Through my monitoring of Roger Smith Hotel via Radian6 I noticed Roger Smith Hotel is using a platform called Revinate to monitor all their social media and create a customized metrics dashboard around it.

Alert from Radian6 that told me about Revinate.

Tweeting for travel Author: laurasmith     Posted on: Jul 30, 2010 02:29 PM Facebook fan pages — with 14.2 percent having no page to manage at all. Forty-two percent don’t use Twitter and if they do, only 25 percent tweet for less than an hour a week. The Roger Smith Hotel in New York recently adopted Revinate, which is a tool to facilitate active social media management strictly for the…

Link http://blog.collinsonmedia.com/?p=45

I got very curious about Revinate since I just spoke to Brian Simpson a few days ago at the At Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup! which I wrote about previously – he had not mentioned Revinate in our conversation (but Radian6 picked it up – ha!).

The use of platforms like Revinate fits in well with my prediction that Social Monitoring would go more Niche and Vertical this year and next - and that, in fact, might be the only viable way to improve the quality of the monitoring and derive actionable insights from it.  Because it’s about the hotel only – and the interface is customized for people who own and run hotels – they can simplify and delve into Social Media in a more useful way, than perhaps, a general insights or market research tool that has overlapping functionality – but is too far removed from how a hotel actually works.

Here’s what I said at the end of 2009:

1. As highlighted by OurSocialTimes – Social Media Monitoring will go niche, in a big way, in 2010 -  the first few entrants already emerged – and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I wrote about one of them in a post titled stories I didn’t write about, yet …,  a monitoring tool for pharma was released in Nov 09, called ScanBuzz - the first platform for life sciences companies that monitors online mentions of their brands and products in the social networking arena.  Another entrant I just became aware of today, HotGrinds, a monitoring platform built around the hotel and pharma verticals – I’ll do a post on HotGrinds soon, I expect many Social Media Monitoring platforms to specialize because the sentiment and textual analysis is fairly poor now, but improves quite a bit when it’s focused on one area or vertical.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/12/7-social-media-and-web-analytics-predictions-for-2010-from-webmetricsguru/#ixzz0vGczDmci
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Take Competitors – doing a meaningful comparison with Roger Smith Hotel will mean going Geo-Local – it will be hotels in Manhattan at the same or similar daily rate plus hotels within a 6 block radius – (like the Hemsley or Pod, or any number of hotels nearby) – the platform sounds like it’s built for those kinds of comparisons.  ClickZ has an article on Hotels using Social Media Monitoring that came out recently, btw.

The Roger Smith Hotel in New York may be one of the few hotels that has a designated driver. Brian Simpson, director of social hospitality, said social media “allows us to put the people side back into the business.” With the majority of hotel visitors booking through travel sites, he says, the only way he formerly could connect with guests was by bumping into them in the hallway. “Now, with social media, we can build a relationship with guests before they arrive, find out that they’re here and meet them.”

To handle the plethora of channels social media provides, the Roger Smith uses Revinate, a social media management service. Revinate is a new player, coming out of beta last November with a roster of approximately 400 customers.

While there are more than a dozen social media listening services out there, Revinate aims to differentiate itself with its focus on hotels. “Review site comments are so critical to hotels, and they’re everywhere… It’s an incredible amount of work to not only stay on top but also to respond,” said VP of marketing Michelle Wohl.

Now, I wonder who is working on the Social Media Monitoring platform for Restaurants?   I think we need one there – just as much as for hotels, perhaps even more, and there are many similarities in terms of reviews, etc.

I’ll be asking Brian Simpson more about Revinate then next time we get a chance to talk AND I’ll also contact Revinate myself to get a hands on demo which I can review here at Webmetricsguru.com (though I don’t run a hotel – so I don’t know exactly how much I’m going to be able to monitor with it, personally).

I was at the Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup! at Roger Smith Hotel tonight.   I would not have known about the book signing had it not been for a Radian6 alert I have on the Roger Smith Hotel that tells me most of what happens there (that’s tweeted or blogged about, etc).

Never been a DeadHead but everyone knows how famous The Grateful Dead are, and when I saw the book signing was going to happen I made a point to be there and got to speak with David Meerman Scott, who introduced me to his publishers at Wiley (hopefully this will be the beginning of the book I want write on Social Monitoring   – at least I can see the path to it is a detailed book proposal, a proposal I feel ready to write).

