Posts tagged trendspottr

This week, Twitter announced the launch of its Twitter Ads API to allow advertisers to manage Twitter ad campaigns programatically and at scale. Twitter also announced five initial partners who will use the Ads API to offer real-time Twitter advertising features to their customers. Among these partners are two of our very own partners: Salesforce and HootSuite. 

While the release of the Ads API promises to usher in a new era of “real-time marketer content to the platform”, the key issue facing advertisers now is how to optimize ad performance for a real-time, rapid-fire, interest-based network like Twitter. Relying on traditional web marketing and ad buying strategies will certainly not do the trick nor will replicating ad campaigns used on other networks like Facebook or Pinterest.

The key to ad success on Twitter will be for advertisers to match their campaigns and messaging to the life cycle of user engagement on Twitter. With the half-life of content on Twitter at around three hours, being able to predict what messaging and content will engage users within these brief engagement windows will be critical for effective ad performance. 

This is where TrendSpottr comes in. TrendSpottr’s real-time predictive analytics automatically identify and recommend the most optimal keywords, hashtags and content for any ad buying campaign. These recommendations are based on the projected trends, viral growth and social engagement on Twitter over the next engagement window. By using our predictive ad recommendations, advertisers will continually “skate to where the puck is going to be” and organically supercharge the performance of their Twitter ad campaigns.

TrendSpottr’s predictive ad recommendation technology will soon be integrated into social ad buying platforms. In the meantime, advertisers can get started today by subscribing to TrendSpottr Dashboard and TrendSpottr Alerts to surface predictive trending data that is relevant to their ad campaigns. 

It’s that time of the year when technology pundits, mavens and analysts gaze into their crystal balls and make their predictions and prognostications for the next 12 months.

One of the hottest technology sectors over the past year and one that most industry observers agree will continue to grow in importance and reach in 2013 is Big Data. Big Data is more than just a buzzword. It’s real, significant and is driving disruptive changes in major markets like healthcare, finance, retail, media and advertising. Gartner forecasts that in 2013, Big Data will drive $34 billion of enterprise spending. 

While the overall market for Big Data will grow by over 20% this year, many industry experts anticipate significant changes in the type of Big Data solutions that will gain market share in 2013. For example, Forrester Research predicts that “real-time architectures will swing to prominence in 2013.” Specifically, Forrester states that:

Firms will seek out streaming, event processing, and in-memory data technologies to provide real-time analytics and run predictive models…In 2013, enterprise architects will step out of their ivory towers to once again focus on technology — real-time technology that is highly available, scalable, and performant.

Forrester also predicts that in 2013 the demand for actionable insights and advanced analytics will require Big Data solutions to extend beyond simple rules-based models and incorporate sophisticated statistical algorithms. 

Advanced analytics uses advanced statistical, data mining, and machine learning algorithms to dig deeper to find patterns that you can’t see using traditional BI tools, simple queries, or rules. Big data is the fuel. Algorithms are the engine to explore virgin data, seek out new meaning and models, and deliver more personalized, contextualized customer experiences.

Investors are also predicting that 2013 will witness major changes in the way Big Data solutions are delivered and architected. For example, Hollie Moore Haynes, managing director with tech-focused private equity firm Silver Lake, predicts that 2013 will usher in Big Data’s second act. 

The second act of Big Data is about action. This time intelligence will go beyond reporting. It will live at the heart of the organization, not at the edges. It will involve moving from historical insight to predictive information, enabling managers to make smarter decisions.

So there you have it. Big Data in 2013 will continue to be a big deal. More importantly, the solutions that will likely win the day (or the year, as it were) will look a lot like TrendSpottr: real-time, predictive and algorithmic. 

Here’s to the pundits and to a fabulously successful 2013!  

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Salesforce.com to bring TrendSpottr’s real-time and predictive analytics service to thousands of Salesforce customers directly through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Starting today, TrendSpottr will help Salesforce customers get “ahead of the curve” by identifying the most important emerging trends from their topic profiles. By using TrendSpottr, companies will be better positioned to anticipate crises and opportunities, optimize content marketing, identify real-time influencers with high viral influence, enhance social SEO strategies and increase their social and business intelligence capabilities.

TrendSpottr is available directly from the Radian 6 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dashboard and can be purchased via Salesforce’s new credits-based currency system. 

The TrendSpottr service automatically identifies the top trending links, hashtags and users from customers’ topic profiles. In addition, TrendSpottr expands shortened links such as “t.co” to reveal the source domain and URL for top trending links making it easier than ever for companies to gain useful insights from their social data. TrendSpottr can be used to view top trends by time period to allow for comparative analysis and insight.

With TrendSpottr Widgets anyone can now customize and embed TrendSpottr trending content on their website, blog or social network page. TrendSpottr Widgets are ideal for publishers, bloggers and content sites that want to engage their audience with the most timely and trending content for any topic or keyword.

A sports website like Goal.com can now create a TrendSpottr Widget that will display the top trending real-time news and stories about the beautiful game. Or, a lifestyle blog like Jezebel can customize a TrendSpottr Widget that will display real-time trends about fashion and celebrities. TrendSpottr Widgets are also perfect for social media users that want to customize their Blogger or Tumblr themes with relevant trending content from across the social web.

TrendSpottr Widgets display “more signal and less noise” than a Twitter search widget by highlighting emerging stories, news and events with high viral potential rather than a chronological stream of tweets. TrendSpottr Widgets provide  a much easier way for your website visitors and blog readers to view and consume the most timely, important and engaging content right on your site.

Customize your own free TrendSpottr Widget and add it to your website or blog.  

Earlier this week, Fred Gallagher of Actian Corporation, wrote a guest post on GigaOm titled, “Big Data: The quick and the dead”. In the post, Fred challenges the conventional thinking about Big Data; specifically, “the implied premise that bigger is better and that adding more data will naturally produce insights.” Fred goes on to note that about 95 percent of data in a data warehouse is dormant and that adding terabytes or petabytes of unstructured data to this data warehouse is likely to make dormant data, dead data. What businesses need and what ultimately drives business value, Fred correctly notes is “live “quick” data not dormant or dead data.”

At TrendSpottr, we believe that one of the most disruptive Big Data opportunities is the real-time analysis of “live” data elements. More specifically, our focus is on identifying trends and predictive insights from real-time, incremental streams of Big Data; i.e, a predictive early warning system based on real-time pattern recognition and analysis of the velocity and acceleration of living data. The reality, as Fred notes, is that most of the data that is being analyzed today by Big Data implementations is dormant or dead. By focusing on only those data elements that provide the potential for insight and action, we can leverage the potential of Big Data by making sure it’s alive! 

Finally, a quick plug for TrendSpottr cofounder and CTO, Alain Chesnais. In addition to being the technical architect of the TrendSpottr service and the source of one of our favourite recent quotes, “What we’re doing is actually playing the role of an automated data scientist for you. Now you can consume big data without needing a Ph.D in statistics”, Alain also serves as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and computing organization.

This week, the ACM is in Warsaw, Poland hosting the prestigious and highly competitive International Collegiate Programming Contest. The results are now in and the winner of this year’s ICPC is St. Petersburg State University. The University of Warsaw came in second place and our very own University of Waterloo came in ninth place. Congratulations to all the teams and to the ACM and Alain for hosting this amazing event.