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Business Intelligence via Social Media Data – Presented March 22, 2011 Athens, Greece

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Business Intelligence via Social Media Data The Socializers

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SUMMARY: In all fields of business, there are varying levels of sophistication. The small business owner juggles bookkeeping, rent, vendors and customers and, if he is lucky, has time left over to take his original business plan one step further via Marketing and Sales activities. The medium and enterprise level businesses have a responsibility to analyze their markets through best-practice business intelligence and innovate. Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to unknown. The open seas that enterprise-level businesses chart require captains and admirals who can judge when and how to take such risk.

THE VALUE OF SCOUTS: New technologies aid such leaders in their future plans. The most important members of the team in this respect are the SCOUTS. In the world of social media marketing, the scouts are social intelligence providers, experts in predictive analytics, text analytics, cluster analysis and sentiment trending. It is the responsibility of these scouts to discover the VERY BEST sources of intelligence in a specific vertical or world region. As the founder of Klout says, “Targeting the few key influencers who have authority around a given topic and allowing them to tell the story. The message is then amplified up through the network to reach a large engaged audience that trusts the message sender.” It is important to note that social media monitoring tools come in all shapes and sizes with varying angles on what is and is not important.

Highlighted in an article by Brian Solis,Ray Wang writes, “Overall, on a global scale, social analytics will evolve in 2011 from ad-hoc experiments into refined information services. Enterprise-level organizations should continue with experimenting in listening services that filter out noise from the social sphere, identify trends that deliver insight, and create models that support prediction.”

REGIONAL PROVIDERS: (In the following paragraph, I mix some of my thoughts with Mr. Wang’s observations to deepen the observation). “Regionally, it is recommended to identify LOCAL providers who have a deep understanding of the local language and customs. As algorithms increase in complexity, global tools will have to adapt to these regional and cultural differences, as well as requiring greater vertical specialization. The global tools like Sysomos, while very good, will no longer be able to support in house efforts due to the volume of demand and that may effect quality. A new breed of LOCAL information brokers will aid global intel providers in delivering social analytics at a scale and specificity that will support the challenges of big data in heterogeneous systems. Expect vendors such as Sysomos, Alterian, Attensity, Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, IBM, Radian6, SAS, Scoutlabs, Telligent, and Visible to shift their business models from software vendors to information brokers.”

LOCAL ANALYSTS: Regional Business Intelligence providers with LOCAL vendors trained in Predictive Analytics, Semantic Analysis, Cluster Analysis, and active in hands-on solutions analyzing the local language are important allies/partners to these global tools. This is clearly seen upon going into the representation of the data by these global social media intelligence providers with LOCAL analysts. Refinement of the data MUST be accomplished by native speakers. It is advised that the global tools identify regional managers to (a) make sales (b) identify local highly trained analysts who speak the language natively and (c) shift their identity from a tools centered approach to human-refined intelligence provision.

MERGING OF SOCIAL INTEL AND SOCIAL ACTION TOOLS: The leaders in the field will form alliances with social action tools like Hoot Suite and Buddy Media to mutually enhance value proposition. M&A in this area is an important evolutionary step for those organizations keen to the benefit of actionable intelligence. Brands want punchy insights, smart recommendations based on these insights along with actions that may be measured.

THE BUSINESS INTEL CUSTOMER: The sophisticated customer of social monitoring intelligence wants his provider to develop insights and action-steps from the masses of data that come through a WOMMA-ethics-level tool…that is, a tool that includes total, or near, access to firehoses from “walled-gardens” like Facebook or the giant Amazonian rivers of Twitter. He then wants that provider to write up a brand booklet complete with a few neat charts and a storyline of how the brand may utilize the current economic climate for maximum growth.

LIVING INFOGRAPHICS: To go further, the Business Unit Manager of the marketing agency working with this enterprise-level customer may want the intelligence provider to produce an interactive infographic that gathers intel AND grows customer equity all at once. Great example of this is JESS3’s APTA project.

BUSINESS PLAN: In an A+ scenario, the Business Unit Manager from the agency provides the Brand Manager with a comprehensive plan that charts the growth of the brand over the coming year, its relative competitive weaknesses and advantages (SWOT style or another scenario planner) and a few preliminary creative mock-ups of the customer-facing solution. For internal business solutions, the Business Unit Manager recommends a few choice third-party vendors to come alongside the team for sCRM, a possible re-vamping of how collaboration takes place in the organization and re-vitalized, efficient HR.

