Social Media Panel

Get Social Media? from JohnstonWells Public Relations on Vimeo.


I participated in this panel back in November hosted by the PR firm Johnston-Wells of Denver. These guys are at the forefront of helping companies figure out the new world of social media and "the why and how" of effectively participating in this powerful distributed world of consumer influence.

The event was well attended by local companies in the Denver front range community and highlighted the range of emotional embrace organizations have for social media, from outright fear to competitive advantage.

Obama leading in the blog wars

Collective Intellect posted our take on the election from a quantitative evaluation of social media perspective. We compared Colorado blogs to blogs across the nation to determine both the buzz around the candidates and net sentiment towards each candidate. The result was a Barack Obama lead by nearly 10 percentage points. Read the full blog post here.

Crazy Dog Company Hike

Just finished another annual Collective Intellect company hike. This year we started up at the Moffat Tunnel East Portal. This is really close to Rollins Pass and where the train passes through the continental divide. Was a beautiful day and a wonderful hike. We had been going for about two hours and paused while some of the guys who were camping for the night pitched their tents.

About four of us where standing around talking near one of the lakes when a golden retriever came bounding out of the woods and right up to us. Goldens are normally very congenial dogs as everyone knows but this one dove straight into the backpack of one of the hikers, fished around for a couple of seconds and came out with a peanut butter sandwich vised in it's mouth. I think everyone was frozen in shock except for Paul, who just looked down and deadpanned, "That's my sandwich." I jumped in and tried to pry the sandwich from the dogs mouth when I heard the owner start to yell at her dog repeatedly, "drop it, Drop It, DROP IT!"

The dog finally did drop the sandwich and the woman handed the mangled package back to Paul. Paul asked if he could go ahead and give the dog the sandwich and the owner, completely serious, said, "He doesn't eat people food" I was about ready to die with laughter at this point and told her that her dog certainly new what he was doing and looked like a natural at the people food business. Perhaps it was one of those situations where you just had to be there but we were all in tears laughing. Classic moment of the hike for me. And much better than previous classic moments where we were almost struck by lightening!

Forrester Meeting

I had a great meeting with Josh Bernoff, one of the authors of Groundswell today. Josh has a lot on his hands lately with the announcement that Charlene Li and Peter Kim are leaving. Was an informative meeting and always great to work with the people at Forrester. Good luck Josh.

Interview

I was interviewed the other day by local Colorado marketing blogger Marie Rotter about how Collective Intellect is helping companies track, understand, and engage with social media. It's fun doing interviews with bloggers who are trying to spread the social media word. Very meta I guess. Social media on social media.

I also, ordered Charlene Li's book called, "GroundSwell" off of Amazon today. I recently sat on a panel with Charlene, looks like it has great reviews, and am looking forward to sitting down with it somewhere over America in the near future.

History of Wikipedia

One of the things we monitor at Collective Intellect is Web 2.0 technology and trends. I came across this video using our tool today. It's a great piece on the history of wikipedia and how Web 2.0 changes our collective future. Web 2.0 is the ultimate democratization of information on the planet and that changes everything. It is indeed an exciting time to be alive!

primaries too close to call - but we did

We just posted a primary prediction on our corporate blog for Texas and Ohio. While it's very close, our man Yordy has put his name on the line and made a prediction.

company blog switch over

We just changed blogging platforms from movable type to wordpress at Collective Intellect, so now we are here. I would say overall the switch was a pretty good experience. It was fairly straight forward to import the old posts and after digging around I was able to quickly hook up google analytics, Lijit, and Twitter Tools. Twitter Tools is pretty cool because you can configure it to auto-twitter everytime you create a blog entry and it creates a TinyURL on the fly for you. Conversely, when you twitter (and you can twitter right from the blog page!) it will either create a blog entry for each twitter or create a digest of your twitters at the end of the day. This is the exact kind of interaction that will make the abundant social web survivable. Teach a man to twitter and he'll twitter for a day, teach a man to integrate twitter with all of his socialness sociality online environment and he'll twitter long after he's forgotten what twitter was :)

The only thing that I haven't figured out is why someone with "author" privileges can't post a picture or a link. I had to set people up with admin permissions before they were allowed. Yes, before you flame me, I'll flame myself for not looking it up in the documentation.

So check out the new CI blog and subscribe. We have some pretty cool stats we're pulling to predict primary results. Look for more of these predictions as well as some pretty interesting analysis we'll be doing around the superbowl coming up this Sunday!

coffee and marketing

I've been helping on the marketing front and as far as I can tell there are five primary components:

1. Evangelism - If the market is not mature you need to create a value proposition that will resonate with buyers and educate the market. Note, this can take a while and is also why it is good to have competition. Didactic distribution.
   
2. Positioning - Know your product vs what other people are selling, accentuate the differentiators using as many keywords as possible. Note, this can be over engineered.
3. Landing - Build a compelling website and landing pages that are informative, appealing, and again, have lots of keywords. Design as a funnel to gravitate people towards certain pages that will result in a trackable lead.
4. Analysis - analyze where people are coming from, how many leads each source generates, and the quality of those leads by how many translate into prospects and customers. Use this analysis to improve lead generation and lead quality.
   
5. Coffee - Purely anecdotal but every good marketing person I talked to likes great coffee :)

Happy Marketing!


Coffee art courtesy of The Cup in Boulder

Predicting polling outcomes

One of the flat out coolest things about the technology we're working on at Collective Intellect is the analytical output. We have a model in place using our proprietary sentiment algorithm and volume to analyze blog posts leading up to caucuses and primaries. It is fairly accurate in it's predictions, much more so than just analyzing traditional media. You can check out the full post on our company blog that goes into more detail and see below our summarized results of the NH primary.

