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Is MySpace Making a Comeback?

Before we get too wrapped up in a potential comeback by social media’s “grandfather”, MySpace, let me first say the answer to the question posed in the heading is a resounding “No”.

Yes, Justin Timberlake is attracting a lot of press and notoriety to MySpace since he was part of a group that acquired the company last June for $35 million. And yes, MySpace has gained a million users in over a month, while legitimately claiming to have more than 42 million songs in its library.

With these facts and stats, you are probably wondering how anyone can doubt the potential resurgence? But it might be a case of semantics more than anything else.

MySpace is publicly repositioning itself in a very public way as a community of music lovers and sharers, and not the social media behemoth it was five years ago. In the words of LL Cool J, don’t call it comeback.

If MySpace is to really re-enter the digital scene, we should all be all over it, similar to an athlete lacing it up once again. Many people forget Michael Jordan played for the Washington Wizards, but it was still a ton of fun while it was happening.

For MySpace, it seems the money is there, the content is coming and the users are following suit. Something about this seems both very right and a little bit wrong. Right in the sense that MySpace was such a trailblazer, it seems weird that social media has moved on without it. A little bit wrong because its latest incarnation is not what we recognize MySpace to be.

It will be fun and fascinating to watch MySpace’s rebound unfold before us, and here’s hoping they have moved beyond the problems that has plagued it to the point of near extinction the first time around.

The leadership seems to understand the art of reinvention, as oppose to trying to simply strike their luck once again against Facebook. This time, it could be different.

By Mark Evans - February 14th, 2012 - 2 Comments »
Tags: facebook, justin timberlake, myspace, sysomos
Posted in Social Media

Next Week Is Social Media Week and We’re Helping to Celebrate

Next week is Social Media Week and we at Sysomos are super excited to be a part of this wonderful event for a third time. From February 13-17 twelve cities around the world will be playing host to a week of social media focused events. Sysomos will be helping to track all of the social media activity for the Social Media Week global team and sharing some of our findings with the general public over on the Social Media Week Blog. If you’re in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, or Washington DC, you should really try to get out to some of the events. If you don’t live in one of those cities, many of the events will be live streamed so you can watch them from wherever you are.

Not only will we be providing social media monitoring and analytics during Social Media Week, but we have been also been doing some analysis to lead up to the big week. For the past few weeks we’ve been taking in depth looks at what the social media world has been saying about each of the host cities. While the series hasn’t gone through all of the host cities yet, below is a few interesting things we’ve found:

Usually, most talk about a host city comes from within the city’s own country. For instance, when we looked at talk about São Paulo 71.4% of the talk came from within Brazil.

However, when we looked at talk about Tokyo, that majority of talk wasn’t coming from Japan, but rather from within the US.

When we looked at social media activity levels for talk about London we found that over the past six months there had barely been any significant spikes in chatter. Aside from the large spike we found around the beginning of August the activity levels stayed rather level the rest of the time.

As we already noted, most talk about the host cities came from within their own countries, and this played a significant role in the activity we found about Hong Kong. We also found that Twitter was usually the most active social channel likely because of its quick and easy to post nature. However, because Twiiter has been banned in Mainland China it was actually the second lowest activity channel mentioning Hong Kong.

While most of us in the social media and technology space think of San Francisco as a hot bed for our industry, the rest of the world thinks about it for something else. All of the larger activity spikes we were able to find that spoke about San Francisco had nothing to do with either social media or technology, but rather their NFL team the 49ers.

These were just a few of the interesting things we were able to find in our lead up to Social Media Week series. Head on over to the Social Media Week blog to read all of our posts on the host cities.

Hopefully you will be celebrating and participating in Social Media Week no matter where in the world you are. And if you’re in Toronto, keep your eye out for me as I’ll be hoping around to events all over the city.

Happy Social Media Week everybody!

By Sheldon Levine - February 9th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, SMW12, Social Media, Social Media Week, sysomos
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

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 - 1 Comment »
Tags: analytics, facebook, Facebook IPO, heartbeat, IPO, MAP, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Announcements, Samples, Social Media

Will the Olympics Suffer from its No-Social Rules?

As we near the London Summer Olympics, it seems there will very limited insight provided by the army of volunteers (approx. 70,000) via Twitter, Facebook and any other popular social media services.

