Yahoo Answers was always a great platform for QA. It is, by far, the most popular one. We definitely look at it as one of the greatest platforms for social media communication.

And, from today, Yahoo Answers is part of the supported platforms in uberVU. Save a stream and if we find questions or answers meeting your query they will be added to your stream and all the metrics will be part of the analytics in real-time.

And it’s not just the mentions (questions or answers) but also the meta-data you are used to get from uberVU. Things like location detection, language or sentiment are are also part of the package.

We hope you’ll enjoy it.

On February 11, 2012 we had our 3rd hackathon at uberVU, uberVU Hack Days #3. We had 7 great teams build 7 ingenious and witty projects, all in the period of a day. We had fun, we talked, we hacked, we met new people.

With the help of the guys at Robofun (big thanks to Viorel Spinu for teaming up with us and providing the neccesary parts), 3 out of the 7 were DIY hardware projects.

Here are the projects and their presentation.

1) Predicting the Oscars

For me, one of the most intersting projects was the one built by Andrei Olariu who used data collected with uberVU about the 2012 best picture Academy nominees and analyzed the mentions gathered through uberVU from Twitter, Facebook and other sources, then determined what were the unique adjectives that described each of the movies.

The idea, borrowed from Edwin Chen, was based on the supposition that the more unique adjectives a movie has, the more diverse are the conversations around it and, therefore, the more interest it generated. In the authors own words: “[...] I started writing some code to get frequent captions out of tweets, but there were too many noisy expressions that would require some advanced filtering. I decided to stick just to words and finally just to adjectives [...] I sorted the movies by the number of adjectives they attracted. If the movies are ranked based on how many emotions they determine in their viewers, then [...]” the winner would be “The Artist”.

Andrei used Python and the uberVU API to get the data and do his magic on it. The code is freely available on github.

2) Censor me not

Dan Serban and Teodor Pripoaie worked on a bold and interesting project they’ve named CensorMeNot – we called it the Anti Acta tool. In Dan Serban’s own words: “CensorMeNot is a decentralized, censorship-resilient, cooperative service for looking up IP addresses of Internet domains the DNS records of which have been abusively tampered with by the ICANN at the behest of malicious organizations.[...]

CensorMeNot aims to be your mechanism of choice for preemptively storing DNS lookups ahead of time, while your favorite websites are still alive. This information is carefully propagated between participating nodes on the Internet using the principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. [...]

CensorMeNot is written in Ruby on Rails and is currently at the prototype stage (I wouldn’t even call it pre-alpha). It goes without saying that CensorMeNot is open-source, and if you’re in the mood to experiment with it, you can get a copy here. All contributions are welcome.”

3) Webcam events

Cristi Contastntin and Costachi Andrei built a Python and Java client-server app that was able to identify different objects using the webcam and trigger custom events, based on that. They’ve used the OpenCV library to do the image identification.

4) “Type and fight” robot typing game

The name is what I call it, the authors didn’t give it a name. The idea of the game was to have two Magician robots race each other. Each participant would get a phrase and the faster and more accurate you would type it, the faster your robot would go. The 3 person team included Vali Banu, Mihai Paraschiv and Cristian Musat.

5) Gmail subject auto-suggest

The 3 person team in which Alex Topliceanu and Stefan worked built an interesting app that would statistically analyze the text typed in the body of an Gmail email and would give you a suggestion for a subject. They wanted to build the app indepent of any external resources and they’ve wrapped it all in a Google Chrome plugin. Alex started from a previous library he built called text-summarization.

6) Virtual joystick

The first hardware project presented at the hackathon was a virtual joystick for a PC, based on Arduino and an 3 axes accelerometer ADXL335. The idea is to be able to make a glove that was a point and click device. Seeing the real thing is quite impressive!

7) Google Earth airplane simulator controlled via an accelerometer

Another hardware project done at uberVU Hack Days #3 was done by our own Ruxandra Burtica and Cornel Lupulet.
They’ve started from the cool idea of controlling the Google Earth airplane simulator via a glove that incorporated an accelerometer and a bluetooth connection, all put together by an Arduino UNO. They had their ups and downs, but managed at the last minute to make the glove work well enough for our little demo!

All of the projects were very interesting, and even more so if you consider that they were built in just under 8 hours on a Saturday. I certanly enjoyed the hackathon, and we’re always learning from these experiences, so next time we hope it will be even better – we’ll have more teams and we’ll definitely have a lot more fun.

The easiest way to find out when a new hackathon is being organized is to signup on Meetup and we will keep you up to speed on all our events.

