Being a little Twitter obsessed here, we couldn’t help but notice that Seesmic released the brand-new Seesmic Look yesterday. Touted as featuring extensive upgrades to the UI, the product is aimed at making social media adoption easier for consumers. As founder Loic Le Meur put it, “We were challenged to reach out to an untapped market – a mainstream audience not familiar with Twitter – [...] (think “Mom” or “Dad”), that heard of Twitter but were never interested, or never had the opportunity to have a positive and friendly experience.”
So how’d they do? We went to Twitter to find out.
VoxTrot Opinion Breakdown of Twitter Conversation
Overall reaction was fairly positive, with about 60% of Tweets praising the design, although a small portion of these (9% of total) felt that the product still lacked key functionality. This mirrored about the feelings of about another quarter of Tweeters who were generally unimpressed or were sticking with arch-rival Tweetdeck. Some users didn’t have a choice in staying put; Seesmic Look isn’t available on Macs, as about 11% of the conversation pointed out.
Seesmic’s done a great job with the release and we’re looking forward to Tweetdeck’s response over the next few months. In the meantime, we’re battening down the social media hatches for Apple’s tablet mystery product reveal next week.
Last week, tens of thousands of tech junkies flocked to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), eager to get their hands on the latest electronic gadgets, network with like-minded professionals, and maybe catch a glimpse of visiting celebrities. With so many savvy users in the same place, it’s no surprise that the event generated a massive Twitter buzz. We thought it would be interesting to let loose our VoxTrot Opinion technology on the CES-related tweetstream – here’s what we learned.
New TV and 3D technologies overwhelmingly garnered the most praise on Twitter, led by the Boxee Box, which directly links internet content to your TV, and four separate television manufacturers who launched 3D sets. The Boxee Box took top honors in the “Last Gadget Standing” competition for most exciting new gadget at CES (as judged by audience applause).
Mobile technology also got people at CES excited, making up 15% of relevant CES related tweets. This conversation was driven mostly by Google’s Nexus One, RCA Airnergy’s wireless charger and FLO TV’s mobile live TV player. There were far too many new gadgets to create a category for each of them, but rave reviews for all other consumer electronics at CES made up fully one fifth of tweets.
Not everyone was satisfied with what they saw at CES, however.
Ten percent of people were less than impressed with the new technologies and exhibits they saw at CES. Some thought that 3D TVs and games were gimmicky, while others simply didn’t see anything that wow’ed them
Another 13% thought that the atmosphere at CES was lacking, especially as compared to last year. This included seeing lower profile displays, fewer giveaways and fewer “booth babes”
Finally, AT&T frustrated many iPhone users with spotty 3G and wireless coverage at the Las Vegas convention. The increasingly popular hashtag #attfail saw a lot of use as tech junkies lashed out at AT&T (13% of conversation)
With CES 2010 now a memory and a whole year of new technology ahead of us, we know that people will continue to tweet about their favorite (and least favorite) gadgets – and Crimson Hexagon will be right there to measure the conversation.
Today we announced a major strategic partnership with our long-time friends and allies over at Porter Novelli. This is a very big deal for Crimson Hexagon, and while the full text of the “Official Story” appears below, I thought I’d share some commentary on what this really means.
First off, let me say that while we are happy and proud to work with many partners in the agency space, Porter Novelli has a special place in our hearts and minds.
First there’s the factual observation that these guys really know what they’re doing when it comes to social media. CEO Gary Stockman is a longtime vet of the agency wars, and a person who embraces rather than recoils from technology. Anthony Viceroy is decidedly not-your-average CFO-type, more focused on value creation than on value capture for both clients and partners. CMO Marian Salzman – coiner of the term “Metrosexual,” and considered to be among the world’s top trendspotters – is just the kind of person you learn from every time she openshermouth. Brad McCormick is the pro who discovered us, a visionary thinker and superior human being whose support for us has been unflagging since he first saw what our technology could do. And to all that they just added the great Steph Agresta – of GeekGirl fame – who brings more social media juice, smarts and energy to the table than most old school PR shops can muster company-wide.
