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Posts Tagged ‘business intelligence’

Brand Marketers Embracing Social Media

While social media has been enthusiastically embraced as a way to share ideas and have conversations, it is just beginning to gain some serious traction as a marketing tool.

According to the “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report” from Equation Research, 59% of brand markets are now using social media as a marketing tool, while 28% plan to implement it over the next 12 months. Only 13% of brand markets said they have no plans to use social media. The most popular social media tool for brand and agency marketers are Facebook, Twitter, online videos and blogs.

Of particular interest are the barriers cited by brand marketers when it comes to using social media. The two leading responses (37% each) was they did not know enough about social media, and there is no good way to measure its effectiveness. There was also concern that social media is not proven or tested as a marketing strategy (31%), while funding was mentioned by 25% of respondents.

In terms of ways to measure the effectiveness of social media market, there is little doubt that brand marketers will find it easier to do as the social media monitoring and analytics market continues to evolve.

At Sysomos, we’re seeing strong traction from public relations, digital and advertising agencies using our Heartbeat (social media monitoring and measurement) and MAP (analytics) services to get information and insight into what’s happening on the social media landscape and, as important, engage with people driving the conversations.

US Brand Marketers

By Mark Evans - August 28th, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Heartbeat: Monitoring the Pulse of Social Media

Since Sysomos officially launched earlier this year, our flagship product, Media Analysis Platform (aka MAP) has attracted a lot of attention for its ability to provide in-depth analytics so users can listen, measure, understand and engage, as well as generate reports that provide valuable insight and information.

While MAP has enjoyed the spotlight, it has perhaps overshadowed our second service, Heartbeat, which provides leading-edge social media monitoring and measurement tools.

Heartbeat is user-friendly, flexible and cost-effective – features that we think makes it the leading social media measurement and monitoring service when compared with any of our competitors.

Since Heartbeat was introduced a couple of of months ago, it has seen an enthusiastic reaction from customers looking for a service that provides real-time social media measurement and monitoring, and a user-friendly, intuitive interface.

Heartbeat also features a database with billions of social media conversations collected by Sysomos over the past three years. This is real-time and historical data that we’ve collected, indexed and made spam-free.

What also differentiates Heartbeat from the crowd is its flexibility. With Heartbeat, you can make as many queries as you like; there are no restrictions so search to your heart’s content to get the information you need.

Heartbeat’s other features include the ability to automatically measure buzz and sentiment – something the New York Times wrote about earlier this week. You can also do comparisons between competitors and topics, and engage with key influencers.

This makes Heartbeat the obvious choice for companies looking for a powerful and valuable social media and monitoring tool.

If you’d like more information about Heartbeat or like to see a demo, let us know. To see how MAP and Heartbeat compare, here’s a chart showing their respective features.

By Mark Evans - August 26th, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Technology

You’re Tweeting from Where?

One of the challenges in assessing Twitter-Land is getting an accurate picture of where users are located.

Right now, location is mostly determined by the information that people provide within their profiles. There are a few issues:

1. Not everyone provides their location information

2. Some people provide wrong information. For example, many users change their location to Tehran to support the political activists in Iran.

3. It can be difficult to assess location information if it’s written in non-English languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

So, it’s exciting – if you’re into geography and geoloation – that Twitter is going to be introduce a new API that will lets developers add latitude and longitude to any update. In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said:

“Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

If and when the new API gains traction – and users opt-in to having their locations made available – it will provide a much more accurate and interesting view of how and where Twitter is being used around the world.

For more thoughts, check out Fast Company’s blog on what Twitter could do with your location information, and Mashable’s list of five geolocation features it wants.

Here’s a chart from our Inside Twitter report that shows the countries where Twitter is being used the most. In future reports, we plan on providing more details about countries and cities.

sysomos-twitter-newusersbycountry

By Mark Evans - August 21st, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Growing Interest in Social Media Measurement

As social media becomes a more integral part of how company’s communicate, market and sell their products, it is becoming increasingly important to effectively measure and monitor what’s happening within the social media landscape – be it blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, as well as traditional media.

