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.

Tags: measurement, news, product by edward
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Among the many uses of Crimson Hexagon’s technology, analyzing how consumers feel about a particular brand is one of the most interesting to us. Part of the appeal is how hard such sentiment is to measure through conventional means; part of it is how social media provides a window on what consumers really think in their day-to-day conversations.  It’s also that this application makes particular use of one feature of our technology – the ability to quantify abstract concepts instead of just keywords – that is entirely unique to our underlying science.

To spotlight this we’re starting an occasional blog series called “The Battle of the Brands”.  We’ll choose two (and sometimes maybe three) competing brands and analyze how they’re discussed in the online conversation, quantifying the range of opinions and perceptions that shape the online brand identity.

Our first head-to-head will be none other than Walmart versus Target.   With the recent news of Target’s planned increase in marketing spend , we started thinking: are the online perceptions of each brand consistent with the concerns expressed by Target?  And how will this increase in marketing spending impact those opinions?

We analyzed online opinions about Walmart and Target from July 15^th to September 3rd. Using our technology, we focused on customers’ opinion about the shopping experience, drawing from blogs, forums, Tweets, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Target (all opinions)

Walmart (all opinions)

• Overall, the online conversation about Walmart was chiefly critical, breaking down into 61% negative and 39% positive.  Target enjoyed 75% positive reactions with only 25% negative opinions.

• People talk about the social implications of shopping at Walmart (Bad for Local Business, Treats Employees Poorly categories), but when talking about Target focus on their actual shopping experience.

Walmart (shopping conversation only)

• The motivations for shopping at each retailer are vastly different:   People shop at Walmart because they’re looking for cheap staples.   At Target they feel that can get great stuff (Love this Product, Awesome Clothes categories) for a low price.  Customers get more excited about shopping at Target, but, a larger percentage finds Walmart to be a better bet for low prices.

Walmart is currently seen as the brand delivering the basics at low prices, but price comes at a cost in quality of products and services. Fortunately for Walmart, being seen as the low cost provider buoys the brand during tough economic times.  Target, on the other hand, is the brand that delivers a more enjoyable shopping experience, with more excitement expressed for products and deals.  However, this may not be the best attribute to reinforce when consumers are “tightening their belts” and “getting back to basics”.  The interesting aspect of this battle will come when the economy and consumer confidence starts to pick up.  Will the tables turn for Target and Walmart?  How can these two brand giants balance their core brand attributes to win over consumers in the good times and bad?  And as Target executes expensive marketing campaigns, how will they measure whether their investment is having the intended impact?

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, product by Megan Costello
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We’re VERY proud to announce that Crimson Hexagon has been awarded the very first PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Award by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX)!

The award was conceived to spotlight emerging companies in the Boston technology community, as described here by MITX Executive Director Kiki Mills, for Xconomy’s Wade Roush:

“There are such exciting innovations that are happening within the startup community that deserve further attention and awareness. To shed some light on this, we decided to incorporate into the program a way to recognize the young, emerging companies and start ups that have solutions that may not be fully deployed but show significant promise.”

We want to thank MITX and PricewaterhouseCoopers for the warm recognition, and the entire Crimson Hexagon family for the hard work that made it happen.

We’ve had an amazing few weeks here in the Hexagon. Stay tuned for more exciting news…

Tags: company, product by mike
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Comprehensive piece here, our segment begins at 2:30…

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Tags: data, opinosphere, product, social web by mike
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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.

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Tags: company, customer voice, marketing, news, product, social web by mike
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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.

Tags: events, measurement, news, opinosphere, product by edward
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The Kindle series is among the first consumer uses of a revolutionary display technology called ‘E-ink’.  E-ink displays are more akin to digital watch style LCDs than the TV variety, featuring low-powered, uncolored displays that are reputed to be easy to read for long stretches in contrast to computer monitors.