Thanks to all who took part and see you next time!

Check out the hackathon’s Youtube channel and see more pictures on our Facebook page.

If you work in marketing, PR or just want to make your business shine in the digital space, we recommend you sign up for Explore, Social Media Explorer‘s signature event, which will be taking place in Dallas-Fort Worth, on February 17, 2012. We’re really excited to be joining the event as part of the sponsors lineup, so drop by  so we can exchange ideas, insights and some great tips to use in this crazy social media world.

What are the topics?

The intensive seminars and workshops that Explore has in stock are designed to help you understand and thoroughly apply digital marketing techniques – from getting ROI out of your social media activities, to incorporating location & mobile marketing into your strategy or integrating social media across your organization.

Who will be talking?

Speakers include Social Media Explorer’s Jason Falls, Copyblogger.com’s Brian Clark, Tom Webster of Edison Research, Aaron Strout from WCG and co-author of Location-Based Marketing for Dummies, Zena Weist of Edelman Digital, Kevin Magee from Expion, Arienne Holland from Raven Tools, mobile marketing expert Tim Hayden of 44Doors, Nichole Kelly from Full Frontal ROI, video marketing expert Giovanni Gallucci, DJ Waldow from Waldow Social, Mike Merrill from ReachLocal.com – with more to be announced.

With these being said, we hope you’ll be joining us in Dallas this Friday for a full day of social media galore! You can register here and also get a discount if you use this code. See you there!

According to uberVU stats, about 32 people share their love for social media every day, while those who publicly break-up with social media saying they hate it amount to 5 or 6 users per day.

While the users who are in love with social media are almost evenly split (47% men & 53% women), the users who share away how much they hate social media are mostly women (61%).

While a quick browsing through the mentions of those declaring their love for shows that people love social media because of the beauty of sharing, some of the most common reasons people give for hating social media are are – the oversharing, the public displays of irrelevance and, most frequently, the fact that they simply hate it (although they’re using social platforms to get the word out)

South Africa ranked as the second geo-location where people share their hate for social media, while Australia and the UK ranked as the second for people addressing their affection towards social media (US users being caught up in a love-hate relationship about the topic).

Another curious finding is that saying you like social media has a 52% RT chance, while saying how much you hate it will only bring up a 20% RT chance.

What are your thoughts?

Do you love, hate or embrace social media as it is?

Today we introduce a small but very important metric to our Analytics section for search streams. We’ll show you how many likes and shares mentions about your search topic get on Facebook. We think this will complement the already existing retweets metric.

Our analytics section has 2 more metrics you should check out

This is important because it will give you some way to asses not just how many mentions you get for a specific topic, but also how viral that topic is.

The new numbers are displayed in the Overview section of your Analytics page. We hope you’ll enjoy this nice new feature.

Related articles

• Predefined reports for Twitter and Facebook (ubervu.com)

The 46th Superbowl was the most talked about sporting event in the history of Twitter. With so many people sharing Superbowl related posts in social media, we ran an interesting experiment trying to understand which ads were the most talked about during the game. We randomly sampled a few million social media posts (not just from Twitter) which we analyzed, removed spam and duplicates and then sampled further. What we were left with was a statistically relevant picture of the ads most – and least – mentioned in social media during the game.

As you can see, car manufacturers were wildly successful in generating conversations around their ads, while CPG brands were way less popular.

We use social data to understand the evolution of a brand in the online space, both in terms of pure volume and intangible KPIs like reputation or customer satisfaction. This means taking a step back and analysing what already happened to come up with relevant strategies.

But can real-time social analytics also predict future results? We’ve decided to use a very important event in the entertainment industry – the Super Bowl -  to show how social intelligence can help you take informed decisions and predict risks, based on the online buzz.

By monitoring tons of data from all over the social web, we were able to understand how social coverage and people’s preferences can provide early clues for Sunday’s result. We believe that metrics like sentiment and mentions evolution can clearly show how supportive fans are of a team, who’s the most popular quarterback and who has the most invested advocates. These are powerful early indicators of the overall performance in social media. Whether they actually coincide with the winner of the championship game, we still have to wait and see.