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS ANSWERED: Important questions answered through social intelligence projects include:

• Buzz in broadcast and social media: what is the volume of mentions?
• General topics and impact: which news, headlines and developing stories influence my brand?
• Special topics and impact: which hidden parameters influence my brand?
• Opinion mining: do people think positively or negatively about my brand?
• Mood analysis: do people express pleasure about my brand? Are they calm/relaxed or alert?
• Seasonality and time-of-day: when do people discuss my brand and topics of interest?
• Named entities graph: who am I connected to?
• Influencer detection: who do we recommend as influencers in regards to my brand?
• Meme detection: how do ideas spread throughout the population?
• Visualization: how can I represent information by combining insights and graphics?

“ON THE FLY” COMMUNITIES: But the MOST important fruit of business intelligence derived from social media data is an on the fly community. Non-branded aggregations in Twitter of Key Influencers in the form of lists OR Twitter accounts filled with Key Influencers around a specific topic are a very powerful means to accessing a customer base quickly. TO REPEAT: Non-branded, on-the-fly Communities aggregating Key Influencers are a far better fruit of business intelligence than “snap-shot” insights. The social eco-system is fluid and Brand Managers want something of real value from BI projects that can be used RIGHT NOW. Using tools like PeopleBrowsr one may assemble such “on-the-fly” communities quickly and accurately. Check out this video of Jodee Rich, CEO and founder of PeopleBrowsr, talking about the Research.ly solution:

WITHIN THE ENTERPRISE: The happy Brand Manager gets to go to her Marketing Manager and GM and show off a plan for her brand(s) that will elevate business by a nice percentage, decrease overall internal costs, address any outstanding PR and Customer-Service related issues and foster a glowing relationship with the community in her region through a customer-centric ad/marketing campaign. And, due to the entire solution being driven through social business, she has decreased the ad spend by 60%, saving money in the process. Finally, through deeper business intelligence, the enterprise may find ways to economize and grow hitherto unseen:

10 Criteria of Social Business Maturity

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Soul Monitoring: Peering into the collective for meaningful connections

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What if we saw image AS experience? One may use social intelligence tools to discover a community surrounding an image. NOW!

“It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.” ~James Hillman

What if we saw the social networks as a soul-making exercise, one intended to train the human community in depth of experience? What if we saw image AS experience? What if we saw one aspect of our consciousness as follower and one as leader? And what if that leader was like a very clever Market Research Director using social intelligence gathering tools like Research.ly, Sysomos, Radian6 and the like? What if this leader in our psyche was peering into conversations within and deciphering meaning, finding insight and plotting direction?

James Hillman goes on to say, “Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve….I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. ”

Social monitoring tools give Market Strategists an opportunity to hear the voices within the culture and plot direction for the collective psyche. Ideally, digital engagement offers a bridge to both spiritual AND flesh encounters. Social networks like Meetup.com offer physical engagement with those who share a passion.

Imagine a person dreaming in his bed. He/she lives within a scene. The scene is distant, yet close; powerfully enwrapping the dreamer in another life, another place. We now have the ability to wake up, switch on our laptop and search the collective consciousness/sub-counsciousness using keywords in tools as simple as Google and as complicated as Radian6, Research.ly and Sysomos.

One may use social intelligence tools to discover a community surrounding an image. And within a very short amount of time, one may be with these people in the flesh, in that dream scene in the flesh. This experience, this journey, from image to flesh, from passion to experience, from my tight inner circle to the outer world, IS one of the greatest gifts social networks offer.

James Hillman writes, “The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel ‘blest by everything.’ ”

We now live in times when we can “dislocate from center” and be “blest by everything”. That’s the journey of the seeker in social networks. And no set of tools could be more effective than those that search the Interest Graph. Twitter is the Interest Graph, a place where individuals and groups have grouped themselves into lists and are sending out byte-sized messages with links to information related to niches. Jodee Rich, CEO of PeopleBrowsr, has said, “The trend I’m seeing is that the world is evolving from a social graph towards an interest graph.” Susan Etlinger, consultant at Altimeter Group, says, “I see social graphs and interest graphs converging. FOr example, people into fashion conecting online and going to events together.” Etlinger identifies here that movement I referred to earlier concerning the journey from searching online to meeting in the flesh.

When one realizes the potential of powerful social media monitoring solutions to connect one to one’s dream, the world changes dramatically.

Dreamtending/Collective Consciousness Research/Creative Exercise:

1. JOURNAL AND MEDITATE: Spend an hour before bed journalling and meditating on what you want out of life, what you want in your career, what you desire in a relationship.

2. DREAM PREPARATION: Tell yourself prior to sleeping that you will dream about this. Put a journal and pen next to your bed.

3. DREAM RECORDING: Upon having a vivid dream and waking, write down the dream.

4. SEARCHING THE COLLECTIVE: Go to your computer and use social media monitoring tools/social intelligence gathering solutions, to search the collective consciousness/unconscious using keywords from your dream journal.

