Tag Archives: glide technologies

Oh what a tangled web we weave

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Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)

Maybe the News of the world should have put this in their front page instead of “Gotcha” – that headline has already returned to haunt them (1,479 times – I wonder how many more times before I finish writing?).

GlideIntelligence’s soon-to-be-launched social media module has proved itself a useful thing to have around recently – it has a click counter on activity which for the News of the World we saw jump from about 45/minute – to 170/minute to 290/minute and rising – clearly, something was afoot.

One of the great things about GlideIntelligence is its ability to ignore much of the everyday and mundane content as it sweeps through the social media space and zeros in on clumps of data which are collecting around a single theme – and all without human intervention. In the past it has spotted a protest group gathering for a ‘meeting’ to let their feelings known to their local bank manager, and it picked up a cluster rivalling the NoW when Sony at first, and then a whole group of organisations, started getting hacked.

The success of the system comes in two forms – first it can use its language and symbolic analysers (it does emoticons, slang and even obscenities without blushing) – and yet can spot a trend in a heartbeat (literally) and warn you something’s up. The second part is the fact that you can break the trend into meaningful chunks – who are the most vocal? what is their status? (customer, member of the public, newspaper owner…?) and show you why their language got noticed.

Using natural language processing (NLP), it’s a world away from the old keyword way of doing things, “the DJ is going down a bomb at the party” with “I’m off to the (insert your choice) Party HQ with a bomb”.

Much has been pedalled about the failings of automated analysis – humans, the naysayers insist, are the only way forward. When real-time and accurate analytics are needed, even a roomful of humans would struggle to read, aggregate and score 10,000s of pieces of content an hour. Leave it to GlideIntelligence – not only will it not complain, it will also show you the quickest route to the best house party…

Keith

Public Service Announcement

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Our blog will be undergoing some infrastructure upgrades this weekend, as a result the blog may become unavailable for some of the weekend. In addition there may also be some visual changes while this is taking place.

Do not be alarmed, normal service should be resumed next week.

Have a great weekend.

Update – we will be working on a few tweaks over the coming week so don’t be alarmed if a few things change as we do this.

Apollo

Measurement Tools – helping us understand or drowning us with data?

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It remains a curious irony that in a world never richer in data than it is today we are sometimes poorer in information terms than we were, say, a decade ago. This is certainly true for anyone trying to manage a brand or company reputation where the ability to collect millions of items about brands, products and customer insight is relatively easy – but the volumes and complexity of the data has made getting any useful information out of it harder than ever. Many tool vendors in this space don’t help matters – like people who confuse precision with accuracy. They confuse data with information, some even confusing data with knowledge or even intelligence – not good at all.

To what extent can metrification help?

Before we go anywhere near metrics and dashboards there are a few basics to cover. The foundations of any successful system are going to be: access, accuracy and context. It’s the last one which lets most systems down. They struggle to assign arbitrary values based on nonsensical assumptions that ‘absolute accuracy’ is a valid concept. On its own accuracy is impossible without the context within which to frame it. And therein lies the problem: how can an automated system ‘know’ what someone is looking for? To quote a long-time client: “…finding 20,000 articles about my company is easy – finding the 20 I need to know about right now isn’t”.

Two things to note here:

  1. The ‘right now’ introduces a fourth element which though not part of the system solution is nonetheless a very valid concern. With results timing is everything. Want to know last week’s lottery winning numbers? Thought not.

Now imagine having to track every lottery combination manually before the draw. Impossible? You bet it is.

  1. While in the traditional media space human analysis may at least be theoretically possible, in the social media space the volume would overwhelm any attempt to analyse this data within an actionable time frame.

That’s not to say there isn’t a strong role for human analysis but let’s not turn them into glorified data entry clerks which brings us to what’s now possible with real-time automation.

Learn to love your automated analyser and it will love you back!

Enter the new generation of analyser which combines natural language (so you don’t need to learn all manner of combinations of AND, OR and NOT) when asking questions with the ability to use your specific context as a guide to filtering and refining results. Science fiction? Not anymore.

The beauty of using such advanced techniques is that they don’t require you to understand much, if anything, about how they work. Put simply, if you want the system to tell you how well a new product ‘X’ is being received, you can type in “what are reactions to ‘X’?”. Then leave the analyser to figure out all the variations it needs to answer the question from your perspective. Getting perspective right is the key to accurate sentiment. Of course, you (with the assistance of the system provider) have to define what it is you want to know at the start. This is typically something that takes a few hours and then it’s done. The smartest of this new generation have some feedback or learning capabilities to help the system evolve as your company changes and improve its guesses and scores for context.

