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We are excited to announce a new version of Biz360 Community Insights targeted at getting individual users immediate access to the online service in order to quickly start monitoring social media activity. The new release has many exciting features which we will be talking about in more detail over the next few weeks, one of which is the new User Interface (UI) to the Community Insights web site.

There is no better time than the present to get started monitoring your social media!

Based on market demand, we opened the online store to help new customers quickly and easily get started with Community Insights. “We have received feedback since releasing Community Insight that users wanted a self-service option to get started immediately.  While the product is engineered to be easy to use, upon sign-up we also provide user guides, instructional videos and other helpful materials.  For clients who want a more personal touch, we compliment these with an outreach program that ensures that clients get value quickly,” said Patrick Keegan, vice president of services at Biz360.

The process is very easy to get started:

Complete the form; select which plan you want once the trial period is successful; then receive the welcome email within minutes to login and start creating topics to monitor what is important to you.

Community Insights monitors social media and delivers the insights that can help you make faster and better decisions to improve your business in significant ways:

• Eliminate time and effort to gather and process vital information
• Surface emerging and hot issues that require immediate response
• Identify opinion leaders and social influencers for marketing outreach
• Use real and timely consumer feedback to develop better products and services
• Participate in the conversation with recommendations for outreach tactics

By targeting individual users, we also created an affordable pricing plan to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) use the power of enterprise-class software at a very reasonable and affordable price. After the free trial, users can start for as little as $399 per month, per user. Puneet Arora, the new chief sales officer for Biz360, mentioned, “Now, the smaller businesses can use the powerful software and services used by the largest companies in the world. And only Biz360 can scale up from the self-service individual to the full-service enterprise, with worldwide roll-outs using 16 languages for Fortune 50 companies.”

We welcome your feedback on the online store and new pricing. Stay tuned for more posts about what makes Community Insights unique and capable to deliver your social media monitoring needs.

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

With so many different tools to use to measure and engage in social media, it is important to understand how you can get such different results while searching for the same thing on different platforms, or even how some platforms like Google return different results at different times. If you care about accurate metrics or avoiding sifting through irrelevant results you should understand what makes the difference. Most of it comes down to the way you and the tool defines the topic.

Let’s say you wanted to find all of the conversation about customer service at McDonalds. Many of the low end or free social media tools provide very basic search queries where you can either search for an exact match such as “McDonalds Customer Service” or any content that includes the words “McDonalds” and “customer service” anywhere in the same article/post/tweet. Here are some examples of the difference between these search methods:

• Searching social media for the exact phrase “McDonalds customer service” generates only 12 results for the past 30 days
• Searching social media for the terms “McDonalds” and “customer service” mentioned anywhere in the same post/tweet generates more than 2,000 results for the past 30 days
• Searching social media for the terms “McDonalds” and “service” mentioned anywhere in the same post/tweet generates more than 20,000 results for the past 30 days

The exact match example is eliminating many relevant results because people don’t always use exact phrases when talking. They may say “the service was awful at McDonalds”. The two examples looking for any mention of those words within a single post does not necessarily mean there is any relationship between the terms (McDonalds and service). These are the most common methods low end social media tools use to define topics. Some allow you to add more terms or even exclude terms but they still use either the exact match or terms anywhere within the post method, and that is challenging.

There is a better way. With more sophisticated tools you can use advanced search features to get more accurate results. In order to get optimal results in our example, you want to be able to find all of the occurrences where people are talking about McDonalds and customer service even if they are not using the exact phrase. At Biz360 we use proximity searches and multiple phrase topics to get more specific results. Proximity searches allow you to find multiple phrases within 3,5, or 10 words of each other including a reversed order. This shows Biz360 Community Insights creating a search for McDonalds customer service using proximity:

The results are better when you can include proximity:

• When searching social media for any results where McDonalds is mentioned within 3 words of the term service or customer service, we find more than 500 conversations where people are talking about customer service and McDonalds.
• This method allows us to include phrases like “awful service at McDonalds” and “McDonalds has awful service” which the exact phrase match would miss.
• This method eliminates results where the term McDonalds and the term service may be in the same post/tweet but not associated like: “We were hanging out at McDonalds. I hate when I cant get cell service.”

