Posts tagged Territory
SAP Invades Radian6 Territory with Social Media Drill-down Tool
Dec 12th
In a New York Times interview published yesterday, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff – who was no doubt relishing his place in the spotlight – poked a little fun at his competitors, whom he now perceives as challengers to his position. “Where are SAP, Microsoft, Oracle?” Benioff asked. “Why haven’t they taken our customers?”
Well, Mr. Benioff might want to look over his shoulder. SAP, which still touts itself as the world’s largest provider of business software, is entering one of Salesforce’s prize markets in a very big way this morning: with a live social media analytics tool that leverages an existing mother lode of data on consumer sentiment from market research firm NetBase. The objective is to enable manufacturers and service providers to get live analysis of consumer sentiment about the services and products they offer, based on what they’re tweeting to Twitter and Facebook.
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SAP Social Media Analytics, whose availability is slated for “early next year,” will be a cloud-based tool that includes the last 12 months of NetBase data, with sentiment analysis already having been processed. So any new trends that come in (and they will, up-to-the-minute) will be live supplements.
“Think about a 30-terabyte database that is populated with all kinds of social media posts – Twitter feeds; Facebook comments; blogs like Huffington Post, Gizmodo; news site feeds like MSNBC.com, NYTimes.com; GlobeAndMail.com – and we refresh this environment with 95 million postings every single day,” explains Byron Barnes, SAP’s vice president for business analytics solutions marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. “And the environment contains about a year of information. It’s all been normalized, it’s already categorized by topics, brands, vendors, areas of interest. And we also provide the [customer] with a set of dashboards and metrics so they can come in through a browser and have immediate access to a year’s worth of social media data, to start to understand, what are the trends? What are [consumers] talking about? What things do they like?”
NetBase tells RWW it’s already scouring the world’s forums and comments sections (probably including ours) in search of the context in which consumers tend to mention brand names. And by running sophisticated linguistic analysis (not just written language, but also Twitter-ese), the firm has already drawn conclusions about consumer sentiments, extrapolating demographic breakdowns by comparing the comments and expressions we make every day against the personal data we’ve already provided to social network hubs like Facebook.
“It’s more than just tweets. Where it gets really interesting, and where I think the more actionable insight comes from, are places like forums,” explains Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase’s chief marketing officer. She cites the example of beer drinkers, who peruse forums on the subjects of brewing and microbreweries, sharing their insights about grains, recipes, sugars, agriculture, and distilling equipment. NetBase has already drilled down to this level. Scrapbook hobbyists are another example: They like to share comments about various grades of paper, and grades of adhesives that don’t organically degrade their precious keepsakes over years of storage. “The really juicy insights come from forums, blogs, comments, ratings, and reviews.”
People’s new-found habit of commenting online on what they’re doing naturally extends to what they’re consuming, Rosner goes on. She calls this habit “Twitter Tourette’s:” for instance, enough folks out there who just happen to be drinking Diet Coke or eating Snickers will tweet that little fact. It’s a big enough sample of people to make analytical conclusions – certainly bigger than the number of people gathered by a soft drink producer for focus groups.
The official name for this analysis process is not “Twitter Tourette’s” but rather occasion-based marketing. One NetBase customer, Rosner tells us, can view into Twitter data by time of day to determine when they are interacting with their products. (Imagine a wave of Snickers eating activity passing over the Earth like nightfall.) That customer can then determine the best times of day to e-mail coupons to their customers; if they can catch just the right half-hour block, they can maximize these coupons’ usage. “There are different types of insights that come out of these different channels for this chatter,” she says.
How much of this data is that trustworthy? Let’s face it, a great number of tweets are automatic. And many are more full of hashtags than they are verbiage. Simply because something is retweeted does not necessarily mean something was said.
As NetBase’s vice president for business development, Fred Mondragon, tells RWW, those contingencies were already considered.
