Category Archives: Big Boulder

Big Boulder is the world’s first conference on social data, bringing together the top publishers, industry leaders and consumers of social data to discuss trends, best practices and how this data is changing industries of all kinds.

Big Boulder: Measuring Engagement on Facebook with Sean Bruich

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An interview with Sean Bruich, head of measurement and Graham Mudd, head of measurement market development both at Facebook, about measuring engagement on Facebook.

Sean Bruich and Graham Mudd of Facebook

“Something’s wrong when the guys at Facebook are more dressed up than everyone else here,” – Chris Moody said before introducing Sean Bruich and Graham Mudd of Facebook.

The highly anticipated talk kicked off with the measurement issues marketers face online, specifically with Facebook. As Sean put, Facebook believes in solving measurement issues that every marketer is facing and allowing them to understand how online media can work for their businesses. As many marketers and brands attempt to brave the social media marketing ecosystem, it’s important to educate them on how this ecosystem can impact their business on a bottom-line level. Sean clearly put, it’s in everyone’s best interests to solve this problem and it’s very much at the forefront of Facebook’s plans. As a platform company, Facebook believes syndicating information can propel their business, however they want marketers to be able to engage with other platforms as well.

But how do companies attempt to navigate this ecosystem? Graham says it’s all about specialization. Facebook possesses a deep level of it that allows for truly deep measurement. Graham also states, “We can’t do it on our own.” Both Graham and Sean emphasized balancing innovation with standardization. Facebook wants and needs the help of other companies like Gnip to tell them what information they want to see and how they could use it better. But it’s not just about online. Marketers want to know about its offline effect:  how it incorporates into their business plan down the line and how it affects their bottom line.

Sean says traditional measurement hasn’t kept up with the technology that consumers are using. The big questions aren’t being answered. While developer communities are working towards that very quickly, there is still room for improvement on how ROI and marketing spend online fit into the marketing mix.  As in industry, we’re not answering the big questions that marketers need to know to justify spend and a presence online.

Standardization is the huge challenge. As Graham put, “Innovation is hard for the people who have to react to it.” It’s really hard to deviate from standards that brands have in place. While brands may want to jump into the deep end with online media, it’s difficult to take those chances on something that is so far removed from what they’re accustomed to. Some people who might benefit from innovation aren’t in a place to justify the changes.

So how does Facebook build this new set of standards? Investments. Facebook wants to invest in the people who can build new measurement platforms, and it’s not just about Facebook. They want cross-platform solutions for marketers to use to optimize and understand their consumers and online media. ”We do believe strongly in the platform; we believe strongly in the user side but also in the developer side,” said Sean. “The data is massive and there’s a lot of expectations around privacy, both user and marketer privacy. From a stability and access perspective we understand a lot, but we still need to hear from our users and marketers.”

While tough questions where asked, Graham says it’s not important to focus on why brands like GM pulled their Facebook advertising, but rather on the larger issue. Facebook believes it’s their responsibility to provide companies the insight and direction that actually has impact. Facebook isn’t the same as television and shouldn’t be approached with the same strategy. Whether or not that’s why GM pulled out, Facebook wouldn’t elaborate, but it’s a clear indication of the importance of measurement that companies at Big Boulder could potentially help to solve.

Facebook was tight lipped about product plans, but real time insights are important to FB. They want marketers to be able to see data as it happens. But there are challenges with this. From a measurement perspective, it’s not clear that marketers will even be able to take advantage of this data. As developers, Facebook wants to solve those problems too; how do we enable faster decision making through the tools they build? On a deeper level, Facebook wants to enable marketers to make decisions on a day-to-day basis, but it’s hard to have the level of intimate understanding of the data. If Facebook can get this feedback from it’s core marketers, they can better serve marketers and the end consumers.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Boulder and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Communities

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Brad Feld from Foundry Group talks about Boulder entrepreneurship and how Boulder built an entrepreneurial community, and the lessons Boulder has learned along the way.

Brad Feld

What makes Boulder the special place that it is? Many people don’t engage fully in experiences anymore when they are able to get lost in the noise of an urban sprawl. In Boulder,  people are held hostage in a dense startup community. The dynamic of Boulder is that everyone realizes how visible they are and can be.

