Understanding the social media whispers

The evolution of Roamz into Local Measure tells us a lot about how businesses can use social media and online local services.

What do you do when paying customers tell you they would rather your product be different to what you were offering? This is the predicament that faced Jonathan Barouch when he discovered the real market for his Roamz service was in social media business intelligence.

How Jonathan dealt with this was the classic business pivot, where the original idea of Roamz evolved into Local Measure.

Originally Roamz was set up to consolidate social services like Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. If you wanted to find a restaurant, bar or hotel in your neighbourhood, Roamz would pick the most relevant reviews from the various services to show you what was in your neighbourhood.

The idea for Roamz came from when Jonathan was looking for places to take his new baby, jugging several different location services to find local cafes, shops or playground is hard work when you have a little one to deal with.

A notable feature of Roamz was the use of geotags to determine relevance. Even if the social media user doesn’t mention the business, Roamz would use the attached location information to determine what outlet was being discussed.

Enter Local Measure

While Roamz was doing well it wasn’t making money and, in Jonathan’s words, it was a “slower burn, longer term play”. On the other hand businesses were telling him and his sales team that they would pay immediately to use the service to monitor what people were saying about them on social media.

“People said, ‘hey this is cool, we want to pay for this.” Jonathan said of the decision to pivot Roamz into Local Measure.

“I want to say it was a really difficult decision but it wasn’t because we had people saying ‘we want to pay you if you continue with this product.’”

Local Measure is built on the Roamz platform but instead of helping consumers find local venues, the service now gives businesses a tool to monitor what people are saying about them on social media services.

The difference with the larger social media monitoring tools like Radian6 is Local Measure gives an intimate view of individual posts and users. The idea being a business can directly monitor what people are saying are saying about a store or a product.

For dispersed companies, particularly franchise chains and service businesses, it gives local managers and franchisees the ability to know what’s happening with their outlet rather than having to rely on a social media team at head office.

The most immediate benefit of Local Measure is in identifying loyal users and influencers. Managers can see who is tweeting, checking in or updating their status in their store.

Armed with that intelligence, the local store owner, franchisee or manager can engage with the shop’s most enthusiastic customers.

Customer service is one of the big undervalued areas of social media and Jonathan believes Local Measure can help businesses improve how they help customers.

“It makes invisible customers visibile to management,” says Jonathan.

An example Jonathan gives is of a cinema where the concession’s frozen drink machine wasn’t set currently. While the staff were oblivious to the issue, customers were complaining on various social media channels. Once the theatre manager saw the feedback he was able to quickly fix the problem.

Employee behaviour online is also an important concern for modern managers, if employees are posting inappropriate material on social media then the risks to a business are substantial.

“From an operational point perspective we’ve picked up really weird and wonderful things that the business doesn’t know,” says Jonathon. “Staff putting things in the public domain that is really damaging to brands.”

“We’ve had two or three cases of behaviour that you shudder at. I’ve been presenting and it has popped up and the clients have said ‘delete that, we don’t want that up’ and I say ‘that’s the whole point – it’s out there.’”

That’s a lesson that Domino’s Pizza learned in the US when staff posted YouTube videos of each other putting toppings up their noses. Once unruly employees post these things, it’s hard work undoing the brand damage and for smaller businesses or franchise outlets the bad publicity could be fatal.

Local Measure is a good example of a business pivot, it’s also shows how concepts like Big Data, social media and geolocation come together to help businesses.

Being able to listen to customers also shows how marketing and customer service are merging in an age where the punters are no longer happy to be seen and not heard.

It’s the business who grab tools like Local Measure who are going to be the success stories of the next decade, the older businesses who ignore the changes in customer service, marketing and communications are going to be a memory.

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Coming to your city – the internet of machines

A chart by sensor manufacturer Libelium illustrates how the internet of machines is growing

An intriguing infographic from Spanish sensor manufacturer Libelium – which to Australian ears sounds like a new age defamation law firm – illustrates how the internet of things is being used in all walks of life from shipping containers to park benches.

The notable thing about the diagram is pretty well all of the sensor applications have been available for years – in some cases decades – and its only with the arrival of cheap sensors and pervasive internet access that widespread monitoring has becoming possible.

