Per our press release about Collective Intellect’s engagment with Royal Bank of Canada to provide a customizable, real-time information to users of RBC’s direct investing Web site, Tim Wolters was contacted by Katherine Heires, a correspondent with Securities Industry News, who was interested in CI’s statistics and semantic-based algorithms.

Rather than using natural language processing, which “teases out” the meaning of postings, Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect says it determines sentiment with statistics and semantic-based algorithms. “Trying to derive or score sentiment out of unstructured text is a hard problem,” says Collective Intellect founder and CTO Tim Wolters. There is room for improvement in sentiment filtering, he acknowledges, but the current technology is reliable when analyzing data about active securities. “For stocks that are heavily traded and posted, we are a pretty good indicator,” he asserts.

Please go to SI website for the full article.

Securities Industry News (www.securitiesindustry.com) is written and edited for securities operations, technology and processing services professionals worldwide. The bi-weekly publication provides continuous coverage of the latest financial technology advances in the Internet.

Tags: Public Relations, Reputation Management, Social Media Analytics by Michael Conti
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Collective Intellect recently moved into a new facility with 10,000 more feet of space from their previous headquarters just down the street.

We are now stationed on two floors with the developers taking the ground floor and sales/operations on the second floor. There is some good karma with the space as Google had purchased SketchUp from here.

“After Google purchased SketchUp, the operation outgrew the space. The landlord negotiated a new lease with social media analysis firm Collective Intellect, which expanded its operations.”

Boulder County Business Report

Just outside our front doors is the heart of town and ever-lively Pearl Street Mall which runs between 11th and 15th streets.

The office is open without the need for cubicles as there are numerous free conferences rooms for client/sales calls within close reach of every-one’s desk. It is the perfect space for a social media company since conversation can flow easily across the floor without formality.

Our Address is: 1433 Pearl Street, Ste. 200 Boulder CO 80302.

Tags: Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), On Our Radar, Public Relations, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Best Practice by Michael Conti
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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 by Michael Conti
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Collective Intellect (www.collectiveintellect.com), the leading social media analytics company helping businesses track, understand and use social media, today closed its second round of institutional funding by raising $6.6 million from venture capital firms led by Grotech Capital Group and including existing investors Appian Ventures and Croghan Investments and new investor Crawley Hatfield Capital, LP.

Proceeds from the investment will be used to dramatically expand Collective Intellect’s marketing and sales initiatives, leading to expanded distribution of its monitoring services and analytics-based content, as well as broader application of the company’s insights in social media campaigns. This round of funding follows the $2.6 million infusion that Collective Intellect received in February 2006 which was led by Appian Ventures and included other accredited investors in Colorado and New York.

“Social media is now a mainstream phenomenon impacting the bottom line of every business,” said Don Springer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer for Collective Intellect. “This investment validates our success in providing these businesses with real-time intelligence on social media, empowering them with the actionable insight to create relationships, optimize campaigns, and invite closer one-on-one participation. We now have the resources to become the standard in how companies measure the impact of social media.”

Collective Intellect specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering, ranking, and analyzing social media content for a wide array of businesses. The company refined its approach by helping financial services clients with more than $100 billion in assets utilize social media to make smart business-building decisions. Across blogs, discussion boards and social networking websites, Collective Intellect employs advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to identify and analyze social media.

“Collective Intellect’s management team has a strong record of generating substantial returns to its investors,” said Joseph Zell, General Partner at Grotech. “Collective Intellect enables marketers and communicators to engage in the single largest trend shaping consumer behavior today through data-driven decisions. Their instantaneous data allows social media to be actionable as well as informational. We are confident that Collective Intellect is poised to achieve even greater success.”

More on MarketWire

Tags: Brand Management, Public Relations by Michael Conti
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Lawson DeVries, a vice president at Grotech, said the immediacy of Collective Intellect’s technology gives it an edge.

“It allows brands in real time know how their advertising campaigns are going,” he said in a telephone interview.

• From interview with RedHerring http://redherring.com/Home/24134 #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tags: Brand Management, Public Relations by Tim Wolters
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Techcrunch posted a blog about us.

“The service is most useful for marketers who need to understand how well their brands are being received by the media and general public. It tracks discussions about particular topics being posted on news sites, blogs, and message boards. For instance, MTV could decide to check out what people think about “The Hills”. Collective Intellect will use graphs and lists of discussion items to show how sentiment has changed over time, and where the bulk of discussions come from. The analytics can be refined by choosing narrower topics, such as actress Audrina Patridge, to see what people are saying about her in particular.”

