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May 08 2012
[Webinar] “Instant Insights” – learn how to automate getting insights from social media
Recently, we started seeing a pattern in our customer conversations. “There’s just too much data, too many mentions” a marketer at a well-known brand confessed. An account manager at a big agency had similar issues: “It’s difficult to understand what’s important and what I should act on. I need to do this quickly, I have a lot of work on my plate. I can’t just sit around looking at mentions all day.”
With this growing avalanche of social media data, it’s no wonder marketers are feeling overwhelmed. They don’t need data, but insights, and getting them quickly is becoming critical to their day to day jobs. That’s one of the reasons why the job of Data Scientist has gained incredible popularity lately. Getting these insights is so valuable that McKinsey projects ”a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively“.
But is hiring a data scientist or a full-time analyst the only way you can understand what’s going on, in real time?
We strongly believe that software, rather than people, should contribute most to the solution. After all, social media is being integrated into the enterprise more and more, and not all marketers or customer service reps can do the analyst’s job.
uberVU Signals is our very own artificial intelligence software that automatically analyzes your brand mentions and detects the actionable conversations and events. If an influencer spreads the word about one of your products, or a story catches everyone’s attention on the web and spreads like fire, you’d most likely want to be there to assess the situation and use those insights to make informed decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
If you want to learn how to use Signals to get insights for your organization, join us on May 10th for the “Instant Insights” Webinar.
May 01 2012
Introducing uberVU Signals: automatic insight detection from social data
Companies are data rich and insight poor, considers Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. With social sharing doubling every year and the average enterprise managing 178 social media accounts, enterprises are getting buries under an avalanche of data. But it’s not data companies need, it’s insights they can act on. Getting these insights is so valuable that McKinsey projects ”a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively“. But is hiring an expensive and rare data scientist the only way for you to understand what social data means and get the insights you really need, in real time? There has to be an easier way!
Today, we are launching uberVU Signals, a ground-breaking product for the social media industry. uberVU Signals is a set of artificial intelligence technologies that automatically extract actionable insights from the overwhelming number of social conversations that you have a hard time keeping track of. Think about it as your very own social media personal assistant, mining the data for you and just sending you a set of insights as they happen. You’re standing on a goldmine – and that’s the data flowing into your mentions streams everyday. Getting social insights from it can transform business entirely. You don’t have to mine this data yourself anymore, Signals will do the hard work for you. Here’s how it works.
Unlocking big data’s true potential
Digital trends are happening really fast, and it’s getting harder to stay on top of everything. You need to react quickly when something big is around the corner, and constantly listening to the buzz in social media is a very important first step. But there are far greater results to be achieved through intelligently delivered insights.
Our technology makes it possible for you to make decisions based on insightful solutions, for a measurable business advantage. This is a knowledge-centred approach to social media, one that allows you to go past the standard metrics like buzz volume and evolution, sentiment values or number of estimated views and extract the “signals”: topics that everyone’s talking about, industry news that are changing the market and could impact your company, people who have the ability to shift attitudes. Having all this data simply showing up in your dashboard or inboxes at the right time will make you more efficient when developing your strategy and action plans.
We detect the signals, you get all the social media love
With social media Signals, you can be immediately notified of any major opportunity or vulnerability for your brand, without the need to dig through mentions or interpret analytics. Information is extremely powerful, because it provides a record track of every important change in your market and by using it, you get an overviews of the stories, people and places that push your name to the newsstands.
Signals detects 3 types of insights right now, with dozens that are being added:
- Trending stories around your brand, product, competitors
- Influencer mentions
- Spikes and trends of any kind (more males talking about you on Twitter in German than usual)
If an influencer spreads the word about one of your products, or a story catches everyone’s attention on the web and spreads like fire, you’d most likely want to be there to assess the situation and use those insights to make informed decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly. uberVU Signals crafts actionable insights to understand who starts the valuable conversations in your community, what important events are shaping your brand reputation and who to engage with at the right time. By doing this, you’ll know exactly where to target your action and resources.
The best part of this amazing feature is that it doesn’t simply highlight changes, but it correlates them with other important KPIs, like share of voice, geolocation, top languages and anything else that’s relevant. This is to ensure you have the big picture when the next alert about your keywords will be popping on your radar.
You can instantly take action for a top story: post it directly from the widget in the dashboard, or send it to your preferred social networks. Why wait, when you can act right away on an inside scoop you’ve found and gain social status? When it comes to spikes & bursts for analytics like language, sentiment or geolocation, you have the option of moving your attention to the stream (to check everything that people are saying right as it’s happening) or sending the event as a beautiful PDF report to your email address for later reference.
So how can you test out uberVU Signals for your own company? It’s very simple.
If you’re not an uberVU customer yet, we can personally give you a demo & a trial of Signals, already set up for your brand. You can also sign up for the Signals Webinar on the 10th of May, where we’ll be showcasing Signals and going into a lot of interesting use cases.
If you’re already an uberVU customer, you can either run the Signals Wizard from the Signals link in the left side menu (under Dashboard) or you can use Configure Stream for each stream you want Signals to be enabled on.
Signals is a very powerful addition to our social intelligence dashboard, one that will most definitely enhance your experience in social media. You can start playing with Signals right away, just log into your account and give it a spin. We’re always appreciative of your feedback and support, so please tell us what you think of this new uberVU release.
