Sysomos Blog

Apple’s Stock Not Affecting What People Are Saying

By Sheldon Levine - April 25th, 2013

Earlier this week Apple released it’s latest earnings report. In the report the company said that they did better than expected in bringing in revenue. Despite the good Q2 report, the Apple stock had been going down lately. In fact, it hit the lowest it had in years. This intrigued me, so I wanted to know what people were saying about this and it turns out the dropping stock didn’t stop people from loving the company.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, I looked for talk about Apple in the past week. In that time period I found 1.7 million mentions. There were 83,638 blog posts, 88,658 online news articles, 335,307 forum postings and 1,250,667 tweets.

Looking at the talk about apple spread out over time shows that when the company released their earning results talk about them rose. The numbers were made public on Tuesday and we can clearly see the talk rise from then on in blogs, news and Twitter. For some reason, the report had the opposite effect on forums.

While all this talk was on the rise, a look at some of the key conversations from blogs going on at the time were indeed talking about Apple’s stock price.

Despite this talk about the fallen Apple stock, it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the greater public. When I looked up sentiment across all channels, Apple was still getting a lot of positive talk. In fact, they have an overall 87% favourable rating. The company is seeing 47% of the conversation about it being positive and only 13% negative.

So, despite what investors are thinking about Apple by selling off their shares, it seems that the company is doing well according to their earnings report, but even better in the publics’ eye.

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Tags: analytics, apple, MAP, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Samples, Social Media

Anticipation and Expectations Build For A New Daft Punk Album

By Sheldon Levine - April 23rd, 2013

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a album. And I feel like I’m not the one that feels this way.

Yesterday, it was reported that when Daft Punk released their first single from their forthcoming album, Random Access Memories, it set a record for being the most streamed song in a single day ever on Spotify. But this is just the recent hype. There’s been a lot of hype around both Daft Punk and their new album for quite some time now.Rumours about them playing at Coachella started almost right after last year’s Coachella ended. Near the beginning of March they released a 15 second commercial during Saturday Night Live, and another one last weekend. There’s also a series being done by The Creators Project, a venture between Vice and Intel, of interviews with people Daft Punk collaborated with on their upcoming album. All of this has got many music fans very excited.

Even though Daft Punk was not on this year’s Coachella line up, it was still rumoured that they would come out during another artists set. They didn’t. But it got me thinking about all the people that probably tweeted their disappointment. Then I saw the article about their single breaking the Spotify record and knew that if I kept talking about Daft Punk, other people must be also. So, I used MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to see if I was right.

I looked back at a month’s worth of talk about Daft Punk. In that time I found the french robot duo mentioned just under 927,000 times. Daft Punk was mentioned in 11,343 blog posts, 6,135 online news articles, 20,283 forum postings and 889,117 tweets.

In that same time, there has also been over 26,000 videos uploaded about Daft Punk.

When I looked at these mentions spread out over time we can see that talk of Daft Punk was going quite strong at the beginning of the month. It then slowly rose the closer it got to the first weekend of Coachella, April 12-14. We then see a small spike in activity on the 13th and 14th as the 13th was the day Daft Punk was rumoured to make a guest appearance at the music festival, however, since it was after midnight by the time people knew they weren’t coming out, the mentions appear to have happened more on the 14th. As well, that evening was the night their second SNL commercial played on TV. Then, the large spike we can see towards the end of the chart corresponds with the release of their single last Friday and became the most streamed song on Spotify in a single day.

While Coachella happened and SNL aired in the United States, it didn’t stop the rest of the world from talking. The single, Get Lucky, was also released world wide and had everyone talking. A look at where all the mentions of Daft Punk have been coming from over the past month show that their much anticipated album has people talking in all corners of the world. The United States leads the conversation with 26.7%, but are followed by France (where Daft Punk come from) with 12.8% and the United Kingdom with 11.4%.

A look at our heat map that shows where tweets about Daft Punk were originating from shows visually that the entire globe has these dance music making robots on their mind.

All of this hype about the band has certainly got people talking, even though their album doesn’t come out for almost a month still. The hype has also got people’s hopes (including my own) quite high. The sentiment around Daft Punk in the past month has a favourable rating of 88%. 47% of the conversation has been rated positive while only 12% rated negative. Most of the negative talk was also due to Daft Punk not actually appearing at Coachella despite them saying many times that they would not be there.

There’s a lot of hype and expectation for Daft Punk’s new album. Let’s hope that it lives up to all this hype.

