Social Media « Sysomos Blog

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

The Buzz Around Facebook’s IPO

Everyone knew it was coming, but yesterday Facebook officially filed for an Initial Public Offering, more commonly known as an IPO. Not knowing exactly when the IPO would be filed and announced, I started doing a little research into what the social world was saying about it yesterday afternoon. About 20 minutes after I thought I had enough information to write about, Mark Zuckerberg dropped the news. So, for the most part of this post I’ll be looking at the chatter that led up to the IPO announcement, and then I’ll look at what occurred after.

As I said before, everyone knew that Facebook had been planing to go public for a while. In the past six months (up to about 3pmEST yesterday) I had found “Facebook” and “IPO” mentioned together in 33,452 blog posts, 38,215 online news articles, 5,904 forum postings and 68,143 tweets.

Trending those mentions out overtime we can see that the topic had been part of conversations for a while. We can also see from some spikes in activity when certain new news came to light. For instance, the spike that we can see at the end of November and beginning of December was when a story broke that Facebook was looking to file the IPO in the spring of 2012. That soon changed though as the large spikes right at the end of the chart were people talking over the past few days as they knew the IPO was shortly coming.

I also looked at which countries the talk was coming from. The US, both home to Facebook and the stock exchange the stock will eventually be traded on, accounted for about half of all the conversation. However, we can also see that a lot of countries with strong social media usage also had their eyes on the story. Countries like India (2.9%), Singapore (2.8%), Indonesia (2.1%) and even China (5.8%).

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what the conversation over the past six months had been about. Whats most interesting about this buzzgraph is how many other “social” companies’ names we can find in it. It seems that talk about Facebook’s IPO has been compared to other social networks who have recently gone public like “Zynga,” “LinkedIn” and “Groupon.” We can even see that Facebook was being compared to “Google” who went public back in 2004.

I then dug a bit further into the activity around Facebook’s IPO in the past week (up to about 3pmEST yesterday). Here the buzzgraph seems to be a bit tighter on the conversation and definitely more focused on Facebook’s IPO. The greater connections we can see in this buzzgraph link to financial institutions. We can see “Morgan” “Stanley” in the graph because it became public knowledge last week that Facebook would be using them to underwrite the IPO. We can also see “Goldman” “Sachs” in there because they had strong financial links to Facebook in the past and it came as a surprise to some that they were passed over for Morgan Stanley.

Now, as I said earlier, most of this data I collected just before 3pmEST yesterday. A short while after that, around 4:30pmEST, the news of Facebook’s IPO broke. I took the liberty of trending out at an hourly rate the talk about Facebook’s IPO over the past two days. Now the chart below looks like a lot of no activity before a huge spike between 4-5pmEST yesterday. However, most of the time leading up to the announcement was averaging between 500 and 700 mentions of an hour. Those mentions vastly pale in comparison though to when the announcement was made and we see the large spike in activity. Between the hours of 4-5pmEST yesterday we saw Facebook’s IPO being mentioned 14,761 times.

So, will you be buying some Facebook stock?

By Sheldon Levine - February 2nd, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, facebook, Facebook IPO, heartbeat, IPO, MAP, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Samples, Social Media

Who Knew! Inane Tweets Are Disliked

I’ve been fascinated with inane tweets. You know, people who tweet about their need for a coffee, how they’re not feeling well, the statement of mind of their cats or dogs, their affinity for pickles or the ultra-annoying “Good morning!”

They’re the kind of tweets that make me wonder: Why do people feel compel to spend the time to share these kind of tweets, which, at best, have a limited audience or have no interest to any but the author? It is because people have nothing better to do with their time? Do they really think other people are interested, or they provide a shred of value?

For anyone curious about why these tweets happen, you’ll be interested in a study called “Who Gives a Tweet: Evaluating Microblog Content Value” by researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech.

After spending a year studying 43,738 tweets, they found the three most strongly disliked categories were “presence maintenance, conversation and Me Now”.

In particular, “Me Now” tweets only had a 22% chance of being read even though there might be an expectation their followers would be interested.

“Analyzing the free text responses to understand the reasons, we found many cases in which the follower was not interested by the tweeter’s life details, e.g., “sorry, but I don’t care what people are eating”, “too much personal info”, “He moans about this ALL THE TIME. Seriously,” the study said.

Foursquare Check-Ins a “Special Hatred”

The study said a “special hatred” was Foursquare location check-ins: “Foursquare updates don’t need to be shared on Twitter unless there’s a relevant update to be made.”

