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Conversations Have Always Been Leading Indicators Of What Is About to Come

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged predictive analytics, SDL, SDL Social Intelligence, social data, social media on May 6, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Long before modern technology, conversations were monitored to gain insights on popular trends. The conversations around various French university pubs and cafes in the 1780′s forewarned the pending revolutionary changes about to take place. During the industrial revolution, privileged men in country clubs shared information about up-and-coming companies for stock tips. Anyone can be an accurate prognosticator of future trends by listening to the right conversations.

Unfortunately, access to these conversations has always been limited to a privileged few throughout most of history. That was until the recent advent of social media. Now, billions of conversations are accessible through technology. The problem no longer is about getting access to conversations, but finding the relevant ones amid the enormous clutter of noise. The late 18th century French university pubs were obvious places to hear the ideas of a revolt. Within the social data set how can you find the “country club” conversations if you are a hedge fund manager looking for sentiments on different stocks?

Social media is a universe of unstructured data that can be overwhelming. Understanding the general sentiment of conversations or changing daily volumes are only superficial information compared to what social media has to offer. Moving forward, the industry will introduce better ways to structure the social media data set for deeper insights. We will better understand the right “places” within social media to uncover leading indicators on any particular topic. That is why the social media data set offers such promise of predictive capabilities.

Currently, the social intelligence/analytics industry is still immature with only a few new compelling concepts reaching the market. Our social intelligence group at SDL has just launched a framework by which you can measure the customers’ commitment to a particular company’s product(s), brand(s) and content. By measuring the social conversations within this framework, we can provide data-driven insights that help marketers be more effective.

No doubt others will follow and come up with their own frameworks and algorithms. Meanwhile we will continue to try to lead the market with improvements and innovations of our own.

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A Simple Way to Look at Big Data

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, social media, tagged Big Data, CXM, SDL, social intelligence on April 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Big Data, Big Data. Yes, we’re capturing more information than ever. The web, social media and large business applications are all capturing an unprecedented amount of information. BUT why is big data even a big deal? Well, if analyzed properly, the trends and insights revealed from Big Data can be extremely important in gaining a competitive advantage in business.
Let’s use the analogy of professional basketball. There was a time in the NBA when film study and scouting opponents were not overly complicated and most teams focused mainly on their own strengths to prepare for a game.
Now with an abundance of information, film study and effective scouting are critical to a team’s success. Coaches and scouts have thoroughly analyzed each player throughout the league looking at tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. They know that a certain player is 30% less likely to finish at the rim if you make him go to his left. Another player fake pumps a shot 80% of the time before crossing-over to his right. These types of insight are vital competitive advantage in the league.
A business landscape is much more complex with considerably more variables. Yet, not all businesses are good at “scouting” the marketplace. Better understanding the tendencies and motivators of existing and prospective customers can be the difference between success and failure of a strategic product launch. Big Data, especially through the social data set, also has the promise of showing predictive trends with conversations that can be leading indicators of what’s on the consumer minds.
Effective use of Big Data, however, is not just about the right technical software and hardware framework. Investing in new technologies is useless without a skilled and experienced team to properly utilize these tools to support strategic planning and action. Today, building such a capable team is a big challenge that is not being considered enough when architecting a Big Data solution.

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Taking Advantage of Today’s Inflection Point Around Big Data

Posted in business, social media, tagged ARIS, Big Data, SDL, social intelligence on February 27, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Our time is like a river, constantly flowing downward on a path until reaching an eventual end. You can’t ever veer from this path, yet the journey remains uncertain ahead with different challenges intermingled with opportunities. All we can do is be prepared to fight through the challenges and to take advantage of opportunities that come our way.

Timing truly determines how we live our lives. Along the journey of time, there are many inflection points that have allowed “prepared” people to do great things. During the early 19th century, the industrial revolution gave great opportunities within the steel and oil industries for the Carnegie and Rockefeller families. These early smart and opportunistic industrialists took advantage of the opportunity that timing had afforded them.

In the same way, the 1980′s and the information revolution gave rise to the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, among others. Certainly, these brilliant entrepreneurs and visionaries were gifted with extraordinary abilities. Yet, had they been born in another time, these opportunities would not have been available. During this time, other lesser known technical entrepreneurs benefited as well and became success stories in their own right.

It was during the 1990′s that we were able to ride the tide of the migration to relational databases to take ARIS public on NASDAQ. Sure, we executed on a solid strategy but timing was a key element to our success.

Since then, I’ve learned to better understand and appreciate the importance of timing. I look for opportunities as it relates to trends of our time and look for areas of possible disruptions (inflection points). This has allowed me to sell my last two start-up companies within the first 12 months of each’s inception.

Right now, I know I’m in the right space with social intelligence. This is a space that I’m excited about. It’s why I’m committed to finishing this endeavor to completion. Many organizations will be (are) trying to bring compelling value to Big Data. Effectively harnessing this new “black gold of data” will result in tremendous rewards. New standards for predictive analytics and data visualization will develop. There will be tremendous crowd sourcing around making Big Data a competitive business advantage. All any of us can ask for is a chance to play with such an opportunity that today’s timing has afforded us.

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SDL Offering Product Commitment Score Using Social Media Data

Posted in business, social media, tagged predictive analytics, SDL, SM2, social intelligence, socialytics on May 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I recently returned from Singapore where I got to witness the last few presentations for a roadshow by members of the SDL Social Intelligence Customer Experience Measurement and Analytics (CXMA) team. The topic was around measuring product commitment scores using social media data.

We’re launching a near real-time measurement system to monitor the commitment of customers to a product and/or to a brand, as well as the product’s relevancy to its customers.

This is where social intelligence is headed. Many have claimed the data set within social media to be the new “black gold”. However, the data itself is not of great value unless you apply intelligence to it. Up to now, social media data has been used for simple aggregated information in a dashboard format. These include daily volume of brand mentions and the sentiment of these brand mentions. However, the data set has much more potential than that, and we’re proving it with our commitment and relevance scores.

If a product manager knew that the commitment score was dropping on his product during the awareness campaign of his launch, he could change his strategy. And we can show how the strategy needs to change by the digging into the reasons for the drop in the commitment score. I’m talking about real-time course correction during a launch of a product. This is predictive and actionable.

I’ll be writing more about these offerings as we take the roadshow to Europe and North America. There will be a white paper coming out as well. Needless to say, the reaction so far has been extremely validating. We are working with several potential customers in Australia as well as Singapore to launch this predictive framework (using the SDL SM2 product) into their businesses.

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