Libelium smart world infographic

With affordable, even disposible, sensors coupled with internet projects like Google Loon and Australia’s National Broadband Network, these networks are now possible at a price that won’t sink a government’s budget.

In fact these sensor networks will probably improve councils’ and governments’ budgets as they promise to improve the efficiency of services like rubbish collection and street repairs.

The real challenge is managing all the data this equipment gathers, that’s going to be one of the big jobs of the next decade.

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Smart cities and the sensors in your pocket

Community wide sensors promise to change government

National Public Radio’s Parallels program has story on how the Spanish city of Santander is wiring itself as a ‘smart city’ with a network of sensors wiring everything from garbage bins to parking spots.

The hope with the sensors is they’ll will improve local government’s services, allowing things like more efficient garbage collection and better pricing of parking meters.

What’s notable about the story is that smartphones are included as ‘sensors’ with Santander residents being able to submit data from their handsets.

The idea of smartphones as sensors isn’t new — pothole reporting apps were early to the iPhone — the increased sophistication of handsets and improved tracking technology is making them more powerful.

So we have another Big Data problem with local councils being flooded with information.

Processing all this information is going to require the community pitching in so the data is going to have to open.

Once governments make the data open it also creates opportunities for smart entrepreneurs to create new services and technologies.

Creating new opportunities is a hope of government sensor programs around the world, including Tasmania’s Sense-T project .

With factors like water quality and weather being monitored, existing sectors become more efficient and new industries are being created.

Hopefully the urge to hoard this rich, community data will be resisted by governments.

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Big data’s big truths

There’s a lot of hype around Big Data but it doesn’t mean we should ignore the risks or opportunities.

One thing former Obama 2012 campaign CTO Harper Reed cannot be accused of is subtlety so his statement at the Sydney CeBIT conference last week that Big Data is Bullshit wasn’t wholly surprising.

Reed has a good point – like all IT industry buzzwords there is a fair degree of hype and BS around Big Data although his referring to it as a storage problem misses the point.

Data storage is a problem largely solved; when we’re talking about Big Data today, we’re talking more about analysing the information and managing the life cycle of an organisation’s data.

Not that these issues are new, the tech industry has been dealing with the challenges of storing, managing and analysing data since computers first appeared. In fact, that’s the reason computers were invented.

An excellent NY Times Bits blog post expands on Harper’s views and rebuts many of the myths and hype around big data.

Most important is the point that big data is not the truth, we can torture those bits and bytes to tell us anything we like.

Claims that Big Data can tell us everything or that it will conquer discrimination and make cities smarter are fanciful. It all depends on how we choose to use the data.

There are downsides with Big Data too — we live in an age where it’s easier to let the algorithm do the work and if the computer says ‘no’, then we can shrug and say “sorry it’s beyond our control.”

Letting the algorithms run our lives is one of many risks, but it doesn’t change the opportunities for businesses, governments and communities Big Data presents. If we can understand our world better, we can do smarter things.

That’s the real opportunity with Big Data and we don’t need the hype to tell us that.

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ABC 702 mornings – Storage and your computer

How we deal with the information explosion in the age of Big Data is the topic of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram on the decidedly unsexy topic of storage – hard drives, cloud computing and the struggle to keep up with ever expanding file sizes of documents, photos and downloads.

It’s an opportunity to revisit the How Much Data Does The Internet Need topic which I covered for Radio National last year, although almost certainly that needs updating.

Earlier this year networking vendor Cisco released its 2013 Virtual Networking Index which forecast global data traffic growing fourteen fold over the next five years.

Those bytes slopping around the internet have to come to rest on someone’s hard drive and this is what’s driving the storage crisis.

Yesterday US business site Venture Beat had an op-ed by an executive from Seagate, the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturer where he discussed the storage challenges with a claim from industry consultants IDC that worldwide computer storage is 2.7 zettabytes.

A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or ten followed by twenty zeros – it’s the equivalent of a billion one terabyte hard drives that are standard on most cheap desktop computers.

Where those hard drives are located is the big challenge, is it on your laptop, smartphone or on a somewhere on a cloud service?