The edict, handed down from the Organizing Committee, is an antiquated way of doing business. The victims are the fans and supporters, who have grown accustomed to social media providing a behind-the-scenes look at big events.

This, by no way, means athletes will be limited, but let’s be honest, athletes can be fairly generic compared to someone who is part of the event from a different perspective.

Athletes have an image to protect and future endorsements to consider; a volunteer does not and, as a result, can be an amazing source of unfiltered information. The lack of filter can go both ways, but a non-athletes or organizers’ viewpoint seems more enticing.

One of the harsher restrictions is that no volunteer can make public statements about the games without permission. This sounds more like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but that was more aligned with Beijing’s social media policies. As well, social media has grown a lot in the past four years.

The lack of communication will impact the overall Olympic experience for those outside of the event. We have come to rely on social media to learn, experience, enhance and deliver a voice to everyone.

The rules are understandable from certain standpoints (i.e. protecting the athletes), but there are bigger issues. Out of the 70,000 volunteers, can you imagine how many wonderful stories will not emerge now.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the London Olympics are being overly sensitive, and not putting their millions of fans first?

By Mark Evans - January 27th, 2012 - 2 Comments »
Tags: London, olympics, Social Media, sysomos, volunteers
Posted in Social Media

Was Your Community Manager Appreciated?

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

For some more information on community managers and a nice infograph, check out Social Fresh’s 2012 Community Manager Report.

By Sheldon Levine - January 26th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, CMAD, Community Manager Appreciation Day, MAP, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

The Day The Internet Went Dark

You may have noticed yesterday that some of your favourite sites on the internet weren’t as they should be or were shut down all together. This was a large initiative by many internet based companies to protest the Stop Internet Piracy Act (more commonly known as SOPA) that was scheduled to be voted on in the US yesterday. Some of the sites that went black included Wikipedia, Reddit and even smaller sites like popular blogger Chris Brogan’s site.

For those unfamiliar with SOPA (and a similar bill known as PIPA), here’s a great video that explains just how it would affect everyday internet users like you and me:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Because these bills are heavily supported by the US entertainment industry, there has been very little talk about them in the mainstream media. Most people know about it because everyday people had taken to the internet and social networks to help spread the word. And spread it they did. I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to see just how much talk had been going on through social media.

To be inclusive of the numerous sayings and hashtags people have been using I searched for the terms “SOPA,” “PIPA,”StopSOPA,” “SOPAblackout” and “blackout.” Over the past 3 months I was able to find 247,213 blog posts, 82,713 online news articles, 311,327 forum posts and 2.9 million tweets containing my search terms.

Trended out over time that activity looks like this:

Because yesterday was a known day of protest the activity greatly overshadows all the previous activity. The following popularity chart shows the activity for three months up to January 17th, the day before the blackout. The first large spike in November was when the SOPA bill first started getting attention by the public. Then there were two large spikes in talk in December. The first, on December 15th, was the day that the US government passed NDAA, a non-internet related but also unpopular bill and people made connections between the two bills. The second spike in December was the day that the public became aware that the popular internet domain seller Go Daddy was supporting the SOPA bill. Go Daddy later retracted their support, but the public had already spoken.

While SOPA and PIPA are both bills that could be passed the United States government, they would have a great effect on the way the entire world uses the internet. That’s why the entire world has been talking about the bills. The greatest majority of talk through social media was coming from the United States (53.5%), but other countries were making their thoughts on the bills heard. Brazil, a large Twitter using country, accounted for 5.5% of the talk, followed by Spain (4.9%) and the UK (3.9%).

And just what have people been talking about? Our buzzgraph shows that “piracy” is right in the center of the conversation. But there’s strong connections to words like “protester,” infringement” and “censorship” showing that a lot of the talk was against SOPA and PIPA. We can also see a lot of talk about the websites that went black yesterday in opposition to the bills like “Wikipedia,” “Reddit” and “Google.” There’s also a strong connection to “Go Daddy” from that large spike in November that talked about their support of SOPA.

I already noted that talk on January 18th greatly overshadowed the previous three months, so I dug into the conversation that just happened yesterday. On blackout day alone I was bale to find 32,548 blog posts, 13,107 news articles, 18,504 forum posts and 1.4 million tweets containing my search terms.

All of the talk and support from everyday citizens led to the bill being temporarily shot down and not voted on yesterday as was originally planned. However, PIPA is still set to go in front of US congress on January 24th, so the internet blackout happened just as it was planned. The fate of the internet is still up in the air, but if enough people raise their voices, the people with power may just get the message that there has to be a better way to solve the piracy problem.

By Sheldon Levine - January 19th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, blackout, MAP, PIPA, Social Media, SOPA, StopSOPA, sysomos
Posted in Samples, Social Media

How Should Twitter Improve?

The whole world is a Twitter! Whether you get it or not, Twitter is gaining more users and credibility each passing day. This being said, we’ve all had some issues with Twitter so now it is time to brainstorm some solutions.

Here are some ideas I have, and it is on you to agree, disagree, demand change or accept things the way they are:

Update the Newsfeed:

Twitter needs to take a page from Facebook, which wrote the book on fickle design and the need to constantly reinventing the wheel. Twitter’s interface is old, it is not intuitive and even though there is a nice simplicity to it, it fails to wow.

Twitter needs to go back to the drawing board and create a sleeker design that also includes more features and quicker access to some of its key features. As well, the direct messaging process needs to be re-thought and enhanced.

Twitter gave us something revolutionary concepts when it opened its doors; now it is time to give us a design that will make us connect on a whole new level.

Become a Home for Interactive Content:

This is my wild idea but consider this: at its very core Twitter is a content aggregator yet it doesn’t really lend itself to anything dynamic. It lends itself to micro-blogging via text. Twitter has to land upon a compelling and useful way to allow interactive content to appear on the website.

Maybe the answer is to embed content or maybe it borrows from Facebook in how it enables the viewing of content. Either way, Twitter needs to become a home for dynamic content rather than just a gateway.

Twitter has come a long way in terms of marketing and monetization, which has let it become one of the leading social media services. At the same time, there is always room for improvement.

What are some of your suggestions for Twitter improvements? Or are you happy with the way it is now?

By Mark Evans - January 17th, 2012 - 4 Comments »
Tags: Social Media, sysomos, twitter
Posted in Social Media

Tebow Takes on Twitter

Tim Tebow may be the most popular man in sports right now. He was a first round draft pick the NFL’s 2010 draft. He became the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback part way through the 2011 season and has lead them on a wild charge ever since. His celebration ritual has spawned an internet and photo meme known as “taking a Tebow.” And as of Sunday, he can say that he is also a Twitter record holder.

This past Sunday during a Broncos’ game against the Steelers, Tim Tebow threw an 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime to win the game for Denver. The crowd in Denver went wild, but even more so, Twitter exploded with tweets about Tebow. Right after the touchdown pass Twitter recorded 9,420 tweets per second, making it the second most tweets per second for a single event. It was however the record for a sporting event.

I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to look a little bit deeper into the event. I found that it wasn’t just Twitter that was talking about Tebow. On Sunday, January 8th, I found Tebow mentioned in 2,549 blog posts, 1,495 online news articles, 22,950 forum posts and 484,946 tweets.

While 484,946 tweets doesn’t sound like a giant amount, it’s much larger when most of the tweets happen at almost the same time. Also, I pulled up a popularity chart of mentions of Tebow on Twitter over the past six months and found that this one day was almost the amount of tweets on his last most popular day.

I also found something interesting when I looked at where all the tweets were coming from. Surprisingly, Colorado didn’t even come close to being the state that produced the most tweets about Tebow. Neither did Pennsylvania. The top three states that were talking about Tebow were California, New York and Florida. Colorado actually tied for the state with 9th most Tebow tweets with Virginia and New Jersey.

Lastly, I took a look at the talk surrounding Tebow in a buzzgraph. Not surprisingly the Broncos are right in the center of the conversation. We can also see strong ties to the Steelers and the score of the game, 29-23. We can also see that Tebow’s winning touchdown pass was also a main part of the conversation as we can see from strong connection to the term “80-yard.”

With every NFL fan now with their eyes on Tebow, I wonder if he could set another record next week? Or maybe at the Superbowl?

By Sheldon Levine - January 12th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, Denver Broncos, MAP, nfl, Social Media, sysomos, Tebow, Tim Tebow, twitter
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

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