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Free Webinar: “Impacting Business With Social Media” with Brian Solis

Two weeks ago we launched our Sysomos Business Library for Social Media, a resource center filled with content to help your entire business really succeed at implementing and using social media. Currently you can find reports and white papers focused on how different parts of an organization can effectively use social media. Today, we’re proud to announce that next week we’ll be kicking off our Business Library for Social Media webinar series.

On Thursday August 18th, Brian Solis, principal, Altimeter Group and author of Engage!, and co-host Nygel Weishar, Sysomos’ social media & community relations specialist, will present “Impacting Business with Social Media,” a free one-hour webinar. This expert-led session will show attendees how to build the business case for social media and how to champion it through the organization to build online buzz, brand and the company’s bottom line.

Many companies have fallen behind the curve and the competition because social media isn’t already part of their business strategy, and many marketers and PR professionals have realized that it can be difficult to get the company-wide buy-in for social media they need to ensure success. This webinar, together with Sysomos’ new white paper, “Building the Business Case for Social Media,” will equip digital marketers and companies alike with practical applications for implementing a social media strategy and illustrate why it’s critical for businesses to market their brands and services via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networks. Attendees will learn more about:

Social media benefits: Metrics, new studies and examples
Common roadblocks: Typical management misgivings and strategies for countering each
Social media strategy templates and best practices for B2B and B2C companies
How social media insights can be leveraged throughout the organization
Measurement and monitoring tips: How to track the value of your social media program and prove it to management
What the C-suite must know to sign off on implementing social media

Webinar details:

What: Free webinar “Impacting Business with Social Media” (#blsm)
When: Thursday, August 18, 2011, 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT
Note: The session is 60 minutes in length and is archived for later viewing. All registrants receive access to the archived webinars.
Who: Brian Solis (@briansolis), principal, Altimeter Group and author of Engage!, and co-host Nygel Weishar (@nweishar), Sysomos’ social media & community relations specialist
To Register: Click here to register for “Impacting Business with Social Media“

By Sheldon Levine - August 11th, 2011 - 2 Comments »
Posted in Technology

Twitter’s Addictive Appeal

For all the talk about Google+ being a threat to Twitter, here’s something that should be kept in mind: Twitter is highly addictive.

No matter how much personal discipline you may have, and no matter how much you may claim Twitter is simply a tool, the most active users are addicted to Twitter. How else to explain the flurry of tweets day and night, weekday and weekend. They tweet during during meetings, watching TV, eating, during sports games, movies and concerts, and while waiting around.

A perfect illustration of Twitter addiction popped up yesterday afternoon (Yes, I realize being on Twitter on a Sunday afternoon is not a good sign!) with this tweet:

“Hey all, I’ve decided to leave Twitter for a while to get a break, so this will be my last tweet until tomorrow”.

Upon reading it, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand, it’s funny because the immediate impression is the user has made a major decision to step away from Twitter for an extended period of time. Then, you realize he’s talking about less than 24 hours – but probably less. That’s not a break; that’s a pause in the action to catch your breath!

You see, that’s the underlying appeal of Twitter for the 10% to 15% of hard-core users who drive a vast majority of the activity. They’re addicted to Twitter, and have little way or inclination to control their fascination, obsession or use.

Twitter is a never-ending parade of 140-character goodness. The tweets keep on coming so there is likely something interesting or entertaining to see if you stick around long enough or visit frequently.

Twitter doesn’t take a lot of effort because everything is bite-sized. In many ways, it’s the perfect digital form factor for a fast-paced, multi-tasking, attention-deficit world.

I’m not suggesting Google+ doesn’t have appeal but it’s a different beast than Twitter. Sure, there will be some people who may might Google+ more interesting or valuable but there’s something about Twitter that needs the core need of the enthusiastic digital user.

By Mark Evans - July 18th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
Tags: addiction, twitter
Posted in Technology

Will iOS5 Lead to a Next Twitter Explosion?

Last week at Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) the company showcased their lasest version of iOS, which is the operating system for iPhones, iPads and iTouch devices. While the new operating system toutes many new features compared to it’s predecessors, one of the most interesting is that Twitter will be fully integrated throughout Apple’s stock apps on the devices. This means that i-device users will be able to easily share their thoughts, links, pictures and more seamlessly to the mico-blogging platform.

