If a Volcano Erupts in Your Industry, Social Media Monitoring Can Help

Ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland (Reuters)

On April 14 a volcano erupted in Iceland, spewing ash in the air for hundreds of miles and canceling flights across Europe for days. As with other recent emergencies and natural disasters, social media is helping to spread the news and helping those affected by the event. This article by Tracy Staedter in Discovery News, “Social Media Sites Help Volcano-Stranded Travelers,” documents several of the Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, and other online resources that are keeping us informed.

Biz360 social-media dashboard of the topic, "volcano." Click to enlarge.

I used Attensity360 social media monitoring software as a service to analyze social media activity around the topic, “volcano.” Not surprisingly, use of the word “volcano” in social media skyrocketed from under 3,000 per day before the eruption to around 27,000 per day on April 14 and on the days following the eruption. The dashboard I created allows me to directly access the posts, interact with the authors, identify the sites with the highest number of posts, and monitor sentiment. I can also qualify topics, such as adding “Iceland” to the “volcano” search string.

You can use the same solution at your organization to monitor any erupting volcanoes (good or bad) in your industry or about your organization. What if you could shape market perception, understand the buying process, respond to competitive threats, evaluate trends and issues, and improve the return on your marketing investment from product positioning, branding, PR, and marketing campaigns? What if you could help marketing to quickly determine whether their messages are gaining traction in the marketplace and which of those communication vehicles—including spokespeople—are most effective at delivering those messages?

Social media monitoring can help you answer the above questions, gain insight into the discussions about the topics you select, and address issues, just like the travelers in Europe and their families are using social media to help them navigate their situation and return home.

Cloud Computing and Seismic Upgrades

SF Bay Bridge new eastern span (right) and original eastern span

In San Francisco, we’re very familiar with building renovations such as seismic upgrades. Here are just a few public building renovations that occurred recently:

• Asian Art Museum, renovation and move to former SF Public Library building, 2002-2003, $15 million
• War Memorial Opera House, earthquake repair and seismic strengthening, 1996-1997, $88.5 million
• Davies Symphony Hall, acoustic and seating renovations, 1992, $10 million

In some cases, a renovation just wasn’t enough to serve our current and future needs. San Francisco recently built:

• Main Library in 1993-1996 for $110 million
• AT&T Park in 1997-2000 for $357 million
• the M. H. De Young Museum in 2002-2005 for $202 million
• California Academy of Sciences in 2005-2008 for $500 million
• San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge western span retrofit and new eastern span construction, currently underway, will cost $6.3 billion and will be completed in 2013

In the new arena of cloud computing, traditional software vendors have no choice but to upgrade their on-premises offerings to support the new cloud-based delivery model. Without a strategy and the resources to bridge the gap between the old computing model and the new, even the largest software companies risk falling behind.

While it’s difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to retrofit a historic building to current seismic standards, or to build a new ball park, museum, or bridge, it may seem fairly easy, quick, and inexpensive to re-engineer on-premises software to software as a service. Not so, according to Don Fornes, CEO of Software Advice, who outlines some of the obstacles of bridging on-premises software to SaaS in this post, “The Software as a Service Dilemma.” Fornes writes that on-premises software companies must re-think and re-organize their business models and operations, in addition to nearly re-writing their code to support a web-based architecture.

One of the hallmarks of progress is creative destruction, when new and improved technologies or methodologies replace the old. Sometimes the transitions are painful, but they are usually beneficial. For example, how many of us would rather have paper-based systems than computerized systems; or how many would rather bring down the Internet and revert to the former methods of storing and communicating information?  How about leaving our cell phones behind for conventional phones, or carrying CDs rather than storing hundreds of them on an MP3 player?

In the future, installed software will have the same appeal as our old methods of storing and accessing information, while cloud-based systems shine as the best solutions for securely and efficiently accomplishing our business objectives.

While the large enterprise players are busy re-writing decades of code and re-aligning their businesses to support a web-based architecture, consider these cloud-based business solutions that were written as web-based applications from the start, and that are continually upgraded to incorporate the best practices and suggestions of their customers:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

How will you use cloud-based systems to upgrade your ability to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud?

Cloud Computing: The Hype is Dying and Budgets are Rising

Attensity360 social media dashboard for cloud computing - click to enlarge

Last week David Linthicum of InfoWorld wrote an interesting post, “The cloud computing hype is beginning to die.” He wrote that less information about cloud computing is entering the market and the hype is settling down. Meanwhile, vendors are now focusing on creating new products for the space, and both vendors and IT pros are strategically targeting cloud-based products for specific needs. He based this assessment on his own observations and on an unscientific poll of his cloud computing Twitter buddies.

