SiliconANGLE » PR 2.0

Spotify Goes Great with Coke, Launches Branded Apps

Mellisa Tolentino — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:37:09 +0000

Spotify really wants to achieve everywhere access. Aside from recently launching the Play Button, a widget that people can embed on their sites to share their favorite tunes, the cloud music service unveiled branded apps today.

Spotify teamed with AT&T, McDonalds, Intel, and Reebok for the latest series of branded apps, and the global partnership with Coca-Cola was also announced.

“Our goal is to make Spotify ubiquitous,” SPotify CEO Daniel Ek stated. “We want to be everywhere.”

Though apps on Spotify aren’t new, the branded apps bring something different to the table. The AT&T app, “Surround Sounds,” lets users view maps and locations tagged for where popular songs were recorded. Reebok’s app creates workout playlists, and Intel’s “Sifter” recommends songs, bands and artists based on what users’ Facebook friends are listening to.

Also, Facebook is said to be integrating a “Listen” button on artists’ pages, expected to make Spotify the preferred listening tool for the social network, though this particular feature is said to be available for other services as well. The Listen button will also be seamlessly integrated into the Facebook Timeline.

“The new button will give music fans an easy way to listen to songs through their favorite services, such as Spotify and MOG, directly from Facebook Pages,” a Facebook spokesperson explained to VentureBeat.

MOG reaches the land down under

MOG, the on-demand subscription music service, and Telstra, an Australian telecommunications and information services company, announced an exclusive partnership that brings MOG’s music to Australian shores. This is MOG’s first international deal.

“It’s thrilling to broaden MOG’s reach and bring Australian’s the best music listening experience available on multiple platforms,” said David Hyman, CEO and founder of MOG. “We’ve been working toward global expansion for some time and prioritizing markets based on opportunities. Australia is a key, major music market ripe for disruption and we’re pleased to be the sole provider of on-demand music for the leading telecommunications provider in Australia. We can’t wait for music lovers to experience MOG’s entire catalog of on-demand music from wherever they are and we’re making it easier than ever to do so.”

Pandora’s box reveals secret project

Pandora has been secretly working on a project that not only categorizes music but dissects songs to determine how they fall into specific genres. With Intel’s sponsorship, Pandora was able to work on the Inside the Music project that tells listeners how songs are categorized in the Music Genome Project, Pandora’s proprietary taxonomy of music DNA.

“For more than a decade, we have been capturing in great detail every aspect that gives a song its unique character, whether it’s the melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vocal performance or lyrics,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren said in a statement. “We’re pleased to partner with Intel to give people a unique opportunity to discover even more about the music and artists they love.”

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In the same vein:

Ruminations re: Relationships

chrissaad — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:40:41 +0000

My last post was about personal behavior. This one is about personal and business relationships.

—-

There’s no such thing as normal. We all have our biases and neurosis.

We obsess over ceremony, process, dogma and fear. Did he do the right thing on date number 3? Did she file form number 5? Did they come through the right door?

Our egos, pride and fear get in the way of real connections and meaningful leaps of faith. We classify ‘ideal’ as unattainable ‘fantasy’ instead of a worthy goal. We semi-commit, leverage, tell half truths, white lies or outright betrayals. What if your business model matched your vision? What if your words matched your thoughts. What if your thoughts matched your highest ideals – ideals based on love and openness.

We think we must choose between love, work or self. We are all selfish. But we don’t realize that love is broadening the definition of self to include another person. We don’t realize that success without love is like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear – it happens but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit.

We think we must chose between one person or another. The truth is we are all nodes on a network. We need different types of signals from different kinds of people.

We try to ‘find ourselves’ not realizing that our everyday actions define us. Did you say that kind word to that stranger? Then you are kind. Were you loyal to a friend? Then you are loyal. Did you avoid that confrontation? Then you are someone who avoids confrontation. Did you tell your complete personal truth? Then you are honest.

We look for the next best thing instead of recognizing that truly getting on the same page with someone is the rarest and most astounding miracle of all. Achieving that kind of collaboration – even for a moment – should be cherished in the moment and for a lifetime. Sometimes it happens like a lightning strike. Most times it takes hard work, communication and trust.

There are so many stories of people breaking up because they were ‘too young’ and now, years later, they long for that lost connection. We’re different now. They have a girlfriend now. They are happy without me. Why did you give it up in the first place? Why not try again? Are grand gestures only for the movies?

