See the connections.

Tout coule de source, dit l’adage. On pourrait ajouter que la fluidité et la clarté dépendent de la source…

Vous avez peut-être entendu parler de l’expérience Huis clos sur le Net , où d’éminents  journalistes se sont exilés dans le Périgord, du 1er au 5 février, afin de se donner en pâture aux médias sociaux.

Sans accès à la presse, à la radio ni à la télé, cinq reporters d’expérience (de France Info, de France Inter et de Radio-Canada notamment) se sont ainsi abreuvés aux seules sources parfois troubles de Facebook et de Twitter pour avoir l’heure juste sur l’actualité.

Le but étant de constater comment les médias sociaux agissent en tant que filtre de l’information, sans apport externe offert par les médias traditionnels (sauf lorsque ceux-ci font l’objet d’un hyperlien dans les tweets ou mises à jour; il était alors permis de consulter les liens.)

Le droit à l’ininformation?

A priori pas inintéressante, l’étude a abouti à des conclusions un peu floues, et s’est butée à des critiques virulentes de la part des camps des médias traditionnels (Le Monde a été jusqu’à qualifier l’initiative de “Loft Story radio”, en référence à la superficialité patente de la populaire émission de téléréalité) tout comme du côté des vendus 2.0, qui y voyaient une tentative éhontée de discréditer les médias sociaux au profit des institutions médiatiques en crise.

Grosse chamaille sur une divergence de points de vue, parce que les médias sociaux partent souvent de l’individu et non d’une institution pour déployer le contenu.

Ainsi, à s’abreuver aux mêmes sources, on peut finir par tourner en rond. Par ailleurs, le fait que le Saint-Graäl de l’objectivité soit remplacé dans Twitter et Facebook par divers niveaux de subjectivité, chatouille certaines sensibilités bien établies.

Voici quelques citations évocatrices provenant d’un article de Cyberpresse.ca:

Nour-Eddine Zidane de France-Inter: «L’info dépend aussi de la qualité de son réseau Twitter. D’où l’intérêt d’avoir un bon réseau de contacts qu’il faut affiner.»

Olivier Monnot de Blogonautes: «Le journaliste fait sa hiérarchie de l’info par rapport à des critères qui lui sont propres, alors que sur Twitter la hiérarchisation est faite par les internautes.»

Janic Tremblay de Radio-Canada:  «Twitter reste un formidable outil d’alerte [...]. Aucun journaliste ne peut concurrencer un tel réseau.»

De deux choses l’une: Twitter, de manière quantitative, sert surtout à évaluer l’intérêt du grand public pour certains sujets au détriment d’autres. De manière qualitative, eh bien, chaque utilisateur revendique son droit à l’information la plus béton comme au potin le plus gras, à l’anecdote la plus futile comme à l’actualité la plus alarmante, en choisissant de suivre des filons et non d’autres. 

Dis-moi qui tu suis, je te dirai qui tu es.

The talk of the past week has been Apple’s launch of the iPad at a special event in San Francisco. Apple’s launches typically attract an extreme amount of attention, and now that Twitter has become a mature, mass-use tool we decided to do an analysis of local reactions to the launch.

Twitter analysis is all the rage at the moment, but the analysis that we most often see is pretty basic. One of the best is this analysis from the NYTimes Research Labs: Monitoring Twitter’s iPad Commentary. But while the presentation of their results is fantastic, there is more to social media analysis than counting keywords in Twitter. Or, as Annie Pettit of Conversition put it last week from the podium at the MRIA Net Gain 4.0 conference (and later tweeted), “Counting is not analysis“.

Counting is certainly part of analysis, but what we most often see passing as “social media analysis” is just the first step. While there is some value to counting tweets, it’s much more important to analyze the concepts contained throughout all of the tweets in a dataset, whether those words represent likely keywords or not. It’s only using more advanced methodologies that can we get a complete view of a conversation.

To demonstrate this, Nexalogy Environics’ Guido Vieira performed a Twitter study of the 24 hours of discussion following the launch of the iPad in the Montreal area. As you can see, the results are very interesting. Read to the end of the PDF – this analysis suggests a very important methodological issue to pay attention to related to Twitter analysis.

Download the PDF [500kb]: NexalogyEnvironics-iPadLaunchAnalysis

We’re very pleased to announce that as of today, Exvisu Canada has become Nexalogy Environics.

We’ve joined the Environics family of companies, and will be working alongside Environics Communications Inc. and Environics Research Group to continue to strengthen our efforts to define the gold standard in social media analysis and bring this approach to a wider audience.

We’re also very excited to work with our new corporate siblings, both in Montreal (Capital-Image) and in Toronto at Sequentia Environics whose innovative approach to social media marketing and communications is very closely aligned with our philosophy and approach.

Bruce McLellan (the President of Environics Communications) wrote a really nice blog post about this news on the ECI blog, Thanks, Augie.

Here are the links to today’s media release: English; French.

Il y a un an environ, nous avons complété une étude de cas comparative des deux campagnes publicitaires de Molson de l’époque: « L’Association des Pros du Party » et « Une bière de Serge ». Les deux campagnes ont éventuellement été remplacées par d’autres, mais l’analyse que nous avons effectuée demeure évocatrice, et démontre en quoi les services que nous offrons peuvent être utiles à des fins de stratégie de marque.

Télécharger la version PDF: nexalogie-etude-molson [1.4 MO]

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.”

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.

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.

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”.