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!

Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer has recently been posting about how sentiment is determined in online conversations while pointing out the difficulty posed with language and mentions Collective Intellect.

“Part of their analysis is of language within conversations and the sentiment that is displayed there. The sentiment is then tracked over time and can be a key metric in the success of a campaign. Their formula for extracting the sentiment is not publicly accessible so I am not sure how they calculate it.”

His question prompted our own response to explain how we determine sentiment. What follows is our current working approach hot from those that know.

Sentiment = The Collective Intellect tonality algorithm performs linguistic and statistical analysis on each post to determine its overall sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). The CI algorithm is designed to operate effectively across a broad range of domain areas. The algorithm has been tested on several standard sentiment datasets (such as movie reviews) and consistently performs at a level close to human inter-rater accuracy.

And if you are wondering what human inter-rater accuracy is, here is that definition.

Human inter-rater accuracy (really correlation) is a measure of how well a set of independent raters correlate on rating a test set. For example, for a particular test set, if the sentiment ratings of a set of 4 human raters only correlate at 70% (on average) then that is the best accuracy level any automated system could hope to attain on that test set.

Clearly, there is a lot more to discover here, but that is a good reason why you should stay in touch with the social media strategy and activation experts at Collective Intellect.

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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.

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

As a serial entrepreneur, I have been at the frontline of customer relationships many times. Through these start-up experiences, I have discovered that new business services exist on a continuum from tactical operational improvements to services of truly strategic import. The good news for investors and users is that services everywhere along this continuum have the potential to create value. The dynamics of the value provided have a significant impact on the client’s (i.e. users) underlying business models.
From my perspective, it is clear that many earlier adopters of Collective Intellect’s services are adopting them in ways that deliver strategic advantage. I would like to highlight some the strategic potentials associated with social media engagement.

• First, social media engagement is being used to increase revenue and market share. More and more consumers trust web sites for recommendations and advice than ever before. Several weeks ago, General Motors announced that it was shifting 50% of its marketing spend to digital. The reason was that traditional media was primarily valuable for building up awareness for new vehicle models, but digital media is where consumers made consideration and preference decisions on which cars to purchase based on their own online research and conversations.

• Second, social media engagement is being used to optimize messaging delivered through social media and through traditional media. Identifying the key issues and concerns of authentic voices found in blogs and other social media allows companies to deliver the messages most important. Coca-Cola recently opted to encourage and recognize user-generated mash-ups of creative advertisements rather than continue to try to enforce trademark protection. Now, if you create a cool Coke commercial, you could get sponsored to create the next one.

• Third, early adopters have less competition for the attention of creators and users of social media. Thus, the odds of meaningful engagement will never be higher than now. We have clients that are creating meaningful relationships with the key influencers in social media around topics that are associated with their brands and companies. These relationships form a foundation for future interactions that start to integrate these companies and citizens in valuable communities.

• Fourth, innovators are striving to harness the value of the social media content in their web properties to engage clients. We are working with several clients to build next generation publishing models that integrate social media influencers together in ways that support specialized vertical topics. These early models, if successful, will provide enormous first mover advantage for these clients.

If you’re an adopter of social media engagement, I encourage you to contact Collective Intellect today; so you can take advantage of this outstanding opportunity.

I think it would be simplest to put an abbreviated 2 letter type code at the start of the message with a sentiment symbol next (+ = good, - = bad, / = neutral), and the subject that you will be talking about. For instance I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis. My flight was delayed again (probably my fourth flight in a row on United that was delayed).

I twittered the following: “RV-UAL another trip, another flight delay on United”. In the first 6 characters I know that this is a review of United Airlines and it is negative. Simple, brief, easy for both humans and machines to parse and interpret.

The codes I’m thinking of are:
OB = observation
EV = Event
RV = Review

If it’s an event, perhaps the standard could be to create the event in facebook and snurl it for the event subject. what are some others? Let me know what you think!

There appears to be more uncertainty than usual in the mainstream media regarding the Pennsylvania pre-primary polling. Pundits are pointing to the ambiguity that comes with the 300,000 newly registered voters. The old “cell phone” argument is making a comeback, too.

So a lot of doubt is being cast on the poll numbers, specifically that Clinton will be able to maintain her significant lead. Our survey of the political blogosphere will only serve to cast further doubt on traditional polling methods. Real Clear Politics, which averages all the traditional polls, is giving Clinton a 6 point lead.

Our data shows that it will be much closer: Clinton 51%, Obama 49%. So close in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised that when the results come in, those numbers could be flipped. Using our traditional methodology, Obama is ahead in the Pennsylvania-based blogs, but the national average allows Clinton to pull slightly ahead.

Many within her own party are calling for Ms Clinton to step down if her margin of victory is close, so a 2% win would be a pyrrhic victory at best. This should become very interesting indeed.

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.”

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