I’ll be presenting this deck in Montreal Tuesday – the exact session is here.

Looking at the program, much of it in French, it seems to be about Big Data, which is perfect as that’s the area I’m most interested in exploring.

I also have a rule that every presentation I give contains at-least 50% new material.  This deck has several ideas from previous presentations, but I’ve mixed a lot of new things in.  I know there are people who will go all over the world, pretty much repeating the same information, and perhaps the same presentation, but I’m not one of those.

In particular, this deck has the addition of Camplyst, a new platform (and new friends, btw) who have managed to accomplish something that Google Analytics hasn’t done  - tie actual twitter tweets, Facebook posts and Influencers to measurable return of investment.

This deck was originally going to be a repeat of the Recorded Future presentations I did in late December and early February 2012, btw.

Enjoy!

I’m part of eSavV’s new video on their services and offerings; eSavV is a Lincoln, Rhode Island based software development firm.  Go take a look!

I was at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium most of the day(missed the first 3 sessions), and it was really good conference and was packed; as soon as I arrived I spent an hour speaking with Seth McGuire (Business Development) and Fred Funke (Director of Sales) about their “Social Cocktail” and  GNIP’s capabilities, along with various ways we could work together.

While GNIP doesn’t share it’s server architecture, our conversation answered a question I always had – why didn’t Twitter just supply it’s data directly to developers instead of having 2 external vendors (GNIP and DataSift) do it for them?

The answer made sense – Twitter wanted to focus on it’s own core business and preferred to farm out Data Delivery.   The conversation continued to focus on how companies use GNIP data, which is why they attended and sponsored #SAS12.

It was also great to catch up with friends at Radian6 such as Ed Sullivan, Jeff Cann of Sysomos and of course, Seth Grimes, who organized the conference, which took place at the  LightHouse on E. 59th Street.

While most of the presentations seem to confirm my perception that automated Sentiment Analysis isn’t too reliable, there seemed be a divergence in the belief of some, such as Zack Kass  of CrowdFlower (who spoke about crowd sourcing sentiment analysis),  Dr. Stuart W. Shulman of Textifier and DiscoverText and a few others who were for manual scoring of sentiment vs. Ronen Feldman of Hebrew University and Digital Trowel who felt the algorithms for NLP were sufficiently advanced now, that if the right model and algorithms were used, could do most of the work for humans (which I tend to agree with – but… and there’s a bit of a big “if” here, that everything is set up properly in the processes).

After a good two hours of after hour networking, I headed over to the NY Data Stories meetup, which I helped found, but stepped back from lately.   We had Nef Araia of ABCNEWS speaking about how to do an Analytics Report – and the presentation was excellent.   Afterwards, a group of us went over to Havana Central, for dinner and drinks.

A long and excellent day, over all.

Upcoming Events

Just want to mention that I’ll be at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium this Tuesday, all day, and blogging/tweeting from it.  There’s still time to sign up to attend.

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On May 15th, I’ll be speaking at La Boule de Cristal  in Montreal (this is the specific session – looking at The Future of Social Media Analytics with focus on Recorded Future’s solutions, and others I’ll present).

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Will also be at various Internet Week Events in NYC later that week (but I’m not yet sure of what they’ll be).

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Teaching and Analytics Platforms I’m using more of lately:

• NetBase – Students  will have full access and NetBase and it will integrated  the UCI Irvine Extension course assignment of Social Media Measurement course I developed and am teaching this summer at Irvine (online).   Students can register (and get free access to NetBase for the duration of the course).  Students and followers of this blog that sign up will get the access to NetBase as well, which probably would cost far more than the cost of course, with is $625.00.
• And when we take into consideration how theRutgers Social Media and The Arts course turned out-most of my students got far more than they bargained for, and I have learnt so much from them – the students are so bright and my approach, is as a facilitator, I don’t claim to have all the answers, because no one does – but together, we can find them – and the Rutgers course, I think, delivered immense value for the students who took it (and many have written me thank you letters to tell me just that).  Hopefully it will be offered again soon (Summer, perhaps, Fall, more likely, or perhaps both), as it was a new course and we’re fine tuning it – we know more now and would do some things better (nuff-said).
• Coincidentally, the course at Rutgers, had 84 students enrolled in it(partly due to the subject and partly, due to the course fulfilling a math requirement – the alternative in the spring semester would have been a Calculus course, so I’m told).
• HubSpot – I have been using more of late because a client of mine, CreoPoint.com, has a full implementation.
• I think the closed loop aspect of HubSpot makes it an appealing choice for marketers that want to have, more or less, one solution that does everything.   However, as I pointed out in my recent article at Search Engine Watch, and here, HubSpot is now vulnerable to Google’s own desire to own the entire marketing suite, and is on a collision course with HubSpot, it’s only a matter of time, till Google takes this over, as well.
• Ecairn – I will be presenting some slides from Ecairn’s high end B2B Analytics API offerings in Montreal on the 15th (as mentioned in the beginning of this post).   I’m impressed with the high end work, beyond their more current platform, which deal with finding blog Influencers, that I’m also currently using for a client.
• Working with Visibli Social Analytics platform which is a slightly different approach than some of the others I’ve used lately – here’s a topic cloud of followers to a candidate I’m tracking in Rhode Island.. 
• The first chart shows the words the followers are using, the second, the related words while the third shows the stories followers and theirfollowers are sharing.  More in a few weeks once I have had a chance to fully evaluate Visibli.