Get an in-depth walkthrough of Signals by signing up to the Signals Webinar on May 10th.
uberVU Releases “Signals” – Helping Brands Like PayPal Easily Identify, Understand and Take Action on Most Crucial Social Media Activity
We’re very excited to launch what we believe to be a true game changer in how companies get actionable insights from social media – uberVU Signals.
You can find out more about how Signals works here, and read the press release here.
You can see Signals in action for free on May 10th by signing up to the Signals Webinar here: http://business.ubervu.com/signals-webinar/
Here are some key excerpts from the release:
“uberVU Signals gives us actionable insights, identifying the most critical conversations about our brand and industry. Its ability to instantly categorize all the data available helps us to better understand what to take immediate action on,” said Jon Bishop, Innovation & Social Communications Manager of PayPal, a long time uberVU customer. “When conversations in the marketplace are important, Signals ensures we’re the first to know so we can react faster and better. It takes the work out of monitoring social media and enables us to focus on smarter, more valuable engagement strategies.”
“Think of Signals as automation for Social Media. Has an influencer mentioned your brand or your competition? Is there a spike of negative sentiment in Los Angeles about one of your products? Has your number of Facebook fans increased dramatically today because of a news story? uberVU will show you all that and more, in real time, 24X7. Brands don’t have to waste time anymore by drilling down to look for the needle in the haystack,” said Vladimir Oane, Chief Product Officer.
As social media becomes integrated throughout different divisions of every organization – from HR to marketing, customer service to business development and more – the ability for each department to see pertinent information in real time is critical for action and decision making. With social media sharing doubling every year, brands are spending more and more time sifting through thousands of conversations in search of insights and actionable information – and trying to figure out who in the company should handle or respond to each. uberVU Signals makes it easy for brands – decreasing the risk of missing critical conversations or information in due time and automatically surfacing important information that can be routed to the appropriate function in the organization – avoiding the need to sort through huge amounts of data.
April 26 2012
The perfect social media report – tips and tricks to get the best results
We can no longer hide from the importance of using social media, no matter how reluctant some people are. But for those that have a hard time figuring out how all this wraps up in a coherent strategy, it would be ideal if you could prove that your daily online activities actually make sense.
It’s fairly easy for web companies or small agencies to understand why social engagement does pay off, but if you’re part of a bigger company or a traditional organization, how do you convince your boss that it’s worth investing time and money in social media? Determinining the ROI and value of social media has given headaches to marketers ever since the beginning. It’s definitely not an easy task to handle, but no matter how you choose to do it, it’s always bypassed by an important step called social media reporting.
Why should you care about social media reporting?
To make sure social media is worthwhile, you need to track your activities on a monthly basis – make that weekly, if your level of interactions is similar to that of a larger company. By gathering all the data into social media reports, you have the possibility to determine which channels are the most effective for building conversations and where exactly in the sales funnel do social media actions come up. In the end, what you’re trying to do is to gain insight into your community’s behaviour and figure out how it relates to your business goals.
“… each report serves as a benchmark for future activity.” (Brian Solis)
You’re probably already tracking your website’s traffic and measuring sales figures. So it makes sense that you would want to correlate all this with the numbers coming in from social media measurement. Especially if you’ve started employing online netwotks across all your organization, people from all departments (marketing, sales, customer support) would benefit from knowing how it all fits together and if it adds up to your overall business strategy.
How does the perfect social media report look like?
Beautiful graphs are always a big plus
A great report is a comprehensive review of your brand’s online presence and an analysis of your market & clients. Let’s take a look at what performance metrics should this flawless report contain:
The big numbers (aka quantitative metrics):
- overall number of mentions – though engagement is not measured in numbers, it’s pretty clear why you would need to know exactly how many reactions your keywords caused to assess the impact of your social media presence
- top social platforms and the conversation share for each one of them – social networks where most of the buzz comes from and where to focus your attention
- overall exposure (views) – an estimation of how many times people viewed your content or anything you shared through social media
- geolocation – the countries, regions and cities where most of the talks took place
The refined statistics (aka qualitative metrics):
- audience demographics – who are the people that are driving the conversations surrounding your name (location, gender)
- conversations evolution on the social web (graphical) and top conversations by platform and subject
- tag cloud – most important topics related to the main subject
- sentiment - so you can understand your customers’ feelings, attitudes and opinions about your brand
- gender distribution – to know who to target on your next campaign
- top influencers – who creates most of the buzz and has the ability to change the way your business is perceived, how many people follow them
How to boost your social media reporting
After making sure all these mandatory metrics are included in your report, you can take the time to include some other extra information than will power up your reporting:
1. You should always have the option of filtering results by a specific demographic sector, country, social networks or timeframes. But what’s even more important is cross-filtering. For example, you might need the sentiment for a specific time period, top platforms used in Asia or how many women posted on Facebook about your last campaign.
2. Another feature is the possibility of including the actual text of mentions you are interested in (for example, mentions with a specific tag) – this is very useful if you want to highlight an update that got a lot of WOM on the web – for example, this tweet from Dropbox’ CEO after Google Drive was launched sure made a lot of people smile.
3. You could also benefit from Facebook and Twitter specific metrics, like the number of new followers and unfollows, mentions, viral reach and engagement graphs. These are not details you get a hand on by simply monitoring a keyword.
4. To check out industry trends, you can track your competitors’ names and specific topics from your line of work and add them in the report about your brand name. This way, you’ll identify emerging trends and significant changes happening in your market. Engaging in topics that are important for your business and establishing yourself as a thought leader is a great use of a detailed report. A comparison feature always helps in getting the full picture of what you’re tracking.
