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This Is Social Media To Commander Hadfield

On Monday night the crew of Expedition 35 at the International Space Station touched back down on Earth for the first time in five months. Among the crew was Commander Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut that some call “the first man to master social media in space.”

Five months ago Chris Hadfield headed to the ISS, but never really lost contact with us here back on terra firma. Commander Hadfield kept in touch by using social media to wow the world with the things he was doing up in space. Whether it was his tweets, his pictures from space, his YouTube videos and anything else he sent back down to Earth, the world was enthralled by it.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I took a look at the impact that Chris Hadfield had on the social media world.

I started by looking for all mentions of Hadfield by name or his Twitter screen name for the past 6 months. In that time I found him mentioned over 1.7 million times across social media. There were 14,956 blog posts, 29,689 online news articles, 11,921 forum postings and 1,680,939 tweets about, to or from Hadfield.

On average, people were mentioning or talking to Commander Hadfield about 10,000 times per day while he was up in space. The giant spike we can see at the end of the six month period below was people watching and tweeting along with Hadfield and the other two crew members as they descended back to Earth.

While Hadfield was up there, he managed to capture the attention of the world through his social media communications from space. A look at where tweets about the Commander came from shows that people around the world were talking to and about him over his five month stay at the space station. Below is a pie chart that shows where mentions of Hadfield were coming from. And below that is a world map plotting out where tweets about him were coming from.

What’s most amazing about most of this is that Chris Hadfield just got into social media right before his trip thanks to some convincing from his kids. Now the astronaut boasts over 842,000 followers on Twitter. With all of the tweets he sent back to the planet he wowed and amassed his large following over his five months in space.

His Twitter handle, @Cmdr_Hadfield, was mentioned 1.5 million times during his trip as well.

I also looked up some of the most retweeted tweets either from or aimed at Commander Hadfield.Five of the top six tweets were sent from Hadfield himself. Most of them were amazing videos and pictures (like the one below) that he beamed down for us from space. The fifth most RT’d tweet was the first one he sent once he had touched back down on Earth.

Tonight’s finale: Northern Lights – recent aurora in green and red waves, USA and Canada below, the universe above. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 11, 2013

Not only did Commander Hadfield mange to rack up an impressive Twitter following, but he also did the same on YouTube. The Commander started a YouTube channel where he would beam back videos of things he was doing up in space including answering questions that us common folks had about things worked in space. His most popular video though was his last one from the station where he gives us one last look at the station while singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” The video was only posted a few days ago and has already racked up over 11 million views.

Commander Hadfield utilized social media to capture the attention of the entire world while he wasn’t even on it. He gave us all a chance to experience something that most of us will never get a chance to do ourselves (although I hope that’s not true). He truly was the first man to master social media in space. But let’s hope he wasn’t the last.

By Sheldon Levine - May 16th, 2013 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, Chris Hadfield, Commander Hadfield, MAP, Social Media, twitter, youtube
Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

Using Data To Delight Your Community

Every company or brand out there has its fans and naysayers. It’s just a part of business. One great example where we’ve seen both types prominently over the past few years is the company formerly known as RIM (now known as just BlackBerry).

The company was at one point the leader in smartphone technology. In fact, they were probably the first real smartphone makers in the market. But then other companies like Apple and Google entered the market and some people felt that BlackBerry had been left behind. Fast forward a few years and BlackBerry has made a stunning reemergence in the field with their fully redesigned operating system known as BlackBerry 10.

When BlackBerry announced that it was completely revamping itself from the ground up, it was again met with its fair share of vocal fans and naysayers. For example, take a look at this tweet below that highlights one of the naysayers being countered by one of the very vocal fans:

One thing is for sure; whether it was from a naysayer or a fan, there was a lot of talk leading up to the launch of BB10. Check out this popularity chart below for mentions of BB10 over the past 6 months leading up to the launch. There were over 19 million tweets during this period.

Now, this is where the story gets very cool:

TELUS, a large telecom in Canada, was just as excited about launching the BB10 line on their network as some of the super fans out there were. They also knew how excited a lot of their customers were for the new BlackBerry devices. That’s why they decided to reward a lucky customer who was the most eager (and persistent) for the big release.

