Posts Tagged ‘keyword monitoring tool’

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.

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Last week’s CES brought us a flurry of exciting announcements, but the most exciting one (I think) happened the day before CES got underway. Last Tuesday (which also happened to be my first day with Biz360), marked the launch of Nexus One, the first official Google phone built on the Android platform. A topic that’s this widely discussed in the blogosphere and the Twittersphere is just music to the ears of someone like me. Imagine all the tracking, monitoring and measurement that can be done! Well, now you can stop imagining and just read this post.

I wanted to figure out not only what’s going on in the Nexus One land, but also how this news is affecting public opinion of its closest competitors. Is it really an iPhone killer? Where does the Motorola Droid fit in? For the purposes of this post, I tracked mentions of three touch-screen smartphones: Nexus One, iPhone and Motorola Droid, across 4 types of media: blogs, microblogs, online news and forums / discussion boards. Unless otherwise noted, data is based on a combined measurement of these media.

During and after its launch, Nexus One experienced a tremendous rise in coverage (coverage is an estimated count of online mentions across the 4 types of media at hand). Even so, at 102.4K mentions, it pales in comparison to the 866k iPhone mentions (that’s 8.5x the coverage of Nexus One!). Clearly, the iPhone is still top of mind across social media platforms and is the reigning king of the touchscreen smartphone sector. Based on mindshare, Nexus One is not the famed iPhone killer (at least not just yet). *Note: you can see a larger version of each chart by clicking on it.

Here it makes sense to make a distinction about coverage vs. impact and reach, the terms I will be using liberally in these trend reports. As I mentioned above, coverage is basically the number of mentions via the social web (by keyword, collection of keywords, however you define your “topic”). Each of these media mentions has reach and impact. Reach signifies how many visitors / subscribers that site has. Impact is a more finely tuned metric: with impact we actually estimate how many people read a particular article, and thus how much influence a particular post carries. For example, Mashable may have x number of unique visitors and subscribers, but does everyone read every post? Of course not! We estimate out how many people actually read a particular post; hence the two separate metrics of reach and impact. What does this mean in the context of our smartphone study?

If you look at impact, iPhone’s impact is only 4.9 times that of the Nexus One (see below left), as compared to 8.5 times Nexus One’s coverage. Also, Nexus One receives more comments per mention than the iPhone (see below right). What does this mean? This is how I think about it: even though there are a lot more instances online in which the iPhone is mentioned, readers are more likely to read and interact with articles written about Nexus One.

Now let’s take a closer look at where all of this action is happening; just as importantly, how people feel about these products, and how that feeling may have changed over time: pre and post release of the Nexus One.

Where is the chatter?

Nexus One was covered by all 4 types of media, but the majority of the activity happened in blogs (35% of all mentions), and in microblogs (29%) (see below). iPhone is covered pretty evenly by discussion boards (29%), microblogs (28%) and blogs (27%). Droid (not shown here) also was mostly discussed in forums, microblogs and blogs.

Coverage across the different sources is pretty clear cut, but what impact do they each have? Here’s an interesting finding: if we look at impact, microblogs are pretty much absent. If you look at the chart below, the majority (63%) of Nexus One conversations is happening in blogs. Where did Twitter go? Microblogs were, after all, the #2 source by coverage. We use a different calculation to calculate impact of tweets (based on retweets and other metrics), but it’s clear that the impact of each tweet is much less than that of a blog or news article (although there are roughly as many tweets as blog mentions).

What’s the implication for a community manager, social media marketer, or blogger? If you are trying to engage with your community in a place that’s relevant to them, you need to know where your community is. This is how you decide where you should focus your time and effort. Clearly, for the smartphone sector, blogs, microblogs and discussion forums are best. But where do you start? Well, a deeper dive needs to be conducted to figure out what the top sources are, and who the top authors are (bloggers, online journalists, thought leaders on Twitter), and engaging with them.

Survey says… People like it!

So now we know there’s a lot of chatter, and we know where it’s happening. But what exactly are people saying about this new product? According to Biz360’s sentiment analysis, the vast majority of the Nexus One sentiment was positive (39.3%) or neutral (37.9%) (see below left). However, if you look at sentiment of impact, you will see that it was overwhelmingly positive at 66.4% (see below right). What does this mean? Simply that the articles that garnered the most readership happened to be positive; looks like the respected tech reporters and bloggers felt positively about Nexus One.

By comparison, Droid garnered the most positive sentiment at 67% (below left), and iPhone sentiment was the lowest of the three.

Let’s take a look at how Nexus One sentiment changed over time (see below left). Before launch (which is represented by the tallest spike of coverage, as expected), feelings were mostly neutral, but on 1/5/10 positive sentiment soared. Incidentally, in a sort of a halo effect, the Motorola Droid also got a lift of positive sentiment on 1/5/10 (see below right). This makes sense, as a major announcement like this gives rise to many blogposts and studies comparing competitive units. Seems that Motorola Droid fared pretty well.

On 1/5/10, articles with Nexus One positive sentiment were consumed by 170 million readers, which is simply staggering.

