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Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

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Hachette Inks Deal With Sysomos

Since our official launch in late-2008, Sysomos has attracted a growing number of major global companies looking for leading-edge social media monitoring and analytics services.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new customer, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., whose portfolio of popular magazines include ELLE, ELLE DECOR, Woman’s Day, Car and Driver, Road & Track and Cycle World, which has selected Sysomos to provide it with social media monitoring and analytics services.

“Increasingly, brands with a global footprint are relying on Sysomos for their social media monitoring and analytics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ president and co-founder. “Social media in changing rapidly, and more brands realize that the new generation of social media software offers functionality well beyond monitoring.”

Steve Goldner, Director, Social Media with HFM U.S., said the company selected Sysomos because its technology and services provide the required depth and breath of social media analytics.

“We’re looking to tap into the wealth of data and analytics that Sysomos offers to understand trends and opinions for our brands and the general topics that a single search cannot capture,” Goldner said.

Sysomos’ products include Heartbeat, a robust and cost-effective social media monitoring and measurement service, and MAP, which provides powerful analytics and in-depth reporting tools.

By Mark Evans - April 12th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Announcements, Social Media

Social Media: Man & Machine; Not Man vs. Machine

Over the weekend, the social media landscape was dominated by discussions about how social media monitoring needs to have people involved in the process to be effective and successful.

- Jason Falls had a well-read post, “Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail”
- Roger Harris suggested on “Twitter Thoughts” that social media will “shift away from technological solutions and to the human element”, and
- Tatyana Kanzaveli did a post on the difference between social media analytics and analysis.

On the surface, it’s difficult to tell why this “man vs. machine” discussion emerged in multiple places but it may have to do with the fact that social media monitoring and analytics are seeing major traction as more people and companies start to embrace tools to help them make sense of all the conversations taking place.

While 2009 saw healthy adoption, the past few months have seen a major spike in interest. Companies that weren’t even thinking about social media monitoring a year ago have become enthusiastic users and customers.

Within a growing number of large companies, social media monitoring is becoming an integral part of their marketing and sales operations.

As social media monitoring services and technology mature and evolve, it is also prompting people to ask where humans fit into the equation. If technology is doing  all the monitoring, what role do humans play?

In a nutshell, social media monitoring at its best is a beautiful marriage between man and machine. The technology collects the conversations taking place, aggregates, organizes and presents them in a user-friendly way, and then gives people the ability to arrange, filter and manage it to meet their strategic and tactical objectives.

At the same time, social media professionals can use their experience and expertise to layer intelligence, perspective and insight on top of the social media data.

When you think about it, neither side can be successful or effective without the other. The technology is interesting but not useful or valuable without people to do something with it, and people are only able to do a limited amount of monitoring without the assistance of technology to sift through millions of conversations.

All the chatter about how people need to be involved in the social media process makes complete sense, although it’s certainly not a revelation or anything that hasn’t been part of the mix.

It may have to do with the fact that social media monitoring is getting more popular and, as a result, attracting more attention.

By Mark Evans - April 5th, 2010 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence

The soft and fuzzy side of social media dominates the spotlight – social media is about about having conversations, engaging with people, and building relationships.

If there’s a dark side of social media that isn’t mentioned often, it’s how social media can also be used for competitive intelligence to pursue a rival’s customers or potential customers.

It’s not that this activity is evil or nefarious, it’s just that it’s not a happy, kumbya kind of thing.

When you are looking for weaknesses among rivals such as complaints about their products and services, and inquiries from people who might be interested in what they’re selling, it means operating in the social media shadows.

Truth be told, there’s as much value to focusing on gathering competitive intelligence as there is monitoring your own products, services and customers.

Customers are talking about their desires, needs and issues on Twitter, Facebook and blogs so why not take advantage of all this information to create a strategy built on leveraging the weaknesses of competitors. If your rivals are offering a window of opportunity, it makes complete sense to use social media to take advantage of it.