Having the data does not equal getting the insights
A good report should provide a comprehensive approach to monitoring – you don’t have to swim through oceans of data to gain insights that you can discuss upon at the highest levels of your organization. Developing an action plan based on the most important findings should also come in handy after flipping through an awesome report.
The end purpose of reporting is to back your future plans with reliable data and help you make informed decisions – not just about social media, but about your entire organization. You should be able to see at a glance what you’ve gained using social media and where to focus your efforts from now on.
What questions should a comprehensive report answer?
Reputation: Is there an increasing interest for my product in a specific part of the world? Is my brand visible enough for the demographic section I’m currently targeting or should I shift my focus? What values are people associating with my brand?
Attitude: How do people feel about my brand? What’s the tone of conversations around my brand name?
Costs: Where should you invest your social media efforts? What social network do your customers prefer to use? What percentage of your marketing budget should you allocate to social media? Will social media investments contribute to an increase in sales?
Competitors: How are others in my industry using social media? Who is setting the trends? What are the key influencers in your line of work and how could you transform them into ambassadors?
April 25 2012
Google Drive getting a positive welcome
Google just launched a cloud storage service that was intended as a direct Dropbox competitor. The social conversations we registered around this topic showed a far bigger interest from men (80% compared to only 20% women). The spike in mentions is correlated to the time the announcement was made, with Twitter as the main driver for social talk.
The overall positive reactions we caught were most likely caused by the generous storage limit that Google set for Drive – 5 GB. At least when comparing it to Dropbox (which starts with a 2 GB plan), because other storage tools, like Sugarsync or Box, also offer 5 GB. Another thing that definitely helped was the PR stunts they created when news about the rumoured service started appearing on the web, developers leaked a preview about the new service prior to its launch, or an article was mistakenly posted on Google’s French blog.
Looking at the tag cloud, it’s easy to spot the main topics that people talked about in relation to this subject: the fact that it seamleassly integrates with Google Docs, Android and Google Apps; the big impact it will have on similar services: Skydrive, Box, or Dropbox, now a market leader; Mashable is nominated as a top influencer for this news; it’s also obvious that discussions about the ownership of cloud-stored files have already started.
April 18 2012
Measure your team’s social activity with the new engagement metrics
We’ve been working on new ways to help you understand how your social media team is performing. Managing your online presence is definitely not an easy job, and it’s even harder when you have to look over the activities of an entire organization. You’ve got your support team answering questions on Twitter, your event planners posting pictures from the last conference on Facebook, marketing people promoting your services on all relevant platforms and so on. How do you handle all of this?
We developed a set of targeted, but powerful engagement metrics to help you maximize your team’s potential. You get detailed info on how many times each of your team members engaged from inside the dashboard, how quick they are to respond to queries from customers and how they’ve evolved from one week to another. What we count as engagement are actions such as replies and retweets.
Keep track of who did what in your social media team
You can use these analytics to perform a social media audit trail of your entire team or for each group. It’s basically a set of records that helps you track the activities of your team’s involvement in social media. We archive all the social media conversations that your employees engaged in using uberVU – this is important especially for bigger companies that deal with security measures and specific industry regulations (these are critical measures for financial companies or government agencies, who have to set up social media policies before joining the conversation).
By going to the General tab in Settings, you can download the entire log for your team. The data you get in the CSV file contains a complete activity history for each message sent from the dashboard: date, login email of the sender, social account used to send the message (since you can add multiple accounts, one can post from either the company’s account, a personal one or a dedicated account for certain activities like social customer service), social platform, the actual text of the message, as well as complete data for the post it was intended as a reply to (account name, message, date).
All this information is extremely useful when you’re trying to make sure that every employee is accountable for their social media activities. Since all messages are captured in their initial form for all your employees, you can easily back up the data for social media compliance issues, keep tabs on the engagement workflow for review purposes, as well as the filter the data by any criteria in case you need to draw up activity reports.
PS. For a better grasp on what your team is doing, you can always turn to the permissions tab to define which social networks employees have access to. You can even choose which streams they’re allowed to work with.
April 17 2012
Social monitoring for real-time disaster management
What if we used social media as a real-time barometer of everything that’s taking place around us, in the real word? It’s already happening: public organizations, NGOs or government agencies are utilizing social media not just to spread out messages, but also to warn people of emerging natural disasters.
Social media monitoring is not yet fully-equipped to deal with events like earthquakes and tsunamis – but using a real-time monitoring tool, you can get a lot closer to developing a real-time alert & response system that can actually change the way we deal with disasters.
While monitoring social mentions on earthquakes, we noticed a massive spike in mentions on April 11th, at 10:00 GMT. Looking at the stream, we correlated this to the earthquakes that happenned on both coasts of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island. The spike can be tied to people’s panicked attempts to leave for higher grounds – the earthquake could have triggered a tsunami wave all across the Indian Ocean, mimicking a series of events that happened in 2004, in approximately the same area. Luckily, the tsunami alert was lifted after 4 hours. Social conversations increased with 1148% in this geographical region over a period of 6 hours.
Top countries where social conversations took place (for the period of 10-12 April) are:
Since the outburst for Indonesia was far bigger than the ones for US and Japan, but the overall social media coverage was less impressive, we decided to further investigate the issue.
