MutualMind has moved its engineering, operations and sales functions within the ng Connect Gravity Center at Alcatel-Lucent’s facilities in Plano, TX, which also houses the AT&T Foundry Innovation Center. MutualMind has also joined the ng Connect Program as an Associate Member, which allows the company to begin to explore potential opportunities for engagement with the other 125 members of the Program.

Besides the extensive resources offered by this program, our team truly values the open and collaborative working environment that the ng Connect Gravity Center fosters.

The ng Connect Program, founded by Alcatel-Lucent in 2009, is responsible for driving innovation by bringing together technology entrepreneurs and thought leaders in an environment designed to overcome traditional business and technology barriers to success.

There are three primary elements to the ng Connect approach:

• Innovation Ecosystem: a community of organizations and individuals pioneering high-bandwidth infrastructure, devices, applications and content.
• Innovation Environment: empowers this community of collaboration with an environment of physical and virtual innovation spaces and leading edge tools and techniques.
• Concept Development: helps service providers create, evaluate and validate service concepts in a very agile way — delivering tangible results faster.

We have big plans for 2012 and being part of the ng Connect program is a promising kick off. Stay tuned for more news and announcements about our upcoming partners and clients.

Respond When Creating Tasks

We’ve simplified our social task workflow quite a bit in this release. You can now create a task and respond to a user, all in one step!

Simply click on the “Respond now?” checkbox to show the response section. Compose your reply and then click “Create” to create your task and post your reply. The response you post is automatically added to your task’s conversation history.

Attach Content to Tasks

Sometimes, you need to have to a back and forth conversation with your customer. Or you found some related content that may be related to a task you are working on. We’ve added a way for you to attach any arbitrary piece of content from the content browser and attach it to a task’s conversation history.

Simply click on the attachment icon next to a content item, select the task of interest and click “Attach”. It’s that simple.

Instant Labels and Sentiment Reclassification

We’ve drastically improved the user experience of our content browser. You can now apply/remove labels and reclassify sentiments instantly, one at a time or in bulk! This enhancement allows you to get your work done without having to wait for the page to reload. Check out the video below for a demonstration.

And Much More

We’ve also fixed some bugs and made some minor enhancements. We are constantly enhancing our software to serve you better and bring you the best user experience. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

The collaborative work between IBM and MutualMind was showcased in a live demo called “Social App Throwdown” at the IBM Connect and Lotusphere 2012 conference this week in Orlando. The demo showed how to enable social intelligence in enterprise products such as Lotus iNotes and IBM Connections using rich and dynamic “Embedded Experiences”, OpenSocial and OAuth. Shown below are two example of social content shared in Lotus iNotes as email, complete with rich insights and dynamic updates.

The view below shows geo-location as embedded experience. Also note the engagement insight (number of shares) derived from link analysis.

This work was mentioned in the opening sessions on Sunday (Business Partner Development Day) and Monday (Opening General Session). I would like to express my gratitude to the fantastic team at IBM who worked very hard to produce this event. The IBM development team – Andrew Davis, Paul Bastide, Ryan Baxter and Stanton Sievers – was phenomenal. From MutualMind, Nizam Sayeed and Mike Metzger did an outstanding job of leveraging OAuth, OpenSocial and Activity Streams to produce a compelling solution.

We believe that this is the beginning of a new and innovative way of bridging the gap between enterprise activities behind the firewall and insights from public social networks. Bringing interactive insights in enterprise applications will change the way enterprise information is consumed. We are truly excited about the opportunities ahead and will continue to deliver more intelligent solutions with top-notch user experience.

Stay tuned more information about our work. If you are interested in the details, here are a few definitions of the terms.

Embedded Experiences is a method of embedding the “experience” or functionality from one application into a different, host application. The end user experiences the 3rd party application in their host application environment as if they were using it directly from the 3rd party provider.

OpenSocial is an open standard which defines APIs that can be used to build social applications using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The specification includes both JavaScript and REST APIs. OpenSocial leverages many other standards, such as Activity Streams and OAuth.

Activity Streams is an open standard which defines a data model to represent a stream or list of actions performed by users and applications. This specification DOES NOT define any APIs, it simply defines the data model.