So, what are the basics for collecting competitive intelligence? Here’s a few tips:

1. Monitor popular keywords within your industry. For home renovators, it could be “renovations”, “home improvements”, “DIY repairs” or “home projects”

2. Keep a steady eye on competitors to see what’s being said about them. In particular, focus on people who are complaining about bad products, service or customer service. Then, step in by offering advice or help, while shying away from trying to sell them something.

3. Look for conversations about trends within your industry. For home renovators, it could be chatter about new kitchens, bathrooms or energy-efficient appliances. Then, you can participate in the conversations by providing advice, insight and recommendations.

There’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence within the social media landscape. Spending some time on the dark side could generate some good business opportunities.

By Mark Evans - March 3rd, 2010 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Sysomos Heartbeat: Now with Twitter Integration

Over the past few months, we’ve been steadily expanding and enhancing Heartbeat’s features and usability – making it an even more compelling tool to monitor and engage with social media activity.

We’re particularly excited about the newest upgrade: the ability to use Twitter from within Heartbeat.

Workflow and user experience is a big component of any software’s usefulness. As larger social media teams start to collaborate using the Heartbeat’s built-in social CRM, engagement workflow becomes even more important.

Using our latest Twitter integration, users in a team can link multiple Twitter accounts with Heartbeat to respond, and all the activity will be automatically recorded in the engagement trail. This means users no longer have to switch to Twitter.com or another client if they want to respond to a tweet monitored by Heartbeat, and they do not need to manually record their activities.

Linking your Twitter account with Heartbeat is easy. To start, click on “Settings” on the top-right, and then “User Settings”. You will need to provide your Twitter username and password and click Allow. You need to do this only the first time.

Once Twitter is connected to Heartbeat, it’s easy to respond to tweets from the “Your Heartbeats” page by clicking on the content icon on the right side of the tweet. The engagement trail records all the tweets posted by you as part of the workflow management.

With this update, Heartbeat is now an even better engagement platform. Thanks to all the great feedback from our users, we have a lot more in store for both MAP and Heartbeat, so keep it coming.

By Mark Evans - February 10th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Sysomos MAP Gets Even Better

Since the launch of our flagship social media service, Media Analysis Platform, last year, we’ve made a steady series of improvements to provide clients around the world with the usability, functionality and features they require.

Many of these enhancements have come as a result of valuable feedback from our clients, who have played a key role in shaping MAP’s evolution.

We recently unveiled a variety of improvements to MAP to enhance its ability to provide insight and intelligence about the social media landscape. These upgrades include:

1. The introduction of a major update to the news and traditional media section to provide more search options such as the ability to sort by the most recent news or by authority. We’ve also launched enhanced text analysis tools.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 11.27.16 AM

2. The launch of “Geography for News”, which lets users filter by location and visualize data on a world map, as well as the display country flags next to search results. This complements our existing fully functional support for geography within all data sources that we cover, including blogs, forums and Twitter.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 11.32.05 AM

3. Our Twitter search tool now displays the total number of tweets for a specific query over the past six months. For example, there have been 1.4 million tweets about Tiger Woods. The Twitter popularity chart has also been updated.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 11.32.50 AM

4. All searches and analysis within MAP now default to a six-month period, while our complete historical archive dating back to 2006 is still available. To access different time ranges, all you need to do is manually change the timeline filter.

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 11.33.29 AM

By Mark Evans - December 17th, 2009 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Can You Scale Social Media?

As more companies embrace social media, a reality is the amount of time and effort required to nurture, support and expand activity begins to expand.

Blog posts need to be written, external blogs need to be monitored and commented on, and shared; Twitter has to be updated, conversations need to happen (often in real-time, 24×7) and followers/friends need to be managed and monitored; content and updates for Facebook have to happen and be managed; and videos need to be created and uploaded; and the list goes on.

The question is: how you support all of this activity? If the answer is simply adding more people, then social media programs become increasingly more expensive, making it more difficult to achieve ROI. In the short-term, this is a strategy adopted by many companies because they’re scrambling to keep up. As a result, they don’t have the resources or time to create new, more efficient ways to manage their social media activities.

So, what’s the solution? How do you scale your social media programs without scaling your expenses?

There are two reasonable and feasible answers.

