Buzztalk - grip on the social media hype

Grip on the Social Media Hype

Grip on the Social Media Hype

The Minsk Miracle In 2010 scientists of the Belarusian Minsk State University completed their work on a new technological innovation, hence providing for a considerable evolutionary step for corporate life. They developed a system that allows companies to get a grip on the ever growing stream of information, opinions and experiences sent out into the world through a large number of social media platforms. This tsunami of raw data often bars marketing and communication departments of corporations from obtaining clear insights in data, thus disabling them from staying up-to-date about what is being said about their organisations, their products, their competitors and their industries.

BuzzTalk is a technological instrument developed for companies who want to stay informed about the tidal wave of buzz, without having to mobilize hundreds of employees who meticulously browse the internet from dusk till dawn to find out what is being said and written about their organisation.

Buzz BuzzTalk is named after the phrase ‘buzz’, a word that has become inextricably connected to social media. In its literal meaning, a buzz refers to the low droning or vibrating sound like that of a bee. In its current usage the phrase refers to the buzzing of information in topics or rumors on the internet, the sources of which are often untraceable.

‘Buzz’ is part of a recently created lexicon associated with the emergence of social media. Many other words and phrases were added to our collective dictionaries by the upcoming social media. A ‘trending topic’, referring to a subject being scrutinised or hyped by social media on a specific moment in time, is just one example. It’s a whole new lexis which almost requires a new understanding of language. A language which one should understand and – more importantly – command in order to understand the social media hype.

Internet users Social media are online media in which groups of internet users have organised themselves. The phrase ‘social’ is used to define that these groups consists of communities, rather than a company, even though social media themselves are usually facilitated by commercial organisations.

Well known social media are YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and of course Facebook, which listed on the stock exchange in 2012. In addition to these household names many smaller social media exist, some of which are young and growing (such as Tumblr), others which are older and seem to have lived

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passed their peak (such as Hyves).

BuzzTalk helps to get a grip on social media and benefit from them. Everybody who wants to use social media to improve their marketing and communication results will gain a highly advanced supportive tool with BuzzTalk. It rapidly scans through all online publications in the world, whether these are blogs, articles in online newspapers, scientific publications in journals or tweets and posts on Facebook.

BuzzTalk also defines and shows whether messages are either positive or negative, it measures the online sentiment. With a simple click, you’ll know if the crowd is feeling happy or dissatisfied with you. All coverage regarding a specific topic can be traced, independent of where it has been published, as BuzzTalk is able to track the global information stream in 33 different languages.

An information stream which simply cannot be contained without the help of an effective ‘enabler’.

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Social Media Emerges Social media have already left a firm footprint on our global society.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without them. Let’s have a quick look at how we grew into our current social media

existence. The 1990 to 2000 era is defined as the Web 1.0. Distinctive features of this era are the static websites and the single journey of online information. Consumers looking for information on the internet were exclusively depending on what websites offered. ‘We read what they publish’.

This period of static websites and a limitation of online information streams to ‘send only’ is also called the ‘Information Web’.

Interaction In the years beyond the new millennium, websites started to offer more interactive features. It suddenly became possible to post public messages on websites. It also became increasingly easy for consumers for place their own content on the internet, using blogs of social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest. This is what we call the Web 2.0 (2000-2010 era). Everybody can be a publisher, therefore ‘they read what we publish’ became the standard. This era is also referred to as the Social Web.

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The challenge As a direct result from the self-publishing power gained by consumers, the amount of published content on the internet exploded; an effect lasting until this very day. It has become utterly impossible to keep track of everything, while one obviously needs to stay up-do-date on relevant developments. The logical challenge which subsequently presents itself is to find this relevant publications despite the overwhelming amount of information. This can be achieved by defining relations between messages and structuring web content and data, a development which now leads us into the third generation of internet usage.

‘They analyse what we publish’. Allowing both consumers as organisations to discover very useful information which stretches beyond the scope of the content of articles, tweets or posts. We have arrived at Web 3.0, the semantic web of Intelligent Web.

Position Containing the wildfire of social media is important to every organisation.

Keeping a close eye on your own landscape, your industry, competitors, target audiences and your own identity is key in determining your position; a necessity in order for you to truly start working with social media. Controlling social media means that you as an organisation are able to influence large groups of customers. BuzzTalk enables this kind of monitoring, keeping track of what is happening in and around your organisation. What’s going on with clients, suppliers, competitors, authorities and other important players?

It’s exactly this environmental monitoring that will support you in influencing

Internet as the answer to global problems In his book ‘The rational optimist’, Matt Ridley focuses on this evolution: 10,000 years ago the human species existed of 10 million people, now we’re heading towards 7 billion. Over 99 percent of these near 7 billion individuals now have a better existence than our 10 million predecessors. Ridley shows how open societies wherein ideas were shared in an open and constructive setting, always lead to surprising solutions for problems. Other societies occlude themselves, such as China in the previous century, hence devolving into a more primitive state. By opening up to the world once again, creative contributions can be made to global problems, while profiting from the contributions of others.

