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Posts Tagged ‘social intelligence’

When EF Hutton Talks, People Listen; Today’s EF Huttons Are Talking On Social

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , on May 8, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Following up on my last post about how conversations have always been leading indicators of what is about to come, I remembered some great E.F. Hutton commercials in the late 1970′s, early 1980′s. Anyone who was around in the US during that time would remember that when “E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”. I still think that this was one of the best ad campaigns of all time.
E.F. Hutton, an American stock brokerage firm, eventually became part of Smith Barney (subsidiary of Citicorp) during the consolidation period of financial service companies before now having been merged into Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
With social media data set, we can listen to many influencers such as E.F. Hutton. And shouldn’t all brands be listening to what these influencers are saying?
Here are some of my favorite E.F. Hutton commercials.

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A Simple Way to Look at Big Data

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , 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 , , , 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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Journal From Business Trip Around the World

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 7, 2013 | 2 Comments »

A bit tired. A bit excited.  I’ve been traveling since January 18.

This road trip started in Las Vegas. I got to participate in the SDL Content Management Technologies’ (CMT) kickoff. SDL has market-leading products around content management, including Tridion.  It was a pleasure to present our Social Intelligence solution that measures customer commitment by product, brand, and relevant content.  Our two solutions integrate well as components of the larger SDL CXM offering.

During the evenings, we bonded cheering the dice at the craps tables, as well as sharing drinks at the Rouge (MGM). Somehow, a few of us even made it to a night club one night and ended up ordering a big pizza that we couldn’t finish as the sun rose.  Overall, it was four days of motivating presentations and information sharing, as well as some Vegas fun.

From there, I stopped by home in Seattle for 14 hours before flying to HCMC, Vietnam (January 25). That journey is about 16 hours in total but I still always feel energized after arriving. The scooters, the street vendors, the humid heat, delicious foods all make for a very vibrant experience.  We have an office there with a fun and dedicated team. I got to present our 2013 vision as well as handing out last year’s employee achievement awards. I also hosted a couple of visiting executives from SDL Global Solutions (localization services) division. They also found potential applications of our Social Intelligence solution for their business which we will mutually pursue.

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We ate a lot (but never gained any weight) and played some dangerous drinking games at local bars. I also got to check up on my son who is volunteering at a Vietnamese orphanage for one year and fed him some heavy Western food that he was craving.

Then, I left for Singapore (January 31) to review our APAC business plan for the year.  It’s going to be a stretch year for our APAC business but I remain optimistic as we continue to invest there. During my stay, the Singapore office had their holiday party. I got to participate in a bingo scavenger hunt competition at Sentosa Island. It was great fun. The Singapore office is one of the most diverse in our company since the main business there is language translations. We have Singaporeans, British, Australians, Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, an American and Japanese. Whew, what fun. I left them with one good advice: Organize monthly (or quarterly) potluck parties! Can you image the diverse spread?

Singapore is an amazing place with natural beauty and spectacular man-made high rises. I enjoyed world-class roof top lounges overlooking the city and sea. My schedule had me stay through the weekend, so I made the most of it. A few gracious friends who had recently moved to Singapore took good care of me.

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After an epic night that started at the Latern (top of the Fullerton Bay Hotel) and moved to the night club at Ku De Ta before eventually closing at a club that is underwater, I was on an airplane for a 14-hour flight to London Heathrow. I, then, commuted two hours to Bristol for the Campaign Management and Analytics (CMA) kickoff.

I arrived late Sunday night, presented the next morning the Social Intelligence story. The CMA group is a fun and tight-knit bunch that I know well from being a part of Alterian. I’m happy and proud to see their progress since the SDL acquisition a year ago. I really enjoyed seeing the renewed enthusiasm and the new capabilities. During our time together, we formulated an exciting idea around combining our data sets for more targeted insights to their customers. This could be really good.

I laid low in Bristol at nights due to being jetlag and because I was starting to get sick. Also, it was freezing cold and I didn’t want to leave the hotel if at all possible.

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Now, I’m on a train heading to London (my home away from home) for the weekend before the SDL executive meetings next week. I have one more week before heading home and finish circling the globe.

The thought of London has a big smile on my face. Yeah, it’s a long trip and I do miss home. But I got to do what I got to do. So, I need to be as productive as possible, and enjoy whatever I’m doing because I’ll never get any of my time back! And London, well, I know that town pretty well.

I’m almost to Paddington…

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Relevance of Language in Social Intelligence

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , on May 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Visiting Singapore again was great after about five years. The food was bomb as I remembered it. Fusion of Malay, Indian and Chinese foods is a mouth-watering experience not soon forgotten. The government has done a good job of continuously attracting businesses here as well as some good entrepreneurs with progressive investment and tax policies.

