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Should the BlackBerry Go Social?

In many respects, this is going to be an important week for Research in Motion and the BlackBerry. Facing increased competition from Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, the BlackBerry is being viewed as vulnerable and in jeopardy of losing its status as one of the world’s leading smartphones.

While the BlackBerry has maintained its strength in the corporate marketplace that values its rock-solid email and voice service, the BlackBerry’s consumer foothold is, at best, modest despite efforts to pimp its look and features.

The reality is the iPhone is sexy; the BlackBerry is your father’s smartphone.

This week, RIM is expected to unveil its new OS 6.0, which could include a Web browser that actually works. There’s also speculation RIM could unveil plans for a tablet computer to compete against the iPad.

In the midst of BlackBerry’s challenges, an interesting trend is how the device has gained a foothold with younger consumers. While they are not totally thrilled with the BlackBerry brand given its corporate roots, they like using it because the QWERTY keyboard makes it easy to use text-messaging and social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. If you take a look at younger consumers, the BlackBerry seems to be alive and well.

Given this foothold, maybe a logical strategic direction for RIM is pushing to become the social media smartphone. Rather than trying to out-Apple Apple, RIM should tightly integrate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. so they become a seamless part of the BlackBerry experience.

If RIM makes social media on the BlackBerry so user-friendly and intuitive, it might be able to capture more of the youth market to counter the iPhone’s appeal to the geeks and cool kids.

At the same time, RIM should embrace an Open API system, and encourage developers to create applications to make the BlackBerry even more social.

There’s no doubt this would be a bold step in a new direction for RIM but if can become the “social smartphone”, it would be a terrific way to complement its strength in the corporate market.

By Mark Evans - August 2nd, 2010 - 3 Comments »
Tags: blackberry, facebook, RIM, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Social Media, Technology

The Oil Leak Has Been Plugged, But The Talk Continues

On April 20th an explosion occurred on British Petroleum’s (BP) oil drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon. The explosion caused Deepwater Horizon to sink into the ocean, which in turn broke a pipe causing oil to leak into The Gulf of Mexico. This leak went on for about three months and is being dubbed one of the worst man-made disasters ever. Last Thursday BP finally managed to plug the pipe and stop the oil from flowing out into the ocean.

If you saw any kind of media around this oil spill you may have noticed BP was taking a lot of criticism from everywhere. We thought it would be interesting to see how this event affected their public image in the online social space using our social media monitoring and analytics platform, MAP.

In order to get a fair assessment, we broke our study into three separate time periods; the beginning of the year up to the date of the oil rig explosion (April 20th), the period the leak went on for (April 20 – July 15) and the past week since they plugged the leak.

From the beginning of the year until April 20th there was no shortage of talk going on around BP. Looking at this time period we can see that BP was mentioned in almost 93,000 blog posts, over 202,000 forum posts and in about 244,000 tweets. In this time period we also can see that BP was in good favour of those discussing them with a 76% overall favourable sentiment rating.

Then the day of the explosion came. On April 20th Deepwater Horizon sank and oil started to pour out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico until it was finally plugged up almost three months later. During this time the world couldn’t stop talking about the British oil giant. In the course of this period there were around 602,000 blog posts, 860,000 forum messages and a whopping 4.6 million tweets. This time period also saw their favourable sentiment percentage drop more than 20%. The most drastic change here comes from the negative sentiment around BP rising from 22% to 46%.

Now that the leak has been capped and the oil has stopped flowing into the ocean, there might be speculation that talk and criticism of British Petroleum may have calmed down. Our analysis shows that this not the case. Granted, the leak was only capped a week ago, but talk about it has not seemed to slow down. In the past week there has been over 55,000 blog posts, 42,000 forum mentions and almost 528,000 tweets about BP. Most interesting is that there were more tweets about the company in this last week than there were in the first four months of the year. Also, despite the worst being over (the actual leaking), the overall sentiment of BP has not changed much. The overall sentiment rating still stands at 54% favourable. However, while negative sentiment has not gone down, we did see a slight rise in their positive sentiment from 16% to 19%.

With their positive sentiment on the rise it will be interesting to look again at these numbers in a few months to give a roughly equal time period of measurement and to let the clean up of the spill take it’s affect on both the Gulf of Mexico and the general public talking about it. If BP handles the next few months properly, they may be able to swing the public’s opinion back in their favour. Only time will tell.

By sheldon - July 23rd, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Tags: analytics, BP, British Petroleum, MAP, monitoring, sentiment, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Samples, Social Media, Technology

Sysomos, Now a Marketwire Company

A hallway discussion in 2005 led to the creation of Sysomos. Today, we are excited to announce that Marketwire Inc. has acquired Sysomos. Marketwire is a dominant leader in press release and content distribution, and workflow solutions for public relations, investor relations, journalists and communication professionals.

We started working on several social media analysis problems as a challenging research project in 2005. A lot has changed since then.

