NEXT Berlin

The re:publica 2012 has just closed its doors, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing else to do in Berlin during this week – under the umbrella of the Berlin Web Week (which is in fact lasting for two weeks), a bunch of other conferences surrounding the digital sphere and Internet business are taking place in the German capital right now. The most important one is without a doubt the Next Berlin (not to confuse with The Next Web in Amsterdam).

And as last year, Anton and Anja from the Twingly team are heading to Berlin to attend the event, to listen to hundreds of renowned speakers from every part of the digital industry and to meet inspiring entrepreneurs, influencial thinkers and potential Twingly partners.

In case you want to meet us at the NEXT, we would love to hear from you. Just drop us a line @agaton / @anmara

Of course we’ve launched our Twingly Liveboard for this years’ edition of NEXT, which will provide you with real time insights into the Twitter buzz about the event. If you tweet about the NEXT and want to be included in the stats, don’t forget to add the hashtag #next12 in your tweets.

See you at the NEXT on Tuesday and Wednesday!

As one could imagine, the re:publica createde quite a buzz in the German speaking twittersphere. We set up a Twingly Liveboard before the conference kicked off to be able to visualize the feedback on Twitter. To remind you: Liveboard is a HTML5 based feature that visualizes the buzz about trends on Twitter and works with any state of the art browser.

Twingly Liveboard for #rp12

You find the Liveboard for the re:publica at liveboard.twingly.com/rp12 (since it shows real-time stats, the numbers are still growing even though the conference is already finished).

Here are a few key figures that illustrate how visible the event was in the local twittersphere
Overall number of tweets containing the “rp12” keyword: more than 69.000
Tweets about rp12 during the time of the conference: almost 55.000
Number of different users tweeting about rp12: more than 10.800
Number of unique hashtags in tweets mentioning rp12: more than 6.200
Number of unique links in tweets mentioning rp12: almost 16.000

Top 5 Twitter users mentioned in tweets with “rp12” hashtag
@republica
@RegSprecher
@saschalobo
@republive
@spreeblick

Top 5 Twitter users with most tweets about rp12
@republica
@republive
@forbiddenfeed
@A_Christofori
@bicyclist

Top 5 most used hashtags
#rp12
#Action
#tassebier
#stage1
#stage2

Overall, the first conference day on Wednesday led to the highest number of tweets, and the last conference day on Friday to the lowest.

The clear winner: WordPress! 39 of those 100 blogs examined are using a self-hosted version of WordPress, and additional 9 chose the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com (which actually contains a special “VIP” self-hosted solution as well).

Half of the world's leading blogs use WordPress

So of the 100 top blogs worldwide, almost half runs on WordPress. That’s an impressive dominance for the open source blogging tool and a huge gain compared to 2009, when “only” 32 percent of the leading blogs used either the self-hosted or the hosted version of WordPress.

14 blogs among the Technorati top 100 created their own custom blogging solution, 7 use Movable Type, 6 Drupal, only 2 TypePad (compared to 16 in 2009) and at least 2 Tumblr, the up-and-coming tool for quick and easy blogging. For 8 sites, the Pingdom folks couldn’t identify the software behind, but chances are high that many of them are self-hosted as well.

Interesting stats! Thanks to Pingdom for sifting through the list, and thanks for reminding us of that Technorati actually still exists ; )

At Gavagai, you do some sophisticated stuff. Please tell us in a few sentences what your business is all about?
It’s about continuously reading tremendously large and dynamic text streams, and delivering timely, and actionable intelligence based on the aggregation of information therein. Of course, what is actionable depends on the information needs you as an actor in a particular domain have, be it brand management, assessing threat levels for targets-at-risk, or keeping track of the sentiment towards a particular tradable asset. Example information needs that you are able to address using Ethersource, our system, include:

* How is my brand perceived in comparison to those of my competitors’?
* Why are my customers unsubscribing from the services that I’m offering?
* When is the best time to launch this particular advertising campaign?
* How is the campaign, recently launched by my competitor, received
among my target audience?
* Where is it most likely that the on-line protests against a certain
phenomenon will be publicly manifested in terms of a demonstration?

We have a number of case studies available at our blog.

Fredrik Olsson

What’s the founding story of Gavagai?
Gavagai was founded in 2008 by my colleagues Jussi Karlgren and Magnus Sahlgren, as a spin-off from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). Gavagai was formed as a response to the many inquiries Magnus and Jussi received from people outside SICS regarding their research. Gavagai has been operational in its current incarnation since late 2010.

