Blog « Spiral16

Spiral16 brings on Ken Miner as new Vice President of Sales

posted by Eric Melin @ March 11th, 2010

OVERLAND PARK, KAN. – Social media business intelligence company Spiral16 announced today that Ken Miner has been named as its new Vice President of Sales.

Miner’s extensive experience in business operations, sales planning, strategy development, and marketing oversight will increase company growth and help expand Spiral16’s market base into new verticals.

“I’m excited about the value that Spiral16 can bring to businesses by providing them with relevant and qualified Internet data,” Miner says. “I also look forward to continuing to foster and grow relationships with the company’s current partners.”

Miner is recognized for a broad range of entrepreneurial, professional sales, and leadership skills. He has a proven ability to identify, integrate, and nurture the diverse talents of team members to increase company growth and improve client satisfaction.

Recently as a managing partner at IT support and management company Technical Velocity, Miner changed company culture and environment from a fix-it-only IT organization to a to professional customer service organization that is focused on client satisfaction.

Spiral16 offers a powerful Internet monitoring platform to listen, measure, and visualize online presence. This comprehensive, customizable tool collects more than just social media sites, allowing users the ability to analyze data on any given topic in near-real time, including automated sentiment classification and semantic analysis.

Superior quality of data and consultative customer service are among the company’s differentiators. Another unique aspect is a 3D visual-mapping feature that makes it possible to identify hubs of influence and previously unknown connections and patterns in online communities.

Online:
www.spiral16.com

About Spiral16
Spiral16 is a social media technology company that helps companies uncover patterns within large sets of data. Spiral16’s social media monitoring solution is a highly powerful software-as-a-service platform that monitors sentiment, identifies key influencers, and visualizes online data in near-real time. Based in Overland Park, Kan., some of Spiral16’s clients include professional sports franchises; major motion picture studios; biotech companies; and globally recognized advertising, marketing, and new media agencies.

Spiral16:
Eric Melin
Manager
Marketing and Communications
(913) 944-4285
eric.melin@spiral16.com

Tags: announcement, ceo, leadership, Marketing, media, new, social, social media, Spiral16, tracy panko
Posted in Company News, Press Releases | No Comments »

The Best of Twitter 20 interviews

posted by Eric Melin @ March 11th, 2010

Jay Baer has been doing a series of live interviews on Twitter about the state of social media since October of 2008. Named Twitter 20 for the 20 questions he asks during the 90-minute interviews. The hash tag is #twt20 and Baer posts transcripts of all interviews after they are completed.

If you don’t have time to wade through 20 separate interviews, however, Baer has compiled a new eBook – Staggering Social Media Insights, the Best of Twitter 20, which is available for a free download.

Check it out:

The Best of Twitter 20

Tags: 20, baer, ebook, future, hints, ideas, insights, jay, media, social, staggering, state, tips, today, twitter, twitter 20
Posted in Content Of Interest, Shared Content | No Comments »

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

posted by Eric Melin @ March 9th, 2010

Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group have published Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. This should answer a lot of questions companies may have about utilizing social media in a pragmatic way.

The subtitle is 18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First, and the purpose of the study is to help companies find an “organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Owyang writes: “Regardless if you’re in IT or in a business unit, we wrote this to meet the needs of both groups. This architecture lays out all the possibilities (18 use cases) defines the problem and goal for each, and suggests some vendors to watch. It’s also pragmatic, as it lays out a process on how to get started, baseline needs (listening) and what to do next.”

The full report is below:

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Tags: altimeter, brand, crm, helpgul, information, jeremiah, management, media, owyang, research, social, study, web
Posted in Content Of Interest, Industry Buzz, Shared Content | No Comments »

A Social Media Oscars Post-Mortem

posted by Eric Melin @ March 9th, 2010

Last week we spent some time discussing and tracking the 82nd Academy Awards. Now that the winners have their Oscars, and the smoke has cleared, we can stand back and look at our own study in social media discussion.

Let’s do a quick recap – Last Tuesday we asked “Can online monitoring predict the Oscars?“, a question we set out to answer by tracking the top three contenders for Best Picture: box office powerhouse Avatar, fan-favorite Inglourious Basterds, and critical darling The Hurt Locker (which just so happened to be this humble author’s favorite film of the year).

