Attensity Command Center Gives Clients Control
July 21, 2011
“Attensity Looks to Give Brands a Window into Social Media,” reports the Silicon Valley BizBlog. Attensity is touting its new Command Center software, which takes social media analysis a step further. It’s designed to display the real time information continuously to their customers’ employees. What caught my eye was this passage:
The Attensity Command Center is basically a bank of monitors and the back end software to run the monitors. Using proprietary, patented text analysis algorithms, the platform categorizes incoming tweets by subject, sentiment, and geography, etc. The goal is to aggregate and visualize what’s being said online, so that the customers can know in real time how many people are talking about them and what they’re saying.
Writer Jon Xavier experienced a demo of the product, and was suitably impressed. His only issue was that the passing tweets moved too fast to read them. He noted that to make full use of the software, a company would have to dedicate a couple of employees to monitoring and acting on the information.
Nope, it is not virtual. Will social media augment this reality? Image source: http://goo.gl/i3TIb
The interest in social media is fascinating. Once the Internet was for rocket scientists. Now the Internet is the place to stroll. A digital las ramblas. When gizmos are embedded in the human body, the Information Highway takes on an interesting shape. The metaphors used to describe the next big thing will be interesting. For now, Attensity touts control
With this offering, Attensity amps up marketing in the ad sector. Will it be enough to make headway against the Google+ marketing cyclone?
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Is Google+ a Threat to Facebook’s Business Demographic?
July 16, 2011
EWeek.com informs us that “Google+ Will Target Businesses, Facebook Audience.” It seems that Google intends to entice businesses as well as personal accounts into its Google+ Web. This may pose a problem for Facebook, who has long encouraged companies to set up pages on its site. Recently, that company has even introduced new tools aimed specifically at businesses.
Google discourages businesses from setting up shop in its initial Google+ project. However, it is working on something just for them:
We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year,’ Christian Oestlien, a group product manager at Google, wrote in a July 6 posting on his Google+ profile page. ‘The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.
If that’s true, Facebook had better continue to step up its game. Our view at Beyond Search is rotated about 12 degrees.
First, we think that social media is useful. It is less about the Internet and more about communication. No problem, but communication has a history of industry-centric regulation. As social media follows the path worn by AT&T, there will be some interesting changes coming.
Second, the novelty of social media may follow the pattern of behaviors in other group discussions; that is, intense use followed by declining use and then popping in and out of groups “to find out what’s happening”. The data backing my assertion were collected in the early days of online groups, and I am watching for signals that suggest a similar pattern. My hunch is that there may be some usage shifts coming which will be as interesting as the regulatory net that will be woven around social media.
Third, control of content within social media systems will impart enormous power to those who have a superior capability within the social media system. For this reason, social media will morph into products and services which have a built in magnetic quality. A user may leave one group, only to reengage with a different group later. Fragmentation of attention will be a defining secondary characteristic. The primary characteristic is that fragmenting of attention will be just hat Dr. Algorithm ordered to punch the user’s purchase, vote, think buttons. The users won’t have much choice. Some won’t even care.
Net Net: Both Google and Facebook may be chasing demographics. Neither service may be the end of the line. What’s next is likely to be even more Googley and Facebooky.
Cynthia Murrell July 14, 2011
Vivisimo Assumes Leadership Position in Twitter Chat
July 15, 2011
I noted the write up “Customer Service Industry Luminaries Participate in Vivisimo’s Unique Twitter Chat Experience Vivisimo Twitter Chat #CXO is Named one of "The 12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats". The CXO is a business publication. My recollection is that I wrote something for the company years ago. I lost track of the outfit after I shifted to the Enterprise Technology Management publication. (If you click the link today, you may see the addled goose himself. I wrote about Google, not Twitter Chat. I did not know what a Twitter Chat was.
The write up informed me that I was wrong about CXO, which means customer Experience Optimization and not the publication CXO. I also learned that Twitter Chat has been an ongoing activity since April 2011.
Here’s the passage I noted:
"We’ve grown to over 100 participants in just over 10 weeks and have had A-list participants join us because Vivisimo has established residency as the leader in customer experience," said Tracey Mustacchio, Vice President of Marketing at Vivisimo. "The #CXO Twitter chats are an interactive, convenient, and highly effective medium to collaborate and learn from peers how to improve their customer experience initiatives. Also, being named one of the 12 Most Stimulating Twitter Chats was an honor and will help to set us apart from our competitors." Previous session topics included: What is Customer Experience Optimization? Another Officer in the C-Suite: Chief Customer Officer [CCO] The Intersection Between Innovation and the Customer Experience Customer Experience for the Gen Y, Digital Native Trust in the Customer Experience "Who Comes First in Shaping #CustExp – Customers or Employees?" Social Media and the Customer Experience What’s the best way to make customer experience metrics actionable? Going Mobile with Customer Experience? Customer Data: from Overload to Insight Supply Chain or Customer Value Chain To join in on future Vivisimo #CXO Twitter chats, visit the following link every Monday at 12:00 pm ET: http://tweetchat.com/room/cxo. If you use an application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop, create a search column for the term "#CXO" and follow the Vivisimo chat.