Last week, Mark Evans looked at how Twitter is still a niche as 92% of people over the age of 12 claim to know about the service, but only 8% actually use the social network. No reasons were given as to why people were or were not using Twitter. One reason why people may not be though, is that they just don’t have time to add that something extra into their already busy day. Some people may use it, but don’t understand the nuances of tweeting out links and pictures. But, could having the service so easily accessible from their smartphone change that?

Rather than having to have a couple of different apps on their phone to tweet, to share pictures, to shorten links so they can fit into the 140 character limit, etc, Apple will now make that all easy to do without having to have a multitude of apps to aide that.

Not to mention that the iPhone has a pretty hefty market share on smartphones, making it even easier to get Twitter into the hands of more users. According to eMarketer earlier this year, they projected iPhones to hold about 30% of the US smartphone market share for the next two years.

The question now becomes, with Apple putting Twitter into the hands of so many people and making it super easy to use through their mobile device, will Twitter experience another growth explosion towards the end of this year when iOS5 becomes available to the public?

By Sheldon Levine - June 14th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: apple, iOS5, iphone, twitter
Posted in Social Media, Technology

Sysomos Product Update: Gender Analysis for Twitter and Facebook

Once again, we at Sysomos are pleased to bring you another big and unique update to both our MAP and Heartbeat software.

Unlike many of the other social networks, Twitter users are not asked to reveal their gender. On Facebook, users identify themselves as male or female, but that information is not publicly accessible. However, people who are trying to reach specific target audiences still want this information. So, over the weekend we updated both MAP and Heartbeat to include a new analysis feature that will help identify the gender for Twitter and Facebook users in an easy to read graph.

How are we able to do this? We spent a long, long time creating a database of names. Our list contains common names in English and many languages from around the world. In addition to just reading names, our latest analysis feature looks for clues in a user’s profile and content. There always are cases where a machine can not judge if a user is male or female, e.g., ambiguous names or brands. In a case like the name Jamie, which could belong to either a male or female, we look for clues in their profile like “mother of 3″ to determine that this Jamie is a female. We have tuned our algorithm to be conservative such that it makes almost no mistakes. Using disclosed names along with clues from user profiles and content, it is able to accurately classify two users out of three, with the remaining one-third being marked as “don’t know”.

This latest update is one of the most unique in the entire industry, especially with such a high level of accuracy. We think that everyone using our software to accurately approach and/or research their target audiences will find this feature extremely useful.

As always, if you are a current Sysomos subscriber and have any questions about our latest updates, don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.

Keep your eyes here on the blog for more updates coming in the future.

By Sheldon Levine - May 31st, 2011 - 3 Comments »
Tags: heartbeat, MAP, product updates, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Customers, Features, Social Media, Technology

Sysomos MAP & Heartbeat Updates – New Facebook Features Make Engagement and Competitive Analysis Easier

This week, we’re super happy to announce some major updates to how Facebook is integrated into our MAP and Heartbeat services. Here’s a quick look at what these updates include:

Analyze any Facebook Fan Page in MAP: MAP subscribers previously could search for key terms being used in publicly available Facebook status updates to analyze. With our latest update you can now also perform ad-hoc research and analysis on any Fan Page in the Facebook network.

All of MAP’s usual powerful analysis tools can now be applied to Fan Pages; including understanding the volume of conversation, the overall positive vs. negative sentiment, text analysis, and who the top fans are of any page. MAP can now be used to perform a direct comparison of fan pages to obtain insights into competitive brands and your industry.

The best part is it’s super simple to do. All you have to do is navigate to any Facebook Fan Page and copy the URL. Then in MAP, select “Facebook” under the “Social Media” tab, and click “Analyze a Fan Page”. There will an empty text box where you can now drop in the copied Fan Page URL, click “Analyze” and MAP will instantly pull up current/historical info for that page.

