This event and our sponsorship resonates for us and the work we do at Nexalogy. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time at conferences knows that the individual speakers are important, but it’s the relationships forged at an event AND the particular sessions that really glues the whole thing together. This matches really closely with our approach to social media intelligence. Although a particular blog post or Tweet is interesting – to truly understand it, you must have a good understanding of the relationships between posts (or tweets) and be able to put it in the larger context.

The conference itself was fantastic, and as always, Claude Malaison put together a fantastic roster of local and international speakers, including our friend (and founder of a sister company of ours), Jen Evans of Sequentia Environics.

Two weeks earlier, we were equally to have been invited speakers at the first Webcom Toronto. Hosted by Jane Dysart, the first Webcom in Toronto featured one of the best speaker’s lineups I’ve seen in years, including Don Tapscott, Shel Holtz, and Walton Smith, among others. Being the first edition, Webcom Toronto was a much smaller event than Webcom Montreal, but I predict nothing but growth for the future.

There were some great moments during the day, which as a whole exceeded expectations. Some highlights included presentations by Pierre-Loïc Assayag (from Traackr), and a wonderful keynote by KD Paine. The panel led by Mark Evans (from Sysomos), featuring Darren Barefoot, Brian Cugelman (from AlterSpark), and Ilya Grigorik (from Postrank) was particularly excellent, and really moved the whole day’s program in a very productive direction.

Claude’s presentation during his panel was pretty well received – thanks to everyone for the warm reception. I think video may be available soon, but for now, you can download Claude’s slide deck here: Nexalogy-TTMM-Deck (2.1Mb PDF).

He mentions both cluster analysis and semantic analysis as avenues for future development and accurately describes some of the challenges that go along with these approaches. These techniques are at the heart of Nexalogy’s unique approach to Social Media Intelligence – and are a key element of the value we offer our clients to use social media to do much more than simple monitoring.

For me, this post is another indication that what we’re living through is not the birth of one industry but two: SM Monitoring and SM Intelligence. They’re different jobs with different goals, and the things required to do monitoring well (and that the key monitoring companies have done a good job deploying) are not necessarily the things required to produce valuable intelligence that can feed directly into brand strategy or corporate risk assessment scenarios.

Key quote: a quote from Chris’ interview with Claude:

“This is where physics comes into play,” [Théoret] explains, “Physicists know how to handle literally astronomical sizes of data sets that aren’t very well organized. With blogs for example, the data problem is the same. We need to find signal and reduce noise. Because the data is unstructured, analysis becomes very complicated – but that’s where Nexalogy comes in.”

There are three particular skills that are required to do social media intelligence well:

• The ability to build a comprehensive dataset to analyze. This is more complicated than it sounds, and there are many pitfalls to avoid in trying. To gain any real insight from social media sources requires going as far down the long tail as possible when building a dataset. In our experience, this means relying on a much larger universe of social media sources than most monitoring companies can access.

• An established methodology to use to analyze the contents of the dataset (once it has been properly constructed). In other words, once you have 4000 (or 40,000) blog posts or tweets on a subject, how do you read that material and make sense of it? Doing this right is not as simple as starting at the top and going through all of the material – and anyhow, given a large dataset it would be impossible to do it that way. We use software that we have built that implements approaches based on decades of academic experience to do this. Most companies don’t have the skills in-house to do this correctly.

• The background to take rigorously analyzed data and apply it to help to solve particular strategic challenges. Companies vary widely in this respect. Some companies use a great deal of data to make decisions, but some run more on instinct than anything else. To do social media analysis correctly, the company providing the service has to offer a sliding scale of post-analysis services, from simple coaching on how to use the intelligence produced all the way to the development of complete strategic plans and even management of the execution of such plans.

As a social media intelligence company, Nexalogy Environics appreciates the quality of the work our cousins in the social media monitoring segment are doing. However, as we’re seeing more and more every day, social media presents greater challenges to companies than monitoring can fully address. As Jason Falls suggests, there’s a clear case for a more robust approach to intelligence – but it’s not at all obvious that it’s the client companies themselves who can or should be doing that intelligence work. Our clients get much better results at a more cost-effective rate than anything they could do themselves.

He wrote that although monitoring services do an adequate job, “…none of them do what you want them to do.They only do half the job. None of them tell you what to do with the information.” He goes on to say that the monitoring companies will probably never be good at the analysis half of the job because it’s not something you can do with an algorithm – it’s a strategic services job.

Falls’ post highlights something that is becoming clearer and clearer every day – there are two distinct segments in the social media analysis space: social media monitoring and social media intelligence. Though they are similar, there are important differences between their respective approaches and the kinds of client problems they can solve. Moreover, the more companies explore the value proposition of one group – the monitoring services – the more they understand the unique value of the other group in the space – the strategic analysis companies.

At Nexalogy Environics we’re all about the strategic analysis we provide our clients. The software we’ve built is the cornerstone of what we do, but it’s a tool we use to make methodologically sound analysis of social media datasets possible, not a client deliverable on its own.

Twitter analysis is all the rage at the moment, but the analysis that we most often see is pretty basic. One of the best is this analysis from the NYTimes Research Labs: Monitoring Twitter’s iPad Commentary. But while the presentation of their results is fantastic, there is more to social media analysis than counting keywords in Twitter. Or, as Annie Pettit of Conversition put it last week from the podium at the MRIA Net Gain 4.0 conference (and later tweeted), “Counting is not analysis“.

Counting is certainly part of analysis, but what we most often see passing as “social media analysis” is just the first step. While there is some value to counting tweets, it’s much more important to analyze the concepts contained throughout all of the tweets in a dataset, whether those words represent likely keywords or not. It’s only using more advanced methodologies that can we get a complete view of a conversation.

To demonstrate this, Nexalogy Environics’ Guido Vieira performed a Twitter study of the 24 hours of discussion following the launch of the iPad in the Montreal area. As you can see, the results are very interesting. Read to the end of the PDF – this analysis suggests a very important methodological issue to pay attention to related to Twitter analysis.

Download the PDF [500kb]: NexalogyEnvironics-iPadLaunchAnalysis1

We’ve joined the Environics family of companies, and will be working alongside Environics Communications Inc. and Environics Research Group to continue to strengthen our efforts to define the gold standard in social media analysis and bring this approach to a wider audience.

We’re also very excited to work with our new corporate siblings, both in Montreal (Capital-Image) and in Toronto at Sequentia Environics whose innovative approach to social media marketing and communications is very closely aligned with our philosophy and approach.

Bruce McLellan (the President of Environics Communications) wrote a really nice blog post about this news on the ECI blog, Thanks, Augie.

Here are the links to today’s media release: English; French.

ICBIS is all about ensuring that sustainability decisions are made at the core of corporate decisionmaking. As Ron describes it ICBIS is, “a collaborative, learning, not-for-profit network of business and sustainability practioners who work in business, civil society, consulting, academic and government settings, and support proactive and constructive engagement with business and society on sustainable development and business sustainability.”