We all at Whitevector want to Thank You for the eventful year 2011!

This year we send our Christmas wishes to Plan and support the ”Because I am a Girl” -campaign. More information on the campaign site: http://plan-international.org/girls.

We wish you nice last few days at the office before switching off to spend the Christmas. It’s been a busy year once again and we’ll come back next year with ideas on how to make the most out of your social media monitoring.

Merry Christmas to You all!

Whitevector team

We are looking for an experienced software developer to complement our development team. You will join us to make our social media retrieval and analysis product even better.

You will be part of a small an agile development team and will take ownership of the features you develop. You will apply the latest technologies and produce top-quality results that you are proud of. You already have solid experience on software development.

The user interface of our product is implemented in Ruby on Rails framework. The search engine and document preprocessor have been implemented in Java. Our development and production environments run on Linux. We are firm believers in agile development, continuous integration and test driven development.

You will implement information retrieval and machine learning algorithms as well as user interface features, distributed systems and production monitoring tools. Even though some of this is new to you, it won’t matter because

We Expect

* passion for learning new technologies,
* an MSc (tech) or equivalent degree,
* ability to work together in a tightly knit team, and
* common sense.

We offer a competitive salary, an office in the Punavuori district of Helsinki, flexible hours, laid-back work atmosphere and a whole bunch of other benefits such as an extensive health care plan, luncheon vouchers, fresh fruit and a masseur.

Job Type: Full time

Created: 16/11/2011

How to apply: Please send your application and CV to juho.muhonen@whitevector.com

Last application date: 16/12/2011

http://www.arcticstartup.com/jobs/539

We are looking for an experienced software developer to complement our development team. You will join us to make our social media retrieval and analysis product even better.

You will be part of a small development team and will take ownership of the features you develop. You will apply the latest technologies and produce top-quality results that you are proud of. You already have solid experience on software development.

The user interface of our product is implemented in Ruby on Rails framework. The search engine and document preprocessor have been implemented in Java. Our development and production environments run on Linux. We are firm believers in agile development, continuous integration and test driven development.

You will implement information retrieval and machine learning algorithms as well as user interface features, distributed systems and production monitoring tools. Even though some of this is new to you, it won’t matter because

We Expect

* passion for learning new technologies,
* an MSc (tech) or equivalent degree,
* ability to work together in a tightly knit team, and
* common sense.

We offer a competitive salary, an office in the Punavuori district of Helsinki, flexible hours, laid-back work atmosphere and a whole bunch of other benefits such as an extensive health care plan, luncheon vouchers, fresh fruit and a masseur.

The job is full time.

Please send your application and CV to petteri.susi@whitevector.com.

http://whitevector.com/WV_IFM_Press_Release_en.pdf

http://whitevector.com/WV_IFM_Press_Release_dk.pdf

http://whitevector.com/WV_IFM_Press_Release_se.pdf

As social media has shown vast growth during past years, there is a growing need to monitor what is going on in social media and analyze the ongoing digital discussions on different platforms.

As a result, Infomedia has entered into a partnership with Whitevector, one of the pioneers within the field of social media monitoring and analysis. With the new collaboration, Infomedia’s clients will be able to follow the conversations and discussions that take place in social media.

“I see Whitevector as a very strong partner. Not only does Whitevector have a wide-ranging source base, it also offers unique possibilities for the measurement of social media in an easy-to-use self-service tool. There is no doubt that this collaboration with Whitevector will put Infomedia in a very strong position when it comes to monitoring social media,” says Morten Viktor, Vice President Development at Infomedia.

Whitevector is also looking forward to the partnership that will provide both companies with clear advantages in the Nordic market in the future.

“Whitevector is excited about the collaboration with Infomedia which will give us a stronger position in the Danish market. Infomedia’s expertise and profound customer relations offer a fantastic platform for leveraging Whitevector’s knowledge about monitoring social media in the Nordic region,” says Tommi Lehtonen, CEO at Whitevector.

The autumn is here, diaries start filling with meetings and evenings become increasingly chilly. Whitevector has increased pace during last weeks and there are some news we’d love to share. We’ve started co-operation with tens of new clients, including Valio (a large dairy producer), ISS (global B2B service company) and Nelonen (Finnish TV channel). We’re proud and happy to start working with new companies!

