Grip on the

Social Media Hype

Grip on the
Social Media Hype

Index
The Minsk Miracle 3
Social Media Emerges
5
Grip on Social media
10
Joining Social media
14
My BuzzTalk 36
Social media lexicon
38
Source references 40

About Byelex
Byelex is a rapidly growing dynamic software enterprise with offices in Oud
Gastel (the Netherlands) and Minsk (Belarus). Throughout the past two decades,
Byelex has developed into a renowned internet/software organisation,
servicing a large number of multinationals. Byelex is the mother company of
BuzzTalk (www.buzztalkmonitor.com), which was developed over the past 5
years in a close cooperation with Minsk State University.

Byelex Social Media

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Byelex Sales B.V.
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www.byelex.com
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2012 Byelex Multimedia Products B.V.
All rights reserved. The Byelex logo is a
registered trademark of Byelex Multimedia
Products B.V.

The Minsk Miracle

In 2010 scientists of the Belarusian Minsk State University completed their
work on a new technological innovation, hence providing for a considerable
evolutionary step for corporate life. They developed a system that allows
companies to get a grip on the ever growing stream of information, opinions
and experiences sent out into the world through a large number of social media
platforms. This tsunami of raw data often bars marketing and communication
departments of corporations from obtaining clear insights in data, thus
disabling them from staying up-to-date about what is being said about their
organisations, their products, their competitors and their industries.
BuzzTalk is a technological instrument developed for companies who want
to stay informed about the tidal wave of buzz, without having to mobilize
hundreds of employees who meticulously browse the internet from dusk till
dawn to find out what is being said and written about their organisation.

Buzz
BuzzTalk is named after the phrase buzz, a word that has become inextricably
connected to social media. In its literal meaning, a buzz refers to the low
droning or vibrating sound like that of a bee. In its current usage the phrase
refers to the buzzing of information in topics or rumors on the internet, the
sources of which are often untraceable.
Buzz is part of a recently created lexicon associated with the emergence of
social media. Many other words and phrases were added to our collective
dictionaries by the upcoming social media. A trending topic, referring to a
subject being scrutinised or hyped by social media on a specific moment in
time, is just one example. Its a whole new lexis which almost requires a new
understanding of language. A language which one should understand and
more importantly command in order to understand the social media hype.

Internet users
Social media are online media in which groups of internet users have organised
themselves. The phrase social is used to define that these groups consists of
communities, rather than a company, even though social media themselves
are usually facilitated by commercial organisations.
Well known social media are YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and of course
Facebook, which listed on the stock exchange in 2012. In addition to these
household names many smaller social media exist, some of which are young
and growing (such as Tumblr), others which are older and seem to have lived

passed their peak (such as Hyves).

BuzzTalk helps to get a grip on social media and benefit from them. Everybody
who wants to use social media to improve their marketing and communication
results will gain a highly advanced supportive tool with BuzzTalk. It rapidly
scans through all online publications in the world, whether these are blogs,
articles in online newspapers, scientific publications in journals or tweets and
posts on Facebook.
BuzzTalk also defines and shows whether messages are either positive or
negative, it measures the online sentiment. With a simple click, youll know if
the crowd is feeling happy or dissatisfied with you. All coverage regarding a
specific topic can be traced, independent of where it has been published, as
BuzzTalk is able to track the global information stream in 33 different languages.
An information stream which simply cannot be contained without the help of
an effective enabler.

Social Media Emerges

Social media have already left a firm footprint on our global society.
Nowadays its hard to imagine what the world would look like without
them. Lets have a quick look at how we grew into our current social media

existence. The 1990 to 2000 era is defined as the Web 1.0. Distinctive
features of this era are the static websites and the single journey of online
information. Consumers looking for information on the internet were
exclusively depending on what websites offered. We read what they publish.
This period of static websites and a limitation of online information streams
to send only is also called the Information Web.

Interaction
In the years beyond the new millennium, websites started to offer more
interactive features. It suddenly became possible to post public messages
on websites. It also became increasingly easy for consumers for place their
own content on the internet, using blogs of social media such as Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest. This is what we call the Web 2.0 (2000-2010
era). Everybody can be a publisher, therefore they read what we publish
became the standard. This era is also referred to as the Social Web.

The challenge
As a direct result from the self-publishing power gained by consumers, the
amount of published content on the internet exploded; an effect lasting until
this very day. It has become utterly impossible to keep track of everything, while
one obviously needs to stay up-do-date on relevant developments. The logical
challenge which subsequently presents itself is to find this relevant publications
despite the overwhelming amount of information. This can be achieved by
defining relations between messages and structuring web content and data, a
development which now leads us into the third generation of internet usage.
They analyse what we publish. Allowing both consumers as organisations
to discover very useful information which stretches beyond the scope of the
content of articles, tweets or posts. We have arrived at Web 3.0, the semantic
web of Intelligent Web.

