Sysomos Blog

Xbox One Gets Gamers Talking

2013-05-23T14:03:25Z

It’s been 8 years since Microsoft released their Xbox 360 console to the world. Technology, games and even gamers have changed a lot in those years. That’s why on Tuesday the company unveiled their next generation gaming console, the Xbox One to the world. But this is not just a mere gaming console. The latest edition of Xbox looks to be your all-in-one entertainment console.

Microsoft gave the world their first peak at the new Xbox One console at a large event earlier this week and the gaming community went nuts talking about it through social channels. While the company promised more details about the Xbox One at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (commonly known as E3) next month, they still gave people enough information to get them all excited this week.

So what about the new Xbox One are people talking about? I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, to see.

It’s been less than two full days since that Xbox One was revealed to the world, but it’s already been mentioned in over 2 million social media conversations. I found “Xbox One” or “#XboxReveal”, the hashtag people were using for the event, mentioned in 18,216 blog posts, 24,791 online news articles, 65,869 forum postings and 1,914,33 tweets in this short time.

On top of those mentions across social media, I also found that a whopping 106,259 videos have also hit the web and have been tagged to have something to do with the Xbox One in that same amount of time.

Gamers all around the world watched the event and immediately took to social channels to talk about what they saw and what they thought of the new console. A look at the country distribution across all social channels shows that there’s a gamer in almost every corner of the world. The most talk about the Xbox One was coming out of the United States (38.7%), but we also saw people talking about it in the United Kingdom (12.7%), Germany (4.9%), Canada (3.4%), France (3.2%) and many more places.

The heat map below shows us where people were tweeting about the new Xbox from, and we can see that no corner of the world doesn’t have at least a few gamers that were eager to talk about this next generation console.

While people around the world were talking, there was a bit of gender divide between who was actually talking about the Xbox One. There’s no question that video games were once seen as a “boy thing”, but there has been a significant rise in the amount of women that love to play video games. However, when I looked into who was talking through social media about the new Xbox it was men that dominated the conversation. Males accounted for 89% of the Xbox One conversations while women only made up the other 11%.

So what did people have to say upon getting a first look at the Xbox One? The first thing I noticed was all the comparisons to it’s predecessor, the “Xbox” “360″. Of course, people also immediately took to also comparing the new console to it’s rival that was also revealed earlier this year, the “PS4″. As well, you can never have a conversation about a new gaming console without talking about the “games” that you’ll be able to play on it. The word “game” also came up a lot as people were talking about the portability of games between consoles, which it looks like Xbox is trying to stop (as in making it harder for people to buy used games). Finally, there is going to be a lot of integration on this new console with Xbox’s “Kinect” wich is a motion and voice capture device that allows people to interact with games and other console operations without the use of a controller.

While the portability of games between consoles may have had some people up in arms, the general overall sense of sentiment around the Xbox One’s reveal seems to be mostly positive. 48% of all conversations I found were positive, while only 12% were negative. This gives the conversations about the Xbox One an overall favourable rating of 88%.

Will the Xbox One stay so favourable? We’ll have to wait until later in the year when the console becomes available to purchase (probably just in time for the holidays) to find out what people really think about it.

How to Avoid a Social Media Meltdown

2013-05-22T11:03:00Z

You’re a small business owner and, for one reason or another, you’re under attack on social media.

What do you do?

There are many ways to handle a crisis. This includes doing nothing, although it’s not one hat comes highly recommended given it allows your critics to flail away unopposed.

After a recent episode of Kitchen Nightmare, Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro came under a lot of fire for just about anything you can imagine.

They’re not the only restaurant owners to be dumped on by Chef Gordon Ramsay but it’s how they handled his criticism that needs to be examined.

In the after-math, the biggest lessons from situations like the one faced by Amy’s Baking Co. is be cool, calm and collected.

Unfortunately, Amy Baking Co.’s owners, Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, did what any business should avoid.

They became defensive, nonsensical, combative and allowed no room for the negative conversation about them to end gracefully.