We’ve been also increasingly active in Nordics and will announce news regarding this later in the autumn. We are publishing several new partners, of which Finnish customer feedback company Etuma is the first one. Press release can be found here. In addition, we will be presenting our experiences in at least two seminars. In November our CEO will be speaking in the IJMR Research Methods Forum taking place in London and he will also have a presentation at the Customer 360 event in Helsinki. In addition to this we will also be arranging client seminars.

Best Autumn wishes,

Whitevector team

Companies offering tools for social media analysis – such as the Chat Reports service by Whitevector – are designed for one end purpose. That is to provide clients with social media data in the most usable form possible.

What the effective use of this data calls for, however, is resources from either an agency or an end client. These resources are what turn social media data into suggestions for the next step, or measures to be taken regarding a company’s online visibility and social presence.

To really get to grips with producing such suggestions for further improvement, a sturdy process is required to be found within each client’s organisation. Through this process it is possible to finally turn the resources needed for processing social media data into something that has substantial value through improved knowledge.

Vice versa, without a meaningful process for handling social media data, the social media analysis tends to remain at a nice-to-know-basis. While this is nice as such, all of us, our partners and our clients need to get to ‘need-to-know’ level with the data we provide. So, in essence, getting the most out of social media data requires organisational involvement and a process to handle it – in order to gain these need-to-know outcomes.

Once a feasible process for handling social media data is in place, we can see that there can be many different functions within each organisation that need to pull together. As a quick example, in a recent client case the functions that wanted their share of social media data went clearly beyond marketing and communications. Organisational groups including R&D, business intelligence, HR and management used social media data to understand their environment better.

Of course there are plenty of different organisations with different needs, but the point is that when multiple functions within a company want to use social media data for their benefit, that company needs 1) resources to distribute that data efficiently and 2) a process to do so and a process to refine and analyse the data. And this applies of course to the marketing and communications departments.

Finally, while very many companies have recently made the decision to ‘go social’, we would like to ask if this decision includes the allocation of needed resources and a few thoughts spent on a structured process that makes going social effective?

Along with the recent barrage of news related to the $50bn valuation of Facebook, we here at Whitevector started to once again ponder about the value of Facebook Fans, or ‘page likers’ as they should probably be referred to nowadays.

In other words, how much are friends worth to businesses in terms of the size and content of one’s Facebook Page?

We would like to note three different measures, or viewpoints, that can be useful for determining the value of brands’ Facebook Pages:

1) The amount of subscribers

One of the most commonly used variables for determining the value of brand-pages on Facebook is simply the amount of one’s audience. While this is a good measure as such, we feel that this alone might be slightly limited.

Surely, the audience size translates to amounts of impressions and reactions when brands share content on Facebook, and the ROI of Facebook activities can, to some extent, be measured from this figure. All we are saying, that perhaps a wider scope of determining audience value on Facebook could be useful.

As a side note on the measuring systems available so far, for Finland’s part there is recent data on the amount of Finnish users on Facebook (approximately 1.8mil so far), and also a site of Facebook Page audience rankings called Fanilista. By understanding the national penetration of Facebook, and seeing your brand in rankings such as Fanilista (Whitevector is #641 with our nearly 400 subscribers, Nokia being #1 with 2,5mil. ‘fans’ worldwide), you should get some idea of the value of your Facebook Page. However, we think there’s more to know in order to understand the value of each subscriber.

2) The content of each Facebook Page

One extremely important thing to remember when determining the value of Facebook Page subscribers is the quality and quantity of content your Page audience will be exposed to. If a brand is very quiet on their page, or the quality of posts does not exceed the occasional ‘good morning!’-updates, it does not really matter whether there are 100 or 100,000 fans if the content does not encourage engagement.

According to previous calculations, the value of a Facebook Page subscriber is indeed not merely the size of the audience, but a function of the audience size and the amount of content this audience is being exposed to. The more content offered to a larger audience, the better will the ROI of Facebook activities be.

Now we’re getting somewhere! Still, we would like to argue that Facebook users are not, unfortunately, equal. One thing to consider is also the average influence or ‘clout’ of your Facebook audience. Is your audience constantly in the top of the news feeds in their network, or are they passive, if not invisible users?

3) The ‘clout’ of each subscriber

According to the algorithm used in displaying content on Facebook’s news feeds, Facebook users who constantly post content that induces reactions are more likely to stay on top of their friends’ news feeds. Others, perhaps more passive users of Facebook might then get left in the dark even if the occasional status update or shared link might be of good content as such.

