He mentions both cluster analysis and semantic analysis as avenues for future development and accurately describes some of the challenges that go along with these approaches. These techniques are at the heart of Nexalogy’s unique approach to Social Media Intelligence – and are a key element of the value we offer our clients to use social media to do much more than simple monitoring.
For me, this post is another indication that what we’re living through is not the birth of one industry but two: SM Monitoring and SM Intelligence. They’re different jobs with different goals, and the things required to do monitoring well (and that the key monitoring companies have done a good job deploying) are not necessarily the things required to produce valuable intelligence that can feed directly into brand strategy or corporate risk assessment scenarios.
Yesterday, Nathalie Babin-Gagnon conducted a radio interview with Claude on French CBC’s Classe économique, a show hosted by Sébastien Bernatchez. The topic discussed was a hot one: social media.
Right off the bat, it was affirmed that companies must develop a social media strategy, for social media is a cheap way for companies to communicate directly with their clients and followers.
According to Claude, more and more companies are getting on board (for example our clients “from primary resources such as oil and mining companies”) and companies that don’t will miss the boat.
Tourisme Montréal and the TD Bank have also seen the light. Pierre Bellerose, Public Relations VP at Tourisme Montréal, hires “connectors” to tweet and post messages on the blogosphere in order to play up the city. Annick Laberge, Senior Manager, Quebec Corporate and Public Affairs at TD, also informed us that the bank has recently created a department that specialises in social media strategies–which companies can’t do without nowadays.
So yes, social media has become indispensable to how businesses operate now, but Claude believes the revolution is yet to come, adding that “even as we’re heading towards 3.0, we’re still at this point only using one-fifth of what social media can accomplish.”
Google, for example, seems to know what you’re looking for before you even type in a coherent search. That is also one aspect of what’s known as 3.0.
It goes without saying that it’s thrilling to imagine what the remaining four-fifths will do for us.
Yesterday our friends at Piehead (a really great agency in New Hampshire) published a new blog post based on an interview with Claude: The Astronomical Impact of Social Media Analysis. The post was written by Piehead’s marketing intern, Chris Firger, who also happens to be a student at McGill here in Montreal – we’re looking forward to meeting him when he gets back to the city.
Key quote: a quote from Chris’ interview with Claude:
“This is where physics comes into play,” [Théoret] explains, “Physicists know how to handle literally astronomical sizes of data sets that aren’t very well organized. With blogs for example, the data problem is the same. We need to find signal and reduce noise. Because the data is unstructured, analysis becomes very complicated – but that’s where Nexalogy comes in.”
Jason Falls wrote an important blog post the other day, Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail. The one quibble I have with his post – and it’s big enough to deserve its own post here – is that he assumes that the “intelligence” part is something the client has to do themselves. He writes, “…they [monitoring companies] probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.” This is difficult, to say the least, because to do it correctly requires skills that most companies don’t have on hand.
There are three particular skills that are required to do social media intelligence well:
The ability to build a comprehensive dataset to analyze. This is more complicated than it sounds, and there are many pitfalls to avoid in trying. To gain any real insight from social media sources requires going as far down the long tail as possible when building a dataset. In our experience, this means relying on a much larger universe of social media sources than most monitoring companies can access.
An established methodology to use to analyze the contents of the dataset (once it has been properly constructed). In other words, once you have 4000 (or 40,000) blog posts or tweets on a subject, how do you read that material and make sense of it? Doing this right is not as simple as starting at the top and going through all of the material – and anyhow, given a large dataset it would be impossible to do it that way. We use software that we have built that implements approaches based on decades of academic experience to do this. Most companies don’t have the skills in-house to do this correctly.
The background to take rigorously analyzed data and apply it to help to solve particular strategic challenges. Companies vary widely in this respect. Some companies use a great deal of data to make decisions, but some run more on instinct than anything else. To do social media analysis correctly, the company providing the service has to offer a sliding scale of post-analysis services, from simple coaching on how to use the intelligence produced all the way to the development of complete strategic plans and even management of the execution of such plans.
As a social media intelligence company, Nexalogy Environics appreciates the quality of the work our cousins in the social media monitoring segment are doing. However, as we’re seeing more and more every day, social media presents greater challenges to companies than monitoring can fully address. As Jason Falls suggests, there’s a clear case for a more robust approach to intelligence – but it’s not at all obvious that it’s the client companies themselves who can or should be doing that intelligence work. Our clients get much better results at a more cost-effective rate than anything they could do themselves.