That’s the “mind” part of why we’re excited about Porter Novelli. The “heart” part is that these guys and a growing number of key folks on their account teams were among the first to really understand what we do, and really get behind it in a way that takes vision, courage, and empathy. THANK YOU ALL, we really do appreciate this endorsement.
As for what it means… Today our business is providing a bundled offering that includes professional services and technology, and this announcement is the first of many steps over the coming year that will mark our migration toward the technology and away from the services. In the end our mission is to find patterns in the dots of the online conversation for our clients, and we have and will continue to do whatever it takes to make that happen. But in the end we are company built on science and technology, and as we put both in the hands of partners like the great people at Porter Novelli, you can expect big things to happen.
Here’s the release, in its entirety:
Porter Novelli Announces Strategic Partnership With Crimson Hexagon to Expand Social Media Analysis Capabilities
Alliance Boosts Specific Insights Into Consumer Opinion of Brands and Products
NEW YORK, June 18 /PRNewswire/ — Porter Novelli, a global communications agency, today announced a strategic partnership with Crimson Hexagon, a Cambridge, Mass.-based social monitoring platform provider that helps brands understand what online conversations really mean to them.
The Crimson Hexagon platform goes beyond basic keyword volume or sentiment analysis to examine the proportions of key themes within any given topic and how those themes change over time. Porter Novelli is deploying and integrating the Crimson Hexagon platform throughout its offices worldwide.
“We believe that social media metrics are a critical practice area. Combined with internal social media expertise and deep relationships with relevant influencers, Crimson Hexagon can provide value above reach and frequency analysis,” said Brad B. McCormick, executive vice president, digital, at Porter Novelli. “Our client teams have another critical tool in the tool box to help understand this quickly changing space.”
Based on technology developed at Harvard University by Professor Gary King, director of the university’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Crimson Hexagon’s enabling algorithm identifies patterns of opinion from large quantities of unstructured text, whether it’s an in-house content repository or the vast blogosphere. King co-founded Crimson Hexagon and is actively engaged in its business.
Unlike first-generation listening services, Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot platform focuses on identifying the patterns in the “forest,” rather than diagnosing individual “trees.” The result is a faster, less labor-intensive, more accurate understanding of what the online conversation really means for a brand, product or market category, as opposed to what words it contains.
“This approach builds on our agency’s research heritage and fits perfectly with today’s need to cut through the clutter and interact more effectively with stakeholders who can influence behaviors, sell products and shape reputations,” said Gary Stockman, chief executive officer of Porter Novelli.
How It Works
Crimson Hexagon’s social media monitoring “dashboard” tracks what is said online about brands, organizations and issues. The program monitors all forms of social media, including blogs, video-sharing sites, opinion review forums, photo-sharing sites and microblogging platforms. It uses quantitative data to answer qualitative brand questions, such as what specific emotions consumers feel about a product or service.
“We are delighted to enter into a global partnership with Porter Novelli,” said Candace Fleming, chief executive officer of Crimson Hexagon. “We’re confident the company’s clients will benefit from our in-depth monitoring and analysis capabilities. Our solution’s unique ability to allow agencies to define their own formula weightings for ranking social media influencers will ensure Porter Novelli’s strategic intellectual property is embedded in the results they share with clients.”
About Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon helps big brands and small businesses understand what the online conversation really means to them. Based on groundbreaking work conducted at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Crimson Hexagon is the only commercially available listening platform that distills meaning — with mathematical precision, about brands, products, services, markets and competitors — from the cloudy torrent of opinion, information and data available online. Founded in 2007, Crimson Hexagon is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, contact us at (617) 547-1072 or visit crimsonhexagon.com.
About Porter Novelli
A global public relations leader, Porter Novelli was founded in 1972 and is a part of Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) . With 100 offices in 60 countries, Porter Novelli helps clients achieve Intelligent Influence–changing attitudes and behaviors by having the right conversations with the right people at the right time. Visit porternovelli.com.
Sometimes finding the answer means going beyond the question.
