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By Steve Canepa, General Manager, Global Media & Entertainment Industry

February seems to be a month of excitement for all movie, television and sports enthusiasts. It’s that time of year – Super Bowl madness and Oscar Buzz – frenzy so electric that it transcends worlds – into the social media world. Think about it, how long does it take for you to see a Tweet or Facebook post once you hear the winner for Best Motion Picture or following the first touch-down? Seconds? Continue Reading »

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With public-sector budgets under greater pressure and scrutiny than ever, having the ability to fine-tune services and to deliver them where they’re needed most is becoming increasingly important. Social media gives city authorities this opportunity, tapping into public sentiment in real time – albeit only that portion of the public using social media and in a raw form.

Crucially, it’s not just a case of passively watching and listening to what citizens are saying. The social web also makes it possible to reach out in new ways. Social networks mean local government can carry out surveys – and publicise them – at relatively low cost. Insights gained in this way not only represent a significant cash saving; they can also be carried out more rapidly than traditional opinion polls, with no paper processing delays and no risk of data transcription errors. Continue Reading »

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What makes a smarter social media city? At its best, it is:

 
Engaging
It promotes citizen involvement and builds a new sense of
ownership with scope for collaboration in every aspect of city life.

Transparent
It lifts the bonnet on how the city works – processes are visible,
dialogue is open, feedback is swift.

Nimble
It delivers services in real time with an enhanced ability to adjust
to citizens’ fast-changing needs.

Secure
It respects privacy, protects data and leverages technology to
enhance the physical security of citizens.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

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John Squire, IBM Director of Digital Marketing & AnalyticsJohn Squire is IBM’s director of Digital Marketing and Analytics.

Updated Post
AN UPSET IN THE MAKING

3 February 2012, 11:30 AM Eastern

Just like on the field, Eli Manning is riding a late surge to overtake Tom Brady in the IBM and USC analysis of Super Bowl XLVI social media sentiment.  Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day. In another interesting development positive sentiment for Giants head coach jumped dramatically with his score rating increasing to 76% positive. That places Coach Coughlin above all of the players and coaches on both teams.
superbowl2
This day-to-day shift in Super Bowl fan sentiment illustrates the speed at which consumer sentiments can shift online — a factor that businesses are watching closely due to the potential impact on their brand equity and sales.

By applying analytics in social media settings we can identify nuances – positive, negative, irony, snarky vs. sincerity, in real-time.  That’s enough time to help an organization, or in this case professional athletes, adjust their comments and actions to dramatically (and positively) impact their brands.

Original Post
SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS TAKES US BEYOND THE TWEETS

2 February 2012

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.  And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Super Bowl social sentiment indexOther noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re an professional football player or a global enterprise.  Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

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Kevin Nosbusch is an IBM senior technology consultant based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1973 he played for the Fighting Irish during Notre Dame’s National Championship season, and went on to play for the San Diego Chargers.

When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.

Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology.  Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.

This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.  By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.

Continue Reading »

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Social media provides local government with powerful and flexible tools to deliver information services through a variety of channels. Equally important, it provides unique tools for formulating policy and redefining the meaning of accountability as well.

Discovery techniques based on social media are already helping local authorities to shape the future and to define exactly what a smarter city should look like. Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands is a case in point. Continue Reading »

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Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, foursquare – we no longer just communicate; we interact. In the process, how can the wealth of information being generated by social media help us better understand how our cities function and create smarter cities in the process?

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all report membership in the hundreds of millions. Google+, the social media network launched by the search engine giant early in 2011, saw 25 million people sign up in its first four weeks. Foursquare popularised geolocation in social media, and now photographs, tweets and status updates can be tagged with your location. Our appetite for social media is changing the way we communicate and offers new ways to interact with our cities.

Over a billion people worldwide log on to social networking sites. British internet users on PCs clocked up a total of 169 million hours on Facebook alone in April 2011, according to research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. Mobile users of Facebook, meanwhile, spend more than five and a half hours on the site each month. Clearly, social media is not a fad. Instant communication over social networks – and the presumption of instant feedback – now underpins just about every aspect of our lives. This includes our relationships with local and city governments. The spectacular growth of social media has also increased expectations about transparency and the right to participate in the policy-making process. Used properly, social media represents new value for local authorities, especially when coupled with the right technology, such as a secure private cloud. Leading cities in the UK, US and beyond are already tapping into this hunger for public engagement, with social media playing a part in everything from town planning to combating traffic jams.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

 

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TaplinGuest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.

What a thriller! After 11 innings last night, the St. Louis Cardinals forced a winner-takes-all Game 7 with tonight sure to be a great finale to close out this October classic.