Compare that to the current crop of ‘staples’ in the industry. Some actually make a point of showing how complicated their processes are. For example, I’ve seen one query which filled a whole screen just to make sure that if you are interested in Apple smart phones your query didn’t bombard you with cookery tips or news about where to buy an orchard.

A side benefit of the new method is that it may actually help you to learn how to better engage with your customers by looking at how they express their opinions. And because it’s quick to try new ideas you can afford to try different approaches without having to worry about wasting time if your first ideas are wrong.

If the worst aspect of an analyser is that it forces you to think harder about your brand, business or communications strategy then I’d call that a success.

Keith

Do you see what we see?

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When Glide set out to transform the current market for monitoring and sentiment analysis, we recognised that to succeed our solution must be both timely and deliver new value for customers.

Not much has changed. The two pertinent questions as we go to market remain:

  • Why now?
  • Why a technology-enabled solution?

Here are three reasons that shout “now”:

  1. The sheer volume of comment
  2. The emergence of multiple channels
  3. The fast-moving nature of news

And, of course, the answer to the second question lies in the confluence of those three reasons. Simply put: there is now an obvious mismatch between the established methods of monitoring and evaluating the news and today’s media environment.

The ‘old’ methods reflect a set of circumstances that no longer prevail. Now, stories unfold and gain momentum within hours rather than days. Comment flows and intersects across multiple channels. The ‘window of opportunity’ within which to respond in an informed and effective way continues to shrink.

Not surprisingly the needs of organisations have evolved. New circumstances create new challenges and opportunities. They require new tools that are fit for purpose.

And so to the last question. If the very nature of media environment is increasingly driving organisations to source solutions that can meet their needs then what are the pertinent questions they might legitimately ask:

  • Do I need separate solutions for print and online media?
  • Can I synthesise social media and traditional analysis?
  • Can I source analysis in a timeframe that enables me to respond effectively?
  • Will it enable me to measure results against planned outputs?
  • Will I be able to track the correlation between sentiment and business performance in real-time?
  • Is the old, content-based pricing model still relevant?
  • How far can technology help me and where is human input best applied?
  • Can new technologies deliver more value for less cost?

If your organisation is unaffected by the changes in the media environment and your need remains a summary evaluation report on a quarterly basis, then new solutions will have little relevance.

On the other hand, for many organisations, perhaps the majority, they see what we see: new opportunities in the new media landscape to grow their brand but also new threats to brand value that must be guarded against.

Apollo

If you’re not quick, you’re not relevant

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At Glide we know that things don’t always run smoothly. This is why we have a suite of tools to help communicators deal with crisis communications in an efficient, responsive and brand strengthening fashion.

Dark Sites
Activated as and when needed, these websites show the world how seriously you are taking things and how committed you are to providing fast honest updates. Combined with our social media module you can display all of the press releases, updates, tweets, Facebook and blog posts that you’ve been managing in this crisis. All under one tightly controlled roof.

Call Logging & Incident Management
Behind the scenes the phones will be ringing off the hook. Help your team manage this by using our incident manager with updating ‘lines to take’ feature. They can see what the latest ‘for offer’ and ‘not for offer’ information is to help them manage the deluge of enquiries and ensure consistent messaging.

Tracking the Conversation
Does anyone care about this? What’s the real impact to your brand, your stock prices, your sales? Track the conversation and make sense of it all using GlideIntelligence services – daily analyst reports, top stories cherry picked for you, realtime sentiment analysis – the works. You can even poll your customers via GlideInsight.

Logging Journalist Enquiries

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Logging journalist enquiries is simple with Glide and recent enhancements (thanks to your feedback) have made these even easier.

Quick Find Journalists
So you’re on the phone, or you’ve just got an email and you need to record this interaction. Simply start typing the journalist’s first name or their last name into the log and we’ll find all the contacts that you have in your Glide system and present back all their details for you.

Or if there are no matches (because you don’t have this person on your system) then keep typing in their details and when you save the log, they’ll be added to your database.

Or if you have their details, but on the call you get BETTER details, then just overwrite the stuff that’s presented to you and when you save the log, their details will be updated.

Logging the details of the call
We’ve updated the formatting controls so that they only appear when you’re typing and if you don’t use them, they won’t get in the way.

