THE Social KPI: Time to Insight
Here is the one criteria you should use to select a product that collects social media data: time to insight.
Time to Insight defined: How long does it take me to get the information I need to exercise judgment? After that, it’s up to governance models and my degree of empowerment to do something about it (or decide not to do something about it, as the case may be). I can control how long it takes to get to that point. Whether I am dealing with a crisis, working on a campaign, troubleshooting, looking for sales leads…you name it. Give me the info I need, in a form I can use and trust, when it’s useful to me. And that can happen IF I have the right tools at my disposal.
Annnnnnnnd we can pretty much end this post here.
Making Waves
At long last, there’s a follow-up to the 2010 Q2 Forrester Listening Platform Wave. I’m sure I can only begin to imagine the hours and hours of interviews, research, travel, and testing that goes into creating a new Wave. Based on my brief interactions with Zach, he clearly knows and cares quite a bit about the social intelligence space and its potential. I hold him in high regard, even if he’s a Gooner. I’m sure this report was a labor of love.
But when I see that Radian6’s Data score has dramatically increased to the point where it leads the competitive set, you need to take this evaluation with a Planetary Resources asteroid-sized grain of salt.
This is probably an important time to make clear: this is not sour grapes. My new employer did not meet the selection criteria, so this is not some whining about getting a score of 3.46 instead of a 3.75. Look in the sidebar at my bio and my previous posts on assessing listening platforms to understand where I’m coming from.
The imprimatur of Forrester is akin to “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Vendors tout it on their websites and sales materials because it gives them credibility and impresses clients. As much as their business model may be threatened by independant “open research” firms like Altimeter Group, they’re not going anywhere.
Somewhere in the methodology, I really hope that beneath data sources or functionality is consideration of trust and transparency. As I’ve harped on in the past, some tools either inadvertently or deliberately make it difficult to expose the limitations of their content reservoir. I’ve singled out Radian6 by name, but they’re by no means the only perpetrator of this. The social intelligence space is so new that there is not yet generally-accepted research methodology to combat bias and error. As someone in the field, I own some measure (zing!) of responsibility for that shortcoming. We shouldn’t get a free pass because of that.
But even grading on a curve, and having put NM Incite/Buzzmetrics and Radian6 through their paces (and then some), I simply can’t believe that a) R6 beat out NMI on data sources at all or b) that R6 beat NMI on data sources by so much. Unless there has been major degradation in the content reservoir in the last year*, there’s no way that there was a sudden massive influx of spam and duplicates, or that NMI no longer covers source that R6 has never had (LinkedIn forums, Amazon Reviews, etc.). *And I can’t rule this possibility out entirely. There has been significant staff turnover at NM Incite since the last Wave (myself included), and there’s bound to be side-effects to the events that led to them taking such a tremendous hit in the Strategy score category relative to 2010.
On that note, a really interesting exercise is to compare the scores of the holdovers from the last report: Radian6, Visible, NM Incite, and Converseon. I’m not sure what the restrictions are on sharing data from the reports, but if you can get your hands on both Waves, I strongly suggest you do. Here’s a public link to the 2010 one. If the past is any indication, recent and future M&As will not result in the hoped-for synergies.
Where’s Your Forum Strategy?
- Consumers don’t necessarily exhibit identical social media behaviors across industry verticals
- Consumers don’t necessarily exhibit identical social media behaviors across platforms
Bitly to Launch New Consumer Version
Social Media Sentiment: Competing On Accuracy | Social Media Explorer
Seth Grimes is a smart dude, and he makes some thoughtful points. Of course, I would prefer if he had mentioned my employer…
But on a more serious note, for a long time there was an apocryphal stat floating around that college-educated people will agree on sentiment only 85% of the time. I have no idea how valid it was, but it’s a point that needs to be investigated and considered.
Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge
The great pain of every analyst is when they send their work off into a black hole. That isn’t what happened here. This is a story of the second greatest pain an analyst experiences: when their work is no longer necessary, but nobody bothered to tell them.
On the other hand, this is also a story of one of an analyst’s favorite geek-out moments: sexy new sources of data to inform even better analysis.
MKTGR » Blog Archive » Google Consumer Surveys
Great analysis by my former Nielsen colleague Dave Martin on the implications of Google’s move into market research.
What You Can Learn From Kaggle's Top 10 Data Scientists
The article reads kind of press release-y, but it’s interesting to get a peek into the heads of the people proving the value of crowdsourced math.
