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.

The use of social media also opens up potential for enhanced cross-departmental collaboration within councils. Local government is a major employer: for example, Merton London Borough Council employs upwards of 5,000 people, as does Brent Council, while Birmingham City Council is the largest local authority in Europe, employing 60,000 people – the same size as a multinational company. Tapping into that resource makes sense and can unlock real value, with crowdsourcing creating synergies that would otherwise be lost.

Perhaps the most important aspect of social media, though, is the potential it has to open up public participation. Social media has a decisive role to play in motivating and empowering citizens, as well as increasing engagement with the third sector, which includes charities, voluntary groups and not-for-profit organisations.

As the Coventry project reveals, the online environment can be “sticky”, with users tending to spend longer perusing material than they might in an equivalent paper-based exercise. CovJam participants each spent an average of two and a half hours online.

CovJam underlines the extent to which social media and new technology can help to improve the agility of local authorities, with complex public consultations made far more manageable and granular than an equivalent approach based on filling in paper forms. Web-based technologies also have the potential to revolutionise routine public interactions. Research carried out by the Society of Information Technology Management in 2010 reveals the scope of potential savings. At only 27 pence, the cost of a customer service interaction on the web is nearly 11 times cheaper than a phone transaction and nearly 25 times less expensive than an equivalent face-to-face meeting.

This does not mean that governments should slash all paperbased services in favour of digital – such a move risks creating a digital divide and excluding those without access to the internet. By offering more digital channels, however, service can be improved and the public feels it has even more options.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet, social business

 
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 Social media and the city new paper

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

John 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.

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.

Other 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.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, nfl, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, storytelling, twitter, Watson

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.

Like previous analyses on movies, retailing and baseball, analytics makes it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments of social media commentary, distinguish irony, and even apply machine learning to figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.  So we can now break down the Big Show’s compelling story lines in a way that traditional media never could.

Take the eternal New York/Boston sports rivalry. Is this a grudge match for the Patriots who had their perfect season ruined by the Giants four years ago?  Will Tom Brady be the first quarterback to win four Super Bowls since Joe Montana?  With his second Super Bowl in four years, has the Giants’ Eli Manning earned elite status and taken up his brother Peyton’s mantle as arch-rival of Tom Brady?   How will the family dynamic affect Eli Manning who will play on his brother’s turf in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLVI?

Talk radio and sports columns are full of pundits and prognosticators discussing these topics ad nauseam. Coaches and players are focused on playbooks and game strategy. Organizations running commercials are waiting anxiously for consumer reaction. In this context, fans today have an opportunity to both share and learn from others instantly; and they’re providing researchers with an unfiltered voice that is ripe for analysis.

But this is about so much more than analyzing which QB fans are rooting for in Super Bowl XLVI.  Uncovering hidden insights from public Twitter comments can help a slew of people, from marketers to the NFL franchise owners, better understand opinions toward players, teams and products.  These opinions can no longer go unnoticed, which is why the NFL has wisely established a Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

We can see from the work that IBM and USC are doing that this notion of shared community engagement continues to expand exponentially thanks to other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. In this context, sentiment analysis can be applied to learning how consumers perceive brands, reputations of companies and organizations, and new television shows and movies – just to name a few.

So which quarterback will be the social MVP of Super Bowl XLVI?  We’ll find out later this week.

In the meantime, the data that IBM and USC are gathering affirms what I’ve known since my playing days — statistics are an important part of sports.  And today gathering social media data can be a powerful tool that impacts the bottom lines for businesses of all sizes in all industries.

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

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, data, Education, IBM, IBM Research, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

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.

CovJam is a collaborative online venture staged by Coventry City Council and IBM. It used social media as part of a unique three-day brainstorming exercise to identify ways to make Coventry a smarter city.

IBM’s “jam” technology is a proven technique for drawing on the wisdom of crowds, capturing ideas in a way that isn’t possible using traditional forms of consultation. CovJam generated more than 2,000 posts, with 82 per cent of re-registered participants, including residents, public-sector organisations and companies, taking part.

Following the event, IBM used corporate brand and reputation analysis to organise the unstructured information, identify patterns and to help the city council to prioritise key topics and viewpoints. For the council, CovJam provided new ideas; for local people and businesses, it provided an easily accessible opportunity for people to become active citizens.

