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The Buzz Around Facebook’s IPO

Everyone knew it was coming, but yesterday Facebook officially filed for an Initial Public Offering, more commonly known as an IPO. Not knowing exactly when the IPO would be filed and announced, I started doing a little research into what the social world was saying about it yesterday afternoon. About 20 minutes after I thought I had enough information to write about, Mark Zuckerberg dropped the news. So, for the most part of this post I’ll be looking at the chatter that led up to the IPO announcement, and then I’ll look at what occurred after.

As I said before, everyone knew that Facebook had been planing to go public for a while. In the past six months (up to about 3pmEST yesterday) I had found “Facebook” and “IPO” mentioned together in 33,452 blog posts, 38,215 online news articles, 5,904 forum postings and 68,143 tweets.

Trending those mentions out overtime we can see that the topic had been part of conversations for a while. We can also see from some spikes in activity when certain new news came to light. For instance, the spike that we can see at the end of November and beginning of December was when a story broke that Facebook was looking to file the IPO in the spring of 2012. That soon changed though as the large spikes right at the end of the chart were people talking over the past few days as they knew the IPO was shortly coming.

I also looked at which countries the talk was coming from. The US, both home to Facebook and the stock exchange the stock will eventually be traded on, accounted for about half of all the conversation. However, we can also see that a lot of countries with strong social media usage also had their eyes on the story. Countries like India (2.9%), Singapore (2.8%), Indonesia (2.1%) and even China (5.8%).

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what the conversation over the past six months had been about. Whats most interesting about this buzzgraph is how many other “social” companies’ names we can find in it. It seems that talk about Facebook’s IPO has been compared to other social networks who have recently gone public like “Zynga,” “LinkedIn” and “Groupon.”  We can even see that Facebook was being compared to “Google” who went public back in 2004.

I then dug a bit further into the activity around Facebook’s IPO in the past week (up to about 3pmEST yesterday). Here the buzzgraph seems to be a bit tighter on the conversation and definitely more focused on Facebook’s IPO. The greater connections we can see in this buzzgraph link to financial institutions. We can see “Morgan” “Stanley” in the graph because it became public knowledge last week that Facebook would be using them to underwrite the IPO. We can also see “Goldman” “Sachs” in there because they had strong financial links to Facebook in the past and it came as a surprise to some that they were passed over for Morgan Stanley.

Now, as I said earlier, most of this data I collected just before 3pmEST yesterday. A short while after that, around 4:30pmEST, the news of Facebook’s IPO broke. I took the liberty of trending out at an hourly rate the talk about Facebook’s IPO over the past two days. Now the chart below looks like a lot of no activity before a huge spike between 4-5pmEST yesterday. However, most of the time leading up to the announcement was averaging between 500 and 700 mentions of an hour. Those mentions vastly pale in comparison though to when the announcement was made and we see the large spike in activity. Between the hours of 4-5pmEST yesterday we saw Facebook’s IPO being mentioned 14,761 times.

So, will you be buying some Facebook stock?

By Sheldon Levine - February 2nd, 2012 - No Comments »
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Posted in Announcements, Samples, Social Media

This Christmas is Powered by Social Media

Around the office we always love to hear and share stories of what our clients are doing with Sysomos. Every so often there’s a story that’s just so cool we have to share it with the world. This is one of those stories.

In Union Station, here in our home town of Toronto, stands a 30-foot Christmas Tree that relies on social media Christmas spirit to light it up. Created by Tribal DDB for Canadian Tire, a Canadian national retailer, the tree takes positive Christmas chatter in social media and uses the data to light up the 30,000 LED lights strung around it. Each colour of light represents Christmas spirit coming from a different social channel. White lights represent social networks like Twitter and public Facebook statuses, red for blog and forum posts, green for online news, and blue lights for messages sent through text message and on ChristmasSpiritTree.ca. The more social media spirit that comes in at one time the brighter the tree shines. As well, there are a few easter egg words (#santa, #snowflake, #magic) that you can send to the tree to make it do some pretty fancy light patterns.

