State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

The social media is taking over the world fast and furious. Found out this interesting video on social media revolution. Sharing it with you all.

What do you say, Is Social Media a Fad?

Very interesting site, stumbled upon it via HBR blog. It is a place where top thinkers of the world are highlighted and everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and thoughts. The site features talks about cutting edge technologies and concepts, such as social media. The site is sponsored by Nokia and here’s how they encourage input:

Share your Big Idea with the world! Our editors’ favorites will receive a Nokia N95 mobile device!

Submit your Big Idea to ideasproject.com, and join our conversation. For the next three months, our editors will be regularly highlighting their favorite ideas, and sending an Nokia N95 to the Big Thinker who contributed. We’ll also be featuring our favorite Big Ideas to feature along with the other ideasproject.com contributors.

Becoming aware of online comments and learning how to use the information can avert potential downturns in sales and can help companies fine-tune their marketing. In a recent article at the Kellogg business school site, a cell phone case study is used to make a point about the value of social conversations for business.

The researchers examined online word-of-mouth for the cellular phone industry. They focused on five specific brand models from five leading cell phone companies in the United States. Using data from an online forum with more than eight million posts, they explored the conversations of individual posters over time and analyzed how the nature of these posts related to individual customer behavior. From there they examined how the nature of online conversations relates to corporate performance.

In a working paper based on their research, Krishnamurthi and his colleagues report that they developed the data set by identifying keywords in the posts that expressed an attitude toward a cell phone and usage experience. He explains, “We classified people’s comments in these posts in three ways. One is an action-type statement, such as ‘I’m going to buy it.’ Another type expresses emotion, such as ‘I hate it.’ The third category is made up of attribute-type statements that have to do with quality, things that relate to the functionality of the product, such as ‘It has great reception.’” Each type of rating can be positive or negative.

Using specially designed software, the researchers rated the action, emotion, and attribute statements on a scale. According to Krishnamurthi, “It’s a little bit like artificial intelligence. You take a large number of posters and look at all the words they use, and create a classification of these words as highly negative through highly positive. The software has a dictionary, and when these posts are made the software automatically classifies them on this continuum.”

Do all those tweets could be used to create something more interesting? when it comes to discovery,search and creating a following, there are some interesting angles that Twitter or its clones offer. Some are discussed in this article at Technology Review. I believe that we will see a shift towards more microblogging in public and semi-professional scenarios.

When Twitter was introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a 140-word answer to the question “What are you doing?,” many criticized the results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has grown to millions, while the content of the many posts–better known as “tweets”–has shifted from banal to informative.

Twitter users now cover breaking news, posting links to reports, blog posts, and images. Twitter’s search box also reveals what people think of the latest new gadget or movie, letting visitors eavesdrop on often spirited conversations and some insightful opinions.

Earlier this week, on The Charlie Rose Show, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was asked directly whether Google might be interested in acquiring Twitter. He responded, somewhat coyly, that his company was “unlikely to buy anything right now.”

Nonetheless, as Twitter grows in size and substance, it’s becoming clear that it offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment. Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land, compares this to the unique real-time feed of new video content offered by YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and says that Twitter could help improve real-time search. Notably, says Sullivan, this is something that Google isn’t particularly good at. Even by scouring news sites, Google simply can’t match the speed and relevancy of social sites like Digg and Twitter, he says.

Twitter’s ability to capture the latest fad is evident from its “trends” feature, which reveals the most talked about topics among Twitterers. At the time this article was written, Twitter users were discussing topics including National Napping Day, DST (daylight savings time), and the new movie Watchmen. A quick search also reveals that five people within the past half hour have posted tweets about last weekend’s Saturday Night Live skit called “The Rock Obama.” The most recent tweet includes a link to the video and was posted just three minutes ago.

Read more »