We found in our archives an Internet Addiction Test .

SAMEPOINT RANKS AMERICA’S MOST SOCIAL MAYORS; SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM TOPS THE LIST

Samepoint, LLC today revealed the results to its study on the most socially active mayors in the country, naming San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom as the country’s number one online connected mayor. Samepoint analyzed fans and followers across Facebook and Twitter, as well as overall social mentions and their associated sentiment on blogs and other forms of social media to derive at its ranking.

Following is a breakdown of the top 10 most social mayors, their Twitter alias, and Facebook Fan count:

Samepoint’s real-time social media monitoring and metrics platform indexes tens-of-millions of social media sources, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Digg, blogs, message boards, review sites, podcasts and much more. The company also offers an API to provide companies with access to a treasure trove of archived and real-time social media data.

According to Kwasi Fraser, Samepoint COO, “As politicians begin to leverage social networking and social media technologies to engage supporters, those who succeed today on a local level very well might be tomorrow’s national leaders.”

“Samepoint actively tracks political debates that are taking place across the social web and works with public figures by providing research to help them know where their constituents stand on the important issues of the day,” he added.

For a complete copy of Samepoint’s top socially connected mayors report, please contact learn@samepoint.com.

Samepoint, Inc. searches the deep social web to discover what people are talking about. The company is the leading online reputation management search site. Samepoint’s proprietary social media mining, monitoring and metrics platform tracks online buzz, aggregates like-minded opinions, uncovers trends, determines attitudes, identifies influencers, spots threats and brings interactive advertising-like measurements to the new conversational marketing paradigm. The company offers a full range of data services to organizations looking to tap into online conversation marketing.

By Kwasi Fraser

Last stop on the WO&D trail?  No way it’s truly the first stop in a town with much avail

It’s where green open spaces meet steel and concrete faces 

Yes a bit of yesterday meeting with today, but not in a consuming way

A 200 year old farm you say, with a new grocery store just along the way

Once the capital of orchard grass seed, for packing munitions and in unpacking many livestock to feed

With that old orchard grass seed mill on a hill, now a restaurant called Magnolia’s at the Mill

Still standing a turn of century hardware store with merchandise delightful to hold, just if you should break it consider it sold

Grounds where Buffalo Soldiers once marched in celebration, all in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation

A ball field for little leaguers with Babe’s name, all playing the games with heart and passion just the same

A majestic park and stream with a theatre powered by a solar roof, all showing the promise of  green energy in full proof

It’s where vineyards new and old fill the landscape, yet making allowance for new business wallscapes

So at the first stop of the WO&D trail on a hill at a mill, it all comes together in the town of Purcellville

 By Kwasi Fraser

          Well, it seems that 2009 is no different from 2008 and the other years prior, meaning another hike in my property taxes to fund our school system.  Even with these hikes schools are still faced with significant shortfalls, just look at some of the real time comments posted on Samepoint at http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=School+Budget. 

So, I live in a relatively small town called Purcellville, it’s in Loudoun County Virginia.  It’s a great town rarely, in this days and age, would you find a major supermarket within few blocks of a working farm that is over 200 years old.  Well, we have that in Purcellville.  I’ll write more about my little town and that great farm another time let’s go back to the matter at hand, funding our schools. 

It seems each year our taxes increase to support the budgetary obligations of the school system, and even with these increases many schools are still forced to make cuts in certain school programs and even in academic staff.  Some districts have eliminated high school sports due to budget cuts. Frankly, I believe the current method of funding the school system has run its course and it is high time for another approach.  Don’t get me wrong; budget cuts are necessary at times. However, when there are financially viable alternatives we need to at least consider and assess them. One such alternative is to monetize certain assets of the schools to create revenue stream(s) to fund our schools.