Getting defensive during personal attacks tends to be the quickest way to lose control and sympathy in the online world.

Most people aren’t natural digital marketers or they don’t have the right approach for crisis management when it comes to social media.

It’s important to remember if you are under attack, the nature of social media is it tends to pass if you stay the course and have a strategy.

It is important to learn from this social media nightmare, and remember the more you go after someone who is attacking your business in social media, the worse the situation can become.

Focus on your advocates and if there is a small number of detractors, feel free to connect with them on a more honest level – put your products and services in their hands.

Social Media: The Importance of Why

2013-05-18T11:36:03Z

At the mesh conference last week in Toronto, Joe Pulizzi did a terrific workshop on content marketing.

One of the key points he made during his presentation was the importance of brands asking themselves why they want to do content marketing.

What the goals and objectives? How is content marketing going to help drive the business forward? How will content marketing meet the needs of customers?

It’s a simple question but it resonated because many brands fail to answer it when they look to get into new things, including social media.

As much as social media is sexy and been successfully embraced by many companies for a variety of reasons, brands still need to ask them why when they’re looking to get into social media or exploring the idea of expanding their efforts.

Is the interest in social media about leads and sales? Is it focused on brand awareness and brand reputation? What are customer service and engagement?

By answering the question, brands can give themselves the information needed to make the right decisions.

At the end of the day, it could be that social media doesn’t make much sense or taking a modest and measured approach to social media is the better way to go.

For brands already doing social media, asking why could provide new intelligence into what they’re currently doing and what they’re thinking about doing.

The great thing about asking why is it gives brands a hurdle to climb over before they race ahead. By forcing brands to think about their goals and the impact on resources (people and money), it hopefully leads to better and smarter decisions.

Truth be told, doing social media because everyone else seems to be doing it is the wrong approach. The reasons for doing social media should be clear, focused and make sense from a strategic and tactical perspective.

So the next time your brand is looking at social, start with a one word question: Why?

Want More Shares on Facebook?

2013-05-16T13:17:47Z

It seems the more a digital marketer tries on Facebook, the more elusive it becomes to get your audience to share your content.

Nothing in social media is easy, but wherever there is a will there is a way.

One of the big goals for social media is making sure what you doreaches the largest audience possible.

How do you achieve this?

Well, here’s a couple of proven ideas and you should give them a shot to discover the results.

Timing is Everything

You need an editorial calendar to map out when you will be releasing content. It needs to be logical and reflective of your goals. Things shouldn’t just happen when it comes to digital marketing.

You also need to consider when your audience wants to receive key messaging. If you’re reaching out to a younger audience, you might want to approach it differently than an older demographic group.

Visuals Matter

Social media is a lot of content but you need to engage your audience in a way that is more enticing than just the written word.

An image or video can make someone more willing to click on a link or want to go a level deeper. Your job is to find a visual that enhances the copy. Not an easy task.

These are only two ideas but there are dozens more that are proven and effective. Take the time to learn what can work for you and build it into your strategy.

This Is Social Media To Commander Hadfield

2013-05-16T05:24:43Z

On Monday night the crew of Expedition 35 at the International Space Station touched back down on Earth for the first time in five months. Among the crew was Commander Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut that some call “the first man to master social media in space.”

Five months ago Chris Hadfield headed to the ISS, but never really lost contact with us here back on terra firma. Commander Hadfield kept in touch by using social media to wow the world with the things he was doing up in space. Whether it was his tweets, his pictures from space, his YouTube videos and anything else he sent back down to Earth, the world was enthralled by it.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I took a look at the impact that Chris Hadfield had on the social media world.

I started by looking for all mentions of Hadfield by name or his Twitter screen name for the past 6 months. In that time I found him mentioned over 1.7 million times across social media. There were 14,956 blog posts, 29,689 online news articles, 11,921 forum postings and 1,680,939 tweets about, to or from Hadfield.