Directly engage with your Facebook fans in Heartbeat: Being able to directly engage with your fans in an easy way is very important to any brand. With our latest update, you can now easily engage with your audience on your Facebook Fan Page Wall to provide status updates or comment on wall posts without ever leaving Heartbeat.

Easier integration of Facebook Pages in Heartbeat – including those of your competitors: In the past, integrating your Facebook Page into Heartbeat and Facebook Page Central required the page’s administrator to dig into the page’s FBML code and place a token (a piece of code) inside. With our latest update it has now become simpler: copy the Facebook Page’s URL and paste it into Heartbeat. The pages can then be accessed like all other information in Heartbeat, including automated email alerts for important activity on your page or your competitors pages.

To add a new Facebook Page to your Heartbeat, copy the URL of the Facebook Page you’d like to add. Then, within Heartbeat, access Facebook through the “Settings” tab and paste the unique URL of the Facebook Fan Page into the address bar. Next, hit “Link Page” and begin analyzing. Any page linked to your Heartbeat can be accessed quickly and easily from the right side navigation entitled Facebook Pages.

If you are a Sysomos user and have any questions about any of these new features, please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.

That’s our big Facebook update, but keep your eyes peeled for more exciting Sysomos updates in the future.

By Sheldon Levine - May 16th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, facebook, facebook page central, heartbeat, MAP, monitoring, product updates, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Social Media, Technology

The 10 Keys to Hiring a Social Media “Expert”

First, I’m being somewhat tongue in cheek with the use of “expert” in the headline given I’m not sure anyone can claim to be a social media “expert”. The marketplace is so new and moving at such a rapid clip, that it’s difficult to suggest anyone has a super-strong grasp on everything.

That said, social media experts (or consultants, gurus, strategists, etc.) can play a key role in helping companies embrace and execute on social media. The right person can help you break out of the gates with the right strategic and tactical approach to provide a good shot at being successful.

So what should you be looking for in a social media expert/guru/consultant? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Look for someone who doesn’t think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al are the coolest things ever. You don’t need a social media enthusiast, you need someone who understand how social media can be leveraged to achieve your company’s strategic and tactical goals. It means hiring someone with solid business knowledge, who also happens to know social media.

2. Find someone who can help create a strategic plan that reflects your company, industry and target audiences – as opposed to getting a cookie-cutter plan. These people are worth the money because they align your business needs with your social media efforts. No offense but good tactical help is much easier to find and staff.

3. Focus on someone who talks the talk and walks the walk. While you can learn a lot about someone by what they do on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs, it is also important see how active and successful they are socially. How many followers do they have on Twitter? How many “Likes” do they have on Facebook? How many blog posts do they write and how many RSS subscribers do they have?

4. Part II of walking the walk is working with people who have a track record with clients. There are lots of social media experts/consultants who are great communicators but it is also important to work with people who have hands-on experience helping companies create strategic and tactical plans.

5. Make sure a social media expert/consultant has examples of how their efforts have helped clients be successful. Get details on how their worked helped a client reach specific goals.

6. Look for someone willing to stick around after the strategic and tactical plan is completed – be it to provide hands-on training or education, tweaking your tactical execution, or, if required, recalibrating what you’re doing. Avoid anyone who takes an in and out approach.

7. Ask for references. Anyone who is any good will be happy to provide them to demonstrate their expertise.

8. Shop around. Be willing to get proposals from several suppliers to compare their approaches, goals and prices. Ask other companies for their suggestions and recommendations.

9. Be an educated consumer by reading about what social media experts/consultants do and the value provide. There’s no lack of information out there.

10. Establish benchmarks for success, and get these benchmarks in writing. Make sure that what you’re buying is well-articulated, including the time involved and deliverables.

By Mark Evans - May 4th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: consultants, Social Media, strategy, tactics
Posted in Technology

Lots of Talk About The Music From The Coachella Festival

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to take a trip down to California to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. For those of you unfamiliar with the festival, it’s a giant three day festival that brings together over 150 musical acts and bunch of art installations. I mainly went for the music, which this year featured headlining acts such as Kanye West, The Strokes, Kings of Leon, The Black Keys and The Arcade Fire. I had the most amazing time while at the festival, but couldn’t help but notice how many people there were constantly on their smartphones and tablet devices, so I decided to see if those people were using social media to talk about Coachella while they were there.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I performed a search for the word “Coachella” over the past week. Our activity summary shows that there were over 21,600 blog posts, 4,200 news articles, 10,700 forum posts and 217,000 tweets mentioning Coachella.

