If you use a mobile device and would like to keep up with the latest happenings at the IBM Pulse Service Management Conference, feel free to try out this new service we are trialing over the coming days of the event. You will find all the latest updates including: Commentary from the social media aggregator Pulse Conversations including blog posts and Tweets Posts from the official Pulse blog Updates from Flickr and YouTube Links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more This is a mobile-optimized website so will run on any handheld device with a modern browser (iPhone, Android, Blackberry). If you have a 2-D barcode scanner, point it at this QR code: If not just visit http://bit.ly/pulsemobile from your phone. We are trialing this new service for the first time at IBM Pulse and welcome your feedback! (For blogs and tweets about the event, remember to use the hashtag #IBMPulse)

When I was growing up, election coverage was characterized by an exuberant political pundit leaping around large cardboard charts of the UK with the kind of coloring normally reserved for the weather report. The ‘exit polls’ we were familiar with only updated about every four hours and only included those people who were prepared to be cornered by the political researchers hanging around near polling stations.

Fast forward to 2011.

We currently have a general election unfolding in Ireland. The Irish online news site The Journal has been crawling over Twitter, that political social network du jour, using the conversations that happen there to predict which way the election will sway. And so far the headline graphic looks like this:

It’s a great case study in the current status of analytics and throws up some wonderful points that have relevance beyond the Irish political scene.

Data is everywhere

Researchers no longer need to go in search of data. Whilst I don’t deny the added color and in-depth insight from questionnaires, focus groups and other tools used by human researchers (whether in the political or commercial realm), there is rich data out there that you don’t have to force out of people. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook give us access to voluntarily-provided information on social groups. We no longer have to bug people to provide us with data.

Growing importance of social media analysis

Let’s face it, we’ve seen a huge growth in the use of social networks over the last two years (not sure why I pick that time frame, maybe tied up with when Twitter/Facebook buttons first starting appearing in ads and on TV). We’ve taken our social lives online. And the beauty of being online is that everything can be tracked. We leave traces. and when you aggregate all of these, patterns start to appear. Is this level of analysis creepy? The privacy issue definitely has to be considered, however I’d contend that the information is so much more valuable in aggregate (effectively anonymized) than it is at the individual level.

Sentiment analysis can throw a curve-ball

Here is what the volume of conversations around the Irish election shows us:

Now look at the sentiment:

Fine Gael have by far the most conversations. However, much of this conversation is not positive. I’d say from a marketing perspective this is something we need to pay more attention to. Far too often we’re still using raw numbers as a determinant of campaign success. We need to add the sentiment layer on top to understand more of the nature of the conversations we ignite.

Presentation is everything

The first image I highlight in this post is so immediately descriptive. Newspapers have been producing wonderful infographics for decades. In the business world we still end up with reports that look more like this:

(not meaning to pick on anyone, this is just an image that came up in a search)

How much further our story goes if we take time to package it up. Business analytics will only move further into the mainstream if the findings are presented in an easily-consumable fashion.

So, having stuck my neck out in favor of The Journal’s Twitter Tracker, I’ll have to come back next week with some post-election analysis. In the meantime, back to Twitter to watch this election unfold.

Only a matter of days before IBM’s premier integrated service management event kicks off in Las Vegas.

Whether you are going or not, you may still want to share some of the excellent content that is sure to come out of the event. Social media maven Tiffany Winman has done an excellent job of collating all the social media embeds in this excellent post.

I thought I’d share my two favorites:

Livestream Channel

Live coverage of the keynotes for those of you who can’t make it (or get stuck in the crowd behind the guy with the Afro).

Cheat Sheet for Social Media at Pulse

A handy reference guide for all the official social media properties covering the event

As I said before, visit Tiffany’s blog for more information on these widgets or visit the Pulse website for more information on the event.

Google has now officially rolled out the latest iteration of its social search which includes much tighter integration between social elements and what the big search giant is commonly known for uncovering: web pages.