Topic discovery

The Biz360 Community Insights tool can also be used to discover relevant trends unfolding around your topic, presented in a highly visual tag cloud. If we include all media, we get a lot of Twitter vernacular like “RT, follow and RT, RT to win”. So this is what you get when you consider all media without microblogs:” Google”, “video,” “Endgaget”, “Google faces deluge of Nexus One complaints”, “Google unveils retail ambitions”, “Nexus One review”, “Nexus Motorola”, “Nexus iPhone” (below right). Hmm… so even if everything seems to be positively-toned on the surface, Google’s inability to service its device is definitely a trending topic. If I was Google, I’d take a deeper dive by building a topic about “Nexus One complaints”, and create a plan of action.

Note: Coverage metrics may differ depending on days and search terms you are including. The Biz360 monitoring platform, just like the rest of best-in-breed platforms, is a living organism, which picks up new sources as they become available, for better relevance. New sites get added and indexed all the time, that’s the nature of the ever-changing social media landscape.

The biggest mistake I see with inexperienced salespeople is talking too much.

They come in with the idea that to sell, they have to be the one talking. They don’t listen because they’re talking and not asking questions.

An effective salesperson is a detective. To be good at what I do, I need be Columbo. Some of you probably don’t remember the TV series Columbo, but it starred Peter Falk as the title character – an unassuming, humble detective with a keen eye for detail. The series was different from other detective stories because most episodes started by showing the perpetrator committing the crime. The show’s creator described it as a “howcatchem,” rather than a “whodunit.” It centered on Lt. Columbo figuring out who the criminal was by asking questions and examining overlooked evidence.

So the philosophy I impart to my sales team is to focus on being like Columbo.

I investigate an enormous organization and find the person whose business problems I can solve. When I identify the prime suspect, I go in and discover the evidence to see if I can indeed really solve his or her problem.

Telling the potential customer what I think they need at our first meeting is no more beneficial than it would have been for Columbo to tell a suspect his theories before he had asked any questions. There is no humility in that. It would be arrogant to assume I know how to solve problems before I even know what those problems really are.

Instead, I ask potential clients about their businesses, their challenges. I follow up with questions like, “When that happens, what does your department do then?” and “Is there a financial impact?”

A good salesperson’s job is to ask tons of open-ended questions to understand the client’s business – to collect the evidence.

“What’s the impact on your company if you’re not listening to what your current customers are saying? Is that a risk to your business? What kind of risk? Have you had anything bad happen? Have you ever used information like that to improve? What strategies do you have to grow your business? What types of things have you tried?”

On the flip side, when I’m asked a question. I offer massive transparency. Ask me a question, and I’m here to publish it for everyone to see.

Therein begins our relationship, a relationship built on honesty.

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?

According to CNN, there are 900 documented cases of the H1N1 virus.  Let’s compare that to how much chatter there is about it on the web:

Our coverage indicated that in its lowest covered day, H1N1 received two and half times as many mentions as there have been total cases since its discovery.  However, there is danger if the strain mutates the same way the flu virus did in 1918. Do you think the amount of press is warranted given the danger, or is this a story being overblown by media outlets?

Eric M. Israel, VP of Sales

In short, my answer is yes.

After 17 years in sales and seven with Biz360, I’m now the VP of Sales and have been working on developing within my team the trust equation idea – the concept that we should be focusing on things that are not necessarily good or bad for us, but are genuinely good for our clients.

Frankly, it can be scary, but I truly believe that is the basis for a long-term business relationship and in this economy, relationships are more important than ever. Having a sales team that focuses only on generating revenue destroys your relationship with the client and breaks the trust equation from the very get-go.

Instead our goal is to truly understand how our clients’ businesses work. We should strive to understand their challenges and how those challenges impact their companies. That’s really nothing new – it’s pretty basic research. But then I guide my team to go even further. We should be finding out how the clients’ challenges are affecting them personally. How do these challenges affect their workload? Their careers? Their stress level? Even their families.

We help because it’s the right thing to do — not so Biz360 gets another deal. It works the other way around. The more you do for the client, the more those clients enlist your help. Those clients develop the longest relationships with you and they end up being the most profitable.

Each and every time we meet with our clients, our goal is to figure out more about their business, and how we can help them get further down the path toward their own success.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to use this forum to tell you how the sales department works here at Biz360. I’ll be honest. I want potential clients to compare the experience they have had with our competitors, and hopefully, decide they’d rather work with our team.

And I welcome feedback. As you’ll find out in my next post, feedback is essential.

Monitoring keywords around the web is powerful. The ability to track trends around the web will allow you to anticipate what’s going to happen next as well as what works in terms of generating buzz and what doesn’t.

Community Insights now offers an affordable means to track keywords all over the web. Since the tool will update mentions of key terms and phrases in 37 million blogs, more than 100 million message boards and forums, all of Twitter’s publicly available content, blog posts and forum content from social-networking sites like MySpace, and 50,000 news media sources every 20 minutes, you can be proactive versus merely reactive in monitoring and/or controlling trends.

We are inviting you to a webinar with our CEO Brad Brodigan and our CMO Tony Priore to take a look at everything Community Insights has to offer your business. Here are the details:
Date: Thursday, September 17
Time: 2 pm ET, 11 am PT
Length: 45 minutes + Q&A

Registration Required
https://biz360events.webex.com/biz360events/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=572387376

As a special thank you for participating, you will be given a free, no-obligation 15-day trial to test Community Insights Professional for yourself.

If you have any questions, please leave them on this blog. We look forward to hearing from you.