We've Been Blended!!!

Forrester's Josh Bernoff has created a "Will it Blend?" video with tchotckes from social media vendors. Cymfony is honored to be among the elite company of Bazaarvoice, Facebook, MySpace, Mzinga, and several others.

Enjoy!

Posted by Jim Nail on August 12, 2008 at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

McKinsey Study: Change Organizations/Processes and Be Happy!

McKinsey's second annual "Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise" has lots of interesting data but what caught my eye was that companies which have changed some aspect of their organization/processes or created new positions for social media are more satisfied with their social media efforts than others. My take: this is a new example of the old "paving the cowpaths" story...

If you just try to plunk a new technology on top of old patterns of doing business, you will be disappointed. It is also an old technology story, too: remember ERP and CRM?

This year is a transitional year in business: before 2007, social media was viewed as a fad, a curiousity, or something only unemployed kids with time on their hands did. In 2007, we saw companies at least dabble and experiment. In the "Social Media in Business" study Cymfony did earlier this year, we saw that many companies were continuing these experiments and some beginning to build out and expand them. This is a healthy trend and a necessary progression. We are definitely seeing more companies create social media positions and budgets as they start to look toward 2009.

Social media in business has been an obsession of mine all year. In addition to our study, we also sponsored an Aberdeen study to find out. Check out our Social Media In Business page to download the reports and listen to the podcasts. If you think your company is moving too slowly, all this data can help you make the business case for the budget and staff to accelerate!

Join our Social Media in Business Facebook group to discuss what changes organizations are making and learn from your peers!

Posted by Jim Nail on August 11, 2008 at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

VISA 42% Share of Olympic Sponsor Discussion? NOT!

Our respected competitor, Collective Intellect, blogged that in their tracking of social media discussion of Olympic sponsors, VISA had a commanding 42% share. That looked fishy to us, so we did our own analysis and found VISA has a 16% share. To us, it looks like CI made 3 significant errors. The moral of the story: in social media analysis you must carefully define and execute the project or you get bad results.

Error #1: we suspected that CI defined the VISA brand incorrectly. It is tricky to get right because a simplistic definition will pick up references to a visa -- a government-issued travel documentation -- not just VISA the credit card. When we dumbed down our definition of the VISA brand we came up with a 51% share of voice, more in line with their results.

Olympic_visa_keyword_7

When we use Cymfony's more sophisticated methodology to limit content to the brand VISA, it is still one of the most-discussed sponsors, but now is essentially tied with Coca-Cola.

Olympic_visa_brand_6

Error #2: This error becomes even more apparent when you evaluate sentiment for the brand. Our friends at CI stated in a Mediapost article about their results that the majority of posts including visa were negative. Our results show a slight positive skew and point to the incorrect definition of the VISA brand as the problem.

To dissect this effect, we used 3 definitions of visa: our sophisicated brand definition, the keyword "visa", and a definition of the travel document. Our keyword search on "visa" shows similar results to CI's: a negative skew. Using our brand VISA definition, discussion is 28% positive vs 20% negative. Isolating documents discussing visa the travel document shows that the skew is caused by the negative discussions surrounding the Chinese government's denial of visas to some athletes, reporters, and protesters.

Olympic_visa_tonality

Error #3: One other problem with their analysis is that they only tracked 7 of the 12 worldwide partners of the Olympics and two of the brands they did not track -- Samsung and Lenovo -- are both in the top 5 of social media discussion. Add all 5 other sponsors Collective Intellect didn't track and VISA's share  drops more -- and we also see that Samsung becomes one of the top 3:

Olympic_sov

The Mediapost article cited some other findings that are erroneous, eg, that Pansonic has no negative posts. In our analysis, 20% of posts about Panasonic were negative.

But maybe I'll save detail on that for another post....

Posted by Jim Nail on August 8, 2008 at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Our summer vacation is over....

OK, so it was more like a spring AND summer vacation when I didn't blog. But that doesn't mean things were quiet at Cymfony.

For instance, check out this interview with Cymfony President, Andrew Bernstein on our local Fox affiliate.

And this Boston Globe article in which I was quoted.

Watch this space for more news, announcements and cool stuff coming from us this fall!

Posted by Jim Nail on August 1, 2008 at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack