I write some of my best posts when I’m tired and about to pass out from a long day of working and writing – since my post on Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – November 17th was re-tweeted several times, and I only covered half the sessions at Monitoring Social Media 09 next month in that post – now that I’m wide awake, after a long nights sleep, here’s the rest of the sessions I did not cover in the first post (read Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – November 17th, first, then finish up reading this post).

In The Truth about Social Media Data – I’m expecting to hear “who” is collecting the data and  partnerships where the data is being resold or “white labeled” ….

The Truth About Social Media Data
Giles Palmer, Founder and Managing Director, Brandwatch
With leading brands increasingly turning to social media for insight, feedback and guidance, social media data is under the spotlight. Questions about it’s origins, accuracy and scope have the potential to undermine the whole monitoring industry. In this session Giles Palmer, who has successfully led more than a hundred organisations through the murky world of social media data, explains where it comes from, who controls it, how it is filtered and categorised, its inherent flaws and limitations, and how to avoid misreading the information you are presented with.

In fact, white labeling of monitoring platforms is happening and has been happening for a while – and it might be there are only a few companies pulling the data in the first place off the web.  I know that Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 is white labeling their platform (though I never saw an example of it) and I know Radian6 white labels CisionPoint (I’ve personally seen this) and some contact management platforms, and CRM platforms, like SalesForce, are using Radian6 as a “gigantic EAR” and wrote about it in a few posts at Webmetricsguru.com where Social Media and Web Analytics are going to be merging more and more (which hearkens back to my session on The Future of Social Media Monitoring panel, earlier in the day).

Here’s the posts addressing the merging of data that I see happening more and more New Developments in Search, Analytics and Social Media plus Radian6’s Web Analytics and Salesforce.com Intergration along the work with Tealium.com, which picks up which of your customers was exposed to the brand message when they land on your site.com.

But, I’m expecting Giles Palmer to come up with something more revealing on who is actually getting rich on this “data” about us - (similar to the rumor that the CIA founded Facebook to collect data on us – rumor)  and how our “identity might be  sold from Social Networks and end up somewhere else or used by someone else” – looking towards finding out something I don’t know, yet, like

” …. you’ll be alarmed at a new article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that outlines how third parties are getting access to your personal information. Sites such as CareerBuilder.com are utilizing cookies from up to ten different tracking domains. These sites are using hard-to-delete cookies that remain on your computer system long after you’ve browsed the site.

Yeah, never liked CareerBuilder.com, but then, I used to work for Monster.com – so why would I? … and that’s what I’m hoping he’ll tell us, and what we can do about it.  Yes, I’m looking for conspiracy theories  in this session (after all, doesn’t the title of this session suggest that?) – lets see if Giles comes out and says that. We’ll see.

If Giles Palmer says what I hope he’ll say – and more – it’ll be worth the plane trip, hotel and conference admission price,  in London, even if I wasn’t speaking (but I am speaking).  I’m tired of going to Social Media conferences that just repeat what we already know, give me something new – Giles.  I bet he will.

In the next session, I’m expecting a Case Study – my guess is it’ll be  sufficiently detailed to glimmer at some truths we all need to apply with Social Media Community Building ….

The Power of Listening & Responding: Skype
Robin Grant, Managing Director, We Are Social
Robin will talk about how We Are Social helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme. He will provide insights into the tools and methodologies used and explain the impact social media monitoring had on Skype’s business. He will also describe how it helped them to manage a major crisis.

The key to this session is finding out what they did, specifically, and how it actually turned things around – I’m not expecting to find out anything that revolutionary here, but if I did, I’d be glad – if I found something about community building, reacting quickly, etc, that is generally not well known or understood, but could be ground breaking - I’ll just go on the record as saying – I’m not expecting that level of insight from this session, but if it happens, it’ll  an added bonus for being at #msm09 .

