Sysomos Blog

Community Managers: Social Media’s Blockers and Tacklers

2010-03-16T12:02:34Z

The sizzle within social media is the tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, Ning, etc. But sizzle only gets you so far without substance.

Substance leverages the tools, creates strategic plans and tactically implements social media programs that are well integrated into a company’s communications, marketing and sales efforts.

For a company’s social media efforts to work well, someone has to lead the charge. The person best suited to do this job is the community manager – someone who has solid experience and multiple skills to handle a variety of tasks – everything from business development, customer service, marketing, public/media relations and sales.

Community managers are also evangelists and active within the community to provide a company with a steady presence. And they’re managers, overseeing other people who tactically implement social media programs.

While more companies are hiring community managers, their value has yet to be fully appreciated. This is likely because social media is still in its nascent stages so many companies are still working on creating management structure that incorporate their social media efforts.

It explains why many companies have launched social media programs without having a community manager in place, or they have someone who is social media-savvy but not terribly experienced.

The reality is community managers are the “blockers and tacklers” within the social media game.

While not glamorous – unless you’re someone such as Comcast’s Frank Eliason – community managers do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. When a company’s social media programs are successful, it’s not often that you see the community manager celebrated as the hero of the day.

At the end of the day, community managers can make or a break a company’s social media efforts – even those that feature an excellent strategic plan. Without someone at the helm who can effectively oversee day-to-day operations, social media can be a losing and frustrating proposition.

For more thoughts on the importance of community managers, check out this blog post on The Intangibles.

What’s the Buzz at SXSW?

2010-03-15T12:54:33Z

For anyone in the technology world, the South by Southwest conference (aka SXSW) in Austin, Tex. is the place to be. It’s a combination of conference, exhibition, networking and a break from winter – sort of like March Break for geeks.

The buzz going into SXSW was all about location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Given their growing popularity, these services were expected to take centre stage as the digitally-savvy attendees happily climbed on the bandwagon – much like they pushed Twitter into the mainstream in 2008 after enthusiastically embracing it at the SXSW conference.

With the first three days of SXSW conference completed, what’s the buzz so far? To get a snapshot of what’s happening, we used Sysomos MAP to put the spotlight on the biggest conversations.

Not surprisingly, “Austin” is the most active keyword with a strong association to “sxswi” (the interactive part of SXSW, which also showcases music and film).

As expected, Foursquare and Gowalla are also attracting some good buzz. But perhaps the most interesting “buzz” from SXSW is “gmail”.

Todd Jackson, a product manager from Google, said during a panel that Google made a mistake by launching its new social network, Google Buzz, too aggressively. Another Google employee, Jonathan Perlow, also said Google is fixing some issues that have slowed GMail’s performance.

More: If you’re at SXSW and looking for a tool to jump-start your visit to Austin, check out FourWhere.com, a new service that combines Foursquare’s content and data with the Google Maps API. FourWhere, which was build by Sysomos, is a user-friendly way to discover content from Foursquare such as restaurants and cafes.

FourWhere Fans Fuel New Features

2010-03-13T09:37:44Z

Since the launch of FourWhere earlier this week, the reception has been amazingly enthusiastic with tremendous traffic, a wave of tweets, some great blog and media coverage (e.g. Now Magazine, TechCrunch and Mashable) and, as important, some excellent feedback from users.

As the suggestions for new features and improvements rolled in, our team of developers jumped into action to introduce an improved version of FourWhere, which is a service that combines data and content from Foursquare with the Google Maps API. This makes it easy to find all the places visited by Foursquare users and any comments they may have left about them.

FourWhere’s improvements and new features include:

1. Support for different languages in tips and comments. Content in French or Japanese now render well.

2. There’s no more need for right mouse clicks. The menu of venues and tips now appears with a single left-click.

3. There’s no more Java required. This was mostly a problem for Mac users. FourWhere is now 100% HTML and Javascript.

4. We’ve added Opera support so FourWhere now supports all the major Web browsers.

5. FourWhere can now be used on an iPhone or a Google Android phone, although the small screen size limits the experience.

Below is a graphic showing the venues around the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Tex. where the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference is now happening. For anyone at SXSW, check out FourWhere as a way to discover places to eat, dance, drink and, of course, do business.

FourWhere was created by Sysomos, which offers social media and monitoring and analytics services.