Internet has changed the way we think about society to a very broad, horizontal network. It can be chaotic and messy and many companies are trying to generate the mess or organize it. This shift began in the mid-90′s and then accelerated. In 2000 and 2001 when the bubble burst, people feared web technology was to be feared and could no longer be wildly successful as it had been. In actuality, the world was just ten years early. There was a period of time after the burst when it was especially painful to be an entrepreneur. In 2003 at the beginning of the web 2.0, many realized they weren’t done creating. Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of activity in Boulder that brings us to where we are today. Brad shares the four principles he believes have made Boulder the tightly-knit success it is:

The Four Principles to Build an Entrepreneurial Community

  1. Any startup community has to be led by entrepreneurs. Government, big companies, universities, and non-profits can’t lead.
  2. You have to take a very long-term view. If you look at Boulder between 1995 and 2000, you’re not impressed. But if you back up to the 1970′s and then look all the way to today, you see the progress.
  3. Be inclusive of anyone who wants to engage in any way. That engagement isn’t a hierarchical structure by any means and it’s important be welcoming to everyone. Assume good intent and allow people to lean in and participate.
  4. Create geographical meaning and activity for the engagement mentioned in the third principle. In Boulder, a visible example of that is TechStars and Startup Weekend, which both began in Boulder.

Give before you get is a contant theme in Boulder. When you remove the expectation of getting something in return, you create powerful, positive force in a relationship. The four principles Brad describes can benefit any community.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Measuring Influence Online with Klout

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An interview with Klout’s Joe Fernandez and Matt Thomson about measuring influence online.

Joe Fernandez and Matt Thomson of Klout

Klout began as an idea in 2007 because Joe Fernandez had jaw surgery, and his mouth was wired shut for months. Unable to communicate on his own, Joe had to depend on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. As is only means to speak, Joe’s way of thinking was radically changed. His conversations with his friends made him think about influencers, and it was while he was wired shut that he starting building Klout. Joe wanted to find the answer to “how do we help every person understand their influence?” Four years into the business, Klout is tackling a very ambitious challenge to  understand conversations, relationships, and tie that back to influence. It’s an early start, but they are leaders in the space and hope to continue to grow and expand upon the idea of influence.

Measuring influence on the web can be a challenge. Joe says Klout strives to brand themselves correctly, which is why they chose their name. They wanted to push out the API for growth and not for monetization: to simple put the data out there so users can see it. It’s an easy entry point for consumers, albeit a bit counter intuitive for business plans. Though the data is often criticized for being incorrect or off, Joe says it’s a huge challenge to measure influence and they are striving to make it more measurable and more actionable. Klout is keeping up with ingesting every piece of data that is becoming available. While Klout is a leader in the space of influence, they’re still not satisfied with their product. They are consistently working toward better real world influence associated with online influence, and taking a first shot at addressing that. Matt Thomson gave the example of Google; In 2000 they had the best search engine available, but it was nowhere near where Google has taken search today. Matt says Klout’s algorithm will continue to change to incorporate the most relevant data becoming available.

Influence spans many topics and platforms online, so Klout must decide what matters more or less on the social web. They aim to include as many signals of influence as possible. Klout  chooses specific data to decide where influence lies and which signals trigger value in their platform. Their team of scientists works with more than 500 different variables to determine Klout scores. However Klout uses tools like ”Who is more influential” that asks a user to rate two friends and uses that against their algorithm to benchmark themselves and their data.

The real value of Klout lies in the context of influence: what someone is influential about, and how they get to a place to have influence. Joe emphasized that if you’re doing anything with customer service, targeting, or filtering, you know data can be a lot of noise. But a Klout score can help with decision making within a business. Klout is consumer-focused because they want something really digestible. Klout hopes marketers are using this, and on some level users are investing in the future of Klout, and where it can go. Klout ranks topics in the background as well, and hopes to bring that feature to the forefront. Topics are critical, and the second biggest investment for Klout after influential people.  Understanding topical analysis, is difficult because often there is so little context. It’s a big challenge, but Klout hopes to evolve to incorporate topics into their product.