In Surviving in iPhone Territory - I hope Chris Thomas gets into the nitty gritty of what platforms he used (I’m thinking Crimson Hexagon – sorta suggested by the title – but maybe I’m wrong) and how hard it was to come up with the insights – how many hours did it take,  how many people worked on it – what kind of problems they came across when pulling the data – and what they learned about the HTC and how to launch it against the iPhone that they’d not know about unless they ran this study (in other words, Social Media ROI came out of it).

Surviving in iPhone Territory: A Competitive Analysis of the Launch of the HTC G1
Chris Thomas, Head of Research, The Conversation Group (TCG)
Chris Thomas presents the findings of a TCG research project covering the launch of the HTC G1 – the first smartphone to use the Google Android operating system. The project showcases the contribution of social media research to competitive intelligence, brand positioning and strategic communications. Covering a three month period around launch, and including almost 100,000 unique items of discussion content. The presentation offers lessons for the effective blending of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, and evaluation of the relative contributions of a range of free and licensed monitoring and analysis tools.

So, Chris Thomas will probably be talking about the undertaking … the kind of stuff, blending of quantitative (web analytics data, for example) with the qualitative (questionnaire, sentiment data, tone, etc).   As you know, merging both sets of data is challenging – and I wrote a post about it a few weeks ago in A Social Media Scorecard based on Digital Footprint Index and a companion post On Measuring Social Media … thoughts and a Scorecard.

So far, Crimson Hexagon seems to have gone the farthest, of all the entrants in this Social Media Monitoring arena, with the potential implications and applications of merging qualitative with quantitative data, but they have yet to carry it out nearly as far as they could, or should, in my opinion.  It would be nice is someone from Crimson Hexagon was in the audience – or even, on a panel, but I don’t think they’re going be there – they should be.

Developing the idea of merging – what if Crimson Hexagon‘s analysis of Obama’s HealthCare Speech last month to Congress, using Twitter accounts only,  captured not only the opinions about how people felt (qualitative data on sentiment and opinions- see below)

… but what if Crimson Hexagon also collected the Twitter accounts of each opinion along with the opinion mapping?  I know they have the data, they have a 75% to 80% accuracy, at this time, of mapping snippets to the actual opinion categories, and a 3% error rate in drawing out the percentages of each category – why couldn’t they take a stab at matching it up – or … we’d find out the match is pretty noisy …. maybe we’d contact half the people we could identify who said Obama’s speech was great and find out they don’t agree – or maybe we’d find out to what degree they did agree.  Maybe we’d approach the people who said Obama lied, see if that categorization is accurate.    We’d go to the next level or two with this data – because that’s what is logical to do.

Now, I’m familiar with STA Travel - I used to have a client who I did web analytics for that did Irish, Scottish and English vacations – STA is one of the biggest travel firms Europe, but getting travel agencies to use Social Media has been …. well, as fruitful as getting Architects to use it …. travel agencies have been, mildly stating it, un imaginative and not willing to take risk, at all, which is what Social Media, today, requires.

Getting Started with Social Media: STA Travel case study
Celia Pronto, Marketing Director, STA Travel
Most brands know they should get involved in social media, but where should you start? Hear from STA Travel how they moved from traditional marketing to placing social media at the heart of their business, including: Getting internal buy-in, How they developed their strategy, What measures they use to define success.

That’s why this session should be so interesting – think about it – there’s so many opportunities to get user generated content from people who take trips using travel packages – of using YouTube and other video data to augment views of a particular hotel, travel attraction, even a particular travel package that is still running – along with the TravelAdvisor reviews of hotels and restaurants that we’re already able to use for the last couple of years.