And then there’s Pinterest. Who hasn’t been captivated by the lure of images, the addictive scrap-booking, and trend detection possibilities of Pinterest?  Few have thought through the disruptive implications, either, for some business models. One of my students at Rutgers came up with some interesting ideas on how she used Pinterest to forecast current and future trends regarding to fashion.

While most SMM platforms that I’ve worked with, haven’t really taken on Pinterest yet (Infinigraph should be going that way, shortly) I feel that there are specialized Pinterest Analytics platforms that HAVE taken it on (Pinterest) and begun to do what the others should key into - influencer and trend forecasting - taste arbitration, and the like.

To that effect, PinReach does seem to “get it”, especially with their “Trending Pins” (see below), with another screenshot here. What’s perhaps missing, yet, is the ability to drill down by one’s own chosen topics – but I’m sure that will come – and could possibly disrupt, in time, fashion forecasting houses such as WGSN, whose model is totally manual and human based (nothing wrong with that part), but haven’t, as far as I can tell, done anything to go past that, or argument it.

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Disruption of business models, by the way, is the subject of a new book I’m reading by Saul Kaplen on The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing that was just published last month. I recently visited Saul and had lunch with him at The Business Innovation Factory in Providence, RI, as well as attend his book signing the week before last.

And that’s it for now – a long post and I promised friend Erik Kramer that I’d keep these posts shorter and more frequent – a promise I aim to keep.

This has been a very busy week for with two interviews with me appearing within a day apart, plus two new articles in Search Engine Watch Magazine, and the continued interest in the AllAnalytics.com article I wrote last week on Mining for Terrorists .

Two Interviews:

1. Technorati Interview  - No Center of Excellence in Social – Interview with Marshall Sponder, Author of Social Media Analytics covers my thoughts around The Social Media Analytics Summit San Francisco, two weeks ago, where we briefly met.  The interview was conducted last Friday and appeared Monday morning.
2. The other interview  with Mike Lewis of Awareness Networks,  appeared in a number of publications including Socialnomics, Business2Community,  The Customer Collective, Social Media Today, titled  Evolving Social Media Analytics: Insights from Marshall Sponder took place a few weeks ago and had a similar overlap with closing the loop on tracking social media and deriving return on investment.

This week also had two key articles appearing in Search Engine Watch (normally, might have written them for WebMetricsGuru.com, but the topics were skewed for the audiences and the opportunities to connect with larger groups, beyond the people who read my thoughts, here.

• What Google Analytics New Social Reports Offer & What They Can’t was written by request from Search Engine Watch, who wanted to know what an Analyst thought about Google’s new offering within the Google Analytics platform.  I had waited to write about the new social reports in GA till I got access, but once I did, found them interesting, though lacking in some ways – and not even remotely close to squaring the circle of social media roi.  Read my post and let me know what you think.
• Fishing for Insights About Google’s Penguin Update – was written on request for Search Engine Watch to explore the aftereffects of Google’s new algorithm update which is code named “the Penguin“.  To be honest with you, for a long time people have used SEO to compensate for a lack of branding, or simply having not invested enough in Branding.   Well, Google has decided to penalize brands that too obviously did this (used SEO to unnaturally, they think raise their search engine rankings).  I put in some of my own thoughts on the matter, and asked if we could all still function as “dogs” on the internet – much as people thought  to be in early years of this century.  Truth is, the big brands are dominating again – but that’s because they spent more building their brands – the very thing that SEO was supposed to be a shortcut to – gone now, thanks to The Penguin.  No doubt it will be readjusted in a few weeks – and many who lost ranking will gain it back, till the next update, when it will happen all over again.

Also, last week Mining for Terrorists (or Tourists?!) appeared at AllAnalytics.com, where I regularly write, which examined the inability of the NSA and DHS to effectively monitor Social Media due to the complex language/lexicon/syntax issues that are not scalable.  The post sparked a lot of debate that is continuing to smolder this week - definitely should check that post out.