As noted in the opening general sessions by various speakers, social business is truly transforming the way business and work gets done. It is apparent in the way IBM is approaching solving problems for customers and introducing social and mobile as the strategic element in its portfolio of products.

As you can expect, the conference is a fire hose of valuable information and insights (there are over 300 sessions – watch it at IBM channel on Livestream).

Here are 7 take aways that I wanted to share with you:

1. Social business is forcing enterprises to rethink the way they work, invent and interact with customers.
2. Analytics are becoming part of the fabric of all business systems & mobile is becoming people’s preferred access method.
3. Technology is a key factor but not the only factor. Its all about the business value, demonstrated through measurable results and outcomes.
4. Trust and culture are extremely important!
5. New standards and technologies – open social, activity streams and embedded experience – will be an essential part of enterprise products. These technologies allow third party developers and partners to integrate and extend enterprise products in ways that provides in-context, relevant information to the right people.
6. Sentiment is a very powerful yet under-utilized tool. It is important to figure out how to analyze all the social behavior that is beginning to emerge through unstructured data.
7. Social business presents profound potential for organizations. The key is to success is to learn how to harness the power without getting overwhelmed.

I’ll leave you with a snapshot of analysis of today’s conversation about these events, captured by MutualMind. In upcoming posts I’ll write more about what MutualMind is doing to enable social media intelligence in enterprise products using open social and embedded experiences. Stay tuned!

Lets start with a few view points about OpenSocial.

OpenSocial 2.0 is not universally loved or accepted, but it has great potential. David Carr, Information Week, Dec 2011

OpenSocial has established itself as the fundamental technology driver of the app based economy. OpenSocial Blog, May 2011

The latest version [of OpenSocial] has a chance to go mainstream, the question is if users will find the features compelling enough to use. Dion Hinchcliffe, ZD Net

OpenSocial 101

OpenSocial is a specification that defines a browser-based component model, known as gadgets, and an API for accessing information about user profile information and social graphs, including friends and activities. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site’s social data from anywhere on the web. [Sources: Wikipedia and Opensocial.org]

Here’s another definition: At it’s most simplified, OpenSocial is able to offer up bits of user interface from one application, while embedding them in another application, exchanging information along with it.

One obvious benefit of using OpenSocial is that personalized and relevant information can be embedded in the workflow of users and users can interact with that information without having to toggle applications.

Latest developments

OpenSocial 2.0 was released in late 2011. Dion Hinchcliffe, noted analyst, has written a very helpful post about OpenSocial 2.0 at ZD Net. Here’s schematic from his post which does a great job of summarizing the key features of OpenSocial 2.0.

As noted inthis article, new features announced for OpenSocial 2.0 include embedded user experiences (allowing user interaction with content from external services), better support for Activity Streams, support for mobile experiences, support for OAuth 2.0 (better unified identity authorization across applications), and more open search capabilities (designed to prevent social applications from becoming new corporate information silos).

Support by Key Players

We think that this new standard – OpenSocial – will be increasingly important for enterprises to bridge the gap between public facing social networks and internal social initiatives. However, without involvement and support from key players, the standards may not go very far.

OpenSocial has gained solid support from enterprise software vendors such as Jive, SAP, SocialText, IBM, Nuxeo, Atlassian and others. For instance, see here and here for more information about how companies are adopting standards and social business.

Open technology is the foundation of the Web. We believe that OpenSocial is on the right track and has built the momentum to build that foundation. In upcoming posts, we will share details of our work with IBM, a business partner of MutualMind.

Eric’s role will be to leverage the OEM partnerships secured by the company in 2011 and to develop new OEM and strategic social media partnerships in 2012.

“I’ve followed this company and have been a believer in their vision for social media intelligence and engagement since the beginning,” stated Eric Gore.

“This new sales role gives me the opportunity to help execute a substantial sales contribution that will enable MutualMind to leverage our world-class technology and OEM partnerships for growth in the coming year and many more to follow.”

