1. Tumblr is a game-changing move for Yahoo!

Buying a major social network is a strategic move that launches them back into the social conversation as a top tier player much like YouTube was a game changer for Google.  Its easy to draw comparisons between the Tumblr and YouTube acquisitions and I think the implications of that comparison haven’t really been covered.  I was on the front lines of Yahoo’s battle against Google from 2002-2006 and I can’t describe what an immediate game-changer YouTube was for Google. It enabled them to pull ahead of Yahoo! in international partnership discussions and changed the power dynamic in major regional deals.

In less than six months, I saw Google move from the number three player to the leader in many key non-US markets. Yes, the property and product integration will take a while but the perception of the integration is immediate. Anecdotally, I’ve already seen that advertisers around the world view Tumblr/Yahoo! as very beneficial to their strategy.

I also saw the negative effect of not buying a major social network. Yahoo! came very close to buying Facebook. Can you imagine what Yahoo! would be today in social, desktop and mobile if management hadn’t fumbled the deal? Having a vibrant social network is absolutely critical for Yahoo!. Google’s incredibly persistent efforts to build Google+ have made it so.

2. Tumblr will help grow other Yahoo! properties

There are thousands of Tumblrs that are complimentary to Yahoo!’s core properties and could drive additional traffic to them. Yahoo! knows the importance of driving traffic and monetization. They will help Tumblr monetize and will do so without alienating users. The perfect model to emulate as they go through this evolution is Twitter.

Anyone that thinks ads of any kind are going to ruin Tumblr should look closely at Twitter to see what is actually likely to happen. Twitter introduced the idea of ads in April 2010 and just recently announced the general availability for US advertisers at the end of April. You know what’s happened since Twitter made the first ad announcement? Traffic has increased 400%. People forget that ads tastefully done fund more engineers and designers, which is critical to making the product even better.

3. Yahoo! and Tumblr will bring more brands and Millennials together

At DataSift, I’ve been fascinated to watch social networks like Twitter, Facebook and others enable brands to build deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. The combination of Yahoo!’s brand name clout, their relationships with agencies and brands and Tumblr’s popularity with Millenials will be encouraging to companies who want to reach that audience. Tumblr can give all kinds of brands like Adidas, Puma, Michael Kors and more insights into what their target customers think of their brands and what their worlds look like.

4. Yahoo! just got an amazing product-oriented team

David Karp is a brilliant product visionary. The rest of his team is equally good. As a regular Tumblr user,  I’m really excited to see where they take Tumblr post-acquisition with more resources and technology behind it, including the backing of product-driven CEO in Mayer, who clearly knows and values the impact of product and engineering.

If Marissa and team’s work on Flickr since she joined is any indication, Tumblr is going to get cooler and more fun to use. As a happy user (and occasional poster) on Tumblr, I look forward to their next stage of growth.

5. The Tumblr acquisition will help Yahoo! with hiring

I’m rather surprised this topic hasn’t been covered in more detail. With the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo! just became a cooler place to work. In particular, Millenials want to work with cool technology that reflects their personal brands and preferences and they are the people aggressively using Tumblr today. From an employee recruitment and retention point of view, there is no downside to purchasing one of the hottest networks in social.

Social Networks like Tumblr are becoming increasingly important for decision-making across organizations, especially in Marketing. A deep understanding of the different social networks, their dynamics and audiences is critical for doing this well.  At DataSift, I’ve watched our team of experts work with hundreds of companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 to two person start-ups on leveraging the important Social Data created by different social networks. If Yahoo! can follow in the direction of other social sites, remembering to serve both their business customers and users, it will be a fantastic move for the company.

To learn more about DataSift, email us at hello@datasift.com.

Nestivity commissioned a survey with Evolve Capital, in partnership with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, which looked at the top 100 most followed brands on Twitter, resulting in analysis of over 739,000 Tweets. The study uncovered brands who have mastered both the art and science of using Twitter to get people more involved with their brands.

The core lessons learned include:

• Counting followers is a useless exercise
• The frequency of Tweets doesn’t matter
• It’s all about consistency
• Timing is everything
• Quality over quantity
• Multimedia is best

Here is Nestivity’s infographic highlighting results of the study. For a more in-depth look at Nestivity’s analysis, visit their recent blog post by Henry Min, Founder and President of Nestivity. Their analysis was also recently covered in Forbes and Mashable. We look forward to seeing Henry at the upcoming AllTwitter Conference on June 4 in San Francisco where DataSift will also be a featured speaker.

This first installment uncovers how Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake became global memes by comparing how the top 5 versions of each video were shared on Twitter and looking at 8 dimensions of each meme: shape, lifespan, popularity, shareability, globality, amplification, variation and diffusion network. To learn more about what FACE found, including the 8 common things to watch out for that indicate if something is likely to go viral, visit the FACE blog.

