Infegy Blog

Word of mouth is on fire.

The control of brands is shifting from the companies to people. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 3 of adults online want to hear the opinion of a friend or family before making purchasing decisions. More people are using social networks and trusted influencers to aid in their purchasing decisions.

Social Radar can help you manage your brand using one of the biggest content collections in the world. Talk of your brand, company, or products can be measured and managed.

How is the new social web changing your marketing strategies?

The ability to simply listen to social chatter lets you engage customers and thought leaders like never before.

Gain valuable feedback on your products and services not coming from focus groups or complicated marketing research techniques, but from the unfiltered voices of your customer base.

Target negative feedback and use it as a chance to engage someone and create a positive customer service situation where none existed before.

Target highly influential people in your industry and leverage the trust they have built with their readership to put your product/service in front of the right people.

Understand the happenings and trends in your industry as well as activities of your competitors.

Keeping a blind eye to the conversations on the web and tracking the wrong statistics can create a very unrealistic perception of what people truly talk about and how they feel about your brand. Don’t be left in the dark.

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One of the powers of emerging technologies is allowing companies to niche market like never before. Using Social Radar allows me to begin building a strategy around social media monitoring and, down the line, customer engagement. This is the first post in a series that will describe the significance of this tool in your usage of social media as a company.

Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring is becoming more and more popular and essential for companies. For better or for worse, your brand is not completely in your hands. Any person can talk about different aspects of your company in a variety of forms and make their opinion public for potentially millions of people to read using social networks and online tools. It is absolutely imperative that all companies begin to monitor their brand, products, and industry on the internet. Specifically, within the social media world. More people are participating more frequently in social networks every day. Perhaps they are a “fad,” but do you want to take that chance? With all of these online tools, it is becoming easier and easier for more people to become content creators online instead of just content consumers.

Using Social Radar allows you to monitor your company in as many or as few ways as you like. Monitoring is listening. How many times are we told that a good businessperson or a good salesperson is someone who has the ability to listen and deliver? Now you can listen to people talking in social media and utilize their feedback immediately. The information flows in real time, as if you can sit in a stadium full of people and hear only the conversations you want. Can you imagine receiving that kind of instant feedback? Now you can. With Social Radar, you can retrieve content instantly without having to scrape the entire internet or wait for aggregation. This allows for lightning fast and accurate analysis.

Social Radar allows you to build a query you can carry across multiple tools to track trends, key influencers, and even just the posts themselves. You can continue to build and refine your social media monitoring platform in one place using all the tools available from Social Radar. All content created in social media is time sensitive and is attached to specific dates, so you know when things are said, not just that they exist. This is key for information gathering and allows you to plan for the future.

So the questions are…

Are people talking about your company? Product? Industry?

Are you tuning into your customers and what they are saying?

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There are several polls going around about opinions on the hearings for government aid for the big three US automakers.  Autoblog mentioned in this post yesterday that CNN conducted a poll which said 61% of Americans oppose such aid.  They conducted their own poll, which at the time of this writing, had just over 11,000 participants, around 52% of which were in favor of aid.

I decided to run a similar poll using Social Radar’s Sentiment analysis tool to gauge support for this aid around the Web and got similar results, as depicted below:

Interestingly, the results were nearly identical with 54% in favor.  This is especially close if accounting for a few percentage points margin of error from either source.  Interesting stuff!

Looks like the country is very much split on this issue, as with many as of late.

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After a long and tiring election, Barack Obama will be our next President of the United States. There is much speculation and theories of why he was victorious, but the message was clear - people are hungry for change, and Barack Obama is the face of change.

I decided to use Social Radar for some post analysis of the election (pun intended!). I wanted to get some stats on some of the important issues and how much they were being talked about with each of the candidates. I used Social Radar’s Topic Analysis feature to give us a percentage of posts that each word appeared in around that candidate. I also included a trend chart of each topic to give you a percentage of posts that contained each topic with the candidate. These results are all between September 1st, 2008 - November 3rd, 2008. Here are the analysis results.

Business
Obama 10%, McCain 9%

Economy
Obama 6%, McCain 12%

Education
Obama 9%, McCain 4%

Environment
Obama 7%, McCain 10%

Foreign Policy
Obama 10%, McCain 7%

Healthcare
Obama 8%, McCain 9%

Religion
Obama 20%, McCain 9%

Science
Obama 2%, McCain 3%

Security
Obama 14%, McCain 11%

Tax
Obama 10%, McCain 10%

Technology
Obama 2%, McCain 2%

War
Obama 10%, McCain 16%

These results are certainly interesting, and some even a little surprising. This may not necessarily show why Obama was chosen, but this certainly helps show how important each topic was for each candidate.

