Unmetric gets funding to help brands gauge their social media clout
What would you get if social media ego measurement tool Klout had a baby with comScore, the Web traffic measurement firm? It would probably be Unmetric, a new “social media benchmark” tool that helps brands measure their social media engagement.
If you’re a big brand-owner all those Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets by your customers and ‘fans’ are fine but what do they really mean in terms of engagement and customer sentiment? More importantly, how do they stack up against your rivals? These are some of the questions Unmetric hopes to help answer after raising $3.2 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Chicago-based Unmetric will debut its Unmetric Score, tailored for Fortune 500 companies, based on weighted data from at least 24 qualitative and quantitative metrics measuring online brand performance versus competitors. The Unmetric Score will be somewhat similar to the Klout Score but Lux Narayan, Unmetric’s Chief Executive, hopes its own score will have, er…more clout (sorry).
As far as marketers and advertisers are concerned these are still very much the early days of social media as they try to engage with their customers in more tw0-way conversations in a range of these fledgling platforms. Even Narayan admits it’s too early to declare what the value of a “like” on Facebook really means in itself. But he believes a “like” for example offers a very important tool for brands in the new world.
“A Like is a right for the brand to engage in a conversation with their customer,” said Narayan.
Unmetric’s customers include Citibank and Nestle and measures data on more than 3,000 brands already.
Tello tries to make customer service gripes more effective
From firing off angry tweets to writing nasty Yelp reviews, there are many ways to vent about bad customer service in the age of social media.
But while it feels good to blow off steam, it doesn’t always produce results for companies or customers.
Tello, a year-old mobile app that lets consumers rate the employees who served them at restaurants, shops and other businesses, is looking to make all that online griping more productive for both consumers and businesses.
On Wednesday, Tello debuted a customer feedback service with an online tool that lets businesses respond directly to the customers who rated their employees. A manager at a restaurant can then reach out to a disgruntled customer to ask for another chance. But it’s not all bad–a retailer can inform a customer that the pair of shoes they wanted are now in stock and a business can also write back to thank a customer who gave an employee a stellar review.
The service also lets businesses track the ratings that their various employees are getting on Tello.
While Tello’s app remains free for customers, the company will charge bigger businesses $99 per month per location to use its service. A basic version of the service is free for businesses with up to three locations.
Tello has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of venture funding from True Ventures and Bullpen Capital.
Facebook’s Timeline: A catalog of nothing
We have seen the past, and it doesn’t work.
Over the past few weeks, Facebook has been rolling out Timeline, its effort to remake its members’ profile pages into scrapbooks that, like nearly everything published on the social web, is told in a reverse chronology. While redesigns always inspire grumbling, the discontent seems particularly strong this time — 70 percent of users surveyed say they just don’t like it, and Facebook’s own blog page announcing Timeline is filled with complaints in the comments.
At first glance, Timeline looks interesting — a retrospective of an online life. But soon enough, there’s plenty not to like. And the biggest problem isn’t that Facebook scrapped the elegant sparseness of the old profile page for a cluttered interface, or that many users will — yet again — need to reset their privacy settings, or even that, once you switch to Timeline, you can never go back to the old page.
No, the biggest problem with Timeline is that it feels like a mean prank Facebook is playing on its users. It confronts them with the unpleasant reality that the sum total of lives preserved by social media is not just mundane but inauthentic, devoid of what gives meaning to the very thing it’s meant to catalog: life.
The press billed Timeline as a kind of scrapbook. But it actually couldn’t be further from one. A scrapbook preserves symbols of moments with deep emotional value. Facebook is an accidental diary of our procrastinations — the games, political rants, lolcats and memes that distract us in the moment but lose meaning even after a few days. If a scrapbook holds the memories of our lives, Facebook preserves the background noise. Timeline makes this all too painfully clear.
Facebook, however, has big plans for Timeline, which is why it’s not letting anyone escape from Timeline’s clutches. Timeline is the front-end user interface for Social Graph, Facebook’s grand plan to create a social platform for the Web itself. Users will share and discover video, music and other content on any number of websites and mobile apps, and their Timelines will act as a central clearinghouse for all of it.