5. CREATIVE EXPRESSION AND FLESH CONNECTION: Create a Kickstarter creative project or Meetup flesh-group based on this research AND your own creative process.

Weaving the Omega Point…Asking the Last Question

admin February 9, 2011 No Comments

A single voice, a single sentence, a single video, a single photo now has the potential to influence the entire fabric of humanity via social networks and its tendrils. But what is it that we would want to collectively manifest? What is the experience we would want to collectively actuate? We are unerringly arrowing toward an Omega Point as a collective community and asking our best questions in the process!

The Omega Point is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to denote the state of the maximum organized complexity (complexity combined with centricity), towards which the universe is evolving.

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry. Whether as a force or a curvature, the universal gravity of bodies, so striking to us, is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. To perceive cosmic energy ‘at the fount’ we must, if there is a within of things, go down into the internal or radial zone of spiritual attractions. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Again, I ask, what flavoring, what tenor, does humanity want to give its Omega Point? What question do we want to answer?

Asimov writes about The Last Question:

“Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And there was light—-“

Funding your Creative Today!

admin February 9, 2011 No Comments

How To Run a Successful Self-Funded Creative Project

The age of the Creative has fully arrived. We are in times when Creatives have the real possibility of identifying an audience for their work and getting funding from that audience.

Using a combination of creative software, free intelligence solutions and free crowd-funding solutions (here and here), Creatives globally can be up an running within 1-2 months on the creative project of their dreams.

THE VALUE OF COMBINING A TARGETED INTEREST GRAPH WITH A CROWD-FUNDING TOOL: When you identify Key Influencers who are passionate about YOUR niche AND their followers, you will have discovered a fertile field in which to plant your crowdfunding campaign. Why? Because these are YOUR people, the ones who LOVE what you love! When you place a Kickstarter or Indegogo project WITHIN a targeted social footprint chock-full of Passionates, funding and momentum occur that much faster. Your Facebook page is GREAT for family and friends to participate BUT you also need to get this project in front of its tribe!

Following is a simple process for getting going:

1. LEARN: Visit KickStarter and Indegogo. Study the projects that have been funded successfully, read the FAQs and blogs and learn how these easy-to-use crowd-funding solutions work.

2. GATHER: your materials: video, photo, music, text.

3. CREATE a promotional video (this one of the MOST important aspects of successfully funding a crowd-funded project).

4. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE/FUNDING SOURCE: Once all of your materials are together and are tightly written, edited and scored, it is time to create the interest graph around your offering. An Interest Graph is a term used to describe the tribe of people who are passionate about the content in YOUR creative offering. While the initial funds for any creative project often come from family and friends, it is a great idea to do a little “intelligence gathering” on your potential audience and funders.

How to do intelligence gathering and assemble a tribe:

a. THE AUDIENCE WITH AN AUDIENCE: Go to wefollow.com , Research.ly and listorious.com. Type in keywords related to your niche. In both of these free solutions, lists of key influencers will emerge. Those influencers and their followers are YOUR tribe. They are the ones who will be interested in what you have to offer.

b. STUDY SUCCESS: Go to Amazon.com and Last.fm and study “similar products” or “tracks you might like” to get an idea of how Creatives of your stripe are marketing themselves. Study the successes AND the failures.

c. AGGREGATE THE INFLUENCERS: Create a Twitter account and brand it. This Twitter account should be around YOUR niche interest. Do NOT title it the name of your movie or album. Title it more generically and then follow ALL of the key influencers you discovered in wefollow.com and listorious.com. Their content and their audiences will be a very valuable resource for you in the following ways:

i. – As an idea of what is trending

ii.- As a virtual tribe to “drop” your Kickstarter or Indegogo project into. Once you create your project in one of these two funding solutions, you can announce it into the fabric of this niche social footprint. The way to do this is simply to tweet the video you created with a link to the Kickstarter project.

iii.- Feedback on your offering. You can direct members of this niche tribe to your video and get valuable feedback. Remember, the best part about critics is how they refine a creative offering. The best Critics are actually lovers of Creativity and offer constructive feedback. Even blistering Critics are valuable since these individuals shave away the fluff and help one identify potency. Never fear a Critic. Seek out a Critic and seduce him or her through your offering.

5. CREATE THE CAMPAIGN: After creating the Interest Graph (the GENERIC “social footprint” around a microsite based on that genre), it is time to create the Kickstarter or Indegogo project. Both sites have EXCELLENT instructions and are very easy to use.

6. MARKET THE PROJECT through your interest graph, to family and friends, and on all of your social networks. Let people know about your project with short punchy tweet-length messaging that contains bit.ly or ow.ly links leading back to the video on YouTube and to the crowd-funding solution.