Yesterday marked our debut on CNN.com, and we were understandably jacked by the whole experience. The topic happened to be twitter reactions to the American Idol finale – a long way from our United Nations trouble-spot identification days – but an interesting topic nonetheless.
What emerged from the data was a slight edge for Adam Lambert over Kris Allen, meaning our “prediction” would have lined up with everyone else’s.
But something else emerged from the data… namely that 3% of the Twitter conversation was vehemently ANTI-Adam, while Kris had no such negatives. Adding Adam negatives to Kris’ positives put Kris over the top – something we saw given the nature of our technology, but no one else did.
The only way to understand what the online conversation really means is to move beyond first generation keyword analysis. That’s exactly what we do, and at the risk of boastfulness, our “big time” premiere proved to be a powerful demonstration of that fact.
Today CNN.com debuted what will become a regular segment… using Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot to understand what’s really happening in the conversation on Twitter.
Amazon’s announcement this morning of the Kindle DX dominated tech news today. The new version of the web commerce giant’s e-book reader features a larger screen than its predecessor, the Kindle 2, and a host of other improvements including improved support for PDF documents. It also carries a whopping $489 price tag, which may prove an obstacle to Amazon’s plan to supplant physical textbooks in schools.
Reading TechCrunch’s post “What Does Twitter Think About the Kindle DX today?” I was inspired to do an analysis of a sample of 1500 or so of today’s Tweets using our Voxtrot Opinion technology. After reading through a few pages of Tweets, I set the system loose on the remainder with some interesting results:
Although the device itself is gathering huge amounts of attention, more than a third of the non-news Tweets are focused on the implications of the DX for the newspaper and textbook industries. The DX’s 9.7 inch screen may be approaching a tipping point, where e-readers become a credible alternative for a much broader array of printed media than ever before. Seeing the amount of buzz around the improved support for PDF, I am further convinced that technologically at least, the e-reader has arrived.
Practically speaking, although the Kindle DX seems to be on everybody’s wish list, the $500 ask is a major sticking point for Tweeters. Even with the economy showing signs of recovery (bottoming, crumbling at a slower rate, whatever) I wouldn’t be surprised to see retail DX sales struggle for some time.
That said, today’s announcment represents a huge moment for Amazon and another milestone in what looks to be a very bright future for e-readers.
Wondering how people feel about the Federal government’s intervention in General Motors? We were too.
If you want to know how many times the words “General Motors” have been used online, there are lots of folks who can help you. If you’re interested in the polling results of this site or that one, there are plenty to choose from.
But if you want to understand what the online conversation really means, you might be interested in this…
Crimson Hexagon co-founder Gary King still heads IQSS over at Harvard — and some of his innovative research design is getting some interesting press after its publication in The Lancet.
King and his colleagues designed and led a study with about 500,000 people: the largest-ever randomized health policy experiment. The study featured innovative research designs and statistical methods that make best use of available data in a cost-effective way.
What’s next? According to HarvardScience, the approach is now being implemented in, or considered for evaluations of — many other public policy programs around the world. The ability to understand what’s important and moving the public policy needle at a lower cost than other research methods is huge — particularly when you’re talking about delivering healthcare to the world’s poorest populations. As the petabyte age becomes a reality, innovative data-driven analysis becomes a necessity.
The Guardian today announced its new Open Platform, and influential technology bloggers and analysts took notice. The Guardian is providing content and data APIs to enable and encourage developers to build third-party apps. Developers can monetize their creations with advertising, but will eventually be required to join an ad network.
As anyone who has picked up a local newspaper lately can attest, the death of print media is not greatly exaggerated, but a grim fact. The Guardian seems committed to the kind of innovation that may help it to weather the storm.
From our perspective, it’s pretty amazing to see the much-heralded age of big and open data becoming a reality. Open access to news and data sets is sure to open the floodgates for insights from new methods of quantifying and visualizing reporting.
Sometime this month TheNew York Times will be launching online Instant Op-Eds. According to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, “the idea is to have a group that provides opinions soon after news occurs, with a solid Web space dedicated to them.” The editorial page and news departments will collaborate on creating the feature.
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Sometime this month The New York Times will be 
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