GoChime Blog

At GoChime, we’re helping brands be better participants in social media. Our goal is to help brands deliver meaningful engagement with consumers in social media, but how is that done exactly? It’s all based on the millions of consumers who publicly express intent in social media every day.

GoChime is designed to listen to what people are publicly saying in social media and find opportunities in those conversations for brands to add value. Those opportunities come about when people express “intent”.

Expressions of intent are conversations, posts, and comments that communicate a person’s unique needs, feelings, ownership, activity, location, purchase consideration, etc. It’s the key to the success of our platform and our clients.

GoChime’s intelligent listening system is calibrated to find and match intent across five key categories: 
Figure A: The five types of intent that we track in social.

Our system processes the hundreds of millions of messages people like you are posting in social media every day to find the millions of expressions that contain intent. You may be reading to see what your friends are up to or what’s new in the world at this very moment, but GoChime consumes social a little differently.

Here’s a status update you might’ve seen in your Twitter feed today that expresses intent:

Figure B: Just a regular everyday tweet.

This tweet probably isn’t very valuable to you or most of this users’ followers. It’s just a person talking about the bad experience they just had. But for GoChime and the brands we work with, this is an intent jackpot.

Let’s break down the anatomy of this intent expression: 
Figure C: Anatomy of an a consumer’s expression of intent in social media.

We know a lot about this person. They own a dog. They take it for walks and visit the dog park. He’s in the market for a new dog leash, and presently he could use some empathy to sooth his frustration.

It’s this profile of a consumer that allows the brands we work with to intelligently engage this person in social media by tweeting to them or targeting hyper-relevant Facebook ads to them in real-time. In this case, we would probably match this consumer to one of our clients focused on pet supplies or pet care.

Perhaps we’re working with a brand that’s trying to promote a new line of doggie accessories like leashes and collars, or its a brand that’s promoting its doggie gyms/daycare. Our system would automatically match that consumer to the brand’s campaign in real time. The consumer would see an ad on Facebook for discounts on dog accessories within moments of having complained about his dog’s collar - or the brand could directly engage that consumer 1-to-1 to empathize and help soothe their frustration.

We see this as the future of advertising, and Jeffery Rayport of Harvard Business Review seems to agree with us on that in his latest piece Advertising’s New Medium: The Human Experience.

Curious to learn more about how GoChime could make your social media advertising more efficient and effective? Drop us a line at biz@gochime.com - we’d love to chat!

We listened to people talking about their bodies in social media to find out what they’re thinking, feeling, and doing with what their mama gave them.

We’ve summed out our observations in this infographic for your viewing pleasure. Click here or “read more” below to view the full-size version.

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In our business we come across a lot of interesting data points about what people are talking about social media. Data that make us think, laugh, or wonder. Starting this week, our plan is to begin sharing some of those interesting stories with you on a regular basis.

For instance, we were recently working on a campaign for which we needed to identify people expressing ownership in the context of family and relationships in social media. That is, people talking about their own mother, father, sister, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, grandma, uncle, and so on. 

Our Intent Mining Dashboard tracks the relative volume of mentions for each member of the family or relationship, so we could quickly see the breakdown as we worked. The engine behind it is able to determine the difference between people just mentioning the word “mom” and people talking about their own mom, so that makes this pretty interesting.

Overall, we’ve observed that men are more frequently mentioned in conversations about significant others (Husbands/Boyfriends) while women are much more frequently the subject of conversations about family (parents/grandparents).

We think its appropriate to see Mom top the list of most frequently discussed members of your family in social media. People are talking about the Mom in social media more than any other member of their family including Dad, husband, wife, girlfriend, and boyfriend. Dad took second place (same was the case for Grandpa versus Grandma).

But, the twist for us was in Mom’s margin of victory over Dad. People talk about their Mom in social media almost three times as much as Dad.

Point: Moms (and Grandmas)

So, Mom definitely wins that one, but let’s take a look at who she and Dad talk about the most when it comes to their kids: Sons or Daughters. This one is a little bit of a closer call, but the boys still win this round. Sons are 54% more likely to be discussed than Daughters.

