Claude turned me onto a recent blog post by Jeremiah Owyang on the topic of successful (and not so successful) examples of social media engagement. Entitled “Damage Control: Social Media Reversals” he takes four very interesting examples of companies responding to incidents in the social media space, and deconstructs them to see where they went right or wrong.

One particular example struck me as being what social media is really all about. The incident was one where a YouTube member, Levinator25, posted a video of a bug (or “glitch” as everyone’s been calling it) in EA Sports Tiger Woods Golf, where you could get Tiger Woods to actually walk on water, to take a shot off a ball that landed in the middle of a pond. Appropriately entitled the “Jesus Shot”, the video has received over 900,000 views to date. Electronic Arts, had an interesting and humorous response. They approached Brian Levi, the member’s real name who made the post, and then actually got Tiger Woods to star in a video they then posted on YouTube as a response. In it Tiger is seen to walk on water to take a shot from the middle of a pond, just like in the original video. EA’s tag line: “It’s not a glitch — he’s just that good!”

The response was fantastic and instantly went viral. This illustrates one of the key characteristics of social media that can easily be missed, which is that it’s not a simple exchange between two or three or a few people online. It is in fact a lot like watching a debate or performance. There are the actors involved, but then there is a whole passive, and often silent audience that views the exchange. And while they may be silent, they do form and have opinions on what has transpired. In this particular case, EA showed itself to be social media savvy, not just because it was able to directly engage one high profile YouTube member, but because it also understood that it was engaging all the other YouTube viewers who had seen the video, and all the future viewers as the video went viral. A very smart move on their part, that has reached over four million viewers to date (and largely for the cost of just making the response video). It’s easy to see that companies that aren’t at least aware of what is going on in this space, might be missing out on some great opportunities.

Ron Nielsen, a long-time, partner, advisor and friend of Exvisu’s, has just launched a new website for his very interesting new initiative, the International Centre for Business Innovation & Sustainability.

ICBIS is all about ensuring that sustainability decisions are made at the core of corporate decisionmaking. As Ron describes it ICBIS is, “a collaborative, learning, not-for-profit network of business and sustainability practioners who work in business, civil society, consulting, academic and government settings, and support proactive and constructive engagement with business and society on sustainable development and business sustainability.”

It’s always nice to get noticed in your local community; we were really happy to see Hour Magazine’s writeup on Claude in their Hot Shots feature this week.

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 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.

During the US election and up to Obama’s Inauguration, Exvisu did a few studies to demonstrate the kind of intelligence we generate. We’ve collected English versions of these in a single PDF – some of our original posts were in French. One thing that’s important to note is that our source data for these analyses included both the blogosphere – the ‘traditional’ source for Exvisu – and Twitter, which is proving to be an extremely rich source of data to analyze.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving my first academic seminar since my days as an astrophysicist, to the GéPS group at HEC.  So what is an astrophysicist doing giving a talk to the management and strategy group at a business school?

Well, talking about how blogs are changing the nature of strategic information of course!

Over the two hours of the seminar, I presented our recent PDAC study and the history of our work starting with co-citation analysis, ANT and then co-word analysis and how techniques initially designed to model and explain scientific collaboration are perfectly adaptable for exploring the range of actors in social media and quantifying blog buzz, and how these forms of collective intelligence are key for decision makers today.

In attendance Professors Wendy Reid, David Oliver, Ann Langley, YulBiz’s own Muriel Ide,  LVL Studio’s François Bédard and our good friend David McFarlane.

Many thanks to Professor Pamela Sloan for inviting me to speak.

Next week I will be speaking at McGill’s PhD entrepreneur Panel.

This week Exvisu is happy to be participating in PDAC ‘09, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual International convention being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. One of our main areas of focus at Exvisu is to help companies to integrate the vast online discussions to help make their operations more sustainable and more socially responsible. We believe – and can produce the data to demonstrate – that a key starting point for sustainable development is to learn as much as possible about the preoccupations of real people – whether they’re in a company’s local community, traditional stakeholders, or financial analysts from the other side of the globe.

PDAC has made a big commitment to sustainability in exploration activities with its e3 Plus Framework for Responsible Exploration, which is being launched this week. Exvisu was invited to contribute an analysis of the discussion on the blogosphere about mining exploration activities, and our report is featured prominently at the convention – a summary brochure is included in all of the delegate bags and the final report is available for download immediately. Go to our PDAC page to download a PDF presentation of our findings.

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.

It was a pleasure to learn this morning that Exvisu’s own Caroline Allard was selected as one of most influential web personalities in Quebec by a panel on Christiane Charette’s show that included Michelle Blanc, Bruno Guglielminetti and Dominic Arpin – each of whom is influential in his/her own right.

Caroline was also mentioned in both Michelle’s and Bruno’s personal top 25 lists.

Exercises such as this one can be difficult, as Martine Pagé pointed out so well yesterday, but to their credit the panel seems to have taken their role quite seriously.

In particular, Michelle Blanc’s first selection is worthy of note. She reserves the top spot in her list for the vibrant Montreal community that has developed around a large (and growing) list of absolutely wonderful events that are held throughout the year.

Congratulations to everyone who made it on any of the lists that are circulating now!