That’s why social analytics companies are always fascinating to me. Consumers are spending more time living in a digital space — giving companies endless opportunities to gauge and adapt to public opinion on their products and services. Crimson Hexagon has one of the most innovative analytics tools I’ve seen. Reportedly, their software has a 97% accuracy rate in analyzing public sentiment.

According to a Fast Company article “Their approach is simple. Companies first design a question that needs answering.” The interesting part about Crimson Hexagon is that they then set up “possible public reactions” — basically a set of categories based on how they think the public might respond to the question, instead of using traditional keyword matching or semantic analysis. This software seems to go further into the group consciousness of public opinion to enable companies to become more customer-centered.

The technology to understand consumer feelings and behavior is quickly evolving. I think the real bottleneck with these types of technologies will be the companies themselves not adapting their offerings quickly enough to what customers really want. I’d love to see more examples of companies who are continuously adapting to customer sentiment.

Related articles

• CNN’s Social Media Analytics Tool Shows Reid Up on Angle, Boxer Tied With Fiorina (fastcompany.com)
• Major Enhancement to Crimson Hexagon Platform Delivers Groundbreaking New Social Media Monitoring and Analysis Capabilities (eon.businesswire.com)
• Crimson Hexagon Edges Forward in Social Media Analysis with Big Customers Like Bing (xconomy.com)

Reprinted from AppliedConnectioneering.com

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Come join us Sunday, July 19, 2009 to help the author of  The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, Tara Hunt and the crew to live her “dream …to quit my job and karaoke across America, bringing peace, love and brotherhood with me along the way.”

RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=97903985919

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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I must admit being pleasantly surprised by this new application. SalesForce Inc. is helping corporations harness the real power of social networks — namely the Twitter community. Comcast has been a model in providing solutions to customer problems via Twitter, and is one of the first customers of SalesForce Inc’s new app.

It basically seems to be a way to easily track conversations on Twitter, and is not the only app to provide tracking, but could be the most expensive. Pricing is ”$995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the possibilities for Twitter if it were to create it’s own CRM/brand management tool on his Web Strategist blog.

Read the full BizJournals.com article about SalesForce Inc’s new Twitter CRM app here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/23/daily4.html?

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The Sundance marketing team collaborated with us to create an amazing Sundance/Salt Lake City Tweetup featuring Ondi Timoner, who was awarded the Grand Jury prize a few days after our Tweetup at the Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, We Live in Public.

We met in the lovely Beehive Tea Room in downtown Salt Lake City. Not only did we have Twitter users attend this event, but we also welcomed a few who have never used Twitter, but wanted to join the group to meet a Sundance director. Ondi Timoner, Josh Harris, and crew joined our Tweetup in between showings and graciously spent some time telling us about the documentary, and Tweeting their experience.

Director Ondi Timoner (@onditimoner) and Josh Harris

Tweetup attendees listening to Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris talking about We Live in Public

Here’s a partial list of the Salt Lake City Sundance Tweetup:
@rmiriam12
@kittygutz
@roxycross
@ThomAllen
@carysnowden
@ambeestar
@taranaki
@latent_image
@highpointe
@ghennipher
@kevinDwhite
@littleidea
Danica Cross
Krista Smith

Many thanks to Sundance Film Festival, Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris for coming to our Tweetup! We all had a great time! And congratulations to Ondi Timoner for winning the 2009 Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary We Live In Public.

Suntweet Charity Tweetup January 22, 2009

One thing I love about Social Media is the power it has to support a good cause. The #suntweet charity Twetup event definitely supported a great cause, and raised over $600 for Serenity. We also UStreamed the event and even made the front page!

#Suntweet panelists prepping to talk about social media.

@ghennipher with fellow #suntweet panelist Jesse Stay (@jesse)

We all had a great time with the Tweetups during the month of January. I’m really proud to have had a part in supporting an important charity — Serenity, and to support a budding documentarian, Ondi Timoner.

If you’re an organization in Utah that would like to be part of our SLC Tweetups, please contact me. Your customers are actively using social media and talking about your brand via social media. Theres no better venue to reach this audience than through social media — online and offline. I would love to connect you with this wonderful group of social media users and help you design a strategy to provide real value to your customers during these difficult economic times.

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If you live in Utah and use Twitter, please join us for this Tweetup event to network and meet some great Sundance representatives in person. We’re also welcoming a mystery guest speaker. You can expect to meet a new media filmmaker or a filmmaker that has used Social Media extensively in their film’s promotion, or perhaps an actor at the Fest who is a prominent Twitter user. You’ll be surprised and have a lot of fun chatting with our mystery guest!

Laptops, mobile phones and cameras encouraged — it’s a Tweetup! Feel free to tweet the event. We don’t mind at all! See you there!

Date: Tuesday January 20, 2009 at 7:00pm
Location: Beehive Tearoom (Festival Cafe)
Address: 12 W Broadway, Salt Lake City, 84101

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A key graph from the report:

Most Twitter users are new and 70% signed up in June 2008–

Twitter User Growth

If you’re a business and are using Social Media to find and engage your customers, understanding how they use Twitter can be highly valuable for your marketing efforts. Download the full PDF report.

Want to create a Twitter strategy for your business? Contact Ghennipher to learn how to use Twitter for marketing, PR, customer service and feedback.

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Salt Lake City Tweetup Group — December ’08

The Tweetups have become a monthly staple here in Salt Lake City, and we’ve got a couple of excellent Tweetups planned for next month. I’ll keep you posted on that as we pin down details.

In the meantime, I want to thank all of my new Salt Lake City Tweetup friends for their loyal support of our Tweetups. Last night was a small group, but we ended this year’s Tweetup right. Here’s a list of last night’s attendees:

• @kittygutz- Jessica — (Thanks for the Twitter Name Tags!!)
• @calanan — Michael
• @bluheron — Heron
• @authalic — Justin
• @kevindwhite — Kevin
• @hpebley3 — Harley
• @ladypebbles — Diane
• @littleidea — Andrew the Werewolf
• @TheB0y — Peter
• @susanmercedes — Susan
• Lauren (@susanmercedes daughter)
• @jessibella — Jessica
• @DaveyGravys — David
• @dagonz32 — Gonzalo
• @HappyHealthyPup — Anna
• @carysnowden — Cary
• @h0neyb - Melissa
• @rmiriam12 — Rachel
• @photogirl66 — Robin
• @dmx - D Moyes
• @ghennipher — Ghennipher
• @kinslow - Steve (see this is why I need name tags)
• @keldwud — Not in pic, but did show up.

If I’ve left anyone out, please comment below and I’ll add you to the list. Thank you all for supporting this community! I look forward to seeing our Tweetups grow in 2009!

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Date: Today December 17, 2008
Place: THE SALT LAKE ROASTING CO. 320 E. 400 S. Salt Lake City
Time: 6 PM till the last Twitter user goes home

Why attend a Tweetup?
Tweetups are intimate groups of Twitter users, generally meeting to network and share ideas. Given the current difficult economy, Tweetups are also the perfect venue to connect people and help find jobs.

Our Salt Lake City Tweetups are held once a month, and are often sponsored by a local business. If you’d like to sponsor an upcoming Tweetup, please leave a comment below with a brief description of your company or send an email to ghennipher [at] ghennipher [dot] net. Tweetup sponsorships are a great way to spread the word about your company, recruit new employees, and contribute to a growing and passionate community of social media users.

To all past and future Tweetup attendees, thanks for your support of this community.

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