Today, Sysomos is a profitable business. We operate the most advanced social media monitoring and analytics platform, collecting and processing more than a billion new online conversations a month. We have two very successful products in our portfolio: MAP and Heartbeat.

Thousands of brands around the globe are using analytics from the Sysomos platform. The list includes boutique and international agencies, mid-sized companies and some of the world’s biggest brands such as Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney and Shell.

Most important, we have been fortunate to build a team that consists of some of the most talented and dedicated individuals, bringing together innovation, technical leadership and superior customer service. As a very important milestone in our corporate evolution, we are now part of the much larger Marketwire family.

As the communications industry moves forward, the union between Marketwire and Sysomos makes perfect sense. Our common goal is a customer-centric approach to apply technology to meet the challenges of communicating in an ever-changing environment. Together, we will bridge the established world of communications services and the rapidly changing social media landscape.

Marketwire’s products and services will integrate social intelligence from the Sysomos platform to provide public relations and investor relations professionals, marketers and advertisers with better tools for their business needs. New products are in development to holistically address the needs of modern communications professionals. The integrated platform will have emphasis on ROI and measurable results to drive value.

Together, we are set to become the global leader in the communications industry. Continue reading the complete press release.

Nick Koudas & Nilesh Bansal
Sysomos Co-founders

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I am a Sysomos user, how does this affect me?
A: If you are using any of our services (MAP, Heartbeat and Audience), you will continue to have access to them, along with the great support and superior customer service. Nothing changes except you now have access to resources and expertise of a much larger company.

Q: How does the acquisition affect enhancements to the Sysomos platform and new products?
A: We will continue to frequently release new product features and updates frequently. All three products – MAP, Heartbeat and Audience – will continue to evolve. Our engineering team is already working to develop more to meet your needs.

Q: What brings Sysomos and Marketwire together?
A: There is a natural fit and synergy between Marketwire and Sysomos. With access to thousands of clients, both teams will work together to revolutionize the communications industry. This synergy creates a set of unique offerings that will define the evolution of corporate communications. Sysomos will continue to lead the social media landscape, and smoothly integrate its products with Marketwire services. This union shows it is possible to keep pace with technological and sociological changes in communication and information sharing, and stay one step ahead and set the new standard.

Q: Who will be leading the team?
A: The two founders of Sysomos, Nick Koudas and Nilesh Bansal, will continue to lead the Sysomos division of Marketwire as President and CTO respectively, along with Michael Nowlan, Chief Executive of Marketwire.

Q: How do I get access to your products?
A: That’s simple; just contact our sales team at sales@sysomos.com, and we will send you all the details and pricing.

By admin - July 6th, 2010 - 16 Comments »
Tags: MAP, marketwire, Social Media, social media analytics, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Customers, Events, Social Media, Technology, Tips & Help

Looking Back at the G20

Last Thursday we scanned the social media landscape to see what sentiment going into the G20 looked like. What we saw was that the general web population was looking positively towards this meeting of 20 world leaders and their delegates. We also noticed that there was some negative sentiment towards the summit, but it appeared that the majority of that negativity was coming from the people of Toronto who were watching their city get locked down. To view that post click here.

Now that the dust has settled and the delegates have left Toronto we’ve decided to take a look and see how this information has changed. Searching from Friday June 25^th to the morning of June 29^th we analyzed the social web with our social media monitoring and analytics platform to see what was being said.

At first glance we can see that this summit was a big deal simply by the numbers of mentions that took place over our four-day period.

In terms of overall sentiment there hasn’t been much change despite us thinking there might have been. On Thursday overall sentiment had a favorable rating of 76%. Two days after the end of the G20 summit the sentiment is still positive but has slipped to a 74% favorable rating.

The blogosphere also seems to have a positive look at what transpired over the weekend. Positive sentiment actually seemed to increase. The overall rating is still 76% favorable, but more content seems to be positive rather than neutral as seen before the G20. Negative share of mentions stayed steady at 22%.

Again we also see that Twitter seems to look a bit more negatively on the summit than bloggers do. Heading into the G20 we saw that 2.9% of tweets were of a positive nature, but now that it’s over we see that number drop to 2.0%. Negative tweets also rose from 7.2% to 10.8%. However, when we scan these tweets, we still see a large number of the negative tweets are coming out of Canada.

Because of this we decided to look at the sentiment coming out of Toronto, where the G20 took place, in comparison to how the rest of the world viewed the event. We see that a lot more negative sentiment is coming out of the host city. Looking at these numbers we see that Toronto did not seem to be too happy about having the G20 in their backyard.

A second G20 meeting is scheduled to happen later this year in Mexico. We will come back to this topic again and compare the two summits when the time arises.

By sheldon - June 30th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Posted in Technology

Looking At Sentiment of the Upcoming G20

This weekend the G20 descends on Sysomos’ hometown of Toronto in Canada. For those of you unfamiliar with the G20, it’s a meeting between finance ministers, central bank governors and heads of government from 20 of the worlds leading economies to discuss financial markets and world economics.

