Archive for March, 2010
by Bill Ives
March 28, 2010 at 2:32 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
It appears that Web analytics continues to be a growth market. At least, I see it as the important next step after the introduction of social media has dramatically increased the amount of content on the Web. Viralheat is one of the new players in this space. It is a social media metrics platform that delivers real-time data on over video and micro-blogging platforms as well as millions of blogs and websites. I recently spoke with Raj Kadam, the CEO, and Vishal Sankhla, the CTO, about their offering.
Viralheat was founded in January 2009 and launched publically in July 2009. They now have over 1500 customers on a global basis. They designed Viralheat to support each of the stages of understanding and responding to what is happening on the Web: listen, measure, analyze, and engage. The goal is to provide a single tool for each of these activities.
They made a decision to built all the tools themselves so that don’t have to rely on any third party services. They use a dynamic P2P cloud infrastructure to provide data aggregation, processing, and analysis. This gives them more control over both the data and the pricing of their service.
Viralheat identifies its target content sources and then filters out those who are non-influencers. It looks at both the overall followers to a blog or site, as well as the mentions of a specific entry. You can see this is the screen examples below. While much can be done within Viralheat, you can export data into any format to combine it with business intelligence platforms. I was impressed with the depth of their analytics.
Below is a screen shot of trends from Twitter and Google Buzz on a topic, in this case, Dell. You can see the trend over time. There are general statistics such as total messages, unique authors, total impact, and average impact (or follower) per author. There are conversational statistics such as retweet percentage, top language, and sentiment analysis. You also see the top influencers by volume and the top influencers by impact or followers. Then you can see the actual top mentions and have these sorted by positive and negative sentiment.
You can drill into a stream of related content to see details on an individual source as shown below.
And here more detail from their integration with Klout.
And here is more detail from their integration with Twitalyzer.
In setting up your queries you can use Boolean logic for further refinement. You can also add location parameters. You can create email reports to share results. Viralheat works in real time. They do sentiment analysis through NLP to look at the grammar as well as the words in a message instead of a static dictionary to enhance accuracy. They also provide a REST API to allow you to embed Viralheat in other applications. This integration works in both directions so they can provide a common interface across applications.
I think this is a smart set of features. There is a world of useful data being created by the transparency of social media. Viralheat is a useful and accessible way to tap into this data.
by Bill Ives
March 23, 2010 at 3:06 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
There are a number of firms that offer social media monitoring and I have reviewed several of them on this blog. Vocus in focused on serving the public relations industry and provides this capability as part of their comprehensive public relations management suite. I recently spoke with Kye Strance, the Vocus Director of Product Management and Frank Strong the Vocus Director of Public Relations.
Founded in 1991, Vocus began providing database services for PR professionals in 1997. They went public in 2005. Their clients are mainly PR people within organizations but they have some agency clients. They added functionality over the years beginning with CRM capabilities, then collaboration, and now social media monitoring to go with their traditional media monitoring.
The Vocus suite now provides all the tools to help an internal PR person carry out their job. Tabs on the home page include media contacts, media outlets, distribution, news, projects, analysis and administration. The dashboard can be customized with drag and drop capabilities to add and arrange components. As we went through a demo it became clear than a lot of the value comes from their content, as well as the software features. For example, they offer 270,000 US media contacts and 500,000 on a global basis. Vocus has a research team of about 75 people constantly updating their PR content. Individual users can also update these resources and chose to share them with other users. Vocus then validates any of these additions. There is also an opportunities database for awards, events, etc. for the year with more than 12,500 entries covering 194 countries and 365 days
The social Web opens up new opportunities for analytics and Vocus has stepped up to this opening. Research by others has shown that ROI is big concern for marketing professionals. Kye gave the example, of an internal PR person who used Vocus analytics to look at the relationship of media coverage for her firm and their competitors. In each case there was a positive correlation between media coverage and sales. These results enabled her to get a larger PR budget from senior management.
