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• about
• ifeed
• social media

• Overview

  iFeed is an information discovery and analysis device for online media. It was conceived by Netemic Ltd in response to the rapid growth in social media, which is acting as a growing counter-pole of influence and information dissemination on companies, brand awareness and consumer sentiment.

  iFeed provides user-driven, real time access to online information through a multi-filtered search of social media; a body of web content that is inefficiently distributed and difficult to access methodically. Unlike competitor products, iFeed puts the user in control through a desk-top accessed interface that offers:

  • easy management of multiple queries over multiple projects;
  • real-time, user-driven dynamic filtering of results by date, relevance and source category;
  • automatic clipping and re-distribution of content to a dedicated viewer application;
  • updating of all content independently of user actions (‘persistent search’).

  Forthcoming features include:

  • event spike detection
  • sentiment analysis
  • user preference learning
  • taxonomic classification
  • mobile delivery channels

• Applications

  Originally conceived as a tool for the Public Relations industry, iFeed has since demonstrated its usefulness in a variety of settings. Netemic is therefore developing four distinct versions of iFeed to serve the following industries:

  • iFeed Agency

    Awareness of social media comment and opinion is now a basic requirement of successful relationships between PR agencies and their clients. This has been made more crucial by a decentralisation of media content as the discussion of products and services between customers moves away from traditional axes of media influence to the disparate social networks of blogs, chat rooms and consumer forums that characterise today's Internet.

    iFeed Agency enables ready access to these conversations, helping to reveal the consumer's true agenda and allowing agencies to define marketing and PR strategies to match. iFeed harnesses the voice of the public to the digital communications strategy of the client, thereby helping to move the consumer debate back ‘on-side’.

    iFeed Agency is also helping raise the productivity and analytical reach of PR professionals. iFeed's powerful abilities to search continuously and aggregate relevant content in a format that may be re-published to both clients and colleagues is eliminating the need for time-consuming manual web searches and the cost of clippings services. At the same time, iFeed's charting and filtering capabilities place higher value-added services like competitor analysis, campaign impact and reputation management at the user's fingertips.

  • iFeed Media

    Although today's media companies recognise the fundamental shift in consumer habits represented by the advent of social media, few have devised successful strategies to embrace this trend. A number have responded by creating their own blogs in order to attract online discussion to their websites, republishing this content to lend the impression of social media patronage and endorsement of their digital communications strategy.

    This token involvement, however, often misses the real debate that is taking place between bloggers and consumers on their own social media sites. Recognising that social media's participants are innately sceptical of corporate blogs and sites, a small but growing number of media companies are turning to iFeed to provide a mechanism to republish true social media content on their websites. This is used to contextualise news stories with blog commentaries, and more generally to draw social media's participants to corporate websites by offering unbiased and representative contributions from their peers.

    iFeed handles this task with ease. iFeed Media is easily configured to allow online editors with a powerful retrieval tool to both select and re-format blog content into a format that complements their existing website structure. The result is a stream of social media contributions that provides a valuable frame of reference for content elsewhere on the website.

    As well as its ability to republish content, iFeed Media is demonstrating its value to journalists and editors in print and online news media as a research tool for story backgrounds. iFeed's persistent search capability allows stories and topics to be continually tracked across social media sites, providing ready insight and reference for news stories across a wide range of public interest topics.

  • iFeed Enterprise

    Companies are increasingly aware of the importance of social media in forging corporate reputations as customers debate their experiences online. Social media has fast become a giant clearing house of opinion on products and services and is increasingly the first port of call for a consumer contemplating a purchase. Recent history is littered with examples of how product successes and failures have been decided online – sometimes before the product has even hit the shelves (as in the case of Sony's PS3 gaming console, which was widely judged by bloggers as inferior to Nintendo's Wii long before its Xmas 2006 launch).

    Corporate communications strategies have struggled to adapt to the proliferation of social media given the disparate and varied nature of its content. Online conversations have therefore been missed in their important formative stages when opinions are often set. iFeed Enterprise provides this early-stage access by allowing companies to deploy product-specific searches and to track how blog and consumer comment develops over time. This helps the user determine when a marketing shift or intervention may be timely to correct adverse sentiment proliferating online.

  • iFeed Financial

    Social media is demonstrating an increasing influence on financial market outcomes. Its nodes are alive with market rumour and speculation that can have short-term impact on share prices. More importantly, a smaller sub-set of sites is becoming an authoritative source of information and influence on market-sensitive events and investor perception.

    iFeed Financial embraces this trend by allowing investors, analysts and traders to manage and exploit both event risk (where deals, earnings shortfalls and product defects are flagged by influential bloggers) and brand equity risk by monitoring the incessant debate within social media on product opinion and corporate reputation.

    iFeed Financial offers users an information edge over traditional news delivery systems. The commoditisation of market news and data products in recent years has made financial markets hyper-efficient, eliminating information advantages that could be readily exploited a generation ago. The rapid proliferation of social media marks the advent of a new information age for the industry and its participants, many of whom are beginning to recognise its influence on market outcomes yet remain unfamiliar with its content and means of access.

    iFeed Financial's persistent search 'lobster pots' constantly monitor for market-sensitive events whilst discovering real-time comment on companies' products and services. Used alongside price discovery applications, iFeed Financial offers a comprehensive news gathering mechanism that goes far beyond the source boundaries of today's market-leading market information services, bringing back that elusive information advantage prized by professional investors.

