Startup Festival and the Best of the Valley

July 20, 2011

Claude G. Théoret

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In Our Community, Microsite, Nexalogy Events & Activities

I can’t believe only a week ago, I was putting the last touches on the microsite we put together for the demo table at the International Startup Fest. I was looking forwarding to seeing my friends as well as meeting new ones from around the world. From the utterly unique venue of the Alexandra Pier, I watched fireworks as a DJ played at the kick off party and thought: “Yep, this is gonna be good”.

From the get go, one of the major themes from this festival was startup demystification.  Chris Shipley (CEO, Guidewire Group) gave us a sobering helping of mythbusting on the hype around startups that’s been building in the last few years. Sarah Prevette (CEO, Sprouter) had hand drawn slides as she explained the startup journey with her characteristic mix of humility and charisma. Tara Hunt (CEO, Buyosphere) personalised the entrepreneur’s struggle: startups are hard, they’re risky, and they will test you in every way. She also gave this talk on her birthday.

Upon reflection, success in academia is just like success in the startup life. The first keynote by Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups) really brought this home to me with his presentation “Why NOT to do a startup” where he emphasized the insane levels of dedication, energy and self-sacrifice it takes to realize your vision while knowing the odds of success are miniscule. Many of these points below were inspired by his talk where Dave may or may not have dropped an F-bomb:

  • You need to be passionate enough about a subject that you could think about it 70 hours a week (for me it was supermassive black holes)
  • You must find a problem/need that no one has solved before you start working on your solution (for me, that was a just the beginning of my PhD)
  • You are your own marketing and sales department (“publish or perish” is no cliche – for me it meant non-stop travelling to conferences, networking like crazy with my peers, which by the way, won’t help you a whit if your research sucks)
  • You have to produce world class results on a shoestring budget; “living large” = $30K a year in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Paris.
  • You need to inspire your team with vision – enough so they’ll give up the security of a Real Job.

Startups ARE hard, especially in a town that is far away from all the action in Silicon Valley. Startup Fest opened a lot of doors for the community. Thanks JS Cournoyer, Alistair Croll, Phil Telio, Julien Smith and Chris Shipley for bringing little bit of the Valley to Montreal.

By the way, Startup Fest was indeed very good for us. We placed #1 at the Demo table competition! We were ranked first using Guidewire Group’s G-Score – thanks Chris Shipley, to my wicked team: Mathieu Ouin, Maxime Martineau, Guido Vieira and to our investors at Environics (ERG and ECI ).

Read the Gazette’s round up here!

 

 

 

 

Social Media Monitoring Tools: Their limitations

July 4, 2011

Robin Ahn

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In Our Community, Social Media Analysis, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Trends

They say, not everything is for everybody and it applies more than ever to social media analytics (SMA). We admit the state of the industry has a long way to go to serve what are real and pressing needs in the market. Jason Falls led the way by criticizing the industry’s bias toward monitoring versus intelligence, which we responded to thoroughly here some time ago. Since his blog post in April 2010, however, it seems that social media monitoring tools continue to fall short. These two respected sources Ignite social media (June 2011) and Information Week (March 2011) propose many valid points.

Implementing a new system can be costly in subscription fees alone; some enterprise SMA solutions will set you back over $100,000 per month! I argue they’re vastly more damaging to the organization in an intangible way: it’s a huge blow to morale to adopt and abandon if the tool is simply not right for your needs.

We thought it worthwhile to amalgamate the collected wisdom from these critical minds that have tried more solutions collectively than any SMA supplier could ever possibly do on their own. I’ve got a few notes on things to look for and things to avoid:

  1. Make sure what you’re getting from your solution is actionable. Infographics are trendy but it’s strategy you want. Charts are useless if they don’t give you a clue as to what to do next.
  2. Make sure your solution captures networks of information and not just reporting on social-networks-as-silos. The real insights are in network effects and amplifications, not in short, non-linear relationships.
  3. Do for data what hi-def did for TV. This means Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis that are better than “positive, negative and neutral” and pull the qualitative gems from the quagmire. This goes for reporting on metadata that can tell you the who, what, where and when to give you a sense of the diffusion and discourse.
  4. Filter spam. Don’t just say you do it; actually do it. Paying through the nose for a SMA with poor spam filtering is like going to Le Cirque and being expected to bus your own table.
  5. Creating linkages between networks is what you pay the big bucks for and you want something that uses “sleuthy techniques”, algortihmic-ninja fancy footwork to open up that pandora’s box of the non-obvious.

Before going into any of the above however, I will recall two beautiful latin words “caveat emptor”, which means “don’t be a sucker” in plain english. Writing on Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 5.1 or on parchment has no real bearing on the quality of the prose. Ergo, an SMA tool will never define your problem for you. Dedicate some quality time to your business objectives, how social media impacts them and how you want to measure that.

