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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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

For-profit businesses clearly are tuned into the social media-sentiment analysis trend, to stay abreast of how their brand, services or products are perceived. But are non-profits equally as concerned? The answer seems to be yes, and not just when it comes to social media but across all paths of constituent engagement.

At this week’s Sentiment Analysis symposium in New York City, Banafsheh Ghassemi, the American Red Cross vice president of marketing, e-CRM, and customer experience, pointed out some reasons why. “It’s a brave new world for those of us in the non-profit world,” she said. While charitable organizations don’t like to use the word competition, because they’re all working for the greater good, the number of non-profits angling for contributors’ dollars, time, or other resources, has grown by 60 percent in recent times. And there are even for-profit organizations doing some of the same things the Red Cross itself does, such as blood collection. “We still have to attract your attention for your dollar, time, and even the physical part of you that is blood,” she says.

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Google reports that the company’s news service, Google News “is undergoing a makeover and will now include content from the firm’s new social network. Google News, which has only gone live in the U.S. to date, will see Google+ conversations from people’s ‘circles’ and other high profile users right onto the search engine’s news homepage. In a blog post about the changes, Scott Zuccarino, product manager of Google News, said the feature brings Google+ conversations right to the Google News homepage. ‘Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the real-time coverage pages,’ Zuccarino wrote.” Read more

Market Strategies International recently released the first edition of what it says will be an annual Social Media Brand Index, a measure for brands both of consumer-generated social media about them and of their own sponsored content. The Index takes into account four components. Volume, or the amount of buzz about a brand online, is one of them — and its most highly weighted component, too. The others take their cue from what we might call more meaning-related measures, sentiment analytics and semantic markup among them.

For example, there’s net Sentiment, which Market Strategies says represents the ratio of positive to negative sentiments expressed about a brand based on automated natural language processing of the content of posts, comments and mentions. Another component, Positive Emotions, seems to flow from that measure, representing the number of content items that are identified as having the warm fuzzies about them, again based on automated coding of content.

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At the recent SemTech Berlin conference, husband-and-wife team Michael Trevor McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, CTO and Executive VP, respectively, of KimmiC, led a session that discussed a marriage of a different sort: that between the Semantic Web and the user interface.  The session was described as providing the audience insight into the benefits of the semantic web, given that so much of the world’s economic brain/ecosystem is tied up in the relationships between companies, consumers and suppliers – an interaction between systems and people that is a real-life ‘Matrix’ whose ubiquity is hampered by the lack of a common way of talking about things such that they can be utilized and shared simply, and in a confidential, secure, and vendor-neutral manner.

The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to have an email discussion with the Australian-based minds behind KimmiC, and its FlatWorld cloud-based technology for enabling the global, digital economy, to learn more about the SemWeb/UI marriage.

Semantic Web Blog: Help us better understand this idea of The Matrix in the context described – considering the movie, is that a positive analogy and what does the Semantic Web have to do with it?

Michael: I think we can use the analogy pretty well as is. What we have seen in the market is essentially a few large companies trying to subvert the intent of the web into a controlled matrix (controlled by them) that they can exploit – it is, in fact, the cornerstone of their business models.

We view that consumers, once they become more aware of it, will see themselves as a “knowledge/insight” commodity in that they a) control their information and b) control who, when and where (what part) companies/friends/family etc. have access to them – it is most probably the next big frontier.

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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

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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