(* Source: Michael Arrington *)

Back in March 2009 a trio of MySpace execs -COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto – left to begin working on a new startup.

In May we learned that the company, then called Blue Rover Labs, had raised $10 million in funding. We also heard a few details about what the startup might be about:

Today the company, now called Gravity, is launching into private beta. At a high level Gravity is an evolution on forums (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) and groups (Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc.) services, which haven’t evolved much over the last decade.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gravity is available both as a website service at Gravity.com as well as distributed via widgets and an API. They are also offering compelling analytics services for any service that hosts conversations (think broadly – Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Wave, etc.). That service, called Insights, is arguably a startup in itself.

And, finally, Gravity has created a new way of thinking about and exploiting conversational data. They call the way they track and predict the relationships between people and things the Interest Graph (a play on Social Graph, a popular way of describing online relationships between people).

Gravity: The Service

Gravity allows people to create conversations around topics. The service will be available on the Gravity website as well as via widgets and an API (we’re talking to them about adding a Gravity conversation to each record on CrunchBase, for example).

Gravity won’t be a mystery to anyone familiar with groups or forums. But their goal is to bring some more recent thinking on data architecture and user interface to the table. The team also makes it clear that they think of their domain as much wider than now-ancient forum software. A lot of what they’re talking about is comparable to features added to Twitter, FriendFeed and Google Wave. The goal is to help users discover topics that they’ll be interested in quickly, and then foster productive conversation.

Some of the features are simple and effective – like giving badges for participation. And others are just proven engagement tacticts, like adding a “like” link by comments to show support for what’s being said. This is nothing new to users of sites like Facebook and Twitter, but it’s compelling stuff when you look at aging forum services.

If anything, Gravity is a nice balance of fun, fluffy stuff and seriously thought through features. Here’s an internal Gravity chart, for example, showing how Gravity compares to Google Wave and Twitter. This isn’t to show one is better than the others. It’s a way of quickly visualizing exactly what Gravity is and isn’t:

Insights Analytics

Think Google Analytics but for converstationally-focused services. In addition to tracking visitors, pageviews, signups, etc., Insights shows you how many threads and posts are being created over time. It also shows which threads are the most active, most viewed, etc. It works on Gravity’s service as well as other third party forum software and services. In fact, Gravity has been testing Insights with a bunch of third party forum sites for some time now.

They’ll provide the service to third parties for free. Their goal is to get access to the data to better build and understand the Interest Graph (more on that below).

Here are some screenshots of Insights. The first one, which shows a stream of pictures being added to a forum as well as a live stream thread, is actually a pretty compelling user-facing product, too.

The Interest Graph

This isn’t a product or feature, it’s the religion of the Gravity service. The company isn’t giving a lot of detail on the software behind the Interest Graph, but they are willing to take time to describe the philosophy. The idea is that knowing which people are connected to which people is great for social networks, and Facebook and others have done a good job at that.

Gravity is building an Interest Graph, which shows the relationships between people and topics that they are passionate about. Person A may love baseball and the NYTimes. Person B may love action movies and squirrels. Given enough data the service can start to predict exactly what you’re interested in over time.

And they’re going to great lengths to gather that data. It isn’t simply based on what topics you start and add to. Gravity is also analyzing the language you use to gather further information about your interests.

And they’re thinking about the decay rate of interests, too. You may be very interested in cars right now, but next month after you buy the new Honda you may not have the same level of interest. They’re able to see how engaged you are on certain topics, and how that maps statistically to what others are doing. That helps them build out a very interesting profile of who you are, and who you may be in the future.

Not only can they use that data to push you to new content you may be interested in, it gives them an amazing dataset to advertise against. And that’s the real value of Gravity. The more time I spent with the team the more clear it was that the conversation engine that people will use is merely the very tip of what this company is doing. There’s an ambitious project below the water line that has to do with gathering, analyzing and leveraging data to give people exactly what they want, when they want it. Even, eventually, advertising. Fascinating stuff.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Leena Rao *)

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process.

A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type.

Th workflow feature allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and track the status of the assignments. Any conversations a user engages in, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or with a co-worker, will be recorded for both the user and the administrator. And of course, the console allows you to Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. Similar to many of the consumer focused social media clients out there, Radian6 allows for unlimited accounts and includes a URL shortener.

With respect to Facebook, the client allows users to respond to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Users can also view news feeds for Facebook friends, and see new photos or videos that have been uploaded from within the console. The dashboard also provides analytics from within the console, such as post volume, and engagement stats.

Radian6 has had considerable success in terms of serving big-name clients. The company is currently helping over 10,000 brands track social media sites, including Comcast, MTV, Dell, UPS, GE and Microsoft. And this engagement console has all the bells and whistles to make any brand marketer content. The console, we are told, will be in private beta until April. That being said, there are plenty of other offerings for companies and agencies to track social media and this is a competitive space. Radian6 faces competition from a number of startups including Scout Labs, Visible Measures, Viralheat, HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

Yahoo has launched an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application called Sideline yesterday, once again validating the power of Twitter for real-time search. After taking it for a spin, I have to say it looks and feels really nice, but other than that there’s no real incentive for me to keep using it on a regular basis.

So what does it do?

Sideline is a straight-forward Twitter monitoring tool, giving you the opportunity to stay on top of the latest trends on the microsharing service and/or keywords you feed into the application. It has an auto-refresh feature (which you can tweak to have the search results reload between 1 minute and 1 hour), a notification system that alerts you of new keyword mentions in an overlay that appears whatever you’re doing and the ability to only look for favorited tweets containing the keywords you’re tracking.

