LSQHA Blog Reviews

Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss

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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss

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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

SAS introduced a social media analytics program today that will compete against the major metrics players such as Radian 6 and WebTrends . The new service shows once again how blogs and social networks are deeply influencing marketing, customer support and product groups within the enterprise. The SAS Social Media analytics service is different than many of the social technologies we look at in our coverage. It's a hosted service that SAS builds for the client. The client develops the parameters for what they want to analyze. Rules are established that then server as the framework. Results are viewed through a web page that SAS sets up for the client. Sponsor Most of the services we see are delivered as a SaaS solution. For example, Salesforce.com went live recently with Chatter that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other services. But SAS is a company with analytics at its core. It will take about a year for the company to build up the IP, the data, for specific market verticals. After that time, down, the road, it's a service that could be delivered from the cloud. But the learning behavior may be its key differentiator. Mark Chaves, product manager, SAS, said the service can be optimized to learn, based on inputs. For example, the sentiment analysis can be changed to reflect what has been learned. With most services, the sentiment analysis parameters are defined within the application and can not be altered. The service reminds us a lot of what we see emerging in data analytics for the enterprise. The SAS service imports data from internal and external sources. It can archive and analyze more than two years of information from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs and other sources. It is designed to provide a form of predictive analytics that can be applied, for example, to develop marketing strategies such as brand development. Some of the other features include: Analyzes structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources. Quantifies influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business. Multiple language support. Web-based dashboard. SAS Social Media Analytics platform shows how deep social technologies are filtering into the enterprise. It's important to identify data from social networks as additional data points that when integrated can provide insights, for instance, into campaigns and CRM environments. The SAS offering reflects the DNA of the company. The focus is on data analytics. That seems like a logical approach. Social networks are producing data at an exponential rate. The SAS offering reflects how it is becoming more of a science to analyze the information from these networks and how its outcomes affect the entire enterprise. Disclosure: SAS paid for a train ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the the SAS Users Conference in Seattle.] Discuss

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Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play

During a presentation on Apple's Cupertino campus this morning, the company's CEO, Steve Jobs, announced the next version of the iPhone operating system: iPhone OS 4. Apple will release a preview version to developers today and plans to release the OS to consumers in the summer. Among the new features in the OS are multitasking with the help of a new set of APIs. Developers will get access to over 1,500 new APIs, and users will see over 100 new features. Jobs also announced that Apple has already sold 450,000 iPads. Sponsor Note : This is a breaking news story. We will update this story throughout the morning as more news becomes available from the iPhone OS 4 event. Just reload this page to see the updates. iPhone OS 4 New in iPhone OS 4 Fast task switching Multitasking Folders Enhanced mail app Local push notifications Background location services Task completion in the background iBooks for iPhone Enterprise enhancement Game Center social gaming network iAd advertising network In total, Apple has now sold close to 85 million devices that run the iPhone OS. Developers, who will get access to the new OS today, will be able to access over 1,500 new APIs , including better APIs for in-app SMS, smarter ways to access the accelerometer and access to new users features like 5x digital zoom, home screen wallpapers, and access to Bluetooth keyboards. iPhone OS 4 will also finally include support for multitasking. Jobs noted that Apple isn't the first company to bring this feature to the market, but wants "to be the best." A simple double-click on the home button will bring up a task menu at the bottom of the screen. This, however, is just a way to quickly switch between apps. No Multitasking for iPhone 3G Most of these newly announced features will run on the iPhone 3GS and third generation iPod touch, but users with an iPhone 3G or second generation iPod touch will not get access to the new multitasking features. Apple plans to release iPhone OS 4 for the iPad in the fall. Background Apps To run services in the background, as Apple's SVP of iPhone software Scott Forstall noted, apps will have to access a new set of APIs. Music apps like Pandora will be able to stream their music in the background and use the iPod controls in the lock screen to control the playback. Until now, exiting an app like Pandora would stop the music playback. According to Pandora's developers, making the app background aware only took one day. VoIP services like Skype will now also be able to run in the background. Apple will now allow location services to run in the background. This will be a major boon for turn-by-turn direction services like Tom Tom and location-based social networks like Loopt, which Apple specifically mentioned during the event. In addition, apps will also be able to send local push notifications and apps will be able to complete tasks like photo uploads in the background. Folders With iPhone OS 4, Apple is also introducing a new way to organize applications - something that those of us who have installed way too many apps on our phones will appreciate. Now, users will be able to organize apps into folders. To do this, you simply drag and drop apps on top of each other. The OS automatically creates a name for these folders (presumably based on the apps' categories in the App Store), but you can also edit the name yourself. Folders can also live in the dock. This will come in handy if you want to have all your games or news apps available at a moment's notice. Enhanced Mail App iPhone OS 4 will also bring an enhanced mail app with a unified inbox and the ability to organize emails by thread. In addition, users will finally be able to open attachments with apps. Game Center For gamers, Apple is introducing the Game Center, which is basically a social gaming network that will feature automatic matchmaking for multiplayer games, leaderboards and achievements. iBooks Comes to the iPhone After Apple introduced iBooks for the iPad, it was only a matter of time before the company would introduce iBooks for the iPhone. Just like the Kindle app, iBooks will sync pages and bookmarks between the iPad and iPhone. iPhone users will also be able to access the iBookstore right from their device. iPhone in the Enterprise For enterprise users, Apple is introducing a number of new features, including improved security courtesy of support for SLL VPN. Enterprises will now also be able to distribute apps wirelessly. iAd Unsurprisngly, Apple also announced its new iAd mobile advertising platform . According to Jobs, "most of this mobile advertising really sucks." According to Jobs, the best way to deliver mobile ads in not through search ads but inside mobile apps. Jobs noted that Apple wants ads in apps to be even more interactive than on the Web. Currently, according to Jobs, people don't click on ads because it takes them out of the app. Given that iAd is a built-in OS-wide feature, however, Apple thinks that it can deliver a better experience for users. Jobs also took a swipe at Adobe and noted that these interactive ads will be developed in HTML5. Judging from Apple's demos during the event, these ads can be highly interactive and many of them resembled mini-games more than traditional display ads. Apple will sell, host and deliver the ads and share 60% of the revenue with developers. Update on the iPad: 450,000 Sold At the beginning of his presentation, Jobs also recapped last week's launch of the iPad. According to Jobs, the company managed to sell 450,000 iPads since the device went on sale on Saturday. iPad users have downloaded over 600,000 books from the iBookstore and 3.5 million iPad apps from the App Store. It's not clear how many of these books were free books, however. Jobs also announced that the App Store has now delivered over 4 billion apps to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users, and that there are close to 3,500 iPad apps in the store already. Thanks to our friends at Gizmodo and gdgt for providing excellent live coverage of the event today. Discuss

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Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking

Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media - rather than be disrupted by it. We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us - and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform. Sponsor The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered. SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the "Facebook Imperitive", which we interpret as "be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither". Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine's "Wired: Tired" lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards. Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service. A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the "follower" mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done. Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally. From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum. Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here: "Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business" We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release. SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible. Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter . Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you'll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone's job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear. Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we're bringing our followers with us with every Tweet. IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited. Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter? Photo credits: Salesforce.com Discuss

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This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media