‘Incidents’ and ‘Lines to take’
If you use the incident manager (and if you don’t you should really find out more about it because it’s hellishly useful for managing crises and campaigns) then you can quickly find lines to take and incidents from this next section. Just click ‘add’ and you’ll be able to see all the latest lines to take / incidents which you can grab. This log will then automatically be attached to the ‘incident page’. To find out more, please contact support@glidetechnologies.com

Attachments! Direct from your desktop and in bulk!
We’ve implemented the same funky bulk upload feature to call logs that we have in the media library so you can grab a bundle of attachments from your desktop and upload. As soon as you hit the ‘save’ button on your log then it will upload the items and associate them to this log. It will also place the attachments into a folder called ‘log attachments’ in your internal resource library. Don’t worry – no one but your administrators can see this folder.

Save or Save and Close
If you’ve spent some time on this log and want to save your changes, then you now have the option to ‘save’ (which will save your changes and allow you to keep editing) or ‘save and close’ which will save all your changes and close the log.

What do you think?
Have our changes helped or hindered? Made you happy or left you cold? Please let us know if we are doing a good job by emailing support@glidetechnologies.com or follow me @mamaglide

Samantha

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Sites: A key component of digital crisis management

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Our 24/7 connected world feeds our thirst for “real-time” information and with so much available at our fingertips (Google how we love you so) the speed at which crises now gain momentum adds to the impending threat. Unfortunately it seems that bad news travels faster than good news and remains visible (searchable) for longer. Here’s the rub: reputational damage can be incurred faster than ever and take longer to address and recover.

On the plus side, these same technological advances also offer a raft of opportunities for reputation managers so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Here’s why one organisation built a dark site. The organisation has a global brand in a highly competitive market place. The company’s brand is critical in driving customer preference and sustaining and building the organisation’s equity value.

The comms director’s worst nightmare goes something like this: Confidential customer data gets lost. Within 2 hours ten blogs have picked up the story. Mainstream media gets wind of the stories. Broadcast and print articles will quickly follow. The Twitter sphere explodes with comments. Most of it highly opinionated and inaccurate. Within 8 hours Facebook has kicked off. The others follow. Flickr, YouTube, Digg and co get in on the action. The story spreads like wildfire. Within 15 hours there is editorial comment and the early adopters are now the top search results. The comms director knows how difficult it is to dislodge results once they are top of the news.

A key part of a comms director’s job is to avoid this nightmare scenario and to protect the organisation’s brand and reputation. Increasingly, dark sites sit at the heart of effective digital crisis management. They provide a central hub for all incident related information. In a nutshell, they support three key pillars of crisis management by:

  • Ensuring accurate information is available immediately
  • Presenting information to guarantee absolute transparency
  • Providing a forum for dialogue with stakeholders

A well designed and appropriately deployed dark site can be the difference between an organisation managing a crisis effectively and sustaining significant long-lasting reputational damage. To return to my previous metaphor, it is perhaps the difference between a few sleepless nights and an organisational nightmare.

Apollo

Glide Emails Explained

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If you are reading this, you are either an IT professional wanting to know about Glide’s move to Jango or you are lost. If you are lost, then why not cheer yourself up by watching this video written by a coder turned musician http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE

How Glide Works

Glide sends emails on behalf of its customers (your PR teams). It works like this:

• Your PR team creates content via Glide’s content management system
• This content can then be published to an online newsroom and / or distributed via email
• The email sender is shown as the PR contact (jo.smith@yourcompany.com)
• The email was relayed via MessageLabs but as of May 2011 is now run through Jango SMTP

We have chosen Jango SMTP because they provide great visibility of email delivery and have some lovely APIs which we are busily integrating into our Glide platform. They also help us get through to organisations which consider what we are doing as ‘phishing’ by stamping a sender address in the header of the email of the nature: yourcompany@jangomail.com.

What you need to do

We’re telling you this because it is possible that your internal email systems may prevent emails from the Glide system being delivered internally. If this is the case, we have a number of options:

• You can whitelist a unique range of IP addresses
• You can whitelist the email address your company@jangomail.com
• You can whitelist a unique number found in the header of the email

If you would like to discuss these options (or your own alternative suggestion), please contact support@glidetechnologies.com and we will be happy to help.

Many thanks for your time.

MamaGlide

The press release that got over 30k unique visitors

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It’s all about optimising content. Watch my video about the press release that got over 30k unique visitors here.

If my video is about effective engagement, this blog is about opportunities missed.

What opportunities do corporate PRs forgo if they fail to optimise content?

What risks do corporate PRs run if they remain wedded to comms practises that are no longer aligned to the environment in which they operate?