Vocus added its social media monitoring capabilities in 2009 in time for the early adopters. Key said that many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media in 2009, using some of the free tools. Now in 2010 it has become real and I would agree. Their own research found that 80% of respondants would focus more on social media in 2010. Their monitoring goes against a wide number of targets including 52,000 traditional media outlets and 100 million blogs. They choose the top 100 million blogs by a combination of several raking systems including Technorati. Individual users can also add their own targets through the targets RSS feed.
I asked how they keep current with the changing landscape in traditional media. Kye agreed on the dynamic nature of this space and mentioned they saw 293 closures in their traditional media outlets. To stay current Vocus does a monthly check on the top tier sources, a 3 to 6 month check on the tier two sources, and a yearly check on the smaller tier three sources. They provide a Twitter feed, InVocus to convey the changes they discover. Customers can edit the media profiles and Vocus will verify the new information if the customer chooses to share the update. This way they are crowd-sourcing part of the update process. Vocus also uses social media to monitor changes in their media contacts to continue to filter the information for their clients. You can see why I saw the great value in their content, as well as their software.
We looked at some of the sample reports and visualizations offered by their social media monitoring component and I was impressed. We used the cruise line industry for the samples. The first screen shot shows a share of the positive voice for a number of cruise lines. You could also get a share of negative voice as well as a share of total voice.
The next screen shot shows the key topics related to cruise lines over a several weeks. You can see peaks that were related to events at the time.
The third screen shot shows a social media by type chart for a specific cruise line over a two week period. There are many others.
Here is an interesting and amusing post that Frank wrote, Blogs, Twitter and Traditional Media All Still Matter at the North Pole and Beyond: What Santa Claus Can Teach PR About Media Monitoring. It shows how often Santa is mentioned in blogs, social media and traditional media and the sentiment conveyed. For example, “Old St. Nick was referenced more than 120,000 times in social media outlets over the same period. As with blogs, just over 10 percent was toned negative, although about 19 percent was positive and 73 percent was neutral. Unsurprisingly, 85 percent of those mentions occurred on Twitter, while the next largest percentage occurred in YouTube—just over eight percent.”
Frank went on to add, “At some points, Santa Claus was earning more than 10,000 Tweets a week. It’s simply not feasible to be able to read and respond to each Twitter post. However, by applying automated toning, you can isolate the negative posts, analyze them and respond accordingly. For example, as rumors of “Claustrophobia”—the fear of Santa Claus—circulated on Twitter, Santa’s marketing team could respond accordingly. Few things could ruin Christmas more than if people actually feared Santa.” There is much more. It is a great post, both humorous and insightful.
by Bill Ives
March 11, 2010 at 6:11 pm · Filed under
Web 2.0
Google’s recently launched its online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easier for more than two million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience that can increase business efficiency and reduce administrative overhead.
Now Zoho recently announced it has added Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects to the Google Apps Marketplace.™ These are two of their most popular offerings. Zoho had previously integrated their apps with Google at the log-in level with single sign-on. Now, they are taking their integrations deepe using the enhanced APIs for Google Apps.
Users gain a variety of benefits from the integration of the Zoho applications with Google Apps. For all Zoho applications, the integration lets users automatically sign in to the Zoho applications with their existing Google Apps credentials. In addition, Zoho Business applications are listed in Google’s universal navigation, and Zoho application gadgets can be embedded in relevant Google applications, such as Gmail™, iGoogle™ and Google Sites™.
With Zoho CRM users can view Gmail emails in Zoho CRM contextually, so all Gmail emails exchanged with a Zoho CRM contact can be viewed. Users can also import contacts from Google Apps to Zoho CRM, view Zoho CRM calendar events in Google Calendar, and more.
With Zoho Projects users can view Zoho Project calendar events in Google Calendar and attach Google Docs™ files to Zoho Projects.
