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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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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Earlier this week, a few of the bloggers at Engadget posted what they called an open letter to Palm. In their typically sarcastic tone, they actually spelled out some intelligent critiques of Palm and their lack of innovation with the Treo. The post was a critical look at what’s needed from Palm to get back to the top of the innovation game.

All this wouldn’t necessarily be that exciting, except what happened next — and after that.

First, Palm’s CEO actually responded publicly, on the Palm blog. Granted, Ed Colligan’s response to the bloggers was pretty general, but the important piece for those of you in PR and brand marketing is he did agree with some of their points. He took a risk of engagement by participating in the conversation. In fact, he says he shared the critique with executives at Palm because he appreciated the fact that these bloggers cared.

I honestly haven’t seen this too often. Typically, companies don’t respond, either because they don’t have a clue that discussion is happening, or they are frozen, not sure what to say because of fear of saying the wrong thing. Ed’s reponse, from a PR perspective, was pretty good. He thanked them, said that he didn’t agree with everything but did in fact agree with much of their critique. His post was short, so he didn’t respond point by point, which was probably the right choice. He seemed genuine — another good thing.

What happened afterwards is the piece many companies could learn from. Yesterday the bloggers from Engadget posted again — excited and surprised that Palm responded. Many exclamation points in their posts. I would almost call it downright giddy. This from a blog that gets tons of traffic and attention.

And, other bloggers discussed Palm’s response in a positive tone.

The takeaway from this interaction?

If you’re on the corporate side:

• pay attention to social media, it’s an important source of information from the people who use your products.
• don’t be afraid to engage.

Sure, its hard to control the message, and that can be difficult to let go of. But, remember, you have no control anyway. Information in the blogosphere and across social media will move quickly, so you have a short window in which to respond effectively.

Don’t be afraid of your customers and critics. Embrace them.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture, Reputation Management by Robin Seidner
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