The internet is an ideal medium to share these ideas amongst people. Pleas to keep the internet free and open, excluding any form of curtailing, are therefore powerful and logical. The possibilities of cooperation have grown gigantically through the emergence of the internet and will lead to solutions which we currently cannot even fathom.

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important players through the internet. Many people still don’t understand well how this significant influence can be used to their benefit. We do at times take notice of impressive reports.

Take China, where social misconducts are published on the internet and often lead to public outrage. This has led to situations wherein authorities actually adjusted their decision making in order to contain the turmoil. In the Syrian civil war, social media were used to confront the world with atrocities of both parties, up to publishing executions. This coverage is also used for propagandist purposes, attempting to influence allies.

Society Claims about social media state that they can profoundly change our society by the intensive exchange of knowledge and ideas. On a first sight the endless amount of information may cause for confusion, but those who manage to bring order to this apparent chaos, are able to achieve great things.

Examples from all over the world show how news and event coverage on the internet can move people to take action. A large degree of this influence is contributed to social media. This effect works the same on a level more closely to our homes, with over 60% of all social media users placing reviews

T-Mobile and Dell The influence of an individual grows parallel with the number of followers.

Telecom giant T-Mobile learned this lesson the hard way. Their teacher: Dutch comedian Youp van ‘t Hek, who used Twitter to propagate his discontent with the service of T-Mobile. The process of his ‘T-Mobile Terror’ started in 2010 with a single tweet, which initially had no results as T-Mobile wasn’t paying attention. Youp however didn’t give in and kept tweeting about it, until something did happen. His 45,503 followers on Twitter started to retweet his message, after which the story spread across the internet in no-time. Other media noted the scoop and published it, turning this initially small affair into a national topic of discussion. Newspapers, television and radio suddenly started publishing large numbers of negative articles about T-Mobile, creating a nightmare for the telecom giant’s marketing department. If they had read their history lessons, T-Mobile probably should have known what damage in PR could occur based on a single publication Back in 2005 computer manufacturer Dell experienced its fair share of PR damage, also starting from a single post on the internet. Jeff Jarvis, an internationally well-known blogger, wrote a blog about his dissatisfaction with his Dell laptop. Dell also didn’t react, until the story avalanched into a storm of public protest against the computer manufacturer.

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of products or services they purchased. These reviews often form a primary source of reference for other potential clients.

People rely on these reviews. Social media usage therefore influences the shopping behavior of consumers. Users of social networks shop online more often than those who don’t use social media; a difference no less than 12 percent. Over half of the social media users follows a brand (53 percent), making this more popular than following celebrities, who are ‘only’ followed by 33 percent of social media users. [1].

A third of all consumers with a social network profile has a relation with a brand or an organisation through their network. On average, every user has some sort of interaction with nine of these senders [2]. The degree to which this relation is actively maintained, depends on the relevance experienced by social media users. These users may be looking for special offers from brands or companies, or may want to stay up-to-date about events and news. The more a brand or company meets these consumer needs, the better will they be able to create and improve their relation. Social media users are usually shielded against commercials and uncustomised, impersonal messages, which are simply ignored or blocked.

Social media owe their very existence to the tremendous amount of internet users who can all interconnect. Their numbers has rapidly increased in just a couple of years. In 2009, approximately 25% of the world’s population or 1.5 billion people had frequent access to the world wide web. [3] In 2011 this number grew to 2.1 billion. In this year the amount of existing e-mail accounts also crossed the 3 billion mark, while over 300 million new websites were created. [4]

Portals Even since the dawn of the new millennium just over a decade ago. The landscape of the internet drastically changed. Both the internet as social media only took up a minor role in peoples’ daily lives compared to current standards, simply because reliable broadband internet didn’t arrive at home yet. Facebook, Hyves & Flickr were founded in 2004, while Twitter established itself in 2006. Even then, internet cafes were an essential portal to get online.

A 2008 count showed over 600 internet cafes in the Netherlands, only to have dissapeared from all large cities less than a year later [5].

Mobile internet has proven to be a massive accelerator for social media, as almost everybody can now go online both affordably as from virtually every location. School classes, trains, meadows and airplanes: people can send messages and upload photos and videos from just about anywhere. A near 40% of social media users do so by using mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Social media apps hold a steady position in the top-3 of most used

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apps on smartphones. When compared to the third quarter of 2010 , mobile usage of social channels has increased with over 30 percent [1] in less than two years time.

Mobile internet The always available presence of mobile internet often makes us forget how young this technology actually is. The first smartphones and tablets found their way to the market at the end of the nineties, carefully being tested by early adapters. The first smartphone in history was created by IBM in 1994, but failed to succeed. In 1996 Nokia took its turn, achieving a first breakthrough with the Nokia 9000 Communicator when actor Val Kilmer used one in the 1997 movie The Saint.