Klout’s business model right now is very consumer-centric. One way users are benefiting from Klout is through their perks program. Klout Perks are exclusive products or experiences that you earn based on your influence. Influencers have earned sweet Perks like laptops and airline tickets. Chevy is a great example of this; they came to Klout looking to reach out to influencers about cars. The influencers were given a Chevy Volt for a weekend with gas money to burn, and in turn these influencers generated social proof on Chevy. While these influencers weren’t paid to do this, they felt empowered to talk about the Chevy Volt. And it worked: 180 million impressions on the Chevy volt were produced, and advertisers were happy.

Joe had a great personal example when he tweeted about a poor experience with Delta. Because Delta was using a tool that incorporated Klout into their API, they were able to immediately contact Joe and remedy the complaint. Joe says this is exactly what Klout is working toward: improving customer experience. Every interaction between a company and a consumer is an opportunity for a story to be told through social. If you have the most passionate people talking about your brand in good ways, it’s super valuable.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Data Science at LinkedIn

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An interview with LinkedIn data scientist, Yael Garten, and LinkedIn business strategist, Jennifer Weedn, about data science at LinkedIn and the applications of LinkedIn data.

Yael Garten & Jennifer Weedn of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest professional network out there where users can find compelling products, look for a new job, and connect with other professionals. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn gets 2 new sign ups per second, 4 billion people searches annually, and supports international professionals in more languages everyday. When it comes down to information, LinkedIn is  ”Disney World for data nerds” as Chris Moody put it. And with data like “percent users who are decision makers” (42%!!!), LinkedIn has a jackpot at their fingertips. Amazing data sets of education level, company information, and number of companies worked for are just some of the pieces one can pull from LinkedIn. For example: What happens when someone senior leaves a company? Where do they go? This is all data that LinkedIn has a wealth of.

Yael Garten delved into the different areas of information that LinkedIn gathers and how they use it. As Yael put, normalized data is information. And what do we do with information? We gather knowledge. Within LinkedIn, “products” are defined as people, pages, groups, jobs, and more. At LinkedIn, they have a saying “If you can’t meaure it, you can’t fix it,” and this is how LinkedIn operates. To understand the data is to understand how users engage with LinkedIn’s services and products and how they can make products better for users. According to Yael, every decision is data driven, and with good reason.

To define a data scientist is to incorporate many different skill sets:

Data Scientist = curiosity + intuition+ data gathering + standardization + statistics + modeling + visualization + communication

Data Scientists use LinkedIn data in 3 ways:

  1. Products: LinkedIn’s newest product is “Skills”. Launched last year, it is a dictionary that allows for users to search by professional skills and qualifications to find new employees, see what’s current, and more. For example, the skill “Hadoop” has grown 43% year over year. Someone searching for “Hadoop” would also come across related skills. This new sections allows for really collaborative filtering, and huge insights for LinkedIn users and the company as a whole.
  2. Insights: When can look at growing and shrinking industries with LinkedIn. Even the government has used LinkedIn data for speeches on growing job industries. Data  around growing and shrinking in a geographic area can be found and used in practical ways. A great example of insights derived from this data: Where did people in the finance industry go after the 2008 financial crisis? A surprising answer, but they just redistributed into other financial institutions.
  3. Wisdom: With the wealth of data, it can be used to drive business. What is the value of an action that a user takes on the site? What early behavior on the site is predictive of future engagement? What is the value of a user? Does mobile usage impact site engagement? Mobile usage can cause actions that impact web engagement. LinkedIn uses this to understand implications for the product and the business, because wisdom is the ultimate goal of the data science team, and it is an art.

Jennifer Yang Weedn of LinkedIn’s Business Development launched into brand engagement and how brands are finding a presence on LinkedIn. Their sweet spot for brands is with B2B marketers. Jennifer says there are 5 steps to engagement on LinkedIn:

  1. Establish a presence on LinkedIn, on a community page. A brand’s company page is their record on LinkedIn.
  2. Attract followers organically or by paid sources
  3. Have a conversation with followers using targeting status updates.  Brands can send and target specific updates to certain types of followers who would most be interested in them.
  4. Drive amplification of engagement by followers sharing a brand’s updates and posts.
  5. Analyze follower base, and slice and dice the data to fit the brands’ needs.

There are 2 million plus companies on LinkedIn, and many have seen success on the site. Phillips, for example, increased engagement by 106% using targeted status updates. Jennifer says 70% of users follow or would follow companies on LinkedIn. Users follow companies for different reasons as well; some looking for job info, but more are following because they want insights from companies and content to help them make better professional decisions. From a data point of view: 60% of users want industry insights, 53% are looking for company news, and 43% are looking for products and services.

