pedals and sticky accelerators. You can also figure out that Camry is affected, and recall has been expanded. Not surprisingly, this recall has affected sales in what seems to be a major way. (Note: this is only a part of the tag cloud).

Drilling down into the Prius Recall (see below), we discover that there’s something about an Apple Co-founder that has to do with the recall. A drill-down into that tag reveals the following article from CNET, which tells us how Steve Wozniak described Prius’s problems as not mechanical, but software based. Moreover, the tag cloud tells us that Prius recall has to do with brakes and hybrid battery, complaints about which are literally “pouring in”. Also, Prius recall seems to be affecting the U.S. as well as Japan, which has forced it to investigate.

As if Toyota wasn’t having enough fun with all of this, the accelerator pedal recall spreads from the U.S. to Europe, and there’s a class-action lawsuit brewing. However, seems that there is a fix coming, and a plan has been announced. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but clearly Toyota’s reputation is “battered”.

It is no surprise that sentiment around both, pedal and floor mat recalls, is more negative than positive these days.

If you wanted to place the fiasco on a time continuum, you could look at the trendline to understand when the news hit. Seems like most of the action happened on February 3-4, and 9th.

And finally, if you want to know which of the recall issues is creating more buzz in social media, you can use a handy share of voice analysis to compare the topics against each other. Clearly, the Toyota Prius recall is dominating the news.

Right before the Superbowl, we looked at the share of voice and sentiment towards the two soft drink giants, Coke and Pepsi. Prior to the Superbowl, and after its announcement to shift its ad spend away from the Superbowl and towards social media, Pepsi garnered significantly more share of voice than Coke. If you recall, our analysis showed that 90 days prior, the Pepsi Superbowl buzz dwarfed that of Coke at 79% vs. 21%. However, as the big game got closer, and Coke announced its social media campaign, it started to catch up to Pepsi.

Was Coke able to overtake Pepsi on Sunday night? Based on our share of voice analysis (considering Sunday’s social media mentions only), I would say so. Considering yesterday’s data only, Pepsi lost buzz supremacy to Coke, with 39% vs. Coke’s 61%.

However, winning the share of voice during Superbowl is not even 10% of the battle, in my opinion. It’s still one of the most televized events in the U.S, and the Twitter frenzy around ads will elevate any brand who advertised during the game. But how many of us will keep buzzing a week after the big game? My guess is, not too many. And how does Superbowl buzz translate to actual purchase intent? That’s a whole different conversation in and of itself. The real test is the longevity of the buzz, and for that you need to create something buzzworthy. A television ad is no longer buzzworthy; it has to be integrated into a larger online and social media marketing effort. I would be curious to see how share of voice and sentiment develop for these two brands during the forthcoming months.

Perhaps a quick pulse-check of sentiment from Sunday would make sense at this point. Coke came it at a slightly more positive sentiment than Pepsi, considering data from yesterday only (Coke on the left, Pepsi on the right):

Taking a closer look at the tag clouds generated for both brands, it is clear that Coke fans were split between liking the Simpsons / “We are all broke” ad, and not liking the Sleepwalker ad. Curiously, there is a phrase inside of the  Coke could that states “Pepsi wins”.

Looking over at Pepsi’s tag cloud, you can see phrases like “Biggest winner for this year’s superbowl ads”, “Embraces social media for good”, “Pepsi Refresh Project”, “Pepsi wins publicity” and “social media spending $20M instead”. These are positively phrased statements, which point to the fact that the “halo effect” created by Pepsi’s social media efforts stayed strong during the Superbowl, even in spite of absence of traditional ads.

Finally, let’s take a look at costs and ROI. An average cost of a 30-second spot during the Superbowl goes for $2.6 million. Since Coke put out 2 one-minute ads, that works out to be $10.4 that the brand spent in increasing buzz for one night. However, Pepsi’s $20 million investment in social media will last them quite some time and will keep the brand top of mind for many months to come. As I mentioned above, buzzworthy content will win, and Pepsi Refresh is very buzzworthy, as the project elevates the conversation to using social media for common good. I say that given how brand information is consumed and shared these days, Pepsi’s investment makes a whole lot more sense. What do you think?