I also think it is happening along the lines of Dave’s description. Last year we saw an amazing amount of information and alignment around cloud computing: most research firms included cloud computing on their list of strategic client recommendations, and the volume of articles, blog posts, tweets, webinars, conferences, new companies, and new products clearly signaled the arrival of a new model of computing. Now, the volume of information is still great, but I also think it is declining. 

To find out whether the observations of Dave and his Twitter buddies reflect an actual decline in information about cloud computing, I used social media monitoring SaaS product Attensity360 to aggregate and analyze the volume, sentiment, and trend of the topic, “cloud computing.”

Cloud computing topic velocity report - click to enlarge

Attensity360 clearly indicates that mentions of “cloud computing,” are declining in social media. There were 1,153 mentions this month to date, while last month to date there were 2,984 mentions. That’s a 61-percent decline this month. This reduction of “hype” and information is a good thing according to Dave, because it shows that we’ve moved from the “thought leadership” stage to increased understanding and strategic implementation.

A new report from Sand Hill Group, Leaders in the Cloud, supports that IT budgets for cloud computing are increasing as a result of strategic interest and implementation plans. Here is an article about the report inInformationWeek. The study finds that in three years:

• 16% of respondents expect to spend 30% or more of the IT budget on cloud computing
• 8% will spend 21-30% of the budget
• 22% will spend 11-20% of the budget
• 24% will spend 7-10% of the budget
• Those expecting to spend 7% or more make up 80% of the sample

Now that the hype about cloud computing is dying and the focus is increasingly on trying and buying, consider these cloud-based solutions that are easy and quick to deploy, fit well in tight budgets, and will rapidly help you drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Have you noticed an increase in strategic planning for cloud-based implementations at your organization?

Social Media Monitoring of Health Care Reform Topics

Social media dashboard for health care reform - click to enlarge

Now that it’s been a week since the health care reform bill was passed into law, it’s good timing to see how it played out in social media, where unbridled opinions spread like epidemics. Using Attensity360 social media monitoring software as a service, I built a dashboard to monitor the topic of “health care reform.”

Not surprisingly, the topic spiked on March 21 and March 22, in line with the House of Representatives’ approval of the bill on March 21. “Health care reform” was included in 210,157 posts over the last 30 days. The topic spiked from 6,504 mentions on March 20 to 33,701 mentions on March 21 and 33,991 mentions on March 22. Mentions steadily declined thereafter and settled at 5,283 at the end of the week on March 27.

Topic sentiment over the last 30 days was 34 percent positive, 31 percent negative, 29 percent neutral, and six percent mixed. Topic sentiment between March 19 and March 31 was 32 percent positive, 30 percent negative, 32 percent neutral, and six percent mixed.

The top five sources of the posts were Digg (1,402), Reddit (458), Gather (223), Amazon Politics Community (187), and Medlogs (177).  For each of the top sources, I can view reports for topic trend (how many posts per date), sentiment, daily traffic, U.S. demographics, and the top five articles this week that mention “health care reform.”

The top article for posts and comments this week from top source Digg was this Associated Press article, “Health overhaul likely to strain doctor shortage.” I can also view the comments on the article and interact directly with the authors of the comments. Here’s my comment: for those considering a medical career, now may be the time!

It’s clear from this social-media dashboard that positive, negative, and neutral opinions about health care reform are almost equal. This means that the proponents of health care reform, while winning the legislative battle, have a lot of PR to do to persuade the neutrals and the negatives to join the positive camp. Another look may reveal that the neutral articles were written by journalists, who are supposed to be neutral. TheAssociated Press article passed that test with a neutral sentiment rating.

The good news for all involved in health care reform is that, with Attensity360, they have cost-effective and instant access to the largest focus group in history: social media. Social media participation is growing just like universal health insurance, and organizations cannot ignore either of these developments.

How can social media monitoring apply in your organization? What if you could shape market perception, understand the buying process, respond to competitive threats, evaluate trends and issues, and improve the return on your marketing investment from product positioning, branding, PR, and marketing campaigns? What if you could help marketing to quickly determine whether their messages are gaining traction in the marketplace and which of those communication vehicles—including spokespeople—are most effective at delivering those messages?

Health Care Reform and Cloud Computing

Organizational chart of the health plan; click on image to enlarge it.

