We are going to get to London early, so let us know if you would like to meet up before the conference.

We will also be available to chat during the conference.

You can either send us an e-mail (contact@synthesio.fr), tweet us, call, or comment below

Premier indice de maturité, ce marché a enfin une dénomination claire en Français : la e-réputation.

Le concept équivalent en Anglais, l’ORM (Online Reputation Management), a encore du mal à s’imposer dans les faits, car on lui préfère encore souvent les termes de Social Media Monitoring (SMM), de SMA (Social Media Analysis) ou encore de SMO (Social Media Optimization), qui s’inscrivent dans la continuité du terme désormais consacré de SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Peu importe finalement, du moment que les clients savent de quoi il s’agit : nous pouvons constater chez Synthesio que c’est désormais le cas, ce qui fait gagner bien du temps à tout le monde !

Second indice de maturité, ce marché fait enfin l’objet de prévisions chiffrables : selon BIA/Kelsey, il devrait grimper de 460 millions de dollars en 2008 à 3,1 milliards en 2013. En France, notre confrère Digimind estime que le marché avoisinera les 110 millions d’euros en 2010.

Au-delà de chiffres toujours sujets à discussion, c’est la tendance de fond qu’il importe de retenir : la gestion de e-réputation se démocratise et devient petit à petit incontournable, au même titre que la Business Intelligence ou le Web Analytics il y a quelques années. Toutes les grandes entreprises, et à terme toutes les entreprises quelles qu’elles soient, sont concernées par cette vague de fond qui a transféré une partie significative de l’image des marques dans les mains de internautes.

Dernier indice de maturité, les acteurs du marché tiennent désormais un discours structuré et cohérent, qui laisse en arrière les errements des débuts :

• Il joue de moins en moins sur le registre des risques (avec l’évocation menaçante de crises d’image ponctuelles) et de plus en plus sur celui des opportunités (avec l’alimentation en continu des stratégies marketing, communication et relation client). Ainsi, les entreprises prennent progressivement conscience de la valeur ajoutée que représente la gestion en temps réel de leur image sur le web, avec notamment le développement rapide du métier de community manager.

• Il insiste sur la nécessaire composante humaine de ce métier, au détriment des fausses promesses technologiques comme par exemple l’analyse automatique de tonalité qui n’est ni pour demain, ni même pour après-demain.

• Enfin, il montre le consensus qui s’est établi autour des bonnes pratiques en matière de gestion de e-réputation : Listen (écouter), Analyze (analyser), Engage (agir). Or, quand un marché a une promesse de valeur clairement identifiée, cela bénéficie à tous.

L’arrivée progressive à maturité du marché de la e-réputation constitue donc une excellente nouvelle, aussi bien pour les acteurs du marché comme nous, que pour nos clients !

by Thibault

Influence is a subject that is continually being debated, but we would like to offer you 3 ways that we measure influence to get your feedback:

1. Identify influencers at site level

To get started in our look at influencers online, let’s first take a look at the first level of analysis : the site.

We look at the number of inbound and outbound links, the type of site, the frequency and volume of publications, the Google PageRank, and  the site audience. Although the influence of an individual site varies with the scope and parameters of monitoring, brands must have a way of quantifying this slipperiest of slippery topics.

Forum Auto, for example, is ranked as an 8.7  on our influence bell curve. You can see the number of inbound and outbound links from various related sites below, as well as use this graphic interchangeably to bring any of the linked sites to the center to be analyzed, just as we have done with Forum Auto.

2. Identify influencers at post level

While the site on which information is published online affects how influential the information may become, an article (blog post, forum thread, tweet, etc.) itself can become more or less influential over time depending on how many times it has been shared, where, with whom, etc.

Marshall Sponder pointed out that it is the influence of an author that may weigh more heavily than that of the actual site (and will be speaking about it in London in March) ; why not go to the post itself ?

News first broke of an airplane crashing into the Hudson River when a bystander put up photos on Twitpic of the disaster, tweeting,

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy”

This information was reposted multiple times and the author was interviewed by MSNBC only 40 minutes later about what he saw.

3. Identify influencers on a one-to-one basis

How IS it that some celebrities get paid $10,000 (or more!) per tweet?

If you get more, then we owe you a congratulations ! But otherwise the rest of us are just trying to figure out who it is that is leading conversations about your brand or industry and how you can connect with them.

