Start­up social media ana­lyt­ics firm Tel­la­gence could be about to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how com­pa­nies tar­get their mes­sages on social net­works thanks to its unique “rela­tion­ship analy­sis” algorithms

Sort­ing the wheat from the chaff

As any con­tent man­ag­er or social media man­ag­er can tes­ti­fy, a good deal of the mes­sages con­veyed by com­pa­nies via social media get spread too wide and much of the time, reach peo­ple who either can’t com­pre­hend it or find it irrel­e­vant.  Tel­la­gence is aim­ing to stop all that.

Get­ting mes­sages to rel­e­vant tar­get con­sumers as reli­ably as pos­si­ble is the name of the game for this start­up and it knows that the ben­e­fits can be colos­sal.  Ris­ing social net­works attract big vol­umes of users, as Insta­gram with its 3,600-a-minute pic­ture upload rate proves.  And big beasts like Google and Face­book are acute­ly aware of the need to attract adver­tis­ing rev­enue to social net­works with state-of-the-art technologies.

Prepar­ing for the first pub­lic demon­stra­tion of its tech­nol­o­gy this week at the Demo con­fer­ence, Tel­la­gence is clear that dom­i­nant tar­get­ing meth­ods, like ana­lyz­ing what peo­ple say or count­ing up their fol­low­er totals, aren’t near­ly accu­rate enough.  So how does Tel­la­gence actu­al­ly deliv­er its goal of accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ing how infor­ma­tion will flow?

Rela­tion­ships matter

The company’s founder and CEO, Matt Hix­son, says that the key to suc­cess lies not in iden­ti­fy­ing the loud­est tweet­ers or the celebri­ties, but which peo­ple have the right rela­tion­ships.  He cit­ed the exam­ple of a Sil­i­con Val­ley chip man­u­fac­tur­er who want­ed to find out how infor­ma­tion about a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct was flowing.

By using Tellagence’s new­ly devel­oped rela­tion­ship algo­rithms, which can pin­point who seems the most knowl­edge­able and well-con­nect­ed about a spe­cif­ic top­ic, the firm dis­cov­ered that a team of engi­neers based in Japan was fol­low­ing devel­op­ments about its prod­uct intent­ly. More­over, one of the engi­neers played a dom­i­nant role in shap­ing the infor­ma­tion flow about the top­ic.  This is the kind of per­son Tellagence’s algo­rithms can iden­ti­fy; the kind a client com­pa­ny needs to reach, avoid­ing expen­sive and fruit­less non-tar­get­ed mes­sages in the process

As Hix­son put it, “What we are pre­dict­ing is how far mes­sages will trav­el and what path they will take.”