Blah blah blah blah. Could care less about the grand strategy behind the timeline. All i know is that i hate it! Looking at someone’s wall should not be an arduous task. This is the same kind of nonsense that made MYSPACE so unbearable. Seems like their are too many guys sitting around just trying to justify their salaries. Some just never learn “IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!”
Five 2011 tech earthquakes
By John C Abell The opinions expressed are his own.
Pick a year: It’s easy to look back and convince yourself That Was The Year That Was in tech, partly because the pace of change is so rapid and partly because we so readily embrace and then quickly depend on things that are completely different. Consider this: When the class of 2012 was applying to college, there was no iPhone. Until those students were just about at the end of their junior years, there was no iPad. Both of these nascent devices now define the mobile Internet, which is where all the action is.
But 2011 had some pretty remarkable advances that seem to be the start of inexorable things to come, as well as some surprising and sad examples of demise, whose impact will surely be felt for years to come, in ways that are currently near-impossible to predict.
Some may argue that 2011 was the year of the tablet (redux), because of the spritely launch of Amazon’s Fire and Barnes & Noble’s reboot of the Nook color. I say, it was bound to happen, and that the only really interesting thing is that content companies are giving Apple a bit of competition, and not the hardware bigwigs.
The cloud was big in 2011, but in a way it just seemed to finally achieve escape velocity after Apple created iCloud within its rigorously controlled ecosystem.
Here are five tech events from 2011 that may not seem entirely obvious but which I think will resonate for years.
Siri
@Vidya3049 You are correct, sir. We will all be looking for early cracks. I think, however, that there is enough in the secret Apple pipeline to stay on the crest of the wave for many years to come — we’ll be seeing what was in Steve’s cupboard well past 2013, I would venture to say.
Tech wrap: D.Telekom may be forced to play with Sprint
Deutsche Telekom may be forced into a tie-up of its sub-scale U.S. wireless unit with Sprint Nextel after a $39 billion deal with AT&T collapsed.
AT&T said on Monday it had dropped its bid for T-Mobile USA, bowing to fierce regulatory opposition and leaving both companies scrambling for alternatives.
The collapse of AT&T’s deal to buy D.Telekom’s U.S. wireless unit may be welcome news for network equipment makers, as money earmarked for the merger will be freed up for investments.
Research In Motion’s woes continued as sales in the United States fell for a fifth straight quarter in Q3 even as the BlackBerry maker’s overall revenue jumped by $1 billion from a year earlier, a regulatory filing released on Tuesday showed.
Financial advisers in the U.S. are seeing fewer benefits from their use of social media, a survey by Aite Group showed on Tuesday.
“Social media has been over-hyped and the benefits just aren’t there for a lot of advisers,” said Aite senior analyst Ron Shevlin in an interview.
Electronic Arts invested more money and firepower into “Star Wars: The Old Republic” than it has on any game in its 30-year history. Starting today, the company will find out if the bet pays off.
A more controlled stumbling with StumbleUpon channels
It’s been two-and-half years since online social media service StumbleUpon hit the eject button from eBay, its one-time corporate parent.
Since then, the company has grown its users and its staff. The San Francisco-based company now has 100 employees (25 percent of whom are former Googlers, the company says), up from 30 employees at the time of the eBay spin-off.
And the service, which lets users discover interesting Web content that has been flagged by friends and people with similar interests, now counts 20 million registered users, compared to 10 million about one year ago.
Now StumbleUpon is rolling out what it claims is its biggest post-eBay change yet, with the launch of a revamped website design and the introduction “channels.”
By offering specialized channels, StumbleUpon will allow users to fine-tune the stream of Web content that they see on the service. A user’s StumbleUpon stream should become a little more relevant, founder and CEO Garrett Camp explained during a recent visit to the company’s SF headquarters.
For example, if someone is interested in a particular celebrity – such as actor Tom Hanks – rather than information about celebrities in general, they can follow the Tom Hanks channel. Result: Tom Hanks-related content is sure to be included in that person’s stream of Web content.