1 Comment »
Tags: analytics, Daft Punk, MAP, Random Access Memories, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Samples, Social Media

Can Small Businesses Succeed at Social Media?

By Mark Evans - April 22nd, 2013

Many small businesses gravitate to social media it’s free to use, not taking into account the time and effort involved.

But is social media is good thing for small businesses to be spending their time doing?

Maybe not, according to a new study by Manta, which discovered that 61% of small businesses don’t see an ROI on their social media effort at a time when 50% of respondents say they’re spending more time on social media. (See the infographic below for more details about the study)

So why do many small businesses are struggling with social media.

If so many of them are enthusiastic about social media to attract and engage customers, gain leads and referrals and boost awareness, then why do most small businesses claim there’s no ROI?

Maybe it comes down to expectations. Many small businesses hear about the magical powers of social media so they jump on the bandwagon, only to discover it doesn’t automatically mean a wave of followers and fans.

A more reasonable explanation may be that social media isn’t easy, even though it is free. Truth be told, embracing social media is easy, but being successful doing it is difficult.

Social media involves a lot of moving parts, including a well-defined strategy and objectives, benchmarks and a commitment to make social media on a regular (daily?) basis. Companies that also thrive at social media are good communicators, agile and creative thinkers and do-ers.

The willingness and ability to execute tactically is where many small businesses drop the proverbial ball. Sure, they’re enthusiastic initially but after the novelty wears off, reality sets in. This often sees a small business go from being active on social media to inactive because they don’t see immediate returns.

The thing about social media is it’s a game of inches, not a game of miles.

In most cases, traction happens slowly over time, and it happens because a business is willing to work at it every day.

If you want to succeed at social media, there are no digital holidays. You can’t do it for awhile, and then take a break. In many ways, it is like trying to get in better shape. You have to work out on a regular basis to see any physical improvements.

The biggest challenge with small business when it comes to social media is having enough time and energy to do it.

When you’re a small business, there simply isn’t enough time or energy to go around, let alone embrace a new activity. Despite your best intentions, something else will capture your attention as opposed to tending your Twitter or Facebook account. It’s a fact of life (and business).

For small businesses to do well with social media, it not only takes a committed investment in social media but often means doing less or something else or giving it up completely.

For example, a small business may decide that being active on Twitter and Facebook is the best way to engage with consumers. But it means not spending their time or money on direct mail or newspaper inserts.

This can be a difficult decision because it’s not easy for a small business to give up something they have been using for years, even if social media has much more potential.

Doing well at social media also means being creative and engaged. You need to be light on your feet, willing to experiment to new ideas, closely monitor the competition and move quickly to jump on opportunities. Again, this can be an entirely new way to behave.

When you really think about it, the results of Manta’s study are not surprising.

From the outside looking in, social media looks like a relatively easy thing. But once you get into the game, you discover there is a lot more involved, including the need to be patient rather than expect overnight success.

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Tags: manta, small business, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

The Future of Blogs: The Longer, The Better?

By Mark Evans - April 15th, 2013

Is the future of blogging fast and furious or long and insightful?

As blogging matures and content marketing is embraced by more brands, there seems to be a growing amount of conversation around the key elements for a successful blog. Among them is the idea that longer blogs may, in fact, be a great way to attract traffic.

On the Kissmetrics blog recently, Mauro D’Andrea suggested that “small articles, and light content in general, have no future (unless you’re Seth Godin). Look around the web, and you’ll notice that all the major websites in each industry are producing big content.”

HowtoMakemyBlog.com‘s Marko Saric wrote that “the last few few months had “seen the revival of long form writing online. Long form content journalism and in-depth storytelling online are making a comeback. While most articles are still short and quick to read, more and more blogs are publishing long-form features of 2,000+ words, which include photos and videos and need a lot of time invested from the reader to go through it.”

This is an interesting discussion for a number of reasons:

1. A rule of thumb has emerged that blog posts are usually 300 to 500 words, which allows the writer to offer some insight and value without asking the reader to invest too much time. It’s based on the idea that online users are multi-tasking and impatient so asking them to read more than 500 words can be a challenge.

2. Quantity has won over quality, particularly for Websites looking to generate advertising revenue. Giving people a lot of content makes them come back more often, which is great for Website traffic and Google rankings. While this approach works for the high-profile Websites, it has also been embraced by bloggers looking for the spotlight.

3. People don’t read long articles online because it is not seen as the ideal medium, particularly in swipe and scan world.

So why are D’Andrea and Saric suggesting there is interest in long blog posts when short and sweet rule the roost?

