Sports fans held their breath as the Saints took on the Colts during last night’s Superbowl 2010. At the same time, marketers and ad and social media folks waited with baited breath for the famously lavish and obscenely expensive Superbowl commercials, to see which ones would outdo all others (or perhaps tone it down this year due to tough economic conditions). With the immediacy of social media platforms and realtime access to Twitter, it is now possible to know right away which brands did well in the court of social media opinion and which ones failed.

A quick review of yesterday’s social media chatter via the Biz360 Community tool, clearly shows three winners that garnered the most mindshare in social media: Google, Doritos and the Focus on the Family campaign featuring Tim Tebow.

Looking at sentiment across the three topics, it was mostly positive, although tweets make it very difficult to understand sentiment.

What is more telling is the discovery process that can be done around each brand’s name. Via tag cloud analysis, the phrases that most frequently occurred when speaking about the Google ad, were along the lines of  ”my favorite Superbowl ad”, “liked Google ad”, “loved Google ad”, “great Superbowl ad”. Clearly, this was the crowd’s favorite.

The Tim Tebow ad stirred up quite a controversy (as expected) with words “Controversy”, “Controversial” and “Right Wing Fundamentalist” listed prominently, and alongside statements like “Celebrate Life”. On the one hand, folks were urging others to complain to CBS, while others said: “Let’s make it the most popular ad”. Below the fold, phrases like “violence against women” and “waste of a superbowl commercial” make an appearance.

What were your favorite Superbowl ads?

Several months ago Pepsi made a decision to completely replace their traditional Superbowl advertising with social media efforts. In late January, Coca Cola has jumped on the social media bandwagon, and announced that it will be doing a Facebook campaign during the Superbowl. So how did the blogosphere and the Twittersphere  react to these announcements? And did the “tweeps” side more with Pepsi, because of its brave foray into social media at the expense of a more traditional advertising strategy. If this happened several years ago, we would’ve all thought Pepsi was crazy for pulling its Superbowl ads. After all, it was assumed that a large brand that had the funds to support a Superbowl ad placement, would never pass up such an opportunity. Because how else would you be able to reach millions of people? Enter year 2010, the golden age of social media.

So how did the two brands fare against each other in sentiment and share of voice? I built a couple of reports using the Biz360 Community tool, based on a combination of keywords dealing with Coke, Pepsi, and Superbowl ads. Looking at share of voice for the past 90 days, you can see that Pepsi has a considerably larger “piece of the pie” than Coke.

However, if you look at the last two weeks, the gap has narrowed somewhat, which makes me think that Coke’s social media announcement had something to do with that.

Looking at sentiment, both brands have garnered a fairly positive sentiment, but then again, these are Coke and Pepsi, the all-American “Brands Next Door”. Looking at how sentiment evolved over time, it’s interesting to point out that both Coke and Pepsi had a spike in positive sentiment on January 28th, the day that Facebook announced its social media campaign during Superbowl. However, Coke had very little positive activity before that (see below), whereas Pepsi (2nd chart below) had some significant spikes throughout the month.

So I built a sentiment trendline for Pepsi going 90 days back, and this is what I saw (see below). Indeed, Pepsi has been experiencing a positive lift ever since the announcement came out at the end of December.

I would like to take a minute to welcome  Ryan Kuder to the Biz360 family. Ryan will be directing all marketing efforts for the Biz360 brand, and I will be helping execute on the social media side of things. We are excited to have Ryan on the team (he already started yesterday), because his unique blend of skills and experiences are a fantastic match to this position. Ryan describes this best himself in this post. You can view Ryan’s LinkedIn profile here and his daily Twitter musings here.

Please join me in welcoming Ryan to the team!

This interview is part of the 10th Anniversary Interview Series. I sat down with Pat Keegan, the VP of Services at Biz360, and this is what he shared with me about providing excellent customer service in a social media world.

MO: Hi Pat, thanks for joining us! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

PK: I am a proud parent.  I like sports, exercise, history, kids and travel.  I am very interested in business outsourcing.  I am also on the Board of a non-profit that supports an orphanage in Vietnam.