On Friday, influential social media analyst Jason Falls wrote a provocative blog post on Social Media Explorer called Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail that really got to the heart of the value we provide our clients at Nexalogy Environics.
He wrote that although monitoring services do an adequate job, “…none of them do what you want them to do.They only do half the job. None of them tell you what to do with the information.” He goes on to say that the monitoring companies will probably never be good at the analysis half of the job because it’s not something you can do with an algorithm – it’s a strategic services job.
Falls’ post highlights something that is becoming clearer and clearer every day – there are two distinct segments in the social media analysis space: social media monitoring and social media intelligence. Though they are similar, there are important differences between their respective approaches and the kinds of client problems they can solve. Moreover, the more companies explore the value proposition of one group – the monitoring services – the more they understand the unique value of the other group in the space – the strategic analysis companies.
At Nexalogy Environics we’re all about the strategic analysis we provide our clients. The software we’ve built is the cornerstone of what we do, but it’s a tool we use to make methodologically sound analysis of social media datasets possible, not a client deliverable on its own.
The talk of the past week has been Apple’s launch of the iPad at a special event in San Francisco. Apple’s launches typically attract an extreme amount of attention, and now that Twitter has become a mature, mass-use tool we decided to do an analysis of local reactions to the launch.
Twitter analysis is all the rage at the moment, but the analysis that we most often see is pretty basic. One of the best is this analysis from the NYTimes Research Labs: Monitoring Twitter’s iPad Commentary. But while the presentation of their results is fantastic, there is more to social media analysis than counting keywords in Twitter. Or, as Annie Pettit of Conversition put it last week from the podium at the MRIA Net Gain 4.0 conference (and later tweeted), “Counting is not analysis“.
Counting is certainly part of analysis, but what we most often see passing as “social media analysis” is just the first step. While there is some value to counting tweets, it’s much more important to analyze the concepts contained throughout all of the tweets in a dataset, whether those words represent likely keywords or not. It’s only using more advanced methodologies that can we get a complete view of a conversation.
To demonstrate this, Nexalogy Environics’ Guido Vieira performed a Twitter study of the 24 hours of discussion following the launch of the iPad in the Montreal area. As you can see, the results are very interesting. Read to the end of the PDF – this analysis suggests a very important methodological issue to pay attention to related to Twitter analysis.
We’re very pleased to announce that as of today, Exvisu Canada has become Nexalogy Environics.
We’ve joined the Environics family of companies, and will be working alongside Environics Communications Inc. and Environics Research Group to continue to strengthen our efforts to define the gold standard in social media analysis and bring this approach to a wider audience.
We’re also very excited to work with our new corporate siblings, both in Montreal (Capital-Image) and in Toronto at Sequentia Environics whose innovative approach to social media marketing and communications is very closely aligned with our philosophy and approach.
ICBIS is all about ensuring that sustainability decisions are made at the core of corporate decisionmaking. As Ron describes it ICBIS is, “a collaborative, learning, not-for-profit network of business and sustainability practioners who work in business, civil society, consulting, academic and government settings, and support proactive and constructive engagement with business and society on sustainable development and business sustainability.”
At the beginning of this month, a group called the Web Ecology Project published a very interesting report called The Influentials that proposes a far more advanced approach than we’ve seen to date. Frankly it’s not a moment too soon – although the ecology that has built up around Twitter is pretty massive and loads of fun, most of the tools in the analytical sphere should properly be considered toys, not true analytical tools.
What’s most interesting about the Web Ecology Project’s work is not the results (Sockington FTW!) but the approach they propose. It represents nothing less than the beginning of a real discussion about how Twitter activity should be analyzed.
Exvisu has been working with Twitter for some time, and based on that experience the thing that strikes me about measuring influence is that although it’s interesting on a macro level (master-influencer lists will surely be developed based on approaches such as this), it’s even more interesting with respect to a limited (by content or other factors) group of Twitter users.
Identifying influencers related to a specific subject is likely to be a great deal more useful – and quite a bit more difficult to calculate. Can’t wait to help make that happen!