Synthesio teamed with Bouygues e-lab to study and model current event buzz levels on the web and the way it spreads across media sites, blogs, and video-sharing platforms. The study also looked at how the buzz can be broken down among the various sites, and at what the publishing cycles look like for certain events.

Is it possible to analyze the impact of global events on the publication of online news articles, and thus indirectly on the audience of websites? Media channels are rapidly changing, but we can measure media as well as the way consumers are using media to adapt.

Download the Synthesio white paper here and leave us your feedback!

Analytical technology has been around for at least 30 years and is well-developed for the analysis of lengthy, homogenous texts. Recent improvements allow for finer sentiment analysis at the sentence level, but do not take into account :

- slang
- poor grammar
- missepellings
- often, foreign languages
- poor syntax
- puns
- etc.

Download the Synthesio white paper here or watch the MonitorChat video and let us know what you think.

But before we announce the big winners, I should point out that we couldn’t grant a title of this enormous magnitude (touch of sarcasm there) based on Twitter chatter alone. If we really want to understand what people are talking about on the web, we can’t just listen to some of the conversations, right? Much like with real-world marketing, Twitter is only one piece of the media puzzle, and analyzing it alone simply doesn’t provide the complete picture. Come to think of it, what about languages? Or countries? People are talking about our brands outside the U.S. as well; in today’s global village, shouldn’t they be taken into account? Taking a step back now, compiling a list based only on Twitter chatter, only in English and only within the U.S. seems a bit limited doesn’t it?

At Synthesio, we like seeing the big picture, so we looked at public banter in 30 languages worldwide across the web, including blogs, forums, Twitter, and even mainstream news sites from March 4^th (one week before the start of SXSW) to March 15^th (one day following) to find out which “breakout apps” truly got the most buzz throughout the event. So now, without further ado…

The Top 10 Breakout Apps are:

Viewing the big picture, we can see that GroupMe truly was the big winner with just over 22% of public banter across the web and the world, but now we see other apps emerge, taking the global top spots, with Hashable and Instagram tying for 2^nd place, and Fast Society close behind.

Diving deeper into the data, however, reveals some interesting insight about the true meaning of SXSW buzz for these apps – does higher buzz directly translate to public acceptance and usage? Or is there a “higher power” perhaps responsible for inflating some of the buzz?

Some apps got even buzz throughout the event, but many of them had very specific spikes in mentions. Yobongo for example, barely got into the Top 10 with its low level buzz during the monitoring period. However, had we extended just a couple days both ways, it would have reached much higher rankings thanks to a Mashable article about the app on March 3^rd, which caused mentions to spike just before the event.

It did have fairly steady buzz throughout the event, however, as did Kik:

Beluga, and Fast Society share a similar story, having limited mentions during SXSW, but specific peaks thanks to mentions from tech blogs. For Beluga, a TechCrunch article about Beluga and an exclusive video demo of Fast Society caused their sharp rises in mentions but didn’t prove to last even during the conference:

Picplz and Kik, were the only applications that saw a steady rise and fall of mentions throughout the event, showing constant use of the application throughout the conference and perhaps staying power over other apps. In other words, with deeper analysis, we can see that the continual rise of Picplz was due to people actually using it:

GroupMe was the big winner of all breakout apps throughout SXSW, but upon deeper analysis it’s interesting to see that there is more going on beneath the surface, as the buzz generated for some apps may actually be more meaningful than others, even if there’s less of it. Which brings me to my last point, that online listening alone isn’t enough to get a meaningful picture of a brand’s reputation online. It’s through dedicated human analysis that we can truly understand the story behind the data, and convert it into meaningful, actionable insight.

Congrats to the true big winners, and see you at the next SXSW!

Synthesio took a look at what Internet users want from luxury brands, who is talking about them online, and how luxury brands are evolving to incorporate the social web into their marketing and communications strategies.

Dior and designer John Galliano were a part of many conversations on Twitter, blogs, forums, and mainstream news sites, following Galliano’s recent departure from the label. Karl Lagerfeld’s collection with Chanel was the major winner on Twitter, however, accounting for 22% of all tweets that mentioned a designer. We also found a large number of tweets surrounding Lady Gag’s first-ever runway show with designer Thierry Mugler in which she sported some sky-high heels.

Click here to view the Top 100 Twitter users during Paris Fashion Week and the Top 10 designers.

Who else do you know in the list? Did you tweet about Paris Fashion Week or #pfw?

While the Chinese government has blocked most access to Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook, the Chinese web has seen the rise of Chinese copycat networks like Youku (YouTube) and Sina Weibo (Twitter). According to an anonymous Chinese technology blogger, “this is what the government likes to see.”
The Great Firewall of China has indeed been censoring sites, keywords, and individual people since 2003 via what is known as the “50-cent army” or “50-cent party” for the amount they are paid per post, but allowed social networks that follow the rules.

Synthesio investigated repercussions of government censorship as well as brands that have had success within Chinese social networks. Here’s a hint : Lay’s potato chips increased sales from Happy Farmer players (the copycat version of Facebook’s Farmville) by 20% after allowing players to grow their own potatoes and “purchase” Lay’s chip factories.

To download the PDF click here, and visit our MonitorChat.tv site for our community manager’s video version

Don’t forget to leave your comments below !

Synthesio has worked with clients that have community managers as well as others that have brands that need online community service more than anything. We explored the differences between the two roles because, while community management has been a hot buzzword, it might not be the solution for every brand. Orange telecom, for example, saw “several millions of euros saved” thanks to a team of online web consultants – not community managers.

Take a look at the case study on community management and online customer support [PDF] or the latest MonitorChat video about the subject, and leave your feeback below.

Based on the March 12, 2010 “Defining Social Intelligence” Forrester Research report.

Synthesio social media monitoring recently evaluated trends and best practices of brands in Latin America, a market that is expanding at a rapid pace.
Take a look at the study of social media in Latin America carried out using Synthesio, either on our website [PDF] or on MonitorChat.tv

Enjoy and please send us your comments !

This natural tendency of patients, physicians and caregivers to share when it comes to their health can be of huge value for brands. The challenge comes from making sense of large quantities of data while abiding with legal regulations.

Discover Synthesio’s white paper here

In the white paper you will find :

• How Social Media is Changing the Rules in Pharma
• Detecting and Managing Adverse events
• Creating digital initiatives that meet legal regulations
• As well as several case studies

Download the white paper

Also, our thanks to the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki and to Pew Internet Research for the Social Life of Health Information.