The astonishment of this marvelous new technology is now part of history, a testimony to the speed with which the internet and social media grew. The marketing and communication disciplines of corporate life were so far not always able to keep track of this rapid development. Entrepreneurs from all sorts and levels often still feel overwhelmed by social media and lack the knowledge to get a firm grip around them. Despite of these challenges, the internet and social media are still rapidly expanding, both in terms of users as the average time online. In the United States, people spend over a quarter of their time online visiting social media. The growth has gone so fast that four in five internet users now uses social networks in one way or the other. Facebook is heading towards its billionth user, while Flickr facilitates the uploading of over 4,5 million pictures each day [4].

The Netherlands Online Dutch statistics show a similar landscape. Of its residents, 88 percent spend time online; putting the Netherlands firmly in the global top of countries with the highest internet availability in terms of usage. The daily time spent online per capita was 2 hours and 42 minutes in 2010, increasing to 3 hours and 6 minutes one year later in 2011.

The number of internet users who chat online has increased from 44 to 52 percent, while those in threads on forums increased from 41 to 46 percent and usage of social network sites increased from 64 to 70 percent. Between the ages of 16 and 35, over 59 percent spends time on social media each day [6].

The number of mobile internet users grew from 40 percent in 2009 to 44% in 2011, while the number of smartphone users increased in 2012 with thirty percent. On average, a smartphone owner has 24 apps installed on his phone, of which Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are by far the most popular [2,6].

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Grip on social media Corporations delivering an effort to get a grip around the information stream surrounding their organisations, have faced considerable difficulties in doing so. The era when they could keep track of it all with a simple list of bookmarks is certainly over. Alternatives to keep track of all news coverage are hardly available.

Several technological support tools exist to keep track of online publications.

RSS-feeds are one example. Using a RSS-reader or e-mail subscription, you’ll receive instant notifications whenever a new article is published by one of the websites you’re following. This seems easy, but in order for this to work you’ll first have to identity the websites you regard as important. When you’ve done so, you’ll keep receiving updates about every single publication, regardless of whether they are relevant to yourself. Another example is Google Alerts, which informs you about new information on a specific topic, coming from several different websites.

Some instruments have been developed which allow you to keep track of online publications on the internet, but as they only focus on specific media, channels or languages, they fail to provide a complete overview of all relevant information. A second problem arises from the simple factor of volume. How is a marketing department to find its way through the hundreds of thousands of messages, tweets, blogs, articles, movies and more, posted on the internet every single hour? Most of the time it’s hardly even possible to determine whether these are positive, negative or neutral messages, let alone trying to find which influence a single message could bear.

New accounts Let’s provide some context here: The number of blogs in the world increases with three new accounts per second. The amount of Twitter messages, Tweets, increases with 2,5 billion tweets a week. Television took thirteen years to reach 50 million viewers [7], while the early internet needed only four years to achieve the same number. Facebook managed to get 200 million users in less than a year.

The enormous amount of data sent onto the internet by these collective users, has become literally immeasurable. In 2007 the worldwide storage of online data comprised of about 300 billion gigabytes. Only four years later scientists believe this number has grown to 988 billion terabytes [8]. After terabytes we start counting in petabytes. Enough to make even scientists lose count, are the

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next steps of exabytes and zettabytes, the latter being defined as 10 to the 21st power. The last current estimate: 1,2 zettabytes. One zettabyte equals a billion terrabytes. Scientists will next move on to using yottabytes, equal to 10 to the 24th power. Looking for information on the internet hence isn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s looking for said needle in a billion haystacks.

Huge data streams Especially large corporations expect these facts to contain valuable information.

The tremendous amounts of data crossing the internet each day, contain valuable information about consumers, corporations and governments. Data represents value, called data equity. Research performed by the Rotterdam Erasmus University and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 60 percent of professional analysts and investors would want to gain more insights in the value of this data equity [9]. However, the largest part of these organisations are clueless as how to manage these gigantic amounts of information even when this concerns only their own organisation, brands, products, markets or industries; let alone the worldwide view.

Needles and haystacks BuzzTalk was designed to find all relevant coverage, all those needles in a countless number of haystacks, from across all over the world. Organisations can determine directly which buzz is sent into the world about them, not only in static terms, but also for news and event coverage and sentiments. All

BuzzTalk features Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ

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online sources can be easily accessed, no matter where they were published.

Specific industry information can be mapped and tracked easily. BuzzTalk also provides the option of selecting relevant coverage, from all over the world, and share this with target audiences.

Let’s provide for a graphic display of the BuzzTalk capabilities:

This model differentiates between the levels in which we can study online publications: the entity level and the meta level.

On the entity level, individual publications and tweets can be monitored, curated and republished.

The meta level provides for a helicopter view over all this data in order to discover patterns and interconnections. This helps to create a solid insight and provide for a rational basis to make decisions.

One way to start is to identify the most important channels and sources.

Important publications can then be republished, adding your own information to them. This is called content curation, defined as collecting, selecting and republishing content. A strategy used by many organisations as a part of their content marketing strategy.

Another activity is social media monitoring. Listening to opinions on the internet, reacting to them if necessary and pinpointing individuals or organisations who can have a strong influencing role on others. Within corporations its often the PR or Marketing department working on these tasks, with an increase by HR departments for the purpose of recruitment. Other upcoming contributors are customer support and ‘webcare’.