There are so many stories of high-school sweethearts that wake up one day resenting each other. Do they resent each other, or do they resent missed opportunities. Being trapped. Missed freedoms. Did they communicate? Did they give each other freedom? Did they create opportunities for each other? Did they leave when the relationship finally no longer served their evolution?

Maybe most relationships are temporary – a day, a week, a year, a decade. We try to have ‘clean’ breakups. Contracts. Lawyers. Relationships are not clean. They are messy. Love is messy. Life is work. Work is life. A relationship is not defined by what you think it should be or what the contract says it will be – it’s defined by every day. Every hiccup. Every earnest effort to do the right thing for the other person.

Time is not running out. We overestimate what can be done in a day and underestimate what can be done in a decade. Breathe. Take your time. Pay attention. Keep perspective.

These things are only cliches because they are true.

[Cross-posted at Are You Paying Attention]

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In the same vein:

The Hunger Games Wins Big: A Social Phenomenon

Saroj Kar — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:00:41 +0000

After Harry Potter and Twilight, there’s Hunger Games. Like the other Hollywood sagas, Hunger Games is based on the bestselling children’s literature by Suzanne Collins. Now turned into an epic film, Hunger Games opened Friday on more than 10,000 screens across the nation, already grossing $214.3 million globally, marking it as the third-highest film opening of all time.

But will Hunger Games become the biggest hit for Lionsgate in history? Buzz around the film was helped along by social media. The extensive marketing campaign by the production company was aimed vastly at social media outlets like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, iPhone games, and live streaming, to name a few.

In total, according to the New York Times, Lionsgate invested more than $45 million in marketing surrounding the launch of the film. The startup thismoment.com played an important role in the success story as well. Lionsgate used thismoment’s social infrastructure for all their social media marketing needs.

Thismoment’s content management software allows brands to collect video, photo, and text content from users directly through YouTube, Facebook, and brand site pages, and offers full moderation and workflow controls to manage submission data.

Lionsgate and thismoment.com launched a series of social media promotions staring June 2011 on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social networking sites to raise curiosity around Hunger Games. The marketing campaign included engaging video content about the characters and the stories behind the Hunger Games film, active participation by fans on Facebook Pages, and user video submissions about how much they love the movie.

Marketers have also created several ways to engage with the public, including 13 Facebook pages such as MTV and MTV’s Facebook Fan Page to represent each district in the film. Facebook stories are a powerful way for brands to build awareness and engagement around new initiatives.

A Twitter account has been created for the Capitol district, referring to the central city of the film story. Hunger Games became a buzz worthy word with about a million posts on Twitter in just the last month, according to the real-time monitoring site Topsy.

“For Hunger Games this wasn’t a viral lucky strike – it wasn’t a fluke. They started their social program way back in summer 2011. Lionsgate adopted an ongoing continuous process for improvement based upon user data from their social channels. This is part of a trend where smart marketers are adopting a new approach, one that leverages dynamic customer input instead of the old style of phased, programmatic marketing campaigns,” says Vince Broady, CEO of thismoment.

Today social networks play an important role in decision-making processes and the strong brand positioning across consumer-centric sites. Activities in social networks are becoming a must-have for all companies looking for ways to increase its awareness, the strength of their brand and user retention.

Companies often spend millions to promote their products, but social media sites and social content marketing tools make it easier for companies to create buzz, exciting fans around their products. Tools from Thismoment and others are paving the way for enterprises like Intel, Coke, Dell, Verizon, Canon and others to adopt a fully social marketing infrastructure to target, market, plan and execute their business goals and consumer directives, from research to engagement.

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In the same vein:

Five Habits of Highly Ineffective Community Managers

Angela Connor — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:40:25 +0000

Community managers are getting lazy. I think it’s because many who actually hold the title, aren’t really doing the job. On some level, it isn’t their fault. The people hiring them don’t know what they’re looking for and many are strictly numbers driven.

Success is measured in “likes” and ‘comments.” Job descriptions mention the growth of a Facebook or Twitter community, when there isn’t one in existence in the first place. Fans and followers do not constitute a community. But despite how I feel about that, which is all based on experience, the jobs are plenty and that is a good thing. But community management is an art and a craft that must be fostered and developed.

Real community managers know this. The others are simply playing community managers on the internet. And here’s how they operate. Here, I give you the five habits of highly ineffective community managers:

1. They are constantly asking users to help them reach specific milestones. You’ve seen it before: “Help us get to 5,000 fans,” “Like this post so we can beat our record of 90 likes on a single post,” Five more comments to reach 100, come on..post!” Does this sound familiar? I know you’ve seen it. This is the absolute laziest way to grow a community. It’s all about numbers to the people who do this. I hate to even refer to them as community managers. They could care less about actual engagement. They’re just looking for bragging rights.