Moving on to April 12th, we caught important stories about earthquakes happening in the Gulf of California and western Mexico (both happened at around 22:00 GMT). However, the most powerful insights we discovered using the uberVU system where geography bursts coming from Japan (there were as much as 1987% more mentions than usual in just 1 hour, with an increase of 87% mentions in japanese). Top stories we registered came from traditional media outlets like CNN and Bloomberg (for Mexico and US news). In the case of Japan, news dissemination was handled mostly by the Japan Meteorological Agency. This could be an explanation of the fact that there were a lot more mentions in US and Japan than the ones in Indonesia.
The data we got is indicative of the way we can use these online channels to stay up to date with hazards through instant notifications, crisis assessments and monitoring disaster effects. An emergency management program could include issuing live warnings for citizens to limit the damage suffered. For example, disaster mitigation agencies can send out evacuation orders, or embassies can use this information to give real-time travel bulletins.
April 12 2012
Working on it ...
April 11 2012
The database wants a small upgrade...
New Facebook Analytics to understand how you reach your fans
We’ve updated our Facebook Analytics to reflect the new Page Insights that Facebook has introduced for Brand Pages. The default view shows the total number of interactions for the last week, but you get detailed info for each day at mouseover.
What does each of these metrics mean?
Viral reach is the number of unique people that saw your stories from their friends activities, for example if they shared, commented or liked your post, answered a question, RSVPd to an event or posted directly on your wall. The number reflects how many times were your updates seen.
People Talking about measures how much conversations you’re generating through the content you’re posting on Facebook. The interactions that make up this metric include activities shared in users’ timelines, from posting to your wall to sharing, liking or commenting any type of content you add to your Page (posts, photos, questions, events). So this basically answers the question of how many people created a story from one of your posts.
“It’s not about the number of fans, it’s about engagement”
Why are these metrics important? In social media, there have been numerous talks about what to measure when trying to gauge your company’s ROI. The numbers of fans is, of course, important, but on the long term it’s best to focus on the engagement we drive through our interactions with them. It basically boils down to 2 questions: should we make more people click the like button or should we strive to understand what they’re interested in after they become fans?
Metrics like “Viral Reach” and “People talking about” put things into perspective. You can have less fans than a bigger business, but get more engagement from your community’s members. The metrics are a true gem for community managers who want to show their teams & bosses what they’ve been really doing for the brand. Your ultimate goal is not getting more fans, but making sure your content reaches a larger portion of them.
Keep in mind that even people who are not yet fans can see this metric, so it’s important to try to improve your page’s activity, as this number reflects on your overall reputation – how well your community responds to updates by engaging in talks and sharing stories, and how valuable your content is.
We have also included a demographic data tab in the Analytics. What you get here is a breakdown of all the activity on your FB Page by language, country, gender and age, so it’ll be easier for you to understand your fanbase – where most of your fans are located, what’s the age group you’re most popular with. Remember you can choose who receives your updates by targeting users by location and language, so these are important analytics you can use when you decide what to post on your Facebook Timeline.
April 09 2012
Pinterest & the Age of Visual Thinking
We’ve all been flooded with news about the way Pinterest’s popularity skyrocketed these past few months. And, since we’re dealing with probably the fastest growing network of recent years (though its success wasn’t as sudden as you might think), an analysis of why and how it happened seems appropriate.
Cartoon by Tom Fishburne
Shaping a world of visual culture
Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr are an expression of our increasing interest for a more visual type of content, one that is easier to digest and share across multiple social outlets. The viral success of memes and infographics is a clear indicator of how much we’re attracted by this type of visualizing data. Images are easier to remember than words and this leads to a quicker understanding of the information they convey – not to mention more engagement.
Pinterest is tapping into behavior that went beyond simply sharing. Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group
On Pinterest, you can not only collect and organize all the visual reminders of things that inspire you, but it also fuels some sort of serendipitous discovery of valuable content. And that also translates to the way you relate to those collections and discoveries. Here is an interesting explanation by Semil Shah of the way Pinterest actually changes the purchasing funnel and shifts traditional search methods:
“As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running sneakers.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate (pun intended).”
What made people so infatuated about Pinterest?
A few of the reasons why Pinterest has become so appealing to adopters:
1. adding new content is very fast. Basically, through tools like the Pin It bookmarklet, there’s no need to look for share buttons, shorten URLs or open new tabs. Of course, you can use sharing plugins for other social networks as well, but Pinterest is focused on collecting interesting pieces of content, not necessarily promoting them, and putting things into boxes has never been easier.
2. user interaction is not limited by lists of friends or followers. From the homepage, you can look at content posted by pinners you follow, everything that is being posted or just view a domain of your choosing. By putting your mouse over an image, you can quickly like the content, comment on it or even repin it on your own boards – no extra steps needed. The site is entirely public, so your pins are likely to receive feedback from people that are not a part of your social graph. Reaching out to fellow Pinterest users is not interrupted by the need to follow them or request their friendship, which simplifies engagement.
3. it has a totally different approach to socialization: the platform helps people gather around ideas, not common friends or groups. The way you relate to your network of friends through shared messages is not that important here, but rather how your content reflects on other people. This is also obvious from the way content is showcased: on other networks, it’s time-sensitive and displayed in a reverse chronological order; on Pinterest we’re dealing with a carefully organized content, with an emphasis on categories and areas of interest. This gives your content a longer shelf-life than Twitter or Facebook updates.