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The meta level is designed to analyse what’s happening on social media.

For a corporation this initially means not looking at individual messages, but monitoring the bigger picture and movements in sentiments in online.

This data is then analysed, possibly using special software solutions that help to discover interrelationships between individual publications; information which is very useful to your organisation. These insights provide for a great support in making decisions about product development, marketing and communication.

Changing trends Well, what to look at? We could find out who are the leading individuals and corporations on social media and which developments created the largest buzz. It’s interesting to see how trends change. Some of these changes are obvious, e.g. the summer boost in attention for sports during the Tour de France and Olympic Games when compared to winter. Other changing trends have less of a logical explanation. This doesn’t mean however, that they are less interesting to understand.

Trend watching Another feature available in BuzzTalk is trend watching. This is the art of extrapolating what might happen based on a market analysis, combined with sentiments and mood states. Trend watching results are mostly interesting for CEO’s and other executives, while marketing departments are also showing more interest in this specific usage of social media.

Two levels of using social media: Entity Level 1. Content Curation – collecting, selecting and republishing content as part of a content marketing strategy 2. Social Media Monitoring – listening to opinions on the web, reacting to them if required, identifying influencers and ambassadors to increase ‘engagement’ and ‘word of mouth marketing’ Meta Level 3. Market analysis – observing what has happened before, identifying important individuals and corporations and what developments created buzz 4. Trend watching – predicting what might happen based on said market analysis combined with sentiment and mood states.

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Joining Social Media For organisations we distinguish four types of activities in which we can take part in social media. Per activity we then analyse the best methods to get a firm grip around the benefits they have to offer.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Content curation Social media monitoring Market analysis Trend watching

1. Content curation

Content curation is defined as the continuous collecting, organising, selecting and interpreting of online information regarding a specific topic.

The focus lies on content which is both relevant as interesting to one of your target audiences.

Content curation currently is a hot topic in the U.S., while winning terrain rapidly in Europe as well. Content curation isn’t a true answer to the abundance of information the internet unleashes upon us, but does provide for an answer to filter failure. People are confronted with massive amounts of messages every day, they simply do not have the time to differentiate between them. As a result, they can miss quite a lot of information that is actually relevant to them.

These audiences have a need for a filter that selects the best and most relevant

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publications and offer these to them, allowing the audience to skip the rest of the information.

The role of a content curator is to be just that filter. As soon as you manage to filter the most important messages for your target audience and enable them to notice them in an easy accessible way, you determine which reality they perceive. It’s the art of selecting and editing available online content in such a way that it maximally responds to the triggers of your target audience.

Thought leader One significant benefit of this approach is that in time, you’ll be regarded as an authority, a thought leader. As you are a source of permanent relevant information towards your target audience, you’ll be regarded as an expert.

Content curation therefore can play an important part in a content marketing strategy, often being more effective than advertising. Editorial content, customizing specific information, leads to receiving attention from your own target audience which then autonomously decides to show more interest for your organisation.

Another benefit is increased brand awareness due to the larger number of visitors spending time on your social media accounts and website. The more content shared by an organisation, the better they show up in search results.

This also provides for a better image, as those who share knowledge are often regarded as generous. People put lower guards while reading this information compared to advertisements, while they still learn about your organisation.

Your bigger reach into the market, the improved perceived image and the sharing of knowledge therefore leads to a larger number of potential clients.

Authority BuzzTalk is an excellent instrument for this content marketing strategy, as it simplifies the process of finding and curating content. Achieving a position of authority hence becomes increasingly easier for an organisation. BuzzTalk provides for a view over the entire playing field, allowing for simple selections to be made of all information fitting the interests of a specific target audience.

The challenge of a content marketing strategy is to keep providing for content continuously: a lot needs to be written and published. By using a mix of content creation (writing your own content) and content curation (acting as a filter for third party information) contributes in creating a valuable and dynamic blog which can be used to continuously improve your image as well as the generation of leads.

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The 5 steps of the content curation process 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Identify sources Collect Register the original source of the content Provide for context and put the article into perspective Share and present the information to the target audience

3 golden rules for republishing content 1.

2.

3.

Always refer to the original source Add a clickable URL linking to the original publication Don’t copy/paste the entire publication, only quote the relevant part (A full quote of an article might lead to legal consequences with regards to the intellectual property rights of the content.)

Goals of content curation and content marketing 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Gain more leads from a larger audience; improve your image and trust Acquire a position as a thought leader by offering educational content Increase brand awareness Lead nurturing, preparing cold leads to turn into hot leads Social media engagement and creating new relations through social media.

Content curation with BuzzTalk Pick a theme that you want to follow and share with your audience, then create a query for it in BuzzTalk. The next step is to watch the incoming results on a daily basis, selecting the most important publications appearing on the internet and regarding your subject. This is done online. BuzzTalk allows for adding additional selections or sorting based on sentiment, turning your publications into a feel-good-newspaper. Ĺ” Ĺ” Ĺ”

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BuzzTalk demo: Publishing into a digital magazine A digital magazine can be read using a smartphone or tablet such as the iPad. Several apps can be used to do so, of which Flipboard is the most popular.