Using Sysomos Heartbeat, we pull in a list of 50 Christmas keywords, in French and English, such as Santa, Christmas or elf from social media talk across Canada. We then analyze the sentiment of the messages pulled in. From there all the positive mentions get sent through an API to a machine designed to turn the social media Christmas data into a spectacular light show. This is the worlds first Christmas tree powered by Christmas spirit and social media and we’re really excited that we were able to be a part of it.

You can view a livestream of the Christmas tree in action at ChristmasSpiritTree.ca.

As well, take a look at this video that talks a bit more about how the Christmas Spirit Tree works:

Have a happy holidays from all of us here at Sysomos!

By Sheldon Levine - December 22nd, 2011 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Customers, Social Media, Technology

What Happened at Blog World: Some Social Media Stats

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Blog World in Los Angeles. Blog World is one of the largest North American social media conferences and brings together people from all over the world to learn and discuss social media, meet new people in the social media world, see old friends and of course, have fun doing it all. I had a great time over the three day conference and even though I was at our Sysomos booth most of the time, I was still able to keep track of what was going on through social media.

Using our Sysomos social media monitoring and analytics tools, I decided to take a look back at some of the statistics that came out of Blog World. Over the three days of the actual conference I was able to find 933 blog posts, 336 online news articles, 18 forum posts and 24,402 tweets talking about Blog World.

Usually when I do analysis on events Twitter is the dominant channel. That’s no surprise given the nature of the medium. It’s an easy and quick way to share information, so when you’re sitting in a conference you’re able to quickly share tidbits of information that you think others who aren’t there would also like to know. In the case of Blog World, the tweets greatly over shadowed the mediums and it’s even more apparent when you see it as pie chart.

However, Twitter is a great way to get information to people who couldn’t actually be there. From those 24,000 tweets about Blog World there was a potential reach of 199 million impressions. 44.49% of the tweets were original tweets. However, 36.35% of the tweets were retweets. That means that a good portion of the tweets about Blog World, meaning information from sessions and other discussions, were people passing on the talk to even secondary sources and beyond.

The conference also had people all over the world talking about it. A look at where tweets about Blog World were coming from shows us that people around the world were either at the conference, retweeting tweets from the conference or discussing the information that was coming from it.

Next I pulled up a word cloud that shows us some key themes from all three days. As you can see by the range of words below the conference seemed to span a wide range of social and digital topics. We can see words like “marketing,” “mobile,” “bloggers” and networks like “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “blogs.”

Lastly, for my look at Blog World as a whole I pulled up the sentiment analysis around it. Looking at sentiment across all mediums it’s very apparent that most people enjoyed the conference and what they heard. Negative sentiment only accounts for 3% of the entire conversation while positive makes up 58%.

I then wanted to break down the days. First I compared talk on each of the days by share of voice. The first day, November 3rd, had the most talk and accounted for 41% of the conversation. Some of this may be due to people showing up and trying to find people to meet up with, but as you’ll see from the buzzgraph coming up, that doesn’t show as one of the main themes for the day. Friday accounted for 32.2% of the conversation and Saturday only 26.6%.

Next i pulled up buzzgraphs for each day. While a lot of different subjects are evidently talked about each day, there clearly is a difference in what stands out each day. For instance, the words with strong connections on Thursday all seem to be about speakers. We can see strong connections to names like [Chris] “Brogan,” “Jostein” “Svendsen” and “GuyKawasaki.”

Thursday

From Friday we can again see a range of topics and speakers as key parts of the conversation, but there’s one specific topic that stands out. On Friday there seemed to be a lot of talk about making money by blogging. This is evident by very strong connections to the words “blogger” and “blogosphere” and those are connected to “monetize” and “monetization.”