Position
Containing the wildfire of social media is important to every organisation.
Keeping a close eye on your own landscape, your industry, competitors,
target audiences and your own identity is key in determining your position; a
necessity in order for you to truly start working with social media. Controlling
social media means that you as an organisation are able to influence large
groups of customers. BuzzTalk enables this kind of monitoring, keeping
track of what is happening in and around your organisation. Whats going on
with clients, suppliers, competitors, authorities and other important players?
Its exactly this environmental monitoring that will support you in influencing

Internet as the answer to global problems

In his book The rational optimist, Matt Ridley focuses on this evolution: 10,000
years ago the human species existed of 10 million people, now were heading
towards 7 billion. Over 99 percent of these near 7 billion individuals now have
a better existence than our 10 million predecessors. Ridley shows how open
societies wherein ideas were shared in an open and constructive setting, always
lead to surprising solutions for problems. Other societies occlude themselves,
such as China in the previous century, hence devolving into a more primitive
state. By opening up to the world once again, creative contributions can be
made to global problems, while profiting from the contributions of others.
The internet is an ideal medium to share these ideas amongst people. Pleas to
keep the internet free and open, excluding any form of curtailing, are therefore
powerful and logical. The possibilities of cooperation have grown gigantically
through the emergence of the internet and will lead to solutions which we
currently cannot even fathom.
6

important players through the internet. Many people still dont understand well
how this significant influence can be used to their benefit. We do at times take
notice of impressive reports.
Take China, where social misconducts are published on the internet and
often lead to public outrage. This has led to situations wherein authorities
actually adjusted their decision making in order to contain the turmoil. In the
Syrian civil war, social media were used to confront the world with atrocities
of both parties, up to publishing executions. This coverage is also used for
propagandist purposes, attempting to influence allies.

Society
Claims about social media state that they can profoundly change our society
by the intensive exchange of knowledge and ideas. On a first sight the endless
amount of information may cause for confusion, but those who manage to
bring order to this apparent chaos, are able to achieve great things.
Examples from all over the world show how news and event coverage on
the internet can move people to take action. A large degree of this influence
is contributed to social media. This effect works the same on a level more
closely to our homes, with over 60% of all social media users placing reviews

T-Mobile and Dell

The influence of an individual grows parallel with the number of followers.
Telecom giant T-Mobile learned this lesson the hard way. Their teacher: Dutch
comedian Youp van t Hek, who used Twitter to propagate his discontent
with the service of T-Mobile. The process of his T-Mobile Terror started in
2010 with a single tweet, which initially had no results as T-Mobile wasnt
paying attention. Youp however didnt give in and kept tweeting about it, until
something did happen. His 45,503 followers on Twitter started to retweet his
message, after which the story spread across the internet in no-time. Other
media noted the scoop and published it, turning this initially small affair into
a national topic of discussion. Newspapers, television and radio suddenly
started publishing large numbers of negative articles about T-Mobile, creating
a nightmare for the telecom giants marketing department. If they had read
their history lessons, T-Mobile probably should have known what damage
in PR could occur based on a single publication Back in 2005 computer
manufacturer Dell experienced its fair share of PR damage, also starting from
a single post on the internet. Jeff Jarvis, an internationally well-known blogger,
wrote a blog about his dissatisfaction with his Dell laptop. Dell also didnt react,
until the story avalanched into a storm of public protest against the computer
manufacturer.
7

of products or services they purchased. These reviews often form a primary

source of reference for other potential clients.
People rely on these reviews. Social media usage therefore influences the
shopping behavior of consumers. Users of social networks shop online more
often than those who dont use social media; a difference no less than 12
percent. Over half of the social media users follows a brand (53 percent),
making this more popular than following celebrities, who are only followed
by 33 percent of social media users. [1].
A third of all consumers with a social network profile has a relation with a
brand or an organisation through their network. On average, every user has
some sort of interaction with nine of these senders [2]. The degree to which
this relation is actively maintained, depends on the relevance experienced by
social media users. These users may be looking for special offers from brands
or companies, or may want to stay up-to-date about events and news. The
more a brand or company meets these consumer needs, the better will they
be able to create and improve their relation. Social media users are usually
shielded against commercials and uncustomised, impersonal messages,
which are simply ignored or blocked.
Social media owe their very existence to the tremendous amount of internet
users who can all interconnect. Their numbers has rapidly increased in just
a couple of years. In 2009, approximately 25% of the worlds population or
1.5 billion people had frequent access to the world wide web. [3] In 2011 this
number grew to 2.1 billion. In this year the amount of existing e-mail accounts
also crossed the 3 billion mark, while over 300 million new websites were
created. [4]

Portals
Even since the dawn of the new millennium just over a decade ago. The
landscape of the internet drastically changed. Both the internet as social
media only took up a minor role in peoples daily lives compared to current
standards, simply because reliable broadband internet didnt arrive at home
yet. Facebook, Hyves & Flickr were founded in 2004, while Twitter established
itself in 2006. Even then, internet cafes were an essential portal to get online.
A 2008 count showed over 600 internet cafes in the Netherlands, only to have
dissapeared from all large cities less than a year later [5].
Mobile internet has proven to be a massive accelerator for social media, as
almost everybody can now go online both affordably as from virtually every
location. School classes, trains, meadows and airplanes: people can send
messages and upload photos and videos from just about anywhere. A near
40% of social media users do so by using mobile devices such as smartphones
or tablets. Social media apps hold a steady position in the top-3 of most used

apps on smartphones. When compared to the third quarter of 2010 , mobile

usage of social channels has increased with over 30 percent [1] in less than
two years time.