We can use additional techniques including excludes to further refine the topics. So to be sure that the results do not include any phrases that we do not want as a part of our topic we can add an exclude to the topic such as filter results to exclude mentions of “cell service” or “cell phone service” so we avoid examples like: “I got awful cell reception at McDonalds”

Demanding social media marketers need tools and technology that will help them get the most accurate results so they can spend less time sifting through the noise and more time acting to acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and promote their products/services using social media marketing.

To learn more and take a look, visit Biz360.

The short answer is lots of people including corporate giants like Tyson Foods, health agencies, foreign governments, and pork industry lobbyists. In fact, the CDC, WHO and Smithfield Foods CEO want it to be called North American Influenza. Israel wants it to be called the Mexican Flu. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture wants it to be called H1N1. Brazil has said they would be ok with either North American Flu or Mexican Flu. There are at least 5 potential terms and plenty of jockeying for naming rights to this awful virus.

What is happening around this story is an interesting study of how social media has shifted control of information from traditional media outlets to the voice of the masses. It doesn’t matter what these organizations want, the conversation of the masses will dictate what this virus is called. The result is a PR nightmare for the pork industry.

Back in April of 2009, the corporate giants including Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and Bob Evans successfully convinced the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to officially stop using the name Swine Flu and instead use H1N1. They argued that the name Swine Flu was unfairly hurting the pork industry. After some debate the official position in the U.S. Government was to intentionally change the discussion to begin calling the pandemic by the scientific name H1N1. So in all of the press briefings and news stories, we started hearing the official term H1N1 being used.

Click here to read the Washington Post article regarding the pork lobbyists attempts to fight the name.

In the old days when print newspapers and a handful of network news shows controlled the majority of information the public consumed, this official change in terminology might have worked and the pork industry would be happy as pigs in mud (sorry couldn’t avoid it).

However, we live in a new world where information cannot be controlled by a few media outlets. Now everyone with a computer and internet connection can be a publisher by simply sharing their opinion online via the wide range of social media outlets. The combined impact of social media is far greater than any traditional media outlet has ever been. The digital voice of the masses outweighs the voice of the professional media. Sounds like a true democracy.

At Biz360, we use our new Community Insights platform to measure social media conversation and help our clients engage in the conversation. We found some very interesting trends regarding what people are calling the H1N1/Swine Flu virus.

• Most people still think of it as Swine Flu… despite 5 months of concerted effort to move the conversation away from the term Swine Flu, in the past 7 days the term Swine Flu was used 26% more than the term H1N1 across social media blogs, forums, and micro-blogs.
• However, they are making slow progress… back in March of 2009, we found that Swine Flu was used 83% more than H1N1 so the agents of change are making some impact on the terminology.
• The other terms (Mexican Flu and North American Flu) are virtually non-existent except on the specialty sites like the CDC and WHO.
• This issue is not going away… in September there were more than 100,000 posts each week about Swine Flu/H1N1.

We found thousands of blogs and forums that are committed to talking about this virus. Some of the most common communities talking about this include mommy blogs and frequent traveler forums. If the pork lobbyists really want to change the conversation, they need to find the places where people are talking about this issue and help them understand why this virus isn’t about pigs.

So what is the lesson for companies considering a social media strategy? If you are a marketer who still feels you control your brand, this is a pretty good example that you no longer control your message. Your brand is what people say about you. You can’t simply push new messages out there (like the Dept. of Agriculture attempted to do) and expect a change in perception. Social media marketing requires engaging in the relevant conversations that impact your market. The best brands and companies have realized that if you commit to social media as a marketing channel, it can be the best way to promote your story since the invention of the printing press. 

The past several months have been an incredible demonstration of the power of social media. Not long ago most people viewed social media as a fun way to reconnect with old classmates or maybe find those other unique individuals who share your obscure interests. Not many people would have claimed that social media could change the face of major issues like human rights.

Remember that social media is really just the electronic voice of the populate. It represents the intersection of technology and growing interest in peer to peer conversations. 

