KeenKong – is what I call a “conversation analytics” platform that is just about to launch (English and French) in Beta; I’ve known of KeenKong since early this year, when a friend, Frederic Guarino showed me what he was working on.   Occasionally, I’d hear references to KeenKong, and I saw a short demo of it this summer.

Yesterday, I was able to see a working version and get questions  answered  by Fredric Guarino and Oliver Berger.  KeenKong is based in Montreal, but Fredric is a frequent visitor to New York, so I have seen him often here, and I may go up to Montreal at some point in the near future.

KeenKong is designed to handle and add structure to a large number of personalized conversations with Brands and/or Individuals, where it is also desirable to reply personally.

KeenKong captures, parses and groups conversations into several buckets that are defined, partly by the conversation, and partly by the beliefs of it’s creators (I believe, based on Neurolinguistics) that conversations will always fall into 24 (or so) brackets or buckets, if you will – and this is a built in feature of human communications.

KeenKong is built to first take whatever conversation your having online, and structure it into those buckets – so you can better sort on the conversations and respond, in kind.  For example – if you have several thousand people trying to converse with you (say your a famous celebrity), or a with a well known Brand, through a blog or website (KeenKong will soon be available for Facebook, MySpace, Identi.ca and will have iPhone and Blackberry applications available in the near future), KeenKong will greatly simplify how you can respond and build trust by providing personalized answers, and back and forth communications.   As more and more people converse with each other – it becomes neccessary to invent platforms like this one – to facilitate much more optimal conversations.

You start by viewing your conversations on a “TalkBoard” (see above) that groups the conversations into the buckets or categories, on the left, then finds common objects in the conversations (ie: shirt, belt, shoes, etc) – Demographic information is provided, when it is available.

when you select one of the power words or objects, you get all the conversations they’re part of and you have the option of responding to those conversations in the same way by tagging individuals as a group you want to identify.

Once you have the conversations, you can look at the effect of your work using KeenKong over time for Sentiment and Effectiveness.

When I saw the demo for the first time this summer, @whitneyhess was testing it with twitter conversations she was taking part in and it was amazing what she was able to accomplish with KeenKong.

After looking at the Demo yesterday I was tempted to think KeenKong would work out really well for Customer Service, but Fredrick and Oliver were quick to point out that KeenKong was designed for a much wider variety of uses.   We also talked about what the definition of a conversation is, and of “active conversations” (back and forth between one individual and one respondent) and “interactions”, which are more like what most Social Media tools count today (all Tweets, Blog Posts, comments/posts on Facebook and MySpace, when they can be read, photos and videos) as conversations when they are often really one way “interactions”.

Since there is no “standards” that are in place for each vendor of a Social Media package to define what a conversation is, each vendor ends up deciding this for themselves – often making information between platforms totally incompatible – a much worse situation than what Web Analytics had/has with different platforms reading raw data logs in their own way – but at least, most Web Analytics platforms agree with the definitions of what a unique visitor, visit, pageview, bounce rate, etc, are – whereas most Social Media platforms, have no such agreement (see my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring, above for a fuller rundown on this issue).

By the way, I’m excited to give the presentation to a large audience in London next week – and what I’m sensing is KeenKong is a platform that falls in the category of “applied social media monitoring” – it’s more of a next generation application that’s used to make life much easier for individuals that need to understand the conversations and respond to them, in kind.  KeenKong is not a monitoring platform that tries to find out what people are saying about a topic or Brand – it’s purpose is to enable and supercharge conversations between “You” and your customers.

What do I think of KeenKong?

I don’t know about the subdivisions/bucketing of conversations – but as long as it works, whatever way KeenKong wants to classify information is OK.  Furthermore, by classifying conversations at the GetGo, KeenKong is “segmenting” information much in the way some websites are able to segment visitors by offering a simple homepage, but pointing visitors to options (do you want to “learn”, “shop”, “buy”, “get support”, etc) – much as sites like IBM.com, have done – and customers self select/segment themselves by what links they click on and what pages they land on.

This kind of “self selecting” / “navigational” segmentation works very well for Web Analytics – but hasn’t really been applied to “conversations” till now.

What KeenKong has done is look at conversations as if it’s a website, and given us navigation – while adding unique tags to the conversations so you can respond to them in a highly personalized way – but in volume.

There’s a lot of promise in KeenKong – since it’s just launching now – I’m sure there will be an open beta soon, and I suggest signing up for it, ASAP – I know I will.

I was looking for some trend today, that stuck out to me, as prescient, and found what is quickly emerging is Augmented Reality – with a post on TreeHugger on ‘Build Paris on Paris’ & Other Good Ideas for Growth- while the post doesn’t actually mention Augmented Reality – the context upon the changes  that are cited, strongly  suggests it.

