Matthew Weingarten of MMM-Online.com reports, “By applying a scientific approach, and taking advantage of technology that’s available, pharmaceutical marketers can boost the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and improve the return on their investment. Evidence-based approach shouldn’t be confined to the lab. Two current trends  push us toward enhanced rigor in marketing. First, the Internet has globalized the medical profession. Easily accessible medical databases put the latest research into the hands of doctors everywhere. As the profession has embraced social media, the network of influence has been completely remapped. The power of opinion leaders is now felt worldwide, through multiple channels.” Read more

Like lots of other families over the recent Thanksgiving weekend, we made our way to the movies. Our choice: Life of Pi. We’d highly recommend it, and according to the IBM Social Sentiment Index, as applied to Moviegoer Social Sentiment over the holiday weekend, so too would a lot of other folks. It earned a 90 percent positive rating.

IBM has engaged in the social sentiment index pursuit in some other endeavors – using its advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data, it had another recent take on Black Friday, for example. It tallied up that shoppers expressed positive consumer sentiment on promotions, shipping and convenience as well as the retailers themselves at a three to one ratio (see our story here for other takes on semantic tech weighing in on the holiday shopping season).

It’s also applied its social media analysis smarts to studying births of trends (cycle chic is on the rise), and which tennis player was on the hearts and minds of the crowd at the U.S. Open (Novak Djokovic and Laura Robson winning the love, with positive sentiment scores at 90 percent or better).

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Bob DuCharme has shared some interesting insights regarding SPARQL, RDF, and Big Data. He writes, “I think it’s obvious that SPARQL and other RDF-related technologies have plenty to offer to the overlapping worlds of Big Data and NoSQL, but this doesn’t seem as obvious to people who focus on those areas. For example, the program for this week’s Strata conference makes no mention of RDF or SPARQL. The more I look into it, the more I see that this flexible, standardized data model and query language align very well with what many of those people are trying to do.” Read more

At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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The Open Graph protocol continues to progress: Earlier this week Facebook’s Director of Developer Relations Douglas Purdy talked about its intersection with the mobile web.

According to Purdy, more people are accessing Facebook on the mobile web than from its top native apps combined, and the game is on to help developers conquer the challenges of building for that community. One of those challenges is app discovery. At the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the company announced that it’s continuing to address the first issue with plans to extend to native Android apps the ability for Facebook’s 425 million mobile app users to discover them through Open Graph connections.

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In the dying weeks of Britain’s last government, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised a new Institute of Web Science. But the new government cancelled it. Then, late last month, that same government gave the idea a polish, a new name, and unveiled it once again as the Open Data Institute. W3C’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Southampton’s Professor Nigel Shadbolt are still in charge. Semantic stuff, and open data stuff, and government transparency are still the point. Millions of pounds are still on the table. But something has changed. Partly it’s the name, but it’s also a (welcome) shift in emphasis; away from the technology and towards the value. Others could learn the lesson that government appears to have learned, and focus far more on what their technology or product offers and far less on the technical intricacies of how it works. Read more

Five months after raising $10 million in fifth round funding, Lijit Networks has been acquired by blog network Federated Media for an undisclosed amount. According to the article, “The Boulder, CO-based search tools provider will keep its name and headquarters. Lijit CEO Todd Vernon will become EVP of Technology and Lijit COO Walter Knapp will become SVP of Platform Revenue at Federated Media Publishing and will report directly to FM’s CEO, Deanna Brown. The deal comes a year after FM has been quiet on the acquisition front, in comparison to 2010, when it bought three companies—gourmand-focused blog aggregator FoodBuzz, parenting portal BigTent and semantic search technology from TextDigger—in quick succession.” Read more

OpenText recently announced “delivery of its comprehensive vision for Customer Experience Management that addresses the needs of marketers and the challenges of managing major global brands. To complete this vision, the company has formed an alliance with VML, one of the world’s top digital marketing agencies, bringing together the full range of OpenText Customer Experience Management technologies with VML’s creative and implementation capabilities.” Read more

While there may not be a semantic application that can go to work on every issue that requires grappling with Big Data, it certainly has a role to play in many of them. Throw out outliers such as using power grid data to optimize power distribution, and “the lion’s share of big data problems are semantic problems,” says Dachis Group CTO Erik Huddleston.

Marketing leaders are right up against those challenges – and the opportunities that can flow from meeting them, or the pain that results from missing the mark. The non-stop social media milieu, if its behaviors can be categorized and correlated to an ROI like increased brand awareness or better brand value, can be a goldmine – or if not, a cave-in.

Building its social business intelligence-as-a-service platform over the last year with the help of a significant investment from Austin Ventures, Dachis Group aims to help deliver the Eureka! moments, so that companies can discover via social media data if their marketing strategies are working.

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Voxco recently announced the release of its newest product: Acuity4, a next-generation social media monitoring and insights platform. According to the article, “This new product is aimed at the global enterprise market as well as market research agencies and public institutions worldwide. With Acuity4 Social, users capitalize on what the social web is saying about their company, products, brands and competitors; on any subject they find important to follow. By listening to their clients, investors, suppliers and the public, organizations are able to extract actionable intelligence to make decisions and plan their strategy. Ultimately, enterprises using Acuity4 Social unique analyzing capabilities improve their understanding of what is said on the web and thus can improve their business intelligence and capitalize on it.” Read more