HootSuite is launching a social analytics platform for monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Google and other services through 30 individual modules accessible through a new design bar.
The modules are available to all users, including Basic, Pro and Enterprise customers.
The modules are made accessible through a point system HootSuite developed. Points are used to purchase the modules. More complex modules cost more points. Users may use the points at any time for any combination of modules.
Sponsor
Modules include:
Track Twitter brand mentions.
Measure Twitter profile follower growth.
Examine Facebook Likes and demographics.
Overlay social link clicks and website visits through Google Analytics and from within the HootSuite dashboard.
The service is designed to fulfill the more common requirements that comes with the advent of social technologies. As companies engage more, there will be a requirement for a new form of social analytics that give an overall sense of volume, visibility and perception about what is being tracked.
The service is integrated into the HootSuite environment. It can be skinned for the company or the client.
Reports can narrow in on specific campaign elements or give an aggregated view of all user profiles within various networks. The reports are fully integrated with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights and a HootSuite short URL. Reports may also be edited and shared.
Earlier this week, Salesforce.com introduced Service Cloud 3, which ties in social analytics. Radian 6 is considered a top competitor in the market. But overall, the space is just emerging, giving HootSuite a position to extend its popular service deeper into companies and agencies that monitor social media campaigns.
The progress and evolution of web design is tremendous. Even though the official specifications of HTML5 and CSS3 have not yet been released, web designers can already make use of many benefits the new era of web design promises. Let us take web fonts embedding, for example. Now you can easily implement any font you like into your web site without any complicated Java scripts or heavy Flash roll-overs. With @font-face kits, font embedding is now a matter of only a few clicks and couple of minutes of your time. These @font-face kits come fully prepared for web embedding – all you need to do is just download your favorite font kit, unzip it, and follow easy-to-understand instructions provided.
When a company called Meltwater Group released an infographic predicting which Oscar nominees would take home prizes, it was quick to issue a caveat that it wasn’t really making a prediction at all. “The most talked-about nominees are not necessarily going to be the ones who are named the winners by the Academy,” it told Mashable, noting that the company’s methodology simply measured online buzz about the nominees while the Oscars are voted on by a small, select group.
Meltwater is one of several companies that use software to measure what is called social media sentiment analysis. It creates several “fire hoses” of data, pulling thousands of tweets, blog posts, and comments from the social web to measure not only the volume of mentions of a company or person, but also break them down into “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral” sentiments. The idea being that a client can measure its public perception over time and pinpoint when its brand is under attack and, more importantly, why.
But even though Meltwater distanced itself from its Oscars predictions, you can’t blame people for searching for signs that this kind of sentiment analysis can predict future markets (for the record, two out of three of Meltwater’s predictions turned out correct). There is something very alluring about the idea of mining the massive amounts of the data social media users produce every day and using it to foretell the future.
Mining for meaning
In 2010, Science published an article asking, “Can Google Predict the Stock Market?” It detailed the work of several scientists who used Google Trends to detect correlations between search queries and market performance over time. “The Google data could not predict the weekly fluctuations in stock prices,” the article concluded. “However, the team found a strong correlation between Internet searches for a company’s name and its trade volume, the total number of times the stock changed hands over a given week.” Earlier that year, another group tried to use the same idea with millions of tweets, producing similarly murky results.
In both cases, there seemed to be a slight correlation found in hindsight, but no magic formula to actually detect future market fluctuations. Perhaps the most promising example of data mining to predict future trends was when Google began finding flu outbreaks nearly two weeks ahead of federal agencies. By monitoring geographic regions for increases in certain search queries — “flu symptoms,” “where to buy a thermometer,” “flu treatments” — the search giant was able to hone in on these trends much quicker than the doctors who lived within those same regions.
The future of prediction
Will we ever be able to collect a ream of social media data and use it to measure sales of an Apple product before it releases its quarterly earnings reports? Will tweets ever be able to predict who will become president? Late last week I spoke to John Rehling, NLP Expert and Senior Software Engineer for Meltwater Group, about the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s analysis.
“I think in terms of predictions, there are a couple of sources of why if you just look at the raw numbers you can’t get a prediction,” he told me. “One would be who’s talking isn’t necessarily a completely representative sample of the universe. For example, maybe people under 18 will talk about something a bit more while people over 18 spend more money.”
Rehling gave the example of a new car’s introduction to the market. While there may be quite a bit of buzz before the car’s release, it’s the actual experience of driving the car that will determine whether customers purchase it en masse. A simple glitch or overlooked imperfection can make all the pre-release social media buzz irrelevant. “So I think with all these things it will be translated, and people will say, ‘Well in our market, here’s what that buzz means.’ It might mean, ‘Hey, this really is a focus group, and it’s really telling us what sales are going to be like.’ And in another case it might indicate here’s what people will think the week our car comes out, and then after that it’s going to be a matter of the driver experience.”