Point: Sons.

However, if we take a look at how much the siblings are discussing each, Brothers and Sisters, we find that they actually discuss each other equally. The difference in conversation volume was so minimal that we’ll call it a draw between Brothers and Sisters.

Tie: Brothers & Sisters

Looking to husbands and wives, it’s very close. Husbands are talked about more frequently than Wives in social media. The margin of difference isn’t as great as with Moms and Dads though. Husbands are only 0.2 times as likely to be discussed as Wives.

Point: Husbands.

We see lots of conversation in social media about dating, so we wanted to see who’s dominating the mentions in social media. It turned out to be no contest: boyfriends are discussed 2.6 times more frequently than girlfriends.

Point: Boyfriends

Looks like girls and guys with a boyfriend are much more eager to openly discuss their relationships in public – but that’s not much of a shocker, is it? Social Media is often a very accurate (and measurable) mirror of our culture.

That’s part of why we love what we do. We learn so much about ourselves by studying how people express intent, ownership, and interests in social media. And now, we’re excited to start sharing more of our learnings with you.

This round was an analysis based purely on volume extracted right off the top of our usual campaign creation process. We’re actually able to go much deeper into these conversations to mine conversations for deeper insights. If we took this a layer deeper, we’d want to see what’s driving the conversation for each family member. The overwhelming volume of people talking about their Moms could simply be driven by angsty teens complaining. Suddenly, we would have another story on our hands.

Get in touch with us if you want to learn more. We use intent-based data processed by our Intent Mining Engine to help brands target likely customers with their marketing and promotions instead of just targeting broad segments of consumers. The results have blown our clients away; let us do the same for you.

Click the picture to view the d3.js global represention

The globe represents the number of people in various cities who tweeted “my first tweet” in the the month of May.
The scale on the side breaks up the “Tweet Count” per city. When you scroll over a colored circle, you can see the city name and count. 
Most importantly, have fun browsing around!

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According to recent Twitter stats by MediaBistro, there are over 500 million Twitter accounts, 1 million of which are created globally every single day.  One of the most daunting tasks of creating a Twitter account is ‘tweeting’ your first tweet. Why is this task inherently daunting? Because at the launch of your first tweet, you have joined a global conversation. 

Here at GoChime, we look for common conversation themes on Twitter, to allow our chimers to disperse offers and solutions to the people who are asking for them. One common conversation theme that we could not ignore was the plethora of tweets that include the words: ‘my first tweet’, a tag line undeniably tweeted during a new user’s first tweet.

Do you remember your first tweet? Although it may not be the most original tagline, including these three little words, is both exciting and unintentionally unifying. You might ask, how are they unifying? Well, in the month of May, about 70,000 people tweeted those very words. Unfortunately, our search for these terms was not generated in different languages (anyone know how to say ‘my first tweet’ in Spanish, German, etc.— feel free to comment below so we can adjust these stats!), so the actual number of tweets in this conversation would be much larger. 

London, by far, had the most ‘my first tweet’ tweets, followed by Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Not too far behind was Singapore, Manchester and Sydney. As you can see, the majority of these cities are English speaking countries, due to our language skill set, but some exceptions do apply. For example, scroll over to Depok, Indonesia, Abuja, Nigeria or Toyko, Japan. Have fun delving into the map and seeing a d3.js visualization of a sliver of the global twitter conversations wrapped around these pivotal three little words.

We recently had an article in Fast Company that generated a lot of interest among potential Chimers. When I asked one of them what it was about GoChime that they found interesting, and why they wanted to be a chimer, I got an exciting response.  I’ve posted it here with permission because it really fits in with our vision as a company.  The bolded section really stood out to me.  Thank you Andrea!

