Archive for: March, 2011

Today’s acquisition by Salesforce of Radian6 for an estimated $326 million is a strong statement to the power of social intelligence.

Congrats to the Radian6 team.

Converseon is now the only remaining independent leader in Forrester Wave’s Q3 2010 Listening Platforms report. We continue to believe we remain at the front end of what we expect to be profound growth for the social intelligence space moving forward.  The intersection of “big data,” sentiment analysis and analytics is powerful and is not only becoming the impetus for business redesign, but also a plethora of new products, services and applications. We’re just scraping the surface.

While social CRM is one important use case, our focus will remain on unifying real time monitoring with the deepest level of intelligence together with robust consulting and service offerings to make social data intelligent and actionable across multiple use cases. These investments help drive even more attention and interest to the category. As we say, a rising tide raises all boats.

We’re proud of our industry leadership and of our industry. Congrats again to all involved.

Converseon at the ARF Re:think Conference

Converseon will again be supporting, presenting and attending the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think conference on March 20-23. For 75 years,the ARF has been a strong driver of innovation and ethics. Over the last three years, they have been especially focused on social and social intelligence, and an important advocate for transformation of the industry.

This ARF Re:think conference will convene the largest gathering of insights and research executives in the history of the industry.

Converseon will be participating throughout:

• On Sunday March 20, Converseon (along with Harris Interactive) will be participating in a private workshop on “Learning by Not Asking: Listening to Social Media Conversations”  with Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director at ARF and author of the forthcoming book, “Listen First.” This hands-on session will provide a balance of strategic perspective on social listening, its impact on market research transformation and some hands-on, practical applications. Copies of his books will be handed to attendees. If you’re interested in attending, some spots remain, just visit http://rethink.thearf.org/talks/17265
• On Monday and Tuesday, Converseon will be active in The ARF Insights Zone, which features learning sessions, product demonstrations, book signings and valuable networking opportunities. We will have a booth and demonstrating our industry leading Conversation Mining social intelligence technologies and solutions. Please come by.  You can register for the Listening Zone here http://rethink.thearf.org/pages/register
• On Monday afternoon at 2:30–3:30pm, Converseon will be presenting on “Overcoming Social Media Paralysis.”

Last year, Hip Hop sales jumped three percent while almost every other music genre saw sales decline by double digit figures [1]. Why? Partially because of the ways that hip hop artists use social media to engage their fans.

For example, Hip Hop fans embrace Twitter more than any music fans. Of the top 50 most followed musicians on Twitter, almost fifty percent are hip hop or R&B artists.

Social media is rapidly changing how hip hop artists and their fans interact, and also how the hip hop industry operates in general. The hip hop community has thrived by (1) using online platforms to build local and global followings, (2) using Twitter to interface with their fans directly with no filter and (3) bypassing record company agents.

At Social Media Week in New York, recording artist Saigon and blogger/social media consultant Karen Civil discussed how hip hop artists use social media to interact with their audiences. They also outlined two key ways in which social media has changed the industry:

First, while most recording artists were still using MySpace, hip hop artists like Saigon were already starting to build online followings through Twitter. At a time when most artists’ MySpace pages were managed by labels and PR people, Twitter gave recording artists direct and unfiltered access to their fans.

Social media has been particularly important to Saigon, who is an independent artist, as it has allowed him to use several platforms to build large followings all around the world (even playing packed shows in China) without first releasing an album. In fact, Saigon’s first album became the top selling hip hop album on iTunes on the day it debuted.

Austin during SXSW can feel a little unreal. Music, culture, technology and parties, all in that Texan landscape, can make one feel a little transported.

So it is apropos to those looking to reconnect with the real world that on Sunday, March 13 our Lead Scientist, Dr. Philip Resnick, will be speaking on a panel on “Using Text Analytics to Predict the Real World.” Text analytics is one component of how Converseon tackles the next generation of Social Intelligence — finding deep levels of meaning and insight in socially-driven conversation. Here is the description of Dr. Resnick’s session:

How can we use text to tell us what is happening in the real world? Text-driven forecasting is the challenge of making concrete, testable predictions about future events and trends from publicly available text data. Text-based modeling methods make it possible to discover the agendas and attitudes behind the words people use. In this panel, we consider some recent success stories that use various kinds of text (expert-written analysis, blog posts, tweets) to tell us interesting things about the future and about the people behind the texts in various domains (finance, political discourse, and public opinion polls). Session co-organized by the McCombs School of Business and the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC).

For a deeper discourse on our view of the evolution of Social Intelligence, you can read my interview published recently by Digiday Data.