Yahoo! Finance adds sentiment.

Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) added a “community sentiment” section to the front page of Yahoo Finance yesterday, showing stocks with increases of bearish or bullish messages in Yahoo’s own discussion boards. Collective Intellect performs the analysis and gains a persistent endorsement on the Yahoo Finance site.

Yahoo describes it this way:

Community Sentiment shows the stock message boards with significant increases in bearish and bullish message board activity in the last 24 hours when compared to the board’s 30-day average. The data is provided by Collective Intellect, Inc., a social media intelligence company.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management // Add Comment »

Monday’s sessions at the conference were really informative. The crowd that attended the social media sessions — a mix of entrepreneur doctors, health-related Web 2.0 companies, PR firms, healthcare bloggers, public policy organizations, pharma and medical device execs — were very knowledgeable about the implications of social media environments for patients, doctors and corporate liability.

Not surprisingly, the session I spoke on — “Open Brands: Trading Message Control for Consumer’s Trust” was steeped in conversation about Adverse Drug Effect (ADE) reporting. Lots of discussion about why it is valuable for pharma companies to be more transparent with patients and doctors. One way to do this is by using a monitoring and tracking service such as our Media Intellect offering to track ADE — some of our pharma customers are doing this already using our service.

Some big pharma is afraid to read consumer-generated content, because of the fear of burdensome reporting requirements. I heard many comments at the conference from companies who have talked with the FDA about monitoring social media, and, the consensus is that on a case by case basis, the FDA is willing to let companies monitor social media and only report when they meet the identification requirements (a name and contact info for the poster). Since most message board posts do not have these identifiers, there isn’t a reporting requirement.

As more social media-type of environments come in to play — and I saw many at this conference — it will be interesting to see when pharma will decide to open up this barrier to consumers and doctors. I believe it will happen out of necessity, as more and more people go online to discover the vast amount of healthcare-related information you can find in social media environments.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

Flew into Chicago this evening to be part of a panel on Open Brands at the Healthcare Blogging and Social Media Summit happening tomorrow all day at the Hilton Chicago. The healthcare industry is completely enmeshed in social media, with patients, doctors and whistleblowers all engaging in conversations on message boards and blogs. Companies in this heavily regulated industry are coming to this conference to get a better understanding of how they can find out what customers and doctors are saying, plus how companies can benefit from an open and honest dialogue within social media.

Stay tuned for an interesting conversation. More details from the conference tomorrow-

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

Jerry Lewis, of the Boulder County Business Report, interviews Collective Intellect founders Don Springer and Tim Wolters. Access the interview here.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, On Our Radar, Public Relations // Add Comment »

Just finished reading the results of a study, reported at Cyperjournalist.net, that compares user-ranked news to that of traditional media outlets (get the full study here). The study was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the end of June, 2007. They compared what the top stories were in the mainstream news to what were the top stories on user-news sites — Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. The results are pretty interesting.

First off, the top stories in the mainstream news barely made a blip on any of the user-news sites. The week of the study, the main stories in the mainstream press were Iraq and the immigration debate. That same week, the top stories at the user-news sites were Apple’s release of the iPhone and that Nintendo had passed Sony in net worth. However, even considering this, the stories on the user-news sites were much more diverse, and covered a very broad swath of topics.

One of the most interesting things they discovered was that 70% of the stories that appeared on these user-news sites were sourced from blogs and other sites. Mainstream news and wire service stories were a small percentage of stories:

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism: http://journalism.org/node/7495

So what does this mean? Allow me to put my spin on it:
1. User-generated content rules social media; mainstream and wire service stories aren’t as important to online discussion
2. Social media participants are not restricted by a beat, an advertiser or parent company influence
3. People read and write about what is personally interesting to them, whether it is considered newsworthy or not

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

Political bloggers won a major victory this week in their quest towards mainstream acceptance and relevance. On 9/4, the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) ruled that political blogs are considered media, as far as US Electoral Law is concerned. Essentially, the FEC reaffirmed the right for political bloggers to exercise free speech with the same rights as any other media organization.

If the FEC officially recognizes blogs as a legitimate form of media, more and more candidates, campaigns, and interest groups will likely begin to come to the same conclusion. As the relevance and reach of the political blogosphere grows at a rapid rate, politicians will have an increasing and increasibgly difficult need to filter through the noise and get to the content that matters.

Of course a major difference between “traditional” media and blogs is that in the blogosphere, even the illusion of objectivity is absent. This FEC ruling is obviously a boon to the blogosphere, but “Publishing 2.0″ points out a potentially dangerous (and likely unsolvable) side-effect that could develop, if it isn’t already happening on a widespread but subtle scale.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Insights // Add Comment »

Last week, I was interviewed for PRWeek’s Products & Tools Newsletter Expert Q&A feature. The bulletin isn’t available on the web for some reason, so I have re-posted it below:

Collective Intellect provides real-time data on social media. Whats the importance of this service in today’s media environment?

RS: Consumers today not only consume media, increasingly they create and share it. 25% of all Internet users publish content online (Forrester); 40% read blogs regularly (PEW); 120,000 blogs are created daily in the US (CI). Getting access to all the conversations that apply to your company, in real time, as they happen, allows you to respond effectively as the story unfolds, instead of waiting until the next day or the next week when the story creeps into a traditional publication. Customers also use our real-time ability to benchmark activity before they begin a campaign, so they can track changes in activity and sentiment.

Why are message boards still relevant?

RS: In many industries, there is more discussion happening on message boards than on blogs or other social media. For some companies, it exceeds 50% of new media discussion. Message boards will continue to be a place people go to leave anonymous comments and critiques. Companies that choose to ignore these posts are ignoring a great portion of media discussion about their companies, their products, their brands, and their campaigns.

What are some of your tips for PR monitoring, measurement, and analysis?

RS: First, pay attention to the most influential bloggers that discuss your industry. Remember, these may not necessarily be the bloggers with the largest audiences, many bloggers are influential in small, niche areas, and are going to provide you the greatest amount of influence in that conversation stream.

Second, benchmark activity before you begin a new campaign so that your reporting is based on real changes in activity, not estimates.

Finally, measure not just volume of activity, but also how the conversation is changing. Is the tone changing from bad to good?

Tags: Consumer-Generated Media (CGM), Mass Media/Culture, Public Relations // Add Comment »