I spent most of my career in the telecommunications industry with experience in various engineering and services positions.  I was recruited to Biz360 by a former collogue.  It represented a significant career shift, but is something I have never regretted.

For the past five years I have lead the Services team here at Biz360.

MO: How is Biz360 of today different from when you joined?

PK: The business has changed significantly.  At one point we were focused exclusively on traditional media.  With the emergence of social media, we have adapted out technology, products and services to meet the new market demands.  The transition has been very exciting.

MO: How has your role changed since you have been here? How has the Services department changed?

PK: Well, my role has not changed too much – it involves staying focused on client requirements, building a top-notch team, and ensuring that our processes are both efficient and effective.  On the other hand, our priorities and initiatives have changed significantly.  Early on, we put a lot of emphasis on building a highly professional services team, including domestic and global partners.  This has allowed us to offer best-in-class services at highly competitive prices.   More recently we have been focused on creating a suite of new services to support the social media market.

When I first joined the company, Services was focused on application training, usage and adoption.  Since then, we have placed much more emphasis on value-creation.  We now offer a broad set of services that complements our technology and have built a flexible delivery model that adapts to our client’s unique needs.

MO: How has social media affected what clients need from their technology intelligence solutions, and how we service them?

PK: I do not believe our clients needs have changed fundamentally.  They still require information that is timely, relevant, accurately, easy to consume and insightful.  What has changed are the different business functions who now need monitoring and measurement to remain competitive.  Historically, PR and Corporate Communications teams were tasked with managing media.  Social media has expanded the number of functional organizations who need to not only listen, but engage.  Social media is now touching nearly every corner of the enterprise – from service centers to product teams and beyond.  This creates both challenges and opportunities for Biz360.

MO: What are some successes / roadblocks that you have experienced in regards to the changing media landscape, and the types of media sources we are looking at?

PK: For starters, the nature of social media poses special challenges for technology.   Social media is much more “messy” than traditional media – typos, misspelling, slang, sarcasm, etc. are the norm.  Our clients demand high relevancy and accurate metrics.  We work closely with our engineers to constantly refine these capabilities.

Content can be a challenge in this space.  Many content sources and providers have business models that are still evolving.  Some offer full access to content, some are restrictive even when privacy issues are not evident.  Some make their content easy to get, some are more difficult.  Bottom-line, it means that we must closely monitor sources of content so that we can provide our clients the most comprehensive inventory of social media content available.

Servicing clients in a rapidly expanding market is challenging, but rewarding.  Many businesses are racing to get on top of social media.  I believe that technology platforms, like ours, will prove to be indispensible.  But users have varying needs for support, and we want to be there to assist as needed.  We recently launched our new service portal and community.  We also now offer 5×24 global support to better serve our clients in Europe and Asia.  We will continue to evolve our services as the market requires.

MO: What do you think our clients will be looking for in the next year? 2 years? 5 years?

PK: This is difficult to predict since this is still an emerging market.  But I think it will be very important for us to keep pace with the growing sources of content, make it easy for our clients to adapt to the changing media landscape, and build our reputation as trusted advisors.

The Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series continues as I interview You Mon Tsang, one of the co-founders of Biz360. I sat down with You Mon to talk about the company’s humble beginnings, building a killer team, following the entrepreneurial dream, persevering in the face of adversity, and predictions for the social media monitoring space. I was really impressed to hear how in spite of September 11’s aftermath and the crumbling economic climate, the early team of Biz360 literally moved mountains to close the necessary rounds of funding and close those early customers. Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, this interview (parts 1 and 2 below) is sure to move you.

As the news of Apple iPad broke on Wednesday late morning, Twitter was abuzz with the news. So much so, that  a friend of mine asked in a tweet, prior to the announcement: “What will get more press: the Apple announcement or the State of the Union Address?”, to which I retorted “I bet it will be the iPad”. Was I right?