The other big challenge is what do you do with all this information – which is where the Big Data discussion comes in.

While data storage is a mundane topic, it’s a big one that matters. I hope you can tune in.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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Skills, data scientists and the decade’s big IT trends

As the amount data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.

As we all get buried under a tsunami of data, the challenge is managing it. The MIT Technology Review this week looks at the rise of the data scientist, a job title unknown a few years ago.

The problem for industry is the skill sets required to become a data scientist are fairly esoteric.

Data scientist has become a popular job title partly because it has helped pull together a growing number of haphazardly defined and overlapping job roles, says Jake Klamka, who runs a six-week fellowship to place PhDs from fields like math, astrophysics, and even neuroscience in such jobs. “We have anyone who works with a lot of data in their research,” Klamka says. “They need to know how to program, but they also have to have strong communications skills and curiosity.”

Over the last twenty years we’ve done a pretty poor job teaching maths and statistics which is going to create a skills shortage as industry struggles to find people qualified to figure out what all of this data means.

While Big Data might be to this decade what plastics were to the 1960s, it’s not the only technology change that’s affecting business as the McKinsey Quarterly describes the ten IT trends for the decade ahead.

The thing that really stands out with McKinsey’s predictions is the degree of reskilling the workforce is going to need, today’s workers are going to need an understanding of programming, logic and statistics as much the kids currently at school.

If you’re planning on being in the workforce at the end of this decade right now may be the time to consider getting some of these skills.

Just as businesses will be separated by how they use Big Data, workers may too find those skills divide the winners from the losers.

As the amount of data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.

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Can maps change the way we work?

Big data and mobile computing are changing the way business operates as maps become an important part of our normal work and leisure time.

“Work the Way You Live” is Google’s motto for their enterprise maps service which the search engine giant hopes to make as ubiquitous in business as it is in the home.

At Google Atmosphere the company showed off their mapping technology and how it can be used by large organisation. It’s a compelling story.

The technology behind Google Maps is impressive – twenty petabytes of images, one billion active monthly users, 1.6 million map tiles served every second and a target of getting those tiles onto the users screen within ten milliseconds.

Maps are one of the Big Data applications that cheap computing makes possible, until a few years ago even desktop computers would have struggled with the sort of mapping technology that we take for granted on our smartphones today.

Rethinking products

google-street-view-enabled-treadmill

Adding mapping technologies to products allows businesses to rethink their products. A good example of this is the internet connected treadmill.

Using the treadmill a jogger, or a walker, can map out a route anywhere in the world and the screen will show them the Google Street View as they travel along the route. The treadmill even adjusts to the changing gradients.

The Google Maps driven treadmill is a trivial example of the internet of machines, but it gives a hint of what’s possible.

The search for truth

ground-truth-and-google-maps

The success of a map depends on whether it can be trusted – this is what caught Apple out with their mapping application which was released before it was ready for prime time. Google, and most cartographers, take seriously errors and changes.

In the early days of Google Maps, the company would pass errors and changes onto the private and government mapping providers they licensed the data from. It could take months to fix a problem.

“It was really hard, you have to get maps from all over the world to create the product,” says Louis Perrochon, the Engineering director of google maps for business.

“That’s a limitation if you work with third party data so we started a project called Ground Truth where we build our own maps.”

Google pulls together its Street View data, satellite images and information sent in from the public through their Map Maker site and the Maps Engine Lite to build an accurate map of an area.

Changing consumer behaviour

Having accurate and accessible maps has changed the way consumers have behaved; “this revolution hasn’t happened slowly,” says Google Enterprise Directore Richard Suhr, “it’s happened really quickly.”

“Customers have become savvy about spatial. What this means is that businesses are starting to rethink the problem.”

“What are the exciting things I can do with maps, what else can I do with my data.”

That’s a big question of all businesses – how they use the massive amount of information in their organisation will mark the winners from also runs over the next decade. Maps are one way to visualise their data.

While Google Atmosphere was a marketing event for the companies mapping technologies the message is clear – mapping is changing the way we work and play and it’s affecting business.

How is mapping changing the way your business works?

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