One theory is so much content being produced that long-form journalism is a way to stand out from the crowd.

By writing long, insightful and informative posts, you can give people “a proper dinner” as opposed to serving them “fast food”.

While long blog posts take more time and require more of an investment, they can also be more rewarding for both the author and reader. When written well about an interesting topic. long blog posts can be wonderful food for thought.

A good example is Peep Laja, who writes the ConversionXL blog. His posts are long but they’re also chock-a-block with insight, advice and examples. When you read one of Laja’s posts, it offers such good content the length becomes a good thing rather than a hurdle.

The bottom line is there is a place for longer, meatier blog posts in a hurly burly, fast-moving world. There are people who are willing to take the time to read content that offers lots of information and insight – just as there are many people who love to read features in the New Yorker or New York Times magazine.

What do you think? How often are you willing to read a blog post that is more than 50o words? Would you ever read something that tops 1,000 words?

11 Comments »
Tags: blogs, kissmetrics, marko saric
Posted in Social Media

Everyone Gets Writers Block

By Sheldon Levine - April 11th, 2013

Coming up with blog topics and content isn’t easy. Especially if you’re blogging a lot. We have posts five days a week on this blog and it’s not an easy task always having something to say that we think you would enjoy. We manage to pull it off though (in my opinion anyways), but it can sometimes be a struggle.

Do you ever get writers block when trying to come up with something to blog about? Well, don’t worry because you’re not alone. I had a bad case of it while trying to come up with a topic to blog about today, but luckily it wound up serving as my inspiration as well.

I started thinking that I couldn’t be the only person who suffers from contant bouts of writers block, so I decided to see if anyone else was talking about it as well. Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I searched for other people talking about having writers block. Since January 1st of this year I found almost 130,000 mentions of writers block through social channels. While not an insanely large amount of of people were saying they had it, it’s also not a small amount for the past 100 days. In that time I found “writers block” mentioned in 5,299 blog posts, 285 online news articles, 4,681 forum postings and 119,461 tweets.

I then looked at those mentions over time to see if I could find a pettern in when people were talking the most about having writers block. For instance, I thought that we might see a spike in mentions around the middle of February when students were coming up on mid-term papers. While I did see a slight increase higher than most weeks towards the end of February, it wasn’t that signifficat of a mention spike. One interesting thing I did notice though was how bouts of writers block seem to fall away on the weekends. Looking at the chart below we can see that mentions of writers block rises during the weekdays and then falls significantly every weekend. Perhaps people get more creative on the weekend. Or maybe they’re just not writing then.

I then searched to see if certain areas of the world were more prone to writers block than others, and it turns out there is. The writers in the United States seem to get more writers block than anyone else (or at least they’re more prone to actually admitting it through social media than others). Of the 100 days I looked at, 54.7% of all the social mentions of writers block that I found came from the United States. People in China seemed to suffer from writers block the second most, but they only accounted for 17.9% of the conversation. Something interesting to point out is that the other countries that had a significant amount of chatter about writers block were also “Westernized” countries like the UK (8.5%), Canada (3.8%) and Australia (3.5%).

Do people in these countries actually suffer from writers block more often than people in other countries? Or are they just more prone to admitting it?

Another interesting fact I found was that women tended to admit to suffering from writers block more than men did. When I looked at the gender divide of those talking about writers block, women accounted for 59% of those mentions while men were the other 41%.

Again, this begs the question, do women suffer from writers block more often than men, or do they just admit it more often?

So, what do you do when you suffer from writers block and can’t think of something to write for your blog?

Everyone seems to have different ways to deal with this. Marcus Sheridan, also known as The Sales Lion, who we’ve talked about previously on the blog, comes up with content for his blog by writing about questions he gets from his customers. I personally take to Twitter when I have writers block to see if someone or something there inspires me towards a topic. I also talk to people like you who read this blog and will just directly ask people what they think would be an interesting topic to see on this blog. In fact, by talking to a Twitter friend yesterday was how I came up with the idea to write about writers block today.

Those are just a few ways you can get ideas for blog topics. We want to know what works for you. Leave us a comment and let us know how you get inspiration for blog post ideas when you seem to be suffering from writers block.

I’ll leave you with this little quote I found when I looked up the most retweeted tweet about writers block, which comes from the very talented singer/songwriter Erykah Badu:

2 Comments »
Tags: analytics, blog topics, blogs, Erykah Badu, MAP, Social Media, sysomos, The Sales Lion, writers block, writing
Posted in Samples, Social Media

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