2. They don’t bother to learn about community management as a craft, or how to improve. I am not saying they don’t read or subscribe to blogs about social media. They do that. But they probably don’t read blogs about community management or take time to visit other successful communities to see what makes them great. They’re not reading Rich Millington’s Feverbee, Martin Reed’s Community Spark, Blaise Grimes-Viort, Connie Bensen, Alison Michalk, emoderation, The Community Roundtable, Dawn Foster’s Fast Wonder, or Patrick O’Keefe. When you care about community management, you connect with these thought leaders.

3. They don’t contribute as much as they should. Any community manager worth their weight knows that oftentimes you have to be the biggest contributor. The others fail to realize that they must lead by example and if they would just communicate with members of the community, they’d soon become an influential force with the ability to make things happen.They’d rather ask participants to “share their stories” on some boring topic and deem themselves an expert at engagement once the entries start rolling in.

4. They phone it in, scheduling posts in bulk with no interest in real-time conversations. These community manager-types don’t deal with the present or what’s happening in the real world. Timeliness is unimportant, as long as they reach those numbers. They automate it all, and set cruise control.

5. They spend more time searching for their next social media job than fostering dialogue and discussions. This one needs no explanation. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. I certainly fit the bill. But why not focus on actually growing a successful community so that when you do get that next opportunity, you’re a shoe-in?

I’ve interviewed many people who tell me they know how to engage and they’ve run all sorts of campaigns that tripled a company’s fan base and ran a successful Twitter chat. But when the conversation gets deep and I try to hone in on how they engage and maintain a user base, the answers are pretty thin. It’s clear that they haven’t been in the trenches, or if they were, they didn’t want to be there.

So there you have the five habits of highly ineffective community managers. There are definitely more and I do plan to bring them to light over the next few months. In the meantime, if there are any others you’ve seen, I’d love to hear about them.

[Cross-posted at Online Community Strategist]

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In the same vein:

Context in Content: Thismoment Leverages a Social Distribution Model

Cherr Aira — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 19:15:49 +0000

thismoment.com, a provider of social content management software for brands, today announced that it surpassed 650,000 user generated content (UGC) submissions through its flagship product, the Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC).

Thismoment’s UGC contest engine allows brands to collect video, photo, and text content from users directly through YouTube, Facebook, and brand site pages, and offers full moderation and workflow controls to manage submission data.

Big brands can use YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Instagram as viable content and sales channels.

Thismoment customers can build and deploy creative and engaging UGC brand channels on YouTube at a faster rate than ever before.

Since partnering with YouTube in 2010, thismoment has launched over 100 YouTube brand channels for customers within all major industry verticals, including more than 100 Fortune 500 brands. Throughout this time, thismoment has powered some of the most inventive uses of YouTube APIs in the deployment of engaging and flexible brand experiences on YouTube.

According to Vince Broady, CEO and Founder, thismoment

“Given our successful relationship with YouTube to-date, we are pleased to broaden the reach and scope of our UGC contest engine. We’re seeing an increasing demand for user content enabled engagement programs in all international regions that YouTube supports. This is a clear indicator that YouTube is approaching brand relationships more aggressively and openly than ever before and underscores the value that custom YouTube channels provide to brands.”

Security in social context

While social networking proves to be a lucrative space for branding and marketing, it could also be risky for sensitive information with privacy issues looming. SocialVolt knows this well, and promises to drive engagement without having to expose customer’s data. With security measures in place, they partnered with DigitalMedia, a leader in digital communications for financial firms to bring cutting-edge social media engagement.

“Given the SocialVolt team’s history in banking security and strong understanding of the unique challenges the industry faces, robust risk and compliance features were of the utmost importance when we developed the platform,” says Scott Oppliger, CEO of SocialVolt. “DigitalMailer’s deep expertise in the banking space will help us reach businesses who understand the importance of social media engagement, but require a platform uniquely suited to their heavily regulated industry.”

To audit social media content, there will be a detailed audit trail and administrators will be assigned to oversee passwords and profiles.

