At the beginning of this month, a group called the Web Ecology Project published a very interesting report called The Influentials that proposes a far more advanced approach than we’ve seen to date. Frankly it’s not a moment too soon – although the ecology that has built up around Twitter is pretty massive and loads of fun, most of the tools in the analytical sphere should properly be considered toys, not true analytical tools.

What’s most interesting about the Web Ecology Project’s work is not the results (Sockington FTW!) but the approach they propose. It represents nothing less than the beginning of a real discussion about how Twitter activity should be analyzed.

Exvisu has been working with Twitter for some time, and based on that experience the thing that strikes me about measuring influence is that although it’s interesting on a macro level (master-influencer lists will surely be developed based on approaches such as this), it’s even more interesting with respect to a limited (by content or other factors) group of Twitter users.

Identifying influencers related to a specific subject is likely to be a great deal more useful – and quite a bit more difficult to calculate. Can’t wait to help make that happen!

See also the preview of the WEP’s report on Afghanistan and its election on Twitter. Great stuff!

I read and excellent article in the NYT technology section today and came across a term that hits home: sentiment mining. A long time ago we posted about “We feel fine” and since then, it seems that sentiment mining has gone from an interesting art project to a money-making technology.

In the article, the founders of Tweetfeel said that the best they could get at recognizing sentiment with automated systems was 70-80% effectiveness. After our brief, inexaustive trial of Tweetfeel we feel it was more around 50-75%. It is a safe bet that it will take a long time before automated systems will be effective enough to make a quantitative evaluation of sentiment.

Solutions such as Tweefeel and ScoutLabs are excellent for gauging the zeitgeist or the direction of the wind, and they are cost effective for that purpose. But business questions are often impossible to formulate simply – and emerging trends almost always start as eddies in the main wind. The mathematical sophistication to find these eddies in torrents of data must be coupled with a human analysis at some point to understand the particular linguistic and cultural differences that arise in each particular business context.

Sentiment mining is a great term, but a little optimistic when not coupled with some form of qualitative analysis. When processor power grows even cheaper and when the tools now used by folks such as our local Nstein move out of the enterprise software domain and become more available to consumers, sentiment mining might simply become part of a normal web search… at that time, and not before, could we say that the new (aka semantic) web has arrived.

While reading Claude Malaison’s blog, I came across Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle graph. While Claude’s analysis mainly concentrated on the peak position of cloud computing and the eminent decline of the microblogging (sorry for those of you who can’t read in French) hype, my eye was drawn to the more mature technologies.

I was encouraged to see that Social Network Analysis was working its way out of the “trough of disillusionment” and onto the “path of enlightenment”. We here at Exvisu have been working from the get-go on advanced analysis techniques to mine knowledge from these masses of information and have gone from explaining what blogs are to dealing with the “disillusionment”.

Many of our clients (mostly those in big PR firms), have tried web-based social media monitoring/analysis services and have been disappointed in the actual amount of added value for business these services provide (in fact, just this morning one of our clients made that exact comment). Online social media monitoring services have made excellent advances in designing dashboards for presenting collected social media data and are completely sufficient for illustrating the most obvious trends in data, but the analysis part of social media analysis is usually quite light, as automated “one fits all” analysis tends to be.

The maturing of social network analysis spells a bright future for providers who have the expertise to adjust the analysis of social network data to create concrete solutions and solve real problems businesses might have. The NYT described this well earlier this month in an article about the increasing role of statisticians in social media analysis.

Let’s just hope that we can keep riding the wave onto the “plateau of productivity”.

David Armistead has Jon Lebkowsky and Dave Evans have written a good summary of the “United Breaks Guitars” saga on the excellent Social Web Strategy blog.

The short version of the story is that Dave Carroll (a singer-songwriter from Halifax) guitar was broken by United baggage handlers and United Airlines gave him the runaround on compensation for almost a year before simply saying “No” to his claim. So Carroll wrote a song and produced a video – that received 3.5 million views in a few weeks.

Key quote from the post about this story:

We are already deeply into a real sea change, a transformation of the way we organize and coordinate and relate. It affects all our social capital, all our stakeholder relationships. This sea change is technologically based and cost driven, and it is being profoundly accelerated by the emergence of the new social media technologies which are deeply socially enabling. Adoption of these transforming technologies is not optional.

The only thing I would add to this is that for every social media intervention that breaks hugely like United Breaks Guitars has, there are likely dozens of smaller-scale conversations occurring about dozens of other subjects related to any large company. It would be easy to think that they’re not important – but anyone of them could become a big deal at any time.

Companies that don’t take social media seriously are putting all of the work they do at risk. There is a whole range of tools available to companies now – everything from free alerts, to basic monitoring tools, to Exvisu’s advanced reputational analysis studies that can help companies understand how they are perceived and where problems have arisen or may soon arise. For a company to not avail itself of such tools is needlessly risky behaviour.

