Well it’s been a while since someone has done a really in-depth analysis of social media companies and here is a real killer. Philip Sheldrake, Director at RacePoint Group has broken the silence with an incredibly detailed analysis of the current players in the social media world. Download the full 99 pages of sweetness and make sure to subscribe to the RSS at Marcom Professional.

The eBook had the 6 pages about Collective Intellect including the following excerpts (that I liked) :

“Collective Intellect describes their last year as one focused on adding millions of new social media sources and improving data quality with highly automated categorisation and analytic tools. Quite rightly, they point out that analysis is pointless if you don’t start with accurate and comprehensive data. Collective Intellect must be doing something right to have attracted customers from the likes of Microsoft, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Dell, Yahoo!, Viacom, Verizon, Levi’s and Adobe.”

About yours truly: “Collective Intellect’s Nick Sowden is the only staff member of the SWA vendors described here to let me know he’s on Twitter and to have subscribed to my Twitter. He’s also one of two to have invited me to link up on LinkedIn. To me, ‘being’ social inspires confidence that they truly ‘think’ and ‘live’ social.”

“I recall telling a colleague that Collective Intellect has “the magic dust”. Here are a few more things, additional to those above, that led me to make such an exclamation…. ”

Phillip closes with more praise: “In fact, the only other criticism I can muster up is the plainly visible fact that their reports aren’t as pretty as the competions’; not a critical desideratum and easily fixed… come on Collective Intellect!” Good point Phillip. We pride ourselves on data and we’re working on making our reports ‘prettier’.

To be somewhat balanced I should talk about Philip’s main criticism: “Interestingly, Collective Intellect dismisses social networking pages as “highly off topic and generally unhelpful”, and instead prefers to focus on the group / community pages within such networks. They also write off micro-blogs such as Twitter and Jaiku as “highly irrelevant”. That’s one perspective I can’t agree with.” Erroneous! I sent Philip some bad data (what was I think??), as we’re all about twitter. I twitter more than I eat… and I’m a hungry man. We’re already incorporating twitter into our data, in fact.

Thanks for the write up guys!

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Monitoring // Add Comment »

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Organization // Add Comment »

Paul Gillin’s recent thought-provoking comments on whether and if a negative sentiment “floor” exists for Dell obscures a larger point - never give up! Using social media tools to further understand the negative sentiment associated with the “floor” helps build a business case (for or against) further marketing strategy and outreach. My response:

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A natural floor for social media tonality certainly exists, and no doubt varies by industry topics. However, as an employee for a company whose mission is to both interpret and effect change within the social media arena , I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Dell has a unique opportunity to dive deeply into the negative commentary that constitutes the “floor”. Put another way, understanding tonality sets the stage, understanding content provides further opportunity for outreach. If the themes around negative content are inconsistent from month-to-month, a case can be made for a “floor” of constantly churning negative activity that it doesn’t pay to try and influence. However, if the themes emerging from negative social media activity are consistent, and no outreach has been attempted that leverages “the message” of this consistent negativity, the case could be made to further reduce the floor by testing different types of social media outreach. Dell may certainly have recognized this and have attempted the outreach (or decided that an ROI case can’t be made for it) – but it’s worth mentioning!

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Collective Insight helps marketers understand the “face” behind the social media buzz and can use that knowledge to connect in a relevant and timely fashion.

Tags: Blog Analysis, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Metrics // Add Comment »

Collective Intellect, the leading social media analytics company helping businesses track, understand and use social media, today announced the company’s first international agreement with RBC Direct Investing, the brokerage division for the Royal Bank of Canada. Under the terms of the arrangement, the RBC Direct Investing website is hosting a customizable Collective Intellect application that “scrapes” relevant real-time information on customers’ investments from millions of English language blogs and message boards.

Collective Intellect specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering, ranking, and analyzing social media content for a wide array of businesses. By using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to identify and analyze social media, Collective Intellect tracks discussions on specific topics and produces reports that shows share of voice and tonal sentiment. Collective Intellect also develops special widgets for companies who want to find instant industry-related blog posts, and measure community sentiment.

“Successful businesses today understand the importance of paying close attention to online conversations,” said Don Springer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer for Collective Intellect. “We’re excited to partner with Canadian-based RBC Direct Investing, the online brokerage firm of internationally recognized financial institution, RBC. RBC Direct Investing recognizes the explosive growth of social networking and how our patent pending technology finds just those nuggets of information that can help their investors make more informed decisions about their trading strategies.”

Said Mr. Doug Coulter, president and CEO, RBC Direct Investing: “We are pleased to include, as part of our latest round of site enhancements, the new Community page supported by Collective Intellect technology. This new feature enables our clients to more easily access sought-after information that will help them make their investment decisions with increasing confidence.”

To view the RBC news release on CNW, click on

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/mmnr/RBC2008/

http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080611/0405998.html

Tags: Public Relations // Add Comment »

With only four contestants left on American Idol, the voting really gets interesting, and becoming part of the “bottom three” is almost unavoidable. Again, Syesha Mercado leads the way as the blogosphere’s most likely to be voted off. The blogosphere claims Jason Castro as the least likely to be voted off. See ya! Castro