As an example to work with, we’ll use the Non-Hodgkin Today magazine, a Flipboard magazine informing about the latest news regarding this illness.

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As we only review the most recent publications, the Buzz Report is usually quite small and comprehensible. In this example we selected a timeframe of four weeks, viewing publications in a top-down sequence based on publication date (1), as is shown on the screen shot.

While setting up BuzzTalk, a connection was already made between Buzz Report and a relevant Twitter account, allowing you to instantly publish new tweets from BuzzTalk with a few simple clicks. Just select the publication you want to use (2) in your digital magazine and then click on the read ‘Publish’ button (3).

The total message may consist out of 140 characters, after which you can edit the headline (4) appearing after the click on ‘Publish’,. To confirm publication simply click ‘OK’ (5) and the information is now directly part of your magazine.

If you select multiple messages in a short timeframe, you can choose to publish them on specifically determined times. Thus making sure you’ll never publish while your target audience is asleep.

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In addition to republishing third party articles to your magazine, it’s also easy to add your own articles, linking to your own website (news or blog segment) or towards an advertorial.

To do so, click on the button ‘Publish Blank’ above the graphic (1), to type or paste your own content (2) and link (3). Upon clicking on ‘OK’ (4) your content is automatically published.

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BuzzTalk differentiators for content curation strategies You currently have the option of chosing between several methods to find content to curate. Try Google, following RSS feeds or Twitter Search. These efforts demand for a considerable time investment just to find fresh content to publish. Selecting from RSS feeds has the consequence of sticking to the same sources, while your target audience wants to be surprised by that one great article of that website they’ve never heard of before. As you’re not the only organisation trying to publish great content, chances are that people already read articles originating from a limited number of courses somewhere else. BuzzTalk exceeds competitive solutions in this filter. Based on a keyword search, all relevant articles and other publications are filtered from an incredible amount of sources.

Interpretations Another distinctive BuzzTalk feature, is its support in the interpretation of articles. Let’s say that you’re curating a widely discussed theme, then try to filter the relevant information from it published every single day. BuzzTalk allows you to create additional selections or sort messages based on their sentiment, thus enabling you to publish only positive articles. In the screenshot of a randomly chosen company, you’ll directly notice which publications are part of specific subthemes (here, BuzzEvents) within your topic. This allows you to create ‘specials’, e.g. around ‘product releases’ or ‘merger and acquisition’, while finding interesting articles for your target audience which aren’t simply retrieved by scanning purely on a publication date. Every article shows the mood it contains. Is it written positively or negatively (sentiment) or was a certain emotion (mood state) discovered? This makes it even easier to retrieve interesting publications.

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2. Social media monitoring

How to blend into a party where everybody is already talking to each other?

You’ll probably walk around a bit, join a small group of people, listen to their conversation and move on to another group of people. As soon as you know what kind of audience is attending, what the topics of conversation are and how they take place, you’ll start contributing to the conversation by making your own comments. Less than an hour later you’re part of the party and have fully joined the conversation with the people you selected to be with.

Even better, people are listening to what you have to say and will approach you to become part of their conversation. Social media works in exactly this way; they have an important social role to play. As a company you can benefit greatly from this fact, by taking part in social communities and conversations as an organisation.

3 steps for joining social media conversations: 1. Listen – Who is talking about you in which regard? Who do people speak about your competitor? It all starts with listening to what’s going on.

2. Engage – Create relations using Twitter and Facebook, enter into a dialogue.

3. Measure – Determining the effect of your presence on social media.

Do however keep in mind that these communities aren’t called ‘social’ without a reason. They exist because people meet online without any business-like objectives. Crashing a party with hardcore commercial information may lead to people putting up their guards and excluding you from their conversation.

It’s an environment in which you need to be very careful with ‘self-promotion’.

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Before you know it you’ll be put on the blacklist and be cordially invited to remove yourself from the ‘party’. Of course this isn’t the case for every single social media channel. Linkedin is a great social environment where business objectives take a premium position, so don’t be reluctant in positioning yourself as a professional organisation here.

Social setting It doesn’t matter in which social environment you find yourself, you’ll have to be aware of the kind of people sharing the same room. Which rules do they follow? What are their interests? What do they expect from you? People often don’t mind the simple fact that you represent a specific organisation or company, as long as you behave and add value a way that corresponds to the content marketing strategy previously discussed in this document. As soon as you have integrated into your online social environment, you can get attention by sharing relevant information. This might cover just about any topic, from a weather forecast to an advice in cooking or an update on events. Just make sure that it’s a topic of which you’re knowledgeable and want to be associated with.