A look at the overall popularity of talk about Coachella in social media showed that popularity peaked on the final night of the festival. This is most likely due to people talking about the weekend they had just experienced, as well as a phenomenal performance that night by the rapper that everyone likes to talk about, Kanye West.

Because of the fantastic line-up of bands and artists performing at Coachella, I had a feeling that music blogs would be writing about it all weekend. I didn’t expect to find over 21,000 posts though. On top of that, a look at our geo-location map shows that bloggers from all over the world were writing about the three day event.

I dug deeper into those 21,000 blog posts to find out what the bloggers were writing about. I thought that looking at our entities chart, which pulls the most popular people, places and things from posts, would give me a good idea of which artists were being talked about the most. Kanye West seemed to be the most talked about artist from the festival, but we can also see artists such as Wiz Khalifa, Death From Above 1979, The National and Duran Duran were getting a lot of attention. More interesting was that Vampire Weekend also seemed to be written about a lot despite the fact that they didn’t actually play the festival. However, their lead singer, Ezra Koenig, did come out to do a song with Chromeo and that seemed to gain a lot attention. Something else I found interesting was that Nike seemed to show up a lot, so I dug into why and it turned out that bloggers were writing a lot about the new Nike shoes that Kanye wore durring his performance aptly dubbed the “Nike Air Yeezy 2′s”. This was the first time the shoes were seen in public.

Over on Twitter I found a lot of conversations going on about a lot of the same artists that were being talked about on the blogs. I could also see through our buzzgraph that people were sharing their pictures, videos and experiences on Twitter through sites such as twitpic.com and tumblr.com.

Lastly, I decided to see what the traditional media was saying online about Coachella. By pulling up our word cloud I could see that media was talking about the same things as well, but with much more of a reporting feel. This is evident by seeing words that referenced the “stage”s, “crowd”s, “time”s and “songs”. Again though, I found that all of the talk revolved around the “music”.

Overall, I had a great time at Coachella and it seems that I wasn’t the only one judging by all the talk going on in social media from a world-wide audience.

By Sheldon Levine - April 21st, 2011 - 1 Comment »
Tags: coachella, MAP, music, Social Media
Posted in Technology

Sysomos Text Analytics Roundup: Making Sense of Data

Next to listening, understanding is the most important next step when it comes to knowing how your audience is talking about you.

With thousands of tweets, blogs and forums talking about a brand, reading every article can be a chore few would attempt to do. Hence, the need for a concise and summarized view of the social landscape.

While text analysis has been around for many years, it becomes a lot more challenging with social media. Online conversations are informally written, there are too many grammatical and spelling errors, and there is far too much data.

Given the recent chatter about social media monitoring, we thought it would be a good opportunity to put spotlight on text analytics features that make MAP and Heartbeat so valuable.

Over the last few years, our team has developed several key algorithms for machines to make sense of the data: sentiment analysis, language translation, short document summaries, keyword word clouds, visual buzzgraphs, popular phrases, semantic analysis with entities, and key conversations. In this post, we will cover the last five features, while leaving the rest for the future.

Word Cloud
We’re excited about the latest addition, a new version of Word Cloud. It displays the most commonly used words in the search results in a user-friendly manner. Associated CSV export capability includes more details and occurrence frequency for each of the word. Five colour themes and three font themes are available to make the resulting graphic look beautiful and appear in your presentations and report naturally.

The word cloud below shows most frequent keywords surrounding the new BlackBerry PlayBook.

BuzzGraph
A staple within MAP and Heartbeat has been the BuzzGraph, which displays the leading keywords and, as important, the relationships between them. Different words are connected by dashed, thin or bold lines to show weak or strong correlation between them. Obviously, you can drill down in to any keyword to see a synopsis. And if you love data and numbers, CSV exports will make you happy.