“We identify duplicate tweets, so if somebody keeps tweeting the same thing a lot, we can exclude or include that as part of your analysis,” Mondragon explains. “One of the big differentiators between our system and others is that it provides an automatic aggregation of different sentiments, likes, dislikes, emotions, and behaviors. And you’ll quickly see if somebody is trying to game the system, because you can identify the duplicates really quickly, eliminate spam. Though spamming can happen in Twitter, most of what we find [there] is people expressing emotions, behaviors, very succinctly.”
NetBase’s language filtering mechanism was developed and is overseen, we were told, by nine Ph.Ds in computational linguistics. Emoticons, intentional misspellings, abbreviations (one of Rosner’s favorites being “kewl”), and other roadblocks to typical natural language processing engines, “are handled very elegantly with this special-purpose-built NLP engine that runs in the cloud to handle social media,” remarks Mondragon.
Byron Banks tells us that Social Media Analytics will be marketed and sold as a browser-based tool (including for iPad), and on a subscription basis by SAP, using an SAP contract. Users who access the subscription server and the social intelligence database, they’ll be directed to the NetBase environment specially geared for the product.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Citibank Heads into Mint’s Territory with New iPad App
Jul 29th
This week, Citibank released a new banking application for iPad, designed to give customers access to common banking tasks (balance checks, bill pay, transfers, etc.) as well as financial analysis tools. While we don’t (and can’t) cover all mobile application launches individually, the new Citibank iPad is an interesting case study that shows how a large organization has thoughtfully developed a platform-specific application instead of simply repackaging its mobile app for the bigger tablet-sized screen.
In addition, the financial tools now available in the Citi iPad app seem to take inspiration from similar online services, like Intuit’s money management suite at Mint.com, for example. And, says the company, the iPad app’s progress won’t stop here. It will be under constant evolution, getting “smarter” over the coming weeks, and may even help users manage offers and rewards in the future.
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iPad Isn’t Just Another Mobile Platform
When Citi approached the iPad, explains Tracey Weber, Citi’s head of North American Internet and Mobile Banking, it did so thinking of it as not just another mobile offering. “We view the iPad as an opportunity to engage with customers in a much deeper way,” says Weber.
People use tablets in differently than they do their mobile smartphones, she says. They often engage with them in the evenings, reading magazines, books, and newspapers, playing games, and watching videos. This engaged type of use is what gave the bank the opportunity to provide its own more deeply engaging experience via the iPad.
Analyzing Your Finances, How Very Mint-Like!
Instead of simply providing company info and access to banking transaction tools, the app delves deeper into your finances, with rich, interactive charts highlighting things like cash flow, balance trends, overall debt and more. There’s even a section where you can compare your personal data to the aggregated, anonymous data of other Citi customers by a number of factors, including income level, household type, location and so on.
Being able to dive into your own finances like this, visualize trends, and make comparisons is one of the primary functions of the online financial management service Mint.com. Of course, Mint can track more than just bank accounts, covering everything from investments to auto loans. But such deep data analysis is still a rarity among banking institutions, which is why it’s so interesting to see what Citi is doing here. Even banking giant Bank of America only offers a fairly traditional iPad application, which just launched last month.
Future Offers/Rewards Platform?
Meanwhile, Citi comes out of the gate ahead, and is now planning to incorporate even more features, most of which it can’t talk about too much. But Citi is a launch partner with Google on Google Wallet, the new mobile wallet service designed for Android handsets. And Weber says that the company sees a “huge opportunity” in the offers/rewards space, which incidentally is a feature of the new Google service.
While there’s no direct announcement related to an forthcoming offers/rewards feature within Citi’s mobile apps, iPad or otherwise, it only makes sense that the company would one day port the rewards programs it now operates online to these newer form factors. It could then take advantage of the unique opportunities that come from being on mobile: access to a user’s real-time location, SMS text messaging, and more.
Banking just got a little less boring, we’d say. We’re staying tuned.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Moves into New Territory and the Telcos Take Notice
Nov 17th
The Facebook news yesterday about its new messaging platform is raising questions for the telecommunications giants about what they have to do in face of emerging competition from the social networks.