IN booking this trip to London next month, I used Expedia and got a good deal on a 4 star hotel and RT flight – because I read those reviews and looked at the pictures, and looked, and looked … in fact, I visited Expedia on at least 5 occasions to do research before I booked.   What do you think I got in email box a few days ago – contact with a personal team that will answer all my questions about London and a custom mini guide to London, sent to me as PDF – I didn’t get that two years ago when I was last in Paris for LeWeb07 and I booked my flight and hotel with Expedia.  Here’s Dave Sifry explaining it, himself (hint: maybe Dave Sifry ought to come to #msm09 and explain his custom travel guides in person)

Dave Sifry has been doing just that – custom Travel Guides – and testing it out at LeWeb 07, which I attended – though I didn’t come in contact with Dave Sifry there (but Scoble and Sifry had dinner – I wasn’t invited – ha, ha – and that was half the reason I went – to hang out – and go the Louvre, of course).  Maybe Dave sold his technology to Expedia – or maybe what he does is a much more customized version of what Expedia is now trying to do.

Maybe it’s not just for the publishing industry – but for the Travel Industry …Duh!

” … This could be a game changer for book publishing. A new company called Offbeat Guides produces personalized travel books based on your itinerary and travel details. It was founded by Dave Sifry, a serial entrepreneur (and friend) from San Francisco who previously led Technorati and LinuxCare. Dave has participated in our We Media conferences for many years. He’s steeped in knowledge and awareness of how the web is changing behavior and creating new opportunities to inform the planet. Here’s Dave’s blog post on the new business, which just opened for public beta, and more about personalized publishing from the company blog here.

I may add, the Travel data is pulled of the Web, in real time, and customized to you (maybe I’ll get one, just to compare with what Expedia gave me).  Ideally, Dave ought to just supply it to Expedia, STA, etc, for a fee – but that’s a creative use of Social Media – since some of this information might come from user reviews and insights – and I can see where it could be made even better by adding personality type matching with YourUniverse or something similar – I think YourUniverse – http://www.youniverse.com/ had a fascinating – I took a bunch of tests last year but then lost touch with it – but coupled with Sifry’s guide – it could be a very, very, powerful combination.

In fact, using http://www.youniverse.com/ with Travel Agencies Social Media could be a “Killer Application” if done well.  Just another one of my insights –  fortunately, YourUNIVERSE has done the bulk of the work - so messing this one up really will be in how the data is matched up with your itinerary – I suggest a partnership with them – they have the best network for personality testing with images – maybe the only one – best to build on it.

Travel agencies have clearly been late to the game, yet Travel Agencies, have the most to gain, in many ways, from Social Media – due to the wealth of content and the willingness to share it -  so I’ll be looking at what Celia Pronto says about the Social Media program STA put in place.  I’m expecting a very good case study here on the value of Social Media for STA, in terms of bookings, customer satisfaction, loyalty – Net Promoter Score, even – this is what I am hoping to hear.  It also would be nice to hear about how STA “enabled” customers to share their data with each other.

In Social Networking Data – I’m expecting Paul to talk about, and begin to summarize what has been discussed earlier in the day and pick up on the Crimson Hexagon example I gave above.

Social Networking Data – The Vital Ingredient for 360 Customer Understanding
Paul Alexander, CEO, Beyond Analysis
Social networks have the potential to provide companies with instant, reliable and valuable feedback – to help them reduce their reliance on expensive market research. But how useful is this new data source? Can “buzz” ever match the quality of traditionally researched data? And how far can casual online interactions be used to map transactional or behavioral shifts? In this session Paul Alexander demonstrates how several leading brands are approaching these questions and found answers to them.

The question becomes, how useful is this data if Sentiment Analysis is only 60% accurate and is often not even related to the Topic our using the Social Media Monitoring Platform to discover?   Since the data is so “unstructured” and “noisy” without significant work to clean the data and structure it – might the results be more of a detractor than not?

I think we’ve been there before, and I doubt this session will actually tell us something that new, but it would be good to hear about what measures are used for “Success” and get something actionable (i repeat, actionable) from this session about how we can sell social media to resistant stakeholders and clients that are still afraid to dip their toes into the pond.