The historic Game 6 also forced the Twitterverse to crown two new tweet and sentiment leaders in IBM and USC Annenberg’s latest analysis from the USC Social Sentiment Index. Due to their late inning heroics, the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton netted the highest volume of tweets and an 88% positive sentiment while the biggest hero of the night, St. Louis Cardinals’ David Freese led his team in tweets and an 86% positive sentiment. Extra innings afforded diehard fans the opportunity to share their sentiment and push these two players over the top.

So what does Game 6’s analysis tell us? Social media fans are highly vocal, generating the largest volume of tweets during the final moments of the game. These real-time fan insights could have tremendous impact on how and when marketers engage these fans.

game6

Get ready for an awesome Game 7 and a final World Series analysis where we’ll not only crown the Social Media MVP of the series but take a closer look all the cool trends we found with fans’ sentiment toward both teams’ managers, highest spike in a player’s tweets and much more. Stay tuned!

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Back in the 1960s, when a single mainframe computer filled an entire room, most of the data was stored on huge reel-to-reel tape drives. Today, most business computers use disk drives for storage, but, for the media and entertainment industry it’s back to the future.

That’s because TV networks and movie studios have so much digital video content to store (686,000 petabytes, growing to 1,780,000 petabytes in 2015, according to Coughlin Associates) and they can’t afford to stash it on expensive disk drives. So they need tape drives that are updated for modern times–enabling them to easily find just the section of video they want, when they want it.

Now, imagine a tense scene on a highway in the Nevada desert in March of 2009. David Pease, an IBM Research scientist, was driving a rented van toward Las Vegas while Michael Richmond, another researcher, typed away on his laptop computer and made frequent phone calls to Lucas Villa Real, an IBM scientist based in Brazil.

They were putting the finishing touches on a technology that’s now called Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which was designed to provide broadcasters and movie studios with the responsiveness and searchability of disk storage at the price of tape storage. They were set up to demonstrate the technology to attendees of the National Association of Broadcaster’s annual convention. The drive from IBM Research – San Jose to Vegas took 10 hours. Richmond and Real were coding and debugging all the way. “It was down to the wire, but it worked well enough that people saw the potential of it and they got very excited,” says Pease.

He and some of his IBM colleagues will be attending the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards ceremony today at the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles. At the ceremony, IBM and Fox Networks Group will receive an Emmy for media workflow transformation and pioneering the development and application of LTFS.

Here’s the famous Did You Know 4.0 video about the proliferation of digital media and communications.

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Continue Reading »

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TaplinGuest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.  Next week Professor Taplin will be participating in the IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum (IOD11).

Two more World Series games played and millions of tweets later, IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students uncovered new findings in fans’ social sentiment in our ongoing World Series analysis.

Despite lower TV ratings for Game 3, we saw the volume of tweets increase from Game 2 as baseball’s diehard fans continue to turn to the Twitterverse and other social media platforms to pontificate about the game play and players and coaches on the field.

Using the same metrics from our initial World Series analysis, the number of “sentiment” tweets – that is, tweets both positive and negative, in our most recent sampling showed:

– In Game 3: St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols and the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were the most tweeted among players and coaches.

– In Game 4, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols kept his crown and the Rangers’ Derek Holland led his team for total number of tweets.


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Great game play not only can result in a W for the team, but also a W for individual social media accolades.  In this most recent analysis, St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, amassed unbelievable numbers following his historic baseball performance, receiving the most tweets on his team for both Game 3 and Game 4 and the most positive sentiment at 81% and 87% respectively.  The same could be said for the Rangers’ Derek Holland in Game 4, who received the most tweets and an 83% positive sentiment. Rangers’ Michael Young netted most positive sentiment on his team for Game 3 with 83%.  For those keeping score at home, the positive sentiment is the result of ‘T’ scores – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment indicated in tweets.

Our second analysis accurately correlates players’ large volumes of tweets to fans’ positive feedback, reiterating how important social media platforms are to capturing consumer sentiment and uncovering actionable insights. More importantly, it affords us an opportunity to view consistencies and inconsistencies with sentiment—what players continue to stay hot amongst fans, who is falling off the bandwagon, via real-time data to make or change decisions, be it promotions or other marketing efforts. It also goes to show those relying solely on mediums such as TV to uncover new fan insights will be at a disadvantage to their peers who are turning to social media to analyze sentiment to get a real-time temperature check on public attitudes as well as customer segments like diehard baseball fans that can result in making more insightful decisions.

Stay tuned for our final analysis at the conclusion of the World Series.  Enjoy the rest of the Series!

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