Mobile internet
The always available presence of mobile internet often makes us forget how
young this technology actually is. The first smartphones and tablets found
their way to the market at the end of the nineties, carefully being tested by
early adapters. The first smartphone in history was created by IBM in 1994, but
failed to succeed. In 1996 Nokia took its turn, achieving a first breakthrough
with the Nokia 9000 Communicator when actor Val Kilmer used one in the
1997 movie The Saint.
The astonishment of this marvelous new technology is now part of history, a
testimony to the speed with which the internet and social media grew. The
marketing and communication disciplines of corporate life were so far not
always able to keep track of this rapid development. Entrepreneurs from all
sorts and levels often still feel overwhelmed by social media and lack the
knowledge to get a firm grip around them. Despite of these challenges, the
internet and social media are still rapidly expanding, both in terms of users as
the average time online. In the United States, people spend over a quarter of
their time online visiting social media. The growth has gone so fast that four in
five internet users now uses social networks in one way or the other. Facebook
is heading towards its billionth user, while Flickr facilitates the uploading of
over 4,5 million pictures each day [4].

The Netherlands Online

Dutch statistics show a similar landscape. Of its residents, 88 percent spend
time online; putting the Netherlands firmly in the global top of countries with
the highest internet availability in terms of usage. The daily time spent online
per capita was 2 hours and 42 minutes in 2010, increasing to 3 hours and 6
minutes one year later in 2011.
The number of internet users who chat online has increased from 44 to 52
percent, while those in threads on forums increased from 41 to 46 percent and
usage of social network sites increased from 64 to 70 percent. Between the
ages of 16 and 35, over 59 percent spends time on social media each day [6].
The number of mobile internet users grew from 40 percent in 2009 to 44%
in 2011, while the number of smartphone users increased in 2012 with thirty
percent. On average, a smartphone owner has 24 apps installed on his phone,
of which Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are by far the most popular [2,6].

Grip on social media

Corporations delivering an effort to get a grip around the information stream
surrounding their organisations, have faced considerable difficulties in doing
so. The era when they could keep track of it all with a simple list of bookmarks
is certainly over. Alternatives to keep track of all news coverage are hardly
available.
Several technological support tools exist to keep track of online publications.
RSS-feeds are one example. Using a RSS-reader or e-mail subscription, youll
receive instant notifications whenever a new article is published by one of the
websites youre following. This seems easy, but in order for this to work youll
first have to identity the websites you regard as important. When youve done
so, youll keep receiving updates about every single publication, regardless of
whether they are relevant to yourself. Another example is Google Alerts, which
informs you about new information on a specific topic, coming from several
different websites.
Some instruments have been developed which allow you to keep track of
online publications on the internet, but as they only focus on specific media,
channels or languages, they fail to provide a complete overview of all relevant
information. A second problem arises from the simple factor of volume. How
is a marketing department to find its way through the hundreds of thousands
of messages, tweets, blogs, articles, movies and more, posted on the internet
every single hour? Most of the time its hardly even possible to determine
whether these are positive, negative or neutral messages, let alone trying to
find which influence a single message could bear.

New accounts
Lets provide some context here: The number of blogs in the world increases
with three new accounts per second. The amount of Twitter messages,
Tweets, increases with 2,5 billion tweets a week. Television took thirteen years
to reach 50 million viewers [7], while the early internet needed only four years
to achieve the same number. Facebook managed to get 200 million users in
less than a year.
The enormous amount of data sent onto the internet by these collective users,
has become literally immeasurable. In 2007 the worldwide storage of online
data comprised of about 300 billion gigabytes. Only four years later scientists
believe this number has grown to 988 billion terabytes [8]. After terabytes we
start counting in petabytes. Enough to make even scientists lose count, are the

10

next steps of exabytes and zettabytes, the latter being defined as 10 to the 21st
power. The last current estimate: 1,2 zettabytes. One zettabyte equals a billion
terrabytes. Scientists will next move on to using yottabytes, equal to 10 to the
24th power. Looking for information on the internet hence isnt like looking for
a needle in a haystack, its looking for said needle in a billion haystacks.

Huge data streams

Especially large corporations expect these facts to contain valuable information.
The tremendous amounts of data crossing the internet each day, contain
valuable information about consumers, corporations and governments. Data
represents value, called data equity. Research performed by the Rotterdam
Erasmus University and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 60 percent of
professional analysts and investors would want to gain more insights in the
value of this data equity [9]. However, the largest part of these organisations
are clueless as how to manage these gigantic amounts of information even
when this concerns only their own organisation, brands, products, markets or
industries; let alone the worldwide view.

Needles and haystacks

BuzzTalk was designed to find all relevant coverage, all those needles in a
countless number of haystacks, from across all over the world. Organisations
can determine directly which buzz is sent into the world about them, not
only in static terms, but also for news and event coverage and sentiments. All

BuzzTalk features

Stay informed about news concerning your own organisation,

its activities, competitors and the industry

Identify who comments positively or negatively and get in touch with

the individual

Inform prospects and clients with relevant news through your own

website or digital magazine

Inform staff with relevant news using your own intranet or email
reports

Identify relevant news and follow up on it in your content marketing

and content curation strategies to gain more visitors and more leads

Perform market research (measuring the effects of PR campaigns,

measuring your image amongst consumers, identifying which news

sites republish your article, etc.)