You are one of Twingly’s Data clients, that means you are using our API to access data from Swedish and English speaking blogs. Why do you need this information and what do you use it for?
We read data from Twingly 24/7. In particular, the Twingly live feed gives what we believe to be a very good coverage of Swedish blogs, which of course is very important to us in meeting the kinds of information needs outlined above, expressed by domestic actors.

Do you have any insights about this data from Blogs in Swedish and English you want to share? Some surprising fact or observation?
One epiphany we had some time ago was that we’re now able to aggregate and inspect attitudes and opinions of a population as a whole, that’s not necessarily visible in any of the parts. For instance, we can clearly see that Swedish bloggers are optimistic during holidays and weekends, something which is very hard to assess from the posts of any one individual. Analogously, we also pick up on aversive or hostile tendencies in the online population towards a given subject, but where it is hard to identify all the facets of the tendency in any one individual. For example, we recently set up a Xenophobic Tracker using, among other things, the Swedish blogosphere as input; the propensity of violent expressions in that context is not a pretty read.

But it’s not the peak items that we’re most pleased with. With Ethersource, we can pick up and note weak signals and tendencies where other methods fail.

What type of companies or organisations use your services?
The kinds of actors that require actionable intelligence in their efforts to manage brands, make informed decision based on the ‘temperature’ of an on-line population as a whole, keep track of the general mood in the markets, or trade with specific assets.

Your titel is “Chief Data Officer”. That’s not too common, is it? Do you think every company will need a CDO in the future?
No, I don’t think every company will need a CDO in the future. Hopefully, companies will be able to scale down on their data management activities, perhaps due to their use of tools and techniques such as Ethersource, and instead focus on their core business. Much the same way we are able to focus on our core business by obtaining data from Twingly instead of harvesting it all ourselves.

Big Data is one of the hottest buzzwords right now, which is a field you are active in. What’s the potential and biggest challenges of the increasing amount of data?
We’re currently concerned with human-generated text, so it is in the light of that the response to this question should be read.

The biggest challenge with Big Data is to stop focusing on Big Data. Big Data will, by virtue of the prevailing definition, always be slightly too big to handle with common tools. This has mainly resulted in people being obsessed with processing speed and ability to store large amounts of data. Few, if any, have focused on a layer in the so called Big Data Stack that so far has been missing: the Semantic Processing Layer. The key challenge for Big Data is to come to the point where it is easy and swift to turn massive data streams into actionable intelligence; knowledge that you and your organization can act upon in order to obtain a competitive advantage. To put it another way; the key challenge of Big Data is to be of service.

Being a researcher by training and heart, I believe that we’ve yet to imagine the biggest potential there is in harnessing truly Big Data. Let’s talk about that in a few years, when a more representative sample of our world’s population is active on-line. Then, we’ll be able to find the collective answers to questions to mankind, that we’re not able to think of now.

What’s on your roadmap for the upcoming years? Where do you see the biggest growth and potential for Gavagai?
We’ve got very exciting times ahead of us! Ethersource is already unique in the way it is able to read amounts of text that would overwhelm traditional language processing methods, handle multiple (all) languages, in real-time, and learn from variations in the input in an unsupervised manner.

Our development plans involve some fairly hefty stuff. In the short term, we’ll roll out a game changer in terms of a way of identifying the many meanings of a given concept, and use that information to disambiguate expressions of that concept as they appear in social media. For instance, imagine that you are a brand manager for Apple, Visa, “3” or some other brand with an inherently ambiguous and common name: How do you go about monitoring the attitudes and opinions towards the meaning of the word that constitutes your brand, and only that meaning? There is a solution…

The biggest growth and potential for Gavagai is as a supplier of the Ethersource technology to other companies, such as analytics firms, trading desks, governmental agencies etc, that already have an infrastructure in place, but that lacks the competitive edge the ability to understand and make sense of large text streams in multiple languages gives. Ethersource is an implementation of the Semantic Processing Layer of the Big Data Stack, and we intend to move it as such.

And while that might be true in some cases, recent statistics from Nielsen/McKinsey research company NM Incite show that despite the increasing number of competing publishing platforms and the huge amount of time users spend on social media sites, the number of blogs is continuing to grow.

In October 2011, NM Incite tracked over 173 million blogs around the world as source of buzz. At the end of the year, that number had risen to 181 million. In 2006, the company only tracked 36 million. As the graph shows, this growth has been steady, with no slowdown during the past two years, when social media exploded.

So everybody who still thinks blogging has no future should rethink that statement. But what’s certainly going to happen is a fragmentation of the blogging landscape in terms of which platforms and technologies are being used. Just look at Google+ where some users post extensive texts. That might not be blogging in the traditional sense because no typical blog CMS is used, no pingbacks are being sent and no layout customization is possible. Nevertheless it doesn’t seem right to claim those users aren’t blogging just because they do it within a social network.