In what appears to be the last session (unless the listings are not chronological) we get a discussion of free vs. paid tools

The Price of Knowledge: Free vs. Paid Monitoring Tools
Brad Little, Director, Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
When choosing a social media monitoring tool, there are lots of questions to consider: why are there so many approaches and services? How are they different? What justifies the price variances? Can’t we get this for free? What is being measured? What resources should we invest? In this session Brad examines the differences between social media monitoring tools, how they work and what to consider when choosing a provider. He will aim to get beyond the sales hype and look under the bonnet to help you select the right solution for your company.

Personally, I would prefer to see this session and the Future of Social Media Monitoring (which I’m speaking on) switched in sequence.  Here’s why.

First, the issue of weather to use Google Alerts, HowSociable, BackType, TweetDeck, Freeninum version of Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, etc … vs. Cision, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Collective Intellect, etc, etc …. is one that every person faces in this field – it comes up over and over – and is best dealt with at the beginning of the day – where we can uncover pros and cons which we can then take to us to the following sessions.

Furthermore – the discussion of “free” vs. “paid” tools mirrors the same arguments going on in the Web Analytics arena - with Google Analytics, with it’s free, but powerful platform, pushing other vendors out of business since buying Urchin, or pushing the like Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, into directions they’d not ordinarily want go in (such as the Omniture acquisition by Adobe last month and the matching up of Radian6 data with WebTrends – plus the SalesForce.com connection with listening platforms).

This week, at Emetrics Summit, Google is going to announce something new with Google Analytics - what if it was the acquisition of one of the Listening Platforms (like Radian6, for example) and it’s merging with Google Analytics data – which would be logical – would that not be a game changer?

I don’t know if that’s what Google is going to announce this time – but who has the most data in the world in one place?  Google. Who has the most to benefit from adding Listening Platforms into Analytics and Advertising … Google.

I predict, something like this will happen in the next year or two – and it will change the game – in a big way.  I can’t tell you it will happen next week – or next year – but it will happen.  Prepare for it.  Pro, it will help everyone but will hurt some of the big players.  That’s all I can say now – consider it an Intuitive, Prophetic Flash – one that seems logical, given where its all going.

Second, The Future of Social Media Monitoring – should be the last session of the day, because in many ways it’s forward facing and may be impacted by what was said in some of the other sessions – such as “The Truth about Social Media Data” (where are future is going to be data about us being “sold off” or not?) or the impact of new developments in listening technologies like Crimson Hexagon have in Public Relations (after all, several PR firms have been building on Social Media, of late, building Social Media into their campaign pitches – and the Monitoring and Measurement of Social Media, and I should know – because I’m personally involved with that at this moment).

I believe Monitoring Social Media 09 next month, in London, on November 17th, ought to be widely covered – and if your able to make it -  (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using code MSM0910).

Hope to see any of my readers who are at the #MSM09 or a Tweet-up in London, that week – details will be following in a few weeks.

Note: There’s an update to this post based on feedback from Jim Reynolds from Alterian -see the end of the post for the details.   Also- I heard back from Melyssa at Crimson Hexagon and Mashable is going to be publishing an analysis of President Obama‘s Health Care Speech later today or Friday – keep an eye out for it.

Since last week, as  I spoke with Melyssa Plunkett Gomez, at Crimson Hexagon, suggesting  Crimson Hexagon should analyze (much as they  analyzed the recent Disney-Marvel acquisition) Health Care reform and the Public option, that I had access to Crimson Hexagon so I could do the analysis, myself.

Not yet having access to Crimson Hexagon’s Opinion Monitor – I decided to go ahead and see what I could do with their much less powerful “Buzz Monitor” and compare it with Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 – to try to answer the fundamental question of how people feel about Health Care Reform and the Public Option.

Being a Web Analyst – and fairly hands on at that – I’m sharing the steps to how I derived the answer (which will be at the bottom of this post – so read on, all the way, if you want to know what I found out).