Identify new patterns and trends

Discover new interrelationships between topics, find out about

remarkable events within your own and adjacent playing fields

11

online sources can be easily accessed, no matter where they were published.
Specific industry information can be mapped and tracked easily. BuzzTalk also
provides the option of selecting relevant coverage, from all over the world,
and share this with target audiences.
Lets provide for a graphic display of the BuzzTalk capabilities:

This model differentiates between the levels in which we can study online
publications: the entity level and the meta level.
On the entity level, individual publications and tweets can be monitored,
curated and republished.
The meta level provides for a helicopter view over all this data in order to
discover patterns and interconnections. This helps to create a solid insight and
provide for a rational basis to make decisions.
One way to start is to identify the most important channels and sources.
Important publications can then be republished, adding your own information
to them. This is called content curation, defined as collecting, selecting and
republishing content. A strategy used by many organisations as a part of their
content marketing strategy.
Another activity is social media monitoring. Listening to opinions on the internet,
reacting to them if necessary and pinpointing individuals or organisations who
can have a strong influencing role on others. Within corporations its often the
PR or Marketing department working on these tasks, with an increase by HR
departments for the purpose of recruitment. Other upcoming contributors are
customer support and webcare.

12

The meta level is designed to analyse whats happening on social media.

For a corporation this initially means not looking at individual messages, but
monitoring the bigger picture and movements in sentiments in online.
This data is then analysed, possibly using special software solutions that help
to discover interrelationships between individual publications; information
which is very useful to your organisation. These insights provide for a great
support in making decisions about product development, marketing and
communication.

Changing trends
Well, what to look at? We could find out who are the leading individuals and
corporations on social media and which developments created the largest
buzz. Its interesting to see how trends change. Some of these changes are
obvious, e.g. the summer boost in attention for sports during the Tour de
France and Olympic Games when compared to winter. Other changing trends
have less of a logical explanation. This doesnt mean however, that they are
less interesting to understand.

Trend watching
Another feature available in BuzzTalk is trend watching. This is the art of
extrapolating what might happen based on a market analysis, combined with
sentiments and mood states. Trend watching results are mostly interesting for
CEOs and other executives, while marketing departments are also showing
more interest in this specific usage of social media.

Two levels of using social media:

Entity Level
1. Content Curation collecting, selecting and republishing content as part of
a content marketing strategy
2. Social Media Monitoring listening to opinions on the web, reacting to them
if required, identifying influencers and ambassadors to increase engagement
and word of mouth marketing
Meta Level
3. Market analysis observing what has happened before, identifying
important individuals and corporations and what developments created buzz
4. Trend watching predicting what might happen based on said market
analysis combined with sentiment and mood states.

13

Joining Social Media

For organisations we distinguish four types of activities in which we can take
part in social media. Per activity we then analyse the best methods to get a
firm grip around the benefits they have to offer.

1.
2.
3.
4.

Content curation
Social media monitoring
Market analysis
Trend watching

1. Content curation

Content curation is defined as the continuous collecting, organising,

selecting and interpreting of online information regarding a specific topic.
The focus lies on content which is both relevant as interesting to one of your
target audiences.
Content curation currently is a hot topic in the U.S., while winning terrain rapidly
in Europe as well. Content curation isnt a true answer to the abundance of
information the internet unleashes upon us, but does provide for an answer to
filter failure. People are confronted with massive amounts of messages every
day, they simply do not have the time to differentiate between them. As a
result, they can miss quite a lot of information that is actually relevant to them.
These audiences have a need for a filter that selects the best and most relevant

14

publications and offer these to them, allowing the audience to skip the rest of
the information.
The role of a content curator is to be just that filter. As soon as you manage to
filter the most important messages for your target audience and enable them
to notice them in an easy accessible way, you determine which reality they
perceive. Its the art of selecting and editing available online content in such a
way that it maximally responds to the triggers of your target audience.

Thought leader
One significant benefit of this approach is that in time, youll be regarded as
an authority, a thought leader. As you are a source of permanent relevant
information towards your target audience, youll be regarded as an expert.
Content curation therefore can play an important part in a content marketing
strategy, often being more effective than advertising. Editorial content,
customizing specific information, leads to receiving attention from your own
target audience which then autonomously decides to show more interest for
your organisation.
Another benefit is increased brand awareness due to the larger number of
visitors spending time on your social media accounts and website. The more
content shared by an organisation, the better they show up in search results.
This also provides for a better image, as those who share knowledge are often
regarded as generous. People put lower guards while reading this information
compared to advertisements, while they still learn about your organisation.
Your bigger reach into the market, the improved perceived image and the
sharing of knowledge therefore leads to a larger number of potential clients.

Authority
BuzzTalk is an excellent instrument for this content marketing strategy, as it
simplifies the process of finding and curating content. Achieving a position
of authority hence becomes increasingly easier for an organisation. BuzzTalk
provides for a view over the entire playing field, allowing for simple selections
to be made of all information fitting the interests of a specific target audience.
The challenge of a content marketing strategy is to keep providing for content
continuously: a lot needs to be written and published. By using a mix of
content creation (writing your own content) and content curation (acting as a
filter for third party information) contributes in creating a valuable and dynamic
blog which can be used to continuously improve your image as well as the
generation of leads.

15

The 5 steps of the content curation process

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Identify sources
Collect
Register the original source of the content
Provide for context and put the article into perspective
Share and present the information to the target audience

3 golden rules for republishing content

1.
2.
3.

Always refer to the original source

Add a clickable URL linking to the original publication
Dont copy/paste the entire publication, only quote the relevant part
(A full quote of an article might lead to legal consequences with
regards to the intellectual property rights of the content.)

Goals of content curation and content marketing

1.
Gain more leads from a larger audience; improve your image and trust
2.
Acquire a position as a thought leader by offering educational content
3.
Increase brand awareness
4.
Lead nurturing, preparing cold leads to turn into hot leads
5.
Social media engagement and creating new relations through social
media.