The Kindle 2 succeeded the late 2007 original and Amazon says they used the time to improve the layout, increase the responsiveness, and improve the resolution.  Until recently, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.  TechCrunch reported recently that the Amazon has sold their 300,000th unit of the Kindle 2 in only 50 days post-release, making the series by far the best-selling of its type.  Until earlier this month, the public’s verdict on the Kindle’s no-frills display could be summed up with the phrase: “Easy on the eyes.”

Then Wired.com published an article on April 13 titled, “Kindle 2’s Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red.”   Quoting a “user from the Pennsylvania”, the article asserts that the text-display algorithms of the Kindle 2 “Do not take into account the human psychology of perception.”   Although the article spares a paragraph to quote Amazon’s side of the story – users like the display – it continues on to offers home-remedies in advance of the “easy fixes that Amazon can make.”

The widely-linked article certainly had an impact on the online conversation.   The proportion of online conversation on the display characterizing it as ‘hard to read’ more than doubled in the following days – from 13% on 4-12 to more than 30% at its peak.

Author Priya Ganapati’s insinuation that the font display is a widely-perceived problem is somewhat curious given that she herself described the Kindle 2 as “easy on the eyes” in an earlier Wired article.   Whatever the reason, the post’s impact has waned two weeks on, appearing to spare Amazon’s product from any lasting damage to its reputation.  Still, when you’re slinging 6,000 units a day at $360 each, the effects of even a temporary shift in online conversation can be expensive.   The lost revenue from even a 1% drop in sales for a fortnight is enough justificatino for an active social media monitoring and engagement program.  Amazon, while by no means the kind of PR horror story we’ve delighted in this year, would do well to remember the occasionally high cost of the digital word.

Tags: company, customer voice, data, measurement, product by edward
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If you think you get a lot of salacious spam in your email, you should see what turns up when you’re downloading the web.  The proliferation of online publishing tools has resulted in pages and pages of sales links, random advertising gibberish, and incoherent babble akin to word salad.

If your company or product brand gets a random mention on one of these computer-generated pages, is that something you really want to know about?  Worse, do those mentions make you think your online presence is larger than it is?  As humans, we have an uncanny ability to quickly sort the relevant opinions from the splogs, but how do we get a computer do the same?

One possibility is to have the computer filter all web pages containing words that occur frequently in splogs. These words are the usual suspects: the four-letter ones, the ones you might hear in an adult video, and even the kind of pills you might take before starring in one.  Unfortunately, people legitimately use some of these words when expressing their opinion. Don’t believe me?  Just check out  those dirty Twitterers at Cursebird — but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Our approach is to adopt a keyword filter that removes splogs containing the worst of the worst: words and word combinations you’d probably never even think of, let alone post online. To accommodate the range of human expression, certain kinds of profanity has to make it through this first level of filtering.

We then allow our statistical algorithm to learn what it means to be an irrelevant opinion by providing the algorithm with irrelevant samples, including splogs with some kinds of profanity. This algorithm doesn’t just look for individual words but summarizes each document as numbers. Under this numerical representation, splogs then look vastly different from relevant opinions and can be safely discarded. It’s an effective way to get to the real, human opinion and ditch the mentions that don’t — and shouldn’t — matter.

Tags: product, research by John Thomas
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Next week our CEO Candace Fleming is sneaking down to Foxboro to take part in the New Marketing Summit. She’ll be participating in a panel called Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring and the Future. Chris Brogan and CrossTech have lined up some terrific speakers, including Don Peppers keynoting on  Dancing Shoes for Honeybees — which apparently relates to personal mobile technology, and not entomology.

If you want to get spend some time in Gillette Stadium and away from obsessively clicking refresh on Google Finance, go on and register here.

Tags: events, product by admin
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Our CEO Candace Fleming will be speaking at the New Marketing Summit on October 14 in Foxboro.  Chris Brogan has put together a terrific agenda, including Don Peppers who should have some interesting insights on 1to1 media meeting social media — feels more like a continuum than a sea change to me.

Candace’s panel is Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring, and the Future. We’re hoping she’ll get the chance to dive in with some concrete examples of where tuning in to opinion made an actionable difference.

Tags: events, product by admin
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