Finally, my recent post on SEW on The new Social Reports in GA gave me an intuitive flash on where Google might go next in it’s expansionism - HubSpot is a logical target for Google now.  Here’s why.

• My post highlighted the weakness of Google Analytics Social Reporting in that the new capabilities of Google Analytics are of little use if you can’t track all the pieces and tie them together.  But isn’t that what HubSpot charges people thousands of dollars a year to do? Yes they do – and so become one of Google’s next targets, weather it happens now, a year from now, or two years from now, HubSpots days are numbered, I predict – because Google Analytics will eventually want to own the entire marketing suite.  Mark my words.

And that’s it.  I have a bunch of students at Rutgers waiting for their final projects to be graded along with a bunch of commercial real estate insights to deliver, unrelated, of course, to give out (more about that, another time).

A couple of thoughts:

• Why we need Social Media Metrics Standards –  I was thinking about this post, and had mixed feeling about it because I’m often nervous when insiders (in this case, PR Insiders – The Conclave) put their stamp on a definition, perhaps, making it something they end up dominating.  I feel this should be a “democratic process” in order for it to be completely fair.  I’m sure the motivations here are good, but  I remember a friend of mine told me several years ago, that when SEO first emerged ~1997, it was make into something more complicated, so the insiders, at that time, could make a living off of it.  I won’t go into the details, but I suspect, the same thing is happening here by Social PR firms.  I better stop before a bunch of them come after me for drawing attention to this. It feels wrong.
• Still, I see a lot of good here, with the standards work, and I suppose, industries have a right to structure their metrics for themselves – so perhaps that’s what this is about.  If it’s Agency speak for Agencies – then may it’s OK.  If it’s an attempt to tell “the world” how to measure these things, then it should be wide open to everyone who wants to weigh in.
• The same could be said for the field of Social Media Analytics – do we let PR folks tell us what that means and how to measure it? Hmmmm.  Let’s beware of having “insiders” in agencies define how we see the world (unless they clearly state it from the agency perspective, and stay within that framework), perhaps writing their own books about how measure it.
• I was at the Big Data Hackathon yesterday afternoon at Bloomberg LP headquarters in Manhattan – but too late to really get involved with the teams working on data.   It’s as if I walked into an Art Class, everyone working on the big data problem, but it was impossible to speak to many, without interrupting – so I didn’t (speak to all but one person).  It reminded me of how much Big Data is like Art, at the end, everyone was doing it their own way, trying to figure out what was the essential truth in the data, in this case, I think it was a 500GB file – details are online for the meetup group where this took place.

Managed to take this picture yesterday – I c an see why Bloomberg built this building – and the colors and fishtanks on the 28th and 29th floor were amazing!

My latest post at AllAnalytics.com was just posted this morning - Mining for Terrorists (or Tourists?!) which you might want to check out there.   There’s plenty of writing still to do – and I’ve had my hands full trying to keep up and this article was planned for last month, but I didn’t get down to write it till a few weeks ago.

You can read the rest of the post, along with the comments, here.  Feel free to leave your comments (you may have to register at AllAnalytics.com) there or here, at WebMetricsGuru.com.

Here’s my presentation from last week’s Social Media Analytics Summit (#smas12) thanks to Chase McMichael of Infinigraph, who filmed me speak, and I shared the link in my last post to this presentation PDF file.

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Spoke at the Social Media Analytics Summit earlier this week in San Francisco; the conference was packed and pretty good, most people I spoke with were happy with the content.  My presentations from April 16th evening session and April 17th morning session are downloadable PDF files, in case anyone wants to view them, and both were well received.   My general impression, based on the sessions I listened to, were …

• Attensity and NetBase were the big winners at this show (but both also had booths)
• Attensity made a case with several enterprise clients speaking who moved off of other platforms and onto Attensity, such as EMC and Nieman Marcus, that Attensity has  moved to focus on businesses who were more mature, and who needed a partner who could integrate all their data and address it through the same data stream.
• Attensity and INattensity/Carasoft  are two separate companies, INattensity was spun off to deal with mostly Defense contracts and business – I have seen some of the the government facing work INattensity has done last year for the UK.
• Netbase seems to be evolving fast, especially with it’s partnership with CRM vendor SAP, though the connection today is mostly Netbase Data going into SAP – I am looking forward to playing with a NetBase instance that will be set up for me to view political themes in Rhode Island.