Using our MAP platform, TELUS was able to analyze millions of conversations about BlackBerry and BB10 from across Canada to find the people that were talking the most positively about their excitement for the new smartphone. By cross-referencing the top BB10 anticipators with their client records, they were able to grant one lucky customer’s wish of being one of the first people in the world to own a BlackBerryZ10 device.

This is a great example of how companies can use big data (both from social media and from their own databases) to show their customers and fan base that they’re listening and that they care what they think.

Dan Fricker, TELUS’s Social Media Community Manager, had this to say:

“Social media’s one of our many ways of connecting and actually having conversations with customers. What Sysomos offers is an incredible way to listen to those conversations, from different people all over the country. Beyond engaging in real-time interactions, we can also go back and see what people have been anticipating most about the launch of BlackBerry 10, for example, or who’s been talking about this new device the longest. That’s the case with @Im_Sure_ who’s been tweeting with @TELUS about the BB10 for weeks. With tools like Sysomos and the power of social we can engage in customer conversations like Matt’s, arguably the BB10’s #BestFan. Given Matt’s such a big BlackBerry fan, we surprised him with his very own Z10 today.”

By Sheldon Levine - February 12th, 2013 - 3 Comments »
Tags: analytics, BB10, blackberry, community, data, MAP, Social Media, success, sysomos, TELUS, twitter
Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

Introducing Sysomos Publishing

Monitor, analyze and publish all from within Heartbeat

When we first started, Sysomos focused primarily on monitoring and analyzing everything that is said in social media. Over the years, the social media landscape has evolved beyond simply listening to conversations – people are actively participating in discussions with their customers, peers and influencers. Our users wanted a single, unified platform to do everything in one place, from monitoring to publishing. Today, we are announcing exactly that.Throughout 2012 we released 104 product updates, making Sysomos not only the most advanced social media analytics platform, but also a place where brands can engage their online communities. To deliver a truly holistic, end-to-end social platform, we are releasing our Publishing Tab and Content Calendar.Keep reading to find out all of the great features that are now available with this latest update to Heartbeat.

Content Calendar
All published and scheduled messages are displayed in a user-friendly calendar format that helps your team maintain and stay on top of a well-defined content calendar for weeks at a time. All entries in the Content Calendar are colour-coded based on their status. A list view is also available for printing and exporting.

Schedule Messages to Multiple Accounts with Multimedia
You can easily schedule messages to multiple accounts, including Twitter and Facebook, at once. For Twitter, you can also attach images and for Facebook, a customizable multimedia preview is added for URLs automatically.

Customize Time Zone
Each user can select the time zone in which they would like to schedule publishing and view the content calendar. This allows globally dispersed teams to collaborate more easily.

Manage Approvers
For each social channel, including Facebook and Twitter, you can define content approvers. Once this functionality is set up, nothing will be published without first being approved. This allows your larger team to create content, but go through an approval process before actually publishing.

Publishing Stats
Heartbeat’s new publishing section also provides statistics on how much content you are publishing. You can view this report across all social channels or for specific ones individually.

Outlook Integration
The Content Calendar can be easily integrated with your personal Outlook or mobile phone. No more logging in to Heartbeat to see what is scheduled and everything will be automatically synced in the cloud.

Workflow Log
Everything you do is recorded in our Workflow module, making the entire process auditable and accountable.

Best of all, everything is fully integrated in Heartbeat’s existing monitoring and analytics user interface. This means that whether you engage from the Your Heartbeats page, reply from Twitter Engagement Central, or schedule using the Publish page, everything works in unison. For the first time, our users have a fully integrated social platform providing end-to-end functionality.

If you’re already a Sysomos subscriber and would like to learn more about our new publishing features, please feel free to reach out to your account manager.

If you’re not a Sysomos subscriber and would like to learn more about the new publishing and other great Sysomos features, feel free to contact us.

UPDATE: Check out our tutorial on how Sysomos Publishing works

Using the Publish Tab from Marketwire on Vimeo.

By Sheldon Levine - February 1st, 2013 - No Comments »
Tags: heartbeat, product update, Publishing, publishing tools, Social Media, sysomos, update
Posted in Engineering, Features, Social Media, Technology

Sysomos Product Updates: We Snuck In A Few Extras For You Before The Year Ended

Find hashtags, compare Twitter users, add influencers to your media set quicker and more!