If you want more information, visit the Vivisimo Web site at www.vivisimo.com. Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Google+: How Does One Measure Success?
July 10, 2011
I keep trying to avoid the Google+ “thing.” I focus on a different slice of the online world, but my newsreader and Overflight system overfloweth with baloney about a service that is in trial, less than two weeks old, and pretty much a knock off of Facebook. This “me too” stuff is becoming the focus on innovation, and I am not too interested in learning how to use a wheel or light a fire, thank you.
How does one measure success? Tweets, revenue, number of products and services offered customers? Source: http://goo.gl/9yBS9
I did notice two items this morning. The first was a report about the number of short messages mentioning Google+. Yep, let’s get on the Tweeter thing. I find the data illustrative of the spike nature of information. Where’s that Fukushima thing? Long gone for today news consumers, but the aftermath of the event is good for a couple thousand years.
The second item was my favorite techno-management guru, Eric Schimdt. The view that caught my eye appeared in “Eric Schmidt on Gauging Google+’s Success.” There is a great deal of information in the write up and the embedded video. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
When asked by reporters whether Google planned eventually to fill out Google+ with other products, Schmidt answered, “Yeah, and there’s a lot coming,” saying that business accounts and ads are expected, assuming Google+ continues to grow. ”We test stuff and when it works we put a lot more emphasis on it,” he said.
Okay, “a lot” and “test stuff”. Let’s reflect.
Google is juggling a large number of balls, just like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. What’s interesting to me is that the company’s principal—dare I say, “only”—revenue stream is advertising. The purpose of Google+, Android, and the other major initiatives is generating advertising revenue.
I urge Google to move forward and generate ad revenue from these services. The reason is that once again I talked with a number of companies and heard one message, “We need traffic. Something’s changed at Google, and we don’t know what to do.”
My response was, “Adapt.”
Google has shifted its attention from the brute force AltaVista.com approach to information to a new, compound model. The focus of that model is not delivering better results. The focus is producing revenue. And the company needs the new sources. With Web traffic shifting from desktop access to mobile access, Google has to find a way to sustain revenue and then grow significant new streams. Generating new revenue streams is not easy. The case example? Google itself. After 11 or 12 years in business, Google has a giant footprint but it is now good at one thing: selling ads.
I think there are companies with better products in search. Example: Yandex.com. I think there are companies with better social network services: Facebook.com. I think there are companies with better mobile devices: Apple. I think there are companies with better online shopping: Amazon.com. In short, unlike the early days, Google has competition in packaging, technology, and innovation.
So, the buzz about Google+ tells me three things:
- Google excites significant interest, particularly among a certain sector of the online community. That indeed is a marketing advantage. Marketing now has to turn into revenue. Where’s that $100 billion a year company now? About $70 billion to go.
- Google faces significant competition across a wide range of business facets. I suppose Alexander the Great could handle a multi front war, but he died at an early age, and his empire fizzled. I won’t press the metaphor, however.
- The legal opponents Google faces are likely to see the sprawl of Google as an indication of the company’s ambitions. At a time when issues of monopoly and certain business practices is increasing, Google demonstrates that it can pretty much do what it wants, dismissing questions with remarks like “a lot” and “test stuff”.
The upcoming hearings in Washington, DC, will be interesting. I wonder if there will be a Google+ service for those involved? I hope so. That might be a way to measure success just not in terms of revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Twitter Ad Pricing
July 9, 2011
Google and Twitter fell out of contract love. I don’t pay much attention to either company because I am poking around Yandex.com. A threat looms say I. Ads are the name of the game in the US. I was surprised at how much Twitter ads cost.
The cost of advertising on Twitter seems to be skyrocketing faster than a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July. As reported by CNET news, the “Daily Cost of a ‘Promoted Trend’ on Twitter: $120,000”, little “tweets” translate to big bucks.
According to Twitter director of revenue, Adam Bain, the price tag on their “promoted trends” is about five times as much as it was just over a year ago which priced at about $25,000-$30,000 per day. With this growth, services have been added and advertisers expectations have increased. We learned:
Twitter also offers promoted account and promoted tweets, but those are sold through an auction system, and – in the past at least – use a pay-per-click or pay-per-follow system. Recently, Bain says, Twitter has started asking for advertisers to spend a minimum of $15,000 over a three-month period.