Friday

Lastly, Saturday seemed to focus around two main things. The first was one with “iJustine,” internet celebrity, and the second was about the “Tricaster,” a portable device for putting together quality video productions. What’s also interesting about this day’s buzzgraph is that there is less words in it than the other days. This is most likely because there was less activity on Saturday as we saw in the share of voice between days. Because of this, the conversation was more focused on a few larger topics rather than on a wide range as the other days where more activity was happening.

Saturday

Lastly, using Heartbeat, which was tracking the entire conference, I decided to pull up a list of the 10 most influential Twitter handles around those three days of the conference. These are the Twitter handles with high authority rankings that were tweeting, being retweeted and mentioned the most over the course of the conference. They were:

  1. @Ford
  2. @MariSmith
  3. @Problogger
  4. @mayhemstudios
  5. @prosperitygal
  6. @WeBlogtheWorld
  7. @TedRubin
  8. @chrisbrogan
  9. @markdavidson
  10. @blogworldexpo (the official Twitter account of the conference)

That’s it for my overview of Blog World. I had a great time, some great conversations with great people and can’t wait to do it again next year. Were you at Blog World? Were you following along online from home and work? Let us know if you had any part of Blog World and what your thoughts on the event were.

By Sheldon Levine - November 10th, 2011 - 5 Comments »
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Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media, Technology

Social Media Week: Sysomos Looks Back Through Social Media

Sysomos was proud to once again partner with Social Media Week for social media monitoring and analytics. We spent all of last week carefully watching what was going on in regards to Social Media Week around the world and were quite impressed and astounded by what we saw. We contributed daily a short blog post about interesting activity that we noticed for each day of the week and you can find all of those posts on the Social Media Week blog. The following post is appearing on the Social Media Week blog today as our final wrap up post:

 

Hello for what will be my last time posting on this blog! This is Sheldon from Sysomos here with a follow up to all the action we saw last week during Social Media Week. From what I gathered through Sysomos it looked like a fantastic time was had around the globe by all those that spoke, participated and even those that just watched the action through their computer screens (I was one of the latter). Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytic tools, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve put together some stats and charts to highlight the social media activity during the week.

I will start this final post as I’ve started all of my other posts, with a look at the general talk around Social Media Week. Doing a search for all mentions of “Social Media Week” and the hashtags “#SMW” and “#SMW11″ over the course of five days last week I was able to find 261 YouTube videos, 614 forum postings, 299 online news articles, 1,074 blog posts and 17,871 tweets. Not too shabby for five days.

I then thought that I would dive into some demographic information about who was creating all this Social Media Week buzz from around the globe. Since this was a global event I thought it would be best to start with some geographical info. Below you can find a heat map that shows where talk about Social Media Week was coming from. The darker a country is in the map shows more conversation coming from that country. I also pulled up a little chart to show the top four countries that were generating the most Social Media Week talk. If you couldn’t see from the heat map, Indonesia and the United States were generating the most talk at 26% of all talk each. The next two countries talking the most about Social Media Week were the UK (13%) and Canada (6%).

I also pulled up a graph to see what languages the talk was happening in. I was ecstatic to see the range of langues being used to talk about Social Media Week. What’s even more interesting and cool at the same time, is that some of the languages being used to talk about Social Media Week are native to places that weren’t home to our host cities. That means that even people who were physically at Social Media Week were still talking about it. That’s fantastic.

Next I dove into the users that were doing all of the talking online during Social Media Week. What’s really great here is that I found that Social Media Week was being talked about across all ages and genders. First, I found that both men and women were almost equally contributing to the online conversation. I found that males accounted for 51% of the conversation while females made up the other 49%. That counts as pretty much even in my books. Then I looked into the ages of people talking about Social Media Week. Here I found that people 20 and under made up 14% of the conversation, those 21-35 accounted for 36%, those 36-50 made up 29% and the 51 and older crowd made up the remaining 21%. That’s a pretty good spread and showed that people of all ages were engaged in the talk. It’s no surprise that the 21-35 year olds were the largest crowd, as that tends to be the case a lot as they’re a generation very involved in social media. It was great to see that even those 20 and under were getting involved as well.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to show what some of the Social Media Week talk was about and how it was interconnected. What’s really great is that we can see a whole bunch of different languages represented in the buzzgraph. One of the deeper connections we can see in the chart is to the term “livestream” which tells us that people were talking a lot about the livestreaming of the diffferent talks and events. That also probably explains how so many places and languages that weren’t physically part of Social Media Week got into the conversation. Right below the buzzgraph I’ve also included a word cloud to show us some of the most popular words being used in conjunction with Social Media Week.