The NM Incite stats offer some additional insights into who bloggers are: The majority is female and half of all bloggers are aged between 18 and 34. Furthermore, bloggers are well-educated and active social web users – no real surprise here. In the US, the three biggest blog platforms Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr reach 80 million unique visitors per month.

So yes, blogging will evolve and change, and some users might even leave their old-fashioned blog in favour of a better connected social-media-site. But the need for people to express won’t be affected by that. We don’t know which platform they will use in 2, 5 or 10 years. But there is one thing we know for sure: They won’t stop publishing online.

Before you read our short interview with Peter in which he gives some insights into who we his and how he plans to develop Twingly, here are a few facts about him. Peter is 34 years young, a graduate engineer in data technology and he joins Twingly after 7 years of extensive sales experience in his last position as Director of Sales at the Swedish Network Provider IP-Only. Peter is married and he has 2 daughters as well as 2 dogs. You can follow him on Twitter or on his blog – just don’t be surprised about the huge cover photos there. You will get background information on that if you carry on reading here!

Hi Peter. You leave the business-to-business telecom industry to lead a company working with social media and blogs. That’s kind of a big change, isn’t it?
True, but that’s also my intention: After having worked with selling data communication infrastructure and telecom services to large companies for seven years I felt the time was right for a new challenge. I have always been interested in the media sector and social media is an important and growing part of that. That’s why I consider Twingly a great opportunity for me to get to know another industry. It’s a new challenge, and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

Peter and Zoe

Is it the first time you are the CEO of a company?
Yes, although my team at my previous job consisted of 5 people, now at Twingly it’s 8. So that’s not a huge difference concerning management.

You have lots of sales experience. Will that background shape your work at Twingly?
Yes, one of my goals is to make Twingly a more sales-driven company and to focus even more on developing products and services that our customers, like websites using our Twingly widgets as well as clients working with our blog data APIs, ask for.

What does that mean for bloggers who always have been at the heart of Twingly’s interest?
We love bloggers. They don’t need to worry at all. Since 2006 Twingly has been developing its technological basis and services. Now that most of it is in place, we can focus increasingly on selling services to our clients. But it is equally important to us to come even closer to the blogosphere, which is why we recently bought the Swedish blog portal Bloggportalen. The math is simple: If we increase the number of partners who use Twingly widgets, bloggers have more websites that they can link to and get traffic back in return. It’s a win-win situation.

Speaking about Bloggportalen: What can bloggers in Sweden expect?
We will improve its looks and make it easier to use and easier to register. We are also going to add new features for bloggers. Bloggportalen will be the place where bloggers increase the traffic to their blogs.

What else will happen at Twingly in the near future?
In addition to Sweden, Twingly is active in 16 different countries. We will put more effort into expanding our current business into foreign markets and we want to do that in the same effective way as in our home market. Germany and UK are top priorities and we are also going to analyse whether there are other countries that should be of interest to us. In those markets the priority will most likely be our blog data business, while in the Nordics we will heavily continue to push our widget services as well as develop Bloggportalen.

How are you as a leader?
I’m direct and honest, prefer low hierarchies and try to inform as much as possible. The more information the better.

Unlike the telecom b2b industry, the social media sphere is pretty public, both regarding praise and criticism. How will you deal with that?
Since I have participated in a Swedish TV show called “Gladiators” I have experience with receiving public feedback, both the good and the bad. I always try to answer criticism instead of ignoring it.

It doesn’t happen that often that the CEO of an Internet company (or any company) has been a “Gladiator” on TV…
Hehe, that might be true. I participated in the Swedish adaptation of the US entertainment show “American Gladiators” in 2004, and for the current season the producers called me and asked if I want to apply again. Since last time was lots of fun and I love everything that has to do with competition, I applied and got picked again. The whole program was filmed in a period of 3 weeks, so it doesn’t interfere with my new role at Twingly.

And you can deal with the occasional Gladiator remark you hear when talking to clients?
It’s a perfect ice breaker and eases up meetings a lot : ) !

Do you have another hobby you are passionate about?
Yes, 17 years ago I discovered my passion for Rugby, and today I play for the Stockholm-based first-division Rugby club Hammarby IF RF as well as for the Swedish national team.