The approach that I’m proposing is one that I have written about several months ago in my local newspaper.  This approach calls for schools to partner with major corporations that have large advertisement budgets such as Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Time Warner and others.  Proctor & Gamble’s ad spend from January to September 2008 was $2.3 billion.  The D.C. schools’ budget gap of $40 million is less than 2% of Proctor & Gamble 2008 ad spend.  Many schools in my district have cut field trips that could have been easily sponsored for several years by a company like Proctor and Gamble in return for free publicity in the press and on T Shirts given to students during a sponsored field trip.  That’s a topic for another blog, think www.FieldTripSponsor.com, but I digress.

The schools across this nation have many highly visible assets that are advertisers’ dream.  As a taxpayer I am also an investor in the school system, as such, in addition to a quality education I’ll like to see a decent Return on Assets my tax dollars have placed into the school’s daily operation. The schools’ assets range from buses and buildings, to rooms and fields that are viewed by a rather captive audience each school day and at times on weekends.  Sure we can apply my proposal to the majority of these assets but let’s focus on the school buses for this writing.

The school buses are the most visible representation of the school, they are seen during on and off hours by thousands of eyes. Such intense visibility is an advertiser’s dream. Given this, the School Boards across this country need to develop a strategy to lease ad space on all school owned vehicles to generate ad revenues. I know there will be concerns around what items to advertise on the school buses, and the overall policing of the ad placement process.  But in these dire financial times we need to revisit this and work out ways for it to be effectively implemented.

This nation has a multi-billion dollar advertising industry and our school system has the vehicles that will drive in revenues for the advertisers and our schools.  I agree that placement of certain ads like junk food, for example, should be prohibited because it plays into the growing problem of obesity among our youth.  However, there are thousands of other beneficial products and services that can be advertised. For example, a company in Hanover, MD cleared off a part on their fleet of truck to place ads for Xerox, a company that produces office equipment for schools and our homes.  Again, in these difficult times we need to seek out opportunities and creative solutions for the financial challenges we face.  Budget cuts are not always the answer, let’s make use of our free market system, and in so doing let us not only teach capitalism but practice it, starting with our schools.

Well, while the feud between Mayor Cory Booker and Conan O’Brien was going on, Mayor Booker was still in the business of working for the city of Newark and getting things done.  MrSilver, the alias of one of the founding members of the social media search engine and analytics company, Samepoint (www.Samepoint.com), can attest to that. 

MrSilver owns a mixed used building in the City of Newark and has witnessed a significant spike in the water charges over the last two months, amounting to over an 1100% increase.  This increase was in spite of the fact that one of the apartments was vacant during this period and two of the commercial tenants occupy the building for at most 4 days per week.  After making several failed attempts to contact the City of Newark Water department, MrSilver decided to take his request for resolution to the social web. 

On Tuesday October 6th 2009, MrSilver posted the following Tweet at the Mayor of Newark “@CoryBooker I need your help, our water bill increased by over 1120% over the past 4 months. No one is returning my calls to resolve this.”  Within minutes the Mayor of Newark responded to MrSilver with “Please DM me your phone # & I’ll call 2nite. RT @mrsilver I need your help, our water bill increased by over 1120% over the past 4 months.”  MrSilver then shared his information with the Mayor and they both spoke on the morning of Wednesday October 7th, 2009. 

Following the conversation the Mayor’s staff escalated the issue and was able to coordinate and schedule an investigation with the City of Newark Water Department.  MrSilver expressed his gratitude to the mayor and his staff for the quick call to action, and remains hopeful that the issue will come to a speedy resolution.  The exchange, along with updates, between Mayor Cory Booker and MrSilver can be tracked via the below links:

http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=Water+Bill+Increased

http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=MrSilver

The social web continues to enable individuals, business leaders, and government officials to freely exchange thoughts, ideas, and opinions on a multitude of topics. I term it the “Voice of Humanity Online.” The comments and user generated content within the social web sphere range from socio- economic issues to discussions about products, services, and brands.

A single social media comment or user generated content that is well placed can turn viral and be a detriment or the ultimate praise for a company. An example of such content turning viral was the YouTube posting of a worker at a fast food chain taking a bath in the kitchen sink.