Just in time for Christmas! We have a few presents for you, in the form of product updates!

Today we’re very happy to introduce a few new and great features to make both MAP and Heartbeat even better than before. Some of these are features that we’ve received a lot of requests for, while others are a few extra stocking stuffers that we thought you would enjoy.

Some of these new features include:

a way to compare two or more Twitter accounts, side-by-side
an easy way to see what hashtags are being tweeted in conjunction with your search terms
an easier way to interact with your top influencers
new publishing permissions for users.

To find out more about these and all the other new updates, just keep reading.

Top Twitter Hashtags
Our industry-leading text analytics have always been able to tell you what words people are using when they talk about your brand, your competition, or any other search terms you were interested in. But have you ever wondered what hashtags people were using to connect their conversations? Well, wonder no more. We’ve added the ability to pull the top 10 hashtags being used in any Twitter conversation.

You can now see what hashtags are associated with your brand, then use those hashtags to join in their conversation. Or maybe you notice that a #help hashtag is appearing a lot with a search for your company name. You can now know what people are looking for and respond accordingly. Knowing any hashtags associated with your topic of interest will give you a brand new way to make sure you’re on top of conversations.

To find this new feature in MAP, head over to the Twitter section and find the “Hashtags” tab down on the left-hand side. In Heartbeat, this feature can be found under the Measure tab in the “text analytics” section.

Compare Twitter Users
Have you ever wanted to compare your Twitter handle to your competitor’s? Want to know if your followers also follow someone else? What your followers have in common? What the difference is? With this latest feature in MAP you can now know all of these things.

Simply head over to the Twitter section of MAP and click on the Compare Users tab. Then you can enter up to eight different Twitter handles to compare at one time. Once you’ve entered the handles you’re interested in, hit “compare.” We’ll show you a breakdown for each account that includes their basic profile information, their authority ranking, the average authority of their followers, how many new followers they receive a month, a word cloud of their followers’ bios and a breakdown of their followers gender and country of origin.

As well, we will show you a venn diagram of how the followers overlap with the first account in your search and information about those overlapping followers.

New Compare Pages
We’ve made some minor updates to MAP’s compare section as well. You can now compare the sentiment of two or more search terms from Twitter, as well as the geography between searches in forums and online news.

Correlation Diagrams
Under the “Compare” tab of Heartbeat, we’ve now given you the ability to compare certain aspects of the terms that you’re already comparing.

For example, let’s say you’re comparing mentions of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and you want to know how many of their mentions came from Twitter, or from just males, or even what percentage of those mentions were negative. These are only a few of the areas you can compare. You can take a much deeper dive into a number of other areas available in the drop down menu.

Publishing Permissions
There is also a new way to assign publishing permissions from within Heartbeat. Now both Facebook and Twitter accounts are linked directly to a Heartbeat (previously, Twitter accounts were only linked to a specific users’ login). You can then define which team members/Heartbeat users can publish updates to either Facebook or Twitter.

Just head into your Heartbeat’s settings and down to the “Publish Permissions” tab. Choose to allow every user in a Heartbeat the ability to publish, just the Admin users, or just a selected few people.

Influencers and Most Mentions Usability Update
It’s also easier to do things with the users that appear in your Influencers or Most Mentions sections of Heartbeat’s “Measure” tab. If you click on the “edit” tooltip to the right of a user, you can quickly remove the user from ever showing up in the section again, or add them to one of your existing media sets so you can keep a close eye on them.

Lastly, you may have noticed sometimes that when you exported a page as a pdf some charts would occasionaly get caught in the middle of page break. We’ve made sure that isn’t going to happen anymore, so feel safe when creating pdfs for reports again.

If you are already a Sysomos subscriber and would like further information on these exciting new features for Heartbeat and MAP, please contact your Sales Representative or Account Manager.

If you are not already a Sysomos subscriber and would like to find out more about MAP or Heartbeat, please feel free to contact us.

Have a wonderful holidays and we’re looking forward to bringing you many more great updates in 2013!