So here’s my top three list of lost opportunities:

  1. Journalist-only focus: Here’s what a global VP of marketing told me last week. He said two years ago it was all about journalists and corporate stakeholders. Now that no longer adds up. Most people that come to his website are not mainstream media or investors. So the newsroom is not just for journalists; it’s for current and future employees, customers, bloggers, investors, sustainability advocates, and community leaders. The lesson here is we ignore our expanded roster of stakeholders at our peril. Not a risk worth taking.
  2. Not providing options to share on social networks (tweet this, Facebook like, Stumbleupon etc): Yesterday I had a session with a comms director for a major retailer. He told me a critical objective for him is to “make more noise”. I asked him how many employees the company had. Turns out they employ over 130,000 people and the majority of those people are from the “Facebook generation”. So he recognises he has an untapped asset that can communicate his core messages (“make more noise”). Of course the content has to be composed and packaged appropriately so that it can be shared and re-shared easily. Imagine this company has a campaign around organic fresh food. Let’s say they communicate this with their own employees and one in ten like the campaign enough to share it with their family and friends on Facebook. On average people have 130 friends on Facebook so that’s potentially a personal recommendation of your story to over 1 million people – that hasn’t cost you anything. And that is just one group of stakeholders. As an ex-journalist himself he noted that journalists share content with each other via twitter. So it makes sense to make it easy for them to do so. Point made.
  3. Not linking to relevant content: So let’s say a blogger has read an article about your CEO and sustainability that a friend shared with them via twitter. The article has got a link back to the original post on your site. So now what do you do? If your story is about sustainability then why not have a list of related stories on the same subject alongside the article? Now this blogger can find out more about your initiatives in this area and has access to additional content. He’s able to write his own story and add something new to the discussion rather than just repeating what’s already been said. The blogger is happy, the PR is effective and the CEO’s message has increased exposure. Job done.

This list is not exhaustive. These are just three quick wins. Please feel free to add to the list.

Alistair

Are your evaluation reports out of date by the time you get them?

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Today’s media environment exposes the limitations of traditional methods of sourcing and evaluating market intelligence. For many marketing communications and PR professionals, these methods are too slow, too inaccurate, and too limited in scope. To quote Gideon Spainer of the Evening Standard: “Consumers can now voice opinions and make decisions in real time. They expect brands to do the same.”

Consider the following:

  • Are your evaluation reports out of date by the time you get them?
  • Would you benefit from in-depth analysis covering large volumes of coverage in real-time?
  • Have you had to reduce the number of sources you monitor to lower costs?
  • How often are your evaluation reports delivered to you in time to act?

The need for “actionable intelligence” is greater than ever, however the challenge in delivering timely intelligence is also growing. The window (of opportunity) to respond is shrinking, while the volume of comment and channels is growing.

So what are your options?

Aggregate coverage from all channels (print, online, broadcast and social media), create a detailed evaluation brief and utilise a small army (or 3rd party) to analyse all that coverage.

Pros:

  • Yields high levels of accuracy per article
  • Allows for additional qualitative analysis provided by human interpretation (e.g. position on page and associated imagery)

Cons:

  • Human analysis is subjective so it is difficult to ensure all parties are analysing and scoring coverage consistently
  • For organisations that receive large volumes of coverage this is either very expensive or forces you to analyse a small sample of overall coverage

Technology based models are not constrained by the same volume limitations as a people centric approach. They offer a cost effective way of delivering clear and concise reporting in real-time, giving you time to act before the window of opportunity slams shut.

Pros:

  • Can analyse larger coverage samples, resulting in increased reporting precision
  • Is consistent (e.g. human evaluation may show more positive coverage one month to the next simply because a different person is doing the analysis and has a different opinion). Sometimes the rate of change (trends) is more important than an individual snapshot
  • Is far more scalable than people, therefore much more cost effective when dealing with large volumes
  • Can process raw data much faster than humans

Cons:

  • Can sometimes miss-interpret terminology specific to an industry or service (e.g. “big” can be a positive term in some contexts and negative in others)
  • Does not create commentary or give an interpretation of results
  • Can require some time to configure to achieve optimal results

In order to ensure you are acting on quality, defensible intelligence, it is important that you are able to interrogate and challenge the raw data, down to article and comment scoring – this is the only way to ensure accurate evaluation.

GlideIntelligence is our solution for monitoring and analysing your brand’s exposure. It addresses the challenge of delivering “actionable intelligence”.

Sam