Author: Chris Moody, President and COO

Chris Moody currently serves as the President and COO of Gnip, the leading provider of social media data for enterprise applications. In this role, Moody is responsible for the day-to-day execution of Gnip's operations with direct responsibility for sales, marketing, finance, and business development.

Plugged In To Gnip: Shining A Light On Social Data

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Plugged In To Gnip

Today we announced our Plugged In To Gnip partnership program. Although this is an important milestone for our company, we believe this program clearly marks the beginning of new era in the quickly maturing social data ecosystem and that the benefits of today’s announcement will be felt by the end users of social data analysis for years to come.

As we’ve often said, we believe social data has unlimited value and near limitless application. Countless companies, governments, and researchers are now making critical decisions based upon this data. Much of the emphasis across these applications to date has been on the analysis and insights layer. At the same time, there has been clear recognition that the analysis and insights derived from these various solutions are only as good as the underlying social data they are built upon.

In the early days of the ecosystem, the options for accessing reliable, sustainable, and comprehensive social data were very limited. Solution providers that were building upon a sound data layer didn’t want to reveal their proprietary data acquisition secrets. Providers that did not have sound solution, wanted to avoid the data discussion all together. As a result, companies were talking about their solutions without shining a light on the critical data layer portion of the equation.

If social data is going to reach its full potential, the underlying data must be reliable, sustainable, and complete. As an industry we must shine a light on social data so that the data layer is analyzed and scrutinized as much as the application itself. As the world’s largest provider of social data, Gnip has a unique view of the ecosystem and of the organizations that are committed to highest level of social data integrity. At its core, the Plugged In program is a way for us to collaborate with these advanced data organizations to keep driving the ecosystem forward.

There are lots of benefits to partners participating in the program including early access to new data and new features. But, the big winner is the end user. Plugged In To Gnip partners can confidently certify to their end users that they have complete and authorized access to the best social data in the world.

 

Tumblr Analytics: It’s a Whole New World

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Union Metrics has been with Gnip since the early days, using our social data in their flagship product, TweetReach. Earlier this year, when we announced the availability of social data from Tumblr, we were excited that Union Metrics moved quickly to start building a new product based on that data. Last week, Union Metrics launched Union Metrics for Tumblr and was named Tumblr’s preferred analytics provider.

We’re big believers in Tumblr and the value of the conversations taking place there. As we’ve talked about in the social cocktail, Tumblr content has unique properties. Our data science shows that Tumblr content is inherently viral – able to amplify conversations about any topic – and even more than that, the content on Tumblr has incredible staying power.

And we’re not the only believers in Tumblr. Brands like Adidas and Coca-Cola have been actively engaging and advertising on Tumblr since the launch of Tumblr’s advertising platform earlier this year.

Congrats to the team at Union Metrics! This is exciting news and we’re only at the beginning.

You can read more in AdWeek, The Next Web and GigaOm.

100 Billion Social Data Activities Delivered Each Month

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Gnip has hit another big milestone — we’re now delivering 100 billion social data activities each month. In comparison, we were delivering 30 billion social data activities back in November. We’ve more than tripled the data delivered in a handful of short months.

What is the cause for all of this growth? Three reasons:

  1. Enterprise providers continue to rapidly adopt social data into their offerings. As such, our growth rate for new customers continues to accelerate.
  2. Companies are expanding their insight and analysis offerings over a broader spectrum of social conversation. We’ve added three premium full firehoses of data this year including Tumblr, WordPress and Disqus, as well as other sought after data sources such as Sina Weibo.
  3. The number of supported use cases for social data continues to expand beyond traditional brand monitoring. We see the use cases for social data evolving all of the time and have seen a substantial uptick in social data being used in finance and business intelligence specifically.

If you’re interested in working at a company with Big Software, Big Jobs and Big Impact, contact jobs@gnip.com. And if you want to talk about how your company can use social data, contact info@gnip.com.

 

Gnip Named Top 50 Colorado Company To Watch

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It is always nice to get recognition in your own backyard and Gnip is excited and humbled to be named a Top 50 Colorado Company to Watch.  The past four years have been an amazing journey and while we’re particularly excited by all we’ve recently accomplished, we’re even more excited for what’s ahead. We believe social data has unlimited potential and we are excited to be driving the adoption of this data across the world from our home in Boulder, Colorado.