As well as providing a channel for capturing and analysing realtime information, social media provides a critical feedback mechanism, with citizens able to report on everything from road closures to broken water mains. Commuters can also provide feedback after an incident or event is reported, using the social web including Twitter, blogs and forums.

Social media also has a unique capacity to capture the mood of the moment and to spur powerful, impromptu actions. That can have both a positive and negative impact: social media may have been used by some rioters to organise criminal activity during the disturbances that took place in English cities during the summer of 2011. Yet the same social media helped to galvanise the unprecedented community response that followed.  An account on Twitter – @riotcleanup – attracted more than 70,000 followers in a matter of hours, with residents turning out to help in the clean-up operation across the country.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

by Richard Daley, Director of Information Management at Tejon Ranch

Mobile business applications on phones and other hand-held devices are taking hold in the business today, and Tejon Ranch is a great example of how that technology is making a big difference.

Our name is a bit deceiving. We’re more of a city than a “ranch.”

We have nearly 270,000 acres, which makes us the largest continuous expanse of private land in California. With 422 square miles, we’re almost as large as Los Angeles and about 40 percent the size of Rhode Island. Our current projects include Tejon Industrial Complex, a 1,450-acre commercial/industrial park; Tejon Mountain Village, a resort community of 26,400 acres; and Centennial, a 12,000-acre planned city with 23,000 housing units.

With so much land to traverse, our employees needed a mobile solution when they’re off-site to access key information and collaborate across the organization Our employees now use their mobile application on iPads to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely for all parts of our business including contracts management, insurance verification, and bond management.

Tejon Ranch has a mobile application that enables iPad users to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely to provide real time access key records and information, drive dynamic collaboration and agile decision making across the organization. This covers areas such as contracts management and insurance verification across 5,000 consultants and managing access to bonds for general use improvements and building projects.

Now that we’re “mobile,” we’re doing three times as much with our systems now as we did previously, but we’ve only added two staff members to the IT team. We predict a three-year ROI of $4 million using IBM, but as for the value in terms of transforming the way we do business, that’s beyond calculation.

It wasn’t too long ago that we had only a manual, paper-based records management system to manage our growth. Back then our businesses were operating as separate, siloed entities. Employees used paper for their work processes and stored this information in boxes, folders and notebooks.

Using IBM software, we can now maneuver contracts through the office more easily to make sure insurance certificates are updated and pro-actively notify our workers and consultants when their insurance needs to be updated or reissued. Dynamic tasks can be set to ensure insurance verification is obtained or appropriate action is taken. And all this information is accessible via iPads.

As a public company, Tejon also has to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA and is subject to audits by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  The iPad application allows knowledge workers to access critical content, make decisions and collaborate in real time while ensuring that compliance objectives are met by managing content as records, regardless of format.

Our long-term goal is to build our IBM solution out to the 5,000 remote consultants and vendors we work with on a daily basis, providing a way for them  to directly contribute content to the Tejon solution and collaborate with the Tejon team.

Technorati Tags: mobile, tejon ranch

The iPad 2 and Kindle Fire will top many holiday wish lists this year. But not only can you play Angry Birds on these devices; tablets can be used at work, too.

Increasingly, employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the IT department accommodate them.

For years, companies have issued mobile devices to busy executives and sales representatives who depend on their company-issued devices to get the job done. However this thinking is antiquated. In today’s increasingly mobile culture, accessing critical business applications via mobile devices is a must-have for all employees.

In response, many organizations worldwide are adopting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach.  Approximately 72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen Group say they allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets for work. And a recent IDC survey said that 95 percent of workers have used technology they purchased for themselves for work. I recently met with a CEO of large and fairly conservative company in Germany who purchased 1,000 iPad devices for their employees.

However, this increasingly popular practice comes with a host of potential security issues.Moreover, managing the growing alphabet soup of interconnected devices can be a headache for IT departments. IT must now manage the new social, virtual, and mobile employee – not to mention all the applications they access.

In November, IBM announced a major advance to help organizations better secure smartphones and tablet devices in the workplace: IBM’s Hosted Mobile Device Security Management service includes a security application for smartphones and tablets, along with managed services including policy management and user compliance monitoring. IBM is providing security controls and ongoing monitoring for individual devices as a managed service, allowing IT departments to support a broad range of personal devices and capitalize on the cost savings that BYOD can offer.