One last thing I looked into about Social Media Week in general was how the conversation on Twitter was happening. Because Twitter seemed to be by far the most active Social Media Week channel I thought I’d give it a little bit of focus. Out of the 17,871 tweets I mentioned above I looked to see what kind of tweets they all were. My analysis showed that 49.03% of the tweets were regular tweets. That means that nearly half of all the tweets were people sharing what they were hearing to their followers. 39.93% of the tweets were retweets meaning that people were passing along the Social Media Week info they were seeing from other people. The final 11.04% were tweets were @ tweets, meaning people talking to each other about Social Media Week related things. As well, I found that of all the tweets that happened during the week there was a potential reach of 42.4 million impressions.

Half way through the week I posted on the Twitter users that were creating the most amount of mentions per city. Since the Social Media Week is now over I thought I would update that list. The following are the Twitter users with the most mentions of individual host city events (note that I removed the official city Social Media Week accounts):

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Lastly, I thought we would dive into the activity of each of our 12 host cities. Before I list them out for you, I thought it would be interesting to look at them all combined. Below you can see a chart that I put together made up of all the host cities activity as tracked by keywords and hashtags provided to me by the Social Media Week global organizing team. The chart shows the level of activity for each day combined, but also shows how much was contributed by each city individually.

The following shows the activity broken out to the city level. Here you can see how activity levels were each day of the week, activity in each of the social channels and the sentiment rating for each city. Keep in mind that because Twitter was such a dominent channel during the week it tends to out shadow the activity of other channels in the line graphs, but the activity was there. I’ve also included below each city a buzzgraph of that city so that you can get a feel for some of the conversations that were happening.

Beirut

 

Berlin

 

Bogotá

 

Buenos Aries

 

Chicago

 

Glasgow

Los Angeles

 

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

 

São Paulo

 

Vancouver

Well, that’s it for me (at least until the next Social Media Week). I hope that you all enjoyed these posts and got a better idea of what was happening around the world during Social Media Week.

It was a real pleasure for both myself and Sysomos to be a part of Social Media Week. We think it’s a great event and hope to continue to be a part of it.

Quick note: This was my last blog post for Social Media Week, not Sysomos. Someone had thought I would not be blogging here anymore, so I thought I should just point this out.

By Sheldon Levine - September 29th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

The Build Up to Social Media Week

Sysomos is proud to once again partner with Social Media Week for social media monitoring and analytics. On top of providing the organizers with social media monitoring for the week, we have also been contributing to their global blog and will continue to daily for the rest of the week. The following post appeared on the Social Media Week blog on Monday to show the the online build up to the big week:

 

The big day is finally here and today we kick off Social Media Week in 12 cities around the world! Sheldon from Sysomos here and I’ll be your guide to social media monitoring and analytics for this exciting week. If you’ve been following the global blog for the past couple of months I’m sure you’ve seen some posts of mine looking at social media activity in each of our host cities leading up to today. Since Social Media Week is now underway, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how talk of Social Media Week in general has looked leading up to now.

Using two of Sysomos‘ industry leading social media monitoring and analytic softwares, MAP and Heartbeat, I will be digging in to what is happening around the world in terms of Social Media Week. Using information and hashtags provided to me by the global Social Media Week team, I spent the weekend loading up Heartbeat so that I could be prepared to catch as much content as possible through out the week. I’ll be posting daily on the Social Media Week blog interesting stats and information that I find coming from our official 12 host cities, so keep checking back here during the week.