There will initially be about 250 channels, representing various celebrities and brands such as the History Channel, Funny or Die and ESPN Sports Center, said Camp, with more to come.
Congress plans Facebook “hackathon” to boost engagement with public
Top legislators on both sides of the aisle in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Thursday they will work with Facebook engineers and independent developers to make it easier for the public to engage with lawmakers and follow the legislative process.
The first-ever Congressional Facebook Developer Hackathon will take place Dec. 7 at the Capitol, bringing together lawmakers, academics and developers to find ways to make Congress more transparent and accessible.
A hackathon, a term coined by computer programmers over a decade ago, generally refers to a meeting where new programs and applications are collaboratively developed.
With the growing influence social media like Facebook and Twitter has in people’s everyday lives, “it is essential that Congress fully incorporate these platforms into its daily operations,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.
Cantor will host the event along with Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer.
“Americans have a right to petition government, and new online technologies are giving that right exciting new possibilities,” Hoyer said in a statement.
While logistics will not allow for the all-night coding sessions typical of hackathons, the event will look at how legislative data that the House has already made available can be used by developers to build apps the public can easily understand and garner information from.
IBM knows a thing or two about shoes. Retailers, take note.
By Nicola Leske In the fickle world of fashion, the skill to predict what will be en vogue next is invaluable to retailers around the world. While some will argue that it takes style and expertise to predict what customers will want to wear even before they know it, IBM begs to differ. It comes down to science, specifically IBM’s analytics software. Take shoes for example, in particular the height of heels. “We used IBM software to identify those who are the influencers online by searching the web for blogs about shoes,” said John Buscemi. “We found tens of thousands and narrowed it down to those who were linked to a lot and who in turn linked to a lot of other people…if you had a map they would sit at the center of the social network,” Buscemi said. According to that analysis, heels are coming down. “Key trend-watching bloggers between 2008 and 2009 wrote consistently about heels from five to eight inches, but by mid 2011 they were writing about the return of the kitten heel and the perfect flat from Jimmy Choo and Louboutin,” said Trevor Davis, a consumer expert with IBM’s Global Business Services. IBM said the data could be used by shoe manufacturers and retailers looking for insight into the kind of shoes to manufacture and sell in the coming season — and could potentially put fashion consultants out of business. By the way, high heels have traditionally been linked to a falling economy — think high heel pumps during the Great Depression and stilettos following the dot-com bust a decade ago. But this time the decline of the heel may not be a sign of an economic upturn but a grudging acceptance of a long road ahead best to be taken on more modest shoes. “Usually, in an economic downturn, heels go up and stay up – as consumers turn to more flamboyant fashions as a means of fantasy and escape,” Davis said. “This time, something different is happening — perhaps a mood of long-term austerity is evolving among consumers sparking a desire to reduce ostentation in everyday settings.”
Perrier wants to tell you where to go out tonight
By James Ledbetter The views expressed are his own.
Last year on a drizzly Seattle morning I visited the corporate headquarters of Starbucks to talk about social media. At the time, Starbucks had about 2 million of what were then called “fans” on its Facebook page. That audience was both large and engaged enough, a company representative said, that Starbucks had recently been approached by another firm that wanted to advertise specifically on the Starbucks Facebook page. Starbucks declined the offer, but only after serious consideration. “We had to decide if we really wanted to be on that side of the publishing business,” the representative told me.
It’s a striking reminder that in the Twitter-and-tablet age, not only can anyone become a publisher, but for big consumer-facing companies, the real question is: how much of a publisher do you want to be? The question carries an added weight when you consider how many traditional publishers these days are trying to exit that business.
Non-publishers becoming publishers is not new. For twenty years, the Italian clothing retailer Benetton has put out a magazine called Colors. Richard Branson had a buzzy launch for his “Project” magazine/app last year. One of the more ambitious and technologically sophisticated efforts of recent years has been American Express’s Open Forum which — in addition to aggregating (usually small-business-related) content published elsewhere — has commissioned videos from traditional media outlets and then distributed them through a Web ad platform. (I made a few such videos at a previous job.) The advantages are obvious: unlike an ad placed in a magazine or on TV, the company gets to control how much or little integration with the content it wants to have, or even control the content altogether.