Recently there have been several events that have thrusted social media into the heart of issues of humanity. While there are a growing number of such examples, there are a couple that were game changers in my mind:

On June 2nd just prior to the anniversary of the uprising in Tiananmen Square, The Chinese Government blocked access to Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and more sites. Their attempt to quiet the public discussion of the anniversary kicked off weeks worth of public condemnation of Chinese censorship by citizens from around the globe. During the week of June 2nd, the number of negative social media posts about the Chinese Government increased by more than 1900% from the prior week according to our Biz360 analysis. In May, less than 3% of social media posts about China mentioned censorship. However, during the first two weeks of June, the #1 conversation about China was their attempts to block the internet and social media sites. It represented approximately 58% of all social media conversation about China. While the event was covered for a couple of days on television, millions of people continued to talk about it for weeks via social media. While traditional media was on to other stories, this issue remains at the front of peer to peer conversations around the world.

The Iranian Presidential Elections were unique to that nation’s history. Social Media helped ignite interest from a new generation of passionate voters who were looking for reform. The result was record turn out at the polls. The controversy that followed was not necessarily unique in history, but the reaction was. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens used blogs, message boards, web video, social networking sites and micro-blogs such as Twitter to voice their opposition to the election results. They used social media to organize some of the largest protests in the history of Iran. What amazed me the most was that social media appeared to give the protestors sustained energy that remains active today.  Historically, governments like Iran with largely state controlled media have been able to quickly quell voices of opposition. However, social media communication has given the voices of reform in Iran an outlet to continue the debate and their campaign outside of traditional means.  The conversation regarding the Iranian Elections remains very active still today. According to our Biz360 analysis, this past Sunday, the number of social media posts/tweets about the Iranian Election was nearly as high as during the peak of the conversation following the June 12th election. People around the world are realizing the power of their voice. 

While social media might not actually save the world, it has the potential to change the face of big issues like human rights by giving people the power of being heard. If knowledge is power, then social media has the potential to shift the balance of power towards the populate.

In the past 2 years social media has grown faster than any other form of media in our history. Is it a coincidence that the dramatic expansion in the # of people using technology to connect with others via virtual communities happened during one of the most challenging economic times of the past 100 years? There is a strong case that the economy is helping to fuel social media’s entry into main stream society.

Informed shoppers

As consumers have less disposable income they have become more and more judicious in how and where they spend their money. There are hundreds of social media communities dedicated towards helping drivers find the best gas prices anywhere around the country. Many blogs dedicate much of their time to sharing the best room prices for resorts in Las Vegas. And price shopping has moved beyond the various comparison shopping sites to blogs, message boards, and now twitter where people can find the latest deals on anything from cruises to the lowest milk prices around town. The economic turmoil has fueled virtual communities to bond together to identify the best deals so shoppers can spend their money wisely.

Job Seekers

With unemployment rates the highest they have been in many years, there has been a large increase in the number of people using social media to network with others as they look for jobs. Sites like LinkedIn have expanded rapidly as professionals are looking for career opportunities. They provide people the opportunity to find other professionals who are in the same industry, same company, or just a related circle of friends. As the job boards have become less efficient, people are finding virtual social networking as a better way of finding jobs. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and thousands of blogs and forums are places where people are connecting with other communities of job seekers. People are sharing their networks and ideas trying to help each other find a job in this difficult economy. Social networking is providing job seekers important connections as well as a forum to express their frustrations as they seek new opportunities.

Connecting

If you look back at the most challenging times in history, communities have become a key center of support. During the world wars, groups of neighbors across the country would gather to prepare goods to send to the troops. As humans we have a need to bond with others especially during difficult times. While the timing of the rapid expansion in social media may be a coincidence, there are many examples where we can see the evidence of these challenging economic times driving people towards connecting through communities just as they have in the past. The difference this time is that many of the communities are virtual. My bet is even as the economy recovers, social networking will continue to grow faster than any other form of media. We just may remember this time in history when developments in technology intersected with particularly challenging times leading to incredible growth in virtual communities.

Recently I attended a roundtable event lead by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester where 28 industry leading companies discussed our predictions on the future of social media. It was an incredible day where leaders from companies like Wells Fargo, Cisco, IBM, Google, Nokia, SAP, Oracle, Intel, and others all shared our best ideas about how social media will change our personal and professional future. We came up with several insightful predictions that will be published in an upcoming Forrester Report.

 The event spurred my thinking around a couple of ideas how social media can help companies facing shrinking budgets during this tough economic climate.  