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The highly anticipated launch of the iPhone 3G drove many overzealous Apple fanatics to wait at AT&T and Apple stores around the country many hours before the stores opened its doors. I’m not afraid to admit that I was one of them. I, as well as many others, spent our July 11th morning in lawn chairs trying to make use of our time as we patiently awaited our opportunity to get our hands on the newest model of the most revolutionary communication device ever created. When 8am finally hit, the coordinated employees waved in a group at a time to purchase the phones. I was in the second group, and was very ready to walk out of the store with a fantastic new iPhone 3G to play with. However, my excitement started to go sour.

The activation was taking a seemingly long amount of time, and I was given the the bad news that the activation servers were overloaded and I’d have to try again at home. I arrive home to plug in my iPhone and received the same error message. My prior cell phone had been deactivated, but my new phone could not be activated. I had to face the harsh reality that my telecommunication availability was at the mercy of Apple’s servers. Thankfully, the issue was resolved in a few hours, and I could enjoy the new device.

I’m a pretty forgiving person, but its truly a shame when great things get overshadowed by bad events. I had a feeling that this fiasco would generate a plethora of bad press. But, after doing some Social Radar research, it didn’t seem to be quite as bad as I was expecting.

I built a chart comparing all chatter of the iPhone 3G to chatter about the iPhone and activation related chatter.

Looking at the chart above, roughly 7-8% of the iPhone chatter on launch day was related to the activation problems. I was surprised, as I assumed it would be much higher. Granted, I tried to cover many ways that the activation fiasco may have been mentioned, and not all may have been captured here. But, I’m confident that this chart gives us an accurate gauge and covers a good majority of it.

Let’s narrow down and do some comparisons. Below is a bar chart of the difference in iPhone and activation problem related chatter on 7/11.

From this chart above, we can see that almost 14% of the chatter was related to the issues. This is still relatively low. However, let’s see a bar chart for this same comparison on 7/14 (three days later).

This chart shows that in just 3 days, this chatter has lowered to only around 8% of the chatter, nearly half as much.

We can conclude that it looks like Apple has been forgiven and people have moved past the issues they had on launch day.

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Social Networking is changing every day. New services are spawning constantly with new and creative ways to interact with others. Popularity is shifting between these services. But, where will it go from here? Where should it go from here?

I think the key ingredient to the future of Social Networking is mobility. Many services like Twitter, Brightkite, Flickr and others are starting to add some great mobile support, but I believe there are more great things to come. What I’d love to see is a centralized social networking application that comes standard on smartphones and other mobile phones. That will help generate mass appeal and more widespread use. This application would need to take more advantage of the GPS capabilities that are gaining traction in smartphones and provide the ability to view people near you with no involvement whatsoever. Imagine walking into a bar or club, taking your cell phone out of your pocket and seeing a list of people in the bar that want to chat and meet. Imagine being able to send a message to anyone in the area saying “I’m shy, come talk to me.” Socializing would be revolutionized. Making a new friend or meeting a new guy or girl could be accomplished by simply walking in the door.

So, it starts with more mass mobility and widespread use. Then, the possibilities become more and more exciting. You could walk in a restaurant and send a message to people eating at the restaurant for a recommendation on what to order. You could talk to people in an airport and find someone to get coffee with you while you wait for your flight. I’d love to be able to see stats around the city - how many people are where and who’s doing what. Just think of how fantastic it would be to have the option of viewing the most popular events around the city in real-time or check out a map of a specific area and see where the hot spots are at the moment. Data could be gathered from this service to pull some amazing analytics such as the amount of visitors a location gets on average, or what day of the week it receives the most traffic. The possibilities are quite endless.

As Social Networking expands, I’m sure we will see many of these desires become a reality. Our world is becoming more and more virtual and we need to be ready to adapt to it. I, for one am thrilled to be a part of it and am excited to see what the future holds.

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The long awaited iPhone 3G announcement came as no surprise to enthusiasts last Monday at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Many websites have been discussing and rumoring the iPhone 3G months prior to the event. But, it didn’t stop the roars and cheers of the crowd as Steve Jobs made the official confirmation. As with any iPhone related news, we expected a surge in online chatter. We were right.

That’s a nice surge. On June 9th, 2008, 1 in every 55 post mentioned the iPhone.

I think it’s safe to say that there was plenty of buzz about it. However, we wanted to dive in a little deeper and find the hot topics of discussion around the 3G iPhone. We ran our popular topics feature in Social Radar. Here is what we found.