So, it’s not surprising to see a poll by MarketingProfs show that 78% of respondents plan to enhance their social media measurement over the next six months, while only 18% indicate it will stay the same. The poll also found that 47% of respondents believe social media measuring is important, while 36% say it is somewhat important.

In terms of the challenges facing companies when it comes to social media monitoring and measurement, the biggest issue cited is “dedicated resources” (30%), followed by “don’t know what to measure” (25%) and “social media measurement isn’t primarily about ROI” (20%).

Given we’re in the social media analytics and monitoring business, it’s encouraging to see that companies have a growing interest in getting insight and information about the conversations taking place. Our services, MAP (social media analytics) and Heartbeat (social media monitoring), continue to see very solid traction from companies that need powerful, user-friendly tool to monitor, measure, assess and engage.

By Mark Evans - August 19th, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

A Look at Twitter in Iran

Over the past two weeks since the Iranian presidential elections and the subsequent protests about the results that saw incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attract 66% of the votes cast while rival Mir-Hossein Mousavi received 33%, Twitter has emerged as a key tool used by many Iranians to talk about what’s happening.

Twitter’s value as a communications tool was highlighted when the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so Iranians would have access to the service at a time when thousands were taking to the streets to protest.

To get some insight into how many Iranians are using Twitter, and how Twitter is being used to talk about the presidential election, Sysomos analyzed its database to pull some of the more interesting facts.

As a starting point, there are now 19,235 Twitter users in Iran, compared with 8,654 in mid-May. (Note: We determined the number of users by reindexing over 13 million Twitter accounts. Location is based on the information provided in a user’s profile. Update: Locations are based on information as disclosed in May for users who joined before June to avoid counting those who changed it later to Tehran).

Next, we looked to see when Twitter accounts were created over the past 15 months. As you can see from the chart below, the number of Twitter users in Iran has grown strongly in 2009 with the most active months being March and June when 9.81% and 9.93% of all Twitter accounts were created respectively.twitteriranchart1

Here’s a table that shows when Twitter accounts were created in Iran.

Picture 3-51

Of all Iranian Twitter users, 93% are located in Tehran, while 0.94% are in Shiraz and 0.83% in Mashhad.

Iran Chart-1

To get a sense of what Twitter users in Iran were talking about before and after the presidential election, we created two buzz graphs – one on June 11 (the day before the election) and another done on June 19. (A buzz chart shows the major discussions taking place, and the associations between these topics.)

On June 11, there was a lot of conversation about presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi with the strongest association to “Iran”, “freedom”, “Iran” and “vote”.

Buzzgraphjune11

On June 19, the major conversations coming from Iranian Twitter users involved the keywords “Iran”, which had the strongest links to “Mousavi”, “Tehran” and “Protest”. This reflects the protests taking place in Tehran by Mousavi’s supporters.

Buzzgraphjune19

We also looked into the Tweets using the query “Iran Election”. On June 11, 51.3% of all these Tweets came from Iran, while 27% came outside the country, and 21.6% of Tweets did not include a location.

Picture 3-52

On June 19, 40.3% Tweets about the election came from outside Iran as the media and blog coverage about the protests in Tehran attracted global attention. Meanwhile, the percentage of Tweets from Iran fell to 23.8%, while 35.7% of users did not provide a location. The lower percentage of Tweets from Iran could also could be due to reports the Iranian government is blocking access to the Internet and Twitter.

Picture 2-83

More: The New York Times has a story looking at how Twitter is being used to organize political protests in Iran, and six lessons to be taken into consideration, while techPresident has a post looking at how reTweeting is a form of reporting.

By admin - June 21st, 2009 - 15 Comments »
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Posted in Events, Social Media, Technology

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