Content curation with BuzzTalk

Pick a theme that you want to follow and share with your audience, then
create a query for it in BuzzTalk. The next step is to watch the incoming results
on a daily basis, selecting the most important publications appearing on the
internet and regarding your subject. This is done online. BuzzTalk allows for
adding additional selections or sorting based on sentiment, turning your
publications into a feel-good-newspaper.

Review the retrieved information about a specific topic, these are

collected from news sites, blogs, scientific journals and tweets
Add your own publications to them on a regular basis
Republish the selected and edited information, e.g. using Twitter,
Flipboard and RSS

16

BuzzTalk demo: Publishing into a digital magazine

A digital magazine can be read using a smartphone or
tablet such as the iPad. Several apps can be used to do
so, of which Flipboard is the most popular.
As an example to work with, well use the Non-Hodgkin
Today magazine, a Flipboard magazine informing about
the latest news regarding this illness.

17

As we only review the most recent publications, the Buzz Report is usually
quite small and comprehensible. In this example we selected a timeframe of
four weeks, viewing publications in a top-down sequence based on publication
date (1), as is shown on the screen shot.
While setting up BuzzTalk, a connection was already made between Buzz
Report and a relevant Twitter account, allowing you to instantly publish new
tweets from BuzzTalk with a few simple clicks. Just select the publication you
want to use (2) in your digital magazine and then click on the read Publish
button (3).
The total message may consist out of 140 characters, after which you can edit
the headline (4) appearing after the click on Publish,. To confirm publication
simply click OK (5) and the information is now directly part of your magazine.
If you select multiple messages in a short timeframe, you can choose to
publish them on specifically determined times. Thus making sure youll never
publish while your target audience is asleep.

18

In addition to republishing third party articles to your magazine, its also easy
to add your own articles, linking to your own website (news or blog segment)
or towards an advertorial.
To do so, click on the button Publish Blank above the graphic (1), to type or
paste your own content (2) and link (3). Upon clicking on OK (4) your content
is automatically published.

19

BuzzTalk differentiators for content curation strategies

You currently have the option of chosing between several methods to find
content to curate. Try Google, following RSS feeds or Twitter Search. These
efforts demand for a considerable time investment just to find fresh content
to publish. Selecting from RSS feeds has the consequence of sticking to the
same sources, while your target audience wants to be surprised by that one
great article of that website theyve never heard of before. As youre not the
only organisation trying to publish great content, chances are that people
already read articles originating from a limited number of courses somewhere
else. BuzzTalk exceeds competitive solutions in this filter. Based on a keyword
search, all relevant articles and other publications are filtered from an incredible
amount of sources.

Interpretations
Another distinctive BuzzTalk feature, is its support in the interpretation of
articles. Lets say that youre curating a widely discussed theme, then try to
filter the relevant information from it published every single day. BuzzTalk
allows you to create additional selections or sort messages based on their
sentiment, thus enabling you to publish only positive articles. In the screenshot
of a randomly chosen company, youll directly notice which publications are
part of specific subthemes (here, BuzzEvents) within your topic. This allows you
to create specials, e.g. around product releases or merger and acquisition,
while finding interesting articles for your target audience which arent simply
retrieved by scanning purely on a publication date. Every article shows the
mood it contains. Is it written positively or negatively (sentiment) or was a
certain emotion (mood state) discovered? This makes it even easier to retrieve
interesting publications.

20

2. Social media monitoring

How to blend into a party where everybody is already talking to each other?
Youll probably walk around a bit, join a small group of people, listen to their
conversation and move on to another group of people. As soon as you know
what kind of audience is attending, what the topics of conversation are and
how they take place, youll start contributing to the conversation by making
your own comments. Less than an hour later youre part of the party and
have fully joined the conversation with the people you selected to be with.
Even better, people are listening to what you have to say and will approach
you to become part of their conversation. Social media works in exactly this
way; they have an important social role to play. As a company you can benefit
greatly from this fact, by taking part in social communities and conversations
as an organisation.

3 steps for joining social media conversations:

1. Listen Who is talking about you in which regard? Who do people speak
about your competitor? It all starts with listening to whats going on.
2. Engage Create relations using Twitter and Facebook, enter into a dialogue.
3. Measure Determining the effect of your presence on social media.
Do however keep in mind that these communities arent called social without
a reason. They exist because people meet online without any business-like
objectives. Crashing a party with hardcore commercial information may lead
to people putting up their guards and excluding you from their conversation.
Its an environment in which you need to be very careful with self-promotion.
21

Before you know it youll be put on the blacklist and be cordially invited to
remove yourself from the party. Of course this isnt the case for every single
social media channel. Linkedin is a great social environment where business
objectives take a premium position, so dont be reluctant in positioning yourself as a professional organisation here.

Social setting
It doesnt matter in which social environment you find yourself, youll have
to be aware of the kind of people sharing the same room. Which rules do
they follow? What are their interests? What do they expect from you? People
often dont mind the simple fact that you represent a specific organisation or
company, as long as you behave and add value a way that corresponds to the
content marketing strategy previously discussed in this document. As soon as
you have integrated into your online social environment, you can get attention
by sharing relevant information. This might cover just about any topic, from a
weather forecast to an advice in cooking or an update on events. Just make sure
that its a topic of which youre knowledgeable and want to be associated with.

