Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

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…

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

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. 

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!

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.

Since we have access to so much data via our Community Insights platform, I thought we would do something a little fun. Most of the time, we use our monitoring platform and smart sentiment engine to help customers engage and win in the buzzing, and often disorienting, social media space. But sometimes, we use our data and sentiment measurement to make predictions on what may happen next. For example, we used our sentiment measurement to predict the winner of American Idol last year.

Today, I want to ruminate and speculate about the Apple Tablet. It grabbed my attention, because the following FoxNews article is now in day 2 of being at the top of Techmeme. A read of the aforementioned article confirms the several-month-long chatter around the Apple Tablet rumors, and also tells us that Apple is in talks with two of the largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon. A data junkie wants to know if we can we use social media to: 1) understand who is talking about the Apple Tablet and where, 2) how people feel about it, and 3) how they feel about the Apple’s partnership with the two carriers?

Here’s what the data tells us:

Most of the Apple Tablet chatter is occurring in microblogs and blogs:

Sentiment towards the Apple Tablet has evolved over the past couple of weeks. We are ending the 2-week cycle with a more positive disposition than we started with (see below). Perhaps because before it was considered a bunch of unfounded rumors, but now it’s actually starting to look real?  A deep dive into each day of sentiment can help uncover who is driving the conversation. This is beyond the scope of this post, but useful information for an Apple analyst or the marketing and social media team at Apple.

Is there any difference in how the different media sources feel about the Apple Tablet? I am excluding Twitter from this discussion, because tweets are notoriously difficult to calculate sentiment due to Twitter’s own syntax and character economy, which makes grammar and spelling fall by the wayside. Other than that, seems that blogs (see below) are more excited about the Tablet than discussion forums. Among some of the largest (in terms of reach and impact) blog sources contributing positive sentiment on 1.21 were Yahoo! Tech Blogs, CNET, iClarified, MacUser, and many many others.

Interesting to note that interest in the subject peaked on forums on the 13th and the 21st of this month (see below), but seemed to languish in between. A deeper dive into some of the negative forums with the widest reach reveals: PC World Forums like this one, and this one and AfterDawn forums, MacWorld forums, Apple Insider and many others. The Apple Tablet community manager has her job cut out for her!

One of the coolest things that Community Insights can do is generate a tag cloud around your topic of choice. Let’s see what the bloggers are saying about the Tablet:

Most of the phrases are around rumors and confirmations of announcement, camera on the iPhone (it won’t have a camera and it will – hmmm so which one is it?), NY Times Paywall, Webcam, 3G, Apple Tablet coming to Verizon (is it really? I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that one), and other “truemors.”

Speaking of Verizon… Which carrier will Apple choose? Apple Tablet certainly seems to have a higher share of voice than AT&T:

And a closer look at the Verizon vs. AT&T tag cloud clearly shows that “AT&T is an Apple Tablet dealbraker” (wow, strong statement), and contradictory statements like “AT&T to get apple tablet” and “Apple is headed to Verizon”.

The Verizon & Apple Tablet tag cloud includes many of the same phrases, but the most frequently occurring phrase seems to be a more definitive one “Apple will be sold” (through Verizon), while many other occurrences include both “AT&T” and “Verizon” in the same phrase.

Although sentiment for both carriers seems to be about even, with the slight leaning towards Verizon, the fact that Apple is talking to both carriers makes me think that they will be able to offer it through both AT&T and Verizon. I certainly  hope so, because after the release of  the carrier-agnostic (sort of) Nexus One, all smartphone manufacturers should start to become available through many carriers. I guess only time will tell, on January 27th.

Community Insights clients now have a new way of interacting with Biz360 and each other. Our new support portal, based on a Social CRM model, is now available to all Community Insights clients.

The primary requirement behind implementing the new support portal was to find a way to better serve our customers in the Web 2.0 environment. To meet that requirement, we built a robust, searchable knowledge base which contains user guides, FAQs and training videos. We created a place where clients can interact with one another and with Biz360 by submitting questions, ideas or starting discussions. Additionally, the new support portal offers a direct link to service agents via an integrated Case Management System. Now, our customers have a wealth of knowledge right at their finger tips; searching for answers or asking for assistance has never been easier.

Community based support systems are a very important development in the customer support function. Because many clients may have the same question, there is a tremendous value in being able to understand the responses that others received to that same question. Moreover, our service portal allows our customers to submit ideas and suggestions for improvements. Because some of our best ideas come from listening to our customers, we are taking this seriously, and providing a feedback loop to ensure that every voice is heard.

You can read the associated press release here.