It seems that Twitter advertising is no longer for the little guy. Their advertising core is now made up of HBO and Samsung. Twitter is certainly making an insane amount of money, as is their top-tiered advertisers, but no middle-of-the-road business could afford to go to such costly lengths. It sure is interesting since this whole social media phenomenon started with little more than a tweet and a prayer. Can the Twitter outfit survive a break up with Google? High ad rates are okay as long as their are buyers.
Jennifer Wensink, July 9, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Finding Folks on Facebook
July 7, 2011
Want to find people on Facebook? Mr. T (no, not that one) explains via thushyanthan.com how to perform an “Effective Facebook People Search.” We learned:
[Facebook’s] rapid growth is enabled by building on the trust of its current users who actively go out to search for friends, acquaintances and more. Facebook has its own ‘Friend Suggestions’ but sometimes, it is not accurate.
T. has a list of suggestions for using Facebook’s features to get better results. Most directly, you can search for a name or email in the search box at the top of your page.
You can also take advantage of Facebook’s connection to common email sites like Gmail and Hotmail, which tries to match addresses in your email list with those on its network. Similarly, you can login through the site to instant messaging networks and search there.
Cynthia Murrell, July 6, 2011
The addled goose is the author of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
The Google+ Love Fest and Search
July 6, 2011
Right off I want to remind you that I am not social. I urge others to be social, posting useful information in online systems. These data are quite useful for certain types of research. So have at Google+, Facebook, and any other system that connects you to your friends, preferences, and images.
The excitement about Google+ is, I agree, interesting. I read “Google+ Is a Marketing Sensation.” I don’t have an opinion about the write up which seems fine to me. I did notice one quote that did hook me. Here is the snippet:
Searching Google News brings about 6,000 results for “Google +”, but only 85 for “Mac OS X Lion Gold Master”, which Apple released over the holiday weekend. Anything Apple is typically big news, if nowhere else than techdom. Not this weekend. There are so many good posts about Google+, search is the best way to find them. [Emphasis added by Beyond Search]
A couple of thoughts.
First, I assume the search is the Google search function. The statement underscores that the core of Google is search, not social. I think this is an obvious statement, but I find that search the Google way is a brute force approach which is becoming less useful to me. For example, when I need a very specific item of information, I am asking people. This is the method I used before online search became widely available to me in 1981. As search shifts from brute force to surgical inquiries, I think more than marketing is going to be needed to make any new system deliver results. Google has an interesting service, but Facebook, to take one example,has a head start which may be difficult to overcome quickly and economically.
Second, the information about Google+ is easily findable. Most of the services that I use to look for interesting developments provided summaries or original analyses of Google+. To locate these stories, I used news aggregators like www.dailyrotation.com and iPad services like Pulse. No search required. I think that is an interesting point. Maybe social is not going to be the successor to brute force search. Social is more of a “find a human” thing, not a Boolean search thing.
Third, I found the assertion that Google has become a marketing superstar fascinating. The company has the ability to get attention. The same excitement seemed to coalesce around Buzz, Wave, and in Harrod’s Creek for Web Accelerator. The viral uptake is great and I think Google knows how to play the “semi exclusive” access card at the propitious moment. Is this marketing? In a sense yes, but Google just attracts attention and Google+ draws attention. Now Google has to move from marketing to money.
I think that will be the test of Google+. Can Google find a way to sustain its online advertising growth. So far, the company’s attempts to diversify its revenue streams have been disappointing to me. I think that Google+ has to demonstrate more than marketing and more than chasing Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
Seven Years: Has Google Been Wandering or Progressing?
July 6, 2011
I promised myself that I would do my best to push Google+ into the SSNBlog.com which we will be restarting in a month or so. But I read “Google’s Path to Google+ Took 7 Years” and was flabbergasted. I know that the real media is a land of sharp minds, keen analysts, and meticulous research. Sure, there are missteps like the story in a New York newspaper that earned to publication a libel suit from a hotel employee. But overall, real journalists are the Mt Everests of information.
The write up left me with the impression that Google was a bit like a college student. Four years of undergraduate and three more years to knock of an advanced degree. Google, of course, does not have to worry about student loans, but the idea is that one begins a journey and then arrives, presumably at a job and maybe intellectual enlightenment. Now that does not work out. A Yale graduate told me that most of this year’s grads were chasing jobs, not landing them. Who knows?