“Consumers are compiling and sharing photos and video, like an earlier generation collected LPs and bumper stickers, as their version of defining and projecting their individual identity.” Antony Young, AdAge
4. another reason why Pinterest is so addictive is that it’s changing users’ social adventure through a great user experience – their secret was an awesome design that includes optimal use of space through a “masonry” layout and an infinite scrolling browsing style. Also note that Facebook is using these 2 “tricks” on the new Timeline. As a matter of fact, the recent revamping of the interface & board layout is a reminder of Facebook’s way of showing photo albums: bigger image at the top and a few thumbnails underneath.
The rise of visual curation
Just as the first wave of social media has transformed the consumption of information, this next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time. Om Malik, gigaom.com
All this success is most likely driven by our insatiable need of finding relevant and meaningful content across the endless ocean of information that the web currently consists of. And Pinterest, along with all the other curation tools (remember weheartit or craftgawker?), are doing a great job at organizing this informational chaos in a compelling and valuable way. It also redefines the way we relate to content – sharing information in a visual format creates more emotional responses and captures attention faster.
It’s a well-known fact that most social web users don’t create content, but rather consume it. The fact that we have to deal with so much content has shifted our main interest from being successful content creators to thought-leaders - and Pinterest appeared at the right moment. These type of platforms have created a new type of web users – the social curators, which are just as legitimate as any other and have to power of changing the way we relate to social media.
If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all. Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org
Is Pinterest not being fair to its user base?
However, there are 2 sides to every story: while the service gives users the tools to curate content from all over the web, the first set of rules they’ve drawn up clearly stated that users were responsible for making sure they hold the rights for pinned images. Some have even predicted Pinterest could end the same way as Napster if it lets users share protected images without permission.
What I see Pinterest doing is employing you (without pay, mind you) to amass a giant library of original content for them. Kalliopi Monoyios, ScientificAmerican
Though you may think that artists can gain a lot from being discovered through such curation tools, the issue changes if someone else gains material compensations from their work. Even the fact that Pinterest doesn’t show ads or any other strategy of making a profit from all the traffic they get can suggest that their rules are intentionally loose, so that they can monetize content later on.
Nevertheless, copyright issues are of a crucial importance to the social network’s future success, and something had to be done. The company offered websites the option of using nopin tags to keep people from pinning their content – but this merely throws the cat in the users’ yard. As a response to copyright infringements issues, Pinterest recently updated their terms of service. They now state that you are not allowed to post content that “infringes any third party’s Intellectual Property Rights, privacy rights, publicity rights, or other personal or proprietary rights”. This means that their previous policy of avoiding self promotion is also getting a revamp, since it becomes not only acceptable, but also advisable to express yourself through your own content. Even Pinterest’s founder deleted his old account in an attempt to “remember how new Pinterest user’s feel”.
Will you be needing a strategy for your visual content?
Pinterest is a great service for bookmarking and curating personal interests, but since it gathered so much attention, it has also become a playground for brands to discover new ways of promoting their messages. The new type of online behavior generated by sites like Pinterest is determining marketers to create “pinnable” content, with carefully-crafted designs that are visually appealing and easy to share.
Brands have quickly flocked to the new platform, and some of them manage it pretty well. Random House Books are not only sharing books from their shop, but also literature-related tattoos, gifts or book quotes. That’s a great way of interacting with fans through emotionally-appealing content, without being too self-promotional. Another interesting method of using Pinterest is creating event-specific boards, like it happened for SXSW: from restaurants and music parties, to must-have gears and gadgets. And take a look at how The Wall Street Journal uses their account to share memorable quotes by using a custom method of creating compelling images. Even Barack Obama‘s team maintains an active Pinterest account. :)
What you need to remember is that this new platform is as social as every other, so use it for sharing valuable content and try to follow these simple rules (read the entire blogpost to understand why it’s important to always credit the original source):
April 04 2012
5 tactics to increase your visibility in Facebook’s Newsfeed
A Facebook Page Like does not equal people checking out your content each time you post
It’s getting harder to get your content noticed by fans – and with Facebook’s new Timeline, making sure people see your updates becomes even more challenging. Facebook ranks everything you post through a complex algorithm that you have no control over. It’s important to know how your content is being discovered and what drives engagement so that you can draw up a successful Facebook strategy.
People don’t normally come back to your Fanpage after they’ve clicked the Like button just to check out what you’ve posted – so your brand needs to remain a top-of-mind name through the content shown in their newsfeeds. Only 16% of Facebook fans actually see content that companies post organically on the social network. Put this on top of the fact that content receives most of the attention in the first hour or so after publication, and you’ll understand why a content strategy is necessary.
How does Facebook decide how well your content performs?
1. The type of content that drives the most interaction are PHOTOS. The main reason why this could be happening is the fact that Facebook doesn’t want you to leave the platform and would rather have all the action happen on their territory. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post links or videos, it’s just that photos are a lot easier to understand and digest, therefore they catch more interest.
2. Updating your FB page using third party apps results in posts that are less visible than if you posted them manually. Also, automating your status updates is not desirable, since now updates from the same APIs get collapsed into a single story. Could this be a sign that Facebook doesn’t want you posting from social media management tools? If you use a management tool, chances are that you’re posting updates on multiple platforms at the same time or that you’re scheduling them – and that means less engagement on the platform itself.