1: “gps” (30%)
2: “price” or “cost” (26%)
3: “app” or “applications” (21%)
4: “speed” or “fast” (10%)
5: “mobileme” (7%)
6: “audio” (7%)
7: “battery” (5%)

Above is a list of the most interesting topics we found, showing a percentage of how much each topic appeared in iPhone related chatter. The words are stemmed, so “fast” should also pick up “faster” or “fastest”. This is an interesting outcome, as I would have expected more mentions of its increase in speed and improved battery life. As we can see from this list, the GPS was a very large topic of discussion among this chatter, and it’s easy to see that people feel this was the most substantial upgrade to the phone.

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Microblogging is becoming more and more popular and much of its success can be contributed to Twitter, a service that has proven to be a powerhouse as its growth continues to explode. But, as with any concept that catches on, there are bound to be contenders who attempt to do it better. Who are these competitors and are they up to the challenge to take on the microblogging champion? We decided to do a little research with Social Radar.

Below is a chart to show chatter over the last 90 days of the big Twitter contenders (Plurk, Brightkite, Pownce, and Jaiku).

From the chart above, it shows that Jaiku has a small lead on these other services. Jaiku is a very similar service to Twitter, and with the recent announcement of a Google partnership, it has a strong recipe for success. However, not far behind Jaiku is Pownce. That’s no surprise, as the Digg.com founder, Kevin Rose was a creator of Pownce, which has helped lead to some easy conversions. However, as we dug in a little deeper, we noticed something interesting. Plurk, a service very similar to Twitter which offers some additional features such as an interactive timeline and “karma”, a number that correlates to your post activity and friends, has been generating a lot of buzz over the past week or so.

Due to Twitter’s recent lack of functionality and constant downtime, complaints have been swarming around the community and has caused many to look elsewhere to fulfill their microblogging desires. As of just this last week, there has been substantially more Plurk chatter than any of the 3 other services combined.

Will this trend continue? It’s hard to say. But, this certainly means that Plurk has a real shot at being the prevailing contender over the next few months.

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What is Twitter? A lot of people are starting to figure it out. But, many still do not understand it. It’s such a simple concept - update your status in 140 characters or less from your phone or computer which is sent out to anyone “following” you. You can follow others, and figure out where people are, what they are doing, and what they are thinking. It seems pointless to many, but yet there is an underlying value that isn’t so obvious. It allows instant communication and connection with the people from wherever you are at any time, restricted to a few sentences. There are many using it to connect on a business level, and not just a personal level. For example, Zappos.com is using Twitter to notify people of giveaways and prizes, which is creating a lot of chatter and followers for them, and in turn increasing awareness of their brand and their products. There are endless possibilities and many people are finding new ways to use Twitter every day. This concept is catching on like wildfire and people love it. But, a wild fire is exactly what it’s becoming.

Twitter’s popularity has been flourishing, and much of its success is due to South by Southwest, a conference that has one of the biggest Interactive events in the country. However, just within the last few months, their popularity has increased so much that they are leaving their Tweeters with nothing but error pages, feature down messages, and slowness. As with any unexpected growth, issues are likely. Luckily, the Tweeters are forgiving and chatter has stayed surprisingly positive throughout the social spectrum.

As Twitter continues to grow and they begin to support their growth, this platform for communication can be vastly expanded upon. There are so many features and concepts that can be derived from the groundwork that Twitter has created. I, for one, hope that they start focusing heavily on development to take this fantastic communication outlet to a whole new level.

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Remember Ron Paul? It was no more than just a few short months ago when Ron Paul was all the rage. Internet forums, blogs, and social networking sites were flooded with Ron Paul rants and raves from believers in his candidacy. What happened to all this chatter? What are these people talking about now? As for a lot of them, the answer is Barack Obama.

Barack Obama and Ron Paul may not have a lot of the same views, but they do share one common principal that our young generation is craving - change. So, when did this shift begin? When did Barack Obama begin to take social media and the internet by storm? We were curious, so we dove into Social Radar and did some quick investigation.

First, we’re going to show you where the shift began. Notice that Ron Paul and Obama are fairly close in the amount of chatter, right up to the beginning of January. But more importantly, we can see that chatter begins to surge in early January. This can be tied to the event of the Iowa Caucus, which occurred on January 3rd, 2008.

Let’s now take a look at a comparitive bar chart for the month of December, 2007.

Obama has about twice the amount of chatter as Ron Paul, which isn’t surprising due to the amount of play he’s received from news sites and mass media. Now, let’s take a look at this same comparison chart for February, 2008, not more than 1 month from the Iowa Caucus, what we’ve determined to be the start of Obama’s e-popularity.

His chatter increased over 300% in only 2 months, while Ron Paul’s chatter decreased almost 50% in that same period of time. Barack Obama is now mentioned, on average, in 1 out of every 100 blog posts.

We’ve concluded that the Iowa Caucus was a wakeup call for the internet. The Ron Paul dream began to fade, and Barack Obama became more a reality and a real possibility. Those who crave change now have new faith and a realistic dream.

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