Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Tapping into the herd through social media has been a goal for investors for some time.  Collective Intellect (founded in 2005 for this sole purpose) and Dow Jones Insights are listening platforms that specialize in this area.  Late last year Stocktwits became the first Twitter based service based on investment discussion and has been driving change in the way that many day traders discuss and evaluate stocks.   But if there was any question about social media having a measurable impact on trading, that has been quashed with the latest announcement that StreamBase Systems is integrating Twitter with its Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform for money managers and traders.

"Users of StreamBase's Twitter adapter can combine Twitter with market data and build data management applications, says StreamBase CTO Richard Tibbetts. In particular, Twitter can be used as a crowd sourcing tool to help gauge people's sentiment towards a particular event or stock. "It's really useful for sentiment analysis, which traders can then use to help them make trading decisions," he adds. Nasir Zubairi, former product manager for algorithmic trading and FX E-commerce, RBS, points out that as Twitter continues to gain sweeping adoption across the globe, it will increasingly become a key medium to convey information to the financial world too."

Now the question becomes: What impact will this have on stock values? 

Will more information make the markets more efficient? The lightening speed of information transfer on Twitter will allow traders to price in news more quickly.  Case in point, both Michael Jackson's passing and civil unrest in Iran were all over Twitter before there was any news coverage that would appear in a trader's feed from Bloomberg or Reuters. 

Or will misinformation and group think lead to more volatility?  If traders act on the earliest rumors the impact on market value of stocks becomes self reinforcing and may amplify the natural tendency of the market to bubble and bust.

Regardless of the answer, it is guaranteed that day traders not plugged into social media will be at a disadvantage.

Thanks to Fang-Lu Lin for the link.

Russ Hopkinson

Have you heard of Layer Tennis? In short it's two creatives going head to head in battle of skills. The match involves both combatants swapping a single file back & forth in realtime with 15 minutes to complete their "volley". After each volley, commentary is provided by an independent 3rd party. Winners are determined by voting via Twitter by including the #LYT hastah + the contestant of choice.

Friday's match featured Shaun Inman vs. Aaron Scamihorn, and was won by Shaun Inman with his final "volley": Sheep Not Found aka Layer 10. If you're interested the semi-finals are scheduled to kick off tomorrow, June 26th, and the finals will be on July 10th.

Very fun to follow along. Also - as an FYI, Layer Tennis is sponsored by Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Patrick Dunphy

There are a plethora of social media monitoring tools out there now. As they jostle and tousle with each other tantalizing potential clients with colorful charts, demos and trial accounts, I'm still left wondering where this technology will wind up. Will it go the way of the search engines and eventually wind up with just a few mega players? (OK, really one.)

I first started looking at social monitoring tools back in November of 2007. Since then there have been huge advances in the capabilities included in these platforms and some level of convergence in the capabilities in the top players.

Next week I will be representing Organic on an OMMA Social panel called "Choosing a Social Monitoring Tool: How to Find the Right Fit." At Organic we are are continually reviewing tools, and currently using Sysomos. In the review of numerous tools, I've created my dream list for a social monitoring tool:

1. Easy self-service set up of topics and queries.
2. Efficient filtering of topics.
3. Delivery of results in real-time.
4. Sentiment analysis.
5. Trending Data.
6. Comparison to competitive information.
7. Identification of conversation "themes" around a topic.
8. Identification of Influencers or "influential posts."
9. Demographic Information.
10. Respond to and track engagement.

But what exactly does that top 10 dream list mean?

Until recently, the buzz about Twitter had been almost entirely focused either on its explosive growth or on challenges to its cool cred (how many instances of "Twitter" can be found paired alongside "jumped the shark" in online posts? About 43,500 according to Google). Then, #IranElection happened.

Now, the conversation has turned from Ashton Kutcher to how social media may supplant traditional communication channels in times of crisis or dissent. While foreign news coverage is being severely curtailed and reporters are being kicked out of Iran, satellite coverage cut off, and state news is... well... being run by the state, at least a few tech-savvy citizens on the ground are finding ways to break through government-mandated blackout via Twitter and other social media services.

