Companies are high on social media for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them should be that social platforms provide the opportunity to create focus groups at a scale never before possible. Millions of people talk about all sorts of things online, and with the right systems and algorithms in place, it’s possible to decipher how they actually feel about the topics they’re discussing. If you want to know how the web-savvy world feels about a product, movie, team, you name it, millions of data sources should trump interviewing a few hundred people in malls across the country.

IBM has been going out of its way to illustrate the insights that can be gleaned from social media by analyzing and scoring fan sentiment on Twitter around the the World Series, Super Bowl and Hollywood awards. The results have been pretty telling, especially if you assume the thoughts of a few million people speaking freely are more telling than those of a substantially smaller number of people willing to pick up the phone or waste 30 minutes of their day answering questions. For customers, IBM sells a version of its Cognos BI product tuned specifically for social media, and it believes social-media analysis will help it do $16 billion in analytics revenue by 2015.

But IBM isn’t alone in putting big data techniques to social media streams.

Dachis Group is an Austin, Texas-based company that launched in 2008 with the sole focus of telling its large-business customers everything they want to know about their social media efforts. Initially, CTO Erik Huddleston told me, that meant a lot of analysis to determine whether marketing campaigns were resonating with consumers, but now many companies constantly monitor social media to gain general insights into how consumers feel about their brands overall. And Dachis Group will do just about anything to get companies the information they desire.

Step 1: Take lots of data

At a high-level (although you can drill pretty deep) Dachis Group provides its Social Business Index, which monitors about 30,000 brands and ranks their overall social-media status. The idea is to let companies see what the leading brands in their space are doing so those companies can try to replicate that success. Huddleston said about 40 percent of the Fortune 100, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 and 30 percent of the Global 2000 are registered Social Business Index users.

Although its intuitive enough on the surface, the slick user interface belies some serious analytics underneath. Huddleston said the Social Business Index was built atop a research project that involved analyzing how top brands were engaging on social media and then correlating that engagement to desired business outcomes such as brand awareness, love, loyalty and customer satisfaction. It then went a step further by drilling down to determine what tactics worked best in different geographies and how subsidiaries performed. Further, Dachis Group isolated and analyzed external events to determine how layoffs, mergers, product launches and other things might affect a company’s social buzz.

Huddleston compares analysis this detailed to building a beaver dam: “[Y]ou see where the water’s leaking out and you keep plugging it until you have a good handle on the stream.”

Step 2: Drill down

However, while the Social Business Index is something of a one-size-fits-all SaaS offering, Dachis Group also does intense consulting work for its customers and has discovered a lot of about consumer thinking in the process. For example, Huddleston explained, Dachis Group was monitoring pre-Black Friday activity for a retail client and saw the Target opening-hours trainwreck unfolding before it occurred. Consumers’perceptions of stores “was exactly correlated to opening times,” he explained.

Ironically, while Target annoyed customers with its Thanksgiving-night store openings, it won them over with its “Christmas champ” marketing campaign. While most retail mentions on Black Friday were about deals, people were talking up a storm about Target’s commercials.

Huddleston calls this sort of work more like Minority Report in that it’s able see certain trends build up steam into national outrage, but said Dachis Group also does a fair amount of CSI-type work. If a client wants to determine why a particular video went viral or why one brand of lipgloss is selling better than others in a certain geography, Dachis will do some investigating. This can be a particularly interesting process, and one that might catch on as more companies try to figure out the whys (sub req’d) after their big data efforts have uncovered that whats.

Essentially, Huddleston explained, Dachis Group will isolate a particular subset of social media users and monitor they’re interactions over an extended period. By doing this, it can look for specific mentions of the product, video or whatever in question, but can also use semantics to identify greater cultural influences or other trends that might be driving a particular behavior.

As one might expect, all this analysis requires a serious big data architecture. Huddleston said Dachis Group runs hundreds of virtual servers across the world on AmazonWeb Services, as well as a who’s-who list of next-generation data technologies. That includes Cassandra as a backend NoSQL data store, as well as lots of Hadoop — including the Apache Mahout machine-learning project — and custom algorithms around natural-language processing and sentiment analysis. In order to ensure it got everything right, Huddleston said Dachis Group hired contributors from the various Apache projects it uses.

