I’m having a great time here in Austin representing Crimson Hexagon to the wonderfully nerdy SXSW-Interactive masses. We are part of the Porter Novelli tent that just announced their upcoming social media platform, which will combine our tool along with the impressive influencer analysis from our friends at Traackr and workflow from Spredfast to fully dominate the social media monitoring and sentiment analysis world.

We’ve been hearing people complain about how Twitter failwhales have been popping up all over the place as SXSW tweeters barrage the site. It’s unusual to walk into a room or party at SXSW that doesn’t have a solid majority of occupants staring at their iPhones and/or laptops. We thought, why not check out what people are really talking about at SXSW.

As you can see, one sixth of the tweets with the SXSW hashtag are loving the convention and another 13% are using this weekend as an opportunity to meet up with bloggers, clients, partners, luminaries, gurus and others. All the fun that those people are having made 17% wish they were attending themselves.

Not all people are satisfied with their festival experience. There are supposedly 40% more people here than last year’s Interactive portion, so it’s no surprise that 15% of the conversation is overwhelmed by the crowds. Another 13% were of the opinion that “South by” isn’t worth the money ($6 for a bottle of beer is A BIT ridiculous…)

Finally, over a quarter of the tweets about SXSW were people complaining about how Twitter and Foursquare are slow because of SXSW! So yes, SXSW Twitter discontents, Twitter may be going a little slower lately, but look no further than your own thumb as it types out complaints to find the culprit.

We’ve been keeping an eye on reactions to the recent State of the Union address, and the potential repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) remains a hot topic.  Over the next few months, we’ll be using our technology to track what people are saying about DADT on blogs and forums as this story develops.

Right now, a full three quarters of people support the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, over half of whom constitute a general anti-DADT movement. Comparisons to the debates surrounding integration of women and African Americans into the military are common.

Some people (11%) feel that Republicans opposed to the repeal, like John McCain and Duncan Hunter, Jr., are unreasonable, and that the entire controversy is reflecting poorly on the GOP.

Others are frustrated by the speed or degree of change.  Some 15% of the conversation expresses disappointment that even after Obama and top Pentagon officials spoke out in favor of repeal, the policy is being seriously studied for at least another year instead of being overturned immediately.  Others (8%) remind us that the repeal of DADT would be only a small step in the battle for gay rights, and that there are more important injustices to worry about.

About 14% of people oppose the repeal, citing possible complications including effects on troop cohesion.  A number of people (10%) fall in between the two extreme views, expressing either their indecision about the issue or their support for a third, intermediate option.

We’re looking forward to watching trends in this conversation as things progress, and we’ll keep you updated about any interesting changes we see.

While not owning a car is often frustrating, at times it has its advantages in Boston: no digging snow out from around tires, no fighting crowds for parking, and I don’t have to worry about the sticky accelerator pedal in my Toyota sending me to a fiery death. The recent Toyota recall has caused quite the international stir and, while no one in the office owns one, we couldn’t help but wonder what people on Twitter thought. Here’s what we found:

Not surprisingly, people think this is bad for Toyota. Just over a quarter of the tweets about the Toyota recall believe this will damage Toyota’s previously well-respected brand reputation.

Some 22% of the conversation speculated on how the recall would benefit Toyota’s competitors, especially those backed by the American government. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s comment that owners should “stop driving it and take it to a Toyota dealer” fueled theories that the government was looking to boost its investments in GM.

Twitterers dissatisfied with the Toyota response to the crisis thought the company moved too slowly and was wrong to send potential replacement accelerators to assembly plants to build new cars rather than dealerships to repair cars already on the road. The knowledge that Toyotas sometimes cannot be stopped by their drivers left others scared to drive in or around them.

Twitter is usually good for funny one-liners and Toyota’s tag line “Moving Forward” ensured that it failed to disappoint. These snarky tweets, joined by The Daily Show’s coverage of the “Toyotathon of Death” continue to add to Toyota’s collective embarrassment.

Tweets about the recall weren’t all bad for Toyota, as 12% were by Toyota drivers who pledged to remain loyal to the company. It’s great that they love their cars, but for now, I’m happy to keep riding the subway and avoid them on the road.

It’s fair to say we were pleased when CNN aired our analysis of Twitter’s reaction to the State of the Union address.

We were thrilled when the Huffington Post quoted CNN SVP David Bohrman as saying, “This is light-years beyond what we’ve done”

So imagine our delight when Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show picked up the story in last night’s show.  (See 2:15)

Well, sort of.  He may have in fact said, “I’ve never seen a situation where more information helped me understand less.”

Ouch.

But hey, it was 75 seconds of a pretty packed 22 minutes, maybe people forgot about it? We turned to Twitter (of course) to find out.

Based on Tweets from today, Stewart’s (4 minutes long) take on Chris Matthews’s momentary venture into 1932 was the star of show, with 32% of total praise. In contrast, Stewart’s segment on our analysis barely drew more attention than Doris Kearns’s interview (5 min) with a scant 12%. That’s just a fraction of the total humor produced on that show.