Services such as Klout.com are determined to calculate the ‘clout’ or influence of Facebook and Twitter users in order to offer some sense of the impact these people have within their networks. In other words, how noticeable their presence is, and how strongly they can influence others by sharing content.

This is one thing to remember when looking at the mere size of one’s Facebook Page audience. It indeed is not the size of the boat, but it does seem to be the motion in the ocean. A thousand strong Facebook influencers might offer more exposure to your brand than a ten-fold number of passive Facebook users. If an influencer ‘likes’ something, this will be noticed by a higher number of friends than the likings of more subtle users.

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As a conclusion, we feel that there should be at least three things considered when sizing up the compound value of your brand’s Facebook Page. There is the audience size, the amount and quality of content offered to that audience, and finally, the average influence your subscribers possess.

At Whitevector, we understand that acquiring and managing all of these measures, let alone comparing them to one’s competitors or industry might not be very simple. That is why we are currently working on new methods of measuring this data, and solutions such as ‘Facebook Influencers’ and ‘Fan Page Comparisons’ will be made available through our Chat Reports service in the near future.

Until then, stay tuned!

Figure from Social Times (originally by Converseon)

As the year 2010 is nearing its end, this is a good time to pause and think what the past 300 odd days have brought along from the viewpoint of Social Media, and the varied approaches to it. A few of the emerged trends during the year have been, for example:

1. The amount of the term PR being used along Social Media almost inseparably
2. How social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are being handled by search engines
3. Where is Twitter going to make its revenue from?
4. Finally, different ways of talking about engagement, listening, ‘doing social media’ and other synonyms in the form of countless How To’s and How Not To’s

Back in 2009, this year was expected to be ‘The Year of Social Media’, and by the looks of things, both in terms of online ad revenue and the growth of the most popular social media networks and other social media outlets, this year was the busiest any of us have seen to date – even though it still feels as if there could be more done so that social media business could keep up with the hype.

However, quite a big part of the discussion regarding 0social media and all of its related features was set either in the past or present in terms of ‘what has happened?’ or ‘how to do something now?’ – what we are looking forward to, is the future of social media, and where all of this today-oriented discussion is actually taking us. What to look forward to in 2011?

One of the most important things to look forward to, especially from the Social Media Monitoring and Analysis point of view is less emphasis on monitoring, and more profound need for analysing what is being said in online discussions. What needs to happen first, is that brands start to organize themselves internally, so that they have ample resources to tackle social media issues, and the ability to create a working process for using social media tools in a more full-blown manner. That seems to be missing at the moment, but then again, web-analytics was facing the exact same problem just about five years ago.

In essence, brands should make a move from monitoring (i.e. hearing) to actually listening to their customers. What listening calls for, is a set of data, both quantitative and qualitative, that can help to answer more questions than one. For example, knowing why a thousand people got to your website can be answered quite easily with one tool, but it takes another to answer the question ‘why did these 1,000 people come to my website in the first place?’ – and this just one of the questions social media analysis can help you solve.

We came across a very insightful post on Social Times titled ‘10 Rules for Successful Social Media Monitoring & What They Mean to You’. While the social media discussion across industry blogs is riddled with eye-catching headlines promising ‘10 tips for doing this’ and the ‘5 dont’s of doing that’, what really makes this post on Social Times stand out was the ‘What They Mean to You’-part. This post is based on the Listening 2.0 whitepaper done by the American social media consultancy company Converseon. What the post really answers to is not just how social media monitoring works, why it is done or how, but instead the post points to the next step of what brands should expect for when comparing social media analysis vendors.

There is a big difference in being able to offer tools for just social monitoring (i.e. raw data from social media sources) and being able to lead brands into customer intelligence (i.e. giving results on tone of discussion – or sentiment, marking search topic reach, finding relevant keywords around a theme, showing site or user influence in terms of discussion topic, etc.).

What we at Whitevector are expecting, for 2011, is to find more of these brands who understand the need to find actual customer intelligence through social media, since this is exactly what our service aims to produce continuously.

Whitevector’s industry is usually referred to as Social Media Monitoring, but increasingly also the words ‘analysis’ and ‘analytics’ are associated with what we do. With this post we want to elaborate how social media analysis can be used in a more analytical way and also combined with common web analytics, such as Google Analytics.