Gold standard
Although you would probably prefer to continuously spread information about
your own organisation, its obvious that this wouldnt be the smart choice. On
the other hand you wont have to keep your value a secret all the time. A gold
standard for good distribution of information is the 10-4-1 guideline: publish ten
articles that arent created by yourself or your organisation (external authority),
provide four links to own articles or blogs (self-created relevant content) and

How to listen?

Find buzz about your own organisation.

Define four types of tweets: Information requests, support requests,
complaints and compliments.
React accordingly: informing, supportive, soothing, understanding and
grateful.
Find buzz about your competitors.
React accordingly: use your own organisation as an example.
Also monitor blogs and blog comments, as this is the source for the most
explicit and direct personal opinions.

one link to a landing page on which you provide a specific and concrete offer
(self-promotion). Using BuzzTalk you can monitor whether your own influence
works on social media. Or you can create more buzz around your field of

22

expertise or your brand and create a more positive image around it in terms
of media.

BuzzTalk demo: Social media monitoring

Of course it would be ideal if we would know what someone or a group
is thinking and feeling, anywhere in the world, as long as he or they are
relevant to your topic. Considering the ease with which people communicate
online these days, weve come a long way towards this ideal situation. The

consequential technological challenge however, is to filter all the text of which

specific messages comprise and what the relation of the individual or group
is to this content. The sentiment monitoring instrument BuzzTalk allows for

23

measuring the sentiment in these expressions. One distinctive feature is that

youre able to measure whether something was labeled positively or negatively,
a feature usually not available in other solutions.
Another distinctive criterion is the unique capacity to measure emotions.
These so called mood states we know from psychology books as anger,
tension, fatigue, confusion, depression and vitality. The fact of knowing how
people feel by itself of course is not enough, the challenge is to find out how
they are feeling in relation to what. BuzzTalk uses two innovative tagging
engines to determine just this: OpenCalais created by Thompson Reuters and
OpenDover created by Byelex. The combination of these technologies allows
for the enrichment of publications with both facts and feelings.
BuzzTalk therefore provides for a more intelligent look to what is being said
than Twitter. You can directly view the sentiment of the tweet, if an emotion
can be detected (+- 15% of tweets) the mood state also directly shows. Is
somebody being positive, negative, or angry? In extremely large quantities or
tweets, youll be able to grab a hold of the negative or angry tweets quickly and
react to them (or do exactly the same with the positive ones!).

Relevant twitterers
BuzzTalk also provides for a concrete insight in the Klout Score of relevant
twitterers, in order to identify the most influential individuals in your industry.
If you know that the average Klout score is 20, youll immediately notice that
a tweet from a person with a 40 Klout score will have considerable more
impact. After all, they are viewed by a larger audience of people who on their
turn are more influential and are more likely than average to retweet the initial
message. This Klout score shows exactly what chances are that their social
media messages are both read and retweeted.

24

The screenshot depicted above shows the most active twitterers most
active users around the KiKa Foundation, which has the objective of
providing better treatment for children who are suffering from cancer. The
latest tweets are shown with each individual, allowing you to selectively
pick the right and most influential individuals to follow your subject.
And again..theres a big chance that they will follow you on their turn.
Talking to these people can be done directly from BuzzTalk (without having to
separately log onto Twitter) and react on their tweets. This is the beginning of
social media engagement. Finding the most important people in your playing
field and contact them using the medium they use.

25

3. Market analysis

Knowledge is power, so goes the saying, and every entrepreneur knows this
is true. A lack of information on the internet will undoubtedly lead to wrong
decisions being made. Although all this information is out there on the
internet, thats exactly the problem with collecting it. Theres simply so much
information out there that collecting and analysing it is humanly impossible.
At the same time, this fact is also the source of a significant benefit. When the
information is all clustered together, youll be able to find patterns and trends
which you could never retrieve from all tens of thousands individual messages.
Discovering and recognizing these patterns is the art of knowing whats going
on around specific themes.

26

Biscuits
If you discover a large amount of publications regarding biscuits, youll
know that something on the internet is going on about this topic. Youve
just discovered a pattern. However, we still dont know why people believe
biscuits are important. BuzzTalk helps us in finding out more about this pattern
without reading one individual message, as it is able to recognize emotions
and sentiments in messages, blogs and articles.

Using this feature, BuzzTalk is able to accurately pinpoint how people feel
about a certain topic. BuzzTalk helps to find out what makes people feel
tensed, what makes them happy or what triggers an angry reaction when it
comes to biscuits. This helps in creating the insights in the nature of a pattern.
As long as you collect enough information, youll automatically get a good
idea of the role that biscuits currently play in our society. It could be the case
that the trending topic biscuits has something to do with food safety or the
increased prices of flour and sugar.
Only a few years ago, analysts wrote file cabinets worth of reports based on
months of extensive research. Today youre able to gain the most up-to-date
and advanced knowledge about products, industries and competitors in a
matter of hours. Creating market analysis with BuzzTalk therefore saves both
time as money.

27

BuzzTalk demo: Market analysis using BuzzTalk

Become a top analyst with BuzzTalk
Lets have a look at how to use BuzzTalk to create an analysis about the euro
crisis. Well search for events in the Money Market in Italy in the domain
Economics, Finance and Business. The collection of retrieved publications
can now be sorted in a chronological or sentimental sequence. In this example
the publication Euro falls to lowest level in nearly two years comes up as
being negative. The publication How to save the euro is determined to have
a positive sentiment.
Discover your world using Trending Topics

28

The OpenCalais tags found throughout the publications, can also be found
in a word cloud using the Trending Topics tab. This word cloud is animated
according to time. Words appearing more often in publications appear bigger
than the words found less frequently. By doing this you can get a good first
impression of publications retrieved by BuzzTalk.
Want to find out more about a specific word that youre interested in? Simply
click on it to review corresponding publications. The animation is automatically
stopped.