Brands can also have a presence in Groups. There are about one million groups on LinkedIn, and brands play a role in many. They can either be mentioned in the context of the conversations in groups, or they can sponsor groups on LinkedIn. GE was able to use groups to leverage their resources and become thought leaders in the space. By posting an infographic about how people should navigate their career path, they positioned themselves as thought leaders and could engage their customers better.

Data science at LinkedIn is taken very seriously, and with all of its uses, it should be. The valuable insights and wisdom gained from data are just beginning to show their uses, with many more possibilities on the rise.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Getting to Know GetGlue: Distributed vs. Centralized Conversations

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An interview with Jesse Burros from GetGlue, a social network for entertainment. about how users are interacting on the network, what the use cases are for GetGlue data points and how GetGlue differs from other social networks.

Jesse Burros of GetGlue

GetGlue is a social network for entertainment that connects people to the entertainment they’re watching. You check into what you’re consuming whether it be a book, TV or movie. Since launching checkins two years ago, GetGlue has had 100 million checkins from 2 million users. While the platform works really well for movie and books, but TV is particularly is taking off.

What are users getting out of the check in experience? They see a lot of check ins around certain TV shows and communities are developing around those TV shows. While some events are expected to have high numbers of checkins such as the Oscars which had 170,000 checkins, other shows such as True Blood have had 160,000 checkins.  People want to engage around the content when they love a show, and GetGlue enables them to engage. To provide engaging comment, GetGlue works hard to provide relevant content to its users by filtering content based on your social graph and what the community deems relevant by voting up. As Jesse said, they try to avoid giving you the LOL comments. They give you what your friends say and what the community has voted up as really interesting.

So who are the users of GetGlue? Essentially, everyone who watches TV and that is an enormous audience with 100 million TV viewers. Demographics obviously change based on what the TV shows are, but generally GetGlue is prominent amongst the 18- to 34-year-old demographic and skew slightly towards a female office. Jesse’s parents are GetGlue users (and aren’t even on Facebook). His parents will text him when TV shows promote GetGlue on TV serving as Jesse’s real-world push notifications. TV shows are getting savvier about promoting GetGlue to their TV viewers because they see the engagement that is happening.

Jesse shared some really interesting statistics on the engagement around certain TV shows. Big Bang Theory is a show that is always in their top 10 (which you can check out in AdAge). Interestingly, there is a show called Nikita about being a spy that has had 136,000 checkins, and there was 1 in 10 checkins for every viewer. Understanding shows that see high social engagement is meaningful and helps studios understand where to promote TV shows. Another interesting case study is the TV show called Once Upon a Time. GetGlue and Nielson were tracking similarly in terms of ratings until halfway through the season and then checks grew faster than the ratings as the community continued to grow. They see this for multiple shows where the community continues to grow and engage.

Another really cool aspect of GetGlue is stickers, which you can earn by checking into a show within three days of it airing. When you earn 20 stickers, they actually mail them to you. This is an aspect that users really take seriously and they often take pictures of their stickers on a guitar case or laptop. Users often share their stickers and awards on Facebook, and 25% of posts on Facebook see a comment or like. Another aspect of GetGlue that really resonantes is the level of engagement that is happening as brands such as TV Guide often interact with GetGlue users over shows, or characters of a show will jump into a conversation. GetGlue actually accounts for 22% of the online conversations that happen around broadcast TV.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Blogs, Comments, Forums and Rich Social Data Gestures

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A panel discussion on forums, comments and blogs and other rich social data gestures with Ro Gupta from Disqus, Mark O’Sullivan from Vanilla, Mike Preuss from FormSpring and Martin Remy from Automattic, and moderated by Nicole Glaros from TechStars.

Social Gestures Panel at Big Boulder

The definition of community can vary widely across platforms, but is there a real definition of community? At Disqus, they like to think of communities as a continuum. First come comments then conversations on twitter, blogs, and other platforms. Once the conversation is developed, it gives way to a community. Communities are about recognition and repetition, and forums allow for these communities to develop. Commenting systems are a jumping point for communities. Mark O’Sullivan of Vanilla coined them “community training wheels” because they are a good starting point for community forums. They enforce familiarity and often lead to offline communities as well. Mike Preuss explained what draws people into communities: FOMO. As social beings, the “fear of missing out” or FOMO drives communities. When 45% of daily users on FormSpring are creating content and engaging others, users feel the need to contribute to the conversation. About 74% of visitors to Disqus will return everyday or every other day. ”When you think you’re missing out on something,” Mike says, that defines a community.