Yet even with such precedents, it’s rare to see something as sweeping as the Web site Société Perrier, which describes itself as “a global source for everything interesting in art, music, fashion, travel, nightlife and cocktail culture.” If you want to know who’s playing this weekend in Dubai, or how to get into a “secret bar” in Moscow, you can find out from this site, which is 100% produced by the company that’s sold fizzy water for more than a century (and in 1992 became part of Nestlé). At least half a dozen staff editors run the site from New York, L.A. and London, and dozens of others contribute on a freelance basis.
To hear the company tell it, Société Perrier is an urgently needed solution to an image problem. Perrier has to “recover its iconic status,” Jorge Torres, marketing group manager for premium brands at Nestle Waters, told me. “It’s a little bit old, and a little bit dusty.” The answer to that problem is usually the same — engage the younger consumer — but if everyone knew how to quench that thirst, Perrier wouldn’t be in this position today. Within the United States, the challenge is even larger, because our tastes are increasingly domestic. While the U.S. continues to be the world’s biggest market by volume for bottled water — and Nestlé the biggest player in it — U.S. sales of imported water are down 44% from their peak in 2004, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Perrier, then, needed to find a way to be both global — where Perrier is still growing — and local. Torres says the site actually grew out of a realization that Perrier was contributing to a number of interesting cultural events and institutions all across the world, and there was no central place to promote them all. Using the marketing budget from the bigger markets to create a platform that could highlight what was happening in places like Sao Paolo or Toronto with fewer resources just made sense. Michael Blatter, whose Mirrorball agency helped strategize the site, says: “Société Perrier has global presence with local activation.” The target, Torres says, is the “social hedonist,” whom Perrier wants to reach at every decision point, including what-should-I-do-tonight?
what a scam the main business is!? transporting water from perrier, france to 1000s of miles away for drinking, not because there is no drinking water there, but to make a profit despite of being vastly resource wasteful.
The Cain mutiny
Everyone is now calling Herman Cain toast because of poorly-handled revelations that the apparent GOP presidential front-runner was the object of a couple of sexual harassment lawsuits that were apparently settled back when he was a lobbyist in the 1990s.
This, of course, comes on the heels of everyone saying Cain has no chance because, well, he’s Herman freaking Cain, who has no organization, no apparent campaign strategy, sports a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat and hired a chief of staff who doesn’t think twice about puffing a cigarette in a web ad for his candidate.
In other words, this is a guy who the political establishment didn’t ever take seriously. Some Republicans are as scared (I would think) as some Democrats are craving the prospect of a Cain presidential nomination. It’s just like when some damned with or without faint praise other Tea Party favorites like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry in the secret (or not so) hope that someone who actually could appeal to a wider electorate would get the nod (hint: Mitt Romney) without getting too beat up by allies before enemies had their opportunity.
I say everybody, but Nate Silver of 538 has it right: There is a difference between impossible and improbable. A huge difference. Just like the biggest leap is from zero to one, since going from nothing to something is always more disruptive than going from something to more. There is enormous power in the Power of One, even in the Age of the Internet.
The early “defense” put up by/on behalf of Cain is to link him to another very conservative black political figure who rather more defiantly and directly told his attackers to screw off. By using the loaded phrase “high-tech lynching” Cain defenders are saying their guy is being persecuted as much as Clarence Thomas was.
Of course, the battle lines drawn at what is still known as the Thomas/Hill hearings have not receded one inch in two decades. But both Thomas — who was confirmed by the Senate to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after Anita Hill publicly accused him of sexual harassment — and Professor Hill herself have survived and thrived.
@Quatermass: Your link says nothing about anyone supporting or sponsoring (i.e. providing money) to Mr. Cain. Working for an organization in 2006 does not mean he has received money or is getting financial support in 2011. Where are the facts supporting this?