….. New plans for both London and Paris hope to address similar problems by enhancing and linking emerging areas of urban concentration to create “polycentric” cities that minimize transit needs (and thus environmental impact). Anticipating an influx of 800,000 new people between 2001 and 2016, London hopes to contain that growth on already developed land within its existing greenbelt by increasing density around a network of public-transportation hubs, said Richard Rogers, the chairman of the London-based architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

The site of the London Olympics is just one example of a plan to improve a city through retrofitting and connecting. Artist’s impression via London 2012.

I noted, in my Facebook page ,, wonder if this visualization of the future of London – for the 2010 Olympics – is something that could fit into an “augmented reality” application. That’s one way to both sell the improvements AND – the pitfalls of the growths – and show planners the possible future layered over the current present.

Filing that away, I noticed the New York Times has an article today on Preserve d with Lasers – about a team in Scotland using laser technology to visualize objects in greater detail than ever before – this project is getting a lot of attention in Scotland, by the way, according to the Times article:

A section of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, captured in minute detail with laser scanners – NYTimes.com

…. The technology isn’t brand new or unique to Scotland, but the Glasgow team is on its cultural front line.

Earlier this week an article appeared on how the New York Times and others are experimenting with augmented reality.

” …Young and his team of technologists at the Times have been looking into AR to help with such location-based journalism as restaurant reviews (point your phone at the restaurant and get its details and ratings), real estate (see how many apartments are available and what floor they’re on in a given building), and even historical data overlain on weekly architecture articles by Christopher Gray.

One recently revealed app for which it’s easy to imagine multiple journalistic uses lets you point your handheld and get an overlay on the screen that shows how bailout dollars have been spent in your neighborhood. The startup Layar, which produced the app, used Recovery.gov for the data.

And here’s a video clip I found on YouTube that explains what I just wrote about, above:

Interesting post by Luke at OutSocialTimes (who I’ll be meeting shortly at Monitoring Social  Media 09, in 10 days) on why some companies should Not Use Social Media - and it ties into another thought that is seemingly unrelated, but not.

Luke poses a question I find interesting -

…. does the character (or “brand”) of a company dictate how successful it is likely to be in social media? Does a laid-back, fun-loving, youthful company stand a better chance of success on Facebook, Twitter and the like than an ancient, grey, corporate monolith?

Yes, it’s true.  Some companies take so long to respond, are so uptight, that Social Media is too hard for them to be active with – and Luke says as much..

… some large corporates have such torturous processes and regulations that it takes at least  48 hours for a Tweet to be approved by the lawyers – if indeed it is approved! This would make for rather stilted conversations, to say the least. In my experience the unwillingness for companies to free up staff and allow them to engage with customers via social media is subsiding – but there are undoubtedly still a large number of bosses who don’t “get” social media and shudder at the thought of their IT Support guy talking to customers.

But the question goes deeper than mere attitudes. Should the ethos of a company preclude it from engaging in social media? Or, put another way, are some companies so dowdy and uncool that encountering them on Facebook would feel like getting a friend request from your dad?

Yes, again.

However, there’s a role for a Public Relations Agency, in such cases, if I ever saw one.   With proper setup, a PR Agency can do for a large, conservative brand, what they can’t do for themselves  – but, the problem is that it would be expensive for a PR firm to do regular tweeting for Corporate Behemoth.  Something in between needs to evolve – but yes, there is a middle way – and it has only barely been explored.

On another note – Joe Taplin, over at TPMCafe, points out, in a post called The New Normal, that the 80% – 20% rule applies to labor and the employment report.

… What if some version of the Pareto Principle begins to apply itself to employment–20% of the workers produce 80% of the GDP? Dan Greenhaus of Miller Taback & Co has the grim reality of our future.

We have argued and continue to argue that another jobless recovery is materializing and if our estimates for G.D.P. growth going forward materialize, the unemployment rate will remain at elevated levels for several years. Nearly 16 million people are unemployed right now while another 9 million are working part-time jobs because they cannot get a full-time job.

Furthermore …

So here is the reality of life for the bottom 40% of America’s families. After they pay for food, housing and transportation they have $1200 per year to spend on “discretionary items” like clothing, medicine and doctors. Never mind telephone, Internet or cable TV which are supposed to be middle class entitlements. I don’t believe the 25 million underemployed people in this country are not going to sit on their hands passively zoned out in front of the TV set in the next two years, especially when they see Hedge Fund managers taking home $100 million bonuses for successfully taking down companies like Abitibi-Bowater, CIT, General Growth Properties, Six Flags and even General Motors with their brilliant government subsidized Credit Default Swaps and bond packages that forced the companies into bankruptcy.

Here’s how I think Luke’s earlier question about Social Media for Companies ties into Jon’s somewhat enlightening but depressing thoughts about the economy and future job prospects and disposable income.

It may be that only 20% of the companies or businesses can take advantage of Social Media – and will create 80% or 90% of the buzz.  That’s the tie in – all this talk about the production economy, all this talk about Social Media – but who is really positioning for the 20% – and that’s the paradox of it – of all of it … that much of the buzz and future, for labor, is directed at a much smaller number than what we need for the future.

This is the paradox of the future – what is needed is a much wider adoption than what we’re currently seeing.