Klout Launches Brand Pages To Help Companies Engage Influencers
I’m still not particularly thrilled with the black box nature of Klout scores, but they’re not going away. PR firms are going to go nuts for this new feature; it will drastically reduce the amount of time they need to spend identifying influencers for outreach. They can spend their time vetting existing lists instead of trying to find them in the first place.
Incredible video shows how 100 years of shipping changed the world from 1750-1850
I don’t talk much about data visualization here, but I really ought to. This video reminds me of the replays at the end of a game of Civilization.
Gnip Adds Sina Weibo, 300-million member Chinese Microblogging Service « Gnip Blog
This is a big deal to anyone interested in ex-US social media data. While I didn’t call it out by name, it was one of those big sites like Quora and Orkut that have been challenging for social media data collectors to obtain.
On Correlation vs. Causation
Interesting article in this week’s The Atlantic on the birth and evolution of microtargeting:
All of these online movements contribute to what Gage calls “data exhaust.” Email, Amazon orders, resume uploads, tweets — especially tweets — cough out fumes that microtargeters or data brokers suck up to mold hyper-specific messaging. We’ve been hurled into an era of “Big Data,” Gage said. In the last eight years the amount of information slopped up by firms like his, which sell information to politicians, has tripled, from 300 distinct bits on each voter in 2004 to more than 900 today. We have the rise of social media and mobile technology to thank for this.
The Creepiness Factor: How Obama and Romney Are Getting to Know You - The Atlantic
But I think the response from GigaOm is equally thought-provoking:
Finding the why answer matters, though, especially if you’re in the business of trying to convince people to buy products or vote for you. You need to understand what really drives them. And as we move away from telephone and in-person surveys toward web-based sentiment analysis, it might get more difficult to find out. A marketer can’t just email someone and say, “I’ve been tracking your online activity (that’s how I got your email address), and I noticed you’re a Diet Dr. Pepper-drinking Republican. Why Diet Dr. Pepper?” We have to figure out ways to find answers to obvious questions that we can’t just ask.
All these neat patterns in data remain just that until you turn a connective thread into an arrow. It’s the difference between a fun fact to whip out at the bar and a proof point for a business meeting.
Big (Data) News
I’m excited to tell the collected internets that I have decided to join the team at NetBase. I’ll miss my team at Porter Novelli, but the top-secret stuff I’m here to do was mind-bendingly awesome enough to tear me away. (The PN Strategic Digital Analytics team will be coding this post as Sentiment: Mixed)
The only changes here will be disclosures when competitive issues come up and access to new sources of data. And potentially lighter posting if I am too busy circling back offline providing actionable social business intelligence to shift paradigms into Web 3.0 (by putting birds on things).
Sunday Times Analytics Wrap
There was a nice assortment of articles in today’s Times worth sharing.
I’m not sure how I managed not to share his original blog post, but the Times has just caught up on Mathematica inventor Stephen Wolfram’s quest to quantify his life. I feel like he and Nick Felton (aka Feltron) need to join forces for the good of humanity. Felton’s data is presented in a more easy to grok visual style, and it comes from the approach of human relationships and not just vast longitudinal data series.
It’s not clear that anyone has thought hard enough about what measurements are actually worth taking, and how quantifiable they are. What if the goal of a school is to teach its students social justice and not a trade? The inscription on the gates of my alma mater reads: ”They only are loyal to this college who, departing, bear their added riches in trust for mankind.” What units do you use to measure that? Number of protests organized? Probably not.
Finally, there was an interesting pair of articles on the values and limitations of algorithms that I happened to read back to back:
Consolidation in the social listening tool space
I was in an airport desperately trying to catch up on my Twitter stream when I saw the news that Visible Tech is buying Cymfony. I remember a period in 2009 where Cymfony seemed like it was outflanking my then-employer Nielsen Buzzmetrics on tons of opportunities, and Visible kept us from gaining much traction within Microsoft. And then suddenly in 2010 all these market researchers and marketers fed up with Cymfony started switching over and Microsoft’s Looking Glass was edging out of the realm of vaporware. But other than their appearance in a 2010 Forrester report (with an update from Zach Hofer-Shall here), I haven’t heard much from either of them, bar getting a Visible demo in my role at Porter Novelli. If Visible had any traction within the agencies of Omnicom, IPG, or Havas before, WPP’s bigger ownership stake will probably dampen it. The holding companies will not want to risk having the rug pulled out from under them. I know some really smart people at Visible, so hopefully this either removes looming uncertainty and doubt, or gives them a kick in the pants to do something even more awesome.