IBM, of course, has all sorts of its own tools to power analysis, ranging from Hadoop for number-crunching to Watson for natural-language processing to SPSS for predictive analytics.

Step 3: Kill polling?

Which brings us back to the initial question: As social media usage grows and the ability to analyze that activity gets better, are fan voting, focus groups and telephone polling on their way out as the primary methods for finding out what “the people” really think? Dachis Group has actually provided a little food for thought — an infographic comparing its findings to those of USA Today‘s AdMeter for rating the popularity of Super Bowl commercials. You be the judge as to which is more accurate.

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The U.S. Transport Safety Administration (TSA) has been testing a program called TSA Pre✓™ that allows you to supply the TSA with a handful of personal details in exchange for skipping the long lines at security checkpoints. Depending on how you feel about the TSA, this may sound really great or really terrible. Now that the program is expanding the many more airports, we're taking a look at how the program works and whether or not it's worth your time. More »

When Apple announced its initiative to bring iPads into schools and provide textbooks in digital format, the reaction among many was enthusiastic. iPad textbooks are more interactive, they can be easily updated and they can’t be easily vandalized. The price Apple announced at their launch event — $14.99 per textbook — also sounded like a steal, certainly far cheaper than traditional textbooks. But when you dig into the fixed costs associated with digital textbooks vs. their paper counterparts, there are some major reasons to believe that iPad textbooks might not be coming to a school near you any time soon.

The biggest is that the textbooks themselves don’t turn out to be cheaper. A representative of textbook publisher McGraw-Hill made clear to Mashable shortly after Apple’s announcement that the functional cost of a digital textbook for a school will actually be the same as the paper version, despite the much lower sticker price. Because of the way iBooks will be linked to specific user accounts, reuse from year-to-year isn’t possible; a freshman algebra textbook purchased in 2012 will need to be repurchased for new incoming freshman in 2013. If you use the standard cost and lifespan estimates for paper textbooks of $75 and five years, the digital versions end up costing the same as the paper editions.

SEE ALSO: Why the iPad Won’t Transform Education — Yet

So if textbooks cost the same, then going with iPads actually ends up costing schools much more, because of course, the schools need to purchase iPad hardware on top of the textbook software. And that’s not a one-time cost — iPads don’t last forever. Apple tends to refresh the device every year, and judging by how poorly my heavily-used, three-year-old iPhone was functioning when I finally upgraded in January, a four-year lifespan is probably a good estimate (if not a little generous). Further, iPads can and do break. Which will cost more to replace, this or this?

The infographic below, created by our friends at Online Teaching Degree, details the costs associated with iPad textbooks versus traditional paper editions. Of course, it is important to note that iPad versions come with numerous tangible benefits that can’t be matched by paper books — they’re interactive, they can access the web, they’re better for a student’s health (carrying one iPad instead of multiple heavy books) and they can be kept up-to-date in real time. However, unless Apple and textbook publishers can come up with ways to greatly reduce the cost — via things like drastically cheaper iPad hardware, innovative trade-in programs and discount volume licensing for textbooks — it is unlikely that many schools will be able to absorb the sizable cost increase necessary to get iPads in the classroom.

Infographic via Online Teaching Degree, grab the embed here

Thumbnail image via Flickr, mortsan

More About: apple, education, electronic textbooks, iBooks, infographics, ipad, textbooks, trending

Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest, is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter @seosmarty.

Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them?

That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. They are free, highly customizable and extremely easy to use.

Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are “public,” meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team).

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1. Fetch Twitter Search Results

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GetTweets is a simple and fast Google Spreadsheet script that lets you quickly export Twitter search results into a spreadsheet. You can play with the spreadsheets in two ways.

• Increase the number of results returned — up to 1,500. I managed to fetch about 1,300.
• Twitter search operators can help you filter out links (search “-filter:links“) and find tweeted questions (search “?“). Check out this article on advanced social media search as well as this list for more search terms.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: AutomateAnalytics.com.

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2. Count Facebook Likes and Shares

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FacebookLikes script evaluates Facebook user interaction for any given range of URLs. It will display:

• Facebook like count.
• Facebook share count.
• Facebook comment count.
• Overall Facebook interaction.