With its unique capability to post user reports via SMS, the Web or other applications, protesters are embracing Twitter as a tool to pass along eyewitness reports ("police are acting party on protesters side"), assist others ("Help protect the bloggers in Iran: change your settings so that your location is TEHRAN & your time zone is GMT +3.30"), and organize ("demonstration Wednesday at 4:00 pm from Enghelab Sq. to Azadi Sq.").

Expats and others supporting the protesters are in turn forwarding their tweets and posting their photos and videos on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social media aggregators for the world to see. The Iranian government has responded by attempting to shut off access to social media properties, although many are getting through via proxies set up by others outside of Iran to access the blocked sites. Others like our very own State Department are quietly helping as well, requesting that Twitter delay scheduled maintenance earlier in the week to avoid disrupting communications in Iran.

Whether this will make the difference for Iranians hoping for democratic legitimacy or greater freedoms remains to be seen. While protesters are so far successfully transmitting their message to the world, the world may have a difficult time interpreting what it all means. The sheer number of posts (#iranelection is the top trending Twitter topic) are mostly unverifiable without an independent press. Anonymous or third party posters make it almost impossible to know who to trust. And the messages that are getting out are deeply local and personal rather than analytical or contextual in nature. All of this makes it easy for the world to get caught up in the rush of events, but makes it difficult to assess actual impact.

Can Twitter fuel a revolution?

For more analysis and information on how the post-election protests are being waged via social media, check out the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5446

Bridget McKinley

I'm going to let you in on the Search industry's dirty secret...

Google is slipping.

PageRank assigns a reputation score to the URL where content is published. This makes it a great fit for content that stays put in one location. However, evolving content distribution via blogs, RSS, guest columns, and syndication are a challenge for PageRank. Tweets, retweets, micropublishing, ratings, and comments - even bigger problems.

The solution lies in associating reputation with the identity of the author - a PageRank for People.

In mid-April 2009, two Domino's pizza employees decided it would be funny to pull a little YouTube prank. One employee prepared sandwiches for delivery while putting cheese up his nose and blowing nasal mucus on the sandwiches - all while his co-worker provided up-close camera work and a play-by-play narrative. Within 24 hours, over a million people had viewed the video. The incident brought a whole new meaning to brand reputation "nose-dive". Domino's sales plunged overnight.

In mid-May 2009, Michael Silveira - a 22 year old lab technician who does not own a car, got fed up with receiving unsolicited phones calls to purchase an auto warranty. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Silveira decided to seek revenge on the auto-warranty company by leaving voice-message recordings of Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never gonna give you up" - sort of an audio version of "RickRolling". Silveira invited other disgruntled customers to join him in his crusade- by publicly posting phone numbers and addresses on various activist sites. The online mob resulted in overloaded phone lines, changed voice mail greetings and even arson threats for the Irvine, CA based warranty company, AutoOne.

FRIEND OR FOE?
Both of these powerful examples prove the new social media customer service formula: one outraged customer + two fast typing thumbs + 50 Twitter followers = a formula for corporate catastrophe. If there was ever a time for companies to step-up their customer service practice, that time is now.

According to a study by the London School of Economics, brands must increase positive word of mouth by 7% to generate 1% of business growth - or reduce negative word of mouth by 2%. Which proves: negative word of mouth adversely impacts business growth. With today's available social media, the potential for bad word of mouth to go viral is greater than ever. Disappoint just one customer - and be ready for the possibility that she tells her circle of social media friends, and so on, and so on - to create a wildfire swirl of "bad-vocacy" about your company.

There is good news however. Besides customer service, social media can be used to successfully blend initiatives of other traditionally siloed aspects of business- research, marketing, sales, and product development. Most businesses are still fumbling their way to adapting to this new model. Even though their customer's conversation draws no lines between these topics- the disciplines are still disparate within their organization. But some companies are successfully proving communicating through social media does, in fact, result in business gains.

Photo Credit: Jeroen Diepenmaat

Social music discovery and recommendation services have exploded in recent years. It's nice to see DRM schemes crumble and looking around it seems that that the rapid fragmentation and proliferation of these services is likely to continue for some time. Changes to licensing and distribution models that spanned several generations have forced people to choose how they want to discover, consume, and share music.