Like the Word Cloud, the BuzzGraph delivers a user-friendly snapshot of lots of data. In this case, we’re displaying the leading keywords from more than 100,000 mentions of the recently launched Blackberry Playbook. It shows many related topics but RIM, tablet and blackberry form the heart of the conversation with the bold connections between them.

Popular Phrases
Moving beyond just words and relationship between them, MAP also displays a list of popular phrases found in the results. Again, you can drill down by clicking any one to refine your searches further.

Entities
Our Entities feature goes beyond words and phrases to analyze the text semantically. By using natural language processing, conceptual entities are extracted and categorized as being a person, name, city, company, etc. You are no longer limited to the entire universe of words and phrases, but more meaningful entities categorized automatically by the system.

Below are the extracted entities from about the newest Playbook tablet and a zoomed in version of just Industry Terms. Here, the text is analyzed semantically to categorize “New York Times” as one entity meaning a publication, whereas “New York” is another under cities.

Key Conversations
Last but not least, Heartbeat and MAP include Key Conversations, which shows complete meaningful sentences that summarize all the results based on analysis of the key discussion themes and topics. This makes it a very powerful but concise tool to quickly see exactly what is being talked about by reading just a few sentences.

Below is a graph showing the key conversations. Notice, how we have moved from simple word lists to full meaningful sentences summarizing the content – and how good these sentences are in showing a very succinct snapshot of all that is being talked about the new tablet.

Text analytics is one area Sysomos has focused on from the beginning, never separating it from just monitoring. Most of what you see here is a result of our in-house research and development team, consisting of PhDs and experts in data mining, specifically tuning the algorithms for social media content.

Having in-house technology not only means our continued ability to innovate and adapt to our customer needs, but also no extra fee to our users for using any of these features.

As always, we are always interested in hearing your feedback and suggestions on making these useful features even more awesome.

By Nilesh Bansal - April 18th, 2011 - 4 Comments »
Tags: keywords, playbook, sysomos, text analytics
Posted in Technology

Sysomos Heartbeat Updates – Multiple Twitter Handles, Additional Forum Coverage, Weekly Reports and More

We are constantly improving all of our software offerings, releasing updates based on user feedback every couple of weeks. If you are a Sysomos user you’ll know this from the emails that we send out with each major update. We’ve decided to now also post each of our feature updates right here in the blog where they’re easy to find and all our readers can see just how often we are updating the software to work better for you. Keep your eyes out for many more of these posts in the future.

Yesterday we rolled out our latest update for Heartbeat, our real-time social media monitoring and engagement offering. Some of the key features in this update were:

Additional Forum Coverage: In December we updated our forum and message board coverage for MAP to cover 30-40% more content. Now, we bring that same coverage over to Heartbeat to crawl additional 200 million forum posts per month to help find your search terms.

Multiple Twitter Handles: While you’ve always been able to engage on Twitter right from within Heartbeat, you were only able to attach one Twitter profile to each account. We now offer you the option to attach multiple Twitter accounts to each Heartbeat account so you can engage from different handles with the click of a button.

Weekly Summary Report Email: Not every company/brand needs a updated report seven days a week. While you could get daily reports before, we’ve now allowed users to get a weekly summary instead if that fits your needs better.You can configure this through the “Email Alerts” area under the Settings Tab.

Highlighting Based on Tagging Rules: When viewing the content in the “Your Heartbeats” tab, you may have noticed that keywords from “Queries” were highlighted. We have now changed the yellow highlighting to instead use keywords from the “Tagging Rules” to make it easier to see why a post is assigned a particular tag.

Flag-Query with Option to Delete: If you are a Facebook Page Central user you most likely know of the ability to flag specific words that need to be brought to your attention. This allows you to receive email updates every time certain specified terms have been posted/commented on your fan page. Now you have the ability to delete the mentions right from the email. Just click the X beside the Facebook users name and it will delete the wall post or comment from your Facebook Fan Page.

If you are a Sysomos user and have any questions about any of these new features, don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.

We’ll have some more updates to highlight in the near future, so keep your eye out for these.

By Sheldon Levine - March 24th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: heartbeat, product updates, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Features, Social Media, Technology

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