Attentio Blog

Attentio provides social media monitoring and analysis tools that continuously track a broad range of online sources for insight about companies brands.

Social media is ’sticking’ around

As an analyst for Attentio, I come across all kinds of topics that people are discussing online. Right now for example I am preparing a social media report on… glue!!
While doing some research on the topic, contrary to my first thoughts that such a topic is not very much discussed, I found tonnes of forums discussing glue related issues! Forum users are in need of advice on which type of glue is best for sticking paper to walls, metal to tiles, plastic to plastic, mirror to wall, broken glass, wooden parts, and so on. Hints on how to prepare a surface so that the glue works best, are all over the place.
People look for something solid and strong. It seems that the magic “pâte à fixe” is most popular for those who do not own a property but do rent one. Instead of hammering nails that can destroy a wall, apparently one can stick anything using this kind of glue.
The interesting insight here is that people are looking for two contrary glue’s properties at a time. They want it to be strong – so that the fixed object stays fixed for years, but also something easy to take off the wall when they move out. I wonder if this is not too much to ask…
PS – my research brings up very funny results as well:
“Votre mari n’est pas infidèle mais aime bien regarder les autres femmes? Alors utilisez la colle Loctite sur son alliance! Un print spécial St. Valentin”.
Approximate translation: “Is your faithful, loving husband always chekcing out the ladies? Then glue his wedding band on with Loctite!”

I refuse to grow up

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been paying rent and making budgets and studying stuff and thinking “career” for years now, but there are some things I simply won’t let go of.
 
I laugh giddily for no reason. I pull pranks on my colleagues here at the Attentio Brussels office regularly. I store snow balls in the freezer. I keep a ping pong ball and racket in my desk at all times just in case, and I religiously read Calvin and Hobbes. Those two give me great ideas as to what I should do on the weekend.
 
I also play video games. A lot. If I manage to stay away from the sauce on Friday nights, I’ll get up nice and early with my lady on Saturday morning, make her breakfast in bed. Then I’ll send her off to her weekend course and saunter on into my game room, complete with Wii, PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Über flatscreen TV and telephone. The phone is there to call my for pizza.On these days I will be joined by thousands of gamers around the world – albeit most of them are a decade or more younger than me – ready to sit prone on the couch for the next 10 hours and do ostensibly nothing else then wiggle my fingers around and stare attentively at a screen. Of course Nina will come home after her course and expect the same man that brought her coffee, boiled eggs and toast in bed, but instead she’ll find Sgt. Paul Jackson of the USMC shooting Al-Asad soldier after Al-Asad soldier, while quite possibly having used the tomato sauce from the half-mauled pizza as face paint.

Truth be told, I couldn’t be the only grown-up playing video games. The video gaming industry is booming at such an alarming rate, it’s actually surpassed the film industry. According to recent NPD insights, North Americans now spend 29% of their entertainment Dollars, compared to 24% on movies and TV shows combined. To this end, I thought it would be interesting to monitor some of the online buzz revolving around these video game developers’ upcoming titles:

• Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Electronic Arts’s Army of Two, 40th Day
• Ubisoft’s Avatar: The Game
• Bungie’s Halo: Reach
• Capcom’s Lost Planet 2
• LucasArts’s Star Wars Force Unleashed 2
• Sega’s Vancouver 2010
• Sony’s Bioshock 2
• Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City
• BioWare’s Mass Effect 2

Now the beauty of the Attentio Brand Dashboard is how we can collect and categorise the data. The Dashboard is designed with a three-tier approach. First, we collect the bulk of your data about your product or brand (or whatever, it’s completely open-ended and restricts your choices in no way). Then we create vertical categories based on your needs (these can be topics, products over brands, product ranges, even cities). After that we tell you what language the data is coming in, or what country.

Now that we have the games we’re going to track, maybe you’d like to suggest relevant topics you’d like to find out about with regards to these games? Just let me know below or mail me at marc@attentio.com, and we’ll see the results next week :)

NikePlus, Social Media and a herd of elephants…

I am, for my sins, a ‘technoholic’. I love gadgets. I love iPhones, computers, TVs, HiFi and Wifi. And the first thing I do when I get home with my latest purchase (after the window shattering argument with my girlfriend of course) is throw the instructions in the bin!!! I don’t like being told what to do especially by some ink and a piece of paper. I will go out of my way to use technology to make my life easier (or complicated as is usually the case) and fun (or frustrating as is, again, usually the case).