First Step, Build Monitors in Crimson Hexagon and Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 –

I built my queries (the same exact ones that are used on both platforms) using Google Insights for Search as my source for keyword data – this is probably the best data I can get about keywords people are actually using while searching about Health Care Reform and/or the Public Option.

I used “health care reform” as the first query in Google Insights and “public option” as the second query (here’s an example of the first query – you get the idea)

Queries:

Health Care Reform: “health care reform” AND (“health bill” or “health reform bill” or “health care bill” or “obama health reform” or “obama care” or “healthcare reform” or “healthcare” or “health reform 2009″ or “health care myths” or “health care facts” or “health care debate” or “hr bill 3200″ or “health care jobs” or “town hall meetings” or “hr 3200″ or “health care issues”)

Public Option: “public option” AND (“health public option” OR “health care” OR “the public option” OR “obama public option” OR “public healthcare option” OR “public option insurance” OR “single payer option” OR “public option plan” OR “public option bill” OR “health care reform” OR “public option obama” OR “public option poll” OR “public option healthcare” OR “public health option” OR “public health” OR “obama health care” OR “public insurance option” OR “health care” OR “public option support”)

While I said yesterday that no keyword tool that currently exists is built for Social Media, I do believe we can use search tools to  seed social media platforms such as  Crimson Hexagon, Radian6 and Alterian with keyword phases currently being searched for with the idea people are having conversations around  topics (keyword phrases) they are searching for.

Here’s Crimson Hexagon’s Buzz Monitor results for Daily Volume on both queries over the last month.  The Public Option had the most conversations on August 18th, 2009 (don’t know what happened that day).

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 monitor for Health Care Reform, while not complete, is similar to Crimson Hexagon’s results (the Public Option profile is still running).

But that’s where the similarities end between both platforms; Crimson Hexagon’s Buzz Monitor indicates a slightly negative sentiment about Health Care Reform and The Public Option:

Health Care Reform Sentiment:

Public Option Sentiment:

To be honest, the “Topic View” Crimson Hexagon Buzz Monitor produces isn’t particularly helpful to me, any more than the “word clouds” that Radian6 and SM2 produce, help me get any insight at all.  Maybe the only thing I get out of the Topic View is a possible Keyword List for Organic and/or Paid Search – but that’s just me.  I admit – often felt Computer Scientists create what they find useful and assume everyone else wants it, instead of just asking people what they want in the first place.

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 paints an entirely different picture and says the overall sentiment about Health Care Reform is Positive by a factor of 2:1.  The same is true for the Public Option (again, running the same exact query in Crimson Hexagon and SM2):

But when I looked at what SM2 considers a negative opinion, I got a hodgepodge of results, some which were negative, but others that were actually positive, but worded a different way (for example, if a blogger is angry that someone is denied medical care, the algorithm considers that negative, even though the blogger was really for the Health Care bill and the Public Option).

The Sentiment results from Crimson Hexagon appeared to be more relevant, when I read a few, even though I would not neccessary call them accurate.

Based on using both Crimson Hexagon and Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 I can say, neither one really answered the question, with any degree of accuracy and confidence, how people feel about Health Care or the Public Option.

I’m awaiting using Crimson Hexagon’s Opinion Monitor, which will give me the type of results you see, below – this kind of stuff is far more useful than what I could pull out of the Buzz Monitor or SM2:

… But .. you can only build these charts, well, using the exclusive Crimson Hexagon opinion monitor.

At the end of the day – aren’t much closer to knowing what people really think about Obama’s Health plan and the Public Option, than before; I’m disappointed – I had hoped one of these tools might have answered my basic question, but neither did, with any degree of confidence.

However,  Jim Reynolds from Alterian got back to me today and said I should have used a different report for sentiment than the one I did – here’s Jim’s words to me:

I was just reading your latest blog post and I wasn’t sure if anyone on my team every clarified the differences between Brand References & Content Tone.