First, you leverage technology as much as possible without creating an automated social media machine that spits out content with no personality or people behind it. This happens by using social media monitoring and measurement services, as well as tools that let you update multiple social media platforms at the same time such as Ping.fm. This lets you stay real and have conversations led by a small group of employees, while technology powers much of the behind-the-scenes work.

The second approach is engaging people within the organization beyond your social media team. The social media team acts as a quarterback, while encouraging employees to create a healthy amount of the content needed to maintain a vibrant social media presence.

For example, blog posts can be written by a variety of people willing to share their insight and domain expertise. IBM, for example, has more than 13,000 internal bloggers, who operate using 12 straightforward rules. Employees can also be involved in support Twitter, Facebook and other social media activity. This can be done by participating within corporate-run tools or their personal accounts.

In a sense, companies can outsource social media to employees rather than having a large social media team that tries to do everything.

So, the answer to the question of whether social media can scale is “yes” – although it does require an embrace of technology and internal resources.

By Mark Evans - November 27th, 2009 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Say Hello to Heartbeat 2.0

Since Heartbeat made its debut in June, it has received an extremely enthusiastic reception, attracting clients from the around the world looking for a user-friendly, robust and flexible social media monitoring service.

To ensure that Heartbeat continues to stay ahead of the pack, we’re excited about the launch today of an upgraded version, highlighted by the integration of Facebook and a new look and feel. Here’s a short video about Heartbeat’s features.

Sysomos Heartbeat Video.

Many of the changes and improvements were made after we received valuable feedback from customers such as Shell Oil, Roche, Sony Ericsson, Ketchum and Hill & Knowlton, who asked for new ways to monitor social media conversations, including key metrics and built-in engagement.

“The new version of Heartbeat demonstrates how Sysomos is pioneering the evolution of this industry by listening to customer needs, and then developing innovative tools to support social media professionals,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ president and chief executive.

We’re particularly excited about being to integrate Facebook into Heartbeat. Heartbeat users can now monitor conversations happening on Facebook, and directly manage their public or private Facebook Pages. This offers superior flexibility so clients manage their communities in a fully secure and flexible way.

We’ve also really pleased with Heartbeat’s new and improved design that makes it even more user-friendly.

But don’t let Heartbeat’s elegance and intuitiveness fool you; under the hood, there’s sophisticated and leading-edge technology that powers an industry-leading suite of features such as demographics, geo-location, text analytics and automated sentiment.

As important, Heartbeat is a cost-effective solution that will meet your social media monitoring needs and budget.

heartbeat-screens

By Mark Evans - November 19th, 2009 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Announcements, 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

Introducing: Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat

Four years ago, Sysomos started as an advanced research project at the University of Toronto. So it goes without saying the company has come a long way from then to today with the official – and exciting – launch of Sysomos’ two social media analytics products – Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat.

We’re confident MAP and Heartbeat are going to shake up the social media analytics market by providing customers with the real-time insight and intelligence that hasn’t been available before.

“We help them see not only what’s happening but where it is happening, what it means, and who’s driving the most important or relevant conversations,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ CEO, who started the company with Nilesh Bansal. “We give users a level of granularity and context that is currently unequalled in the industry.”

So, let’s talk about MAP and Heartbeat.

MAP lets users analyze and understand social and traditional media conversations, including blogs, news articles, social networks, forums, video sites, wikis and micro-blogs. MAP provides real-time results, geo-demographic and key influencer information, collaboration tools, multi-language support and value-added information to generate customizable detailed reports.

Heartbeat is a cost-effective, real-time monitoring and measurement service. Heartbeat offers constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using user-friendly and intuitive graphics.

With MAP and Heartbeat, Sysomos offers a powerful one-two social media analytics punch to meet the needs of anyone who needs to know what’s happening, what’s being said, and who’s leading the conversations.

Getting from Sysomos’ roots to today has involved a lot of hard work so it’s great to see Sysomos take a huge step forward by “going public”.

For more information about Sysomos, MAP and Heartbeat, check out the launch page, which includes a press release, a video explaining what Sysomos does, and some screen captures and logos.

By admin - June 4th, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Announcements, Social Media, Technology

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