For more information on FACE’s Pulsar TRAC tool, visit www.pulsarplatform.com.

Last week, the official account of the Associated Press (@AP) was hacked and the account was used to Tweet the false news that the White House had been bombed and President Obama was injured as part of a potential attack. The Dow Jones Industrial Average proceeded to plummet almost 150 points, as did several other market indices around the world. I think this is an incredibly important moment in time and important learning experience, but not for the reasons you think.

1. Twitter has become an absolutely vital source for breaking news.

I can’t think of a stronger sign of the importance of Twitter for the distribution of news than the market moving dramatically from one pretty obviously fake Tweet. (How could the AP know so instantly that Obama was hurt as the explosion was happening?) All companies should think deeply about what the growing importance of social networks, and Twitter in particular means for them.  Especially news organizations. If you don’t have a strong presence on Twitter, you will be eclipsed by competitors who do.

2. Security is as important to your Social Media strategy as virality.

The AP hack incident underscores the importance of carefully thinking through security around your Social Media accounts.  Several AP employees claim the hack was preceded by phishing attacks at AP, which leads me to the conclusion that the security breach itself may have just as likely been at AP or somewhere else, not Twitter.  There are plenty of signs that hacking attacks are increasing in number and sophistication.  For example, during the last week, Living Social was hacked and 50M accounts were compromised.  Even the CIA got hacked last year. (http://ubm.io/15VtjJ0).  It’s probably time to move on from keeping the password to your company’s Twitter account on a Post-It note by someone’s computer.

3. Social networks are an amazing platform for validating news.

The hacked Tweet about the White House was posted at 1:07 pm and within 5 minutes, there were thousands of Tweets correcting the false news. That’s impressively low latency for news correction. Compare that to TV/cable or printed news, where corrections can take days or weeks. I’m constantly amazed how quickly social media users correct news/facts they think are incorrect.  For example, I posted an article last week about how some news outlets had incorrectly reported that a Brown alumni was a suspect, and that reporting may have led to his death. Turns out the news was false (http://bit.ly/ZQTde9).  Someone corrected me within minutes of my post and I took the post down. Indeed social networks used intelligently can be an incredible platform for not just validating whether something happened, but also *what*  happened, *where* it happened, and how bad.  Last year, I found Twitter invaluable for getting direct, first hand insights into such unfolding events as Hurricane Sandy (yes, the warnings were right, the hurricane was actually turning out to be as severe as weather forecasters predicted) and Occupy Wall Street (a very vibrant online global community on Social, but it was a bit hard to figure out what exactly the movement’s specific calls to action were).

4. The AP Hack means companies should invest more in mining the web and social networks.

I’m obviously biased on this topic as the CEO of a Social Data platform company. Still, I think perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the hack and subsequent market plunge is that Twitter and other social networks have become such an important news source that mining them intelligently is now critically important and doing it incorrectly can be very costly. For example, any funds or news organizations that caught the Tweet about the White House could have almost instantaneously checked out the validity of the news using social networks. They could have checked for other confirming Tweets about the incident, even focusing their search on the DC area. Even the average individual investor could have checked the news out by doing a Twitter Search, or even just checked out the White House web cams: http://whitehouse.gov1.info/webcam/oval.htm.  News reporters every day validate breaking news using multiple sources–the same should be true for Social.  HFT funds that had automatic triggers kick on the White House Tweet without validating signals should be investing more in their engineering teams so they can build more sophisticated monitoring systems.

We live in exciting times where news is being revolutionized. News is getting faster and more viral. It’s crucial that a company’s processes and technologies keep pace with this quickening rate of progress.

At DataSift, we have built the world’s most powerful and extensive infrastructure for intelligently processing large volumes of social and finding signal. We have hundreds of corporate customers (including many major US news organizations) using DataSift to power ever more sophisticated monitoring and tracking of Social.  We also have a team with deep experience in using Social to power applications more intelligently.

There’s a saying in investing: “You never know who’s swimming with no shorts until the tide goes out.”  I’d update that saying to say: “You never know which funds/news companies are using outdated technology/platforms until there is a news hack.”

Give us a call, we’d love to help you.

Our talented data science team analyzed the amount of social interaction around big data in 2012.

We’re proud that a BBC News article on DataSift took 2nd place for the most shared Big Data stories of 2012.

Impressed with this infographic? Imagine having access to this amount of social data and being able to use that data to provide insight into your business. Not currently a DataSift user? Sign up for a free trial now.

As a big data platform for social data, we’re always looking for new ways we can innovate to extend our platform to make it easier for companies to filter and receive social data from us.