By Sheldon Levine - December 20th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, blogs, facebook, heartbeat, MAP, monitoring, product updates, Social Media, sysomos, twitter, updates
Posted in Announcements, Samples, Social Media, Technology

The Nicest Person in Social Media 2012

Clifford Brown of Waukesha, Wisconsin says that he thinks that he’s a pretty nice guy and that he always tries to mind his manners in social media. It turns out though, that Clifford is actually the nicest man in social media for 2012.

You know the old Christmas lore that the kids on Santa’s naughty list get a lump of coal in their stocking? Well, Kingsford Charcoal, a client of ours, got sick of their product always being associated with the naughty side of the list and decided to do something about it by flipping Santa’s list on it’s head. Kingsford decided that they wanted to give the nicest person in social media a BBQ, grilling supplies and of course, a whole lot of coal.

Kingsford came to us for help developing a algorithmic script to dig through billions of Twitter conversations to find an “average joe” that said “please,” “thanks” and “thank you” the most on Twitter throughout 2012. Once we narrowed the list down to a few finalists we also looked for those who didn’t cuss and had an overall positive sentiment rating around them. In the end, the nicest man on Twitter wound up being Mr. Brown, who said “please,” “thanks” or “thank you” over 1,500 times.

Santa surprised Clifford last Friday with his coal:

This was a really great idea to put a twist on an old tradition and we were really happy to be a part of it.

Kingsford didn’t finish with Mr. Brown though. They also want to know who you think the nicest person in social media is. You can nominate someone by tweeting at them with your nomination and the hashtag #BeNiceGetCoal and a random winner will also receive a year’s supply of charcoal. You can check out their blog for the official contest rules.

By Sheldon Levine - December 18th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, Christmas, Clorox, Kingsford Charcoal, Nicest Person in Social Media, Social Media, sysomos, twitter
Posted in Features, Samples, Social Media, Technology

Why Do You Blog?

Why do you blog?

It’s a straightforward, but interesting, question in a world dominated by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, et al.

So why invest time and resources into something that requires creativity, commitment, writing skills, moderation and community building?

Not to suggest that other social media services are easy but a blog is hard work. It’s 400 to 500 words vs. 140 characters. A blog is about thought leadership vs. a quick update. A blog requires people with particular skills that can be difficult to find.

But at the end of the day, a blog completely worth it. This is I why frequently counsel clients that a blog should be part of their social media and content marketing efforts.

So, why are blogs so appealing?

I guess the biggest benefit is it gives small to large companies a platform to tell stories to different target audiences. These stories can educate, entertain, engage, provoke, instigate or drive brand awareness, leads and sales.

A blog is a corporate asset, not space “leased” on another social platform. It’s whatever you want it to be, and no one is going to suddenly change the rules.

A blog is place around which a vibrant community can be established by providing people with a steady stream of valuable content and resources. Some content might attract new customers, while other content may nurture goodwill and brand awareness.

As a content engine, a blog is a vehicle that can support a lot of other sales and marketing activities. A blog post, for example, can be used on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as part of a newsletter or email campaign.

Blogs are also SEO-friendly because the search engines love fresh content. They make your Website dynamic and fluid, as well as creating opportunities to attract inbound links.

As well, blogs provide the ability to a brand to differentiate itself from competitors.

A brand that combines creativity, value and resources can create a powerful platform. Some great examples of KissMetrics, SEOMoz and Mint, which all have blogs that feature lots of great content that gets read and shared.

While blogs may not be sexy, they offer a lot of value for any brand willing to make a long-term commitment.

By Mark Evans - December 3rd, 2012 - 1 Comment »
Tags: blogs, Social Media
Posted in Technology

Product Updates: We Tell You The Best Time To Tweet and More

The year may almost be over, but we’re not slowing down. We have a ton of new features for MAP and Heartbeat that we’ve recently added and are excited to share with you. A lot of these features make your social media data easier to access, view, understand and, of course, give you insights into your online communities.Some of these new features include a way to see when the best time to reach your Twitter followers, quick access to data around spikes in conversations, and aggregated data for companies using multiple Heartbeats. Just keep reading to learn more about these and other exciting updates.

Best Time To Tweet
Over the years, multiple studies have been done to show when Twitter users are most active. We even released some statistics around this a few years ago. The problem with these stats is that they’re a generalization of the entire Twitterverse, but may not necessarily be true of your specific Twitter audience. As of right now, we have a solution to that problem for you.