Developing a community is a huge task, but the bigger task is engaging users. At Vanilla, they have a full range of social gestures because not everyone will be able to contribute to every topic. But by using “light weight” gestures such as “likes” or “smiles” in the case of FormSpring, content creators can receive feedback and give readers some way to signal back. It also helps to identify good and bad content, influencers and contributors in the community and drive moderation from these. There’s a tremendous push toward allowing anyone the chance to become a content creator. A recent and fascinating case of this is Pinterest; “pinning” photos is creating content and allows users to express who they are.

At Disqus, they focus on reaction tools, according to Ro Gupta. Ro says they want to be able to reengage after the fact, and this includes cross-pollinating on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Engagement can be measured by “daily active users.”  The 90:9:1 rule is something that Disqus deems true for their platform. 90% of users are passive clickers, 9% help curate content, and 1% create the most content and drive discussions. However, there is a middle ground because of lightweight gestures that encourage users to engage on a smaller scale. According to Ro, about 35% of users contribute solid participation in the form of  lightweight gestures. In the case of Vanilla, Mark said some users were hesitant to allow lightweight contributions, but over time, users found it encouraged new content and lowered barriers to engagement.

Lightweight interactions are relatively new, but do they really affect product roadmaps? The answer is always yes. Martin of Automattic says WordPress isn’t adding social for the sake of “adding social,” but rather because the feedback from lightweight interactions is motivation for content creators. WordPress is adding more tools to enable this as well. As Mike of FormSpring explains, “we want to reward good user behavior,” by releasing new features for users. Lightweight actions help them sort what’s actually relevant to communities, so FormSpring came out with a feature to sort by most popular and by language.

When it comes to platforms, each company agreed that it is extremely important to carry content across platforms. As Martin said, it’s important for people to publicize their content outside of their blogs. Users want to share on tumble, twitter, and elsewhere. Tumblr actually doubled engagement within WordPress. “Viralizing the content,” Ro of Disqus says, draws in more users. 50% of Disqus’ users connect with another social platform and 10-12% of comments are shared on Twitter. And while you’re always competing for eyeballs online, no single platform can own a conversation about something. When a user is particularly interested in a topic, it will naturally cross platforms. Facebook has even helped discussions grow through “Facebook comments”. They tend to increase the pie for everyone and open the eyes of new users.

One of the biggest concerns of content creators is engagement versus reach: which is more important? Both matter to different creators, and but it’s important to consider who is asking. For example, a blog like TechCrunch has more influence and reach than a personal blog, but both reach and engagement are valuable within different communities.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Engaging with Customers Online with Wendy Lea

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Get Satisfaction’s CEO Wendy Lea on how brands are learning to provide social customer service, how Get Satisfaction’s platform is evolving, emerging businesses cases of Get Satisfaction and how Get Satisfaction views social data.

Wendy Lea of Get Satisfaction

The heart of the product at Get Satisfaction is to help companies connect with their customers online, wherever they are. “We talk about ourselves as a customer engagement platform that allows companies of all sizes and industries to build a community and have conversations,” Wendy says. It’s about the organic nature of consumers engaging with companies, also known as the outside-in model. In the beginning, individuals needed service and support and would find one another through Google searches about their issue. Suffice it to say that when customers are talking to one another about a product, they usually have quality idea. If the company gets out of the way, these ideas incubate and then amplify, creating huge potential.

47% of the activities inside a Get Satisfaction community are questions about the product itself, not specific problems about the product. This is both a sales and customer development opportunity and marketers need to be paying attention. The solutions to the use cases need to make sense to the businesses, i.e. not a horizontal come-one, come-all frenzy of suggestions from the market. Everyone is used to ratings and reviews technologies and Get Satisfaction is finding that companies have more success when they embed their customer and community interactions inside their purchase place. When a customer’s transacting in the flow of a purchase and they have a question, often not getting a response is what causes them to abandon their cart and not follow through with buying. Customers helping customers to expedite a transaction is a whole new market.