Resources:

Nexalogy White Paper on Social Media Intelligence vs. Monitoring

 

North By Northeast Toronto Music Festival

June 27, 2011

Lorien

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Microsite, Nexalogy News

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 :

 

 

 

 

Nexalogy @ Defence Research Social Media “Big Data” Analysis Workshop

June 21, 2011

zdevereaux

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In Our Community, Nexalogy Events & Activities, Social Media Analysis

Last week I passed a personal milestone and gave my first “Keynote Address” at the Defence Research and Development Canada Social Media “Big Data” Analysis Workshop on Friday June 17 in Ottawa.

The other keynote address was given by John Kelly from Morningside Analytics, whose approach highlights the importance of segmentation in the blogosphere when it comes to telling the difference between ‘fake sharks’ and ‘real sharks’ in the waters of partisan blogosphere activity. John’s presentation was very interesting and he was nice enough to compliment Nexalogy’s approach as being a “very advanced semantic analysis capacity” that compliments link-driven analysis, which is Morningside’s strength.

The two presentations from the National Research Council were a highlight for me, with Dr. Mohammad Saif presenting the current state of NRC-developed sentiment mapping and Dr. Roland Kuhn presenting the potential for sentiment mapping and machine-translation to be applied to national security priorities. I am hoping to learn more from them about the subject in the future.

The day before I presented at the Public Security S&T Summer Symposium where the focus of discussion was on identifying social media signals from emergency situations; a challenge to be sure but one where a social media analysis solution can be a big benefit. The whole experience was positive, and the discussion definitely emphasized the importance of social media activity in terms of big data and public security.

A few selected areas of work for participants from government that were identified and that I am happy to have on my radar included:

  • Knowledge governance
  • Human capital utilization
  • Empowering the public servant
  • Government 2.0, 3.0 and beyond
  • Forecasting, forewarning, foresight
  • Participatory culture
  • Multi-lingual information processing

 

If you want to download my presentation : click here to download (PDF)

Nexalogy @ MARCOM

June 3, 2011

zdevereaux

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In Our Community, Nexalogy Events & Activities, Nexalogy News

I just spent the last two days at the MARCOM conference in Ottawa at the newly opened Ottawa Convention Centre. The conference was organized by CEPSM and we were happy to go live with a dynamic twitter graph of #marcomforum related tweets in real time.

I enjoyed learning about the differences between public sector marketing and private sector marketing and how social media can bridge the two. Jim Mintz‘ talk on Wednesday morning focused on public sector branding and emphasized that determining brand position and competitors is essential, especially given that branding takes place in social media whether public sector actors expect it or not. Jim made a good point that public sector branding doesn’t have to be expensive if you communicate to clients and stakeholders with a consistent effort over time. Josef Jurkovic discussed the special concerns of public sector actors but still held that it is “a horizontal world where partners and issues matter.” The presentation finished with an interesting discussion of which government departments have good branding: CMHC, SSHRC, Service Canada and Health Canada were pointed out, but in my opinion the social media receptiveness scale runs from Service Canada to Canada Science and Technology Museum to Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada.

However, next to the keynote by Brian Solis, the presentation on crowdsourcing by Pierre Bisson and Jon Juane from Service Canada was my favourite presentation of the conference. The presentation explained the Service Canada Centres for Youth #sccy crowdsourced video contest and evaluated the key concerns and benefits of crowdsourcing for social marketing:

- Brand reputation

- Evaluation

- Crowd control

- Peaks & valleys

- Policies & guidelines

- Creating content

- Building the community

- Marketing and promotion

 

There was a lot of activity at our booth, which was next to Radian6‘s (Jon McGinley from Radian6 argued that social media represents revolutionary democratization), and the conference participants I spoke with were interested in the power of social media for gauging reactions, issues, actors and reputations related to public marketing campaigns a set of concerns related to social media that public sector actors will increasingly need to face and master.

Resources :

Physics, society and social media marketing

May 31, 2011

Claude G. Théoret

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Physics and Social Media, Social Media Analysis, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Trends

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.

Strata on Twitter

February 10, 2011

Claude G. Théoret

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Social Media Analysis

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.

Webcom, Fall 2010 Edition(s)

November 19, 2010

Michael Boyle

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Nexalogy Events & Activities

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.

Measurement Matters

September 30, 2010

Michael Boyle

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Nexalogy Events & Activities, Social Media Analysis

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).

Mashable’s accurate crystal ball

August 20, 2010

Michael Boyle

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Social Media Analysis

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.