Since today is the first day of Social Media Week, I decided to take a look at some high overview stats around talk of Social Media Week in general. To do so, I built a query that looked like this: smw OR smw11 OR socialmediaweek OR “social media week”. I started off by looking at all the talk of Social Media Week from the end of the last event in February of this year up to last night and found 7,456 blog posts, 2,489 online news articles, 35,120 forum postings and 248,295 tweets.

To make it a little more relevant for today, I did the same search again for just the past month leading up to today’s launch. In that time frame I found 1,367 blog posts, 648 online news articles, 3,546 forum postings and 44,666 tweets about Social Media Week.

Trended out over time, that activity for the last month looks like the chart below. We can see a steady stream of activity coming from all channels. We can also see activity starting to peak at the end of last week as people prepared for today. There looks like a bit of a drop off over the weekend, but that tends to happen on weekends.

I then looked at the geography of where all this activity was coming from. We can see that most of the activity was coming from countries that are home to some of our Social Media Week host cities. The most activity was seen in the United States (35%), but Indonesia is hot on their heels (31.1%). While this information is great to know, it doesn’t really do much visually to see all the activity in a pie chart, so I took to Twitter (because it had the most activity) and plotted out where tweets about Social Media Week were coming from on a map of the world.

Next I pulled up a wordcloud that spans across all the mediums Sysomos covers to see what some of the most popular words being used in association with Social Media Week talk were. It looks like a lot of talk over the past month are reflecting the various events going on for Social Media Week. In the wordcloud we can see a bunch of our cities, some topics that are going to be covered at events and of course, a call to register for the events you’re interested in checking out.

Lastly, for my high overview, I wanted to give you a taste of just how excited people are for this week. To do so, I pulled up the sentiment of all mediums collectively. The positive response and talk is overwhelming and accounts for 56% of all the conversations. That gives Social Media Week a favourable rating of  87%.

Not to leave our Social Media Week host cities out of today’s kick-off post, bellow you can find the social media activity for each of city. Each city has been populated to only find mentions of that specific city’s Social Media Week activity over the last month leading up to last night. To do so, each city has been programmed in Sysomos Heartbeat with hashtags specific to that city and mentions of that city that are found with mentions of Social Media Week.

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Well, that’s it for me for today. Be sure to check back here daily to see my reports on what’s been happening each day throughout Social Media Week.

If you’re in one of our host cities, be sure to get out and enjoy some events. Also, if you’re in Vancouver, Chicago or LA, be sure to come out and see our Sysomos team at events in those cities.

Happy Social Media Week everyone!

By Sheldon Levine - September 22nd, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

Sysomos MAP & Heartbeat Updates: Social Footprint, Aggregated Analytics and Scheduled Tweets

If you’re a Sysomos subscriber you may have noticed over the past two weeks some new and exciting features trickling into the software. Today we want to highlight some of the big features that we think people will be very excited about in our MAP and Heartbeat platforms.

Social Footprint: The ability to connect the dots between where people are and what they do online is becoming more and more important. Being able to connect a Twitter account to the blog they write can come in handy when trying to contact people in many different situations like finding and talking to influencers or when dealing with a crisis situation. Users will now be able to connect these dots in both MAP and Heartbeat with Social Footprint. Social Footprint will allow users of MAP and Heartbeat to connect the author of posts viewed in the system to their other accounts around the web on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, About.me, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare and many others.

In order to view an authors Social Footprint just click on the second tab beside an individual post (the one that looks like a person) and both MAP and Heartbeat will pull up the author’s other online profiles.

 

 

 

Aggregated Analytics: Previously in MAP most data was available by individual mediums, but sometimes you want to know the big picture across more than one network. MAP now allows users to view data from more than one source at the same time. You can now view data such as sentiment, geography, word clouds and buzzgraphs across multiple channels at the same time.