Once you can identify influential people on Twitter within your community, or within the communities that you are monitoring, you can better determine if it is worth your resources to engage with this person.

Southwest proved that engaging with Kevin Smith was crucial when he began posting pictures of himself before being asked to step off of a flight recently ; they responded within 20 minutes!

We have recently launched our own widget for identifying influencers on Twitter that are within your scope, but there are other tools available such as Tweepsearch, Klout, etc.

This list is certainly not comprehensive and still lives much room for debate about the power of influence, how brands can tap into its power, and best techniques for gaining influence online.

What we’d like to know is how you identify influence and use it in your social media campaigns? How do you see the relationship between influence and participation? What can we do to better help you monitor and engage in social media ?

by Michelle

Please watch Michelle’s (our Community Manager’s) video below for an overview of these new features !

Verbatim tab

The upper part of the screen now has 3 different viewing modes:

1. The usual timeline

2. A dynamic tag cloud that you can navigate with by clicking on a tag (which will bring forward the corresponding verbatim). Each cloud corresponds to other filters you have chosen below to provide you with a real-time conversation digest !

3. Simplified source profile that display when you click on a source name

These 3 modes of navigation are interchangeable at any moment via the “Actions” box which also allows you to export the data in Excel format and to display a more detailed profile of the site (which will improve considerably in the coming months; we’ll be in touch )

Topics timeline metric

We’ve added the capability for you to:

- Choose the topics to compare at topic and sub-topic level

- Look at the cumulative data by week, month, or trimester

- Display (or not) the totals on the graph

All of the parameters have now been grouped into a “Settings” icon to allow for more readable menu selections, something we aim to integrate into other future metrics.

We’ve also added some other upgrades to allow you to do more, faster:  drill down on the verbatim page by topic or sub-topic and fly through the data with a higher display speed.

As always, we look forward to your comments, questions, and concerns.

by Thibault

In case you missed the latest news, Kevin Smith, an actor and director of the film “Clerks” was recently kicked off a Southwest Flight for apparently being well… too fat. He posted a Twitpic, tweeting “Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!” to which Southwest replied within 15 minutes, offering him a voucher and an apology. Southwest’s new “Customer of Size” policy, “requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling” which had not been the case of Mr. Smith who later claimed he had been seated comfortably and did not understand.

Clearly, Southwest has gotten a lot of attention.While the debates fly over whether Southwest was justified in its move, bloggers, Facebookers, Twitterers, even  YouTubers and more have deluged the Internet with articles about whether they should have such a policy at all, whether celebrities should be kicked off planes (Smith writes “clearly the notion of me going on Larry King scared the shit out of somebody over there”),  ad infinitum.

Southwest has ultimately reached out to the director by having a representative call him personally to discuss the matter and clear up the situation. According to Kevin Smith,

“So, Linda: I appreciate the effort you made, the time you spent with me on the phone, and the work you put into this. You, too, were a reasonable cat during our conversation. .. Thank you for that, Linda - and for being human.”

The aftermath

Although the director encouraged people to talk about “other stuff” on Twitter tomorrow, he has no idea of the monsoon of case studies, brand reputational analyses, white books, and slide shares that he has unleashed.Clearly, Southwest was monitoring social media for mentions of its name and had a crisis plan in action, even if it was the person that happened to be assigned to the Twitter account that night.

The question

So what?! He just got special treatment because he’s a celebrity. Southwest’s rapid response is certainly a nod to the current upswing in social media monitoring for online reputation management purposes, and we commend them for responding so quickly. The fact is, though: every online comment is important to a brand, just as every offline comment is. Although it is impossible for brands to cull all conversations that take place about them all over the world, the Internet is one sphere where you can closely observe how people are interacting with your brand.

Regular buzz monitoring is what can help you detect early warning signals like people retweeting Kevin Smith’s tweet (copying it along to people that are following their message feeds), republications of blog posts, increased numbers of inbound links, the growing influence of certain articles, and the influence of who’s talking. One person all by themself may not be as influential as Kevin Smith, but the fact that they are connected to people that ARE changes the playing field a bit. All it takes is for that influential person to care enough to pass the message along, and the propogation continues. Influencers online are not just celebrities. Monitoring is a crucial daily activity (if not hourly, every minute… ) that can help brands identify risks and opportunities and manage their online presences and reputations.

The turnaround

How would you advise Southwest for their online reputation strategy? Do you think Southwest was effective in managing their online reputation? Did they do the right thing by reaching out so publicly?