By the way, I bought a copy of Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead tonight – thought that was the least I could do after getting the personal introduction to Wiley from David (that was very nice of him, if I do say so, myself! – true, I did ask him – and he was very nice and personally made the introduction as the editors where there in the room)

Join us in our Follow the Band Book Tour (hashtag #GDbook) as we conduct book signings, host virtual events, and follow Furthur (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh) and Rhythm Devils (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann) this summer! Brian and I are out to have some fun, meet fellow marketers and Deadheads, and boogie at some shows. We hope to see you at one of these events.

The Grateful Dead book is good – I really like what I’ve read so far

“…. Because the concert tours themselves were the main source of revenue, the Grateful Dead ran their concerts in a very different way from the other bands.  For example, each show had a unique set of songs,  and each song was played in a unique way, giving fans a strong incentive to see the show for several nights in a row (or weeks, months, or years), because every night you were treated to a different musical experience.  This is the exact opposite approach ot that taken by other bands.

Since the concert tour was at the heart of their business model, the Grateful Dead didn’t tour periodically to promote an album; with few exceptions, they were permanently on tour.  The Grateful Dead invested heavily in their light show and sound systems, both of which were the best in the industry, and in doing so made the musical experience much more powerful for their fans.”

Page 4, Marketing Lessons of The Grateful Dead.

I had a nice 5-10 minute talk with David Meerman Scott where I asked him how he got started writing a book – we talked Davos and he mentioned his first book he self published – then eventually, he got a popular book and that got him asked to speak much more often (a request a day, on average) – he started asking 5K an appearance and got it.    Well, I would not mind replicating part of that.

Like most of my life these days, the opportunities seem to come to me (but I’ve talked to publishers before and it takes more than talk to make something happen).   Anyway, I put myself at Roger Smith Hotel – and things happened.

I also spoke with Brian Simpson who runs hospitality at Roger Smith – and ran into the guy he works for – the owner – whose paintings are on second floor and in various parts of the hotel.   Anyway, I asked Brian Simpson about the book he’s writing and what it will be on – he said it’s going to be Social Media for small businesses (but don’t quote me on it).

It occurred to me the success of Roger Smith Hotel in Social Media might not be something he’d necessarily want to write a formula for – but Brian was relaxed about that – he said that even if they could copy his method and approach – there’s so much that is unique about Roger Smith and his own experience in hospitality (30 years) that he doesn’t believe it would be possible to exactly copy what he’s doing in the same exact way he’s doing it at Roger Smith.

Brian Simpson thinks of himself as a hospitality manager that uses Social Media – much as he used Social Media to deal with Cancer – and then from that evolved an approach that he uses now at the hotel.  Then Brian mentioned that he has many restrictions on him that a restaurant like Havana Central (that I work with) do not have such as Unions – as result of hotel workers union they can’t ask workers to tweet from work – or in fact to a lot of things that we could easily ask workers to do at restaurants without a problem.

Brian suggested that if it were up to him, he’d buy all his workers iPhones and ask them to tweet and respond to people who mention the business on their slow or off time.  He sees the success he’s having at Roger Smith as the result of actually being at the hotel most of the time - I mentioned the results of my Case Study published a few months ago that pegged buzz about Roger Smith Hotel to be about 12 times what Havana Central is today and he said … that’s because he and his workers are there all the time interacting, tweeting – and you’d have to live at the restaurant to do the same thing.

Of course, if this thing gets off the ground, guess who I’ll ask to write the intro – then again, maybe I can get a few intros.

That reminds me – I also met with a friend, Sam Phillips, that works at Glide Technologies in London and visiting the states for several weeks to see the prototype of their new Social Monitoring platform and it has some unique features.  It’s a little too early for me to talk about Glide Technologies new platform (at their request) but it does seem to have an ability to refine entity analysis – and run reports on tonality that I have not seen any where else.

Trying to bring together a bunch of ideas from my last post which will end up being a White Paper along with a test of a new tracking system for Facebook type viral spreading and lift using a new product called SN Reach (which I haven’t talked about yet, but will in a week or so).   I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to seek out innovation and the best ideas, they tend to come to me, more and more – and I’m happy to receive the gifts.

You can take a look at SN Reach’s website but I’ll cover it in more detail in early/mid August when I have some of my own data to display and talk about.  This goes along with my strong bias to talk about data that I touch.  Everyone I know, and me, especially, are sick and tired of slick marketers that talk about the same stuff, over and over, but don’t really say anything and don’t really have the data.