3. Less is more: The frequency of your posts should be moderate, which means no flooding people’s newsfeeds with your updates every hour (nobody wants to be considered spammy), but at the same time you need to make sure you stay on their radar – so at least 2 or 3 posts per day should do the trick. It’s probably even better if you get your fans used to a schedule, for example, starting every week with a “tips and tricks” type of material, or each day with a significant photo. Also, it seems like status updates perform better if they don’t contain more than 80 characters. Once again, quality trumps quantity, so make sure what you post is relevant to your followers.
4. Ask questions – it’s the most clear call to action you can find. Even fill in the blanks type of updates work, as long as you give people the chance to post simple answers.
5. It’s better to use full links instead of shortened ones. This tactic increases interaction, because it’s easier for users to see what the posted content is and they’ll be more likely to click on the link.
And remember – the more your content is shared, the more exposure time it gets, which increases your visibility in people’s newsfeeds. Fans mentioning your brand’s name are another great asset for your awareness level, especially since the new timeline displays these mentions in a highlighted box, making sure people know who of their friends have previously interacted with you.
March 27 2012
Scheduled downtimes for hardware maintenance
We will do some hardware maintenance today (28/03/2012) from 00:30 CEST to 02:00 CEST. Most of this should go unnoticed by you, however we probably won't be able to prevent a few downtimes of about 5 minutes within this timeframe. We will try to keep them as short as possible.
For those of you who care, we will improve the cabling in the server rack, move some servers around and reinstall old unused machines. These will most probably then serve as frontend servers for soup.io and/or as backend workers to deal with the feed imports.
March 12 2012
What you should know before activating Facebook’s Timeline for Pages
With the major redesign Facebook has introduced for Brand Pages, the platform is doing yet another step to become the central hub for your company’s social activity. You still have 3 weeks left to spice things up on your Page before you click that Publish button, so let’s take a look into all the quirks and perks of this change.
What are the key takeaways for brands?
1. Create a stronger visual impact of your Page
Through the new Timeline layout, Facebook gives you the tools to tell your story in a creative and flexible way – the cover photo becomes a canvas for your brand narrative, and you have more control over the way your page looks like by pinning “sticky” items at the top (an idea that Twitter also put into practice a few months ago) or expanding them across the full-width of the Page for better view.
The Timeline cover’s “goal is to symbolize what an organization is all about. For a restaurant it could be a popular menu item, a band could display album cover art, and a business could show a picture of their customers using their product.” Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s Product Director of Ads
By allowing you to make part of the information you share more visible, Facebook is making some big steps in becoming a key broadcasting channel for your brand. Many businesses have already transformed their Page into a go-to place for customers (instead of their websites), but the Timeline clearly pushes things forward. The fact that you can’t use the cover photo for marketing messages (pricing information, promotions etc.) could be considered as a drawback, but it’s apparently intended as a measure of leveling the field for brands’ social media tactics. We all get to start with a clean slate.
“What Facebook is doing is cleansing the brand page of blatant marketing and promotions. They’re forcing a more social experience from brands through policy.” Jason Falls
You are encouraged to use the Milestones to set up the most important events in your brand’s history, which are highlighted by year on the right side of the page (and you can even back-date significant events). It can also be used as some sort of digital yearbook – making the experience more emotional.
Milestones on The New York Times' Page
Think of it as your own online newspaper – you get to decide the cover, the main story, and the featured articles. But that also means that your social media manager has a tougher job from now on: maintaining and growing the audience will require more PR skills than before. Sure, being able to engage people, share the most interesting stories in your industry is still important, but the Facebook Page also becomes a lens into your brand identity and it needs to be properly curated. You can use the Timeline to commemorate important events in your history and even play games with your fans.
What better way to tell the story of your brand than arranging your content both spatially and temporally? The old Wall had its limitations, especially by only allowing you to share thoughts and ideas in a reverse chronological order (it’s probably fair to assume that no one ever scrolled back to your first post). The new way of exploring content is turning into a much more addictive experience for fans, making it easier for you to keep your visitors on the Page – and, of course, for Facebook to keep them on the platform.
Applications and custom tabs are now featured in a more visible space of the Page (and you can even customize the front image of the thumbnails to make the call to action stronger), in an attempt to turn them into more engaging experiences for users. After previously having moved them to the left side of the Fan Pages, Facebook now reconsidered the tabs position and put them back in the spotlight. Also, the actual tab pages (where all the action happens) have been upgraded from 520 pixels to 810 pixels, thus allowing you to use all this new space for more creative apps.
“Facebook’s intent with these wider tabs? Think: Your Website on Facebook… [...] This would keep users within Facebook by providing users with a more website-like experience, thus reducing the need to send people back to your actual website.” Tim Ware
Starbuck's Apps featured under the cover photo
2. Get more data to understand your fans
Another important aspect is the fact that you can now connect with fans on a more personal level. When someone who isn’t a fan reaches your Page, they will first see which of their friends are already fans and their main activities related to the page. That’s probably the best incentive to make them click that Like button. They’ll also see the stories that have received a lot of engagement (not the most recent ones, like it happened before), and that is something you can’t control – it will be determined by Facebook’s algorithms.
Also, it will be much easier to understand the behaviour of your already existing fans in the enhanced Admin panel. It features more information than before, from new likes, most recent messages, insights and notifications, to how well your posts performed. The most important update is the fact that users can now send private messages to your page (a spin-off from Twitter’s Direct Messages). This improves your Page’s functionality to include Customer Support capabilities (another thing they’re borrowing from Twitter, which was the main channel for solving clients issues).