Quarterly Management Meetings

Meetings, meetings, meetings. They're sort of a necessary evil to running a business. People need to communicate in order to synchronize efforts within and across groups. They can be a huge time suck. At Collective Intellect we were having weekly management meetings. These became laughable at some point due to the overall activity in the company. People were either traveling or knee deep in some project or other with too little time to formally sync every week.

Through the tangible and immediate need to get projects done the team has naturally moved towards more frequent, informal hallway, and highly efficient meetings. So the meeting needs have become more about steering than rowing. We recently decided to solve this gap by instituting quarterly management meetings. This is a technique we borrowed from my last company.

After being purchased by webMethods in 2003 I became part of the management team. We held quarterly meetings that were one quarter strategy and three quarters execution planning. We applauded the accomplishments from the previous quarter, discussed the failures, and talked about what we wanted to accomplish in the next quarter. Each department would present how they planned to support those quarterly goals. We would typically do two days and have dinner together on the night in-between. The dinner was a great opportunity to blow off steam and enjoy each other's company out of the trenches of day to day business.

We've had one of these thus far at Collective Intellect. It wasn't perfect. We've got work to do. But it's a great step forward in the maturation of the company.

Eating your own dog food

Often in companies in which I'm involved, the quote, "eat your own dog food" occurs. The etymology of this phrase is apparently based on a circa 1970s Alpo dog food commercial where Lorne Greene professes the benefits to be so great he feeds it to his own dogs. This allegorical cry for using one's own products and services is neither appropriate nor in many cases doable. For instance, if you're Lockheed Martin you likely don't have a real need for a drone helicopter missile launcher, no matter how much you would like to use it on your competition. Closer to home, in my last company we built an enterprise software package for business activity monitoring (coined by Gartner as BAM). Using the software in a small but growing concern the size of Dante Software would be complete overkill where a simple spreadsheet would suffice.

We're in another round of similar discussions at CI and in this instance it seems altogether appropriate. In the current business we baseline, measure, and analyze the impact of word of mouth on a company's industry, products, and services. In this case, eating our own dog food is not just an exercise forced upon some unsuspecting corner of the organization, it is critical to our survival and growth.

Wallstreet and Web2.0

Since Collective Intellect is in the business of finding novel information from consumer generated media sources I often get asked about other opportunities that exist in mining information from the web for trading. Activity is really just starting to heat up in this area with multiple companies getting started and several acquisitions going on. It also seems to me with the popularity of more powerful web interfaces via AJAX and Flash that there are even some opportunities to create research platforms that are easier to use, more robust, and with more information than the current king of the road, Bloomberg. I'll reserve bitching about Bloomberg for a future post however.

I've jotted down an unordered list of what I've come across so far and will spend some time in future posts describing each one in more detail.

• Rumor Detection - Find the people that are speculating on some aspect of the company that would likely have material impact to the stock, such as: big deals, management change, mergers, drug trial results, etc.
• Sentiment Measurement - Detect sentiment towards a company, it's management and directors, and products and run statistical models to compare this against stock price and volatility
• Event Activity Correlation - Track a company event, such as an earnings announcement, that has material impact to the company and measure the amount of chatter before and after the announcement in order to gain insight into what the crowd thinks will happen to the company stock relative to the event.
• Citizen Analysts - Find the people in Consumer Generated Media (CGM) who speak regularly about a company and offer unique insights into that company or its products.
• Trend Death - For consumer packaged goods that end up on auction sites, mine those sites for popular product pricing. When prices reach an asymptote and start to trend down, it is possibly time to short the stock.
• Fill Rate Prediction - Anyone who takes online reservation for resources whether it be airlines, hotels, cars, that have variable rate pricing models, scrape pricing information. Lower prices = lower fill rates and thus lower top line revenues for the company.
• Passive Site Visits to Stock Price - Use Comscore or Compete.com information to track the number of visitors to a consumer packaged goods site. This shows invigorated consumer interest which may translate into stock price movement. I believe there was a study showing AAPL site visits as a predictor of stock price movement.
• Active Site Visits to Revenue - For companies that sell products online, track the number of unique visitors and clicks within the site. If you can figure out the customer conversion to average order size you can estimate revenue contribution from the online property.
  

camping under the super nova

I'm heading to two conferences this weekend in the San Francisco area.  The first is @ Supernova2007.   SuperNova is advertised as:

Business, technology, and social interactions are decentralizing, tearing apart industries with the force of a supernova. Intelligence is moving to the edges, through networked computers, empowered users, fluid digital content, distributed work teams, and powerful communications devices. Business models are under pressure as end-users gain greater control, computing becomes a commodity, and companies collaborate across geographic boundaries. At the same time, new opportunities are emerging through social software, pervasive wireless networking, massively multi-player virtual worlds, and distributed e-commerce, among other trends.

Sounds like fairly heady stuff right? I certainly hope so and will be looking to connect with a few of the thought leaders out there including Paul Kedrosky, Lada Adamic (an advisor for CI), Julie Hanna Farris, Udi Manber, and others.

The second is Foo Camp 2007 sponsored by O'reilly. This is an invite only event sent out to thought leaders on the web. One of my heros, Paul Graham, who turned me on to Ruby in his book "hackers and painters" will be there and am greatly looking forward to the dialog. The agenda is worked out by the attendees on Friday evening and everyone literally camps out on the O'Reilly campus at night. Should be very interesting times.