John Ibbitson wrote an interesting article today titled ‘How does U.S. democracy survive without its newspapers? ‘. Funny really, because most people in my social network today are posting and tweeting about almost the very opposite question: how blogs are an essential tool for democracy in Iran.

Well, not that funny, because after painting a dismal picture of the print media industry in the US. Ibbitson concludes that blogs and other web 2.0 based tools will answer the call.

For an interesting graphical analysis of the Iranian election debate I highly recommend reading the Internet and Democracy blog at Harvard: mapping Iran’s election.

Ils l’ont encore fait! Claude Malaison et sa fabuleuse équipe ont encore une fois réussi à nous épater avec le Webcom, un événement devenu incontournable dans l’écologie internationale des conférences sur le Web.

J’ai eu l’honneur cette année d’en faire partie en tant que conférencière. J’ai pu propager la bonne nouvelle au sujet d’Exvisu et de notre méthode d’analyse de données, ainsi que partager quelques réflexions sur l’identité corporative dans un monde de médias sociaux (pendant que Michael réussissait à faire un somme tout en gardant bien en main les commandes du powerpoint). Mieux encore, j’ai fait des rencontres fort intéressantes, notamment celle de Jessica Lipnack. Sa spécialisation au niveau des réseaux organisationnels est l’un de nos principaux champs d’intérêts chez Exvisu, et ma formation en éthique des affaires m’a aussi fait apprécier sa conférence sur la transparence dans l’entreprise.

Autres rencontres sympathiques: Gabe McIntyre (qui a partagé avec nous non seulement ses réflexions sur l’immortalité de l’identité numérique mais aussi quelques pièces maîtresses de son impressionnante collection de t-shirts) et Cyrille de Lasteyrie, alias Vinvin. Le spectaculaire graph Enberg de ce dernier révolutionnera d’ailleurs notre perception de la vie au sein des médias sociaux (ou en tout cas des névroses qu’ils pourraient générer).

Mais le Webcom en tant que conférencière, c’est aussi l’envers du décor, j’ai nommé, la salle des conférenciers, où se trouvaient notamment le vin, les gâteaux, les langues de chat (amenées d’urgence quand j’ai eu fini de manger les gâteaux), Patricia Tessier, sa pâte à dents, et un vidéo en boucle de Vinvin à moitié nu. Quelques privilégiés ont été témoins des compétences acrobatiques de CFD qui conciliait appel sérieux sur son iPhone avec remise en place gracieuse mais efficace de sous-vêtements trop haut remontés. On pouvait aussi trouver dans cette salle mythique une boîte de chocolats que m’avait offerte Michel Chioini; quelqu’un l’a d’ailleurs si bien trouvée qu’il me l’a piquée. L’effort mis dans mon enquête fut inversement proportionnel au vin que Patricia me servait généreusement, ce qui me pousse à conclure de cette partie de Clue gastronomique que la coupable est Patricia, avec sa bouche, dans le petit salon.

Michelle Blanc, quant à elle, a été croisée beaucoup plus souvent dans les toilettes que dans ma présentation. Normalement, ce qui se passe au Webcom reste au Webcom, mais là, je ne peux m’empêcher de m’écrier SCANDALE!

Tout aussi scandaleuse fut l’entrevue accordée à Sandrine Prom Tep, sous la caméra insistante de Christian Aubry, maître es Webcom Live. Écoutez-là bien attentivement… Le scandale est à la toute fin… Pffff, mais non, y’a pas de scandale, mais si vous n’étiez pas à ma conférence (oui, je m’acharne sur ton cas, Michelle), c’est un bon résumé.

Bref, une fantastique conférence, à l’endroit comme à l’envers, et on a déjà hâte à la prochaine. Only at Webcom!

The media/ad/pr/marketing issue of the day in Montreal: astroturfing! This morning in La Presse, Patrick Lagacé revealed that the agency (Morrow Communications) for Stationnement Montréal – the prime movers behind the (awesome) Bixi Public Bicycle system launching this month – created and has managed a fake blog (plus facebook profiles for the “authors”) for several months.

Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake blogs, media and/or personas to promote a message in such a way that it seems spontaneous and unscripted; to have come from the grassroots. The blog, http://www.avelocitoyens.com/ is reasonably well executed – and it looks like they have quickly adjusted to the fact that they were outed… Regardless, astroturf is astroturf, and it’s never appropriate in the blogosphere. It’s unethical, and anyhow it serves the client very poorly, because such fakery WILL come out in the end – leaving the brand with a public relations problem it never should have had.

Ironically, a quote from a Michel Philibert of Stationnement de Montréal points to the real challenge for organizations in a Web 2.0 world: “If we had built a blog hosted by Stationnement de Montréal, nobody would have been interested.”