It is for this reason that I find myself contemplating going for a run. Let me be clear; I HATE running. I find it monotonous, boring and on the few occasions that I have taken part in this punishing past-time, I come home feeling like I have been attacked by a herd of stampeding elephants. Don’t get me wrong, I have enormous respect for people who go running. Especially people (men in particular) who have the courage to walk out the door in spandex, put enormous energy into placing one foot in front of the other for an hour and a half only to end up back where they started.

Why then would I contemplate such drastic action? One word; technology. I had heard of Nike+ a while ago but only recently took time to research it and can safely admit that you can slap me silly and call me Mr Impressed! I want to be part of this. I really do!

If you want to know how it works, you simply place a small electronic sensory perceptive coagulating transcendiducer (note, may not be actual name of device) into your shoe and it communicates information about your run to your iPod/iPhone or Nike+ wrist band. Things like your speed, distance, calories burned, weight lost etc are then uploaded to the Internet for online humiliation (in my case anyway).

I went to the website and was shocked to learn that Nike+ runners have circled the globe a staggering 8,148 times, burned 2,756,587 kilos and have run a total of 325,995,368 no, 369, no, 370, no, 371 kilometres. WOW! Here, I could look at clear and funky looking charts telling me that I ran x number of kilometres (and still ended up back where I started), I can input the type of terrain I ran in and select the kind of weather I experienced (although, living in Belgium, it only needs 1 setting).

It can give me challenges, coach me to get up to the optimum fitness level and even prepare me for a marathon (an unlikely scenario but nice to know I can). Finally, and here’s the really interesting bit, I can share all of this with my fellow spandex wearing compatriots around the world. (“Take that Rupert Murdoch. You may have all my money but I ran 300 metres further than you today!!!”). Therein lies the beauty of social media mixed with technology.

Doing a search using Attentio’s Trenpedia, I can see that there are roughly 15 to 20 posts on average every day mentioning Nike Plus. I also turned on my Tweetdeck to search for NikePlus and the thing was bleeping at me more than the SS Enterprise.

Do a search for NikePlus on http://search.twitter.com and you will be inundated with times and distances that people foolishly ran in what is obstensibly a large circle.

Will I be taking part in this ingenious use of social media to get fit? I might… but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m THINKING about doing it and for every lazy, pub-going, techno freak like me, there will be at least one other person out there who will don skin tight shorts and almost see-through top in order to leave the house only to end up back there an hour later having accomplished little other than painful kneecaps and a loss of dignity. I just hope that it’s the 19 year old Brazilian supermodel I have in my imagination. All of this because of technology and social media. As for me, insanity subsided, I’m off to the pub!

Eurostar chaos as seen in social media

I confess I have been a fan of Eurostar for 5-6 years. No longer the traipse through Brussels airport and pathetic short flight to London that somehow takes 5 hours from door to door. Eurostar changed all that for me, Leisure Select is lovely and sometimes when the price is right Attentio would pay for me to take that ticket. Two bottles of wine later and normally an interesting chat with fellow passengers and I’d be back in Brussels with a smile on my face.

But they have struggled lately with a number of issues, some acts of God, some maintenance problems but now the worst of all, a disastrous PR fiasco, with hundreds trapped under the tunnel for hours, thousands more delayed, trains cancelled and a stressed CEO getting on TV and via Wearesocial his first taste of social media.

I feel for the Eurostar team, but I also see that they act like a defacto monopoly sometimes. Their loyalty scheme is an after thought (it isn’t really a loyalty scheme) and their prices are rarely “competitive”. Still the criticism they face now is largely unfair, the snow was terrible and the simple nature of a “under tunnel” service, is they maybe stuck in a tunnel. OK they seem to be back in control.

Social media is important for them, but as I wrote to an agency contact recently, most of their work is not about social media. First they need to fix the trains and network. The CEO’s job of communication will have to be on TV and via their web site. The social piece is useful but frankly much of the twitter buzz is from social media types who are not yet full representative of the Eurostar customer base (this will change).

Social media does however provide a useful listening opportunity and as the video below demonstrates the chat is quite representative of their brand today. Many of the conversations are about “chaos”. How this changes and what next month’s hot topics are, will be clearly visible by watching the tweets, listening to blogs and responding to certain types of conversations. But lets watch this space and see how their online reputation evolves and if they do start to listen?

Recent social media chats and a prediction

Just looking at recent twitter conversations it seems companies in Belgium are becoming aware of the medium.

