Steve Garrity, Co-Founder & CTO, Hearsay Social

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Thanks everybody for tuning in and for all the great questions. See you on the message boards!

Steve, thank you so much for a great interview and for your time on the chat.

Thanks!

Thanks Steve!

Thanks Sgarrity!! enjoyed the show and chat!

Much fun, Steve - thanks again.

Walmart DOES have a grrrrrrrrrrreat selection of low to mid priced laptops. 

Thanks for joining us today, Steve!

ok, everyone--I gotta run, but thanks for tuning in, I hope it was as useful for you as it was fun for me! Feel free to tweet at me (@stgarrity) if you've got any other questions!

@awilliams a fine tuned AIML bot?

I need to confirm whether Walmart is really accountable for 10% of US GDP / 2% Global... 

Exactly.  But a huge sample might give you some confidence.  @jawallace, I think you'd want to see the sentiment coming from the customer!

Smells like a bot

Yep that's another great example. There's also no real way to analyze sarcasm, either.

@Kim, so would this tweet have something to do with sentiment analysis? @noodlebar Thanks for the feedback & shout-out! We pride ourselves on great pricing & selection and are glad to know our customers see it.

or even "@kim that's sick!". what does "that" mean? is "sick" california-surfer-dude awesome, or gross & disgusting?

She's so preposterous.

Anything to bring up Katy Perry, Kim...

"Love Katy Perry's latest dumb song."  False positive.

At a very simplistic level, jwallace, it's using search terms to see how many people are tweeting good things about a brand/person/event.  I think you need big samples to rule out the things Steve is just describing - missed context, irony, false positives.

@mary certainly for any customer I'd say buy it (when it's ready)...we're still evaluating build-or-buy as a company to add it to our offerings. We don't want to offer something to our customers that we're not completely confident in, though, so we're waiting at this point

Yeah most of the sentiment analysis I've seen has been rather lame.

I agree...it's also a very tough problem with all of the interleaved conversations, missing context (eg. comment threads and @replies), abbreviations/l33tspeak, and links. sentiment analysis is getting decent at long pieces of text though.

or eyes..

sentiment analysis (something new to my ears)

Would you develop your own, buy it elsewhere? is it that difficult to implement?

My own feeling is that sentiment analysis needs to be performed on a very large scale indeed to be valuable.

@Mary WHOA!!

@mary there are certainly a lot of people selling it. :) Most of the people I talk to who have bought it say it's not ready yet...

@Steve: Is "emotional" or sentiment analysis making it into any social analytics yet?

Steve, I'm glad to hear it.  I see some people trying to change what they want to represent just to fit into the latest social mould.

each have its own purpose Nicole!! I once thought tumblr was meaningless or too felt it was exhausting (another platform)

@nicole no, I think it's very important to choose your properties carefully...the only thing worse than not having a presence is having a bad or stale presence!

@kim talking to many of our internal champions at customers, it helps a lot ... you just spend a lot more time focused externally than explaining yourself/getting buy-in internally. But all it takes is a few people to get started...Frank Eliason (the original @ComcastCares) is a great example of someone who took a very non-internally-social culture and made it a huge social media success story

I can't stand companies who aren't nimble on the social. and some social media teams behind brands need retooling.

Thanks @Steve.

Another question for Steve... Do you think brands need to be present on all social platforms now? Google+, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter... it's getting exhausting.

@mary that's hard to say...they're both good at different things. Financial is probably doing better at person-to-person outreach, but retail is certainly leading the way on lead generation & promotions

@Steve: Is it important to be a social business internally to be able to do social outreach well - or doesn't it really matter?

@Steve: Which sector is doing a better job at social -- retail or financial? Overall, I mean.

@kim yep, there are some pretty amusing (embarassing if you're involved, I'm sure) memes around that ... people often complain about the complexity of Facebook's privacy settings in particular, and I know they're working on improving them -- but fundamentally, if you don't want it on the front page of the NYT, you shouldn't put it online. Something can always go wrong!

also did the employee have the twitter handle before joining the organization or after?!! 

@nicole yes, definitely--the more clearly you can set expectations the better (of course you can overdo it and waste a lot of time handling theoretical scenarios, but for important stuff, certainly!)

Steve: something we see time and time again (especially with NYPD officers, for some reason) is people treating Facebook and Twitter as if they were private conversations with their friends, not seeming to understand that they are (more or less) public.  Have you come across this?

@Steve, then that brings up another question... do you think companies should set those kinds of rules up front in their social media policies?

@jwallace we love that article too!

@mary we certainly think so!

@kim yes and no. Can you go on CNN and conduct an interview trashing your employer? Of course you can, free speech being what it is (yay), but they can also fire you for doing that...Twitter is the same way, just more accessible

It sure seems that social engagement is a local game!

@nicole I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt...but I think it depends on the expectations that were set up front. Was the employee's job to gain twitter followers for the company? Or even something like that? or it just happened to occur as a result/unrelated?

Black SEO is everywhere *mumbles*

@mary I think it comes down to disclosure and "order of magnitude"...someone has to share it to get started, but faking too much of it will usually get you caught and backfire. Local reps are a great way to get this going faster and more authentically :)

a w e s o m e question Nicole!!

there's all sorts of tricks on seeding that goes w/o notice! 

Put another way, Steve, do companies run the risk of being "pony" on social sites? And how can they avoid that?

Conduct business - that makes sense, absolutely.  But across enterprises, hard to stop somebody tweeting "Wow, my company really messed up this launch."  Right?