It was also great seeing Gary Angel for dinner (Semphonic) again and meeting Pete Mannix from Venuelabs.  Chase McMichael from Infinigraph attended the Summit and filmed my presentation on the 17th, hopefully I’ll have that footage soon – Chase was also invaluable as a second set of eyes on both presentation, so I got another perspective on what the audience at #smas12 would respond to – and when I can get expert advice, as I did here, I snap it up – and it was very, very helpful.  As a result, my presentations went over very well with the audiences, both days.

Was also able to visit the folks at ReTargeter and get a updated look at eCairn on this trip.   There’s also an outside chance I’ll make a last minute trip to XChange Berlin (if I can work out the logistics) late next month.   I’ll also be in Norway in Mid June to meet with Integrasco (who many of my readers are familiar with from my book).

Upcoming speaking and attending

• I will be speaking at La Boule de Cristal on May 15th in Montreal
• I will be attending the Sentiment Analysis Symposium on May 8th (and possibly May 7th evening session) in NYC

Thoughts I had over the last week

• Return on Investment may be the wrong lexicon for B2B Social Media, but the right one for B2C – this may account for why people are so confused about SMROI.  Was thinking back to a conversation I had with someone from Attensity earlier this week – the work they did and do with Whirlpool and now EMC didn’t really focus on the concept of ROI, it had more to do with business process improvement (which is also a return of investment – but not always expressible in currency).
• I gave a chat for Bob Tripani last Friday on Social Media ROI where I crystallized my thinking  that ROI that is currency based needs an apple to apple comparison between money invested and money gained/lost.  If the effort going into the equation can not be fully evaluated in terms of money invested, then the ROI calculation one would make will be inaccurate – perhaps better avoided in favor for a different lexicon or description of value of efforts expended.

Web Journal links I liked this week

• I was at Anthony Gemma’s announcement last Sunday – he is running for RI Dist 1 US Congress
• Check out this new Solar System Application 
• One of my Rutgers students for Social Media of the Arts created a Social Network for Desi (check it out)
• Google’s new Brand Metrics attempt to measure if an Ad was actually viewed - check it out.
• Google + turns out to be popular with Photographers (and there’s a conference in May in SF just for it).
• Semphonic continues to innovate with the a new framework for digital marketing – check out Gary Angel’s post.
• Social Media Monitoring for Photographs - interesting approach – check it out.
• Interesting study that shows the cities that influence music the most – and they are different than the one’s you’d have thought.
• Tim O’Rielly on why he liked Captain America but not John Carter.
• Coverage of my own appearance at #SMAS12.
• Treato looks interesting - a friend thinks it will put a few Health PR companies out of business (sooner the better).
• Need this new 3D App for iPads (hope it works on the iPad 1)
• Need to take a closer look at this Text Analytics Platform.
• Klout launches Brand Pages and gives to Brands what PR firms were unable to deliver, well (biased point of view, of course).
• Interesting new iPhone cases (this is a kickstarter project from one of my students at Rutgers) – I need one, my case went kaput in SF this week.
• The Internet at 30,000 Feet
• Guidance for Artists who what to use new media - this was done for my Rutgers students by Susan McDonald (think she did a great job).

I saw the news earlier in January about and update to the Net Promoter Score, which is the new Social Net Promoter Score and asked to Demo it – that’s going to be happening shortly …. and I’ll share the results here, once I do.   Just got my invite the other day.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the beta site for Satmetrix SparkScore^TM, the Social Net Promoter^® Score.  This invitation to select members of the NPS community is the start of a fundamental and transformative change in the way businesses will measure and use social media. SparkScore^TM applies the same Net Promoter ® methodology of recommendation behavior, which identifies Detractors, Passives and Promoters of a brand, to social media sentiment. With SparkScore, businesses will be able to measure dynamic, unstructured comments and opinions about their brands across major social media sites based on Net Promoter, the widely-embraced customer loyalty metric and business practice that drives profitable growth.

Now, I have written about NetPromoter since 2006 and even posed a question to Gary Angel recently on the NetPromoter Score as a valid measure of customer satisfaction (and loyalty), and many have wanted to build a Social NetPromoter Score, but I never heard of anyone who succeeded.    On the other hand, it was only a matter of time till the creators went for using Social Signals – and now they have.

As far as personal experience with NetPromoter – it was mostly when I worked at IBM.com a few  years back and was somewhat involved with the NetPromoter Scoring being done using a Flash questionnaire to IBM visitors, as part of CSAT and Web Effectiveness.   But even at some PR companies I could name, people wanted to build something similar to Edelman’s Trust Monitor using Social rather than phone calls – and to be honest, probably that’s not a bad idea, if it weren’t for the sample quality being so polluted in Social, that we don’t really know that if we have a good or the right sample.

But let’s see what SparkScore looks like once I get to test drive it.