The most important part of this job is that the candidate must demonstrate “social media DNA” and have extensive social media experience. This means that the person is actively participating in a wide variety of social media activities such as Twitter, blogging, community development and management, social bookmarking, commenting, etc. and is well-connected with the broader social media world. The second important part is that the candidate must be able to serve as the social host for Biz360 – the first impression that most people will encounter for Biz360 (personality will be important).     This candidate will be working at Biz360 headquarters,  and should be local to Redwood City, CA.    Applicants should email:  Biz360SMjob@gmail.com.

Responsibilities – the key responsibilities for this position include:

• Live in the social media world for Biz360 as the ambassador / social host
• Respond to & engage all inquiries for Biz360 on social sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs)
• Seek out & join conversations about social media monitoring on social sites
• Delegate to experts in the company on topics fit for their input
• Experiment with new and alternative ways to leverage social media activities (“marketing R&D”)
• Monitor trends in social media tools, trends and applications and appropriately apply that knowledge to increasing the use of social media at Biz360
• Strategize with and educate the management team and others across the company on incorporating relevant social media techniques into the corporate culture and into all of the company’s products and services
• Measure the impact of social media on the overall marketing efforts

Experience – the ideal candidate will have experience in the following areas:

* Social media tools and techniques
* Marketing (traditional, new media, guerilla and ‘word of mouth’)
* Communities
* Product marketing
* Press and analyst relations
* Business development
* Technology
* Operations
* Sales
* Financial and quantitative analysis
* Project management

Attributes – the key attributes for this position include:

* Social, online and offline
* Engaging in communication
* Creativity
* Willingness to experiment
* Ability to deal with uncertainty
* Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams
* Doggedness and determination
* Ability to synthesize large amounts of data into actionable information
* Excellent writing skills and a willingness to use them
* Excellent verbal communication skills
* Persuasiveness
* Ability to create great working relationships with all levels within the company and across multiple disciplines
* Sense of humor

Please inquire at Biz360SMjob@gmail.com.

One question I often get asked is, “Why can’t I use Google Blog Search to track my coverage?”  There are a variety of reasons one would not want to do this, most importantly, Google’s metrics are meaningless.

To demonstrate the flaws in Google’s metrics, I decided check out the blog coverage from Google Wave.  Doing a quick search in Google Blog Search revealed about 1,569,236 results.  Was this a lot of conversation?  Looking over on the left, I saw the time frame was set to anytime.  Anytime is a little ambiguous so I narrowed it down to last week, and it returned about 15,419 results.  Using a separate browser, I ran the same query and it returned about 27,085 results.  That’s a difference of 11,666 results.  How could this be?  It was from the same machine, just different browsers (one being Safari, the other Firefox). In fact, each time I hit refresh the numbers changed.

Aside from different browsers getting different results, Google has another problem: the problem of counting.  Running a query for “Apple TV” for the date rage of 9/22-9/24 returned 1,526 results.  I wanted to know if there was a spike in conversation between these days so I ran the query once for each day.  The queries returned 162, 160, and 142 for the three days: 9/22, 9/23, and 9/24 respectively.  Adding those numbers returned 464 results.  The math didn’t make sense (464 does not equal 1,526).  As it turns out there is an explanation.

The number Google provides is only an approximation based on the probability of the the search terms occurrence in blogs.  Although I was not able to get an official word from Google (I’ll update the post if I hear back from them on the matter) there is a quote from an unnamed Google employee.  It’s old, but after testing the results, it seems they haven’t done much in this area.

There are small variations in the number of results due to the fact that index updates are done at different times in different data centers. But there are much larger variations due to the fact that these are all estimates, and we just haven’t tried that hard to make the estimates precise. To figure out the number of results in the query [a OR b], we need to intersect two posting lists. But we don’t want to pay the price of intersecting all the way to the end, so we do a prefix and then extrapolate. The extrapolation is done with the help of some parameters that were carefully tuned several years ago, but haven’t been reliably updated as the index has grown and the web has changed, so sometimes the results can be off.

Bottom line, Google’s search results are not meant to be used as an analytics platform.

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. 

There is no better way to get good press than to do interesting things.  With so many software applications out there already, it’s often best to pick a niche, do it well, and then integrate with other similar applications that will benefit your customers.

MySpace used to be one of the biggest social networks on the web.  It has recently come of age by focusing on the music niche.  They recently announced that posts on Twitter can feed into MySpace and MySpace updates can feed into Twitter.  MySpace made this announcement on September 21, earning them more mentions than any other this month.

Biz360’s Community Insights tool will allow you to monitor mentions of your competitors, industry, as well as your brand.  How can companies better use this knowledge to get a leg up on their competitors?