“MutualMind proves to be a great choice for companies who want a listening tool, an analytics dashboard and social media management and engagement capabilities in one seamless turn-key package. One of our key strengths and differentiators is our set of white label and OEM partnership capabilities. The white label and OEM features are based on a flexible and scalable architecture that allows partners to rapidly deploy a highly customizable, secure and powerful white label social media offering.”

Eric brings an immense amount of experience and demonstrated talent for managing and growing key business partnerships for technology-based companies. We’ve charged him with accelerating our growth by leveraging our existing sales channels as we continue to find new opportunities in 2012. Welcome aboard Eric!

First lets look at the timeline. AMR made the announcement early morning on Nov 29 and we saw the bankruptcy conversations on discussion forums, blogs and tweets almost immediately. Using the search within results feature we could easily find exactly the mentions that were relevant to our objective. As you can see below we found 37K mentions of  the term “bankrupt*” in next 80 hours. By the way, this is a good example of using the power of advanced search (with Boolean operators, wildcards etc) to find something you did not plan for before!

Now that we’ve discussed comments from monitoring, lets switch tracks and take a look at the conversations at American Airline’s social channel, namely their Facebook page. For this we’ll use the Social Content Browsing feature of MutualMind.

The view below is similar to above but it is focused on Facebook posts on American Airline Facebook page and is filtered to show posts by everyone other than the page owner i.e. American Airlines. As you can see, the Facebook content browser has the similar search, filter, labels and sentiments features as the keyword monitoring view above.

The posts show a wide assortment of sentiments, even including jokes by @SteveMartinToGo who talked about being on “one of its planes which is now endlessly taxiing”. But going through the results shows more than what meets the eye. Here are 3 things that we noticed.

Lessons Learned

1. Communicate – make sure that the brand is communicating regularly but also that the channels are open for people to express their opinion
2. Be Thankful – thank customers who support you during tough time
3. Respond to questions – a situation such as filing bankruptcy means that customers will ask questions, even if you have already posted FAQs.

On-Demand Data Export

We’ve just rolled out the ability to generate CSV data exports on demand from within the content browser. When browsing your keyword mentions, you’ll see a link to the right labeled, “Export as CSV”.

Click it to submit your export request. You will receive a confirmation that your request is being processed.

Once your data export is ready, you’ll receive an e-mail with a secure link to download your custom CSV file. Data exports are generated based on the filters you’ve applied within the content browser. The data you see in the browser is what you’ll find in the file.

Social Content Browsing (Beta)

We’ve also added a new mode to the content browser that allows you to browse the content we’ve collected from your social channels. Just click “Channel Content” at the top to switch modes.

You’ll then be able to browse the content collected from the channels added to your campaign under “Social Channel Configuration”. These include both your brand channels and competition channels.

This is a beta feature. Only browsing Facebook channel content is currently supported. We’re working hard to add support for Twitter, YouTube and your custom web feeds in the near future.

Sticky Date Selection

Date selections are now sticky within the app. Once you set a date range in one view, it’ll be automatically applied to other date-centric views until you change it. Sticky dates are reset once you log out.

And Much More

We’ve also fixed some bugs and made some minor enhancements. We are constantly enhancing our software to serve you better and bring you the best user experience. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

Kim writes about “confusing buzzwords” and the “chaotic maze of overlapping options” that the buyers have to go through to determine which social media platforms will meet their social media objectives. Some of the questions that are often asked include:

• What is a social media marketing platform?
• What are the various areas of focus for social media marketing platform: monitoring, analytics, engagement and publishing?
• What questions should buyers ask when evaluating these tools?
• Are these platforms optimized for just B2C or are they good for B2B as well?

The Forrester report answers these questions and presents a new way to look at the B2B social platform landscape. Forrester examined 33 vendors and determined where its solution fell on the following two axes:

The report provides explanation of the taxonomy layout as:

The x-axis indicates where the platform is targeted. Social media platforms are either targeted to content and/or interactions that occur “on-domain,” i.e., on the tech marketer’s own corporate online properties (e.g., techmarketercompany.com), or “off-domain,” i.e., the platform is targeted off the tech marketer’s corporate domain, for example, a social network (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter).

They y-axis indicates what the platform is socializing. Social media platforms either focus on content that is created by people (e.g., product reviews) or focus on the identity of people (e.g., individual’s social profile).