Gold standard Although you would probably prefer to continuously spread information about your own organisation, it’s obvious that this wouldn’t be the smart choice. On the other hand you won’t have to keep your value a secret all the time. A gold standard for good distribution of information is the 10-4-1 guideline: publish ten articles that aren’t created by yourself or your organisation (external authority), provide four links to own articles or blogs (self-created relevant content) and

How to listen? Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ Ŕ

Find buzz about your own organisation.

Define four types of tweets: Information requests, support requests, complaints and compliments.

React accordingly: informing, supportive, soothing, understanding and grateful.

Find buzz about your competitors.

React accordingly: use your own organisation as an example.

Also monitor blogs and blog comments, as this is the source for the most explicit and direct personal opinions.

one link to a landing page on which you provide a specific and concrete offer (self-promotion). Using BuzzTalk you can monitor whether your own influence works on social media. Or you can create more buzz around your field of

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expertise or your brand and create a more positive image around it in terms of media.

BuzzTalk demo: Social media monitoring Of course it would be ideal if we would know what someone or a group is thinking and feeling, anywhere in the world, as long as he or they are relevant to your topic. Considering the ease with which people communicate online these days, we’ve come a long way towards this ideal situation. The

consequential technological challenge however, is to filter all the text of which specific messages comprise and what the relation of the individual or group is to this content. The sentiment monitoring instrument BuzzTalk allows for

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measuring the sentiment in these expressions. One distinctive feature is that you’re able to measure whether something was labeled positively or negatively, a feature usually not available in other solutions.

Another distinctive criterion is the unique capacity to measure emotions.

These so called ‘mood states’ we know from psychology books as anger, tension, fatigue, confusion, depression and vitality. The fact of knowing how people feel by itself of course is not enough, the challenge is to find out how they are feeling in relation to what. BuzzTalk uses two innovative tagging engines to determine just this: OpenCalais created by Thompson Reuters and OpenDover created by Byelex. The combination of these technologies allows for the enrichment of publications with both facts and feelings.

BuzzTalk therefore provides for a more intelligent look to what is being said than Twitter. You can directly view the sentiment of the tweet, if an emotion can be detected (+- 15% of tweets) the ‘mood state’ also directly shows. Is somebody being positive, negative, or angry? In extremely large quantities or tweets, you’ll be able to grab a hold of the negative or angry tweets quickly and react to them (or do exactly the same with the positive ones!).

Relevant twitterers BuzzTalk also provides for a concrete insight in the Klout Score of relevant twitterers, in order to identify the most influential individuals in your industry.

If you know that the average Klout score is 20, you’ll immediately notice that a tweet from a person with a 40 Klout score will have considerable more impact. After all, they are viewed by a larger audience of people who on their turn are more influential and are more likely than average to retweet the initial message. This Klout score shows exactly what chances are that their social media messages are both read and retweeted.

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The screenshot depicted above shows the most active twitterers ‘most active users’ around the KiKa Foundation, which has the objective of providing better treatment for children who are suffering from cancer. The latest tweets are shown with each individual, allowing you to selectively pick the right and most influential individuals to follow your subject.

And again…..there’s a big chance that they will follow you on their turn.

Talking to these people can be done directly from BuzzTalk (without having to separately log onto Twitter) and react on their tweets. This is the beginning of social media engagement. Finding the most important people in your playing field and contact them using the medium they use.

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3. Market analysis

Knowledge is power, so goes the saying, and every entrepreneur knows this is true. A lack of information on the internet will undoubtedly lead to wrong decisions being made. Although all this information is out there on the internet, that’s exactly the problem with collecting it. There’s simply so much information out there that collecting and analysing it is humanly impossible.

At the same time, this fact is also the source of a significant benefit. When the information is all clustered together, you’ll be able to find patterns and trends which you could never retrieve from all tens of thousands individual messages.

Discovering and recognizing these patterns is the art of knowing what’s going on around specific themes.

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Biscuits If you discover a large amount of publications regarding biscuits, you’ll know that something on the internet is going on about this topic. You’ve just discovered a pattern. However, we still don’t know why people believe biscuits are important. BuzzTalk helps us in finding out more about this pattern without reading one individual message, as it is able to recognize emotions and sentiments in messages, blogs and articles.

Using this feature, BuzzTalk is able to accurately pinpoint how people feel about a certain topic. BuzzTalk helps to find out what makes people feel tensed, what makes them happy or what triggers an angry reaction when it comes to biscuits. This helps in creating the insights in the nature of a pattern.

As long as you collect enough information, you’ll automatically get a good idea of the role that biscuits currently play in our society. It could be the case that the trending topic ‘biscuits’ has something to do with food safety or the increased prices of flour and sugar.

Only a few years ago, analysts wrote file cabinets worth of reports based on months of extensive research. Today you’re able to gain the most up-to-date and advanced knowledge about products, industries and competitors in a matter of hours. Creating market analysis with BuzzTalk therefore saves both time as money.