Tapping into FourWhere at SXSW

2010-03-12T05:48:15Z

As the SXSW conference kicks off today in Austin, Tex., thousands of people are going to be looking for cool and interesting places to eat, party, drink, dance, relax and do business.

One of the tools that you might want to add to your SXSW social arsenal is FourWhere, the newly-launched service created by Sysomos which combines content and data from Foursquare with the Google Maps API.

FourSquare provides a user-friendly way to see all the places that have been visited by Foursquare users, as well as any comments they made.

To use FourWhere at SXSW, type “Austin Convention Center, United States” into the search box. Then, right-click on the map. This will show all the places around the convention center visited by Foursquare users.

To get information about a venue on the map, click on one of the orange dots. This will display its name, and any comments about it. For example, here’s several comments for the Iron Works BBQ, which is the orange dot with “5+” beside it on the lower right-hand side of the graph below.

More: FourWhere was listed among by Lifehacker as one of “best tools for hacking your next big conference (like SXSW).

Introducing FourWhere: Start Discovering the World Around You

2010-03-09T10:42:41Z

A growing number of people are using location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to tell the world where they’re visiting, and offering “tips” about these places.

But how do you easily find the information being provided?

The answer is FourWhere, a new and free location-based social search service from Sysomos that mashes-up locations and comments from Foursquare with the Google Maps API.

FourWhere is simple to use; you start by providing your location (city or address), and then right-click on the map to see the places where Foursquare users have been and any tips and comments they’ve left about particular places. (There’s a screenshot of FourWhere at the bottom of this post.)

“Creating FourWhere was a natural move for us given that Sysomos is a leading player in the social media analytics market, while Foursquare is emerging as one of the fastest-growing social media services,” said Nick Koudas, chief executive and co-founder with Sysomos.

“More people are using location-based services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Twitter and Gowalla. Today’s launch of FourWhere is the first step in bringing the local buzz together.”

After the initial release, we’ll continue to enhance the service by adding content analytics. We plan to add more real-time information from other social media sources using Sysomos’ extensive content database.

FourWhere is a public service so there is no need to register or sign in. Just visit http://fourwhere.com, and start discovering all the fun places you never knew existed and see the buzz about them.

The Buzz About the Oscars

2010-03-04T22:24:38Z

With the Academy Awards (aka The Oscars) happening Sunday night, there’s lot of buzz about who the winners might be.

Will “Avatar”, which has sold more than $2 billion of tickets worldwide, take home the hardware, or will the voters go for something like “Up in the Air” or “The Hurt Locker”? What about “Up in the Air” or “Precious”?

We decided to focus on the Best Picture category, which has been expanded this year to 10 nominees from five. Using Sysomos MAP, we took at look at the nominees being talked about by the blogosphere over the past month. Our search query featured the name of the film and “oscar”, “oscars” and “academy awards”.

Not surprisingly, Avatar has attracted the most attention with 25.6% of the activity. The Hurt Locker was second with 18.1%, followed by “Precious” (12%) and “Up in the Air” (11%).

This suggests that bloggers are pretty confident that “Avatar” is going to take home the Oscar, although “Up in the Air”, which stars George Clooney, may be a serious threat.

We also took at look at overall buzz for the The Academy Awards. The keyword driving the most conversations is “locker” with a strong link to “chartier”. Given all the talk about “Avatar”, this is an interesting development.

After doing some research, we discovered that there’s a lot of buzz about how Nicolas Chartier, a co-producer of “The Hurt Locker” has been banned from attending the Academy Awards after he sent an e-mail to the Academy encouraging its members to vote for the fillm rather than “the $500-million film” (a reference to Avatar). According to the Academy’s rules, this is not allowed.

So, who do you think is going to winner the Oscar for the best picture?

Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence

2010-03-03T12:00:54Z

The soft and fuzzy side of social media dominates the spotlight – social media is about about having conversations, engaging with people, and building relationships.

If there’s a dark side of social media that isn’t mentioned often, it’s how social media can also be used for competitive intelligence to pursue a rival’s customers or potential customers.

It’s not that this activity is evil or nefarious, it’s just that it’s not a happy, kumbya kind of thing.

When you are looking for weaknesses among rivals such as complaints about their products and services, and inquiries from people who might be interested in what they’re selling, it means operating in the social media shadows.

Truth be told, there’s as much value to focusing on gathering competitive intelligence as there is monitoring your own products, services and customers.