Where is MutualMind positioned on this diagram? Forrester report lists MutualMind in the quadrant of “Manage what is being created About you”. MutualMind’s strength is in monitoring and analytics, insights driven engagement and social channel analytics. Our product philosophy is to provide sophisticated monitoring and engagement insights and integrate them seamlessly with social engagement to deliver social media ROI. That is the thinking behind our tagline “Extracting Business Value from Social Interactions.”

It is worth noting here that the business applications of MutualMind go beyond marketing and today it is being used with great success by brand and product managers, communication professionals, market researchers and customer service teams.

Hats off to Forrester for providing a refreshing analysis of the social media marketing platform space.

Facebook’s recent innovations will have lasting ramifications for the network’s 800 million users and how they interact with brands.

According to a recent study conducted by USA Today and Gallup, about 56% of Facebook users who are aware of changes to the network dislike them, while 36% liked the new innovations.

These statistics are reasons for concern among those who have built their livelihood on the social media phenomena.

While these numbers may seem disastrous at first glance, as with any major change in media, they should be examined as merely a portion of the larger picture. Much of this negative response is the result of concerns about privacy. This could be due mostly to the new Timeline and Frictionless Sharing features. While the Frictionless Sharing has some obvious bugs, like any software issues, they will be resolved or face user rejection.

The Timeline feature shares old posts, status changes, and acts to give Facebook more targeted information for advertisers. It’s possible that users who have been engaged with the network for a number of years would prefer that some of this information remain buried in the past. Mashable‘s poll of 3,200 users on Sept. 30 showed that approximately 59% of users said they had no plans to fill in their Timelines. Translation: if users make no additions to the auto-populated information in the feature, Brands stand to gain nothing from this innovation.

The feature has been stalled due to a copyright suit, but Facebook still plans to launch Timeline as soon as possible. While the reality of how Timeline will be utilized remains to be seen, it should be noted that users have the ability to delete or hide any information they choose. On the flipside, if users become engaged with the feature, it will serve as a better means of sharing their preferences not only to other users, but also to brands that may tap into usage patterns and interests in order to send only the most relevant messages to users.

Other innovations that will impact users and brands are the new integrated APIs and advertising programs. The added user engagement features that go beyond simply “Liking” a product, brand, etc., to “Listening,” “Reading,” and the soon-to-come “Want,” definitely open the door for marketers to more effectively target potential consumers. This too is garnering criticism from users who think this is a bit to “big brother.” However, the underlying element here is that while these innovations will help marketers, they will also help users.

While questions of whether or not Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has “sold out,” abound, when carefully examined, it’s quite plain that these new additions still fit the company’s mission statement of “giving people the power to share and make the world more open and more connected.” Even at f8, which is designed “to bring together the developers, entrepreneurs and innovators who are building a more social web,” Zuckerberg and his colleagues used their stage time to talk about changes for the network’s users, rather than the marketing elements.

Yes, the addition of Share features and the open APIs will make user information more visible to marketers, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Moving forward instead of Brand Pages simply trying to amass millions of Facebook fans, they will need to provide value to their followers. As we noted in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, if a Brand Page is not providing content that stimulates engagement from its fans, there will be no opportunity for this content to turn into Sponsored Stories. That means that the overzealous promotional messages that hold no significance to users will be replaced with relevant, interesting content that motivates us to act through a “like,” a “share,” or a comment.

Of course this evolution won’t come overnight, but the brands that hope to succeed will modify their behavior to become more engaging and we as users will be left with more relevant, valuable messages that may impact our future behavior. While some users will reduce their engagement with the network, it is safe to say that 8 billion users aren’t going to disappear overnight and given Zuckerberg’s history of really listening, if these innovations prove to be detrimental to the network or the users, he can always go back to the drawing board.

Sources Cited

1. http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/facebook-users-dislike-changes/
2. http://mashable.com/2011/09/25/facebook-privacy-issues/
3. http://socialmediatoday.com/imckeevocaniccom/370746/marketers-facebook-not-about-you
4. http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/facebook-users-dislike-changes/