One of the criteria for being selected for this award is that your company is creating quality jobs. If you’re interested in working on challenging problems at a company that was named the best place to work in Boulder, we’d love for you to join us.

Tumblr Firehose Now Available Exclusively from Gnip

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I’m thrilled to announce that the full firehose of public Tumblr posts is now available exclusively from Gnip. Tumblr is one of the fastest growing social networks in the world. Much of this growth is fueled by the enormous number of conversations that are unique to the Tumblr community. These conversations cover a huge range of subjects, from movies, TV shows and fashion to business, apparel and consumer products. Check out these stats to get a feel for the volume of discussion on Tumblr:

  • 50 million new posts every day
  • 15 billion page views every month
  • 20 billion total posts
  • 300% traffic growth last year

While some social platforms react quickly to news and other events, Tumblr conversations often spread around concepts and trends. Take the example of Urban Outfitters where a photographer posted a picture to her personal Tumblr of a piece from one of their new collections. That post received over 1,000 notes and almost no mention elsewhere. In the case of Land Rover, the company posted a picture of a dog riding in a Land Rover to their Tumblr that received more than 5,000 notes and very little mention on other networks.

It doesn’t take a large leap to see the impact this type of information can have on brand management and product development. The conversations on Tumblr are rich in images and discussion about brands and products, from simply sharing a picture about a favorite pair of shoes to reblogging news about favorite brand. And given the highly social nature of the Tumblr community, these discussions move quickly and broadly through the community. You often see posts that are shared tens of thousands of times. For brands, every conversation matters and access to the full firehose ensures they won’t miss a thing.

We’re excited to be able to offer Tumblr to our customers and can’t wait to see what other intriguing use cases they find for this data.

Drop us a line at sales@gnip.com to learn more.

Big Boulder: The World’s First Social Data Conference

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Social data is an emerging new industry and enterprises are applying social data to solve challenges in both the business world and the public sector. And while there are a wide range of conferences to discuss big data or social media marketing, there hasn’t been a place for the people and organizations working with social data to discuss best practices, challenges, trends and developments.

We decided to change that. Gnip is excited to launch Big Boulder, the world’s first social data conference and the myriad use cases surrounding it.  Big Boulder will take place on June 21-22 in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

Our speaker lineup is incredible and we’re proud of the caliber of talent we’re attracting to our inaugural conference. Confirmed speakers include Dave Morin of Path, Ryan Sarver and Doug Williams of Twitter, Sean Bruich of Facebook, Daniel Ha and Ro Gupta of Disqus, Howard Lindzon of StockTwits, Joe Fernandez and Matt Thomson of Klout, Zach Hofer-Shall of Forrester and Bryan Hyndman of NASDAQ. And this is just the start.

In fact, I’m excited to announce two new additions to our speaking roster, Scott Nicholson, data scientist at LinkedIn, and Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction. We’re thrilled to add them to the agenda and look forward to announcing more new speakers in the coming weeks.

Social data is in early stages but it’s already being used to power a range of incredible use cases including predicting stock markets, breaking the news of earthquakes, and helping emergency responders in Japan find medicine after last year’s earthquake. Big Boulder will have both fireside chats with the leading social publishers and panels discussing the use of social data in the public sector and financial markets, geo-spatial applications of social media data and social data analytics.

Being located in Boulder has been amazing for Gnip, and we’re thrilled to show off our hometown. Boulder has been frequently recognized for our thriving high tech community. Not to mention, Boulder has been named the foodiest, healthiest, happiest and the best town for startups.

Big Boulder will be a deliberately intimate conversation, so attendance will be by invitation only for Gnip’s partners and customers. Check out www.bigboulderconf.com to learn more.

Rich Comment Data from Disqus Now Available Through Gnip

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Imagine going to a dinner party and listening to the first thing each person said. You’d learn a few things, but you’d miss out on the meat of the conversation that happens in the give and take of the dialogue.

