The Most Social Batsman

IBM has taken its social analytics capabilities to the subcontinent.

If you’ve ever visited India, you know that the name of the game there is cricket.

So IBM applied its advanced analytics and natural language processing capabilities recently to try and get underneath the “social sentiment” around that country’s leading cricket stars.

With little question, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar continues to rule the game of cricket, both on the pitch and on social networks, and is followed by captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and opening batsman Murali Vijay.

This all on the even of the last test match in the ongoing Border-Gavaskar cricket series between India and Australia.

Ravinda Jadeja came out on top as India’s most popular bowler for the match, but nonetheless, it was Tendulkar who consistently lead the social conversation during the period.

A whopping 50 percent of the public sentiment revolved around his batting performance, followed by other that topics that include his past records (which are virtually endless), his stature, and his retirement plans, among others.

The index further revealed that negative sentiment towards Captain Dhoni was high at the beginning of the first match.

However, his on field performance is reflective of how public sentiments changed making Dhoni the most positively referenced player in the series. Another interesting highlight was the emergence of Shikhar Dhawan on the social networks after his debut century — within 5 days, there was 200 percent growth in his online conversations.

For the first time, IBM applied advanced analytics software and natural language processing to cricket to build a social score board for the Indian Players based on the intensity of the sentiment and volume of online conversations.

Over 1.2 lakh posts (~ 120,000) on a variety of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the blogging community were analysed during the first three matches in the current series.

Speaking about IBM’s Social Sentiment Index, Virginia Sharma, Vice President, Marketing & Communication, IBM India/South Asia, said of the effort:

“IBM is changing the game — both in business and in sports. By applying the social sentiment lens to cricket that has a multi-screen experience, we demonstrated how analytics can provide real time exciting insights into public preferences. This can be leveraged by organizations across the media, entertainment and sports industries to better understand their audience, determine endorsement values, and deliver effective marketing campaigns for their businesses”.

About the IBM Social Sentiment Index

The IBM Social Sentiment Index uses advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data in order to assess public opinions.

The Index can identify and measure positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared in public forums such as Twitter, blogs, message boards and other social media, and provide quick insights into consumer conversations about issues, products and services.

Representing a new form of market research, social sentiment analyses offer organizations new insights into Big Data that can help them better understand and respond to consumer trends.

Go here for more information about IBM Social Analytics technology.

From Liking To Leading: Driving A “Purposeful” Social Business Strategy

At IBM Connect 2013 in Orlando, Florida, IBM announced earlier today new software and cloud-based services to help business leaders, such as chief marketing officers and chief human resource officers, advance their organization’s transformation with the adoption of social business technology.

The new offerings will help business leaders integrate IBM’s industry-leading social networking and analytics technologies into their business processes to empower the 21st Century workforce and transform client experiences.

Leading From The Front (Office)

Just as social networking has flourished in the consumer realm, Forrester has identified social business as an emerging business category, with the social technology industry growing to $6.4 billion by 2016.

Increasingly, front-office leaders, such as chief human resource officers, are looking to form a smarter workforce to unlock human potential and unleash innovation. According to a recent IBM CEO study, 70 percent of companies surveyed cited human capital as the single biggest contributor to sustained economic value.

The new social software offerings will help companies gain deeper insights into big data generated through the use of social networks. Organizations applying analytics to their data for competitive advantage are more likely to substantially outperform their industry peers.

Today, leading organizations, including 61 percent of the Fortune 100, are licensed to use IBM’s social business technologies to transform their front office business operations. This includes connecting employees globally to empower faster decision making and analyzing big data from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and public forums, to react swiftly to customer trends and outpace competitors.

Using Analytics To Better Understand Social Behavior And Business Opportunity

At the same time, social media and predictive analytics have emerged as indispensable tools for CMOs, who are using technology to make the customer experience more intelligent, intuitive and individualized.

According to the IBM CMO study, 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three-to-five years to communicate with their clients.

IBM’s new software and cloud-based services include:

• A new Web-based social networking environment that provides HR leaders with a better way to recruit and onboard new employees, while giving employees access to digital media and data in real-time, enabling faster decision making.
• Software to help marketing teams design sophisticated advertising campaigns and quickly publish those campaigns to leading social networks, resulting in a consistent customer experience through every online channel.
• The next release of IBM’s industry-leading social networking platform will further enable users to access and analyze big data from inside and outside the organization, including Facebook, Twitter, audio and video.
• Already in beta, IBM is also announcing its plans to release the industry’s first truly social email client incorporating file sharing, activity streams and a simplified user interface. This will be the first major release of Notes and Domino in five years.

“IBM is revolutionizing front-office processes with the application of cognitive computing and advanced analytics,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. “Social business has transitioned from being an emerging idea to a fundamental platform that clients everywhere are using to change the way they empower their employees and engage their customers.”

Enabling the 21st Century Workforce

Following its $1.3B acquisition of Kenexa in December 2012, IBM today announced a new Web-based social networking environment that is expected to integrate IBM’s industry-leading enterprise social networking platform with Kenexa’s recruiting, on-boarding, learning and performance management solutions.

The IBM Employee Experience Suite will help HR leaders attract, empower and motivate talent to address skill and resource gaps while enabling their workforce to deliver better results for their clients.

For example, employees can use social networking, e-meeting and instant messaging capabilities to access applications and interactive rich media such as videos, resulting in improved collaboration and greater teaming across globally distributed teams.

The Suite intends to integrate with Kenexa’s Applicant Tracking System allowing HR leaders to more swiftly educate existing employees and identify prospective talent. HR leaders will be able to set up a recruiting site, use it to onboard employees, present training options, administer surveys to employees and manage performance. Prospective employees can view the HR data on the broadest range of mobile devices, helping HR departments reach an increasingly social-savvy and mobile workforce.