Additionally, the spreadsheet’s embedded chart lets you compare Facebook interaction for the number of pages provided.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Facebook Likes Counter.

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3. Compare Facebook Pages

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Like the previous spreadsheet, FacebookFans is a Google macro based on Facebook API. For any Facebook page ID, it fetches the number of fans. It also visualizes the data with a pretty pie chart. Track your as well as your competitors’ Pages using the script, and the numbers will update each time you open the spreadsheet — easy!

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Facebook Fans Counter.

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4. Monitor Social Media Reputation

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This spreadsheet not only generates Google search results for the term you provide, but also fetches Twitter and Facebook counts for each page returned. Anyone can easily run a search for his or her brand name and see how actively it’s being discussed in social media.

Try using a few search Google operators, for example:

• ["brand name" -intitle:"brand name"] to find in-text brand mentions you are most likely to have missed.
• [inurl:"guest * post" search term] to find recent guest blogging opportunities on the topic of your interest. Note: if you are getting a “too many connections” error, try another search to refresh the scripts. Or re-save the scripts from Tools + Script Manager.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public scripts? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit here.

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5. Extract and Archive Your Followers

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This spreadsheet is the hardest to set up, but also has the most complex functionality. It lets you extract your friends and followers to easily search and filter your Twitter contacts.

The script requires your own Twitter API key (which is pretty easy to get), and provides easy-to-follow set up instructions. Try running the scripts a couple of times to get them working. Go to Tools + Script Manager and run Test script.

If you have done everything correctly, a Twitter Auth will pop up. Then, you’ll be able to authenticate your own application. After, go to Twitter + Get Followers and you should see the tool importing your following list. However, if you have large following, you likely won’t be able to import it all (for me, that meant about 5,000 recent followers).

Spreadsheet details:

• Public scripts? No.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Export Twitter Followers and Friends.

Are you aware of any other useful, social media-related Google spreadsheets? Please share them in the comments!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Jirsack

More About: analytics, contributor, Facebook, features, Social Media, social media analytics, Twitter

Google is finally about to big-foot its way into the cloud storage business, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

With its “Drive” or “G-drive” service — which has been talked about for some time — Google would take on some very popular consumer-oriented cloud storage entrants, notably Dropbox and Apple’s iCloud. People use these services as virtual closets for their digital photos, documents and music. Once their material is in the cloud, they can access it from many devices.

According to the report, posted late Wednesday:

The Google service, which is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months, will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files, the people familiar with the matter said.

Drive would be yet another in an array of new consumer services from Google which added Google+ web conferencing and collaboration in June to compete with Facebook and Skype and Google Music which stores users’ audio collections.  Google retains its lead in Internet search but has seen less success in with these newer,  ancillary services.  Still, adding consumer cloud storage service is another way for Google to leverage its prodigious infrastructure.

Dropbox has seen huge adoption — it claimed more than 45 million customers last fall. Customers use it not only for archiving their pictures and documents, but to manage and sync those files between devices.

But it’s not just Dropbox and iCloud — there are  several competitive services like BackBlaze all of which offer free storage up to a point — in Dropbox’s case up to 2 GB. Users with up to 50 GB of storage pay $9.99 a month. There are also more business-oriented cloud services like Box, (formerly Box.net) that are also gaining traction.

Given the proliferation of millions camera-toting cell phones and the explosion of digital music, the appetite for cloud storage is likewise booming. It makes sense for Google to fight for its share of that action.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user brionv

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Stefan Magdalinski, CEO of Mocality, a sort-of crowd-sourced Yellow Pages directory in Kenya:

Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.

Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.

Copiously documented and recorded. Just jaw-dropping. Boing Boing has a brief statement from Google. My question: Is Mocality the only company Google has done this to?

Apple is slowly rolling out international support for iTunes Match today, with the service appearing in the U.K., Australia, and parts of Europe. The music matching service has been exclusive to the U.S. since its launch earlier this fall, but it made its way to Brazil earlier this week. If you can’t see it where you are, here’s a handy tip to get it working.