On average, people were mentioning or talking to Commander Hadfield about 10,000 times per day while he was up in space. The giant spike we can see at the end of the six month period below was people watching and tweeting along with Hadfield and the other two crew members as they descended back to Earth.

While Hadfield was up there, he managed to capture the attention of the world through his social media communications from space. A look at where tweets about the Commander came from shows that people around the world were talking to and about him over his five month stay at the space station. Below is a pie chart that shows where mentions of Hadfield were coming from. And below that is a world map plotting out where tweets about him were coming from.

What’s most amazing about most of this is that Chris Hadfield just got into social media right before his trip thanks to some convincing from his kids. Now the astronaut boasts over 842,000 followers on Twitter. With all of the tweets he sent back to the planet he wowed and amassed his large following over his five months in space.

His Twitter handle, @Cmdr_Hadfield, was mentioned 1.5 million times during his trip as well.

I also looked up some of the most retweeted tweets either from or aimed at Commander Hadfield.Five of the top six tweets were sent from Hadfield himself. Most of them were amazing videos and pictures (like the one below) that he beamed down for us from space. The fifth most RT’d tweet was the first one he sent once he had touched back down on Earth.

Tonight’s finale: Northern Lights – recent aurora in green and red waves, USA and Canada below, the universe above. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 11, 2013

Not only did Commander Hadfield mange to rack up an impressive Twitter following, but he also did the same on YouTube. The Commander started a YouTube channel where he would beam back videos of things he was doing up in space including answering questions that us common folks had about things worked in space. His most popular video though was his last one from the station where he gives us one last look at the station while singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” The video was only posted a few days ago and has already racked up over 11 million views.

Commander Hadfield utilized social media to capture the attention of the entire world while he wasn’t even on it. He gave us all a chance to experience something that most of us will never get a chance to do ourselves (although I hope that’s not true). He truly was the first man to master social media in space. But let’s hope he wasn’t the last.

Is a Kickstarter Backlash Upon us?

2013-05-14T01:03:46Z

Kickstarter has been all the rage in social media for the past year. It seemed to cement itself as a force when Veronica Mars creator used it as a means to fund a movie based on the popular TV show.

There’s a debate raging within the digital world about whether Kickstarter has lost its way. Has it become a tool for people and brands with money and power to get their vanity projects off the ground?

If this is true, then it has definitely deviated from its original purpose. This would be a shame because Kickstarter shows real promise for digital marketers along with budding entrepreneurs.

Kickstarter’s appeal is to let the average user realize a dream that has been halted by a lack of funds; a common problem for most. A celebrity could more likely kick start their own projects without the help of the Kickstarter’s crowdsourcing means.

It’s important to remember that whatever you do in the digital realm, you must stay true to your original intention if it worked. Kickstarter still works on several levels for brands of varying sizes.

Kickstarter might be at a bit of a crossroad because the celebrities are bringing mountains of publicity to the site. At the same time, however, they might also be overshadowing the true purpose of Kickstarter’s existence.

Of course, it helps when Zach Braff (who is using Kickstarter to fund a sequel to Garden State) asked those who joined Kickstarter to make sure they browse the site.

As for digital marketers, you need to still figure out if Kickstarter is a network that can help get your project off the ground. There’s a good chance that with the right incentive, it could be a great boon to your brand.

B2B Social Media: Who, What, When, Where, How and Why [Infographic]

2013-05-14T04:40:48Z

Social media isn’t just for consumer brands. In fact, more and more B2B brands are waking up to the power that comes from being able to connect with their customers and potential customers through social media. More importantly, they’re seeing results from it.

Did you know that 83% of business marketers say that they’re using social media? Or that 75% of customers of B2B business customers plan on using social media to connect with and learn more about vendors? With numbers like that, it’s hard to ignore.

So where does one start when using social media for the B2B space? Well, lucky for you, we’ve put together an infographic to help you get started.

Below you’ll find our infographic with three tips to get get started in B2B social media, along with some pretty interesting facts about the space.