These new data sets can be found on the right hand tab of the MAP dashboard. Users can select to look at the data from all sources or just the ones of interest at the time; such as blogs and Twitter, but not news or forums. Simply select the channels you’d like to aggregate the data from at the top of each page and click apply.

  

  

 

 

Scheduled Tweets: We all know that it’s hard to be in front of a computer all day long, but that doesn’t stop the need for information to go out at certain times. This is why we’ve introduced the ability to schedule tweets right from within Heartbeat. Simply navigate to the Twitter tab in Heartbeat and find the “Post a Tweet” section under the user profile. Enter your tweet into the box then select if you want to post the tweet immediately or at a future time. If you want to schedule a tweet for a future time select the date, then the time and then click “Post Status Update.” It’s that simple.

Those are just a few of the exciting updates that we’ve recently released. Some other updates now in MAP and Heartbeat include:

  • A cleaner look and UI for YouTube search in MAP
  • You can now remove words from the buzzgraph in Heartbeat just as you could previously in MAP
  • Detailed Entity reports in Heartbeat under the Text Analytics tab
  • The ability to email PDF’s of reports directly from Heartbeat
  • And secure HTTPS logins for both MAP and Heartbeat

An email containing details about these and other features will be coming out to all MAP and Heartbeat subscribers, but if you ever have any questions about updates please reach out to your account manager who will be more than happy to tell you more and teach you about all of our updates.

We have even more great updates scheduled to be released very soon, so stay tuned!

By Sheldon Levine - July 25th, 2011 - 4 Comments »
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Posted in Announcements, Customers, Features, Social Media

Mr Obama Goes To Twitter Town

Yesterday was a historic event in the world of social media, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, used Twitter to answer questions from the general public. In what is set to be the first of many Town Hall meetings using the mico-blogging service, Twitter users were asked to send questions to the President by using the hashtag “#AskObama.” In turn, the President tried to answer those questions in little 140-character snippets.

While the idea was very progressive and interesting, some people felt that the event didn’t go exactly as they hoped it was going to. For one, an estimated 40,000 questions were sent via the #AskObama hashtag, but since the event only went for about an hour, the President only had time to take and answer 18 of those questions. Others spoke out about  how the questions were chosen. The question were supposed to be coming from every-day Americans who wanted answers, but some said they only let through the soft-ball questions and others noticed that somehow a question from House Speaker John Boehner got asked while many others were passed over. The last criticism that I’ve seen apparent over the event was that the public was expecting the event to be more of a conversation via Twitter, as most people use the service everyday for, and it was rather more of the President dictating canned answers that seemed more like a broken up speech than an actual conversation with the people. To that end though, after the event finished Jack Dorsey, one of the cofounders of Twitter and moderator of the Twitter Town Hall, asked his 1.7 million followers how they can make these Town Hall events better in the future.

While Twitter is working with some partners to handle the official analytics and assessment of what actually happened on Twitter yesterday, we thought it would interesting to look at what the rest of the social media sphere was saying about the event using our Sysomos social media  monitoring and analytics software. A look at just how much the event was talked about starting the day before the event to this morning showed us that the event was talked about in 4,715 online news articles, 2,545 blog posts, 627 forum posts, 149 YouTube videos and 1,386 public Facebook statuses.

We also found that the two age groups that seemed to be most interested in the event were those 21-35 and the 51-and-over crowd who accounted for 33% of the conversation each. Not surprising was that those 20-and-under only accounted for 4% of the conversation outside of Twitter. As well, we found that outside of Twitter males seemed to be the ones talking the most about the Town Hall event.

While the event took place in the United States and was aimed at citizens from the country, a look at our heat map of the world shows that people around the world were still talking about the historic event. Of course though, the most conversation was coming from the USA as shown by the darker colouring.