The event is causing quite a stir here in our own backyard with everyone preparing for heightened security all around Toronto this weekend, but we thought it would be interesting to see what the rest of the online world thinks of this meeting of nations. So, using our social media monitoring and analytics platform we took a look at what the world was saying about the G20 in the month leading up to the giant summit.

While we at Sysomos are hearing a lot of chatter just from our real life neighbors, we can see that it’s not only us Torontonians, but people all over the world that are talking about the G20.

It also appears that the world seems to have a positive outlook on the meeting with an overall favourable rating of 76%.

Although, while everyone around the world seems to be talking about the G20, there appears to be a discrepancy in sentiment between the blogosphere and the Twitter community.

The blogosphere seems to be looking positively towards the summit with an overall 78% favourable rating. Only 22% of what’s being said is negative.

Meanwhile on Twitter a different picture is being painted. Only 2.9% of tweets are positively talking about the G20, while 7.2% are coming from a negative perspective. However, if we take a closer look, it appears that the majority of these negative tweets are coming from people in the Toronto area whose lives are actually being affected and disrupted by the G20 coming to town. Some of these tweets read as follows:

With the G20 poised to start tomorrow, it will be interesting to look back next week and see how the sentiment changes. Check back next week and we will update these numbers and compare.

By sheldon - June 25th, 2010 - 2 Comments »
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media, Technology

What About Female Social Media Stars’ Followers?

Last week we released a new study that looked at the authority rankings of the followers of some larger Twitter accounts using our social media monitoring and analytics platform. Included in our list were five celebrities, five social media heavyweights and five media outlets. The findings of the study showed that while all accounts we looked at had large number of followers, those accounts more involved in social media had followers that were also more involved in using Twitter.
However, when we released the report we were met with some feedback that our list of social media heavyweights had no females. This was by no means done on purpose; it just so happened that we chose some accounts we thought that most readers would recognize easily.
In response to this though, we decided that we should take a look at some of the female players in the social media game and see how they stack up to their male counterparts we included in the original study. Using some recommendations from those that spoke out we have put together this list of five female social media stars and the authority levels of their followers:

Like their male counterparts it seems that our female social media heavyweights have a follower base that is very active in the Twitter community. This is unsurprising seeing as they participate in the space that they work in and tweet about. As well, it seems that an earlier report we did on the statistics of bloggers that showed the male/female split of bloggers was almost dead even holds true on the side of Twitter as well. It seems both male and female social media heavyweights attract the same kinds of followers, proving even further (sort of) that the net is a gender-neutral place.

By sheldon - June 22nd, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Posted in Technology

FourWhere Now Combines Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare

We are excited to announce that FourWhere now includes places and content from Gowalla and Yelp – a move that makes it the only service to integrate information from the three leading location-based services: Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare.

Since its launch in March, FourWhere has received an enthusiastic reception by providing users with an easy way to discover places and comments for thousands of restaurants, bars, cafes, stores, tourist attractions and other venues. The service uses data from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, and displays it using Google Maps API.

Not only does FourWhere now combine information from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, it also uses intelligent matching to amalgamate similar venues. For example, Moonbean Coffee can appear as Moonbean Coffee Company or The Moonbean Coffee by different sources. Fourwhere merges all three descriptions, along with comments to the venue.

FourWhere is a free service developed by Sysomos Inc., a leading social media monitoring and analytics provider. Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ chief executive and co-founder, said Fourwhere reflects Sysomos’ ability to quickly introduce innovative services.

“FourWhere is an example of how Sysomos can leverage its leading-edge data and text analytics technology to seize upon new opportunities,” Koudas said. “We recognized the growing interest in location-based services, and we continue to look for new ways to expand FourWhere to take advantage of the market’s growth.”

The addition of Gowalla and Yelp means FourWhere users now have even more information at their fingertips when looking for places to eat, shop, socialize or visit in thousand of cities around the world.

Using FourWhere is easy. There is no need to register, and you don’t have to be a member of Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp to discover new places and comments. To use FourWhere, search for a location (city or address), and then click on the map to see the places in which Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp users have been, and any comments they have left about particular places.

If, for example, you are looking for a place to eat near the Charlestown Bridge in Boston, you would search for “Boston” or “Charlestown Bridge, Boston”, and then move the map to the area around the bridge. FourWhere then displays information about each place on the map, as well as offering details about the service it came from, and the users who provided the information.

In this case, we are looking at comments for a Polcari’s Coffee Shop. Each comment includes information about whether it came from a Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp user. More information about a user can be seen by clicking on their photo or avatar.

If you have any comments or suggestions about FourWhere, please let us know.

By Mark Evans - June 21st, 2010 - 19 Comments »
Tags: foursqure, fourwhere, gowalla, sysomos, yelp
Posted in Technology

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Looking Back at the G20

What About Female Social Media Stars’ Followers?

FourWhere Now Combines Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare

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