How well is your brand evangelized online? What exactly is the dollar value of the buzz generated by your latest ad campaign? How does your brand compare with major competitors in social media reach? Did recent news help or harm public perception of your company?
General Sentiment can answer those questions. To help customers apply social analytics to big business challenges, the company scours and analyzes more than 60 million sources of content on the web, including blogs, news sites, and tweets. Its Media Analytics Platform presents a real-time snapshot of public opinion about brands and people. Custom reports estimate the dollar value of ad campaigns and PR events. Syndicated industry reports map public perceptions of prime-time television shows, global consumer brands, and restaurant chains.
And how does General Sentiment organize development of its innovative software tools? With Assembla.
General Sentiment has a complex software development environment for an organization of its size. The company releases software on weekly or bi-weekly cycles. Analysts and product managers are located in Charlotte, North Carolina, with backend system developers in Jericho, New York, user interface developers in Bangalore, India, and the QA group in Delhi. They use Agile techniques like scrum, but also plan 3-6 months ahead.
The development organization makes extensive use of Assembla tickets. Tickets flow through workflow stages. Weekly releases are represented by milestones. Work is organized using Agile Planner views (see screen shot). Each location has its own view.
Managers like the Agile Planner view. They can see stories, projects and components on the left side, and milestones on the right side. They can see at a glance the main stories being worked on, then drill down and look at the tasks that make up each story and milestone.
Developers also like the Agile Planner view, because everyone can see what he has been assigned and how it fits into the big picture.
General Sentiment uses Assembla tools to for communication among developers. Wikis are used to share “how to” documents. Developers exchange requests and comments on tickets. Email alerts are used to keep team members informed about each other’s progress. Analysts and customer support representatives also use Assembla tools to communicate with developers and with each other.
According to Greg Artzt, CEO of General Sentiment: “Before using Assembla we tried a number of other bug tracking and project tracking tools. Assembla gave us the most organized way to tackle projects. It is very good for feedback and communication, and allows us to organize processes and workflows. It has also helped us improve software quality.”
Attention business developers
General Sentiment is opening up the APIs of its social media analytics platform. External applications will be able to access the company’s massive media database and utilize its sophisticated sentiment analysis tools. Developers will be able to feed consumer, brand, industry and media data and trends into their applications. If you are interested, contact Greg Artzt at greg.artzt@generalsentiment.com.