The main objective for common web analytics is to understand volume of visitors, behaviour of visitors on the site and traffic sources of the visitors. Meanwhile the goal of social media analytics is to turn the mass of social media comments into quantitative statistics measuring brand visibility in product contexts, lead generation potential, consumer preferences and analysing influential social media sites and profiles. This is the first part of the posting, and we will follow up with a posting that includes practical examples so that the basic idea will not remain too abstract.

Social media monitoring is often perceived as following postings or tweets about brand mentions without focus on context and only understanding ‘what is being said about us?’ While this is very useful and social media analysis always starts from the basic monitoring, we could argue that the most valuable use cases of social media analysis include a clear analytical approach where the context of the numbers is understood, social media analysis is combined with other metrics and KPI’s are set.

So how are the numbers put into context? In the first place, there are three basic ways:

• Benchmarking against competition
• Comparing changes over time
• Setting target values to visibility metrics

Competitor benchmarking is best done with direct comparisons in the respective category or benchmarking the brand against category average. Changes over time are best understood through weekly or monthly changes and through plotting for example six months of data into the chart to understand the trend. Third part, setting target values (or KPI’s) and benchmarking measurement results to the objectives is a simple but efficient way to understand social media activity as part of the digital marketing performance.

These ways to present social media data in context are all basic approaches in social media analysis, but our experience shows that too often social media monitoring is left outside the analytics functions even when the client already has an appropriate service in place and the data is there.

The next step is to generate insights by combining social media analytics with other metrics. Thanks to our Facebook followers we found a good example on how web analytics and social media analytics can be combined to determine social media campaign effect. Social Times published a posting last February that is headlined The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor. The article introduces a list of metrics that measure social media campaigns to understand success and ROI, and the metrics are based basically on both common web analytics and social media analytics.

Social Times argues that in order to determine ROI from social media campaigns looking only at visitors, sources of traffic, network size and the quantity of commentary about a brand or product is not enough, and introduces an extended set of metrics. The set consists of social media leads, engagement duration, bounce rate, membership increase and active network size, activity ratio, conversions, brand mentions in social media, loyalty, virality and blog interaction metrics. Of these ten the last four are derived from social media analytics whereas the first six are more based on web analytics.

This set is a good example of a toolkit that answers something that web analytics or social media analytics alone cannot extend to. For example, a company website might see a peak in visitor traffic, even though there have not been any recent ad campaigns. While web analytics shows the change in traffic, social media analytics can help to find answers to what is the reason behind a sudden traffic increase. Furthermore, understanding the reasons behind the traffic enables to make the most out of the opportunity and improve the performance of your site further.

Social media content is a significant driver of web traffic, which makes it natural to combine the data. Social media analysis helps to determine the drivers for the traffic offering information and a qualitative view on what happens before the visitor ends up on a landing page. This extends the visibility of an online lead generation funnel for site owners. This also shows a difference to web analytics: social media analysis is a combination of both numbers and qualitative insights.

And thanks to the Social Times people for a good post!

In our last post,  we emphasized the importance of social media mapping. What this means, is that before making sizeable investments into social media outlets, companies should take a while to just listen and learn about their surroundings. In other words, smart companies will like to map out their social media surroundings rather then jumping into the pool head first. As in our personal lives, it really pays in the end to check whether you’re going in the deep or the shallow end. Some might approach this by hiring a specialist to handle social media monitoring and through that, mapping as well.

However, being a company that actually provides an easily approachable tool for not only social media monitoring, but the analysis-side of things as well, we would like to highlight cost-efficiency. Hiring someone to specifically monitor social media with free and / or costly online services is a viable idea, but the downside is that it is also a very expensive approach.

In fact, we spotted a short, yet very on-point comment by Alf Rehn, professor of Management and Organisation at Åbo Akademi, regarding the new social media endeavors taken on by quite a few consumer companies:

“For many companies I would suggest starting by listening first: hire someone to monitor online discussions for six months.” (published at Kauppalehti.fi – one of Finland’s leading sources for business news)

Even though our tweet (posted above) proves that we do appreciate Mr. Rehn’s comment a such, we would like to take the idea and make it a bit easier on the wallet. As it is, a much more cost-efficient method would be to give your current marketing and communications staff an easy tool to map out your surroundings, to keep listening, and finally to be able to make some sense of where your brand stands among all of the online buzz. This will enable you to construct and execute a sound social media strategy, and this is something Whitevector can help you out with.

Feeling skeptical? Get in touch and order a free trial!