Dachis Group has launched a new app, the Social Performance Monitor. It is the company’s third app built on their big data analytics platform and their first subscription service. Erik Huddleston comments, “Our Social Performance Monitor app correlates social activities to four main brand marketing business outcomes: Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Mindshare, and Advocacy. For each, we track a set of metrics that correlate to the outcome’s value, analyze brand activities and their impact on the engaged audience, and then provide a set of lenses (insights) to help marketers with understanding and attribution.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

FindtheBest (the site where users can compare some 700 topics side by side, initially discussed here) has some new capabilities on tap. This includes what it says are soft joins for relating together diverse data sets.

“Joins is a very hard database connection between two tables. Soft joins are a little more semantic,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “We’re linking a lot of data sets together on a loose basis.” To the end, he says, of trying to “cross-relate information a lot more, trying to discern all the data we have and give it some semantic meaning into ways people can understand it. It turns out there’s a huge, huge number of these semantic relationship between our data.”

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Dachis Group has released a social business index that companies can use to measure their social media marketing against their competitor’s. According to the article, “The Social Business Index hopes to bring mounds of big data into a consumable format by helping enterprise corporations gain a holistic view of how they rank in social business. The challenge with social media is that it’s still in the infancy stage (albeit, quickly growing from a walk to a slow jog); from software solutions to the fire hose of activity – there’s just not a simplistic way to understand it all. The Social Business Index (SBI) hopes to help alleviate this concern.” Read more

The National Archives is taking a hard look at social media. According to the article, “In November 2011, conversations about connection technologies have shifted from whether governments should use social media to how governments should use social media. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube are part of the default template for the websites of newly elected officials. As the year comes to an end, the risks and rewards of Web 2.0 are better known for both citizens and government alike. People from every walk of life naturally have questions about what the explosion of social media will mean for the future of society, including difficult questions about what this new landscape will mean for privacy, security, freedom of expression and online identity.” Read more

 

More vendors are making waves among the ranks of those that figure semantic technology has a role to play in the travel sector, from helping hospitality providers assess the quality of user experiences to serving as a B2B backbone for companies that want to help users book travel plans, whether they’re aiming to spend Thanksgiving with the family in Nebraska or Christmas shopping in Paris, and more.

* At the PhoCusWrite 2011 Travel Innovation Summit last week, ReviewPro won the QuickMobile Award for Travel Innovation: Emerging Category.

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San Diego startup Swarmology has stepped out of stealth mode with the debut of its website and the disclosure of $1.2 million in initial funding. According to the article, “The company, founded last December by pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm, provides targeted, Web-based marketing services for its customers by analyzing online conversations about specific health concerns on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Swarmology’s customers already include a large healthcare insurance provider and a couple of smaller pharmaceutical companies, Bohm says.” Read more

A new article asks, “How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of questions, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media… The CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of a nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as ‘vengeful librarians,’ are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.” Read more

In the weeks since Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, the Cogito team has used semantic technology to sample and analyze sentiment about Jobs on the internet: “Twitter was the place where many immediately went to share quotes, links to online memorials, commercials, cartoons and photos from years past, and to comment about anything and everything related to Jobs.” Read more

Attensity, a leading provider of text analytics solutions recently announced an extension to Attensity Analyze 6.0. According to the article, “The new “Facebook Analytics Module” is available with the latest release of Attensity Analyze 6.0, the next generation in voice of the customer analytics and engagement applications. This module enables business users to quickly and easily analyze Facebook comments, posts and surveys to extract deep business insights.” Read more

 

Social media intelligence and analytics provider ViralHeat is making its sentiment engine, which it claims as one of the biggest repositories of sentiment data on the market, available for free to developers as an API. The company has been building that engine in conjunction with its agency and big-brand customers (think the likes of Dell) the last few years, and is hoping that the move will open the door to new applications of sentiment analytics, as well as deliver benefits that will profit its paying clients.

“The key for brands and agencies is sentiment,” says CEO Raj Kadam, and ViralHeat got started down that road with a keyword dictionary approach to analyzing social media that proved disappointing. It led to a lot of neutral vs. positive or negative conclusions, and accuracy wasn’t a strong suit. That’s when it turned to its clients to take things up a few levels. “We scrapped that first approach and started building a really large-scale machine learning cluster focused on speed – we get hundreds of millions of mentions a week – and also on accuracy,” he says. Today, the technology runs mentions through its sentiment cluster and gets a sentiment score back, and from there humans play a role in further assessing the text and passing it back to continually train the engine.

Its speed, scalability, and training are what Kadam considers the features that differentiate its Python-built sentiment web service platform from other vendors in the space, and it’s that same Sentiment API that it’s opening up to others. Kadam says the fact that it can quickly do its work, tagging the sentiment score and its accuracy probability on the fly, is one reason why it can open up the API. “If that cluster was really slow it would take us days and probably a large swath wouldn’t get tagged,” he says. He says the latency on competitive systems is “incredible. It’s like batch processing. You send the data in and wait a really long time to get results. Ours is just completely real time.”

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