 1)       Eliminate Guesswork –

a.       Then…..It used to be that one of the best ways to find out what consumers thought was to pay small groups of random citizens to sit down in a non-descript room with 1 way mirror windows to answer prescribed questions about their shopping habits (or whatever issue we wanted to probe them about). We would conduct hundreds of these focus groups in small and large cities across the country trying to be sure our methodology was defensible – since we were expecting that these few hundred specimens would absolutely represent the sentiment of the 300 million people in our country. We would supplement this with random calling households by telephone precisely at dinner time to ask them a series of questions with very specific words designed to predict what the person would do in the real world.

b.      Now….On the internet today there are tens of millions of active communities talking about every topic you can possibly imagine. People are telling you what they think without the interpretation bias of a survey question. Technological advances in text mining and Natural Language Processing allow us to understand what millions of consumers think about virtually any topic you can imagine. The most innovative companies have already figured out ways to bring social communities into their board rooms to help make critical business decisions. More and more companies see social media as a way to mitigate the budget cuts that are forcing them to cut spending on traditional market research studies. You no longer need to guess what people think about a specific topic – millions are already talking about it every day in online discussions.  Reduce your traditional market research budgets and supplement those projects with technology based social media research.

2)       Don’t be afraid to jump in –

a.       Then…there were so many miss-steps early in social media that most companies were happy to stay on the side lines to avoid making a mistake that could impact the brand and get someone fired. We can all think of our favorite social media gaff whether it was a PR agency pretending to be enthusiastic employees of a major retailer or images of laptop batteries catching on fire spreading across the global web, or even the Turner Network devices that were scattered around several cities to hopefully generate online discussion of a new TV show that instead lead to a bomb squad scare.

b.      Now… the most innovative companies have found ways to join the discussion in a transparent way and that doing so can be really good for business by changing the dynamics of the discussion, solving problems faster than traditional means and generating scores of great ideas. Rather than making customers go through the incredibly annoying voice activated telephone directories trying to find any live person in customer service, the best companies are deploying customer service reps directly into online community discussions to see if they can help resolve common problems. These companies are finding that you can answer common problems that hundreds or thousands of customers might be having with their products by simply joining the conversation. The result is a lower cost of service as well as an increase in client retention. These companies are also benefitting from an increase in advocacy as most social media citizens applaud the more open and honest discussion with companies that was all but eliminated with the advent of scripted call centers or automated telephone systems. You can do this a number of ways but the most common include creating an area on your corporate web site where customers can chat with your customer service reps (swimming in the shallow water) or you can empower your best customer advocates to engage discussions in the online communities that are having the biggest impact on your brand or your products (diving in the deep end). We always recommend full disclosure of who they are and what they are looking to do – solve customers’ problems.

 There are many ways you can use social media as marketing and operations budgets are being scrutinized.  These are a sample of some of the ways our clients are using social media to swim upstream during this challenging economy.

You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

As I get ready to begin my role as CEO of Biz360 tomorrow, I reflect back on my decision to leave a leadership role with a very successful business enterprise and move my wife and two young daughters more than halfway across the country away from our friends and family. Really, it was an easy decision for us to make.

I am fortunate to have spent time working with many different world-class organizations. My career consists of more than 15 years of building successful sales and marketing organizations for both small and large companies. Much of my career has been spent with technology-based organizations. As a Partner in the Management Consulting Division of The Gallup Organization, I helped executives use scientific research to develop business strategies for engaging their employees and customers.

As I learned more and more about Biz360, I realized the tremendous market opportunity facing the company. With the increasing levels of media coverage and explosion of social media on the Internet, even the most advanced companies are struggling to measure and manage the fast pace of changing perceptions in today’s digital society. Biz360 has been and will continue to be a leader in developing innovative technology to measure and interpret market perception.

The company has the talent and the technology to deliver the full service offerings our most demanding clients require. From real-time insight to analyst services, Biz360 has the foundation to lead the way for years to come.

On a personal note, my wife and our two young daughters will be joining me in the Bay Area in November. After meeting the people at Biz360 and studying the business opportunity, we knew this was the right move for us. Personally, we love the outdoors and welcome the chance to live in a great place like the Bay Area. It’s an easy decision to make this level of commitment when you feel so confident about the opportunity.

You can expect great things to come from Biz360. And I look forward to your thoughts along the way.