Specifically we wanted to see if online discussion could in any way act as a predictor towards who would walk away with that oh-so-coveted little gold man.

Throughout the week, a consistent trend occurred with Avatar leading, The Hurt Locker usually about 11-15% behind, and Inglourious Basterds typically another 3% behind The Hurt Locker.

Was there was a direct correlation between online chatter about three Best Picture candidates and those movies’ chances of winning the big prize at the Oscars Sunday night?

The short answer: not exactly.

In February, I predicted on my own that The Hurt Locker would win Best Picture in a YouTube video for my movie site. It was kind of a no-brainer. But I was curious to see what overall volume would show us.

Avatar had 42% of all online Best Picture discussion among the top three contenders (not surprising since its the highest grossing movie of all time), but it came up short Sunday night.

The Academy is a closed voting body and clearly online buzz didn’t affect their voting to the point of predicting the correct winner. That said, Avatar’s loss Sunday night does illustrate the need to look at social media from the perspective of how it fits with outside datasets, and not merely as a stand-alone source.

In this case, maybe combining picks from industry analysts and movie critics (who championed underdog winner The Hurt Locker since its release last July) with the online data could have bolstered The Hurt Locker’s position. Among those groups, The Hurt Locker was the clear favorite.

Some other takeaways:

Blogs accounted for 41% of the total URLs collected. This is where most of the conversation about these three nominees and the term “best picture” was taking place.

Semantically, The Hurt Locker had a very solid presence, even beating out Avatar in the Inglourious Basterds insight.

In the Avatar insight, “hurt” was the fifth most-used word, “locker” was the sixth, and “basterds” was a distant third at 27th.

In the Inglourious Basterds insight, “hurt,” “locker,” and “avatar” were three, four, and five respectively.

To wrap-up: This recent Twitter study from NMS also bears out the notion that Avatar was clearly the most discussed film online. In that respect, our study was a success.

While online samplings didn’t predict the Best Picture winner, they are certainly valuable in finding out all kinds of other metrics. After all, isn’t the Oscar supposed to be about artistic merit and not popularity?

Tags: 2010, avatar, best, hurt locker, inglourious basterds, media, monitoring, oscar, oscars, picture, predict, prediction, social, tracking, win, winner
Posted in Case Studies, Content Of Interest | No Comments »

“Avatar” leads in volume, but “Basterds” has edge in average sentiment

posted by Eric Melin @ March 5th, 2010

If online buzz amounts to anything in this year’s Oscar race, James Cameron’s Avatar will win Best Picture on Sunday night.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is obviously a closed voting body, but they are influenced by the media just like everybody else. The study started on Feb. 10, the day ballots were mailed to members of the Academy.

Using Spiral16’s online listening platform Spark, we tracked the top three contenders for Best Picture this year: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds.

On Tuesday, Avatar led with 42% of Best Picture-related conversation. In three days, the movie has amassed even more relevant URLs and sits far atop the other two movies with 44%.

The Hurt Locker had the second biggest total share of online chatter on Tuesday, with 33%. Since then, however, the volume of URLs that relate the film to the terms “best picture” have decreased, leaving it with a 28% share today.

Inglourious Basterds started at 26%, but has gained two percentage points this week to tie The Hurt Locker with 28%.

This kind of measurement only takes into consideration volume and not the sentiment of the collected URLs. Unsurprisingly, a huge majority of all of the sentiment surrounding all three movies is positive.

Spark has two sentiment scoring capabilities.

The first is an average score based on all the words on the page and the second automatically extracts the most positive and negative passages.

Among the overt sentiment samples, all three movies have a higher than 97% positive rating. This means that of the loud voices on the Internet, the positive ones far outweigh the negative.

When URLs are scored for an average amount of sentiment, Inglourious Basterds leads the pack, with a 79% positive rating. Avatar is second with 74%, and The Hurt Locker is third with 71%.

Could it be that the multiple last-minute controversies surrounding The Hurt Locker are affecting its overall sentiment score? Is Basterds poised to play spoiler, riding a wave of positive sentiment, and challenge Avatar?

We’ll find out Sunday night! Stay tuned Monday for our Oscar report wrap-up.

Below are some random sentiment excerpts from the study. Click for a larger image:

« Older Entries