While you digest the above – lets talk about Inception – not just of this idea, and the case study/whitepaper that is coming up, but the movie, Inception, that I saw recently (and so did everyone else I know for the most part).

The other day I wrote a post about using Compete.com to gauge the popularity of recently released movies (or other media properties) – see Comparing major movie popularity using Compete.com.  As days go on, Inception the movie is getting to be more talked about and at the same time, plays into the ideas I’m developing and gets me to think about creating off of ideas (ideas feeding on one another).

Here’s some high level charts of how the conversation about Inception is progressing (and how it’s broken down).


Using Sysomos MAP, I noticed most of the action is in Twitter – but I checked all the social media channels for spam and didn’t find much (simple query:  Inception AND movie).

Meanwhile – here’s some of the more notable sharing of information I found about Inception the Movie, over the last few days (haven’t heard of anyone who saw the movie who did not like it).

First, I found the Inception Infographic on Jason Calacanis’s blog

Inception infographic

source: http://dehahs.deviantart.com/#/d2unnlj

Then again – here’s Inception‘s musical secret shared by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

According to Cory:

… Here’s a YouTube clip showing some of the nice attention to detail in the film: the two major musical stings in the movie (a threatening, bassy throb and a grainy Victrola of Edith Piaf singing “Je Ne Regrete Rien”) are, in fact, the same song, played at very different speeds.

Interestting.

There are also people who are wondering if the dream ended – are they stuck in it?

There’s a good post at Gizmodo on  The Neuroscience of Inception – what cought my eye was the image on the top of the post

The idea being we’re often in a dream when we’re watching movies

From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes. Consider this study, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie (“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”) and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. The scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision”.) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here’s the nut graf from the paper:

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

Anyway, onto the Web Journal part of this post.  Tonight it looks like a new way to annotate the internet is about to be released according to Read Write Web – Write On Top of the Internet With New Firefox Add-On

“Glass is a virtual canvas over the entire web where you can literally place notes on top of any website. Now, instead of sending a link, your contacts see your thought together with the moment that inspired it, in context, allowing you to share the experience of being there,” says the web site.

The add-on is similar to the Sidewiki extension for Chrome, which lets users post text comments in a sidebar to any website. But Glass lets you anchor a comment, photo or video to any text or image anywhere on the page. Basically, it’s as if someone placed a transparency over the website you’re viewing and handed you a felt marker.

Can’t wait to try out Glass.

Meanwhile, if your into tracking garbage trucks in NYC you can now do so using QR Codes (starting in August) according to B L Ochman in Whatsnextblog – QR Codes hit the mainstream – led by NYC Garbage Trucks. Platform wars escalate.  Certainly a lot of depth to QR codes and to compare what is going on the VCR – Betamax format wars is telling.

Also telling is a new rule about Newspaper Circulation that should help Newspapers quite a bit – and they need all the help they can get especially now – thought I wonder if the problem is not one of circulation, but of providing enough  value  – anyway Under New Rules, Newspapers Increase Circulation by 400% Without Gaining Any Readers

… The new rules will allow newspapers to count a single subscriber multiple times if he or she pays or registers to access content via a print subscription, website, mobile reader or e-reader edition, among other changes to the way digital access is counted.

The changes could massively increase circulation numbers at outlets such as the New York Times, which has multiple mobile readers including a glossy iPad app, requires registration in order to access parts of its web site and plans to start charging for digital content next year.

Yes, I bet people at the New York Times are happy about this change, for all I know, they might have lobbied for it.

And it occurred to me while reading about how the W.H. condemns ‘irresponsible’ leaks, dismisses stories that it doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office – the same response would have happened – though you would have thought that since Obama is so much more liberal and free thinking than his predecessors that he would have cut down on the propaganda – but that’s apparently not the case here.

BTW, if you want to learn about your health and use  Social Media – The Mayo Clinic wants to teach you according to a post I read by JaTin – Mayo Clinic Launches Center For Social Media

The center will accelerate adoption of social media for health-related purposes, starting at Mayo and then within health care more broadly. Through this work, Mayo Clinic looks to help improve health literacy, health care delivery and population health worldwide.

I’ve gotten more interested in the medical field of late as I’ve done a bit of research into some of the larger brands via Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon.

And if you like Widgets, Wolfram Alpha will let you build your own Widgets and embed them in your blog, again, according to JatiN.  Finally, I need to check out the news that Amazon Launches Potentially Powerful Facebook Integration – once I do, I’ll write a review here.

Anyway, this is a long post – longer than I intended to write.