• How iFeed Works

  • User-driven, Real Time Search

    Accessing, and making sense of, the convoluted world of social media is difficult and cumbersome. Existing search engines are largely trained on traditional media and sift these sources in a manner that is not suitable for social media search given the prolific and variable quality of its content. The result is a random, unstructured delivery of content that fails to represent the true balance of content available on a topic.

    iFeed has been designed to overcome these shortcomings, as well as those of competitor products that rely heavily on post-event reporting and consultancy relationships that are both expensive and lack the immediacy of iFeed's content delivery.

    iFeed's vital advantage is three-fold:

    1. User Control iFeed delivers to the user's desktop an easy-to-use interface that lets the user drive the search process and generate real-time results across limitless search terms. iFeed searches take moments to create and continue to work even after the user has logged out. This dramatically reduces the work-flow overhead of the user, who can continually check search results in their own time at the click of a mouse, and deliver these to clients and colleagues through iFeed's clipping and redistribution mechanisms, including a unique Clipstream viewer.
    2. Persistent Search iFeed searches dynamically by laying specific search traps (or lobster pots, as we like to think of them) on the sea-bed of social media, into which relevant content 'crawls' over time. The user sees this process occur over time both numerically and through simple graphs, which may be used to compare visually the share of voice dedicated by social media to a particular company or product versus its competitors over time.
    3. Multi-Filtered Results Behind the scenes, iFeed is constantly scouring social media for new sources via its content crawler. Discovered content is then filtered twice before it is displayed to the user. First, the most relevant content is aggregated in our database, ready to be re-interrogated for relevance by iFeed's search technology (or analysis engine) and dispatched to the user's iFeed interface. Secondly, the user then has the ability to filter these results by time, relevance and source by adjusting buttons and sliders on the iFeed interface (or interaction engine) to ensure the final clutch of content is as relevant as possible.

    

  • Social Media at your Fingertips

    The beauty of iFeed is its ability to draw information from a wide range of sources from traditional media to consumer forums, and even video. By toggling between buttons on the iFeed interface, users can instantaneously switch between content drawn from the following sources:

    1. Recognized and influential blogs Industry sector consultants, analysts and also personal loggers who have gained a reputation and following.
    2. The “long tail” Individual grass-roots loggers who are not yet influential but may become so through comments they make.
    3. Customer forums Common to shopping sites, specialist magazine sites and other web nodes where consumers come together to share their experiences. We are developing tools to not only track comment on customer forums but also provide sentiment analysis of what is said.
    4. User-driven sites Sites whose content is influenced or driven by the aggregated actions and opinions of individuals and allow direct participation. At present, these are predominant in technology-related areas. Examples include news sites (Digg and Slashdot), media content (YouTube, Flickr) and social bookmaking (del.icio.us, Magnolia).
    5. Although this information is initially displayed to the user, iFeed also has a Clipstream viewer that allows users to clip and re-publish web content to clients and colleagues. This is accessed via a URL and appears (with the user's corporate branding, if desired) in a neat viewer window on the clients' or colleagues' desktops. iFeed also offers the ability to annotate and post comments alongside this content to draw particular attention to its relevance.

  • A World of Applications

    The list of uses for iFeed is already extensive. A number of common needs shared by Agency, Media, Enterprise and Financial users immediately stand out:

    1. Event risk tracking Companies have a vested interest in identifying media comment that has a bearing on their business at the earliest opportunity. Social media has already gained a formidable reputation for delivering hard-hitting vocal content to a wide audience, often with profound results. Well-known examples include the revelation of Dell/Sony's exploding laptop battery problems by bloggers; and Kryptonite's expensive bicycle locks that, bloggers revealed, could be opened with Bic pens. The implications of these events can be reputational, legal and market sensitive in nature, creating a common interest in their early identification that spans marketing, corporate management, compliance and investor relations departments alike.
    2. iFeed's persistent search ('lobster pot') function gives the product a valuable edge. This allows the user to deploy an ongoing search that links a company with a specific event (unlisted company +'IPO'; airline +'crash'; product + 'market share') and offers real-time notification.
    3. Competitor analysis iFeed provides a highly cost-effective solution for tracking media comment on a client's competitors, as well as their relative coverage at any point in time. Search terms can be deployed to cover an exhaustive list of competitor products and services. The content results count can be seen at a glance in miniature using embedded sparklines, and can be plotted against each other over time using iFeed's charting function. These give the user an immediate visual impression of how social media coverage 'spikes' over time and how these spikes vary in intensity against those of a client's competitors.
    4. Campaign impact By linking iFeed to a specific media campaign, the user can track and measure its impact on consumers by 'listening in' on dialogues as they ripple across blogs, consumer forums and bulletin boards. At the same time, the share of social media voice captured by a campaign can be graphically represented through data series charts that plot volume of activity over time.
    5. Reputation management Customers actively comment on blogs and customer forums about a company's image, its products and customer service, and are doing so in growing numbers. These opinions reach and influence a wide customer base. An ability to monitor and address these views is now a basic requirement of successful brand management.
    6. New business intelligence Aside from its client-facing role, iFeed is an invaluable tool for preparing for new business pitches. By monitoring blogs and forums, users have access to a vast repository of primary data regarding customer attitudes towards the prodprospect, as well as their market positioning relative to competitors.