In the write up, I marked this passage as notable:
But look back in time and it’s clear that Google has been playing in the social world for years, but never quite put all the pieces together in one place. Here’s a chronological look at the long path Google has taken to form what could be the next big social network, if the company can pull off the mega-coup of convincing most of the half a billion Facebook users it has a better service.
Source: http://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/maze/mazecam.html
The walk down memory lane was Google’s management approach which relies on an interesting method called “controlled chaos” has produced some services that sure can look like social ramble. My view is that most of these services were islands, erupting from the “controlled chaos” of the Googleplex. Google’s most notable successes got their DNA outside of Google. Examples range from maps to Adsense itself. Now the company is hooking together services and asserting the mash up is a new Google. I see a 1998 style portal. So I don’t buy the hype. It is the same old Google, anchored in brute force search and selling online advertising.
The Google+ service seems to lack integration with Google search and Gmail, but I may have overlooked this obvious blend due to my nonchalant attitude toward social networking. Google+ is getting a jump start. Someone told me that those lucky bloggers with content on Blogger.com are going to be part of Google+.
My thought is that Google faces an interesting challenge. Facebook has defined its “space”, demonstrated an ability to move from one niche to others, and has information its users willingly provide. Despite privacy hassles and technical glitches, Facebook users appear to be loyal–for now. Can Google close the gap or will another company flow from one space into the areas dominated by Facebook and Google?
Microsoft’s rise and now its money-flush stagnation took a quarter century. Will the trajectory of Google or Facebook take less time to arrive at Microsoft’s location in the growth curve? My view is that time may be short for Google in the social space, and it may be even more compressed for Facebook. Happily I am approaching 67, and most of the people in the old age home eschew digital gizmos for a TV. Youngsters are going to make the decision for Google and for Facebook, not cheerleaders. I see wandering. With one revenue stream, I don’t see much progressing. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2011
This post is sponsored by Pandia.com, publisher of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
More Than File-Sharing Needed in SharePoint 2010
July 2, 2011
The article “Is SharePoint 2010 Ready For Social Business? Nope” chomps on the meat and potatoes of the competition between leading file-sharing programs. The loser? SharePoint 2010, and it is no big surprise.
A run down of SharePoint 2010s inadequacies seen from a rather narrow angle is the focus of a This Week in Lotus podcast. Expert Luiz Benitez examines the overwhelming challenges Microsoft faces with its SharePoint 2010, focusing on file-sharing as a jumping off point. Mr. Benitez asserts that the much more progressive IBM Connections offers tools that meet the needs of organizations jumping into social computing.
Briefly moving past file-sharing into the other essential components of a successful social business platform Benitez states,
…this is just comparing file sharing. It doesn’t even get to compare head-to-head Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Team places, Profiles/My Sites, Ideation (which SharePoint doesn’t have), and other capabilities that are in Connections but not in SharePoint (microblogging!)
The final nail on SharePoint 2010s “sharing” coffin is that a major consulting company, IDC, ignored this weakness not once, but twice. We must admit we did not know about this alleged IDC shortcoming, but Mr. Benetiz has been more attentive.
Despite SharePoint 2010s popularity as a file-sharing entity, it clearly faces hurdles unlikely to be overcome with the fast-changing pace of social business initiatives demanded in the world marketplace. Microsoft may be able to redeem itself and its insufficient SharePoint with its next release. We think that SharePoint might be late to the sharing snack table.
Catherine Bize, July 2, 2011
From the leader in next-generation analysis of search and content processing, Beyond Search.
Data Fusion: A Source of Contention?
June 29, 2011
Research. is reporting that Kantar and TRA are doing battle over intellectual property. In their article, “Kantar and TRA at Loggerheads over Data Fusion Patent” they report that Kantar and Cavendish have filed a joint complaint as a pre-emptive strike against TRA who is threatening to sue them over patent right infringement.
According to Kantar and Cavendish, TRA claims that Kantar’s RapidView-Retail product encroaches on its patent. The product marries TV audience data and purchase behaviour data with a view to better targeting ad spend. The case is unusual as Kantar has been a long-time investor in TRA, and Sheila Spence, a WPP and Cavendish executive, sits on the TRA board – though she is alleged to have been excluded from a recent board meeting and may also be excluded from another upcoming meeting.
Let’s think about this. Will a patent spat about data fusion in the ad world trigger potential downstream issues in other market sectors. On the surface, a person might say, “No.” However, with the surprises the US legal system can spring, I am not so sure. My view is that patent litigation can spill over and take out the entrepreneurial Minots and Fargos. There is considerable risk in certain legal matters. Data fusion is the issue but the problem is the advertising. Some folks care a great deal about advertising. My yellow warning lights are now flashing.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
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