My name is Andrea Gomez, aka @FashionLadder. I must say, I am surprised I received a tweet back from you. I normally feel like I don’t get that many responses to my questions/inquiries. You have already proven to me that your startup is doing what it says it is and truly interacting on a personal level. I am very impressed. Now, to answer your question, why do I want to be a Chimer? Well, I find your startup fascinating and as an avid online social media user I was instantly attracted to what you had to offer. Encouraging brand loyalty, professionalism and engagement on a personal level are all things that I am not only interested in but passionate about. I feel like I am constantly asking questions or declaring that I want/need something on the web and hearing no feedback in return. You’re main page quote “You should never have to ask twice.” is exactly how I feel about the web. Why is it so difficult to find answers? who is really helping me? those are things I constantly question and if being a Chimer is the solution and can help others find answers then that is exactly what I want to do. Let me know what you think and if you have any other questions, you’re company seems really cool and I would love to keep the conversation going.

You know what’s awesome? Little red and green lights. Little red and green lights that tell you what parts of your software are broken and what parts are good as gold. 

People from Java and .NET backgrounds know a lot about mocking frameworks and Dependency Injection, which is a means of constructing your objects so that any outside resources they use are provided to them in a way so that they can be mocked and your object’s code can be tested in isolation. The thing about dependency injection is that it’s a pattern that appears to be antithetical to common and recommended design of Node apps and libraries. 

So what does Dependency Injection mean, in practice? A piece of code like the following is difficult to unit test because there’s a big giant chunk of functionality included in it which we can’t ignore. They have to be tested together. 

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Heroku is a great platform for developing and deploying Rails apps. Since their cedar stack arrived, we’ve been able to deploy other platforms as well. At GoChime, we’ve been playing with node on Heroku for a while. One problem with Heroku’s setup is their default version of Node is only 0.4.7 - far behind the curve in Node years. Luckily, we can do something about that. 

Giant caveat: Heroku has a max request time of 30 seconds…which means websockets just don’t work. If you want to play with websockets and socket.io, Heroku is not what you want to play with. But, if you’re familiar with Heroku and want to try out Node, read on for info about how to play with the latest bits. 

A little background on running Node on Heroku’s cedar stack: 

Heroku is built on git. Creating a Heroku app via their command line tools is essentially just adding a new remote to your local git repository. Their remote repo has post commit hooks that trigger a build process which goes out, provisions a chromed virtual machine, clones your repo, and runs a special set of code called a BuildPack. The BuildPack has all the smarts about how to deploy your environment. Running a node app? The Node BuildPack installs node and uses npm to install your app’s dependencies. 

Heroku relies on your project’s package.json file to get everything moving. If Cedar sees you have a package.json file, it assumes you’re running a Node app. As a result, it selects the proper Node BuildPack - the default one, unless you’ve specified your own - and does its work, creating and loading up your application’s environment. The standard Heroku Node.js BuildPack installs Node version 0.4.7. …which is f()cking old as hell. Lucky for us, we can specify a new buildpack and coerce Heroku into using a version of our specification by setting a BUILDPACK config variable. Here’s how we set ours, after we’ve already created our app:

“`

heroku config:add BUILDPACK=http://github.com/mateodelnorte/nodejs-buildpack.git

“`

Assuming you’ve started your app, the above should set the buildpack, restart your app, and send you on your way with Node 0.6.9.

If you’ve set up your Node app using git and created a heroku app on the cedar stack, you can get up and running with whatever version you want, allowing you to stay up to date and still get super-easy deploys and everything Heroku is great for. 

Feel free to play around with the custom build pack I’ve forked here: X

And use these instructions to get a Node app up and running on Heroku if you’re never used it before: https://github.com/mateodelnorte/SeattleNodejs.SimpleServerWHerokuDeploy

I was in northwest North Dakota recently and got to witness it’s “great oil rush“ first hand.  People are coming from all over the country to work there.  Everyone drives a brand new F-350 truck, roughnecks (hard manual labor) are getting paid $70k+ a year, and millionaires are being born overnight.

We’ve known about the oil reserves in North Dakota for a long time.  We just couldn’t get to them effectively because technology and market circumstances wouldn’t allow it.  

