Been really busy writing my Social Media Analytics Book – the site for the book is live but still being worked on (hopefully it won’t be taken down much for additional work but that’s a possibility).  The trip to London and Oslo ended Sunday night with jet-lagged me on  a flight back to JFK.  I put my presentation at the CIPR below in case anyone wants to view it.  Also the first two parts of the talk that followed mine is here and here (still waiting to upload the third and last clip)

As far as the book site, I’m getting ready to share some teasers for the book and lay out a vision of what comes next in the monitoring field.

Meanwhile, on Saturday night I was in Brighton meeting with Giles Palmer, CEO and founder of BrandWatch and interviewing him for the book.  Giles gave me a lowdown of how data is collected for Social Monitoring platforms and I came away with a new appreciation with for platforms such as his that crawls data instead of buying most of it from data aggregation services like Moreover and BoardReader.  Here’s a video of the visit – let’s put it this way, I have 3 or 4 hours of solid information and I’m not even half way from processing it all.  Having said that, information Giles provided me will probably make most people hyper aware of the difficulties in collecting data and how much of it is questionable.

Before meeting Giles I filmed this clip just outside the Hotel Du Vin, where I stayed last Saturday night – every room of the hotel is named after a wine and Giles told me it’s the best hotel in Brighton, and it’s not hard to see why.

As far as the whole trip, I sensed many of the vendors I spoke with are waiting for the big shakedown in Social Media Monitoring to happen, not sure it’s going to be like that or not, but the market in Europe is much smaller and more segmented.   Having said that, many of the technological advances in the European systems are better than the one platforms that originated here in the US and I clearly saw that.

I’ll be back in the UK and Davos in mid to late February, after my book is submitted to McGraw Hill, and be able to access the situations more closely then.   Finally, there was a lot that I missed in the US while I was gone, including Thanksgiving and a nasty article about Google in the New York Times.  Try as I may, I can’t get the article to render for me.   Also, Google is buying Groupon, and some people think Groupon is evil, but some people say that about Google, too.

I’ll have more to say soon, but with the writing of my book, my time is cut down and it’s harder to post – then again, traveling to Europe last week didn’t help there – I stayed in 5 different hotels over 9 days I was in Europe, including one night in Oslo, Norway.

But it was the best trip to Europe I’ve taken yet!   And if I could tell my readers just how many weird, fated things seem to be happening to me, things that can’t be chance, the whole thing is almost surreal, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just me, doing the stuff I meant to do.

Today I spoke with Nick Koudas of Sysomos who gave me an advanced look at Sysomos Map and Sysomos Heartbeat Social Media Monitoring tools (see my animated GIF below)

GIF animations generator gifup.com

Nick started by showing me Sysomos Map which is an analysis tool used to produce reports and insights (see image 1) and contrasted it to Sysomos HeartBeat (see image 2), a real time search trend tool used to keep track of what is happening now.

I got an appreciation on how Sysomos is somewhat different than the other Social Media Monitoring platforms I’ve worked with so far -

1. Data (historical back to 2002) is “atomized” semantically allowing for more complex data visualizations, often, on the fly.    One example is collection of Twitter followers for any influential Sysomos tracks in their system. Sysomos can show the number of unique viewers (de-duplication of Twitter Followers).   System Architecture makes complex analysis easier than what I have seen from Alterian or Radian6.

2. As a result of atomizing data and a better graphical representation than what I have seen elsewhere – Sysomos might be a better platform for certain types of analysis (ie: competitive analysis looks to be better here than anywhere else).

According to Nick Koudas, Sentiment Analysis may also be better than other platforms I’ve worked with.

87% accuracy in sentiment analysis of general text

91% accuracy in sentiment analysis of product reviews

85% accuracy in sentiment analysis of movies and celebrities

That’s not bad!   What I mean to say, at 87% Sentiment Analysis accuracy you an almost do what most people wanted to do with Social Media Monitoring platforms, in the first place, score sentiment of a large amount of information in an automated way, with a certain degree of confidence (that’s not possible to do with Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, Radian6 or any of the free tools out there – though it may/may not be true of Crimson Hexagon).

Influencer ranking and producing Influencer Lists, according to Nick, is fairly easy. Sysomos appears to focus much more on noise reduction – the approach is based on an idea that data full of “noise” is not worth analyzing. I have found that it’s typical to get many unrelated results in most profiles I’ve set up in platforms I’ve worked – by eliminating “noise” or unrelated information, the accuracy of information that’s left is heightened.

Sysomos has  more powerful contextual search capabilities than average – using the program interface you can control how close keywords in your profile need to be to each other to be contextually more relevant (see image below) and more complex queries can be constructed using AND, OF, NOT logical operators.

Besides identifying influencers, Sysomos can map influencers - the map can be added to in realtime and altered while the pages automatically refresh.

Because information is collected and stored atomically, extremely rich reporting can be done, including geo-demographic profiling, isolating influencers by city and state level with a high degree of confidence – this seems to be entirely missing from the capabilities of anything else I’ve worked with.  For example, I mentioned that Alterian and Radian6 are next to useless for geo-location queries, regardless of what the companies tell you and wrote about it in a post on finding local blogs and bloggers where I gave up on Alterian and Radian6 for hyper local searches as the platforms were not designed for it.   In the future, this may change as more geo-local data is transmitted (ie: using mobile devices with geo location turned on – we’re seeing this appear first with Twitter – but it will NOT end there)

While Radian6 and Alterian technically do have the same capabilities – for example

- drill down by location, age, sex, (Sysomos can also break down traffic by industry)

- identify languages (Sysomos can identify and translate back and forth between 55 languages and identify up to 186 languages)

I suspect, it’s not so much what Sysomos does, but the way in which it does it, where it’s strengths are.

The “BuzzGraph” looks similar to what some tools like Crimson Hexagon produce, though the style of the map is somewhat different – and the inclusion of Facebook and MySpace data (data that can be gotten from public  crawling of profiles where they can be found on Google, for example, is powerful, and features people are asking for, more and more.

To sum up this post on Sysomos – I was impressed with how much thought went into the data architecture and reporting capabilities of Sysomos.   It’s a powerful platform and an example of how fast the Social Media space is evolving.

I’m happy to say that Nick Koudas will be at Monitoring Social Media 09 in London and the Influence Scorecard gathering in New York during November – and I’m looking forward to that.

To read more about Monitoring Social Media 09 – check out these two posts

Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – Part 1 November 17th

Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – Part 2 – November 17th

To learn more about the Influence Scorecard – thisisbeta.influencescorecard.com/

Looking like  the upcoming Monitoring Social Media 09 Conference on November 17th, in London is going to be FANTASTIC and I’m happy to say that there’s a DISCOUNT for readers of my blog (who happen to be in London or want to be) who register to attend.

Use the discount code “MSM0910”  now and get 10% off  the 95 Pounds for the Earlybird Ticket – after November 16th (day before the conference) the priced goes up to 195 Pounds.

There will be at least one Tweetup – probably more.  I’ll be speaking at Monitoring Social Media as well – and I’m really, really looking forward to it.

By the way, there’s a twitter hashtag associated with Monitoring Social Media 09 – it’s #msm09 – in case anyone wants to follow this conference on Twitter.

However, I promise that people who come to Monitoring Social Media 09 will get a lot more information than what shows up on Twitter.