I tweeted I was unhappy with the sandwiches at Exki (they can be bad) but did specify I like other things they do. (They tend to focus on healthier foods and in a market saturated by mayonnaise rich sandwiches that can be a plus.) Their General Manager, Laurent Kahn reached out and asked me what the problem was and I explained my miserable meal. Two things here, firstly he uses Twitter to share stuff and secondly he doesn’t mind taking a public conversation. As it turns out most of the buzz around them is positive or neutral so he doesn’t have to be too worried. Of course the question is, what will he do with my feedback and should he add social feedback with some traditional research? Maybe they’d sell more sandwiches. We’ll see.

While I was announcing some new financing for Attentio (great news by the way!) I shared a negative experience on using PR Web. PR Web asked me what the problem was and when I explained, they showed sympathy, even if the response was a little “most customers like the new version”. Still at least they talked with me. The funny part is that Market Wire also said hello and asked could they help. They couldn’t help this time, but I now know that they are relevant for future releases and communications, that is very good as I had seen them as more for releases around stock listed companies (don’t ask me why…).

So, good that companies talk to people. Great that Belgian firms see the value at a senior level. Wonderful that companies see the potential for new business leads. But this is just the tip of a fast growing iceberg, now twitter is still niche (super niche) and the real time web is still properly years away, but its coming and all companies will need to know how to communicate to their stakeholders, manage this and ensure learnings are properly spread across departments.

My prediction is that over the next three years the CIO and IT Director will now be a main decision maker in future when it comes to listening platforms as they will integrate with many departments and be apart of Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management and CRM not just glorified press clippings or only a marketing dashboard for writing reports. Fancy a bet?

Online is hurting Traditional Research in a new way

Traditional research has obviously taken a whack since the inception of the Internet. The billions of euros that goes to online research came from somewhere, but not a problem, the major agencies have shifted larger portions of their business online or bought companies that had done it first.

What is happening now is something different, what occurred before was Internet as the medium of transport i.e. online panels, internet based questionnaire, web based focus groups, now it is Internet as the source. This is where companies like Attentio make their bread and butter. The cost is through extracting the information and while this is significant, when we do it, we have it and then once categorised and “cleaned” we can really reuse and enable insights for clients repeatedly. We get those insights from truly conversational sources such as the blogs, forums, networks where the discussions are free flowing, unstructured and unedited.

While reading Research Live (a leading research website) I saw an article demonstrating the impact. The piece was entitled Pressure from online alternatives could stunt research recovery and Morgan Stanley’s Edward Hill Wood says “in recent years ‘traditional’ MR agencies have been undercut by start-ups using purely online data collection methodologies and new approaches such as social media analysis”

Those 7 words “new approaches such as social media analysis” talk to thousands of jobs that will change, millions of euros of lost sales to research companies, methodologies that won’t exist in 5 years, but also companies who will get information quicker while you and me get listened to more. A metaphor for the impact of this is record producers. Online distribution was first a new channel to ship CDs but when online downloads emerged the impact was catastrophic. Services like iTunes, Last FM and Spotify have and will do very well but they are new approaches and most record companies simply have not dealt well with the new world. I believe as with the music analogy the Research Industry will lose revenue although a large portion will go to listening and community based approaches, but will the larger players be flexible enough to do something about that? We’ll see.

First Direct (HSBC) continued

So, I am still wowed by the look and feel of the First Direct site – gorgeous. I especially like when you group the feelings together and they “shiver” next to each other like children after a swim in the sea. But, still I have a bee in my bonnet regarding their methodology.

My own quick research using our tools and that of other companies shows a much higher amount of neutral commentary than they represent. Via Tweetdeck you can check yourself and the positive buzz is about the new site, mainly from social media types, so not much in terms of people being wowed by the First Direct product.

I asked some “people I trust” for their view

Person 1, social media analyst, not associated with Attentio – “I agree with you on the sentiment score, but I have a more basic complaint: who’s doing this for them, and how? There’s really no information there, just a big number. To have any credibility, I’d expect it to have a link to something that explains where they’re getting their numbers. Otherwise, it’s just a number from the air”

Person 2, PR practitioner, social media projects, not associated with Attentio – “I agree with you. I have a feeling there were some doubting comments about it on Twitter when it first launched, or some sort of chatter. They certainly don’t explain or justify where they are getting those metrics from”

Anyway, no one is screaming about a great injustice, just questions on what data set does this come from and what methodology they are using.  First Direct actually come across as a “nice brand”, personable, there is a lot of good stuff on the site, but help a guy out here and add where the data comes from. Perhaps they plan to do this at Social Media ‘09 where they present a case study on this initiative…here’s hoping (link via @simongrice). In the mean time just sit back and relax and enjoy the bubbles :).