Other than the responsive audiences from our SDL Social Intelligence roadshow events, one of my favorite parts was visiting SDL’s language services office there. SDL is a world leader in language translation services and software. The Singapore office houses translation services for five different South East Asian Languages. Talk about an international favor — the office had a great vibe.

For me, one of the most intriguing elements of the SDL acquisition of our Social Intelligence business was the potential of leveraging the language capabilities into our social intelligence platform. Relevance is very critical in social media and what is more relevant than language? We are working very closely with the machine translation as well and language services group to make sure that our Social Intelligence roadmap includes the integration with these capabilities.

More than 50% of social media data today is not in English and growing. The ability to translate and understand multiple languages from a social intelligence perspective will be a real differentiator in the near future, if not already.

Bhagwat Pant, General Manager – Singapore

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SDL Offering Product Commitment Score Using Social Media Data

Posted in business, social media, tagged , , , , 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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New Beginning At SDL Allows Us to Dream Big

Posted in business, social media, tagged , , on February 2, 2012 | 2 Comments »

On Monday, the SDL acquisition of Alterian was officially announced. I will remain the head of the Social Intelligence Division for SDL, helping to roll out our solutions globally.

This is an exciting time because of the tremendous assets that SDL has within its family.

At Alterian Social, we’ve evolved our Social Media solutions beyond just social monitoring and listening to encompass analytics and insights. We’ve been on the leading edge of social monitoring and engagement by integrating social insights to answer critical business questions for our customers. We’ve validated the inherent advantages of the social data set – its authenticity, near real-time access, its predictive nature, its scalability and much more.

Now, we can integrate further with SDL’s world-class language translation capabilities with our social media solutions. We can now offer better insights and intelligence globally across cultures and languages. In addition, we will now be able to provide a Social Intelligence Framework that will allow analysis of social, campaign management, email and other data sets in one business intelligence environment. Eventually, I can see that within this environment the opportunity to truly link customer information from these different data sets to offer better customer experience to consumers.

SDL wants  to provide relevant content when and where people want them. Social Intelligence obviously fits well into that.

At new beginnings, we are all allowed to dream. But certain beginnings allow for bigger dreams. My dream is to be a disruptive force in traditional markets (i.e. BI, Market Research), and we’re better armed now than ever to make that a reality.

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Social Intelligence Will Provide Compelling Insights & Foresight

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, digital media, social media, tagged , , on June 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Social media is changing the way we interface with the web. Rather than searching (i.e. Google) for content, we are starting to read more and more content distributed from our social networks. As this trend continues, social intelligence will become increasingly important. This isn’t about just tracking brand mentions and daily volumes. Social intelligence will be leveraging social data for compelling insights and foresight as not yet common.

Social data has many unique elements that lend itself to insights.

  • Highly Responsive: Can collect & respond to any timescale
  • Specific: Can relate to specific activities to conversations at a defined point in time
  • Highly Predictive: Social conversations are leading indicators
  • Longitudinal: We can look back & track forward
  • In Context: Feedback is pure & customer generated (not contrived)
  • Provides unique access to competitor activity
  • Can provide a 360 degree view of a customer (not just about their relationship to your brand)
  • Highly Scalable: Provides access to high volumes of data & a global dataset

The immediate evolution of social intelligence will be about finding compelling insights and foresight within the social dataset. That is why different industries have been acquiring small social monitoring tools companies. They want ”access to the data” to come up with these insights that is relevant in their industry. In the end, the successful social monitoring tools will mature to offer not just the data but also a framework that  visualizes these insights and foresight in meaningful ways. When industry consolidation happens at that point, these companies will be at a much higher valuation.

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Report on Nordstorm Shows Lift9′s Capabilities

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , , , on December 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Here on this blog, I’ve often written about the progress of my newest venture, Lift9. My thoughts on company-building and entrepreneurship are a recurring theme for sure.

After coming up with a business plan in July and finding the right partners, we started hiring and building a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. That has been,and continues to be, a tremendously rewarding experience. Our staff there has exceeded all my expectations not only in ability, but also in their embrace of our company vision and culture.

After a couple of months of ramp, we started to offer our services here in the US to forward-looking brands. Our traction really started to take hold this month in December. We are closing out 2009 with great anticipation for the coming year.

Amongst friends, however, some still have a difficult time grasping what it is that Lift9 does. This is not surprising given the newness of our industry in social intelligence. Recently, Lift9 posted one of our research reports on Slideshare (see below). This report measures the sentiment and reaction on social media to Nordstorms’ New Moon Sweepstakes campaign and its Twilight Fashion Line.

Our reports require a lot of data cleansing and validation, but the findings are very interesting. Also, we try to have tangible actionable takeaways from each page.

I hope this helps everyone understand the value that Lift9 is providing, and why we are all so excited about our future.

Peace everyone!

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