In much the same way that joining a brokerage means you must disclose all of your financial transactions (to prevent inside trading and the like), you also have to disclose (and archive, filter, and review) customer communications

Steve, there's a lawsuit going on right now with someone who left his company and took his Twitter followers with him. Do you think company's have a right to claim ownership over employees' Twitter followers?

I have a question too: When companies "seed" social sites with videos etc, does that make the engagement seem less authentic?

thoroughly enjoying this http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/clara-shihs-hearsay-social-02022012.html 

@Kim no, certainly not. But at least in certain cases (financial services is a great example), they are required to disclose them (and subject them to monitoring) if they conduct business on them

Hi Steve! Thank you again for joining us.

Steve:  I am still struggling with how an enterprise can control what its employees do and say - even about the business - on their own devices or platforms.  Are they contractually bound to offer up their personal social media accounts for monitoring?

Thanks everyone! I'm trying to catch up on the comments, but any burning questions?

I have a hunch Steve may be on line but we do not yet know his handle. And by the way, many thanks, Steve!

Steve will join us here to take questions, so get yours ready.

thank y'all!

Thanks, Steve and Mary.

Thank you Steve and Mary!

Yay! Thank you!

Kim, I think we're unusual for that reason and many, many others...

"Oh, Mandy" was originally "Oh, Brandy."  FYI.

brandyyy you're a fine girl... whattaaa

@Nicole: I think we're unusual though, in that we certainly don't have our own personalities (such as they are) fenced off from the corporate personality.  Harder with a bigger outfit.

I think IE is a bit too engaging to be brandy... brands are densisitized logos

jwallace, IE is a brand, and not to toot our horn, but I think engaging with our social media pages is rewarding because it's us... it's the same us you're engaging with here. It's not the IE logo you're communicating with.

entre-po-neurs.. 

Sore subject.

....

I understand companies can implement policy on their own devices, but if you can tweet or post about the company using your personal device, from your desk, aren't the risks as big?

let's declare what a brand is first :)) IE is a brand.. RIGHT? ;P

do migrant farm workers use email? mebe idk

ty!

Jwallace. You are now famous.

@Jwallace -- which brands have tried to engage you?  How are you engaging them and what are you getting out of it?

@jwallace what do you get out of engaging with brands? Have they modified their product or service due to your feedback? Do you get rewards?

the good ol saying "reach out and touch" AT&T 

Why, jwallace? What are the benefits for you?

bottom line (key word)

ROI: always the important thing.

I totally disagree. I find engaging brands fruitful.

Same, smkinoshita.

sure.. just like the $15 billion facebook valuation was inflated... some months ago. 

I don't know about anyone else, but a lot of the time it's not worth my while to engage a brand.

Steve's right: the worst response to criticism is to try to shut it down or intimidate the person with lawsuits. 

Oh got it, Kim. Right. It doesn't.

Re: streisand effect

I don't think going after a person for a social media liabel is a very good idea at alll

Good point about it not being worth the negative PR.

then engage it. transparency. I hate cover up blunders such as deleting comments (user)

What does it matter whether you're using a device provided by your employer or your own device?

Kim -- yes, about devices. Makes no difference. But I'm confused by the second part of your question.

I do hate Bank Y...

Awilliams, same here.

@Nicole I personally value my data very high, and most incentives have totally and completely failed to seduce me into giving it up so easily.

Well I'm puzzled now.  Being blocked from social media on the work system or device is not the same as being blocked at work - if you have your own device.  And since social platforms are up there in the cloud, what does it matter?

Right, smk, sounds like a non-issue (for employees).

Awilliams, would you if it meant you could get a deal or a freebie?

Company:  "You can't access your personal email from our computers"

Employee:  "That's OK, I've got my smart phone"

ironic that every company in the world can see every detail of my facebook account, yet my employer would need "permission" to do the same :/

How do they deal with mobile devices?

@Nicole I almost sorta interact with The Walking Dead.... that's the closest to any kind of social media engagement. But I don't think I interact with any products really...

I've lived DISCONNECTED in a CONNECTED world.. starting with no sound for weeks. I think I've learnt something.

socialscrooge

That won't stop the employees from screwing things up on their own time.

Thanks for the question, jwallace. I'm taking questions for Mary to ask on air, so please share yours.

@Awilliams I'm stumped although I must have the answer somewhere i my brain. @smkinoshita oh I disagree 

Awilliams, I suppose that's the problem then, isn't it? Have you ever engaged w/a brand Facebook page?

@Jwallace -- I think just about anything can be measured.

@Nicole #engagement

social analytics. how accurate is it and what CANNOT be measured currently?

Honestly as a consumer why would I want to engage with brands on facebook?

What's Walmart doing well w/social?

I have seen a lot of data about how little users are interacting with brands on Facebook. Is it really worth all the effort to be there if it's not influencing purchases?

Walmart is doing amazing on the social. I tweeted re: walmart selection and got mounds of responses. - thx Nicole!! 

Haha. No need for SNAD, jw.

j/j (wish I could delete)

I'm taking craigslist social. Booster Half. We boost, you buy. C2C 

What do you guys want us to ask Steve?

Hi there C5000. Welcome.

Ah, yes that's a good way to lose friends.

Hi

Smkinoshita and Awilliams! The party has started!

Yes let's call people out.

Hello Radio Land

Ping!

Hello Kimbo. Great to see you here.

Hey jwallace. Welcome!

Hello then.

hello Nicole! Nathan!

Say hello when you've arrived, friends!

Hello everyone.

I look forward to this!