What Do You Make of This?

Found another number crunching outfit, SocialNuggets. Seems their thing is combing through the web, social operations in particular including both the heavyweights (Twitter, Facebook) and blogs, XDA probably and hey, maybe even us, or completely different sources depending on what it is they’re after to give their clients actionable information. Their social approach strikes me as both inventive and revealing. Maybe they won’t mind if I snatch a few of their charts in which they demonstrate what sets them apart.

Starting simple, and click these charts to get further details behind them, here’s their Share of Voice data on smartphones last month, which phones are the center of how many discussions relative to each other. You could score high on this with a product or service that’s extraordinarily awesome or awful. Howard Stern would score highly here throughout his career, but so would Glenn Beck:

Getting a little more interesting mathematically in terms of how exactly they figured this out, here’s their Net Perception Score. In contrast to the first, this does not take volume of discussion into consideration, rather what it finds and considers to be positive comments about a particular phone minus the number of negative comments multiplied by a hundred divided by the sum of the positive and negative comments, something like that – whatever, here’s what they came up with for last month:

Now here’s where they get more interesting in producing information that is potentially more actionable, their SocialNuggets Index, the formula behind which is the Net Perception Score multiplied by Share of Voice multiplied by a hundred over overall Net Perception Score times total voice percentage). You know what that means, right? I didn’t, but in English it’s a mixture of how something’s perceived and how many people are perceiving it one way or the other, a combination of the two charts above.

I suppose if you’re trying to get information out of this information to accomplish something that satisfying curiosity neither the top or the second one individually are useful. Otherwise on the Net Perception index your kid’s lemonade which he’s reselling from the grocery store could appear to be a greater contribution to society than windmills. So here’s that chart, the closest thing this company can offer us to the thing you should buy (or blog about in our case) if you want to appear to be hip to the right technology to the greatest number of people you encounter with your phone whipped out on the subway, feeling all badass:

Back to Howard and Glenn, and let’s add a less incendiary man to the mix to try to explain these three indices (that’s the smart way of pluralizing index..) while still remaining kind of politically neutral about this, Brian Williams, I bet, would outperform both Howard and Glenn here but only here as would Sean Hannity. Maybe Jimmy Fallon too, but not Leno. .

Lastly, I’ll leave you Windows Phone people, to avoid calling you something stupid like WinPhonatics, something to feel good about (after I coach you a little), a Share of Voice breakdown by platform in March. Now keep in mind you’re barely over half a percentage into the smartphone market. I’m unsure of how big that blue slice is in terms of a percentage but it’s a whole lot bigger than 0.5% so high five as if this could be used to surmise how interested in or aware of their phone’s platform by comparing the groups of phone owners making up these pie slices below to what we think is their respective share of the market or if you’re thing is to be on the team that people talk about disproportionately, who’s psyched up, whatever you want this to say to you, you crush everyone right here:

Thanks for the material SocialNuggets, I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Now if any of you out there are involved with some organization that’s willing to spend a few bucks in order to find out exactly how people think about something specific to your business, these guys will cook it up and sell it to you. Their sales pitch is right here, basically offering themselves as a shiny powerful truck for your company to offload some of the work you do that involves thinking to their crawlers and custom-fitted formulas. Here’s their feed where I got this stuff, plenty more here, check it out. Assuming they didn’t just make these numbers up, this is impressive, this SocialNuggets outfit and the nuggets as they call them they could cook for you for you to eat up in real time. I’ve got a nugget for the SocialNuggets people, keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll rise fast.

Now as for the HTC Thunderbolt 4G being the most talked about phone, a huge chunk of that chatter could be about its exceptionally horrible battery life (hence the less mighty Net Perception Score). Also Jenna Jameson was spotted with it. I’d give you a picture of that but she seems to have hit the wall I’m afraid. Speaking of which, I could use some realtime social trend indicators on which “actresses” I should be searching for on a lazy Sunday, know what I mean? Something to think about thinking about, SocialNuggets, for another one of your public offerings. That might not be as stupid a suggestion as I admit it sounds.

Doug Simmons