Negative iPhone buzz in Poland

I have been travelling around Europe in the last weeks. A small price to pay I suppose for being a European company. After my trip to Oslo I went to Poland. The reason for this trip was to present a story around social media monitoring at a conference organised by one of our partners Digital Media Consulting (DMC).

Poland is a still a fast growing economy even with the recession and has emerged strongly after years of stagnation under communist rule. It has also taken social media to its heart. There are a high percentage of young educated people who spend much of their time in internet. The most known phenomenon of the Polish social media is the social network called Nasza Klasa that has 14 Million users (35% of the Polish population) and was chosen medium of the year 2009.

Karol Szumowicz from DMC prepared a case study around the brand image of mobile phones in Polish social media. The most discussed phone – surprise, surprise – is the iPhone. In discussion forums however most of the buzz around iPhone is negative due to internet connection problems and issues with software update and bugs.

It has been great to be able to present in Polish (though it’s been difficult, too – not using this language on daily basis any more) and I hope there are more chances like that to come!

First Direct sentiment monitoring – more questions than answers

I can’t help myself. If a major brand comes to the realisation that social media is important and they decide to get involved, well, I feel happy, seriously. Still, they should be able to take some scrutiny around their activities in this new medium.

I noticed First Direct, a division of HSBC are testing social media. They have a set of widgets available at http://www.live.firstdirect.com one of the most beautiful parts is a gorgeous sentiment tool showing the amounts of negative, positive and neutral buzz. If you click on a button it will group the sentiments into the 3 categories, they say -

“Every hour the happiness index sweeps the web for comments about First Direct and shows each posting as a positive, negative or neutral bubble”

When I checked, 74% of posts were positive. I am sceptical. If this is harvesting information from social media sources how come there is so much positive sentiment?  Actually, let me phrase that again, how come there is so much sentiment at all? Based on our experience, sentiment is very much present in blogs and twitter but it is very unusual to have even 50% of posts being sentimental about a brand.

To illustrate in one Attentio study, we analysed a group of mobile phone companies and LG with 50% sentimental posts (pretty much split down the middle negative/positive) was nearly twice that of the other companies, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. My own brief study of recent posts from Trendpedia and Twitter show nowhere near the amount of sentimental posts that would drive a three quarters positive sentiment score.

It is conceivable that they are tracking some discussion forums that give mainly emotional posts and those that post, like HSBC/First Direct, but then they should be transparent as to where this is. I am not the only cynic, there is a good post and great comments here from the Next Web blog.

I want to be wrong but this doesn’t look right.

Talking at the European Parliament

Thanks to my colleague Denisa, I got an invite to talk at the European Parliament last week to a group of young journalists. The program was developed by The European Youth Press, an umbrella organisation with the involvement of 48,000 young journalists, they had a slightly smaller group of 40 journalists availing of the 3 days of workshops and presentations.

I was at a New Media workshop and spoke about how social media provides opportunities for the more entrepreneurial journalist. One doesn’t have to look too far to see how Techcrunch, Mashable and others have built up strong audiences and successful businesses by finding a niche, producing great content and monetising their brand through events, speaking opportunities, awards etc.

As we know most offline press is in decline. There are a few examples of companies increasing circulation but these are few and often free press. We all see that online is emerging to take some of that market but is not replacing the losses. On one hand Murdoch sees a world where people will pay for the news content (he has shelved some free offerings), while others see that free is the only way and business models are driven by advertising and events that come from the online profile of the site. These are interesting times, truth has a cost and someone has to cover that cost.

There was one slide with a nice Attentio graph. It was there on the basis that new media often provides a platform for online conversations that are analysable and available for anyone to get involved. This also offers a keen eyed journalist a possibility to spot trends or prove a trend by showing how the buzz emerged and grew.

We finished off with a round table discussion on how the European Parliament will use social media in the future and the general feeling was they can be more engaged but the main difficulty will be speaking as “one voice” to the conversations. Perhaps the conclusion is MEPs can connect with social media, some information can be pushed by social media but as an institution it may have to refrain from actual conversations?