For example, Cummins Inc., the largest independent maker of diesel engines, is empowering its 40,000 employees in 190 countries with a BYOD program. The ability to collaborate from a smart, mobile device enables employees from this Fortune 500 company to be more productive in more places because they can access mail, calendar, contacts, and to do lists anywhere in the world. In the future, the promise of mobile computing will help Cummins employees perform diagnostic tests while working on top of large engines to taking parts inventory and finalizing parts distribution logistics to having instant access to comprehensive business analytics that reflect a business unit’s growth in a key market segment.

Cummins’ executives say that its workers have benefited from the use of IBM Traveler collaboration software and its functions have been well integrated into its model of how they work and help to increase the productivity of their workforce.

IBM is embracing the BYOD model internally, too. IBM encourages employees to use their own devices, including iPad, iPhone’s and Android smartphones and even Android tablets, and we are moving towards providing access to critical IBM business apps on both personal and corporate-issued mobile devices.

It’s clear: the time is right for organizations to implement a BYOD program in the work place. So, when opening that iPad 2 or Kindle Fire this year, don’t forget the power it holds for work as well as play.

If you’re going that route, here’s information about seven new mobile social networking and collaboration apps recent made available by IBM that are designed for enterprise computing. The new software is available for download from the most popular app stores.

Technorati Tags: BYOD, IBM

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MQTT is not easily digested by non-techies, but know this: it has the potential of doing for the Internet of Things what the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) did for the Internet that connects people. It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device.

Today marks a new departure for the protocol. Its creators, IBM and Italy’s Eurotech, are contributing the software to the Eclipse Foundation where it will be available to anyone who wants to use it under an open-source software license. The goal is to turn MQTT into a pervasive, cross-industry standard that will accelerate the transmission of information not just between machines but from businesses to businesses and from businesses to consumers–as in the Isle of Wight ferry application. “The goal is to get people to come together around this protocol and use it to connect all sorts of device and systems–so we can share information more easily,” says Andy Piper, a software researcher at the Hursley lab who is involved in the strategy for messaging technologies.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The protocol was created in 1999 by Stanford-Clark and colleagues at IBM and Eurotech, a leading supplier of embedded technologies. Since then, it has been used by companies and whole industries to improve communications between machines–for instance, messaging between sensors on a remote pipeline and server  computers that monitor the status of the pipes and the flow of material through them.

But now it’s clear that MQTT could do so much more. It could be a key enabler of the effort to make the human-made systems of the world work better by deploying trillions of sensing devices, connecting them via networks and using analytics to mine insights from the data so people can make better decisions.”We can’t make the most intelligent decisions unless we can connect to the instrumented world. That’s where MQTT fits in. It’s the the connection between the sensor chips and the network,” says Piper.

Innovative companies are already finding important uses for the protocol. Facebook, for instance, uses it as the basis for its new Facebook Messenger application, making it possible for people to reliably send instant messages and conduct online chats with one friend or several. The protocol is especially useful when people are communicating via smart phones–where connectivity can be an issue.  “We were able to achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds,” Lucy Zhang, one of the Facebook Messenger architects, wrote in an Aug. 12 blog post.

The connection with the Eclipse Foundation augurs well for the future of MQTT. Eclipse oversees a set of open source projects, software tools and frameworks that are used by millions of developers to help build applications. In addition, IBM and Eurotech hope to greatly expand the use of MQTT by getting it adopted as an international standard by a technology standards body.

In the meantime, it’s possible to configure sensor-based systems so they can take advantage of MQTT even though it’s not installed in the sensors themselves. Piper did just that with a pet project of his own–a weather station that he has installed in his backyard. The data from the sensors is transmitted to a server in his home via an RF connection. From there he shares it with with friends at work, the world via Twitter, and the open “Weather Underground” community, using MQTT as the protocol. Sometimes making a smarter planet starts in your own back yard.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Internet of Thinks, MQTT

Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innov

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.

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!

• Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
• Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
• Read more about social media analysis from Games 3 & 4.
• Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.

• Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, IBM, predictive analytics, Smarter Planet, social business