29

BuzzTalk also offers insights in why a specific publication is marked as being

positive or negative. This complete transparency and insights is a unique
feature called a white box, compared to many other applications where the
sentiment is determined in a so called black box that doesnt allow you as a
user to check on method used for determining moods and sentiments.
Upon checking the two publications used in our example, we find the word
bad in the translated version of the Euro falls to lowest level in nearly two
years publication. This is determined to have a negative sentiment with a
value of 2. In this specific case only 1 sentiment word was found. The other
publication How to save the Euro was determined to be positive, resulting
from the arithmetic averages of all sentiment words found in the content.

Another way of discovering the collected data, is clicking on the Spikes

detection button. This shows all tags which deviate from the progressive
average, effectively BuzzTalk informs you that something is going on that
might require further research.

30

Lets head back to the euro crisis publications. Were currently reviewing April
2012, how did people experience the euro crisis in this month? A large amount
of activity was measured (vigor). Also notice the increase of the purple line
(tension). As time passes by, we discover that the number of publications
containing emotions (mood state) increased. Selecting an emotion that caught
our interest, were able to zoom in on it using a filter.

31

This shows all publications, allowing you to further investigate and retrieve the
reasons that caused this tension. You can also review why this specific emotion
was detected per publication, while having an immediate click-through to the
original article available.

Have the world presented to you in film

Sometimes youre browsing without knowing what youre looking for, trying
to get an overview of publications about the euro crisis and assuming that
remarkable matters present themselves. BuzzTalk adapts to this need by
offering the Discovery Tab. This shows internet publications in the form of a
useful film. Simply select the category (or two categories) and a timeframe to
display content from.

32

The items from the two selected categories are then plotted into a word cloud:

The size of the square or circle shows which amount of publications appeared
about the selected topic. If a certain correlation scores above the progressive
average, this is noticed by the thickness of the line between two topics.
If youre interested in getting to know more, just pause the timer and the film
will stop playing. Select the topic on which you want to know more and review
the accompanying publications. Again youre able to use filters for further
research and finding the corresponding publications. If youre done reading,
simply continue playing the film.

33

4. Trend watching

What if we could predict events in the future? This is something extremely

valuable for corporations, which consequently leads to nearly infinite attempts
to try to get as close as possible. Using the internet smartly of course wont
provide a literal glimpse into the future, but it surely provides for a great
preparation on what might happen.
By looking at all information about a certain topic chronologically, we might
discover trends which continue to move into the future. Of course it provides
no rock-solid guarantee, but our average decision making will improve without
a doubt. People use digital media more and more to express themselves,
while computing power has increased to the degree wherein we can process
large amounts of data. This enables us to find patterns which were previously
impossible to discover. As a large degree of human behavior is controlled by
our emotions and people express themselves emotionally on social media,
the hypotheses was born that Twitter could hold a certain predictive value.
A number of different scientific teams have since committed themselves to
perform research on this concept.

34

Cinema blockbusters
HP Labs experts Asur and Huberman tried to predict which new movie releases
would become blockbusters based on Twitter, publishing their results with the
title Predicting the future with social media [10]. They discovered that the
speed with which buzz is created provides for a solid predictive value to rate
the success of cinema films. They introduced the concept tweet rate: the
number of tweets per minute regarding a specific film. Films which are widely
discussed online, are more successful.
Johan Bollen used the stock exchange as his subject, discovering that the
accuracy of the prediction of the DJIA stock values can be significantly
improved if mood states are taken along in the equation. Mood states are
emotions that can be detected in social media expressions. These emotions are
divided in six categories: enthusiasm, confusion, fatigue, depression, tension
and anger. One of the unique BuzzTalk features is that it uses and displays not
only sentiments, but also includes these mood states. To do so, the scientific
classification of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) is used, resulting into a
quick overview of results based on scientifically validated information.
Studying emotions as part of achieving organisational objectives is a science
which is still in a rather state of infancy. Considerable scientific research still
needs to be performed and formulas have to be determined. Despite of this,
social media analytics and emotion marketing is a challenging and promising
discipline.

35

MyBuzzTalk

ecome a master in social media with BuzzTalk too.

Apply for a personal demo on BuzzTalkMonitor.com

Stay up-to-date about all news coverage on your organisation, your corporate
activities, your competitors and the industry. Find out who writes positively
or negatively and contact them directly. Offer clients and prospects relevant
news through your website. Share this relevant news with your colleagues
using your intranet or email reports. Perform your own marketing research
and get direct insights into the results. Discover trends and patterns and with
that, gain a competitive edge over anyone else. Have a look into the future to
predict what will happen. Thats what BuzzTalk has to offer.

36

Become a
social media
winner with
BuzzTalk

BuzzTalk uses OpenDover to

determine 27 different domains
allowing for your search query being
more effective. (E.g. only show
publications containing the word
gold if it concerns the buillon, not an
expression)
Using OpenCalais, BuzzTalk is able
to determine 36 different categories
in blog posts and articles, based on
individual and organisation up to
industry term and market index.

BuzzTalk facts
BuzzTalk daily collects hundreds of
thousands of publications from over
55,000 sources across the world
wide web.