Google has been displaying results from social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and its own Buzz in its search results pages, but these were typically segmented out at the bottom of the page.

With the latest update, these are now intermingled with other page results:

(see the first and third result)

The New York Times points out benefits, such as seeing links to pictures from your friend who recently went to Mexico when performing holiday searches for that same destination.

I'm not convinced this will hit such mainstream applications for one reason. There's a big elephant that is still not in the room: Facebook.

Let's face it, this is where most of the sharing happens. According to recent reports, we're talking about 100 million photos a day that just wouldn't make it into the Google search result pages. Going back to the New York Times example, there's a big chance that Facebook is where those Mexico pictures would have been posted, so they'll never make it to the Google search results page.

What kind of results will show up? Areas where Twitter is particularly strong: news (as the recent events in Egypt made clear), technical information (eg. the code samples and tips often searched for by developers), and location-based searches that could show up results from Foursquare, Gowalla and other similar services from local searches.

At the individual level, those who stand to gain are those who have built up a following by sharing content - the curators. (A by-product of social search could be an increase in SEOs employing Twitter curation/syndication models). It will also help breakdown the time zone barrier that has long segmented the Twitter crowd: if you post a Tweet at lunchtime in London, it will be pushed way out of my Twitter feed by the time I wake up in San Francisco. However, if you happen to be in my network, I could see your tweets show up in my search results, even weeks after the tweet.

If these social results start showing up in a larger number of searches, this is obviously a boon for Twitter (as well as the other networks Google features). It's effectively a free SEO boost.

And what could be construed as a snub to Facebook.

The fight for content from each other's network has been pretty public. Will this be enough pressure from Google to force Facebook's hand into releasing its well-guarded trove of user activity data?

That remains to be seen. One potential issue of adoption is that Google social search is heavily tied to Google Profiles and the search giant still has some way to go to make these as visible and user-friendly as other services out there (um, Facebook springs to mind).

Still, go ahead and hook up your Twitter/LinkedIn/YouTube accounts to your Google profile and try social search for yourself.

I've covered this before, but there is palpable excitement in the air as there are literally minutes before an IBM computer competes against Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (see here for local US show times).

Delaney Turner over on the IBM Software Blog does an excellent job of running through the different ways you can connect and learn more about every aspect of IBM Watson and this fascinating project.

For those interested in some of the specs of Whatson, check out this technical post on Wikibon.

On February 9, Nova aired this breathy backgound piece on Watson’s four year build-up to this event with an in-depth look at technology used and the team that created it.

I thought it’s worth sharing the chapters:

Chapter 1: smartest machine on earth – preview

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Chapter 2: the challenge

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Chapter 3: programming intelligence

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Chapter 4: Watson’s audition

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Chapter 5: machine learning

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Chapter 6: playing the game

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

For more information, follow IBM Watson on Twitter.  

A wonderful case study came out last week of how Sequoia Hospital is using business analytics software to inform heart surgery doctors on when to operate and what is the best post- and pre-op care option.

The hospital is using IBM SPSS predictive analytics software to sift through heavy data spanning healthcare databases, medical precedents and real-world medical cases:

"For instance, the software revealed that an anticoagulant drug often given to patients after a heart attack dramatically increases the chances of serious postoperative bleeding. Based on that information, Sequoia was able to put a protocol in place to stop the drug at least five days prior to surgery to allow the patient's platelets to recover and significantly reduce bleeding events."

Why can business analytics play such an important role in healthcare?

Statistics is at the core of modern medicine. Whether it is measuring the response of a sample group against a control group to decide whether a new drug outperforms the placebo, or whether it's tracking through a national database of asthma sufferers in search of factors leading to increased instances of attacks, the medical profession relies heavily on statistics-based predictions. Software such as IBM SPSS solutions have the tooling to crawl through this data and help medical professionals make more informed decisions.