Can you somehow use your Rugby and Gladiators experience for your professional life?
Well, the Rugby rules are hard to apply at work. You don’t tackle your clients or co-workers. But since I have been manager of a Rugby team for a few years, I learned a lot about how to coach 25 guys with very strong opinions. That experience naturally can be useful on the job, too. And through the Gladiators show I gained media training, which might come handy in some situations as well.

Will you get your Twingly colleagues to play Rugby?
Only if they like to : ).

Where do you want Twingly to be in the end of 2013?
My goal is that in the end of 2013, Twingly will be known to have the best quality and area coverage of blogs in Europe, and that any company which needs to get deep knowledge and understanding about the European blogosphere knows that Twingly can deliver that. Furthermore, I want Bloggportalen to be the heart of Swedish blogosphere.

November last year we launched Medienbewachen.de, a Wiki in German for everyone looking for social media monitoring tools focusing on the German-speaking market. On the Wiki you’ll find dozens of tools that can help you monitoring and analysing the buzz on the web. Many services listed offer a detailed presentation introducing their core features, pricing and contact details. Medienbewachen.de shall make it easy for everyone to find the tool suiting their individual needs best.

Since its launch, the Wiki has grown – it now lists 76 social media monitoring tools of which 38 offer a detailed presentations plus another 38 where a presentation will be added in the future. Every week we get in new requests regarding the Wiki and we are really happy to see that Medienbewachen.de also clearly helps with generating new leads and giving additional reach to the social media monitoring services taking part.

According to Stefan Vetter, Head of Marketing at MeMo News AG Switzerland, Medienbewachen.de has become the fifth biggest traffic source for MeMo News. He praises the Wiki for being an excellent platform where everyone looking for  social media monitoring tools can gain a good first overview. Such a platform  has been missing before, he said.

Echobot, based in Karlsruhe, Germany uses Medienbewachen.de actively as part of its marketing strategy. Tobias Görgen, Managing Director of Toocan, thinks that being part of the Wiki means increased traffic and visibility for monitoring tools. We made an interview with Tobias last year, you can read it here.

Google Analytics shows that during the last month 75 percent of all visitors came to Medienbewachen.de for the first time, while 25 percent were returning to the site. This means that people started actively using it as a resource for their research of social media monitoring tools, but also that a lot of new people find to the site. A good balance!

We look forward to developing Medienbewachen.de further and would love to see your tool listed as well, so you offer a social media monitoring tool aimed at the German market. Get in touch and we get you started!

Medienbewachen.de

Im November vergangenen Jahres haben wir mit Medienbewachen.de ein Angebot für alle gestartet, die nach Social-Media-Monitoring-Werkzeugen speziell für den deutschsprachigen Raum suchen. Auf dem Wiki findet ihr eine umfangreiche Übersicht zu Werkzeugen für die Beobachtung und Analyse von Sozialen Medien – viele davon mit einer detaillierten Präsentation. Ziel ist es, allen, die auf der Suche nach einem Social Media Monitoring Tool sind, bei der Auswahl zu helfen.

Die Site hat sich in den vergangenen viereinhalb Monaten sehr gut entwickelt. Mittlerweile sind 76 Social Media Monitoring Tools vertreten, davon  38 Tools mit oftmals detaillierten Präsentationen, sowie 38 weitere die noch eine Präsentation hinterlegen werden. Wöchentlich erreichen uns Anfragen, und Medienbewachen.de hilft ganz offensichtlich den gelisteten Unternehmen dabei potentielle neue Kunden zu erreichen und ihre Sichtbarkeit zu verbessern.

Stefan Vetter, Head of Marketing bei der MeMo News AG Schweiz, ließ uns wissen, dass Medienbewachen.de mittlerweile  Platz 5 der Besucherquellen für MeMo News einnimmt. Sein Urteil: “Ich halte Medienbewachen für ein sehr gutes Angebot, um einen Überblick über Anbieter von Social Media Monitoring und Analytics im deutschsprachigen Raum zu bekommen – das hat zuvor einfach gefehlt.”

Echobot.de, ein junger deutscher Anbieter aus Karlsruhe, nutzt Medienbewachen.de aktiv als Teil seiner Marketingstrategie. Tobias Görgen, Managing Director von Toocan, geht davon aus, dass Medienbewachen.de vielen Anbietern zusätzlichen Traffic und damit zusätzliche Reichweite bringt. Mit Tobias haben wir übrigens im vergangenen Jahr ein Interview geführt.

Ein Blick auf Google-Analytics zeigt, dass im letzten Monat 75 Prozent aller Besucher auf Medienbewachen.de die Site zum ersten Mal besuchen, 25 Prozent sind wiederkehrende Nutzer. Das deutet daraufhin, dass bereits rund ein Viertel der Besucher das Angebot aktiv für seine Recherchen nutzt, während gleichzeitig sehr viele neue Besucher zu Medienbewachen.de finden. Ein gutes Verhältnis, wie wir finden, und nun gilt es Medienbewachen.de weiter auszubauen.

Fehlt noch ein Anbieter mit Fokus auf den deutschsprachigen Raum, oder wollt ihr euer Tool vorstellen? Dann meldet euch!

Today we make it public that, after six years on duty, I’ve made the decision to replace myself as the CEO of Twingly. Effective as of now, I no longer work on a day-to-day basis at Twingly. I remain as shareholder and will take a seat on the board of directors.

While recruiting Peter as our new CEO we also made the decision to elect Niclas Heurlin as Chairman of the Board. He has been on our board for several years and contributed a lot to our success. Together, the CEO and the chairman have very defining roles and it will be great to see how far they can take Twingly with the help of our great team.

I believe in intuition, the importance of taking your gut feeling into account when making decisions. Intuition is often thought of as something that comes to you in an instant. But life altering decisions are rarely made in an instant, and they shouldn’t be. You need to feel out the consequences of a decision over some time, sort of trying it out to see if it fits.

In big decisions I believe intuition is as important as in smaller ones. But it’s a different kind if intuition, that grows on you instead of appearing in a flash. These are the gut feelings that are really important to pay attention to. Otherwise you end up living a life that’s not what you want it to be. In the most literal sense, life is far too short to spend on anything else than fulfilling your dreams.

Last year I realized I felt uneasy from being too safe and not learning as much every day as I want to. I thrive in uncertainty. I’m an entrepreneur because I love the unknown, and Twingly is today a profitable and predictable business. We have accomplished a lot, even acquiring Bloggportalen.se which was our biggest competitor when we started up in 2006. The feeling of accomplishment is a big part of why I need to do something else: It’s time to take on a great challenge again.

Since the opportunity seldom arises I want to extend my deepest gratitude to everyone that has been part of my journey at Twingly. Everything I have accomplished at Twingly has been thanks to the best co-founders in the world; Björn, Nicke and Figge. The best team I have ever worked with; Anton, Pontus, Oskar, Jörgen, Mattias, Hugo, Anja, Kristoffer, Marcus, Annie and Charlotta. A great Board of Directors; Lars, Björn J and Niclas H. And the best supporters and advisors imaginable; all the people of the Swedish social media sphere, Bubblan.

There are a few people I especially want to mention that have helped define Twingly from the outside. Per-Åke Olsson, who opened the door for Twingly at Dagens Nyheter, our first customer. Joakim Jardenberg, the archangel of Swedish media, who has always been supportive but also never held back on due criticism. Emanuel Karlsten, who is a never tiring lighthouse in Swedish journalism. Matti Palm and Åsa Melin-Mandre, who helped shape the Twingly brand more than anyone else. And Sandra Källström, my wife and better half without whom I would never have made it to where I am.

Actively turning the page into a new chapter of my life allows me to get back to what I do best, dealing with uncertainty. At the birth of a new company everything is unknown and every day is an opportunity to learn something new. And a new opportunity to conquer the world.

With love,
Martin Källström

And the cool thing is: The Webciety team uses our Twingly Live tool on their live streaming page to show reactions from Twitter in real time. If you click on this link you are being forwarded to the stream, and if you look at the right you see the Twingly Live box with the the real time stream of tweets containing the #webciety hashtag (there is also a second tab highlighting tweets that received the most reactions).

Since #webciety is a pretty popular hashtag on Twitter right now, some spammers thought it was a good idea to hijack it, hence the Live widget showed their tweets as well. Fortunately, Twingly Live offers tools to moderate the real time Twitter stream – something you can’t do with Twitters own widget solution.

After users have created a Twingly Live stream for a specific keyword or hashtag, they can access the admin area where they see all incoming tweets that will be shown. For each and every tweet there is the option to either remove the tweet or to block the specific user permanently. So if you create a Twingly Live stream and want to get rid of some tweets or even block spammy users, you can do that easily!

In the case of #webciety – which has been using Twingly Live already in 2010 – we also created some custom-made filters to make sure that no spam will appear in the Live feed.

Whether these additional measurements are necessary is something that we decide on a case by case basis, and usually it’s only needed for some really huge events which get a lot of media attention. In most cases though, users are happy with the moderation features included in the admin area.

In this post we introduced you to 3 additional features of Twingly Live that you might find useful. Go, check it out and create you own Stream on http://live.twingly.com. And in case you are in charge of an event and need support, we are looking forward to hear from you.