Brand References will traditionally focus on a clear negative or positive conversation focused on a brand.  This is why you may have seen false positives.  We will traditionally walk our customers through tweaking the sentiment dictionaries to adapt the engine to the topic we are monitoring. For example if we did a campaign for the “angry whopper” we would add positive phrase to our dictionary so it doesn’t automatically rate the post as negative.

For a apples to apples comparison with the other providers I’d suggest using content tone.  This looks at the overall tone in the conversation vs references directly to a brand. From scanning the data this appears to be more accurate than the data that you’re seeing.

I’d love to discuss this in depth so I can share the details with the team on how to improve this piece of the application.

Well, the only thing I see, to be honest, is there’s almost all neutral or positive conversations – and that doesn’t match up with Crimson Hexagon’s Buzz Monitor – so while the information is more accurate, perhaps, it’s clear both platforms are counting sentiment differently – much differently, in fact.

I’ll be speaking directly with Jim Reynolds from Alterian, shortly.

Something caught my eye today – along with the practical implications of it – an article in Search Engine Land on Paid Search without Keywords says machine based learning algorithms can replace keywords for Paid Search Advertising.

….  keywords were used as a proxy for relevance. Conceptually, there is no reason an advertiser couldn’t achieve the same results without having to directly manage a keyword list. Down the road, Google wants to state outcomes and have machine-based learning and algorithms come up with the best method of achieving specific outcomes. In the case of no keyword search, an advertiser (like a retailer) would provide information on products, product descriptions, pricing, etc. and Google would use the information to find the most effective way to place ads in front of potential customers.

In a way, it makes sense – though I wonder, just what the role of a Search Marketer is going to be if they don’t come up with keyword lists anymore?

It’s almost as if Google is saying – just give us the information and we’ll optimize everything for you – sure, if your a retailer, like The Gap, you’ll need to specify all the features of your shirts, pants, bras, belts, etc – and that could be a job, in and of itself – but I’m guessing by that time, Google will just ask for an XML feed with a list of “attributes” against a set of “products” or “services” and that’s it – your done – no keyword list – Google will do it all for you.

My feeling, gut wise, this will happen, in about 18 months to 2 years – as a trial, and within 5 years – keyword lists will be entirely eliminated.  According to the article on Paid Search without Keywords

….. there are several advantages of no keyword term search such as …

• Efficiency for advertisers—there would be no keyword research component to a PPC advertising campaign.
• There could be better connections between searchers and advertisers on natural language queries.
• It would allow advertisers to better connect with consumers and capitalize on all relevant advertising opportunities.

These are obviously initial ideas and now Google needs to figure how to make no-keyword search work. According to Nick Fox, it will be some time before Google shares specific product details. Sharing the concepts with the advertising community at this stage doubles as a feedback mechanism and a trial balloon: if too many people hate it, Google can modify its approach. We sure look forward to hearing more on this.

Taking a forward looking view, maybe getting rid of “keywords” is good idea – as people often use the same terms to mean different things – even in subtle ways – and let’s face it, people usually don’t say what they actually mean, nor do they write what they actually mean, either, for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, Men and Woman process information differently, and  different parts of a human brain process different words while different languages put different significances to the same terms

…. In English, months of the year are treated as containers. People say “in January” or “in February.” Other languages treat months as surfaces. For example, “on January” or “on February.”

Considering that many people’s native language is not English, the brain structure may well have adapted some what differently – overlaying different languages, as we learn them, doesn’t necessarily make the same exact mappings – and everyone has their own way of processing information.   When you add all of that together – it’s no wonder the list of keywords for a typical campaign is getting bigger and bigger – and harder to manage – more people are using search – and the ability of keywords to describe intent is actually diminishing (Search Engine Land cites “increased Searcher Sophistication” – but as things move faster and faster, with more people searching and exchanging information, the number of words needed to map concepts to objects is multiplying faster than our ability to describe what we mean - which we don’t know, half the time).