• TechCrunch blogged us. Sweet, except for that UI piece. http://tinyurl.com/6b284y

Tags: Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture, Public Relations, Social Media Monitoring by Tim Wolters
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Last week’s Society for New Communications Research Symposium apparently discussed the findings of a study they put together on social media influencer research. The most interesting piece to me is that PR professionals struggle to find effective metrics for deciding who are the most influential players. I will be interested to read the full study when its out.

New Influencer Study Initial Findings Shared At Society for New Communications Research Symposium

Adoption Strong but Companies Struggle to Identify Influentials

Boston, MA – December 6, 2007 – As more companies adopt social media, they struggle to find effective metrics for deciding who are the most influential players. This is among the initial findings of a study, “New Media, New Influencers and Implications for the PR Profession,” presented today at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium in Boston, MA. (www.sncr.org/symposium). The study was funded by the Institute for Public Relations and Wieck Media (www.wieck.com).

Nearly 300 public relations, corporate and marketing communications professionals experienced in social media participated in a survey focused on how influence patterns are changing and how communications professionals are addressing those changes. In addition, several case studies have been collected.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. Only 3 percent stated that social media has little or no value to their communications initiatives. Respondents believe that social media is most effective for the following sectors: arts, entertainment and recreation; communications; computer hardware; and education.

“Blogs, podcasts, and social networks are changing the way we think about media and influence,” said Jen McClure, executive director of the Society. “We wanted to learn what criteria communications professionals use to define new influencers; how social media is being used to communicate with these influentials; and how to measure the effects of such efforts. The ultimate goal of the study is to offer a set of recommendations to the PR profession.”

Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:

• Blogs
• Online video
• Social networks

The top three criteria for determining the relevance and potential influence of a blogger or podcaster are:

1. Quality of content on the blog or podcast
2. Relevance of content to the company or brand
3. Search engine rankings

Surprising to the researchers was the fact that criteria that measured online engagement for blogs and podcasts were among the least important to the respondents.

However, for online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:

1. Participation level
2. Frequency of posting by the community member
3. Name recognition of the individual

Fifty-one percent of respondents are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives. The metrics they value most are enhancement of relationships with key audiences, enhancement of reputation, customer awareness of program and comments/posts relevant to organization/products. Close to the bottom of the list was traditional media coverage.

“The respondents are admittedly power users, but their thinking on new media and influencers will be instructive to all communications professionals,” said McClure.

Detailed results of the study will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of New Communications Research and a full report will be made available via the Society and the Institute for Public Relations in early 2008.

Tags: Public Relations, Social Media Best Practice by Robin Seidner
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Should have done this last week, but I never did get a chance to put my spin on the BlogWorld experience. At my session with Ari Newman and Howard Kaushansky, not only did we discuss tracking corporate reputation, but also about personal reputation. With so many people now putting out a public persona as part of life and work, anyone working in the online space also needs to pay attention to their personal reputation online.

We had lots of good dialogue with the attendees, as well as amongst us. One of the key points raised, from me as well as through the discussion, was that deciding when to respond to potential reputation-dinging posts can be a difficult decision, because not everything is worth responding to (basically not everyone is worth having a dialog with).

Some good questions to think about before responding about an issue:

• how big is the blogger’s audience? Or, if posted on a message board, how active is that board?
• is the issue delicate enough that you might rather it die quietly, or would posting a response add more fuel to the fire?
• how forthright can you be? Since being authentic is key, if you can’t be, then perhaps leaving it alone is a better solution?

I’m not saying that these are the only things to consider, or that I am even right. My experiences with Collective Intellect’s customers vary — sometimes addressing a blogger or community directly is a good idea. Other times, a phone call or an email is a better approach. Other times, it makes sense to just watch and wait.

The key is, if you’re not watching, then you can’t make good decisions. You’re working with limited and potentially inaccurate information. Access to a dedicated service such as Media Intellect gives you the data you need to make better decisions in reputation management, and gives you the tools you need to track what happens with your response afterwards.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Reputation Management by Robin Seidner
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This morning at 10:15m, I will be co-presenting a seminar on Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere, with two of my Boulder colleagues, Ari Newman of Filtrbox and Howard Kaushansky from Umbria. If you’re in Vegas for BlogWorld, stop in to our session, ask questions and stay and listen for a while, it should be an interesting conversation. One of the things I will discuss in whether reputation always matters for companies in every industry. Plus, just like in middle school, reputation is only as good as the people who like you, so understanding who those different influencers are is very important to gaining understanding of your reputation.

Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to blog other sessions later — at the very least, I will Twitter my experiences. Follow me at CollectiveIntel.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management, Public Relations, Reputation Management by Robin Seidner
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Toyota has launched an ad campaign to revive their green “halo” in the wake of the bad press that they have been receiving over CAFE standards. The campaign price tag could run around $40 million. Since the consumer seems to have a short memory, one has to question whether this is money well spent.

Tags: Reputation Management by Brandon Line
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