Are there any set-backs to these changes?
However, even though most of this seems to benefit your brand, there are a few things that might arise as problems.
1. First of all, the default landing tab is now gone, so if you had created a custom welcome tab, that won’t be the first thing users see anymore. Applications are showcased under the cover photo, but you can only feature 3 of them on the top row (aside from the Photos box). If you previously developed special applications to show on your landing page, you haven’t lost them altogether, but they’ll be harder to reach. Some of them might need a redesign, since the new tab width for apps is wider (from 520 to 810 pixels). Even if you try to direct people to your old Welcome Tabs, these won’t refresh after they click Like, so people would have to refresh manually – and it’s obvious why this would be a disadvantage.
2. Your old profile image has to be compressed, and if you put that on top of the fact that the cover photo has custom resolution specifications, you already have a few reasons why you’ll need to put some effort into crafting your new Timeline view. Jay Baer explains why the new Timeline is not that friendly for small businesses who don’t have the extra hands to take care of this.
“Creating emotional connections is a luxury that is out of reach for small businesses where the Facebook page manager is doing so on her lunchbreak.” Jay Baer
3. When it comes to community management, you have to take into account that all private messages need your attention. If you’re not prepared to handle Customer Support issues, this can turn into a PR fiasco, as clients may turn to your wall to address complaints. And yes, you can opt to review all posts before allowing them to appear on the page, but that’s not in the sipirit of social media openness either. To top all of this, you can’t send messages as a Page, but only respond to your users’ inquiries.
4. As for content, it will be extremely important that your posts reach more people and go viral, so you’ll have to constantly update your page with pertinent information (of course, that wasn’t less true before, but it didn’t affect your Page’s layout). The Fanpage’s overall aspect depends on what your fans react to even more than before, so you’ll have to pay extra attention to what tickles their toes.
Have you activated Timeline for the pages you administer? What are your thoughts on the possible use-cases?
March 09 2012
New: Change your video theme while editing!
March 07 2012
Join me for “Advertising Accountability” at Media Summit NY
Advertising Effectiveness Model
Tomorrow I will be speaking at Digital Hollywood‘s Media Summit in New York City and I am looking forward to sitting on a panel with incredible folks like Jeff Plaisted, who’s in charge of Microsoft Mobile Advertising, and Scott McKinley, EVP of Advertising Effectiveness at Nielsen – among others – about Advertising Accountability. Those two words have rarely been used in the same sentence but they’re important to view together because billions of dollars are dedicated each year to advertising products and services. And yet, so few executives truly take a look at the ROI of their spending.
Beyond the slick graphics and smart words, what data are you gathering to determine ROI? And who is asking the right questions to determine if this medium is held up in your marketing mix with the right amount of resources dedicated to it? What tools do you use to measure effectiveness? For too long, advertisers haven’t been held accountable beyond the initial creative pitch and a static number of “views” that were expected. Today, we have the ability to understand the metrics and analytics being applied to new technologies such as broadband, UGM, Social Networks, P2P and mobile – that are beginning to show results. I, along with my fellow panelists, take a look at the latest techniques and question the assumptions that underpin advertising in the new mediums.
I hope you’ll join us for this important and enlightening discussion. Make your advertising dollars count better than ever in 2012.
And check out the rest of the show – there’s a lot of great content and speakers to catch. I personally am looking forward to the keynote by Entourage actor, Adrian Grenier, who is speaking on how new technology and devices are changing the entertainment and film industries, allowing fans and consumers access and interaction like never before. Cool stuff. I hope to see you there.
And if you can’t be in New York tomorrow, you can still follow along on Twitter: @mediasummitny. Or connect with me directly if you’d like to meet up @pascarella or @ubervu.
February 29 2012
The new Hourly Sentiment Trends: Understanding attitude changes in real-time
When you’re trying to make sense of the way people feel about you on the social web, average sentiment values might not be sufficient. This is why we provide an overview of daily changes in sentiment data, which is very useful if you want to understand how the sentiment evolved over the last week. But looking at how our customers use the tool, we realised that sometimes the daily breakdown is just not enough.
It’s hard to find patterns and incentives behind each sentiment change, but we’re getting closer to helping you achieve that through the newly-introduced hourly sentiment display. It allows you to see exactly how sentiment progressed throughout the day and it makes the charts even more actionable than before.
This is especially useful when dealing with important global events, such as The Oscars or The Super Bowl – with so many people tweeting and updating their Facebook profiles, it’s only natural that you’ll have to deal with big amounts of data that require you to drill deeper into the analytics. Just imagine what would happen if suddenly an unexpected event took place, like the stunt Sacha Baron Cohen pulled on Ryan Seacrest at the Oscars – that definitely caused a massive spike in sentiment and volume.
Take a look at this example:
In the visualization for the daily evolution, you can clearly see the volume for positive, negative or neutral mentions, but the overall picture seems to suggest a rather constant flow. But change the graph to hourly view, and this is what happens:
It’s now become obvious that the day started pretty quiet, then something important caught people’s attention and got them talking. It would have been hard to catch this had you not been able to see the hourly visualization.
Getting a glimpse of these values makes it much easier to determine whether certain changes correlate to something in particular (a blogpost, a tweet, or maybe even a real-life event) and what causes the values to drop or increase.