As a data junkie, I was fascinated on the spot, and recalled this question immediately when picking a topic for this week’s Biz360 trend report. So without much ado, I tracked social media mentions for the following topics: Apple iPad, State of the Union Address, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is another big world event going on currently (which seemed to be getting a little lost amongst all the iPad chatter). I analyzed two days: January 27th, the day of the iPad announcement and the State of the Union Address, as well as the following day. I tracked these topics across Twitter, blogs, forums / discussion boards, and online news, and this is what I found:

The iPad coverage did, in fact, far outweigh the coverage received by the State of the Union and Davos, resulting a crushing 58.8% share of voice. People talked about iPad more than twice as much as about the State of the Union (at 34.8%), and completely obliterating any Davos conversation (at 3.8%). The Apple iPad received a staggering 164,000+ mentions across various social media channels.

To an extent, I think this may be a function of the medium, as the lion’s share (86.6%) of the iPad conversations were happening on Twitter (see below), which in its early days tended to skew towards the “geeky and techie” contingent, with traditionally a high adoption rate of Apple products. Thus, it would make sense that the folks most interested in the iPad announcement, were tweeting up a storm about the announcement. However, since Twitter has gone more mainstream, this argument becomes a little flawed. Other than the possible Twitter medium explanation, your guess is as good as mine as far why the iPad received more coverage than Obama’s first State of the Union Address.

So how did the public feel about this very hotly debated new gadget? If you look at all social media sources (which is highly skewed towards Twitter, as we discussed above), sentiment is mostly neutral. Twitter is notoriously hard to measure because its character economy (maximum 140 characters per tweet) makes us forgo the grammar and correct spelling, making it difficult for a machine (heck, even a human!) to understand sentiment.

However, removing Twitter fetches quite a different result. Not counting Twitter, sentiment towards the iPad has been mostly positive (see below). In another post, I think I may dig into how we, the Social Media Republic, feel about the iPad name, which has been responsible for an avalanche of jokes about feminine products.

As part of the Biz360 10th Anniversary interview series, I have been chatting with several long-term employees of the company, from different job functions and perspectives. Most recently, I had a chance to catch up with Eric Israel, our VP of sales. Here’s what we talked about:

MO: Eric, thanks for joining us today. Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Biz360, how you got here, and why you decided to make Biz360 your professional home for the past 7 years?

EI: My name is Eric Israel, and I am the Vice President of Sales at Biz360. I am responsible for sales to new customers, as well as maintaining and expanding current client relationships. I am approaching my 7^th year with Biz360, and to this day remember the excitement I had after my interview with our Founder You-Mon Tsang. It was an easy decision for me to come to Biz360, as my background had been in large business intelligence applications and data mining. It was clear to me that an enormous value could be provided by Biz360’s solutions to businesses. I knew they (businesses) required the actionable insights that could be gained from understanding what was being said about them in the media.

MO: Thanks, Eric! Can you tell me how Biz360 has changed over the years?

EI: When I first joined Biz360, most companies were skeptical about the level of analysis that could be done with technology and software applications. I remember spending a lot of my time with clients educating them on what can be done. Most people were using samples of data vs. everything that was available to them. With the pervasive expansion of information available online, it became clear to our clients that using software was the only way to gain a competitive advantage. Today, when I speak with people in the market, they are expecting the technology to do even more than I thought could ever be done. We have clearly come a long way in such a short time.

MO: Eric, How has your role changed since you joined almost 7 years ago?

EI: The sales team here at Biz360 has seen a lot of change over the last 7 years. When Biz360 first came to market, we spent a lot of time educating the clients on what was truly available to them. There was a huge investment made in education and putting perspective around the change that businesses could make. Today the market has been educated and exposed to change so quickly. The time to market is a lot faster. The other area that has changed in a dramatic way is the content. The volumes and types content are simply staggering. What’s a Tweet? No one asked what the editorial page was or if the information was in print? We all knew. We need to help clients understand what the next Twitter will be. The sales team at Biz360 must be on the bleeding edge of these new developments.