Rob Johnson of Gnip talks about the intrigue that led Wendy to get involved in the social conversation world. When Get Satisfaction was first pitched to Wendy, she recognized it as a simple model: true relationship building. Companies don’t always have the courage to be public about conversations. She knew the opportunity of the social CRM is what matters most. Get Satisfaction is sitting between the social web and systems of record but it’s a freemium, SaaS model and now has 3,000+ paying customers. Wendy describes the words “brands” and “engagement” as jargon. Get Satisfaction’s mascot is even named Jargon. “Being from the South, I like to talk straight,” she drawls. It’s not about run-on sentences that mislead or confuse the customer regarding solutions. It’s about productive interactions inside each conversation. When this happens, relationships are built around not only the product but also around the interest in the product.

Skills, process, and legal issues for each employee online all come into play. For example,at a big corporation, what details are even allowed to be public? Bringing value to the conversation happens when customers connect with companies on a human level. “Cut and paste crap does not work in a community,” Wendy says. Community managers have to hone their skills because jumping into the conversation too early can kill a good idea, too late can reflect poorly on the company, and it’s crucial to let the flow incubate somewhere between those two extremes.

Wendy also offered her insight on how to successfully scale community management. “As social media conversations grow and proliferate, and they will, that’s when community managers become facilitators. It’s not one to one and it’s not a call que so it’s also easier to scale. You’re basically gathering a party under a tent and you need that tent to be structured enough to expand.” Get Satisfaction likes to keep its communities open so as to not limit any potential conversations. Get Satisfaction also scales by pulling in all departments in to support the community managers in a cross-functioning capacity.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Creating the Social Data Ecosystem with Twitter

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Ryan Sarver and Doug Williams of the Twitter platform discuss the launch of commercial public social data nearly two years ago and how the Twitter firehose has evolved.

Doug Williams and Ryan Sarver at Big Boulder

Ryan and Doug of Twitter have been there three years and describe the experience as “learning as you go.” What excited Doug was for the first time was that there was an open data source on the web, and he became the API evangelist. During the last six years, Twitter now has 140 million users. During that incredible growth page, the scaling has been tough for the company yet having that many users has created many opportunities for people to build products on top of that social data.

Several years ago, Twitter decided to change how data was syndicated. Twitter was built to serve consumers, so at the time it was hard to take resources away from that to support the API. Two years ago, Twitter was receiving multiple requests and weren’t able to provide enterprise-level support for features. At the time, Joe Fernandez of Klout was in the same building and was making multiple requests because Klout felt they could create much cooler features if they had access to more types of metadata. Wanting to focus on serving the consumers that were using the product but still wanting to support the API, Twitter decided to work with outside companies such as Gnip to provide its social data to provide that enterprise level support. Twitter decided to select a small number of companies to provide the data because they wanted to know where the data was going and how it was being used. Doug Williams called working with Gnip one of the most successful partnerships that Twitter has ever had. But it was important to Twitter that by providing companies with data, they wanted to create value for both directions. The companies represented at Big Boulder are helping to create a better audience, encouraging companies to invest time and resources into Twitter.

One of the most frequent questions that Twitter is asked if they’re going to do analytics. What Ryan and Doug talked about is that they’re going to continue to build out baseline features,  but they’ll rely on other companies to provide the features that companies need to do business and interact on Twitter. They want companies to get the analytics they need and recognize that the analytics that other social media companies provide add value to Twitter. When people get the analytics they need, they understand the value that Twitter provides and it powers their decisions to use Twitter and advertise on the Twitter platform. They also talked about how Twitter is firmly committed to providing Twitter data and are invest in by making sure companies receive all the tweets they need.

The conversation segued to the firehose, which Gnip still receives requests to have access to the entire firehose but most companies are realizing that they really don’t need it. Receiving the entire firehose can be prohibitive because it can be too much to consume and expensive. Ryan and Doug talked about how they will continue to license the firehose when it makes sense but the overall trend is to service those use cases less and less. Each case is evaluated on a case by case basis. Twitter is committed to ensuring that businesses have a clear path to getting the social data they need, as they recognize businesses are being built around the Twitter data.