So far, nothing special, but what’s nice about Sideline is that it enables you to create so-called Search Groups which pull together multiple keywords for tracking purposes. This basically allows anyone to create e.g. a TechCrunch group and track different keywords and phrases like ‘techcrunch’, ‘crunchgear’, ‘michael arrington’, etc. Also really nice is the advanced search function, which lets you filter results down extensively, for instance by person, hashtag, ‘asking a question’, by negative or positive connotation (determined with smilies), and so on. Update: this is actually a layer over Twitter’s advanced search functionality, as a commentor points out.

It’s slick and useful, but nothing major any way you look at it, especially since it’s not a functional client that lets you actually send direct or public Twitter messages. I wonder how many people will effectively keep using it after trying it out, but I doubt it will be many.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mike says...

It’s no secret how bad most of the analytics firms are at gathering statistically relevant data about Internet traffic. All of them, Quantcast, Comscore, Hitwise, Compete, Alexa, etc., are flawed in various ways and to various degrees.

But today’s blog post by Hitwise shows just how bad their data really is. They say that Craigslist is now the top searched term on the Internet, taking that honor from MySpace. Facebook is third.

But the real data is out there for the taking. Google Trends shows Google search data, and since Google commands such a large lead in search in most countries, presumably the data is accurate. Google trends shows exactly the opposite data as Hitwise - Facebook is by far the most queried term, followed by MySpace and then Craigslist.

I’m putting my money on Google when it comes to accurate search trends. And if I were Hitwise, I’d make very sure my search data conformed to whatever Google was saying.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *)

Erik says...

There are plenty of ways to monitor the buzz of any given topic in the blogosphere, on Twitter, or across social networks. There is Artiklz, Trendpedia, Trackur, Brandseye, Radian6, Attentio, Buzzcapture and Chatterguard, to name a few.. Now Omgili, a search engine that focuses on forums, discussion boards, newsgroups, and Q&A sites, has just added a new buzztracker called Omgili Stream. It searches the same set of discussion sites on the Web and returns results based on how recently they appeared.

Results are not ranked by anything other than chronology, which produces an undifferentiated set of results. What I really want to know is what are the most important or influential discussions going on about any given topic. Fortunately, Omgili Stream allows you to filter results by minimum number of replies, language, and where the search term appears (in the title, topic, or replies). Another filter opens up a column with Twitter search results on the left. A unified view might be preferable, but that might then be dominated by the Twitter results. Omgili’s strength is in searching through discussion boards, forms, and the like. It sifts through 7 million such posts a day.

Omgili’s greatest strength (its focus on deep discussion sites), is also its greatest weakness. It completely ignores blog comments, for instance, where a huge chunk of discussion on the Web takes place. That is a huge oversight, in my opinion. Although, there are other sites where you can search across only blog comments, such as Backtype or Artiklz. And then what about public discussions on Facebook and other social networks?

Omgili is geared towards marketers who want to keep track of what people are saying about their products, companies and brands. Yet it returns results from only one portion of the Web. So if you are a marketer, you might want to bookmark it (consumers might be more likely to talk about product defects or other problems on a discussion board or Q&A site where they are looking for assistance from other users). But it only addresses a portion of the discuss-o-sphere.

As far as it goes, it does a decent job. One of the more helpful features of Omgili is the ability to create a buzz chart for any set of topics. Below is one comparing “IE8″ to “Gmail” and “Flip Video.”

Posted by brian tiong at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Slideshare *)

Social media has matured beyond early adopters to earn a place in mainstream marketing. Cymfony sponsored this Aberdeen Group study to learn how “best in class” companies are using social media monitoring and analysis to improve their business results.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Jeff Zabin *)

Jeff says...

By now, most companies recognize that blogs, discussion forums and other Web 2.0 social media can provide a highly effective platform for any consumer who wishes to share their recommendations, experiences or opinions about any given brand. Their voices can wield an enormous amount of influence in shaping other consumers' opinions -- and, ultimately, their purchase decisions.

Pay Attention to Web 2.0

Lately, I've been thinking about the concept of trust in the context of consumer marketing and the fact that control over a brand's marketing messages -- and indeed it's very image -- is continuing to shift from traditional media to online communities. Of course, what underlies this shift is the fact that consumers place far more trust on the opinions of other consumers than they do on a company's traditional marketing messages.

By now, most companies recognize that blogs, discussion forums and other Web 2.0 social media can provide a highly effective platform for any consumer who wishes to share their recommendations, experiences or opinions about any given brand. Their voices can wield an enormous amount of influence in shaping other consumers' opinions -- and, ultimately, their purchase decisions.

While it may be true that companies can't control consumer dialog, they can certainly pay close attention to it. Moreover, if appropriate, they can modify their own messages and/or strategies accordingly. 

Monitoring Brand Loyalty

With the advent of a new breed of solutions designed to monitor, analyze and measure the impact of consumer-generated media, companies are becoming increasing adept at keeping a proverbial ear to the ground -- but how adept? That's what I intend to find out through my current market research efforts.

In particular, my upcoming benchmark report will seek to understand the extent to which brand monitoring tools are already being deployed and what percentage of companies plan to adopt the tools over the next 12 months.

It will also seek to identify what metrics are being used to measure success as well as what lies ahead as companies strive to keep even closer tabs on consumer perception as part of their product marketing, brand intelligence and consumer insight activities.

In the context of product recommendations, trust is indeed the common glue. Consumers trust the opinions of other consumers, plain and simple, and what marketers have to say about their own brands is becoming increasingly less important than the chatter of consumers participating in online social media. However, that's not to say marketers can't use brand monitoring solutions to listen in on the conversations.

More here

Posted by brian tiong at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)