Looking forward to your comments and questions, below and @Synthesio.

by Michelle

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING MASTER-CLASS

Wednesday 31st March 8.30am - 5.30pm

hosted by  (venue tba)

The bootcamp will cover :

• Getting Started with Social Media Monitoring
• How to Choose The Right Social Media Monitoring Tool
• How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service
• How to Monitor Sentiment and Benefit from The Insight this Provides
• How to Identify influencers and Build Valuable Relationships with them
• How to Monitor and Engage with Customers in Real-time
• How to Measure the Success of your Social Media Marketing Campaigns

With featured speakers :

• Nathan Gilliatt, the principal of Social Target. He also blogs at The Net-Savvy Executive and runs Social Media Analysis, the industry portal for social media intelligence and analytics.
• Marshall Sponder, Analyst & PR/SEO Consultant, the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, writes a monthly column for Entrepreneur.com, and has his own analytics consultancy, Now-Seo.
• Philip Sheldrake, Founder & Partner, Influence Crowd, and the author of “The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008“.
• Katy Howell, Managing Director, Immediate Future.

There is a limited number of early-bird tickets so get yours soon and subscribe for e-mail updates.

See you there!

by Michelle

See who’s talking on Twitter

Identify who the key influencers are that are talking about your brand. Discover how influential they are in terms of their activity, reach, and authority and use social media for what it’s meant to be used for - finding out about your customers so that they can find out about you. Find out where they work, where they’re from, what their interests are, etc. to begin to develop relationships with Twitter users that are influential for your brand.

Focus on key influencers

Maximizing your ROI on social media is a topic that has long been debated - as it should be! - and is now something that social media monitoring tools can help you quantify. As Olivier Blanchard, business strategist specialized in new media, highlighted in his presentation the Basics of Social Media ROI

Losing even 1% of your budget’s efficiency could seriously ruin your day

Our new influencer widget allows you to compare the profiles of advocates and detractors and engage with them directly from your Synthesio dashboard. You can also compare the number of their on-topic updates and overall scores of influence.

Respond to your advocates and detractors

What good would an analytical tool be if it didn’t allow you to respond directly to the Internet users that interest you? Interact with your customers to encourage potential or existing brand advocates and mitigate the concerns of online detractors. Real-time comments means that your brand is under pressure to respond as quickly as possible to comments made about your brand, products, company, people, or industry.

Take advantage of Twitter and use it to answer questions, share news, identify risks and opportunities, and take full advantage of all that it has to offer.

Your turn

What would you like to see added to the widget? What would help you, as a marketer, do your job better?by Michelle

We’re a little crazy: we may have possibly kind of drank a little bit of Kool-Aid. And we may sometimes think (even though we write that we don’t) that marketing using social media is the end-all be-all of marketing, Amen.

But, who isn’t if you really like your job? If you got to spend all of your work time connecting with people and building relationships that are enriching for both parties (meaning profitable for you and valuable for your customer), wouldn’t you want to brag about your job a little bit? It’s just, we feel like we get to have fun doing our jobs, and who doesn’t want a little bit of that in their life?

We know it’s not perfect: We would love to say that we have all of the metrics figured out and can calculate with a certain percentage of error and standard deviation what your return on investment will be; but the truth is – we can’t! If we could, why would we all be competing? There would be one of us. Because he would have won and become the monopolist.

So bear with us, we’re trying to figure it out the best we can because we all know that in a free labor market, whoever does it better gets the clients. And client satisfaction.

[Does the double-hand clap from Top Gun]

We still think you need it: Because the truth is, everyone is getting interested, even if they’re not actively participating in some form of social networking…yet. So why would you not go hire an ethnologist account manager to discover the wants and needs of the new consumer culture? Because the more we share information, the more we change – and the faster! So we need to be adapting our tools more quickly to appeal to the consumers’ desires. And because if we don’t, our competitors will. …guess who wins.

by Michelle

Travelers could easily find out that if they took the (free) airport shuttle to a hotel that was a little farther out, they could save money - more shopping, please!

Accor International hotels decided it was time to take action and start listening to what consumers have to say about hotels and hospitality services online.

Virginie Bignon, of Accor in Paris, met with us to discuss :

- Why it is important to monitor online conversations?

- Why did they choose Synthesio?

- Are online conversations helpful or just noise?

What about you? How are you listening to social media?