Is Social a Fad? See for Yourself.

A great Friday diversion. If you company is pondering how or why to use social data to enhance analytics understanding its impact is critical. This video does a nice job driving home the key points of how pervasive social is in our lives.

DataSift Raises 42 Million "C" Round

DataSift a leading Social Data aggregator has raised additional capital of 42 million in a "C" round investment. The round was lead by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, IA Ventures, Northgate Capital, Daher Capital and Cendana Capital. 

The social data distribution space has been very active this past few weeks. Apple purchased Topsy in early December leaving Gnip and Datasift as the last remaining companies with licence agreements with Twitter for distribution of thier social data stream. 

See TechCrunch Coverage of this story here.

Apple Acquires Social Data Firm - Topsy Labs

Apples purchase of Topsy this past week caught many analysts and social data experts by surprise.  This was an unexpected move on Apple's part as they have not been successful or aggressive in their social data strategy.  Apple hasn't had much to say on the acquisition and while $200 million is the reported purchase price it's a relatively small purchase by Apple standards. Wall Street liked the deal and Apple stock got a bump up on the news last week.

Comments from CEO Tim Cook in 2012 indicated that social expertise and strategy were on the agenda for Apple. At the all Things D conference he stated that Apple planed to integrate with other social networks rather than build its own and Apple needed to be social, because it doesn't have to own a social network.

 I don't suspect that Apple will use Topsy's database of 450 billion tweets dating back to 2006 to launch a social network. That ship has sailed and unless Apple could creat a new value proposition for that space they are best left to leveraging social data not creating it.

Apple has a vast database of customers and mountains of historical content use data, purchasing data and behavior data that they could enrich with social data to creat better and smarter product offerings.

 I would watch for the following to be powered by the Topsy acquisition.

• Delivering more targeted ads on iTunes Radio and to the iAd platform
• Using social data to drive more accurate content to users
• Enhancing search with social data to increase relevancy 
• Acquire-hire of the Topsy engineer team for faster social driven R&D
• Using social signal to better deliver app's
• Increase insight on users and share information with advertisers

Datasift and GNIP remain in the market as competitors to Topsy and I wouldn't be surprised to see another acquisition soon.

Social networking by the numbers

Jesse Thomas does an excellent job of rolling the numbers of social media in to a fast paced video. Its crazy how fast these numbers keep growing!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Who are the top social influencer's in your space?

Thats not an easy question. There are a lot of interesting solutions out in the market that do a good job counting things like number of posts or number of twitter followers but do these simple metrics actually tell us who is the top influencer on a topic within a market? I don't think they tell the whole story.

I recently tackled this challenge using some existing technology coupled with external data to create the Topic Influencer Report you see below. It takes into account not just the easy to count items but additional information to analyze the facts and metrics that include calculating a proprietary Engagement Power Ranking along with an proprietary Authority Ranking. Often times we make assumptions about how important one author may be to our brand based on volume but in the end making noise doesn't matter if the community doesn't respect or see the author as authoritative. And its especially interesting when you take into account weather they have a loyal and engaged audience. Adding Authority, Engagement Power Ranking and the other data points create a clear picture of the best conversations to follow and participate in.

The Influencer Report below is based on 2 large, publicly held business intelligence and data warehousing companies, their brands and their products. These firms are direct competitors. We monitored over a 6 month period during which 7,200 references and comments were made on 675 website, 105+ twitter accounts, 100 blogspot domains, 400+ Facebook posts and another 5000 various web based social references. 

In this example we identified 40 powerful voices for this community and for demonstration purposes have plotted the top influencer's here. (don't panic if you don't see your name, this report is topic based on two brands so if you don't write about these two companies much or their technology you won't make this list)

 

We produce three separate views of the report to help our clients each is based on the same methodology.

1. Topic Influencer Report - Example above

2. Competitive Influencer Report - Identify who leads the communities that take about your competition

3. Sentiment Influencer Report - Identify your brand Mavins as well as the authors who are broadcasting negative content so you can engage and educate

Give me a call if your interested in seeing who the true top influencer's on your brand, topic or technology are.