Check out the infographic below and let us know if you think we’re right. (Click here for a larger view)

uberVU is used daily by companies all over the world to track social conversations happening around their name. While this can solve real business issues, the analytics can also be used to come up with some interesting comparisons between competitors. I decided to illustrate this with some fun, down-to-earth example – and what’s better than music? :)

By taking into account actionable insights like the share of voice on social networks, sentiment breakdown or estimated views, I measured which of the best minimal DJs out there has the biggest social impact. Check out the infographic to see what result I came up with using the data gathered through uberVU. (click on the image for full size)

On the 11th of February we’re going to have our 3rd edition of the Hack Days, a hackathon style event which has the purpose to bring together tech people, from programmers to designers and product guys to hack together on cool ideas and have fun.

We are putting a lot of effort to make it fun and interesting. And a big part of the cool stuff is going to be provided by the Robofun team and Viorel Spinu, who generously offered to provide the necessary hardware for cool DIY hardware style projects. Besides the hardware they are going to be there with their extensive know-how an ingenuity so we can hack together amazing things.

Check out a few of Viorel’s ideas and here is one of their spectacular projects:

There are going to be a bunch of us working on cool software hacks too. Our uberVU team is going to work on a way to predict the winners of this years Oscars by using data from social media.

Any project or idea, be it small or large, is welcome. The theme of this hackathon is making life easier, so think of an idea and come over and show us what you can do.

All you need to do is sign-up on meetup and, if you want to work with the Robofun guys tell Viorel at contact [at] robofun [dot] ro what you have in mind to make sure you’ll have anything you need.

See you there!

When: February 11 (Saturday)

Where: It will take place at the uberVU HQ which is right across from the Dinamo Stadium (see meetup event for more details).

What: The theme will be: Making life easier. We’ll work on ingenious, fun and witty hacks that can make our daily life easier. On the meetup page there are a few of the ideas we’re going to work on.

What you need to do: You need to bring your laptop and think of or pick an idea you will hack at. And that’s it! We work in teams on 2-3 people, it’s more fun this way and you can get more done, so bring your friends or make new friends at the event and convince them that your idea is worth hacking at. Everything else (food & drinks) is provided by us.

(or why you need a monitoring tool to get the most out of your social media efforts) 

With over 750 Million Facebook users and 200 Million Twitter users, social media is already established as the hottest new marketing channel around. That’s part of the reason one of the most pressing tasks for social media community managers is getting to some objectives that concern raising the number of followers or fans for their brand profiles rather than increasing the overall engagement or getting to the core target of the brand they’re representing. That’s also desirable, of course, but the target is to usually get liked by more people than those liking your competitors, right? So should you focus only on that? Well, not quite.

Focusing just on increasing the number of likes and follows means settling for quantity rather quality, and, while that’s pretty much a good objective to have in mind, you can’t really have one without the other. Without engagement, the thousands of fans will only like your updates (no shares, no comments) and the followers you spent lots of effort on getting will soon start to unfollow you if you don’t act social enough through replies and interesting content. That also means no proactive reputation management or lead generation and no real market insights for you to dig in and upgrade your products.

Of course, if you are a national brand like Coca Cola, quantity might be enough to get conversations about you rolling and generate awareness (thus substituting some of the advertising costs), but if you’re up&coming or a runner up in a niche category, then you should bet on engagement to get noticed fast. Mixing them both, like RedBull does on Twitter, is a good example of engagement-oriented social media efforts.

While handling social media is easy for everyone to do nowadays and getting people to like you can easily be solved through a sweepstakes for example, engaging your users in brand conversations takes a lot more effort and resources. This is the main reason some social media managers overlook the existence or need of social media monitoring tools such as uberVU for handling the social presence of brands. Stepping up your game in social media also means having a monitoring tool you can rely on. That’s where uberVU comes in :)

From Monitoring to Engagement

What monitoring tools like uberVU do more than the fans/follower counter visible on social media profiles is tracking down conversations, mentions and potential topics of interest for your brand to start conversations around, through all the web, and providing useful statistics and analytics for all the mentions and keywords you track.

 That can easily be translated in lead generation, by engaging with potential clients, or handling customer support right from the uberVU platform and assigning tasks to other colleagues that can help people, and even reputation management and business intelligence, by also tracking down your competitors’ mentions and using the insights you get out of that for your advantage. For a good example in leads generation there are clients in the Automotive who monitor social media conversations about cars and then convert the the respondents to have a test drive.

The benefits of having a reliable monitoring tool can transfer to most of your company’s departments, from sales to support to HR or marketing. Understanding in real time what people are talking about related to the market you’re targeting is invaluable and that’s what makes the difference between the number of social media users following you and the ones that can really help your company grow through social media.

As 2012 is considered to be the year of social business, and social business means the creation of shared value, monitoring engagement is more important than ever.