Without any doubt, that posting had some measureable impact on brand perception and sales. For this reason, I believe more companies need to utilize and incorporate social media monitoring, and consulting services into their ERM strategies. With this added dimension to ERM strategies, companies will be better positioned to evaluate the merits, risks and other aspects of comments and user generated content about thier brand, product, and service that are published on the social web.

By

What if we can actually speak things into existence? Like say, let there be light and then the sun fills the sky. Well, today we are witnessing a collective voice online, I call it the voice of humanity that comes close to speaking things into existence. This collective voice is currently moving products, services, brands, and a multitude of issues on the social web. So, the social web has provided the platform for all humanity to freely engage in the exchange of thoughts and ideas about any given topic.

Typing a simple query on a social media search engine like www.sampoint.com will deliver individual comments that make up this collective voice of humanity online. However, it is yet to be seen if and how this collective voice is able to move the financial markets, stock by stock.

As an investment professional with over 15 years of investing in stocks and various derivatives, I am witnessing the ability of this collective voice online to influence the direction of financial securities. In the mid to late 1990’s we witnessed how mass emails and faxes about Over the Counter securities (i.e. Penny Stocks) were able to produce significant short term gains and losses.

Today the authors of those emails and faxes are establishing their presence on the greatest publishing platform in the world; the social websites, and message boards. These authors are joined by many other individual and professional investors voicing their thoughts and ideas about targeted financial securities and other investments. Samepoint’s Universal API enable companies to create customizable dashboards to enable individual investors and financial professionals like myself to track and trend current and historical comments on various securities to identify any correlation with stock price and volume changes to gain from any arbitrage opportunities.

With the stock options market being predominantly driven by volatility, the ever changing sentiment and frequency of comments may very well be a crucial component in predicting volatility on any given financial security. The team at Samepoint (www.samepoint.com) is partnering with our users in academia and the financial sector to research and identify any such correlation.

A recent survey by Nielsen to better understand consumers online behavior including their search behavior, use of portals, and social media habits found that search engines and portals are still consumers’ research tools of first resort, with 37% and 34% of respondents looking first to engines and portals respectively.

However, the study also pointed to a rising number of Internet users are using the social web—blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. as their main tool of online discovery.

This bodes well for Samepoint.com and speaks directly to our mission, helping consumers organize and discover social media content.  Whether social media replaces search engines and portals or not in the future is anybody’s guess at this time.  But, one thing is clear, for many online users, social media is more than a destination, it’s a discovery tool.  By tuning into the social media landscape, consumers are finding what they’re looking for, and that’s a very good thing.

The gaps were volume, diversity, and search-ability. By volume I mean, if you want to make a real brand attribute decision, you need more than 100 comments. I need say 100,000. No API was giving that up. Well I guess the hose from twitter does but that does not settle the diversity factor. By diversity I mean, we need comments from bookmarks, networks, micro blogs, blogs etc. We found that the only way to get such a diverse representation of sources was to build it ourselves.

The other gap was search. The APIs we reviewed were awesome for mashups. The gap that existed was the ability to search deeper like proximity search, fuzzy search, etc. This is so needed because the vocabulary of social media contributors is very diverse. For example, LOL means Laugh Out Loud or btw is “by the way”. When looking for Brands like “Target” you can imagine the value of having enterprise search functions.

I did take six months to build this, and thanks to Amazon, our server farm can grow with the speed of social media. You can read about the API here. If you can think of some cool features you’d like to see added, just shoot us a note at learn@samepoint.com or make a comment. Thank you all for your interest in our unique API. I will just put this out there – If you think you have a need for a robust API to make your application rock, just shoot us an email. We love to collab.

- Darren

I think today I struck a nerve in some of my “friends” within social networks. I recently set up a personal account on Facebook, and went to invite some 500+ of my friends from another network.   To my surprise I got a message back from one friend that read … “I appreciate I will pass.  I do not use facebook at all and will not ever… don’t email me again”

It would seem that “friends” are network bound.  This is a very interesting concept Samepoint will explore in detail.   As we learn more about this social media thing,  I hope we all can stay friends in the “real” world. After all, I thought we were friends .

- DC