To get a better handle on the tweets that people like or dislike, the study rated tweets in worth reading (WR) and not worth reading (NotWR). In the NotWR category, the tweets were described as “arrogant, boring, depressing, mean”, while WR tweets were “funny, exciting, useful, informative”

In conclusion, the reachers suggest if people should do the following to improve the chances of their tweets being read:

- Embed more context in tweets (and be less cryptic)

- Add extra commentary, especially if retweeting a common news source

- Don’t overuse hashtags and use direct messages (DMs) rather than @mentions if more appropriate

- Happy sentiments are valued and “whining” is disliked

- Questions should use a unique hashtag so followers can keep track of the conversation.

More: Business Insider‘s Megan Garber has some thoughts on the study.

By Mark Evans - February 1st, 2012 - 1 Comment »
Tags: inane tweets, research, twitter
Posted in Social Media

Why We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Timeline

If you’ve managed to avoid the new Facebook Timeline, your time of resistance has come to an end and proven futile.

Timeline is now live for the more than 800 million Facebook users, and the opinions seem split right down the middle. Those who have adopted Timeline appear enamored with the layout and functionality.

I know this has been written about a lot but now we can look at Timeline in a completely different light. Users have no choice but to learn it and love it. I, for one, can tell you it was love at first sight for Timeline and me.

It is an ingenious layout once you get over the reticence that change inevitably brings. It structures your profile as a testament to your life as a member of Facebook. When I clicked on 2006, I was immediately met with a flood of memories which created an instant emotional connection. Something all of the digital world strives to achieve.

Maybe there are those who don’t want to be reminded of the post they made after getting dumped or fired or after they attended a Nickelback concert in 2005. Timeline acts as a reminder that what we do on the Internet, always leaves a footprint. But like a bad ’80s hairdo, you should revel in it, not be embarrassed.

All future politicians need not worry, you can still limit visibility on posts. This seems to be one of the underlying fears, but like anything on Facebook, you just need to take the time to read through the fine print.

So the time has come, and the best advice I can give is that social media is in a constant state of flux. You can’t fight it but Timeline is one change for the better because it advances what was and makes something great even more dynamic.

- PC World has a primer on Timeline for anyone who needs to know the in’s and out’s.

- The Telegraph suggests only one in 10 Facebook users support Timeline

- Flowtown’s Jennifer Rose has post suggesting that Timeline “ushers in a new era of social media, celebrating the individual and giving you more power over your online presence”.

By Mark Evans - January 31st, 2012 - No Comments »
Posted in Social Media

Will the Olympics Suffer from its No-Social Rules?

As we near the London Summer Olympics, it seems there will very limited insight provided by the army of volunteers (approx. 70,000) via Twitter, Facebook and any other popular social media services.

The edict, handed down from the Organizing Committee, is an antiquated way of doing business. The victims are the fans and supporters, who have grown accustomed to social media providing a behind-the-scenes look at big events.

This, by no way, means athletes will be limited, but let’s be honest, athletes can be fairly generic compared to someone who is part of the event from a different perspective.

Athletes have an image to protect and future endorsements to consider; a volunteer does not and, as a result, can be an amazing source of unfiltered information. The lack of filter can go both ways, but a non-athletes or organizers’ viewpoint seems more enticing.

One of the harsher restrictions is that no volunteer can make public statements about the games without permission. This sounds more like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but that was more aligned with Beijing’s social media policies. As well, social media has grown a lot in the past four years.

The lack of communication will impact the overall Olympic experience for those outside of the event. We have come to rely on social media to learn, experience, enhance and deliver a voice to everyone.

The rules are understandable from certain standpoints (i.e. protecting the athletes), but there are bigger issues. Out of the 70,000 volunteers, can you imagine how many wonderful stories will not emerge now.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the London Olympics are being overly sensitive, and not putting their millions of fans first?

By Mark Evans - January 27th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: London, olympics, Social Media, sysomos, volunteers
Posted in Social Media

Was Your Community Manager Appreciated?

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

For some more information on community managers and a nice infograph, check out Social Fresh’s 2012 Community Manager Report.

By Sheldon Levine - January 26th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, CMAD, Community Manager Appreciation Day, MAP, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

Reddit’s On A Major Roll

There are plenty of news aggregators out there but perhaps one of the most dynamic and under-appreciated is Reddit.

Reddit? Yes, Reddit.

Long seen as Digg’s little cousin, Reddit is on a major roll while Digg trundles its way toward irrelevance.

The question is why has Reddit surged ahead while Digg has stumbled. In an interesting article, Slate’s Farhan Manjoo suggests it’s the enthusiastic and engaged nature of “a real and vibrant” community, particularly its willingness to get involved in political issues such as SOPA.

Manjoo also contends Reddit has thrived because it has become more than a service that just aggregates links from external sites.

What’s particularly interesting about Reddit is how it has thrived within the corporate bosom of Conde Nast, which acquired Reddit in 2006. It is rare to see a startup get stronger and bigger after becoming part of a big empire. In many cases, a startup flounders because its energy and entrepreneurial culture evaporates within the corporate confines.