Last Thursday, March 25th, Congress approved a bill for major health care reform, which has been a priority for several administrations and a topic of discussion and controversy for decades. I compiled below a few articles, perspectives, and summaries of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590):

• New York Times: “Final Votes in Congress Cap Battle on Health Bill“
• HealthReform.gov, managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
• Examiner.com, “A plain language summary of the current health care reform bill“
• American Medical Association letter to Speaker Pelosi, supporting the bill
• AARP Statement on Historic Health Insurance Reform Package
• Kaiser Permanente Comments on House Passage of the Health Care & Education Affordability Reconciliation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

While the business side of health care will change considerably as the new regulations take effect, I think it’s also interesting to take a quick look at current and future technology improvements in patient care, such as bionics and nanomedicine. Artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought are currently being developed and tested, while nanomedicine will create breakthroughs in treating many diseases at the cellular level.

• National Geographic article, “Bionics“
• The Pentagon Channel on YouTube, “Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms“
• UnderstandingNano.com: “Nanotechnology in Medicine – Nanomedicine“

In most business environments, business intelligence is high on the wish list to help control costs, improve performance, and identify business opportunities by discovering patterns and insights in data for improved decision-making. According to the below articles, business intelligence is also a high priority in health care:

• SearchDataManagement.com: “Business intelligence in healthcare: Special report“
• Information Management Magazine: “BI’s March to Health Care“
• BeyeNETWORK: “Trends in the Healthcare Business Intelligence Marketplace“
• The Health Care Blog: “Next Generation Healthcare Analytics“
• Healthcare IT News: “Investors keen on analytics, patient safety tech“
• Information Management Magazine: “Bringing Analytics to the Treatment Level“
• Federal Computer Week: “Tracking Pandemics –  A Closer Look at Healthcare Analytics“

Cloud-based business intelligence solutions can help health care companies achieve their goals of reducing cost, streamlining operations, and delivering better care through improved decision-making, because BI SaaS can be instantly activated and scaled to meet business requirements. Just as health care reform promises improved access to health care for more people, BI SaaS provides insights to more employees for better decision-making. But is health care ready for cloud computing? According to these two articles, the answer is “yes.”

• The Health Care Blog: “Is Cloud Computing Right for Health IT?“
• iHealthBeat: “Health Care Might Be Ripe for Cloud Computing“

If you are interested in reforming your business to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud, consider these cloud-based solutions:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

How do you plan to reform your organization to better serve your patients and customers with cloud-based solutions?

Avatar, The Singularity, and Cloud Computing

In the film Avatar, I was especially interested in the ability to link to other beings or transfer ourselves from one body to another. If we believe inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, we will soon be able to do these transhuman activities ourselves. The Singularity is a theory that computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in a highly accelerated rate of technological progress. In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil writes about our future ability to digitize and upload our minds to new types of bodies, and even to live forever, since our minds would exist digitally outside of any specific body (and assuming you have several good backups). Here is a video in which he explains these concepts. A movie, The Singularity is Near, will be released this year. There is even a Singularity University, co-founded by Kurzweil and personal spaceflight pioneer Peter Diamandis, in partnership with Google, ePlanet Ventures, and Autodesk.

Imagine, rather than venturing to a rainforest for an Avatar-like vacation, just renting a body (a cyborg) there, and downloading yourself to it! You could also tap directly in to the experience of someone in a rainforest, with his or her permission. If your cyborg were harmed or destroyed, you would be backed up elsewhere and could resume from there.

If you’re concerned about any of the issues surrounding The Singularity, you have time: according to Kurzweil, The Singularity won’t occur until 2045, although mind uploading will be possible in the 2030s. If you’re really concerned about whether The Singularity is here yet or not, visit www.isthesingularityhereyet.com.

In addition to transhumanism, Avatar is about revolution. According to Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus and a columnist for CIO magazine, cloud computing will cause three revolutions. He masterfully wrote an epic three-part article series describing each cloud revolution in detail:

• Part One: Prologue and “Revolution #1: The Change in IT Operations.” Winners: Apps groups, Apps groups (2); Losers:  IT operations; Winners: IT operations
• Part Two: “pay-as-you-go” pricing; opex vs. capex; control shift from IT to business units; low cost fosters experimentation; scaled cost encourages large-scale applications
• Part Three: Epilogue; price elasticity means apps explode; apps explosion puts unprecedented pressure on IT infrastructure; app developer shortages, with emphasis on locating talent and leveraging service providers

Here is Golden’s conclusion: “I’m sure it’s easy to dismiss these three revolutionary developments of cloud computing as over-dramatic. However, as a species, we humans have very little temporal perspective. In 1995, who would have predicted the rise of a computing giant like Google? Computing at that time was underpowered PCs communicating to servers that looked like slightly beefy desktop computers upended onto their sides. Rack servers didn’t even exist. We don’t do a very good job of extrapolating current trends into the future, but it’s clear that cloud computing is a trend that will overturn the practices and assumptions used in IT today. It’s going to be a wild ride.”