The service has already appeared in the U.K., Australia, and France, according to reports this morning. However, it may also be available in other parts of Europe, too. If you don’t already see it in the iTunes Store, here’s how to get it working:

• First, go to the iTunes Store on your desktop
• Scroll to the bottom of the store and click on your flag, then click on United States to visit the U.S. store
• Click iTunes Match on the right-hand side and attempt to sign up with your Apple ID
• You will be presented with an error and taken back to your own store, but you should now have an iTunes Match tab under the “Store” heading on the left-hand side of your iTunes app:

• Click on iTunes Match and you should be able to sign up as normal

If you don’t see iTunes Match using the steps above, or you can’t sign up yet, it would appear iTunes Match hasn’t quite reached your territory just yet. However, it should work for those in the countries listed above. It certainly works in the U.K. because I followed these steps to sign up this morning.

For my fellow Brits, iTunes Match costs £21.99 per year. In Australia it’s $39.99 a year, and in Europe €24.99 a year.

Can you sign up to iTunes Match where you live?

[via The Next Web]

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Google has released an update for its Gmail iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch applications today that adds several new features requested by users.

The new features include a new notification sound for new email messages, access to the vacation responder and the ability to set custom signatures, which should be helpful for people who want to distinguish messages sent from a mobile device (e.g. “Sent from my iPhone, please excuse any typos.”). The update also includes support for nested labels and some user interface improvements.

Another big addition users will notice is the Scribbles feature. The feature lets users open a canvas to draw (or “scribble”) something using multiple colors and brush sizes. When finished, the scribble can be attached to an email and sent via the app.

The company first released the Gmail iOS app in November but quickly pulled it from the App Store due to widespread login problems. Two weeks later the app returned, but proved to be a huge disappointment for most people, including VentureBeat’s Heather Kelly. In addition to the lack of support for multiple accounts and poor image message scalability, she called the app pretty useless for anything but plain text messages.

However, Google said it plans to add multiple account login support, banner notifications and a “send as” feature in future iOS app updates.

Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat

In the wake of reports that Apple is considering the purchase of Israeli firm Anobit, Israeli financial newspaper Globes reports that Apple plans to set up its first research and development center outside of its Cupertino headquarters.

Sources inform "Globes" that Apple Inc. has decided to open a development center in Israel focusing on semiconductors. The decision was taken even before the company entered into talks to acquire Herzliya-based flash storage solutions provider Anobit Ltd..
Apple has hired Aharon Aharon, a veteran player in Israel's high tech industry, to lead the new development center.

[...]

Aharon Aharon comes to Apple with a varied background that will assist him in setting up a semiconductors operation for a foreign company. His most high-tech venture was Camero Tech Ltd., which develops Radio Frequency (RF) based imaging systems, and which he founded in 2004 with Amir Beeri. Aharon serves as chairman of Camero Tech. Before that he was chairman of embedded security solutions developer Discretix Inc. and managed their Israel development center. Earlier still he was VP operations at Zoran Corp. (Nasdaq: ZRAN), having begun his career at IBM's Haifa development center where he reached the post of deputy director.

Globes also claims Aharon will spend several months at Apple's headquarters and will return to Israel to set up the research center whether or not Apple purchases an Israeli company.

Both Globes and Israeli business paper Calcalist report [translation] that Apple vice president Ed Frank has been taking meetings with high-tech companies in Israel ahead of the announcement of the development center. A number of other US tech firms have research centers in Israel, including Intel, Google, IBM, Microsoft.


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Microsoft is expected to launch iOS versions of the company’s popular Office suite sometime in 2012, according to The Daily. This means Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even Outlook could soon be arriving in the App Store for use on the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.

According to the report, Microsoft is likely to release each app for $9.99 each. This is the same price Apple charges for its comparable (but less popular) applications – Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on iOS.

In addition, Office 2012 for Mac is also expected to arrive sometime in the New Year. This suite, when released, would arrive in the Mac App Store.

Office is one Microsoft’s biggest sellers, second only to Windows. In 2011, the software suite should earn more than $15 billion in revenue, according to Business Insider. By branching out to new platforms — like the iPad — that number should only grow.

When Office does come to iOS, it will be huge news and also a game-changer. After all, it will finally bring together the world’s most popular business suite and the top-selling iPad tablet. Because of this, the suite’s arrival will almost certainly be a win-win for Microsoft and Apple. For Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, perhaps less so!

We’ll keep you updated.

• Pages
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