Maybe Conde Nast’s best decision was allowing Reddit to maintain its uniqueness and separate identity rather than trying to make it part of the fold. Yes, Reddit has had a redesign but it’s still pretty similar to what it was when Conde Nast acquired it.

As important, Reddit’s community has been allowed to participate, operate and be an active part of Reddit’s progression, which is pretty impressive given Reddit is part of a large and established media empire. It’s like Reddit has the best of both worlds: it has the backing of a large company but the culture and community of a startup.

As for why Reddit has rolled and Digg has lost its mojo, it’s hard to tell. Maybe Digg made some strategic mistakes that alienated users. Maybe the market shifted on Digg as social media gained more traction.

At the very least, Digg vs. Reddit would make for a fascinating case study or even a PhD thesis on the tale of two aggregators.

By Mark Evans - January 25th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: conde nast, digg, news aggregation, reddit
Posted in Social Media

Death of SOPA and the Rise of PIPA

Does it strike you that the Web and social media have been on the defensive recently, playing the role of victim to the whims of the authorities who are attempting to instill some fairly radical, if not draconian, changes to possibly the greatest tool ever?

Powerful Web properties, search engines and social media services recently displayed their collective power of the digital world.

The Wikipedia blackout, Google’s blackout of its logo and the outspoken support of Mark Zuckerberg all played a vital role in this unprecedented act of Web activism.

Politicians gave up and SOPA has been shot down, but the sense of relief could be a short-lived mirage. A decision on PIPA (Protect IP Act) is nearing and Senate support seems to be high. Of course, the same was said about SOPA and we all know how that ended.

The voice of the Web transferred seamlessly to the political arena. It is fair to say SOPA and its aftermath will become a case study for years to come. The curious part is whether we can expect the same result for PIPA, which some believe has more legs.

It is imperative that we fight to secure the nature of the Web. We can achieve this by allowing social media to grow, not only in popularity but also in power and reach. If nothing else, we learned that our online voices can yield offline results.

SOPA and PIPA aren’t necessarily malicious and evil acts against the Web and its users, but they are out-of-touch posturing based on ideas that do not match our love and use of the web.

Ultimately, they have been born from people more concerned with political maneuvering, than with the unadulterated freedom and purpose of the internet.

For more, check out this video featuring Clay Shirky on why SOPA is going to disappear.

By Mark Evans - January 24th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: Internet, PIPA, Social Media, SOPA
Posted in Social Media

Good Blogging is a State of Mind

Darren Rowse had an interesting blog post recently about the lessons he has learned from his five-year-old son about blogging. His son, otherwise known a “X”, is really into art, and often thinks about his next project while doing other activities.

It is a concept that resonated with me because, in many respects, blogging is about the next post. By their very nature, blogs are fluid and dynamic creatures. A good blog (and bloggers) constantly keeps moving forward. As much as a particular post can be fantastic, it is not long before the next post must be produced.

For some people, the steady demands of blogging can be overwhelming, which is why many blogs die on the vine after a few weeks or months. The need to “feed the beast” is a fact of life. By not blogging on a regular basis, a blog can lack the consistency it needs to attract an audience.

So what are the things that can be done to keep the beast happy?

A key is coming up with a non-stop flow of ideas that can be turned into blog posts. As important is the recognition that ideas can come from anywhere. You can be talking to a friend or colleague. Ideas can come from a newspaper article, blog post or newsletter. They can emerge when you’re working out, taking a shower or listening to music.

Given this reality, it is important to “bookmark” these ideas as they materialize. Keep a piece of paper or small notebook in your pocket, or have a text document on your desktop to quickly write down ideas. By being disciplined, you will be surprised by how quickly a notebook or document can start to fill up with ideas.

Not all of these ideas are going to be amazing but there will be enough quality ideas to keep your blog vibrant and consistent. As important, you’ll discover that as you open yourself up to ideas and start capturing them, the ideas will start to flow.

To paraphrase Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” (see the video below), doing well with your blog means being in a “Blogging State of Mind”.

By Mark Evans - January 23rd, 2012 - 2 Comments »
Tags: blogging, blogs, darren rowse, ideas
Posted in Social Media

Search for:
About Sysomos Blog

News and updates from Sysomos, provider of powerful suite of software for social media monitoring and analysis.
Our Products

Powerful analytics platform for social media

Social media monitoring and engagement dashboard
Follow us on twitter
Subscribe to posts
Browse by
- Announcements
- Customers
- Engineering
- Events
- Features
- Samples
- Social Media
- Technology
- Tips & Help
- Uncategorized
Archives

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

About Sysomos Blog

Our Products

Browse by

Archives