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BuzzTalk demo: Market analysis using BuzzTalk Become a top analyst with BuzzTalk Let’s have a look at how to use BuzzTalk to create an analysis about the euro crisis. We’ll search for events in the ‘Money Market’ in ‘Italy’ in the domain ‘Economics, Finance and Business’. The collection of retrieved publications can now be sorted in a chronological or sentimental sequence. In this example the publication ‘Euro falls to lowest level in nearly two years’ comes up as being negative. The publication ‘How to save the euro’ is determined to have a positive sentiment.

Discover your world using Trending Topics

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The OpenCalais tags found throughout the publications, can also be found in a word cloud using the ‘Trending Topics’ tab. This word cloud is animated according to time. Words appearing more often in publications appear bigger than the words found less frequently. By doing this you can get a good first impression of publications retrieved by BuzzTalk.

Want to find out more about a specific word that you’re interested in? Simply click on it to review corresponding publications. The animation is automatically stopped.

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BuzzTalk also offers insights in why a specific publication is marked as being positive or negative. This complete transparency and insights is a unique feature called a ‘white box’, compared to many other applications where the sentiment is determined in a so called ‘black box’ that doesn’t allow you as a user to check on method used for determining moods and sentiments.

Upon checking the two publications used in our example, we find the word ‘bad’ in the translated version of the ‘Euro falls to lowest level in nearly two years’ publication. This is determined to have a negative sentiment with a value of 2. In this specific case only 1 sentiment word was found. The other publication ‘How to save the Euro’ was determined to be positive, resulting from the arithmetic averages of all sentiment words found in the content.

Another way of discovering the collected data, is clicking on the ‘Spikes detection’ button. This shows all tags which deviate from the progressive average, effectively BuzzTalk informs you that something is going on that might require further research.

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Let’s head back to the euro crisis publications. We’re currently reviewing April 2012, how did people experience the euro crisis in this month? A large amount of activity was measured (vigor). Also notice the increase of the purple line (tension). As time passes by, we discover that the number of publications containing emotions (mood state) increased. Selecting an emotion that caught our interest, we’re able to zoom in on it using a filter.

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This shows all publications, allowing you to further investigate and retrieve the reasons that caused this tension. You can also review why this specific emotion was detected per publication, while having an immediate click-through to the original article available.

Have the world presented to you in film Sometimes you’re browsing without knowing what you’re looking for, trying to get an overview of publications about the euro crisis and assuming that remarkable matters present themselves. BuzzTalk adapts to this need by offering the Discovery Tab. This shows internet publications in the form of a useful film. Simply select the category (or two categories) and a timeframe to display content from.

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The items from the two selected categories are then plotted into a word cloud:

The size of the square or circle shows which amount of publications appeared about the selected topic. If a certain correlation scores above the progressive average, this is noticed by the thickness of the line between two topics.

If you’re interested in getting to know more, just pause the timer and the film will stop playing. Select the topic on which you want to know more and review the accompanying publications. Again you’re able to use filters for further research and finding the corresponding publications. If you’re done reading, simply continue playing the film.

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4. Trend watching

What if we could predict events in the future? This is something extremely valuable for corporations, which consequently leads to nearly infinite attempts to try to get as close as possible. Using the internet smartly of course won’t provide a literal glimpse into the future, but it surely provides for a great preparation on what might happen.

By looking at all information about a certain topic chronologically, we might discover trends which continue to move into the future. Of course it provides no rock-solid guarantee, but our average decision making will improve without a doubt. People use digital media more and more to express themselves, while computing power has increased to the degree wherein we can process large amounts of data. This enables us to find patterns which were previously impossible to discover. As a large degree of human behavior is controlled by our emotions and people express themselves emotionally on social media, the hypotheses was born that Twitter could hold a certain predictive value.

A number of different scientific teams have since committed themselves to perform research on this concept.

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Cinema blockbusters HP Labs experts Asur and Huberman tried to predict which new movie releases would become blockbusters based on Twitter, publishing their results with the title ‘Predicting the future with social media’ [10]. They discovered that the speed with which buzz is created provides for a solid predictive value to rate the success of cinema films. They introduced the concept ‘tweet rate’: the number of tweets per minute regarding a specific film. Films which are widely discussed online, are more successful.

Johan Bollen used the stock exchange as his subject, discovering that the accuracy of the prediction of the DJIA stock values can be significantly improved if ‘mood states’ are taken along in the equation. Mood states are emotions that can be detected in social media expressions. These emotions are divided in six categories: enthusiasm, confusion, fatigue, depression, tension and anger. One of the unique BuzzTalk features is that it uses and displays not only sentiments, but also includes these mood states. To do so, the scientific classification of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) is used, resulting into a quick overview of results based on scientifically validated information.

Studying emotions as part of achieving organisational objectives is a science which is still in a rather state of infancy. Considerable scientific research still needs to be performed and formulas have to be determined. Despite of this, social media analytics and emotion marketing is a challenging and promising discipline.

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Become a social media winner with BuzzTalk

Ŕ BuzzTalk uses OpenDover to determine 27 different domains allowing for your search query being more effective. (E.g. only show publications containing the word ‘gold’ if it concerns the buillon, not an expression) Ŕ Using OpenCalais, BuzzTalk is able to determine 36 different categories in blog posts and articles, based on individual and organisation up to industry term and market index.