Capitalizing existing social engagement platforms

Facebook has the benefits of building hype around social advertising, and milking billions from it. Arguably, Zuckerberg’s brainchild is in a league of its own. Capitalizing on this is Offerpop, another social content marketing that runs engaging and viral promotions in Facebook and Twitter for brands that wish to grow fanbase and repeat customers. It’s recently released a Facebook-sponsored feature called Stories. This support will allow marketers to amplify Offerpop campaigns across the social network.

Mark Cooper, co-founder and CMO of Offerpop, briefly explains benefits of the new feature, saying, “Facebook Sponsored Stories is a powerful way for brands to build awareness and engagement around new initiatives. Our Stories feature helps take the guesswork out of running effective Sponsored Stories campaigns – marketers can literally set them up in minutes.”

The Opportunity in Fragmented Social Portals

The fragmentation of media right now, while it may seem a dilemma for brands to break through the barriers, is a sign of distributed opportunities for social platforms. YouTube was a frontrunner, and still is the one to beat when we talk about online video streaming with a “social” component. For brands, building a social presence is the focus to stay relevant in the game. Making sure that they execute efficiently is another story.

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In the same vein:

Presidential Candidates Are Doing the Obama

Mellisa Tolentino — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:00:56 +0000

The U.S. Presidential election is just a few months away, and campaigning has come a long way since 2007. Before, during the campaign period, you’d see thousands of fliers, posters, leaflets etc. making their way to the streets, but now, these candidates are heading to the streets of cyberspace, particularly social networking sites, paving their campaign trails with digital diligence.

Do the Obama

Since President Barack Obama’s win in 2008’s Presidential election, candidates are now looking to “Do an Obama” – meaning they want to leverage social networking sites to gain supporters. But using social media as a platform for election campaign may not be suitable for everyone, as it can be quite tricky. You have to take into consideration how the public will view you as a candidate campaigning on the internet.

“In order to effectively push through the clutter, you have to have a message that is real and true, authentic and credible,” veteran Democratic media consultant Jim Margolis stated. “And voters must be targeted and reached on their terms.”

If you ask President Obama, he would of course say that the “Obama strategy works,” as he is using it again for this year’s election again. If you go to President Obama’s site, you can see the Twitter feeds for @BarackObama and @Obama2012 on the right side, and all the posts on the site can be easily shared to your Facebook and Twitter account. This just shows how his election campaign team sees social media as a very powerful tool.

President Obama is leading the race in social networking sites, with 13 million followers on Twitter and 25.5 million likes on Facebook. His opponents are far behind: Mitt Romney has about 376,000 followers and 1.5 million likes, Newt Gingrich has more than 1.4 million followers and 295,979 likes, Rick Santorum has close to 165,000 followers 177,829 likes, and Ron Paul has about 27,500 followers and 908,056 likes.

Aside from his current popularity, President Obama is aiming to expand his reach with his Tom Hanks-narrated, Hollywood-style documentary, called “The Road We’ve Traveled.” The video is set to go online on Thursday night.

If you want to reach out to people, let them hear what you have to say or vice versa, since everyone is using at least one form of social networking site, social media is the best platform to do so. But social media may not always bring out the positive result candidates want.

The Drawback of Social Media

Everyone has a different opinion on things, from food preferences to religion, political affinity, etc. And when we voice out our opinions on this stuff, you can bet that someone out there will disagree. Nothing’s wrong with a little friendly debate but what if it costs you your friends?

According to a study released by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a number of Americans have unfriended, blocked or hidden someone in their social networking site because of difference in political opinions. The study also stated that Liberals were most likely to unfriend you if they disagree with your political opinions just to avoid arguments, or they just don’t want to be irritated with your constant rantings.

“Among the SNS users whose friends post political content, 25% always agree or mostly agree with their friends’ political postings; 73% of these SNS users “only sometimes” agree or never agree with their friends’ political postings,” said the report. “When they disagree with others’ posts, 66% of these SNS users say they usually ignore the posts; 28% said they usually respond with comments or posts of their own; and 5% said it depends on the circumstances.”

“Social networking sites have become places where political conversation, debate, and proselytizing occur, especially during campaign seasons … Some analysts have expressed concerns about the impact of social networking sites on the broad political culture. They have worried that … users might customize their friendship networks by hanging out only with people who share and reinforce their political views,” the Pew report indicated.

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In the same vein:

LinkedIn Acquisition of Rapportive Brings Social-Professional Magic to Gmail

Kit Dotson — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:32:10 +0000

The interesting Gmail social-context plugin, Rapportive, has been acquired by social-media for professionals company LinkedIn.