Transforming The Client Experience

The rise of the social-savvy, empowered consumer has prompted organizations around the globe to use social business and analytics capabilities to improve the customer experience. IBM today announced new capabilities that allow marketing teams to easily design, test and optimize sophisticated advertising campaigns.

For example, a new Social Media Publisher capability in IBM’s web experience software allows CMOs to push content, such as ad campaigns or promotions, to leading social networks with one simple click and without involving already resource strapped specialized IT teams.

Social Software for the Enterprise

With today’s news, IBM is introducing the next version of its social networking platform, IBM Connections. The new software will further enable users to access and analyze big data from inside and outside the organization, including Facebook, Twitter, audio and video.

Available in March 2013, IBM Connections 4.5 will include embedded document management capabilities so that members of a network can access, analyze and act on wide ranges of data types in the context of their work to improve decision-making and business results. IBM Connections’ Content Manager feature will allow teams and communities to harness an organization’s collective intelligence to solve business problems, increase productivity, and drive profit.

IBM Connections clients have access to new social features in the cloud, including blogging and ideation in Communities and access to information. In addition, IBM Connections will include enhanced integration of social capabilities in the Microsoft Outlook client, allowing users to access their social data such as profiles, files, and communities directly in Microsoft Outlook.

In December, IBM expanded its social business platform to include social document editing on-premises and in the cloud. The recently released IBM Docs, available on-premises and as part of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, allows browser users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents to improve productivity.

IBM also announced that it expects to ship IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9 in March 2013. IBM Notes and Domino 9 will be the industry’s first truly social email client and delivers a social experience to users, whether using a browser or on the broadest range of mobile devices.

IBM Notes and Domino are used by more than half of the Fortune 500. IBM mobile capabilities manage and support a variety of platforms, including Apple (iOS 6), Android, Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows and Blackberry smartphones (including BlackBerry 10).

Go here for more information about IBM’s social business initiative and creating a smarter workforce.

You can also follow #IBMSocialBiz and #IBMConnect on Twitter.

Alister Rennie, General Manager, Social Business @ IBM, addresses how organizations everywhere can move “from liking to leading” and build “purposeful” social business strategies.

A Steampunk Renaissance

Steampunk: A sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century.

That’s how Wikipedia characterizes the phenomenon.

And based on an analysis of more than a half million blog public posts on message boards, blogs, social media sites, and news sources, IBM predicts that “steampunk” will be a major trend to soon bubble up and take hold in the retail industry.

Through its sentiment analysis, IBM has found that steampunk is evolving into a cultural “meme” via a series of leaps across cultural domains (such as fiction, visual arts, etc.)

A combination of science fiction and fantasy, steampunk is a sub-genre based around gothic machinery and the industrialized civilization of the 19th century.

Using advanced analytics, IBM has been able to track the spread of trends geographically, chronologically, and now, culturally. From 2009 to 2012, the amount of steampunk chatter has increased eleven-fold.

Since 2010, more than two dozen U.S. department stores and specialty retailers have become steampunk savvy. During the next two years, IBM predicts that steampunk will shift from low production, high cost “craft” manufacturing to mass production.

Following are a few of the sound bytes that support this forecast:

• 33 percent of online fashion chatter around steampunk can be found on gaming sites
• 2010 saw a year on year increase in chatter of 296 percent. This increase can be attributed to steampunk-inspired NYC ComicCon events in October of 2010
• Twitter is the #1 social network for steampunk chatter; hosts six times the number of discussions as Facebook
• 63 percent of fashion discussions around steampunk are initiated by individuals less than 30 years old
• 55 percent of social sentiment chatter for steampunk fashion derived by blogs

“Smart retailers are using social analytics to better understand, predict and shape consumer demand for “must-have” products before a particular trend gets saturated in the marketplace,” said Trevor Davis, Consumer Products Expert with IBM’s Global Business Services. “By staying ahead of a trend as it develops, a retailer can more effectively control critical merchandizing, inventory and planning decisions. Technology can provide tremendous foresight to help businesses differentiate what is a fleeting fad, versus what is an enduring trend.”

About the IBM Social Sentiment Index

The IBM Social Sentiment Index uses advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data in order to assess public opinions.

The Index can identify and measure positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared in public forums such as Twitter, blogs, message boards and other social media, and provide quick insights into consumer conversations about issues, products and services.

Representing a new form of market research, social sentiment analyses offer organizations new insights that can help them better understand and respond to consumer trends. IBM’s social sentiment capabilities are delivered on an industry-leading big data platform that can access, store and analyze any data regardless of how fast it is moving, what type it is, or where it resides.

For more information about IBM Social Sentiment Index, please visit www.ibm.com/social-sentiment. Follow the conversation at #IBMIndex on Twitter.

Live @ IBM InterConnect 2012: Deepak Advani On Big Data Analytics

Deepak Advani, vice president with IBM’s Business Analytics organization, owns strategy and development for products in the business intelligence and predictive analytics arenas.

Deepak Advani has had a rich and storied career, starting out with IBM before later becoming chief marketing officer for Lenovo, then returning to the IBM fold to focus on the massive information management opportunity.

In particular, on business analytics, and how the improved utilization of technology for analyzing big data can help companies drive desired business outcomes.

Deepak owns the strategy and development for IBM’s Business Analytics products and solutions group, and his portfolio includes products for business intelligence, predictive analytics, risk analytics, social media analytics and financial performance management.

At IBM InterConnect recently in Singapore, Deepak sat down for a chat and explained how organizations should go about tackling the business analytics opportunity. He also provided some insight into the PureSystems PureData announcement, as well as to how organizations can more effectively utilize social intelligence data.