In the world of online public social conversation, blog posts are the monologue and comments provide the dialogue. Each is valuable on their own, but to see the complete picture, you need both. Conversations happen in comments, and it has been a huge struggle for brands to be able to keep up with comments to fill in their understanding of this key piece of the conversation.

I’m excited to announce that we’re making it easier to access these public conversations with the addition of the full Disqus firehose to our publisher portfolio. As the largest third-party commenting platform in the world with 70 million commenter profiles, the Disqus firehose provides coverage of more than 500,000 comments every day, spanning almost every topic imaginable and reaching over 700 million readers each month.

Comments last forever. They appear in search results and remain part of the discussion long after the day they were written.  With their staying power and depth of discussion, the commenting ecosystem provides an important — and different — social signal. Disqus further embodies this by allowing users to react to others’ comments with up or down “votes” creating significantly more engagement. The 2 million “votes” on Disqus each day provide insight into what comments are generating the most reaction.

Our Disqus API partnership provides authorized access for the first time ever to full firehoses of discussion content and interaction across the Disqus network. To the extent that any of this data has been available before, it’s been provided by technologies like content scraping/crawling that pulled pieces of the discussion, but did not guarantee full coverage in real time on a publisher-safe, consistent and reliable basis. Because this new service is being provided via a direct partnership with Disqus, with Gnip’s full firehose, you get low-latency streams that provide full coverage with the support of the publisher to ensure the availability of the data over the long term.

We’re thrilled to have data from Disqus available on our platform and can’t wait to see the amazing ways that our customers are able to apply it to their businesses. Email us at sales@gnip.com to learn more about Disqus and set up a trial so you can see the data for yourself.

Letter From The New Guy

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Not too long ago Gnip celebrated its third birthday.  I am celebrating my one week anniversary with the company today.  To say a lot happened before my time at Gnip would be the ultimate understatement, and yet it is easy for me to see the results produced from those three years of effort.  Some of those results include:

The Product

Gnip’s social media API offering is the clear leader in the industry.  Gnip is delivering over a half a billion social media activities daily from dozens of sources.  That certainly sounds impressive, but how can I be so confident Gnip is the leader?  Because the most important social media monitoring companies rely on our services to deliver results to their customers every single day. For example, Gnip currently works with 8 of the top 9 enterprise social media monitoring companies, and the rate we are adding enterprise focused companies is accelerating.

The Partners

Another obvious result is the strong partnerships that have been cultivated.  Some of our partnerships such as Twitter and Klout were well publicized when the agreements were put in place.  However, having strong strategic partners takes a lot more than just a signed agreement.  It takes a lot of dedication, investment, and hard work by both parties in order to deliver on the full promise of the agreement.  It is obvious to me that Gnip has amazing partnerships that run deep and are built upon a foundation of mutual trust and respect.

The People

The talent level at Gnip is mind blowing, but it isn’t the skills of the people that have stood out the most for me so far.  It is the dedication of each individual to doing the right thing for our customers and our partners that has made the biggest impression.  When it comes to gathering and delivering social media data, there are a lot of shortcuts that can be taken in order to save time, money, and effort.  Unfortunately, these shortcuts can often come at the expense of publishers, customers, or both.  The team at Gnip has no interest in shortcuts and that comes across in every individual discussion and in every meeting.  If I were going to describe this value in one word, the word would be “integrity”.

In my new role as President & COO, I’m responsible for helping the company grow quickly and smoothly while maintaining the great values that have been established from the company’s inception.  The growth has already started and I couldn’t be more pleased with the talent of the people who have recently joined the organization including: Bill Adkins, Seth McGuire, Charles Ince, and Brad Bokal who have all joined Gnip within the last week.  And, we are hiring more! In fact, it is worth highlighting one particular open position for a Customer Support Engineer.  I’m hard pressed to think of a higher impact role at our company because we consider supporting our customers to be such an important priority.  If you have 2+ years of coding experience including working with RESTful Web APIs and you love delivering over-the-top customer service, Gnip offers a rare opportunity to work in an environment where your skills will be truly appreciated.  Apply today!

I look forward to helping Gnip grow on top of a strong foundation of product, partners, and people.  If you have any questions, I can be reached at chris [at] gnip.com.