Rapportive creates plugin software that provides context-sensitive social-media information on top of Gmail’s user interface. As a result, it works as a sort of highly immersive address book that brings a lot of social-media information to the front when replying to e-mails. With Rapportive active, it’s possible to see recent tweets and other information about the subject of the e-mail giving a great deal of context for conversation.

This makes them perfect for LinkedIn’s mission of connecting professionals and probably guided the decision to acquire Rapportive.

While neither company has revealed how much was paid, it’s rumored the price ran somewhere around $15 million in cash, reported by TechCrunch reporter Alexia Tsotsis early February. The acquisition was acknowledged late February by executives at both companies with Hani Durzy, LinkedIn’s director of corporate communications sending out an e-mail to that effect.

“Rapportive does a great job at delivering relevant information in a platform that is universally used by professionals — email. It’s very much in line with LinkedIn’s mission to make professionals more productive and successful in their careers,” Durzy wrote.

In order to quell any customer concerns that the partnership might affect their product negatively, Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, is quoted on his blog displaying great excitement about the acquisition and the future vision of the social e-mail plugin.

“Since we accidentally launched, we have relentlessly pursued this vision, integrating LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and your address book right into your email,” he wrote. “During our partnership with LinkedIn, we got to know them very well. We found a great overlap between our visions.”

No doubt, the partnership between LinkedIn and Rapportive will provide a huge benefit for customers of both. Conversations on all forms of media often shift between them—although rarely seamlessly—but it’s often useful to know what a person is currently saying while addressing them in an e-mail. With Rapportive’s service, a businessman could be speaking to a potential client and see that they’re currently complaining about a particular product on their Twitter; they could then use that to guide conversation in e-mail. It removes the necessity to remember to check all the social media outlets for a contacts current mood before addressing them.

Information overload is about having too many avenues to bring information to a person, but the inability to organize or prioritize it. With an overlay that brings the information to you via context, and provide it when you’ll most likely need it most, it takes away part of the organization stress and gives a better insight into the person you’re talking to.

As long as this can be done without pressing extra buttons, as Vohra said about his service, he wants it to become second nature or something “you don’t have to remember to use.”

Just like Twitter updates and connections, LinkedIn updates and connections provide a whole other context to entertain thoughts and provide information while communicating.

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In the same vein:

San Francisco PR Firm LaunchSquad Launches Premium Content Company

Tom Foremski — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:00:03 +0000

I like San Francisco based PR firm LaunchSquad because they tend to be a little bit ahead of the pack. This week it launched Original9 Media, a company combining content creation with online marketing.

Jason Mandell, co-founder of LaunchSquad tells me:

Over the past couple of years, we have been aggressively building our services in the content area, in both video and written/web content. In doing so, we have recognized and embraced the changing face of media, and the opportunity to help companies tell their stories in a direct, compelling manner to the people they want to reach and engage with.

The mission of Original9 is to help companies of all sizes engage audiences and grow their businesses through premium content creation, distribution and consulting expertise.

Original9 is a team of marketing and editorial experts with decades of experience in shaping content strategies to influence and engage audiences, including a former top editor from Business 2.0.

We will offer a full spectrum of premium content services including strategy, distribution, analytics, creative, web and mobile content and site/app development, infographic programs, blog creation and management and influencer recruitment, among others.

This is part of a reinvention plan that’s been underway at LaunchSquad for several years. It’s a new time for marketing and PR and we believe an amazing time to create new types of services based on the original creation and distribution of high quality content.

It’s the middle ground between ad agencies and PR firms that everyone is acknowledging and running toward. We’ve got some early “beta” success stories (here’s one example) under our belts and several major deals in our pipeline. We believe we have a huge and growing market and our excitement has only grown after engaging with prospects.

Foremski’s Take: Many PR firms have become deeply involved in the preparation and creation of original content for their clients for several years now. As the number of magazines, and journalists able to write about companies has steadily declined “paid content” services have seen a big rise in popularity.

The creation of Original9 is interesting because it seems to split-off that work from the list of PR services that a PR firm such as LaunchSquad would offer.

Will clients notice the difference? Or is this a move to help add revenues that would normally be funneled through PR services?

In many respects, Original9 is acting as a publisher — a media company. It is producing original content and then helping to promote, distribute it, and analyze responses. The promotion, distribution, and analytics can be very hard for companies to do well, so it’s a very valuable service.

The main problem is that companies tend to think in terms of marketing campaigns, which have a finite term. But becoming a media publisher implies a long term commitment otherwise the value of engagement quickly fades away amid a very noisy media environment.