The engineer said that this kind of analysis is much better at mapping long-term trends. A client can view charts detailing volume of discussion and then break these down into sub-categories that measure the varying levels of negative and positive discussion over time. If there’s an increase in negative sentiment, then you can drill down and see the negative keywords that are triggering this response. Rather than acting as a predictor, the tool allows the company to spot problem areas in its public perception that might not be immediately obvious without this aggregate data.
The limitations of data mining
There are certainly blind spots in the data, however, depending on the client and its demographic. Obviously senior citizens are less represented online than young adults, so a product that caters to them might receive a lower volume of mention. There’s also the fact that the largest social network in the world, Facebook, is at least partially a walled garden. Rehling told me that Meltwater’s software can scan public Facebook pages for comments, but a status update on one of the millions of private walls would be blocked off.
“Volume is also going to be important,” he said. “Depending on how big the business is, it’s going to be across the spectrum from a completely overwhelming volume of conversation to basically none. If it’s a small independent bed and breakfast that has one room and is booked two nights a week, obviously there’s not going to be much on the internet about that.”
One question I had was whether social media users are more likely to write about a negative experience than a positive one. We’ll rarely tweet about the calls that go through, but if our cell phone keeps dropping them then we may feel more motivated to complain. Rehling told me this is why it’s important to monitor long-term trends. By creating a baseline of negative feedback it’s much easier to tell when there’s a sudden spike.
Of course this is a far cry from being able to predict the stock market or even the future sales of a single product. In the meantime, we can derive pleasure from this social media sentiment analysis of popular entertainment. Who needs to know the future price of oil when we can focus on more important things, like who is going to win the next American Idol?Image source
John M McKee is often called into organizations to deal with those who can’t deliver on objectives. More often than not, the company is suffering from alignment issues. In this article he provides insight and suggestions to improve results.
In 2011, with web usage, bandwidth, smartphones and tablets all on the rise, it can hardly have escaped the average small business they they must have an online presence. But with “hosting solutions” baffling the majority and even mapping a domain to a free WordPress site still beyond most, the options can be bewildering. At the same time people are more aware of design than ever. UI amongst the best new startups has changed the game and even old laggard portals have undergone a facelift. The iPhone and iPad have brought a new expectation in interface. So the opportunity to make all this easy is potentially huge.
Thus today, simple web site builder Moonfruit has raised new funding from Silicon Valley fund 500 Startups and is re-launching with a new site capable of creating these new design-focused and socially integrated sites for small businesses.
It’s main competitor in this space is Wix. However, its problem is that it is really a surface layer to a building platform (via Flash) and thus there is no rendering on other platforms like mobile. With its new funding Moonfruit is using an extremely consumer-friendly Flash builder for all those web newbies which then renders sites in either Flash or HTML or whatever you are using on Web, mobile or any Tablet browser. Most of Moonfruit’s revenues come from premium paid subscribers are small businesses who want better designed tools to design these better looking sites for the new design-conscious era.
Terms have not been disclosed but the strategic funding with Valley maverick Dave McClure is designed to springboard Moonfruit’s business development in the US. Moonfruit already raised $2.25m in a Series A last September from the US-based Stephens Inc. bank to grow in the US, and is currently the no.1 DIY website builder in the UK, while 30% of its customers are now in the US.
Growth is palpable. Some 3.4 milion sites were built on Moonfruit as of February 2011, versus 2.4 million in the same period last year. It now has 300,000 users, 50,000 premium paying subscribers (a 40% increase from January 2010) and turnover has increased by 51% since Jan 2010.
McClure, Founding Partner, 500 Startups, told us this is a later stage deal than it normally goes for, so therefore a lot of the risk has been taken out of it. But that it was the “great design sensibility, and solutions to everyday problems” that lead it towards Moonfruit.
Cofounder Wendy Tan-White notes that the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs in the United States are still small businesses: 99.7% of companies. Thats a big potential market being left on the table by more slightly more tech solutions like WordPress.
From April Moonfruit is also adding easy blogging with RSS into its core site offering. Where as you can’t edit most blog templates without getting into CSS/HTML, Moonfruit’s will combine ‘literal’ design editing with dynamic, on the fly publishing. Shops are coming in July, editable from an iOS app. A highly customised version of Zendesk is also now integrated.
HootSuite is launching a social analytics platform for monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Google and other services through 30 individual modules accessible through a new design bar.
In 2011, with web usage, bandwidth, smartphones and tablets all on the rise, it can hardly have escaped the average small business they they must have an online presence. But with “hosting solutions” baffling the majority and even mapping a domain to a free WordPress site still beyond most, the options can be bewildering. At the same time people are more aware of design than ever. UI amongst the best new startups has changed the game and even old laggard portals have undergone a facelift. The iPhone and iPad have brought a new expectation in interface. So the opportunity to make all this easy is potentially huge.