Here is an interesting post, It Is Not About Our App, It Is About the User’s Data and Context, by Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu that discusses their integrate with Google Apps. He writes that an important emerging theme in cloud applications is the one-browser-tab approach to design. In this case there is contextual integration of information across applications, so that whatever app the user happens to be in, relevant information is pulled from other apps and displayed it in the right context. This is a good move.
by Bill Ives
March 5, 2010 at 3:25 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Brightidea brings the capabilities of social computing to the idea generation and implementation process. Their WebStormTM product is an Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process that I have covered here (see: Brightidea.com – Brings Focused Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation).
Now collaboration is forecasted by Forrester to be one of the big drivers for smart phone usage in 2010 (see Smartphone Surge in 2010). In line with this trend Brightidea has announced the release of Brightidea MobileTM. Designed exclusively for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as the Google Android platform, the native App brings the Brightidea platform to mobile users.
The Brightidea MobileTM app supports public or private communities and is designed to support the rigorous security requirements and access controls required by large enterprises that host many online brainstorms simultaneously.
Users of Apple’s iPhone and iPad can move between multiple Brightidea WebStorms through the familiar iPhone interface and simple navigation menu with built-in access to all accounts, campaigns, ideas, and comments. With Brightidea Mobile, users can view, post, comment, vote, and share ideas as well as use Brightidea’s corporate micro-blogging feature that allows users to post and follow activity within their innovation community.
One of Brightidea’s first clients to roll-out the mobile app is The Nielsen Company. Brightidea Mobile TM can be downloaded directly from the iTunes store. I think the migration to mobile instances of enterprise 2.0 collaboration software will continue. Most studies have shown that moving to mobile is a major direction for enterprise software (see for example, Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report).
Brightidea was also recently selected by the city of San Francisco to power their program to get more employee involvement in improvements for the city. They are also supporting Ireland’s efforts to get more citizen involvement in improving the country in the Your Country Your Call effort. A mobile app should be very useful in these cases.
by Bill Ives
March 2, 2010 at 3:02 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I first spoke with Acquia as they were beginning to offer support services for the Drupal social publishing system (see: Acquia Makes Drupal Community Building Accessible). Recently, I spoke with Bryan House on their progress over the past six quarters. He said that the Drupal community has grown from 300,000 members to 600,000 during this time. Acquia provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal and it has also grown along with this Drupal community expansion. They now have 450 companies signed up. Customers include: Economist, InfoWorld, TNT, TechTarget, Washington State University, Emory University, and University of North Texas.
Bryan said that they have gotten especially good traction in the media and entertainment, education, and government sectors as you can also see above. This makes sense given Drupal’s combination of low cost and comprehensive features. The US White House has now adopted Drupal and Acquia is helping with this effort. Here is a blog post from Acquia founder and creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, on the White House move.
Other Acquia examples include Florida Hospital that has adopted Drupal for both internal collaboration and to run the web site of each of its seven hospitals. Acquia also has 140 business partners. Bryan said these are mostly web design firms. However, they are now getting a lot of interest from the large global systems integrators.
Acquia has three offerings. First, they offer annual support for Drupal 6. They also offer Drupal hosting so you can have one stop support for all Drupal needs. Their newest product is Drupal Gardens. It is a SaaS-based tool that allows you to quickly and easily build a Drupal website. Drupal Gardens allows a non-developer to take advantage of social publishing as Acquia has simplified the startup process. Acquia’s slogan for this is: “designed and online in 15 minutes.”
Acquia built Drupal Gardens on Drupal 7, which is currently in Alpha, because of its advanced features and increased usability. Examples of this includes: overlay menus for editing, one click editing, personalized short cuts, and customized menu bars. Drupal Gardens also includes a WYSWYG editor, personal media library, tagging and other metadata, and multiple authors. You can export your entire Drupal Gardens site, including users, content and theme, if you want to implement more advanced features.
Drupal Gardens is built to primarily support micro-sites. Large complex sites should use Drupal. Use cases include artist and events sites in entertainment, department and professor sites in higher education, responses to topics of interest and emergencies for government. It is especially useful when you want to maintain a consistency across the micro-sites. This is a nice addition to the Acquia product suite and a natural extension of its support services.
Thought...