Customers are talking about their desires, needs and issues on Twitter, Facebook and blogs so why not take advantage of all this information to create a strategy built on leveraging the weaknesses of competitors. If your rivals are offering a window of opportunity, it makes complete sense to use social media to take advantage of it.

So, what are the basics for collecting competitive intelligence? Here’s a few tips:

1. Monitor popular keywords within your industry. For home renovators, it could be “renovations”, “home improvements”, “DIY repairs” or “home projects”

2. Keep a steady eye on competitors to see what’s being said about them. In particular, focus on people who are complaining about bad products, service or customer service. Then, step in by offering advice or help, while shying away from trying to sell them something.

3. Look for conversations about trends within your industry. For home renovators, it could be chatter about new kitchens, bathrooms or energy-efficient appliances. Then, you can participate in the conversations by providing advice, insight and recommendations.

There’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence within the social media landscape. Spending some time on the dark side could generate some good business opportunities.

The Olympics’ Social Media Stars

2010-03-02T04:25:57Z

The Vancouver Winter Olympics ended Sunday, and by all accounts, it was a huge success from beginning to end.

Within the social media landscape, the Vancouver Olympics had a 91% positive sentiment rating according to Sysomos MAP, while attracting four million tweets and 300,000 blog posts.

Given the terrific performances by the more than 2,600 athletes, we wanted to focus on some of the high-profile medal winners to see how much social media attention they attracted.

Using Sysomos MAP, we did a query using the athlete’s name and olympics OR olympic OR vancouver OR games. We then looked at overall sentiment and the number of tweets.

In terms of sentiment, Canadian Ashleigh McIvor had the most positive sentiment (67%). McIvor, above left, won the gold medal in the women’s ski cross, while her model-like looks attracted a lot of attention.

Another Canadian, Alex Bilodeau, had the second-highest positive sentiment (63%). Bilodeau won the men’s mogul event, making him the first Canadian to take home a gold medal in Canada. During the Olympics in Montreal (1976) and Calgary (1988), Canada was only able to win silver medals.

U.S. snowboarder Shaun White was the Twitter “star” with 27,896 tweets during the Olympics, nearly double the 14,333 tweets that mentioned U.S. alpine racer Lindsey Vonn. White, an international superstar, defended his Olympic halfpipe title with a near-perfect performance.

One of the most surprising things was the lack of attention paid to Norwegian curler Thomas Ulsrud, whose team attracted a huge amount of attention for their colorful checkered pants. While Ulsrud attracted only 33 tweets, a Facebook Page – The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants – now has more than 580,000 fans.

Congrats, Canada and Our Olympians!

2010-03-01T15:21:16Z

As a Canadian company, it has been a challenge to stay completely focused on work over the past couple of week while the Winter Olympics took place in Vancouver.

Probably more so than the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, Canadians were wildly enthusiastic about the Olympics, and Vancouver turned into a two-week party even for people who didn’t attend any Olympic events.

For Canadians, the Olympics concluded on an extraordinary high as Canada battled the United States for the gold medal in hockey. For three hours, most of Canada came a standstill until Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal for Canada in overtime.

The gold medal capped off an amazing performance by skating athletes, who won a record number of gold medals for a Winter Olympics. As important, the games was well-organized and Vancouver dominated the stage for all the right reasons for the past two weeks.

As far as the dominant conversations over the past two week, “medal” was the biggest point of discussions with “hockey” and “Canada” having the strongest associations.

Forget ROI, Let’s Focus on Social Media Optimization

2010-02-25T15:02:12Z

As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.

Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

One of the best ways to jump-start SMO is taking advantage of the wide variety of tools that can automate social media activity and extend the reach of your content with no or little manual effort.

For example, TwitterFeed is a easy way to link an RSS feed to Twitter so that every time you have a new blog post, it automatically creates tweet.

Ping.fm is another excellent tool to quickly content to distribute updates to dozens of social media platforms – everything from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace and Ning.

Hootsuite is a Twitter publishing tool with lots of great features, including the ability to schedule tweets, which means you can create a bunch of tweets at one time, and then have them appear throughout the day.

The underlying theme is using tools to make social media work for you as opposed to working social media. This is not to suggest that social media doesn’t require a consistent and sustained effort but there are lot of ways to optimize how you use social media.

So, let’s have more discussions about SMO to complement the growing obsession with ROI.

For another take on SMO, check out Oren Todoros’ post on “Max Your Brand With 4 Social Media Optimization Tips”.