Until now, we’ve only provided “online” options for delivering data to our customers – including HTTP streaming, FTP, MongoDB, Amazon S3 and others (see http://datasift.com/destination for the full list).

But many customers have asked us for more. We’re listening. You’re asking us for “off-line” data delivery. Today we’re proud to announce a new service available today to our customers: DataSift Carrier Pigeon Delivery.

For hundreds of years, the humble carrier pigeon provided a robust, reliable and scalable communication mechanism. Many of us still recall the excitement of receiving our first pigeon-gram wishing us perhaps a Happy Birthday or asking us to send more troops.

However, in the age of the Internet, the carrier pigeon has been neglected and dismissed as a modern means of message delivery. Despite the tip-of-the-hat that Twitter’s logo makes, avian-based communications is a market segment in dire need of innovation and transformation.

Inspired by workforce-crowdsourcing models like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) and TaskRabbit (http://www.taskrabbit.com), we’re able to bring crowdsourced data delivery to DataSift’s platform, bringing the carrier pigeon into the 21st century and putting millions of feral pigeons to work for the Internet economy!

Here’s how it works:

• By working closely with Transport for London and the London Mayor’s office, we’ve secured the exclusive access rights to the carrier pigeon population of London.
• We’re converting carrier pigeons to iPigeons, by kitting them out with mobile RFID trackers, enabling us to track their location and report to you where your data is.
• As a DataSift user, you can configure your carrier pigeon destination end-point with details of your carrier pigeon setup. Take a look at the configuration options in http://datasift.com/destination.
• When using our platform, if your DataSift filters return data for delivery, our data-delivery center (based in Trafalgar Square) will print and dispatch your message and send it on its way.
• Through our console, you can track the status of messages that are in-transit to you.

We’re excited to be launching this in London today, with plans to roll out soon in New York and San Francisco next. Enjoy!

News is in a crisis

But it’s unlike the financial crisis affecting the world at present, where money is in short supply. This crisis is an overabundance of information in the real-time world, and news agencies are struggling to deal with the overflow. But what do we mean by that? Of course, it doesn’t mean that speed is no longer of the essence – early warning is still key, and every agency has to accelerate the pace at which they gather news to be ahead of their competitors.

The Consumer craves relevancy – right now

Quick, digestible context around the headlines they already know is key. They know the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ – and they want to know the ‘how’ and why’. They know that the world is talking about protests in Syria, or Sarah Silverman, or Gangnam style, again, because their social graph is telling them so. Their phone is buzzing. They want to know why – they want detail extracted from the noise. They still want the news, but they want to drill deeper into it at a greater pace than has ever been done before.

When your customers are beating you to the product, it changes the game

With the vastness of the information at hand, and ever-greater access to that information, news agencies have to cope with a reality that their readers may never come to them for a headline again. The headlines are already out there, via Twitter, via Facebook, via whatever medium that is your particular preference. In 140 characters, the news is being broken before news agencies even realize it’s news. Being first to the news is clearly old hat. The scoop is dead. The sift is what it’s all about. And for news agencies, this becomes a huge data-management task. We’ve seen the rise of slow-form data journalism, where tech-savvy journalists digest vast quantities of traditional ‘data’ – be it in excel spreadsheets or databases of information scraped from government agencies, or obtained by freedom of information requests. They turn this into navigable facts, or infographics – basically sifting out the information and digesting it into a form that makes sense to everybody.

Data isn’t just cells in a spreadsheet anymore

Social media provides a non-stop, surging firehose of data which can be similarly mined, albeit more clumsily. It’s not clean, interrogable data like numbers in a spreadsheet – it’s opinion mixed with fact mixed with rumor. It’s on-scene witness reporting mixed with context from external observers with an intelligent smattering of professional journalism, and all of it is being spat out relentlessly at breakneck speed. The news agencies that will win the new information wars will be the ones that develop the capacity to intelligently sift that data for tasty news morsels, get to the nub of the most pertinent global conversations promptly, and deliver neatly digested context to their readers ahead of the pack. That’s not too much to ask, right?

• About Storyful
• Storyful combines cutting-edge technology and professional journalism techniques, discovering the most relevant content from the web, filtering actionable news from the noise. Check out Storyful’s Youtube channel.

With the real-time marketing that comes with Twitter, brands are now able to see, almost instantaneously, the reaction and impact of their investment. In today’s infographic, DataSift takes an in-depth look at different segments of the Twitter-sphere to get a sense of yesterday’s winners and losers.

The Overall Impact

Rather than focus on the total number of Tweets to determine the most popular commercial, the DataSift data science team based their assessment on volume of conversation weighted by sentiment.  Think of it like high school: sure everyone might be whispering about you behind your back, but if they aren’t saying nice things, you probably aren’t getting nominated for Prom Queen or King.