Now in both MAP and Heartbeat you can see when a specific Twitter account’s followers are most active. This chart looks at when the account’s followers tweet and colour codes the activity by date and hour. The darker blue a square is, the more activity is happening in that hour. This will give brands the knowledge to know when their communities are most engaged on Twitter, which is likely the best time to tweet to them. The chart will also show you averages for weekdays and weekends.

The Best Time To Tweet chart can be found under the Twitter User Details tab in MAP and the Analyze tab of Twitter Engagement Central.

Highlights of Activity Spikes from Popularity Charts
We’ve made it easier to see what’s causing an activity spike in MAP’s Popularity Charts. Previously, you would highlight an activity spike to narrow in on specific dates and spike, then refine your entire query to look at data from the spike. Now, when you highlight an activity spike in the chart, highlights of that spike appear underneath.

When you highlight an activity spike, we now show you a word cloud and buzzgraph to show you highlights of the conversation causing the spike. As well, the highlights section shows you demographic data about who’s talking to cause the spike.

See More Data Around the Most Retweeted Tweets
Have you ever wanted to know more about who’s retweeting popular tweets? Well, MAP now gives you a way to see more data around the people retweeting. Under the Most Retweeted Twitter tab, hover over a specific popular retweet and you’ll now see options to click on more information about the Reach of the tweet in question and the Demographics of the retweeters.

Analyze A LinkedIn Page
MAP now gives you the ability to analyze the activity on any companies LinkedIn page. This could be your page, a competitors, or any company you might be interested in knowing more about. Simply put in the company’s LinkedIn page’s URL and click analyze.

MAP will then bring up information around what’s happening on that page. You’ll see information around how many people follow that page, number of posts, number of likes for posts, product information and recommendations, latest updates, a word cloud of the activity on the page and sentiment.

New CSV Formatting
Content search CSV exports will be updated to a new enhanced format on Friday, November30th. Currently, different media sources each have their own format for content CSV exports. With this update, a single unified format will be used across all sources when exporting search content. New CSVs will also include local time in addition to EST timestamps.

If you are not ready for the new CSVs, you can temporarily switch back to the existing format by navigating to the Settings page. The current format will be available till Jan 31, 2013 for compatibility before being retired.

New Activity Summaries for Click-Throughs on Charts
On the Heartbeat dashboard we give you a high view of all the information that you can find as you make your way through the platform. But sometimes you want that information even faster. We heard you ask, and have now made all the charts in the dashboard clickable to take you to a summary page for that specific information.

For example, if you notice a spike in Twitter activity for a certain day on your dashboard, simply click on that spike in the activity summary and you’ll be transported to a summary page for that information. The summary page will show you a 24-hour breakdown of the Twitter activity on that day. You will also find other Sysomos leading analytics, such as sentiment and text analytics, for the specific data you’re looking at on the summary page.

More Aggregated Data for Heartbeat Enterprise View
Some of the larger brands that we work with require more than one Heartbeat to keep track of all their data. That was why earlier this year we released Heartbeat Enterprise View. As of today, it’s now easier to see all the information you need from these multiple Heartbeats together in one place.

First, we have updated the Enterprise View measure page. You can now compare your Heartbeats side-by-side to see how different aspects of your social business are stacking up. In addition to this, we’ve also given you the ability to see the information from multiple Heartbeats combined.

Second, we have added advanced filtering to the Enterprise View measure tab. This means that you can get very specific with the aggregated data that you’re looking at. For example, you can now look at the data from multiple Heartbeats together, but only in the USA and all data but not Twitter.

Lastly, we’ve also updated the email updates for Enterprise view. You can now get email updates sent to you that compare your multiple Heartbeats, or see all the data combined right in your inbox.

If you are already a Sysomos subscriber and want to learn more about any of these updates, please don’t hesitate to contact your account reps.

And if you’re not a Sysomos subscriber but would like to learn about these and other features of MAP and Heartbeat, please feel free to contact us.

By Sheldon Levine - November 27th, 2012 - 2 Comments »
Tags: analytics, heartbeat, MAP, measurement, monitoring, product updates, Social Media, sysomos, twitter, updates
Posted in Features, Social Media, Technology

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