So I really, REALLY wanted to go to NXNE this year. Really. Unfortunately, at my age you (usually) can’t just hop into a car for a week-long music bender in Toronto. For those who aren’t familiar with the Festival, North By Northeast is a world-renowned event dedicated to new and emerging talent, featuring up-and-coming unsigned bands, indie veterans and respected major-label artists. Basically, it’s totally awesome. This year’s Festival included a free (!!!) show by The Descendents, and sets by Swervedriver, Deerhoof, Montreal’s heavy, heavy AIDS Wolf, and one of my favourite new Canadian artists, Vancouver’s No Gold.
Did I mention that pretty much everyone I know was going?
I wanted to keep up-t0-the-minute on NXNE happenings and I knew people were tweeting about it like crazy. However, being more than a bit behind the times when it comes to technology, I don’t have a Twitter account or a Twitter-compatible telephone. To the computer!
It was easy to find what I was looking for. Posts mainly consisted of favourite shows of the Festival and the most popular venues, which included many bars my own band played way back in the day like Sneaky Dee’s, The Horseshoe Tavern, and The Rivoli, and newer venues like The Garrison (one of my favourites – check them out at http://www.garrisontoronto.com/). There was also a lot of discussion about the controversy surrounding the band F**ked Up – but then again, they’ve always attracted controversy, for more than the one very obvious reason. I read that the concert experience was akin to a riot, completely incendiary (http://therewasnosound.tumblr.com/post/6629428153/yonge-and-dundas-square-comes-to-life).
I also checked out the most tweeted links: Men Without Hats’ Safety Dance was tweeted about 80 times. Seriously. Before I knew it, I had spent two hours noodling away on the interwebs, reading about the experiences of festival attendees and artists alike.
There you have it! I experienced the entire Twitter conversation, and was even able to locate my friends’ tweets, giving me a deeper experience of the Festival without actually being there.
Resources :
I never thought I would actually say that I missed reading scientific papers. It was one of my least favorite tasks as an astrophysicist, right after grant writing, and paper editing. But since the social media data revolution I can’t help but gleam at the luscious titles flying by in my RSS feed from the Physics and Society Cornell University Library preprint service: http://arxiv.org/list/physics.soc-ph/new. Titles like “Validation of Dunbar’s number in Twitter conversations” or “Trans-Canada Slimeways: Slime mould imitates the Canadian transport network“ seem either as hard to read as an un-annotated version of Ulysses, or uh.. weird. But other titles could be very useful for anyone who thinks quantitatively about social media: Twitter mood predicts the stock market was all over social media and in the mainstream press and Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams is definitely describing an issue that directly affects every VP marketing or brand manager who is working with social media.
Before I left on postdoc I ran across a job application that was looking for particle physicists or astrophysicists to help improve pedestrian traffic in Monaco. It made sense. People individually are very hard to predict, (duh) but thousands of people bunched together with strict constraints on where they can move , wouldn’t be that difficult to model. Lots and lots of people =~ fluid dynamics. A very viscous fluid but a fluid nonetheless. I had scored a postdoc fellowship and I was already commited to NYC or Paris. But the Monaco job did peak my interest… It was a premonition of my future work here at Nexalogy.
I spent part of last week in California at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference. Strata’s tagline is, “making data work” and it’s all about big data and what to do with it.
One of the sources of “big data” is the never-ending stream of material emanating from the social web. People are taking many approaches to analyzing this kind of data, but at the end of the day, the goal of any approach is the same: to gain a better understanding of the whole stream.
To demonstrate how we approach this problem here at Nexalogy, while I was gone I had my team in Montreal gather every tweet that contained the main hashtags used at Strata (#strataconf & #stratconf). There were 4616 tweets between February 1 to February 7 from a total of 1455 individual Twitter users.
We have built an interactive lexical map of the entire dataset – go to http://strataconf.nexalogy.com to view and interact with the data.
This past Wednesday we were really happy to participate once again in Webcom Montreal, which has become Montreal’s most important web marketing conference. It has quickly become a Webcom tradition for Nexalogy Environics to sponsor the VIP Speaker’s Cocktail the night before the event.