… Increased searcher sophistication. In his keynote, Nick provided an example related to cashmere sweaters that demonstrated this point well. He stated in 2007, people searched for cashmere sweaters 47 different ways. In 2008, people searched for the same keyword phrase 73 different ways. It’s becoming a headache for advertisers to anticipate and react to so many different queries. Should advertiser prowess be measured based on mind-boggling attention to long query keyword detail?

Another point, that wasn’t brought up in Search Engine Land – is Keyword Search is already almost useless for Social Media –  no keyword tool that currently exists for Search Engine Optimization or Marketing is of much help for doing Social Media Research.  Why?   Social Media is about conversations, not keywords – often the words around a key-phrase are as important, or more important, than the key-phrase, itself.  I wrote a post about it a while back where I postulated that ….

1. Keyword Research Tools like  WordTracker and GoogleAdWords Keyword Research Tools (there are a couple, now), along with all the rest out there, are unsuitable for Social Media Research because they don’t capture conversations.
2. Existing Keyword Research Tools are built in order to find the most searched for or niche phrases in order to drive visits to a site; Social Media is not about visits to your site, it’s about Conversations and Relationships which may result in visits to your site, or may not – but do provide value, and may lead to conversions, but not necessarily right away.

I used Radian6, I think in a rather crude way, to show that using a keyword list generated to find information in a search engine isn’t going to help me find influencers - the purpose of the current crop of keyword tools was more to identify objects – or to sell things.

In bringing up the limitations of keyword research for Social Media, the same machine based learning algorithms that can replace keywords for Paid Search Advertising can also do it for Social Media, and, in fact, are doing so right now, to some extent, with Crimson Hexagon.

The recent Disney-Marvel merger, written about by Mashable brings up the variety of “opinions” that people have about the merger, highlighted by Crimson Hexagon’s Opinion Monitor, a very select service Crimson Hexagon offers.  According to the Mashable post ….

.. The Twitter analysis was drawn from a sample size of over 14,500 tweets, and was able to go beyond the high level summary to break down exactly what Twitterers were saying — positive or negative — about the deal. Bottom line, you were conflicted about how much creative control Disney would have over Marvel characters and story lines.

Since I’ve been consulting at Porter Novelli recently, I’ve had a chance to speak with Melyssa Plunkett Gomez at Crimson Hexagon last week – and found out the details how how their machine learning algorithms bypass traditional search.    Melyssa pointed out there are three patents to Crimson Hexagon, a company that emerged from a Harvard Think Tank.   While I love Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, they, and most of the rest of the Social Media listening platforms are still working based on keywords – though I’ve had conversations with Marcel Lebrun about moving past that with Radian6.

1. The first Algorithm, patented,  is able to determine the main meanings in a large amount of unstructured information (ie: that pie chart, above) with a 3% error rate.

2. The second Algorithm, patented, is able to match the unstructured content with the pie chart with a 20%-25% error rate.

3. The third Algorithm, patented,  is for ranking of the content for relevance.

But… get this, Crimson Hexagon doesn’t use Keywords. That’s right.   I don’t think Crimson Hexagon is “keyword blind” …. it does consider keywords – but it’s not the basis of that pie chart, above, and there’s a few white papers on the concepts behind how they do it on their site.

So, to sum up this post – Keyword Search for Paid Advertising may be an endangered species in a few years, and while the methods Google uses to figure out what  you want and serve it to you may not be the exact same one’s that Crimson Hexagon uses to figure out what people mean …. “the Keyword Phrase” the basis of SEO and SEM ….. is fading.

I’m still refining my thinking on this subject, it continues to evolve – and I’ll have more to say about Crimson Hexagon once I work directly with the Opinion Monitors – hopefully, in a few months.

.. And I only intented to write a short post … and here I go again, two hours later – I can’t help these “insights” … they just “flow into me” and once I see the connections – I need to go with it – and write down what see (I’m still an artist, after all – I see and think  in “patterns”).

Now, it’s time to stop, go to bed.