Last week Twitter announced expandable tweets, or as they call it internally, In Tweet Media. This is an exciting advancement for the platform because it provides more options to chose how your content on Twitter gets consumed. Publishers want to have control on how that social data gets syndicated. Since news is frequently breaking on Twitter, publishers want to be able to tell their stories on the platform, allowing them to drive greater distribution with Twitter.

So exactly what is Twitter doing about spam? A lot. According to Ryan, the spam prevention team is one the largest at Twitter, and they’ve made several acquisitions around it. As they pointed out, spam is still a problem for email which has been around for many years. Spam is an ongoing battle that they’ll have to fight for the existence of the program. Doug talked about how when people test the Gnip platform, they often start a new account and then the tweet can be marked as spam and doesn’t make it through. Doug said to the delight of Jud and Chris, “messages marked as spam that you sent from a test account is Twitter’s issue, not Gnip’s issue.” The takeaway is not to create a new account to test Twitter.

Twitter now has 140 million users, and 400 millions tweets every couple of days. Yet the team still sees lots of room for growth, and that they’d love to see everyone with a phone using Twitter. In fact, they talked about during the Q&A with how often Twitter is used during protests that they put much consideration into making sure that Twitter can be used without a smart phone and that Tweets are quickly delivered across the world. As they’re trying to encourage more use, they recognize that much of the world knows about Twitter, but the gap is to help people understand why they need to be part of the platform.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: The Social Cocktail with Chris Moody

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Chris Moody, the COO of Gnip, kicks off Big Boulder by talking about the social cocktail and the ingredients that go into it.

Chris Moody of Gnip

Chris Moody tells us Gnip is founded on the idea that social data represents unlimited innovation. “This full room proves that there will be unlimited, exciting applications,” he says. 100 billion pieces of data are created each month and Gnip is going to understand what makes each set of data unique. Over 90% of Fortune 500 gets content indirectly from Gnip. The variety of people in attendance at Big Boulder is representative of the dense social data ecosystem.

There are many different data sources, which is good news and bad news. New coverage platforms added by Gnip this year inclue WordPress, IntenseDebate, Disqus, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo. So how does an entrepreneur or company prioritize and organize the data that is important to a specific set of customers? This is what Gnip does.

Chris and his team focus on two different dimensions of social data:

  1. Reaction Time: ranging from ultra-fast (example: Twitter at events) to slow (example: the comments on a blog post or a shared video.)
  2. Depth: Data is about the what. Twitter is concise and deals with the immediate, “This is so adjective!” It’s difficult to get into the reasons in only 140 characters. Platforms like YouTube and Tumblr are at the other end of the spectrum and tend to boast deep, personal content. When you begin to overlay business use cases over these different data sources, you see the social cocktail. On one side is public relations and crisis management. If you have a client looking to manage a crisis, the priority is your speed in rectifying the situation. If a person complains that their cell phone is on fire, you don’t need to ask them how they feel about it. It just needs to be immediately addressed. On the other side is brand management: what does the collective universe think about not only you but also your competitors? If you’re the cell phone provider with the faulty and explosive device, what was said about you and what was your response?

Chris brings up an example slide of the market response to Netflix earnings last year. The world’s reaction to the opening bell on Twitter was very fast and factual. It demonstrated information based around how correlated the stocks were performing, or the what. Blogs had a half-life on the curve, well past the end of the trading day when blog content and a variety of opinions began to go public, or the why. Comments to this kind of content peaked much later by comparison, the next day in this case.

There are two noticed patterns in social data: expected and unexpected. It’s also important to observe whether the occurrence is a routine or an event. Generally speaking, no one expects a hurricane. Likewise, the social data around a natural disaster spikes drastically as soon as it occurs. We’re continuing to understand this action because new sources are constantly adding new conversations. As a second example, JP Morgan’s surprise trading loss illustrated a strong story in the comments of its articles, animated political .gifs for humor, and theories. The story shared was factual and the reaction to the story was highly narrative and emotional. As a third example, a recently shared image of the new Urban Outfitters line went viral not only because of Urban Outfitters’ huge market but also because the image was so easily sharable in a micro-blog format.

The message being driven home at Big Boulder today and tomorrow is, “Where is this industry going?” In an interview style format, Big Boulder is Gnip’s first conference and panels are conducted around the data science of what we collectively think and feel.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder and on Gnip’s Facebook page.