BuzzTalk facts Ŕ BuzzTalk daily collects hundreds of thousands of publications from over 55,000 sources across the world wide web.

Ŕ BuzzTalk uses OpenDover to detect sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) and mood states (anger, tension, fatigue, confusion, depression, vigor).

Ŕ BuzzTalk uses Crowd Sourced Learning, by continuously learning about new relevant news sources both domestic as abroad. BuzzTalk is a self-learning and self-enrichting instrument.

Ŕ BuzzTalk’s Spikes detection shows deviations in the progressive average number of publication using OpenCalais tags.

Ŕ BuzzTalk monitors more than 100 countries and uses the Systran translation technology to translate the content of 33 languages to English, allowing for international comparisons.

Ŕ The Klout Score supports in the identification of influential twitterers who can be contacted to facilitate word to mouth marketing.

Ŕ The data collected by BuzzTalk are scientific journals written by scientists, journalistic news sites, blogs from industry experts and consumer tweets. Ŕ BuzzTalk automatically adds semantic data to these publication using two powerful tagging engines: OpenDover and Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais.

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BuzzTalk Lexicon Blog - Website on which messages are categorised on date, subject and author. Blogs are often themeoriented and can be written by one or more authors.

Content marketing strategy Contacting the target audience using substantively valuable content to increase visibility and name awareness, resulting into a larger number of leads. Information focuses on the problems the target audience experiences rather than direct product promotion as done in advertorials.

Social media - Media in which the content is provided for and by the online community.

Crowd Sourced Learning - Using the crowd, by means of social media, to continuously keep learning.

Trending topic - Most popular subject with regards to your BuzzTalk search query.

Interruption marketing - Using advertorials or advertisements between other information which the receiver didn’t specifically went out to look for.

Buzz - Content of the stream of publications on the internet and social media in particular.

Post - Message on a social medium specially a blog.

Editorial content - Custom written content for specific target audiences.

Tweet - Twitter message.

Filter failure - The absence of the capability of separating important news from non-relevant items. Often caused by the enormous amounts of news.

Retweet - Publishing someone else’s tweet on Twitter.

Content - The entire collection of blogs, articles, tweets, images, sound fragments and other expressions. On a specific blog, website or the entire internet.

Whitepaper - Document that can be spread through social media and supports people taking a responsible decision.

Content curation - The process of collecting, organising, interpreting and republishing online information about a specific topic.

Lead - Marketing phrase for a prospect or a potential client.

Lead generation - Activity with the objective to acquire more leads, new potential clients.

Content creation - Writing articles, tweets, blogs or whitepapers or creating video or sound footage.

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Thought leader - Expert or intellectual leadership on a specific terrain.

isn’t exactly correct, as the internet has no central ‘sphere’ where blogs are collected.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication: a technology allowing one to subscribe to updates of a website using a RSS reader.

Fact tagging engine - Application which structures online publications by supplying it with meta data.

App - Small software solutions for smartphones and tablets.

Klout - Online service measuring your popularity on the internet.

Flipboard - App that allows for creating a personal digital magazine on an iPhone or iPad and gathers online news.

Klout Score - The score of Klout on a 0 to 100 scale, showing how much influence you have on the internet.

This score is presented in BuzzTalk.

Headline - Header or title of a message or article.

Tag - Label

Buzz Report - BuzzTalk report containing an overview of retrieved publications, including quantities and sources.

Tagging - Allocating a specific label.

Screenshot - Picture of the exact screen as shown on a laptop or PC monitor.

Mood tracking - Measuring and following emotions surrounding a specific theme.

BuzzEvents - Events recognised by BuzzTalk, such as a product release, a career change or a company merger.

BuzzTalk currently recognises over 35 different sorts of events.

Tweet rate - Speed with which tweets on a certain theme appear.

Spike detection Identifying highlights (peaks) in specific buzz.

Social metric - Performance indicator which can be measured within social media.

Blogosphere - Collective term for the joint opinions published onto the internet through blogs. The phrase 39

Source references 1.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Social Media Report Nielsen, Q3 2011.

Fifth Next web research, Ruigrok – NetPanel (2011).

Market research IDC. Web monitoring service Pingdom.

Shopping research firm Locatus.

Trendreport computer and internet usage, Twente University (2011).

Mediapublications.

Computable.

RSM-Erasmus University PWC: Data Equity— Hype or Happening?

Asur en Huberman, 2010. ‘Predicting the future with social media’.

Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiao-Jun Zeng, 2011. ‘Twitter mood predicts the stock market’.

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Contact BuzzTalk is a technological instrument developed for corporations who want to keep track of the ever-growing stream of online information, without having to mobilise hundreds of employees who scan the internet from dusk till dawn.

Please feel free to contact us at any time in case you have any questions or if you would like to receive a demonstration of Buzztalk.

MCCResources Dragonweg 57 2215 BN Voorhout The Netherlands +31642108561 info@mcc-resources.com www.mcc-resources.com