The same happens for the Daily Mentions graph – switch the view to hourly, and you get a detailed chart for the volume of social media updates, with modifications that were difficult to spot otherwise.
Let us know what you think of this new feature in the comments.
We’ve also added these other cool product improvements:
Reports Console – Create a graph based on your tags
When adding a widget in a PDF report, you can group mentions by volume, evolution, gender or share of voice. But wouldn’t it be useful if you could show your manager a report highlighting all the mentions your Tech Support Team tagged as “Happy Customers”? Well, now it’s possible with the addition of a new widget called Tagged Mentions.
CSV reports – More information included in the raw data files
If you’re using the CSV files to make your own reports, you’ll be happy to know that we’re now including additional data to the already existing one: the report contains 3 new fields with information about cities, regions and countries.
February 28 2012
8 Things Your Company Needs to do with Social Media
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Facebook & Twitter are great places to start.
This might come as a surprise, but you should have a Twitter and Facebook account. It is 2012 and there are still companies out there without these. The excuses are endless – we don’t have time, we are B2B, our clients aren’t on them, etc., etc. Listen – these accounts are FREE and if you get 1 customer from them, well then it costs you nothing!
- Now that you have a Twitter and Facebook account, display these on your company homepage. And make sure you do it above the fold where I can see them. It is becoming more and more common for people to research a company on social media, rather than going to the “about us” section. Make life easy for your prospects.
- Set daily goals for your social media usage. A good start might be to post 2 articles or blog posts relative to your company and industry. Or you might want to start following 5 new people per week.
- Every blog post that is on your site should be automatically posted on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. If you do not have a blog, then stop reading this paper and go start one. NOW.
- Set up Lists on Twitter. You can set up lists for anything you wish – your company name, brand, products, competitors, or industry keywords. Social Media can be used for 3 main purposes: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. Just because you aren’t a huge social media user, doesn’t mean that others aren’t out there talking about you!
- Dedicate a specific time of each day to social media. There is a lot of information out there for you to take advantage of. The most common term people use is “social media monitoring.” Yes, that is the first step, but then what? You want to analyze those mentions, and also engage with your prospects and clients.
- Get others involved at your company with social media. Online mentions are important to every department and person – sales, marketing, finance, IT. Do you think your CEO wants to know if a competitor is bashing your products?
- Start using a Social Media Platform. 2011 was the year that most companies realized that they need a social media presence, but many did not truly understand why. 2012 is the year when the smart companies use all this online information to beat their competition.
February 27 2012
The “Social Oscars” vs the real Oscars
The Help and The Artist neck in neck to win the Social Oscars
On Saturday, we released an infographic about what we call the “Social Oscars” with TechCrunch. We looked at social media mentions around the movies nominated for Best Picture. We measured the volume, built a sentiment index and more interestingly, detected the number and type of unique adjectives used in those social media posts. For The Artist, we found adjectives like “unprecedented”, “predictable” or “perfect film”. We were not trying to predict the actual Oscar winner, but to understand how movie-goers felt about each movie. Obviously, movie fans don’t get to vote in the Oscars.
After looking at the number of adjectives and their type (positive/negative), the number of mentions as well as the sentiment index, we decided to award the “Social Oscars” to The Help. The Artist had more mentions than The Help (69,000 to 52,000) and a higher number of unique adjectives (162 to 68). But The Help had a higher sentiment index by far (92% to 79%) and a higher percentage of positive adjectives.
It’s pretty clear that by looking at the data, a decision could have been made either way – both The Artist and The Help had their strenghts and weeknesses.
But this opens up a very interesting issue. Can you use social media data to predict the results of certain events? And if so, what types of events? Can you use it to predict the Oscar winners?
It turns out, there’s quite a bit of research being done in this field. Researchers have studied whether tweets can predict which scientific papers are going to be cited the most (“highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles“). Tweets also seem to correlate to how the stock market is going to perform (“We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%.“). Looks like you can use tweets to predict the box office success of a Hollywood movie (“showed that the results outperformed in accuracy those of the Hollywood Stock Exchange“) but not the result of elections (“data from social media didonly slightly better than chance in predicting election resultsin the last US Congressional elections“).
So what do all these have in common?
Regardless of the field being researched, social media was able to predict the outcome of an event when the type of people doing the posting also had a means of influencing the outcome in real life. If I tweet about a movie before its launch, that means I might go see it, thus influencing the box office results. This opens up amazing possibilities. You can potentially predict how a new product is going to do in a new market. Or what book is going to become a best-seller. Or which TV ad is going to bring in the most sales.
So then, what about events like the Oscars or the Superbowl? As long as regular people don’t get to vote in the Oscars or play in the Superbowl, they don’t really have a way of influencing the result. So using social media to try to predict that is like using tweets to predict a roll of the dice. You might get it right every once in a while, but scientifically, it’s not better than chance. All one can say then is, if people got to vote, who might be the winner of the “Social Oscars”? Which is what we did.
February 22 2012
uberVU… please meet Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers was always a great platform for QA. It is, by far, the most popular one. We definitely look at it as one of the greatest platforms for social media communication.
And, from today, Yahoo Answers is part of the supported platforms in uberVU. Save a stream and if we find questions or answers meeting your query they will be added to your stream and all the metrics will be part of the analytics in real-time.
And it’s not just the mentions (questions or answers) but also the meta-data you are used to get from uberVU. Things like location detection, language or sentiment are are also part of the package.
We hope you’ll enjoy it.
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