MO: From your vantage point, how has social media affected what clients need from their technology intelligence solutions,and how we sell to them?

EI: I would say that the market’s needs fall into three main categories: Speed, Relevancy & Metrics. Social media moves so quickly that clients have to react in real time. What is hot this morning could be quite old this afternoon. On top of that, the language style that people use in social media is different from the formal writing we were taught in school. Clients want to be sure that the data they are looking at is really about them, and not erroneous content. HP does not want mentions of Harry Potter, and Computer Associates does not want mentions regarding the state of CA. When trying to understand with whom to engage, clients demand that their technology solution point them in the right direction. Clients simply can not respond to every post about them. Our technology needs to let them know when not to mind a comment because it does not matter. This is done with specific metrics around impact, engagement and tone. We at Biz360 show our clients how engaged people are in their conversation, whether or not those conversation are impactful, and what is tone is of those conversations.

MO: What do you think our clients will be looking for in the next year? What about 2 years? 5 years?

 EI: It is clear from our clients that they are looking for one platform to perform a number of functions in social media. In short, marketers need to find ways to help their business grow. At Biz360 we are showing our clients how to use social media to acquire new customers, retain the ones that they have, as well as engage in the conversation while learning about their space.  Couple that information with effective community management, customer support, and using this new channel for promotion – and you see the business flourish in social channels.  As we move further into maturity of this market, you will see social media metrics integrated with other operational metrics used to run the business. This unfiltered voice of the customer will be an invaluable part of the integrated mix model marketing that the most sophisticated companies are using today. The most exciting part is that we can get people there today!

Biz360 is fortunate to have excellent global clients as partners.   We work with some of the largest companies doing measurement today.  These clients have users in over 20 countries measuring in 16 languages!  These enterprise level clients continue to help our offerings and our market evolve — indeed they keep us on our toes.

The latest offering is round the clock global support.   Clients in any location can submit questions to the recently launched Community Portal at all times during the business week, where trained Biz360 agents review and respond to each request.   The Portal will be staffed to answer questions for users in Asia as they start their day Monday morning, all the way through until Friday happy hour, Pacific time.

There is even more good news.  This level of support is available to all clients -  large or small, global or not.    We are aiming to provide an all around best-in-class service response globally.  Tell us how we do!

Additional details in associated press release.

As you know, next Monday, February 1, 2010, marks the beginning of Social Media Week. It is a whole week of educational events, panels, barcamps, networking events around social media. As staunch supporters of social media and the quantifiable impact that it has on businesses, we are doing everything in our power to support this tremendous effort. Social media week will run in parallel across 6 cities worldwide.

As a SMW partner, we are sponsoring Social Media Week SF, Social Media Camp (including hosing a panel of social media measurement and ROI), as well as showcasing our insights in a free report available for download after the week finishes. The report will aim to further explore most popular topics discussed during the course of the week, as well as measure the buzz around SMW and its events, across all the 6 cities.  You can sign up here to receive a copy, and when the report is released, we will email it to you. And if you are in the area, please pop into the events, to say hello to us and other fans of social media.

As a marketer, oh boy do I know how things have changed! No longer do consumers listen to or watch advertisements. Directmail and mass emails get tossed into the wastebasket. Unless it’s a tailored communication or offer, buyers scoff at marketing that treats them like a number. Granularity and 1-on-1 marketing are expected more and more. And to top it off, with web analytics and measurement technologies widely available, ROI is increasingly important to quantify success of marketing programs. So how does a brand stand out? How does a brand truly develop a message, product offering and support to match evolving needs? In a space like ours, with so much data and so many smart technologies around, how do we give our clients what they need? How do we evolve our brand, while keeping our innovative DNA intact? Let’s have Tamairah Boleyn lead the way!

I caught up with Tam Boleyn, our faithful Director of Marketing. Tam lets us in on her path towards this position, and provides  commentary on how our marketing activities have changed to keep up with the changing needs and expectations of our clients.

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