The challenge for organizations isn’t to try and get around this fact by trying to fake out the very public they’re trying to reach. That’s the easy (and dangerous) way out. The true opportunity is to take on the harder but much more profitable challenge of making traditionally-boring organizations interesting enough to gain our attention. It’s a huge opportunity – and organizations that don’t try to accomplish it are serving themselves, and their clients, very poorly.

The past few weeks have seen an explosion of buzz about Twitter. Then, at the height of the new mass-adoption buzz, along came the Swine Flu – and with it, the pessimists. Typical headlines have been like this: “Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform.” Twitter and social media in general have taken a beating over this issue – and quite unfairly, as this analysis shows.

This article and several like it have cherry-picked alarmist and incorrect tweets to make their point, but at Exvisu that kind of anecdotal evidence is never good enough. So I took some Twitter data yesterday to analyze the quality and tenor of the information being spread through Twitter. The answer? Very encouraging.

Lexical Analysis of all tweets near Montreal, April 25-27, 2009 (Click for full-screen version)

To produce this analysis, I took data using the keywords “Swine” or “Porcine” (French for swine), in any language, within 15km of Montreal, anytime between April 25 and April 27 inclusive. This strategy resulted in a dataset of about 560 individual tweets which I analyzed semantically after translating key terms from French to English. This Lexical map represents the 100 most important terms or concepts in the whole Twitter discussion.

The story that emerges is crystal clear. Far from being a worthless mix of junk facts, hype, and hysteria, the Twitter dialog in Montreal is serious, non-alarmist, and concentrates on credible links to published information people want to spread among their network.

The key communications vectors are the AP (@breakingnews), Reuters, the CDC (@cdcemergency), Radio-Canada (here represented by ‘radio’), and Montreal radio station CJAD. As well, one of the most important links in the dataset was to the Google Map of the spread of the H1N1 virus, which by all accounts is a credible, serious reference.

The key actors – particularly those who made news in the timeframe of this analysis – are all very credible and prominent in this discussion by any standard. President Obama, the WHO, various health ministers, and of course the CDC were all visible, while there was very little trace of conspiracy theories or anything like that.

There was some joking and sarcasm – bounded in the map by the dashed red line – but ironically perhaps much of this includes the (small) discussion of Twitter’s power to misinform and people dismissing the whole thing as media hype. Plus, of course, the requisite pig and bacon jokes!

All in all, it’s pretty clear based on this relatively small dataset that the nay-sayers and pessimists are wrong on this one. Anything can (and does) appear in Twitter feeds – but to dismiss the service based on a few alarmist or jokey tweets is seriously misguided. Overall, Twitter seems to be an impressive and sober channel for up-to-the-minute information, alerts, and discussion on an important issue like Swine Flu.

Although there has been discussion about problems in the newspaper business for a decade or more, the volume has really ramped up in the past few months as the financial crisis has put a lot of sterling properties on their back foot.

Claude was looking through an old issue of Monocle the other day and came across a great piece by Tyler Brûlé (an old friend and neighbour of mine from high school days) that anticipated the current crisis by several months and made some really sound suggestions for how newspapers can regain some of their mojo in the current climate.

Brûlé wrote (in December 2007), “2008 may well be the year that some established dailies decide to give up the game and either go under or completely digital.” His suggestion? “…We’d suggest a high-quality 20-page broadsheet… with no ads smaller than full-page, lots of analysis and even more ink on the page.”

Newspaper revitalization is a constant topic of discussion here in our office at Exvisu. Our weblog and Twitter analysis work consistently demonstrates that most big-issue stories have clear traces in both blogs and microblogs before newspapers ever get to print on a subject – a fact that newspapers must find a way to leverage.

Moving towards a format such as the one Brûlé suggested, complemented by a truly authoritative online presence, would go a long way to ensuring that the good work that newspapers have always done will not simply disappear.

To be authoritative in their markets, newspapers should increase the analysis and contextualization work they do and prospectively search and publish links (in the online edition) to the most important opinion pieces in the blogosphere related to any topic. This would create an ecosystem that they organize and focus – and from which they could profit once again.

Le titulaire de la Chaire de commerce électronique RBC Groupe Financier aux HEC, Sylvain Sénécal, a mentionné Exvisu dans un article publié ce matin dans La Presse.

Intitulé “La prise de pouvoir des consommateurs“, cet article insiste sur l’importance, pour une entreprise, d’être à l’écoute des consommateurs qui s’expriment sur le Web:

“la prise de pouvoir des consommateurs est là pour de bon et les entreprises devront s’adapter à cette réalité en utilisant ces nouveaux outils technologiques et ces sources de données abondantes afin de bâtir des meilleures relations avec leurs clients.”

Sylvain Sénécal mentionne Exvisu comme une entreprise d’ici capable d’aider les entreprises à recueillir et maîtriser les informations disponibles dans ce nouvel environnement.