But if this was just enough to wet your whistle, don’t worry, we have more for you in our latest white paper. If you want to learn how to use social media for B2B effectively, check out B2B Social Media: A Roadmap To Revenue.

A New Approach to Social Influencers

2013-05-11T11:29:09Z

As social media has evolved and matured, the value placed by brands on social influencers has gained more traction.

In theory, brands want to connect with social influencers because they have the reach, networks and, frankly, power to encourage people to do take certain actions (e.g. buy a product, follow, tweet, recommend, etc.).

The question is whether brands are placing too much emphasis on social influencers? As brands battle to stay ahead of the pack digitally, do they pay too much attention to influencers in the overall scheme of things.

One of the key themes in a new book, Influencer Marketing, by Danny Brown and Samy Fiorella, is how brands should focus on customer rather than influencers. It’s a straightforward but, in some respects, different approach because customers often get lost in the social mix.

This may have to do with the myth that social media is not a sales medium, and brands that try to push their products are doing something wrong. Instead, social media is supposed to be a place to engage, have conversations and build relationships.

This may explain the fascination with influencers because brands can focus on winning them over, and then use their influence to drive awareness and sales.

While brands looking to court influencers has been around for a long time, the spotlight on social influencer was driven by Klout, which attempts to give people social scores. It was an approach that resonated initially because it was new and established an easy to understand benchmark.

But Klout seems to have lost its cache, partly due to competition and partly due to more people questioning the accuracy and relevancy of social scoring.

As brands look to establish and nurture their influencer marketing programs, they need to embrace new ways to do it that balances the needs to leverage people with large networks and, at the same time, focus on the people (aka customers) that buy or could buy their products and services.

Is Taco Bell the Coolest Digital Brand?

2013-05-10T10:04:19Z

There are many brands that do it right in social media.

Every quarter, we are treated to a new digital delight. The cream will always rise to the top; it’s a truism within the industry and the medium.

I’m here to anoint Taco Bell as a nominee for the coolest brand in social media. If you have to ask why, you really need to start paying attention to their creative and bold digital team.

What Taco Bell does best is they’re never scared to be bold or take risks. This shouldn’t be the approach taken by every brand, but if it works for your culture then you really have to own it.

Taco Bell continues to pile up the wins in the social media world.

The way Taco Bell’s team interact with users is often fun and hilarious. They always seem fair game for a good time, and it’s hard not to enjoy their antics.

Their friendly Twitter battle with Old Spice is still a personal favourite. While this is just one example, they have found the perfect voice for their brand. It works on just about every level.

Do you consider your brand to have a cool presence in social media? Have you found your digital voice?

The Future Of Investing And The Great Social Shift [Infographic]

2013-05-08T21:32:31Z

A few weeks back the SEC (The Securities and Exchange Commission) ruled that public companies were now free to release their important information though social media channels. Since this ruling there has been a debate in the investment community as to what this means for the future of the industry. Some welcome the use of social media while others are continuing to lobby that the way things were worked just fine.

Because of this debate, we took to the street, Wall Street, to ask the people that this ruling will affect what they thought. We surveyed stock brokers, financial and market analysts, financial advisors, individual traders and fund managers, and made their results into the infographic below.

What we learned by doing this was that Wall Street, and investor relations in general, is changing. As the younger generation that embraces technology is coming into power in the workplace, we found that they are also the new workforce that embraces social media. And for more than just keeping in touch with friends.

We found that the investment crowd under 40 support the SEC’s decision to allow the distribution of information through social media. In fact, 60% of those surveyed and were under 40 said that they regularly consult social channels to research investments. But it’s not just the under 40 crowd. 40% of all survey respondents said that they were using social media to find information.

We also found that 49% of our responders companies blocked social media from the workplace, making it hard for them to use it as a source while at work. However, 48% of those people said that they had witnessed colleagues using personal devices, like a smartphone or tablet, to consult social media for investment information anyways.

It appears that the younger generation of investors is rewriting how business is done, and social seems to be part of it.

What do you think?