As more hospitals and medical facilities switch to electronic record systems, the amount of medical data that computing systems can access mushrooms. This requires more sophisticated, powerful applications (such as those that can tie together unstructured data from various sources). The payback is a larger sample group, diminished margin of error, and a performance increase in the delivery of healthcare. Whereas in the past a hospital would have only had its own records as evidence when deciding on a course of action, now state-wide or nation-wide information can be mined.   

More information on how IBM SPSS solutions is transforming the medical profession

So, looks like I managed to bookend social media week in San Francisco catching the PeopleBrowsr event on the first day, and today, one of the final sessions with headliner Shel Israel. I’m sure there’s no need for introduction, but just in case.

An interesting takeaway for me was Shel’s statement that ‘social media is no longer disruptive… it’s in the process of normalization’. What does that normalization look like? Facebook and Twitter buttons are on the website of almost every major brand out there. It also means many companies now have a dedicated person performing some form of social media management role – generally spawned out of the marketing or comms department (although potentially covering much more than that).

Shel mentioned how brands like Dell and Best Buy are hiring journalists to come into the organization and report what they see. As the other Shel present (Holtz) emphasized to me, this is significantly different from journalists jumping over the fence and becoming PR professionals. This is journalists independently reporting about what they see within an organization (kind of like when a journalist team embed themselves in an army unit during conflict, but without the need for body armor).

Shel Israel also described how companies (including IBM) are using social media to inform product development. Upcoming features and betas are shared with users prior to general release. As Shel points out, amongst other things, there can be huge cost savings in marketing departments: no need to go out and try and convince an audience they need to buy a product they didn’t really want in the first place.

As Katy Keim, CMO for Lithium later suggested, we are moving to a paradigm where social business is just a metaphor for good business. In fact there’s no reason to call it ‘social’ business (ties up with what Charlene Li said years ago about social networks becoming like air).

I do strongly agree with the sentiment that ‘social’ is now heavily woven into the business psyche – it’s getting increasingly difficult in business circles to find individuals who will discount the importance of social media in practicing business today (which wasn’t the case two years ago). However, our business processes and organizational silos are yet to materially come up to this ideal. One example I heard this week: social media monitoring is still largely only applied to marketing campaigns, rather than building a picture of all conversations happening around an organization. Whilst the spirit of disruption may no longer be there, I think there is still some change management ahead of us before all business is truly social.

See more of the conversations around this event on Twazzup.

Attend a future Social Media Breakfast (East Bay).

We currently use Unica NetInsight as our web analytics tool of choice on IBM.com. One of it's advantages is that it's highly configurable: on practically any report you can go in and add filters to hone in on the data you want and add metrics/dimensions to expand out on the information you get back (say if you want to add Visits as well as Views to a report).

All wonderful stuff.

But what happens if you want to pass that information around? One neat feature of the tool is that every report you run has a unique ID in the URL. So you can send someone the URL of a page you're looking at and be confident that they will see exactly the same report as the one you are viewing. If they change any of the values (say run the same report but roll back one year prior), once they rerun the report, they get a fresh URL. The structure is setup like this:

https://xxx/xxx.cgi?base=getreport&id=29877

Every time you change any value and rerun the report, that ID on the end of the URL increments. The server does the work to map that ID to all the report variables as the page is being generated.

How does this differ from other tools?

Many other tools out there (such as Google Analytics and Omniture, if my memory serve me correctly) may use the URL to specify what kind of report you are running, eg. Keyword report versus Top Pages report, but other key pieces, such as which data profile you are viewing, are stored through other means such as cookies so what one browser sees will differ from the next. You can’t be exactly sure that the URL will generate the same report for everyone.

It would be wonderful to see other applications in the business intelligence and analytics space follow this example. It may require slightly more coding on the backend to map unique IDs to reports, but from a user perspective it's great to have the sense of security that when you pass around the URL, you can be confident everyone sees the same thing and that you can record or bookmark the URL and know when you reload it a year from now, you’ll be looking at the same report you have in front of you today.