Budweiser’s Brotherhood and Chrysler’s Whole Again and God Made a Farmer commercials proved that feel-good messages will always win the popularity contest.

Understanding the Audience

Yes, Budweiser and Chrysler had the most positive feedback, but drilling deeper did their messages resonate with the right target audiences? Football fans and Baltimore Tweeters gave their approval to the King of Beers, while Beyonce fans and San Franciscans were more likely to prefer the Chrysler commercials.

Interested in learning more about how DataSift can help measure the impact of marketing with demographic data? Contact us.

Real-Time Buzz

Proving that you don’t always have to spend the most money to capitalize on the best buzz, Oreo’s reaction to the Super Bowl blackout proved a bigger social success than their 30-second commercial.

So who were your winners and losers? Leave a comment to let us know and check out the entire infographic below.

Today, were rounding up this week’s top social media stories from around the web. As the year comes to a close, the web has provided an abundance of data analysis of trends, news, and events that have shaped 2012. From the 2012 Summer Olympics, SOPA, Curiosity Rover, U.S Presidential Election and Superstorm Sandy, social media has captured and shared the global pulse of humanity.

1. A Comprehensive Look at the State of the Social Media Ecosystem in 2012 (Nielsen and McKinsey)

Social media and social networking are no longer in their infancy. social media continues to grow rapidly, offering global consumers new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them.  According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile.  Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.

2.  Social Networking Popular Across Globe (Pew Research Center)

Social networking has spread around the world with remarkable speed. In countries such as Britain, the United States, Russia, the Czech Republic and Spain, about half of all adults now use Facebook and similar websites. These sites are also popular in many lower-income nations, where, once people have access to the internet, they tend to use it for social networking. In 19 of 21 countries, about three-in-ten or more of those polled use sites such as Facebook, including about half in Britain (52%), the U.S. (50%), Russia (50%), Spain (49%), and the Czech Republic (49%). Only in India (6%) and Pakistan (4%) is the percentage of adults who use social networking sites in single digits.

3. Internet May Soon Beat TV as Main Source of National News (GigaOM via Ofcom Study)

Internet users already rely more on the network than newspapers and magazines for their national news. Now the net is also on the verge of overtaking television, according to research. The internet also now leads for international news consumption in both Italy and Japan. But, for some, it is local news at which the internet seemingly excels — that is how most internet users in Germany, Italy and Spain get their local info. View the proportion of UK households using social networking sites.

4. 2012 Year on Twitter  (Twitter)

[Twitter]: Every day, we’re amazed and humbled by the many ways in which people use Twitter, which range from simply retweeting to igniting conversations with hashtags (even around lesser-known topics) to sharing spectacular and far-flung views. In 2012, everyone on Twitter brought us closer to moments and places that used to be far away or inaccessible: A Tweet from the bottom of the ocean. Tweets from Mars. An extraordinary view from space of Superstorm Sandy. A quiet backstage momentwith a presidential candidate. All of these and millions of other such moments were ours to experience directly wherever we were, in the midst of work or play or travel. We’ve taken a look back at the Tweets of 2012 and use both data and editorial signals to showcase some of these moments and conversations around several themes.

5. Google Zeitgeist (Google)

Powered by 1.2 trillion queries across 55 countries and 146 languages, Google released their yearly Zeitgest displaying 2012′s top searches, trends, events, images, products, people, hashtags and more. Check out the interactive map here.

Do you have any interesting findings from 2012? Comment and share below!

That’s why we enjoyed our interview with Jake Porway, Founder and Executive Director of DataKind, a non-profit organization that brings together data scientists and social organizations to correlate big data and provide solutions about global social issues. In today’s podcast, Jake discusses DataKind’s work with DC Action for Children on an interactive visualization tool to assess the health, security, and opportunity for children in each neighborhood of Washington D.C. Jake also discusses how data is revolutionizing the health and pro bono space, and his thoughts on the future of Big data and the greater good.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!

• About Jake Porway


• 
  Founder and Executive Director of DataKind, Jake Porway is a machine learning and technology enthusiast who loves nothing more than seeing good values in data. He founded DataKind in the hopes of creating a world in which every social organization has access to data capacity to better serve humanity. He was most recently the data scientist at the New York Times R&D. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from UCLA.
  
• Learn more


DataKind website: http://datakind.org


• Tweets about data and social goodness: @DataKind
  


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• Techies Give Back: http://www.techiesgiveback.org


• Random Hacks of Kindness: http://www.rhok.org


• DC Action for Children: http://www.dcactionforchildren.org