People feel the same way about social advertising.  Everyone knows that social is a huge reserve of potential customers.  Startups have been throwing shit against the wall trying to figure out how to reach these customers in a direct and reliable manner.  By responding directly to expressions of intent across social in a way that scales, GoChime has broken into this channel.  

Brands, we let you reach a new mass of people expressing intent for your products/services across social.  Welcome to the new reserve of potential customers!  

So I’m sitting here at a bar (Eddie Teach’s - order the oysters) on a small island off the forgotten coast of Florida just staring at the walls. On these walls are hundreds, if not thousands, of signatures, stories, quotes, and more written by the myriad of coming and going patrons. Most of whom were probably drunk at the time of inscription.  And I can’t get enough. I’m looking at these walls like I used to look at Where’s Waldo books - finding gems left and right. Mitchell Maxey is too old to be picked on. Deborah and Matt were just married on 3-10-2012. Some guy etched into the wall (and my memory) “Iraq is like your first wife. Easier to get into than to get away from.” Humor, flag plantings, and general statements of existence abound.

I can’t help but to think how this applies directly to what we’re building  at GoChime. A place for people to impress upon others their recommendation for a product or service they love. This wall (pictured above) is a lot like Twitter. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Twitter is a lot like this wall which is a stronger statement because it reveals the depth with which it has tapped into our existing social behavior.

We often talk internally about how individuals are brands. Every single one of us is a living, breathing brand. We wear certain clothes,  we cheer for certain teams, we watch certain shows. In short, we love what we love. And we aren’t afraid to share that passion to friends and strangers alike, both online across sites like Twitter as well as in person. We’re brand mashups and there’s not a single one of us that is the same as another.

GoChime’s raison d’être is to provide a streamlined way for people to share their love, satisfaction, & amazement about anything to the people that can benefit from that share the most. That share is tailored, timely, and most importantly it’s real. Our early results indicate that it works, too. Chimers are receiving thank you’s and other positive responses at a rate higher than most other platforms’ click through rates.  Consumers are getting what they want exactly when they want it simply because we’re listening.

Our goal is to give our users the tools they need to affect positive change in one person’s purchasing decision by sharing their passion. We’re a young startup but our team and our technology is growing. We’ll be opening up to more brands and Chimers very soon. We hope you stop by to give GoChime a whirl.

For the first time in history, conversations are public. People aren’t just talking to their friends over the phone or at coffee shops, they are conversing through tweets and status updates across different social platforms.

To the surprise of many, conversations on these platforms are usually public. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram are public by default. Facebook is continually pushing to be more public. In general, the social web seems to be on an endless march towards transparency and openness.  

So why is this important? Who cares if conversations are public?   

We believe it’s important because you can learn A LOT about someone by listening to the things they say. If you were to sit down and listen to someone talk for 20 minutes, you could easily learn what they do, what their hobbies are, and where they live.  

People are talking about these things (and MUCH more) online and this information is available to almost anyone.  

For example, a quick search on Twitter can show you: 

What music people are listening to:

What people are eating:

Even who is going through a break up:

By listening to what someone says you really get a window into their personality.  In an increasingly personalized web, it’s important for businesses to understand this if they want to reach the right customers.

Once glorified recommendation engines like Netflix and Amazon are falling short because they fail to understand customers on a personal level. The traditional advertisement delivery model has always been to subject customers to unwanted advertisements in exchange for the free use of a service or platform.   

We believe that there is a better way!! By listening to what people are saying publicly online and really getting to know people, you can give people what they really need when they really need it, based on who they really are. That is what we do at GoChime.   

We have early results that show that this better world is really attainable.  Our social advertising campaigns are often upwards of 40 times more effective than traditional online advertising and targeting. The reason we’re seeing such incredibly effective results is because we’re no longer simply throwing advertisements in people’s faces and hoping they bite. We’re listening for them to tell us what they want, and giving it to them when they do. We actually get a substantially high rate of thank you replies to our promotional messages. When was the last time you thanked an advertisement?

Delivering exactly what someone wants exactly when they need it is a very powerful concept. This is the future we are building.