Of course, per second of screen time, Stewart’s Twitter rant generated 28% more praise than his comments on Matthews and 451% more than his interview with Kearns. So maybe it was funny, after all.  What was that again about having more information?

Last night, Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of over 200,000 tweets pertaining to the State of the Union Address was featured on CNN’s post-speech coverage. Broken down state by state, our technology helped John King and Wolf Blitzer report in real-time what people on Twitter thought of President Obama’s speech. We are very excited about our new relationship with CNN and hope to be making more appearances on the ‘magic wall’ in the near future!

Today, Boulder, Colorado-based social media agency Room 214 announced that they chose Crimson Hexagon as a key strategic partner to provide next generation opinion analysis and monitoring to extend their social media research and business intelligence offerings.

Room 214 has been creating interpretive analyses of user generated content and aggregated online data since 2006. They remain tool-agnostic and are leveraging our monitoring platform to help large brands better distill opinions and meaning from social networking properties and online conversations.

The social media agency was one of two early enterprise agency partners we began working with in 2009.  Their insightful product feedback, deep understanding of our platform, and analyst resources make them an ideal partner to deliver and extend the value of our software.

Room 214 co-founder James Clark feels, “In stark contrast to straight up sentiment analysis, Crimson Hexagon data provides the intelligence to drill deeper into relevant opinions in the online conversation to better align marketing strategies and initiatives that incorporate the voice of the customer.”

In fact, one of the key reasons Room 214 chose Crimson Hexagon was that our opinion monitors go far beyond automated sentiment, which in their words is unreliable and only provides a breakdown of positive, negative or neutral conversations.

We are excited about this relationship and the great potential it has going forward.  As strategic partners, we are working closely together on product feedback, training, joint marketing and selling initiatives.

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.

Here in Cambridge, MA, every other TV commercial for the last two weeks has been a senate campaign spot. Yesterday, Republican Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election after taking full advantage of social media campaign tools. Now that the dust from the election has settled, we decided to take a look at the online conversation about the election and see if claims that Brown’s campaign dominated the social media arena were true. This is what we found:

Tweets On Election Day

Yes, social media strongly favored Scott Brown.

-          41% of tweets specifically favored Brown, referencing votes, time and money given to him.

-          An additional 9% were anti-Coakley for her political views and poorly run campaign

-          A further 21% were conservatives happy that stopping Coakley meant hamstringing the Obama agenda in the senate as well (mostly focused on health care and carbon cap and trade)

-          Even the 16% of tweets that were anti-Brown focused mostly on him being too liberal

The lonely few pro-Coakley Twitterers managed to capture 9% of the overall conversation flow and their candidate took 47% at the polls.

Blogs And Forums Throughout The Campaign

Analysis of conversations on blogs and forums showed similar results to the Twittersphere of pro-Brown, anti-Coakley, and anti-Obama sentiment over the course of the campaign, though Coakley’s support was twice that of what it was in Twitter. With access to more than 140 characters at a time, bloggers and forum-dwellers tend to express many opinions over the course of one post, so our categories were a little broader to reflect this (it turns out people who disliked Coakley tended to also think that Scott Brown is great.)

Monitoring over time revealed a brief bump in the conversation focused on stopping Obama’s agenda on 1/8. On that day, Scott Brown appeared on Sean Hannity’s show, bringing a more national, conservative audience to the Massachusetts race. Over the rest of the race, the sentiment held steadily.

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.

In the war that is apparently the norm in soft drink pricing, negotiations are usually held behind closed doors. But on November 17th the doors were blown open as Costco refused to restock Coca-Cola products because they failed to offer “competitive pricing.” When a similar pricing dispute occurred in February between Delhaize, a supermarket chain, and Unilever brands, Delhaize lost 31% of its customers, while Unilever lost 47% of Delhaize shoppers.

So does anyone win these disputes? We decided to turn our VoxTrot monitor’s attention to the online conversation surrounding the Costco/Coke dispute to see what the Twitterverse thought.

The Twitter users who chose a side in the dispute were closely split, with 11% supporting Costco and 14% for Coke. Many Costco supporters saw them as a champion of the consumer, while supporters of Coke said they shouldn’t back down from corporate bullying. One in five mentions were just plain sad about the situation, trying to figure out where they would now purchase their pallets of Diet Coke.

Not all Tweets were concerned. Some were incredulous about the lack of Coke products in Costco, as 18% thought that the whole public dispute was crazy or astonishing and 12% cracked jokes about it. The rest of the conversation was pessimistic about the clash, with 15% ready to dismiss it as simply two corporate giants battling over a few cents per can and the last 10% remarking that competitors to Coke (Pepsi) and Costco (Walmart) were going to benefit.

So who is winning? Perhaps the question should be: is anyone winning? For the few who take a side, the sentiment is even, but most everyone else is sad, disdainful, amused or betting on the competitors, none of which seem positive for either company. As far as the Twitterverse goes, it appears that everyone is losing, including the consumer.