This event and our sponsorship resonates for us and the work we do at Nexalogy. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time at conferences knows that the individual speakers are important, but it’s the relationships forged at an event AND the particular sessions that really glues the whole thing together. This matches really closely with our approach to social media intelligence. Although a particular blog post or Tweet is interesting – to truly understand it, you must have a good understanding of the relationships between posts (or tweets) and be able to put it in the larger context.
The conference itself was fantastic, and as always, Claude Malaison put together a fantastic roster of local and international speakers, including our friend (and founder of a sister company of ours), Jen Evans of Sequentia Environics.
Two weeks earlier, we were equally to have been invited speakers at the first Webcom Toronto. Hosted by Jane Dysart, the first Webcom in Toronto featured one of the best speaker’s lineups I’ve seen in years, including Don Tapscott, Shel Holtz, and Walton Smith, among others. Being the first edition, Webcom Toronto was a much smaller event than Webcom Montreal, but I predict nothing but growth for the future.
This past Tuesday kicked off the 5th season of Toronto’s Third Tuesday events with a day-long conference called Measurement Matters. Host Joe Thornley put together a fantastic lineup including a panel chaired by Terry Fallis in the early afternoon called, “Analysis – more than skin deep – how to find real meaning”. On the panel were Rob Clark (from Edelman), Patrick Gladney (from Social Currency, Northstar Research Partners), and Nexalogy’s founder and president Claude Théoret.
There were some great moments during the day, which as a whole exceeded expectations. Some highlights included presentations by Pierre-Loïc Assayag (from Traackr), and a wonderful keynote by KD Paine. The panel led by Mark Evans (from Sysomos), featuring Darren Barefoot, Brian Cugelman (from AlterSpark), and Ilya Grigorik (from Postrank) was particularly excellent, and really moved the whole day’s program in a very productive direction.
Claude’s presentation during his panel was pretty well received – thanks to everyone for the warm reception. I think video may be available soon, but for now, you can download Claude’s slide deck here: Nexalogy-TTMM-Deck (2.1Mb PDF).
Today at Mashable, Jim Toobin (who is the president of Ignite Social Media) wrote a fantastic post about the future of our field: Why Social Media Monitoring Tools Are About to Get Smarter.
He mentions both cluster analysis and semantic analysis as avenues for future development and accurately describes some of the challenges that go along with these approaches. These techniques are at the heart of Nexalogy’s unique approach to Social Media Intelligence – and are a key element of the value we offer our clients to use social media to do much more than simple monitoring.
For me, this post is another indication that what we’re living through is not the birth of one industry but two: SM Monitoring and SM Intelligence. They’re different jobs with different goals, and the things required to do monitoring well (and that the key monitoring companies have done a good job deploying) are not necessarily the things required to produce valuable intelligence that can feed directly into brand strategy or corporate risk assessment scenarios.
Yesterday, Nathalie Babin-Gagnon conducted a radio interview with Claude on French CBC’s Classe économique, a show hosted by Sébastien Bernatchez. The topic discussed was a hot one: social media.
Right off the bat, it was affirmed that companies must develop a social media strategy, for social media is a cheap way for companies to communicate directly with their clients and followers.
According to Claude, more and more companies are getting on board (for example our clients “from primary resources such as oil and mining companies”) and companies that don’t will miss the boat.
Tourisme Montréal and the TD Bank have also seen the light. Pierre Bellerose, Public Relations VP at Tourisme Montréal, hires “connectors” to tweet and post messages on the blogosphere in order to play up the city. Annick Laberge, Senior Manager, Quebec Corporate and Public Affairs at TD, also informed us that the bank has recently created a department that specialises in social media strategies–which companies can’t do without nowadays.
So yes, social media has become indispensable to how businesses operate now, but Claude believes the revolution is yet to come, adding that “even as we’re heading towards 3.0, we’re still at this point only using one-fifth of what social media can accomplish.”
Google, for example, seems to know what you’re looking for before you even type in a coherent search. That is also one aspect of what’s known as 3.0.
It goes without saying that it’s thrilling to imagine what the remaining four-fifths will do for us.