Ocelot, Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador

I highly recommend reading Golden’s articles about the cloud-computing revolution, because they provide an excellent overview of the changes in computing that we are seeing now and will see over the next few years. Over time, cloud computing may partially pave the way to the transhuman activities we see in Avatar and to what will be the greatest revolution of all (if it occurs): The Singularity.

Avatar won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing. As we’ve probably all heard, it is the highest grossing film of all time. How long will that record last?

If you want to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud in the here and now, consider these cloud stars that are best in their class:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What types of business results can you imagine with the leap in technology we’re now experiencing with cloud computing?

Winter Olympics Advertising and Social Media Monitoring

How to Train Your Dragon

My favorite commercials from the Winter Olympics were for the film, How to Train Your Dragon, and for Jay Leno’s return to The Tonight Show. Watch the animated vignettes for How to Train Your Dragon, specially created for the Olympics and showing the “Viking origins” of several Winter Olympics events, here. Watch The Tonight Show commercial here.

I was impressed by DreamWorks’ effort to create humorous vignettes just for the Olympics, and I think The Tonight Show commercial was a quick, humorous way to promote Jay Leno’s return, playing on Jay Leno’s car collection.

Although I haven’t found advertising pricing information for the 2010 games, this news release from January 2010 indicates that the average price of a 30-second commercial for the 2006 Winter Olympics was $224,600. For at least that amount this year, advertisers must be keen to get as much feedback as possible on their impact. Nielsen Ratings showing the number of viewers of the Winter Olympics were great, but what about consumer sentiment?

Social media monitoring SaaS products such as Attensity360 provide a solution for evaluating the buzz about any topic, not just among journalists, but including any social media activity among the consumers that you are trying to reach. Social media monitoring also helps you directly interact with your audience. You can view their comments, answer questions, thank them for good feedback, resolve an issue, or survey and evaluate a dragon of negative feedback and decide if and how you want to respond.

Attensity360 dashboard showing topic track and awareness reports for How to Train Your Dragon

I created two dashboards in Attensity360 that monitor social-media activity for How to Train Your Dragon and The Tonight Show in the last 30 days. How to Train Your Dragon was mentioned 3,879 times in social media outlets. The topic track and other reports include comments in addition to original posts. Its high point before the Olympics was 93 mentions on one day; during the Olympics, its coverage steadily climbed, reaching a peak of 231 mentions on one day. Following the Olympics, coverage remained steadily over 100 mentions per day. Sentiment was 59.4 percent positive; 35.4 percent neutral; 2.7 percent negative; and 2.4 percent mixed. I can see all outlets where it was mentioned, the measure of sentiment for each outlet, the number of mentions per day, and I can even drill down to each individual mention.

Attensity360 dashboard showing The Tonight Show trend and sentiment reports

The Tonight Show was mentioned 19,596 times in social media outlets over the last 30 days. Coverage rose from a low point of 245 mentions on one day before the Olympics to 1,035 mentions on one day during the Olympics to 3,289 mentions on March 2, the day after Jay Leno returned to the show. Sentiment was 57.4 percent positive; 25.1 percent neutral; 11.7 percent negative; and 5.8 percent mixed. The top outlet was Digg, with 712 items. Here’s an article in The Hollywood Reporter that I found through the Attensity360 reports, when I dug down through the mentions that Attensity360 found on Digg. I could have found the same article from a web search, but Attensity360 adds tremendous value because it aggregates all mentions, including comments, and then analyzes awareness, trend, sentiment, velocity, top sources, top authors, and content distribution by type (blogs, discussion forums, and micro blogs).

Attensity360 shows that both How to Train Your Dragon and The Tonight Show are doing well in social media outlets. How to Train Your Dragon will likely receive many more mentions after it is released on March 26th, just like The Tonight Show did after Jay Leno’s return.

Wouldn’t it be great to have similar insights for your company, products, or executives?