Posts Tagged ‘Community Insights’

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?

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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 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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Ten years ago, You Mon Tsang and Dan Gartung founded a media measurement company, and they decided to call it Biz360. Boy, were they ahead of the curve! As pioneers in the space, they had to oftentimes educate their customers on measurement and tracking, why it’s important, and why they should do it.

As the years wore on, the media landscape as we know it has been turned on its head by social websites and technologies that allow us to connect and relate to others in an unprecedented way. As traditional media has evolved into this more social paradigm, Biz360 has adjusted well, by developing Community Insights, a monitoring, engagement and measurement platform. Each day, we are challenged by more and larger datasets, the growing demand for realtime everything, and the evolving profile of our customer. So we threw a 10th anniversary party to celebrate this tremendous milestone, reconnect with each other, and ponder (over cocktails of course) upon what makes us successful, and where to go from here. Here are a few words from You Mon Tsang:

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.

86% of companies are planning to increase their spending on social media.  However, many marketers and companies are struggling with how to track and measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts.   Join Biz360 to find out what Biz360 Community, our Social Media solution can do to help your business.  Biz360 has been providing media intelligence solutions to major enterprise clients for 10 years.   Now we have expanded the platform so that businesses of all sizes can take advantage of the same features and benefits.

Demonstrations will be available every two weeks, with schedule to be posted in MarketIQ here shortly.  The next one will be Thursday, March 11, 11:00 am PT, and registration is required.    All webinar attendees get a 15-day free trial.

Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series – Interview with Danielle Sherman, Account Manager Extraordinaire

Danielle Sherman understands what it takes to ensure that our clients are using their Biz360 tools to their maximum potential. She is an educator, a fixer, an interpreter of data and a “topic query whisperer”. After we sign up a large enterprise client, it’s the services team, which Danielle is a part of, which makes the social media motor hum daily.

We index such tremendous amounts of data that we want to ensure that our clients can get their hands around their very large numbers of mentions. As easy as our product is to use, our clients have been known to build some very complex topics. And that’s where we come in: from complex topic creation, to custom report generation and  social media education, our services team is here to help unlock the full capabilities of our platform.

Having come from “PR 1.0″, Danielle has a unique perspective on how social media has changed the conversation, PR, marketing, and what our clients are looking for. Take a look at her interview below:

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.

Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series – Employee #1 Gavin Das

We are turning 10 this month! That’s quite a feat; most startups don’t make it past their first year. We started out monitoring traditional media, added blogs, and now fully embrace the social media world. With so much data available in realtime, the tech challenges are enormous. Being able to capture, index and filter all this data, while serving it up in a flexible interface, is not for the faint of heart.

I sat down with our engineering powerhouse Gavin Das, the guy who built the company alongside with the founders. Gavin tells us about the days of working from the founder’s spare bedroom 10 years ago, how things changed, and how Biz360’s technology helps clients measure and monitor social media. Did you know that we re-architected our system 4 times so far, to meet the demands of the ever-changing media landscape? With the team’s technical knowhow, I have no doubt we will be around for a lot more than another 10 years.

The volume of social media content can be overwhelming, even with the best designed search strategy. And even then, there is the always ubiquitous spam problem…

Because of these challenges, focus is key in navigating your way through the social web. How do I focus my search to make sure that my results stay relevant? One of my favorite features in the Community Insights platform is called “Community Lists”.  This feature allows users to create discrete, spam free source lists, even across multiple content types (blogs, micro-blogs, forums, online news, etc.).  I use this feature to segment coverage so I can focus on tracking high impact industry influencers, another list of bloggers I want to engage with regularly and even internal sources so I can monitor our departmental activity levels.   In addition, there are many other possible use cases.

Clearly, there are times when I want to search across the full blogosphere, for example when using our discovery feature to surface emerging topics.  But day-to-day, using Community Lists saves me a great deal of time and increases precision of my analysis.