Will Original9′s clients be able to understand the necessity of a long-term publishing strategy? Probably not, at least, not at first.

Another issue is: will the high cost of producing original content be worth the gains?

Great content doesn’t guarantee great exposure. Unless that content can be pushed through a high traffic platform, its value will be a lot less than its costs of production.

Where will the original content be published? Will established newspapers or magazines accept such content for publication? Will clients build their own online publications and commit to a long editorial schedule? It typically takes a good two years to establish a media brand — trust takes time.

Readers and viewers pay close attention to the publication platform. An article in the New York Times trumps one on an unknown site. Original9′s articles and it’s other paid content will lack weight and effectiveness unless there is a trusted brand association — and that’s not easy.

Standalone pieces of content distributed over the web is not much of a strategy. And publishing that content on a client’s web site isn’t going to get much attention.

This is why newspapers and magazine titles exist: to establish and build trust and act as a proxy for quality and reliability. They are not one-shot wonders. Getting your content into established publications through the use of PR firms pitching journalists is still a lot more effective than trying to write the article yourself — no matter how good it is.

I welcome LaunchSquad’s move because it is willing to take a risk and it just might be onto something very good. I’ll be following its progress with much interest.

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]

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In the same vein:

New Media Minute: Mobile Marketing: How to Reach Consumers in Retail Stores

Daisy Whitney — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:00:48 +0000

More than half of U.S. smartphone users turned to their phone to
perform retail-related activities while in a store, according to
comScore. That could be taking a picture of a product, comparing
prices or scanning bar codes for coupons. How can smart brands and
retailers take advantage of this behavior and reach consumers at that
point of purchase? For all the details, check out this week’s New
Media Minute.

src=”http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#g4pAgu3RFAA”
[Thanks, Daisy.]

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In the same vein:

Marc Smith from Social Media Research Foundation Speaks on Big Data

Kit Dotson — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:19:46 +0000

Social media gathers people together into communities and as people interact they produce and spin off tremendous amounts of data. That data is so considerable and detailed that they only way to approach it is through the praxis of big data theories and algorithms. Sociologist Marc Smith (@marc_smith on Twitter) with the Social Media Research Foundation is at the forefront of producing visualization techniques.

John Furrier of SiliconANGLE and Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org brought him into TheCube at StrataConf 2012 to speak about his insights about big data and its intersection with social media. Smith believes that we’re on the revolutionary cusp necessary to start constructing the tools to engage scholarship about big data and social data.

When Furrier asked Smith how he felt that big data has been changing our understanding of society and social media, he felt that it’s the next big revelation that will break open our intuition of the “big picture.”

There are a lot of patterns that were difficult to discover because the data wasn’t there and we’re going to discover those patterns. Smith says, Whoever “races to the top of the Big Data mountain first will see that vista” and they’ll be the ones who will be able to exploit those patterns first. What Marc believes is that big data will give social scientists the ability to see society.

As in the ability to see society in a “satellite view” that we haven’t ever had before.

The graph represents a network of up to 1000 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “bigdata”. The network was obtained onTuesday, 28 February 2012at01:55 UTC. There is an edge for each follows relationship. There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a recent tweet. There is an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a recent tweet. There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”.

Twitter itself provides an amazing snapshot within the ocean of publicly available social data. Because every comment and connection is trapped by Twitter and can be captured by someone watching means that we can map the relationships between different players and even visualize conversations on specific subjects. For the study of sociology, this is an amazing breakthrough in order to see the flow of ideas, and how different cliques interact.

As Smith says, the scholarship could benefit greatly from tools capable of sieving out patterns from these interactions allowing sociologists (or marketers, enterprise PR, etc.) to transform these big data models to do work for the people who want to know. The enterprise space has been looking into how to use this to outperform their competitors and better serve their customers—but as Smith mentions, scholarship in this realm will move us forward in understanding how we can use big data to serve the entire community.

The project imaged above, from NodeXLGraphGallery.org, uses an open-source template for graphing network data that works with Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010. It uses a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) which allows for derivative works based on the template meaning that it can be spread into academic research easily.

We’ve seen before that visualization is extremely important when it comes to making big data human readable and for distilling trends from information. Social media is inherently a human process with a multitude of communities, people, and behavior all interacting in very complex ways.

With a product like NodeXL and Social Media Foundation delivering ideas on how to better approach products that view these networks will give a powerful starting point to bring big data into scholarly pursuits.

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