A buzzgraph that we put together from all sources outside of Twitter gives us a look at what people were talking about in relation to Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. Near the center of the buzzgraph we can see that the people involved were being talked about the most; “pres” and “Barack” Obama as well as “Dorsey” who moderated. As well, we can see a strong connection to “Boehner” because of all the people calling foul on the fact that House Speaker got a question asked when it was supposed to be questions from the general public. We also see a strong connection to “140-characters” because a lot of news organizations talking about the event felt the need to explain how Twitter works to the non-tweeters. Around the edges we can also find some of the topics that were addressed including “taxes,” “debt,” “economies” and “jobs.”

When we focused in on specific mediums to see if different talk was coming from within we found that both online news and blogs seemed to be talking about the same sorts of things. The buzzgraphs for both online news and blogs looks very similar to the overall buzzgraph above. However, when we looked at what was being said about the event through public Facebook statuses we found that people weren’t really analyzing the event as much there. Instead, Facebook seemed to be being used by people to inform their friends that the event was happening. This is most evident by the time of the event “2pm” being right in the center of our buzzgraph. We also see words like “today,” “ask,” “hashtag” and “whitehouse.gov” being used to inform people of what was going on.

Overall, the Twitter Town Hall seemed to be a successful event despite some of the criticism it received. Lots of people got involved by sending questions and watching for the Presidents responses. Twitter also plans to do more of these types of events and wants to make them better experiences for their users. It was a very interesting experiment to see how politics and social media can mix, but what did you think of the whole event? Let us know in the comments bellow.

By Sheldon Levine - July 7th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Samples, Social Media

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 »
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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 »
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Posted in Announcements, Social Media, Technology

A Quick Look at Canada’s Federal Election Through Social Media

The following post has been contributed by Nygel Weishar.

Yesterday I had the privilege of working on a virtual team with Mark Blevis (@markblevis), Ellis Westwood (@elliswestwood), and Stephanie Brooks (@stephbrooks_) where we conducted some comprehensive analysis regarding social media traffic on the 41st Canadian Federal Election (#elxn41). Down here in Toronto, command central was nothing short of an apartment, two laptops, and a flurry of notes. Up in Ottawa my accomplices were working out of the Canadian Press headquarters.

Throughout the afternoon we collaborated, generating real time reports, and furthermore refining our criteria for what we would define as legitimate election conversation (as anyone who’s conducted SM monitoring knows: clean data is imperative). That being said, we’re currently swimming in data and are just trying to remain calm regarding all the fun we’re going to have pulling it apart. So for today, I’ll present some high level stats with the promise that there is more juicy stuff to come.

In terms of election conversation volume, we saw a pretty consistent Conservative majority hovering around the high 30% range all day. A steady second place was held by the NDP with a volume hold of about 33%. Liberals at 16% while the BLQ and GPC frequently traded somewhere between 5-8%.

Come the end of the day (when riding announcements were becoming final), we saw a pick up in BLQ and Liberal chatter, which unfortunately for them was due to their poor performance at the ballots. Below we have the overall day’s share of voice distribution for the five main parties in the election.

Now the really interesting part is when you compare the overall volume of conversation to the reported election outcome numbers coming in from CBC.ca. Further analysis needs to be done, but in this case it seems that the overall volume of conversation may have been pointing to the popular vote outcome. Food for thought…

When we looked at the tone of the conversation regarding positive/negative sentiment, a stronger negative voice was observed. The automated sentiment tool from Sysomos, benchmarked at 88% accuracy, shows us a 39%/61% split for positive vs. negative conversation respectively. Seems that politics are not only portrayed negatively in traditional media sources (ie: smear campaigns, exploiting commercials), but those messages permeate into social media channels as well.

Observing who was talking and in what language, we saw that overall it was a 21-35 year old male dominated conversation. English also was king on the scene with almost 10x the French conversations taking place.

That’s all for now, but as I promised much more post-analysis to come.

Also, thanks again to Sysomos for the incredible technology and the team up in Ottawa, it was a great experience!

By Sheldon Levine - May 3rd, 2011 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

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