BuzzTalk uses OpenDover to

detect sentiment (positive, negative
or neutral) and mood states
(anger, tension, fatigue, confusion,
depression, vigor).

BuzzTalk uses Crowd Sourced

Learning, by continuously learning
about new relevant news sources
both domestic as abroad. BuzzTalk
is a self-learning and self-enrichting
instrument.

BuzzTalks
Spikes
detection
shows deviations in the progressive
average number of publication using
OpenCalais tags.

BuzzTalk monitors more than

100 countries and uses the Systran
translation technology to translate
the content of 33 languages to
English, allowing for international
comparisons.

The Klout Score supports in the

identification of influential twitterers
who can be contacted to facilitate
word to mouth marketing.

The data collected by BuzzTalk are

scientific journals written by scientists,
journalistic news sites, blogs from
industry experts and consumer
tweets.
BuzzTalk automatically adds
semantic data to these publication
using two powerful tagging engines:
OpenDover and Thomson Reuters
OpenCalais.

37

BuzzTalk Lexicon
Blog - Website on which messages
are categorised on date, subject
and author. Blogs are often themeoriented and can be written by one or
more authors.

Content marketing strategy

Contacting the target audience
using substantively valuable content
to increase visibility and name
awareness, resulting into a larger
number of leads. Information focuses
on the problems the target audience
experiences rather than direct product
promotion as done in advertorials.

Social media - Media in which the

content is provided for and by the
online community.

Crowd Sourced Learning - Using the

crowd, by means of social media, to
continuously keep learning.

Trending topic - Most popular subject

with regards to your BuzzTalk search
query.

Interruption marketing - Using

advertorials
or
advertisements
between other information which the
receiver didnt specifically went out to
look for.

Buzz - Content of the stream of

publications on the internet and
social media in particular.

Post - Message on a social medium

specially a blog.

Editorial content - Custom written

content for specific target audiences.

Tweet - Twitter message.

Filter failure - The absence of the

capability of separating important
news from non-relevant items. Often
caused by the enormous amounts of
news.

Retweet - Publishing someone elses

tweet on Twitter.
Content - The entire collection of
blogs, articles, tweets, images, sound
fragments and other expressions. On
a specific blog, website or the entire
internet.

Whitepaper - Document that can

be spread through social media and
supports people taking a responsible
decision.

Content curation - The process of

collecting, organising, interpreting
and republishing online information
about a specific topic.

Lead - Marketing phrase for a prospect

or a potential client.
Lead generation - Activity with the
objective to acquire more leads, new
potential clients.

Content creation - Writing articles,

tweets, blogs or whitepapers or
creating video or sound footage.

38

Thought leader - Expert or intellectual

leadership on a specific terrain.

isnt exactly correct, as the internet

has no central sphere where blogs
are collected.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication: a

technology allowing one to subscribe
to updates of a website using a RSS
reader.

Fact tagging engine - Application

which structures online publications
by supplying it with meta data.

App - Small software solutions for

smartphones and tablets.

Klout - Online service measuring your

popularity on the internet.

Flipboard - App that allows for

creating a personal digital magazine
on an iPhone or iPad and gathers
online news.

Klout Score - The score of Klout on

a 0 to 100 scale, showing how much
influence you have on the internet.
This score is presented in BuzzTalk.

Headline - Header or title of a

message or article.

Tag - Label

Buzz Report - BuzzTalk report

containing an overview of retrieved
publications, including quantities and
sources.

Tagging - Allocating a specific label.

Screenshot - Picture of the exact

screen as shown on a laptop or PC
monitor.

Mood tracking - Measuring and

following emotions surrounding a
specific theme.

BuzzEvents - Events recognised by

BuzzTalk, such as a product release, a
career change or a company merger.
BuzzTalk currently recognises over 35
different sorts of events.

Tweet rate - Speed with which tweets

on a certain theme appear.

Spike
detection
Identifying
highlights (peaks) in specific buzz.

Social metric - Performance indicator

which can be measured within social
media.
Blogosphere - Collective term for
the joint opinions published onto the
internet through blogs. The phrase
39

Source references
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

Social Media Report Nielsen, Q3 2011.

Fifth Next web research, Ruigrok NetPanel (2011).
Market research IDC.
Web monitoring service Pingdom.
Shopping research firm Locatus.
Trendreport computer and internet usage, Twente University (2011).
Mediapublications.
Computable.
RSM-Erasmus University PWC: Data Equity Hype or Happening?
Asur en Huberman, 2010. Predicting the future with social media.
Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiao-Jun Zeng, 2011. Twitter mood
predicts the stock market.

40

Grip on the Social Media Hype

BuzzTalk is a technological instrument developed for corporations who want
to keep track of the ever-growing stream of online information, without
having to mobilise hundreds of employees who scan the internet from dusk
till dawn. Authors Barbara Kremers and Herman Vissia explain in Grip on the
Social Media Hype how BuzzTalk filters the enormous amounts of information
and interprets online comments and what is being said and written about
organisations.

About the authors

Herman Vissia M.Sc.
Herman Vissia is the CEO and owner of Byelex Multimedia Products B.V. In
cooperation with his colleagues at the Minsk State University in Belarus, he has
written over 10 scientific publications regarding software related technologies,
specifically regarding artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis on the world
wide web.

Barbara Kremers, M.Sc.

Barbara Kremers is Byelex Sales B.V. Marketing Manager. Before Barbara
entered into her marketing career, she worked as a financial business analyst
at Oracle and as a scientific researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute.