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Posts Tagged ‘toronto’

The Joys of Social Media Enthusiasm

When you’re immersed in social and drinking the Kool-Aid by the bottle, it can be easy to forget there are lots – and lots – of people still discovering social media and its potential impact how they work and live.

As a social media practitioner, it is easy to lose perspective about the magnitude of how social is used and the way it continues to grow. In other words, it’s difficult to see the forest through the trees.

This is why it was so refreshing to be at PodCamp ’11 in Toronto on the weekend, which attracted a staggering 1,100 people. Aside from speaking on a panel and giving a presentation about core messaging, I spent a lot of time talking to people about social media, how it’s being used and the new trends and issues on the horizon.

It is uplifting to see so much enthusiasm and excitement about many things that social media “professionals” take for granted. After a while, it is easy to think that everyone is using Twitter, blog, Facebook, etc., and that everyone “gets” it.

Truth be told, we’re just the thin edge of the wedge relatively speaking. There are lots of people just getting into social media or not even there yet. While we may be sitting close to the proverbial bonfire, there is a huge group in the shadows behind us.

The most important thing to remember about this group is their genuine excitement about what’s happening. To many of them, the world of social media is just starting to unfold, and it’s like setting a child free in a toy store.

While some of their enthusiasm about things we take for granted may be puzzling or amusing, we can’t forget that we were in that same position not that long ago.

A few hours at PodCamp is good for the social media soul and a healthy reminder of why social media is such a great place to be making a living.

I can remember when the Web started to hit the mainstream in the late-1990s, and thinking things couldn’t possibly get more exciting. Then came the e-commerce boom and the Web 2.0 wave. Social media is yet another reason to be stoked about the Internet revolution now happening.

By Mark Evans - February 28th, 2011 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Is Social Media Really a Key Election Tool?

In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama leveraged social media to prevail over John McCain. In many respects, Obama’s use of services such as Facebook and Twitter legitimized social media and established it as a valuable tool within the political process.

Two years after the fact, a question that should be asked is whether social media as a key part of election campaigns has been over-rated.

Did Obama manage to catch lightning in a bottle at a time when people were looking for change, and social media was just emerging as new and different way to communicate and engage voters?

Without suggesting that social media shouldn’t be an important political tool, its use during elections needs to be explored given what happened during Toronto’s mayoralty election in which social media, frankly, was less than inspiring.

None of candidates effectively used social media. While they dutifully created YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts, it was like they were going through the motions. There was little creativity or engaging content, and nothing to suggest social media was the new hot election weapon.

As it turned out, voter turn out was strong, which has more to do with the hotly-contested mayoralty race, which had two leading candidates, Rob Ford and George Smitherman, with starkly different views of the Toronto’s future.

The lack of social media sizzle in Toronto, Canada’s largest city and the home to many of its digital companies, was a marked contrast to the recent mayoralty election in Calgary in which Naheed Nenshi came from behind to win defeat two two leading candidates.

For Nenshi, social media is credited as playing a key role. Mount Royal University professor Ron Strand provides a list of reasons why social media worked for Nenshi, including the fact his opponents had little enthusiasm for social media.

So how effective is social media within elections? Is it a magic elixir and a game-changer, or a good but not spectacular part of a political arsenal.

By Mark Evans - October 26th, 2010 - 9 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Toronto’s Next Mayor is……?

After a long, fierce and sometimes nasty campaign, Toronto’s mayor will be elected today. The two leading candidates are Rob Ford, who has tapped into anger among voters by promising to cut waste and spending, and George Smitherman, a former provincial cabinet minister whose campaign has had much to do with his really wanting to be mayor.

To get a sense of who might prevail today, we used Sysomos MAP to see what has happened within social medi and traditional media since Sept. 1 when the election really got into high gear.

We started with share of voice within the blogosphere, which shows Ford dominating the conversations. This is not surprising given Ford’s campaign platform, which many see as polarized. As well, Ford has continued to surprise political pundits by the fact he has maintained his support after jumping out to a huge lead in the polls in August.

We also looked at overall sentiment between Ford and Smitherman from traditional and social media. Smitherman has more positive sentiment (43% vs. 32%), while there is more negative sentiment for Ford (27% vs. 19%).

We also wanted to explore how sentiment within blogs for each candidate has changed over the past seven weeks. Ford’s positive and negative sentiment has remained the same.

While Smitherman’s positive sentiment has declined slightly, while his negative sentiment has climbed.

So what does it all mean? It reflects the reality that it is going to be very tight race between two candidates who have emerged as the two leading people to become Toronto’s next mayor.

By Mark Evans - October 25th, 2010 - 5 Comments »
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Posted in Events

Why Measurement Matters (Part II)

As the social media monitoring and measurement business expands and more companies and consumers embrace the technology, it is fascinating to see how the market is evolving.

In many respects, social media monitoring is becoming pretty standard fare, although there are plenty of companies not on the bandwagon yet.

Social media monitoring is a service most companies acknowledge has to be part of their communications, marketing and sales toolkits so they can monitor social media activity and engage in conversations with various groups.

What’s particularly interesting, however, is the growing interest in new areas as social technology improves and the demands of customers become more sophisticated.

At the Measurement Matters conference in Toronto yesterday, the day started with a straightforward discussions on how to set up a social media command centre, which involved Sysomos’ directory of community, Sheldon Levine.

From there, the agenda delved deeper into the weeds with discussions about issues such as:

- The new metrics that are emerging and how they should be applied. This put the focus on how academic research and R&D are driving a lot of new thinking and activity behind the scenes.

- The way that influencers should be treated and how their influence should be ranked. This was a particularly dominant theme throughout the day given the growing focus (obsession?) with social media influencers.

- Tools that help companies move beyond the influencers so they can reach out to people on in the long tail. This included discussions about the topology of networks and the actor-network theory.

- A focus on return on investment (ROI) and how companies should be assessing the value and return that social media programs provide.

- Talk about how to marry social media monitoring, measurement and analytics with intelligence that companies can use to make strategic and tactical decisions. Simply put, it was a discussion about how technology will be the engine to collect data, analyze and filter data, while humans will be the brains to create recommendations and action items.

In many respects, Measurement Matter was not a day that produced major revelations but, more important, it was an event that made you think about how much is happening, how the marketplace is evolving and some of the new trends and technologies on the horizon.

It put the spotlight on the fact that despite the buzz and activity in the social media monitoring and measurement markets, we’re still in the early days.

By Mark Evans - September 29th, 2010 - 2 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

The Case of the Sleeping Ticket Taker

napping-260Over the past few days, the Twittersphere has been abuzz after George Robitaille, a Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) ticket taker, was photographed sleeping on the job.

The photograph, which quickly went viral after being shared on Twitter via TwitPic, has become a symbol of the TTC’s problems with customer service at a time when fares have increased.

To get a better idea of how “The Case of the Sleeping Ticket Taker” has been treated within the social media landscape, we use our flagship MAP monitoring and analytics service to do a search for “TTC” and “sleeping”. Perhaps the most surprising is that sentiment was 68% positive or neutral, while only 32% of the conversations were neutral.

sentiment

It seems that while many people don’t like that Robitaille was asleep on the job, the uproar doesn’t appear to be widespread. Robitaille put it best when he told the Toronto Star that “When you knock Haiti off the front page you know something’s wrong”.

While nearly two-thirds of the conversations happened in Canada, there was also a lot of chatter in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. The most active keyword within the conversations was McCowan, the station in which Robitaille was working. The strongest link was with “Giambrone” – city councillor Adam Giambrone, who is also chair of the TTC.

MAP - "TTC" and "sleeping"

For more on the Sleeping Ticket Taker, check out Mashable, which points out that the flurry of media coverage didn’t happen until it started to attract a lot of attention on Twitter and blogs.

By Mark Evans - January 25th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Congrats to Hill & Knowlton!

We’re always excited when clients win awards, especially when we’re involved in giving them a helping hand.

Case in point is Hill & Knowlton Digital’s Toronto team, which recently won two awards from the the Society of New Communications Research. One of the awards was a research report that H&K did for Waterfront Toronto looking at key online influencers. H&K used Sysomos MAP, our flagship social media analytics service, to identify online conversations in both independent and media blogs, and then created its report based on the data that was collected.

For more details on how the process worked, check out David Jones’ blog.

By Mark Evans - November 23rd, 2009 - 1 Comment »
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Posted in Customers

Sysomos Has a New Home!

So far, 2009 has been a busy and exciting year for Sysomos with the official launch of our flagship social media analytics service, MAP, as well as the debut of Heartbeat, our social media monitoring service. We’ve also published two reports about Twitter that have attracted a lot of attention and conversations.

And now Sysomos has a new home in downtown Toronto! It’s a move – pun completely intended – that reflects our strong growth in terms of sales, customers, brand and the number of people working for the company. While there are still boxes to be unpacked and a coffee machine looking on the floor, it’s already feeling like home.

So what’s our new place like? Well, it’s spacious, comfortable and gives us enough room to keep growing for the next little while.

If you’re in the neighborhood, come visit. We’ll give you a tour and, if you want, a demo of MAP and Heartbeat.


View Larger Map

By Mark Evans - September 9th, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Announcements

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