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Archive for May, 2009

Vanno’s Superheroes: Elite Influencers

Published by Debd on May 15, 2009 in User Spotlight. 0 Comments

Meet my friends.

Our screen names make us sound like a gang of comic book figures, a League of Cyber Superheroes in a virtual Hall of Justice — names like FlyFisherGirl, mulgi, doranka, pinkuff, shaunsayers, kjripp, joflynn, VicinSea, Cheesehead. Together we are the Vanno Elite Influencers, and actually, cyber superheroes is not too far off the mark.

What we have in common as do-gooders is the power to change the world, one opinion at a time. Each time we post a story, share a bit of news, make a comment or even just vote about something going on in the commercial world, we can alter public opinion.

We’re sort of like a modern-day version of the Nielsen family, but instead of representing the way the world rates TV, we represent the way the world of consumers looks at businesses. And let’s face it, businesses bank on their public image — enough so to do the right thing, if it means it will boost their reputation.

VicinSea,  for example, uses her superpower to fight for the environment. She battled Monsanto, leader of the GMO empire, for their proposal to use Agent Orange, and Chevron for their phony news reports about the disaster in Ecuador. She also praised the green efforts of a soap company that reuses bottles, and Dell Computers for not exporting its hardware waste.

Our savvy consumer, FlyFisherGirl,  forewarned friends about wrongful finance charges by Chase, or the way executives are laying off workers in small waves to avoid the bad press caused by massive firings. She also spread the good news about WalMart worker bonuses and Fedex giving away free résumés, and let us know where to get a good cheap girdle and some free shoes.

Doranka’s  bio says he is interested in how business can make the world a better place, and he is doing just that at Vanno, by encouraging better business practices like supermarkets extending labor contracts  during this tough economy. Mulgi is keeping it green with stories like Disney planting trees or the decline of plastic bags.

StevenLowell works in the media industry, doing voice-overs, and adds his voice to the debates on Vanno. He has an insider’s perspective on commercials like the BK spots featuring square butts and Mexican wrestlers. Pinkuff shares his e-expertise with submissions and tech talk about IBM, Kindle/Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Kjripp is keeping it real with stories like the DQ “sweet deals” that aren’t, or the killing of true stories and the writing of fake reviews. Joflynn is not afraid to stand up to Big Brother, and let the markets do their thing : “As long as it’s not a government regulation, I’m all for it” he wrote of commercial nutritional standards, and echoed in comments about prescription drugs, clean energy legislation and bailout bucks.

There are others in our ranks: skunkworks416, robbob, mattbennett, RoyC, dlhm, worlfram, push123, markw1, jkj, phils, GBS, Steven, glee, christhm, jcolman, tomh, jon, denny, descon, annette, truckeetrapper, and each of us contributes our own special perspective and influences the rest of the network in our own unique way.

We are, literally, trendsetters — Vanno uses our voices and our votes to create the Vanno Company Intelligence, a trending tool that charts the way consumers perceive corporations. The longer we use Vanno, and the louder we get, the better businesses will become as they have the opportunity to listen in. Little by little, we can make a difference.

You don’t have to be a superhero to change the world. But it helps.

 

Measuring Twitter’s reputation

Published by nickd on May 10, 2009 in Company_Insights and Vanno_News_and_Views. 1 Comment

 

Twitter has announced – to much fanfare and discussion - that it wants to build a reputation ranking system for its users in order to bring more credibility to its trend and search tools.    In fact, Twitter trending has been one of the hottest topics on – Twitter.   Having thought a lot about how to measure reputation and extract trends from social media, we  wondered how Twitter planned to do this given their terse, unstructured activity streams.   

Issues of users gaming the system aside (which we’ll address in a later post), 140 characters, no tweet categorization other than voluntary hashtags, and no community feedback (e.g. voting) on tweets doesn’t leave much to work with.    To add a trustworthy reputation ranking system to the existing service, Twitter will likely have to introduce more structure and categorization in tweets.   This will force users to work harder, and will almost certainly impact the fast, free-form ethos that now characterizes Twitter.     Ironically, one of the main things that drove Twitter’s phenomenal growth – input simplicity - may be the biggest impediment to making searches and trend analyses of tweets trustworthy.

What exactly do we mean by “more structure and categorization” of user input?   Well, what better way to explain it than to look at how Vanno determines the reputation of Twitter the company?   To be clear, we’re analyzing the activity stream around a company to measure the reputation of a company, but the process is the same for analyzing the activity stream of a user to measure the reputation of the user. Continue reading ‘Measuring Twitter’s reputation’

Company Intelligence powered by the Vanno Community

Published by nickd on May 4, 2009 in Vanno Updates. 0 Comments

Remember that old Paul Simon song that goes something like:  …”When numbers get serious, you see their shape everywhere… “   We couldn’t find a better explanation anywhere of what Vanno is about.    Recall, for example, the online chatter about Kellogg, peanut butter, bongs and Pop-Tarts on the Web and in the blogosphere?   But it took numbers - ranks dropping from 9 to 16 to 32… – on a graph to crystallize what was going on in the minds of consumers and the media.    That now famous graph got a lot of heat for it’s cartoon-like form, but it’s substance was clear and effective.

Well, we’ve been working on our graphics skills, collecting and processing stories, votes and comments from our community and are now ready to make all our trending data available to the general public.   We call it Vanno Company Intelligence.    It includes amazing features like real-time reputation trend graphs for each of the 6000+ companies in our database, with interactive links to all the underlying stories, the ability to see the different aspects of reputation contribute to overall reputation and a tool to compare trends for multiple companies.   Check out the details here.

We’re offering Vanno Company Intelligence on a subscription basis.   The cost?    Well, if you are an active Elite Influencer in the Vanno community, you’ve already earned your subscription.   After all, without our community, we’d have no scores, no ranks and no trends.    But if you don’t have the time or inclination to participate in the community, we’re offering the service on a “pay what you think it’s worth” basis.     Seriously.    It’s not a gimmick, but an approach that’s based on an economic theory called “participative pricing” that is being used in online music (think Radiohead), restaurants and theaters.    And we think it’s particularly applicable in our case, partly because we’re new kids on the block, and partly because the value of insights gleaned from social news and social media is clearly different for different people.    So we’ll watch and learn, and in the meantime you can be sure you’re getting your money’s worth, because you’re setting the price.

And to be very clear - registered users will continue to have free access to the entire Company Reputation Index, best and worst company reputation lists, membership in the Vanno community, the ability to follow specific companies and users, ReputationCheck widgets and email alerts.

So we invite you to have a look.  Let us know what you like and don’t like, and what we can do better.