It’s a critical time for the telcos. All the attention has been on Facebook’s battle with Google. But there are many more providers that have a stake in how the Facebook service evolves.
It’s a logical conclusion that Facebook will extend its messaging platform to voice and other communications. That realization is forcing the telecommunications providers to respond. Facebook is moving into telco territory.
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The timing could not be better for Broadvision, which introduced Clearvale Paasport last week. The service is built on Clearvale, the enterprise social networking service.
Clearvale Passport is a platform for telecommunications companies to offer email, IM, chat and other services.
Giovanni Rodriguez is chief marketing officer for Broadvision. He says the Facebook news reflects how communications are far more universal. Email is only part of the equation.
“It’s a wake up call for telcos and other service providers,” Rodriguez said. “The new UI is the social network, and `unified communications’ — an idea that telcos have been chasing for many, many years — is almost certainly going to happen on social networks. In the end, this is about who owns the customer experience. More and more, Facebook owns that experience, on the consumer side. But on the enterprise side, the market is wide open.”
Telecommunications company executives are adamant that they are not telephony companies. They call themselves communications providers.
But they have not shown the potential to innovate. They’ve lagged for years. Will it change now?
The least they can do is further open up its telephony platforms to third-parties.
“IP Telephony has become more and more commodity,” said Dimitri Sirota, co-founder of Layer 7 Technologies and now vice president of marketing and alliances.
Nevertheless telco’s have been slow to unbundle their telephony services to third parties. Twilio and similar companies are a reboot of the whole model. Take commodity telephony services and expose them to mobile and cloud developers as a services. This will matter because social networks will start overlapping with traditional telephony services. Facebook users will already soon be able to offer email. Why not voice, messaging etc. After all twitter started out as a SMS gateway service for the Web. Why can’t other telephony services jump the chasm to the Web?”
- Dimitri Sirota
- Dimitri Sirota
Clearvale launched last spring. It is similar to services that we see in the market from companies such as Socialtext and Jive Software. All of these companies, including others such as Socialcast and Yammer, are positioned to service telecommunications providers.
Alcatel-Lucent is in the middle of the emerging telecommunications market. The goal is to match telecommunications companies with developers.
“It’s less about the telcos waking up, and more about telcos realizing the world around them doesn’t operate in a traditional .99999 manner,” said Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent. “It’s also app developers, which is what Facebook is at a very high level, realizing that they need to operate at a level above their .99 manner. Both are trying to figure out how they adapt, which is where we come in.”
The territories we once knew look far different than they did just a year ago. Facebook is having a lasting impact on the communications markets. Companies like Google are not Facebook’s only competitors. It’s really any communications company.
Facebook gets that. We’ll have to see how well the telcos understand that, too.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ping – Apple’s Music Social Network: New Social Media Marketing Territory – The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog)
Sep 5th
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Ping – Apple's Music Social Network: New Social Media Marketing Territory
The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog) Are there linking opportunities for SEO? How much traffic/exposure can Ping generate? It's important to find answers to these questions, and others, … |
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China’s Baidu To Hire 30 Software Engineers On ‘Google Territory’
Jul 1st
While Google awaits to find out whether the Chinese government is giving it the green light for the renewal of its Internet content provider (ICP) licence, its local competitor, China’s largest search engine Baidu is touting its intention to hire up to 30 engineers in July, directly from ‘Google territory,’ i.e. the Silicon Valley, to help it expand overseas.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
SEO Training Academy Expands Territory to Washington State – Promotion World (press release)
Jun 17th
 Impact Media (blog) |
SEO Training Academy Expands Territory to Washington State
Promotion World (press release) Search Engine Academy Northwest provides SEO training for Search Engine Optimization certification and SEM certification. Students can choose to attend a 2, … Mastering What Works for Search Needs “Trial and Error” |
View full post on SEO – Google News
