Arktan and PeopleBrowsr announced last week the integration of PeopleBrowsr's influence measuring tool, Kred, with Arktan SocialStreams. The integration gives Arktan customers an additional tool for filtering Social Web conversation and discussion around events based on influence, and highlighting comments and replies based on influence.

Arktan’s robust product portfolio continues to expand with Kred’s social curation tool now being the latest addition to it. Arktan SocialStreams is already powering social experiences for many leading brands in the Social TV and Social Music industries, and for an increasing number of Social Brands.

The Kred API extends the value of Arktan’s social curation platform by allowing customers to identify influential people talking about their products on the Social Web, and then featuring the influencers’ comments in real-time on customers’ websites, apps, and TV.

Arktan is very proud of its new partnership with PeopleBrowsr, and excited to have Kred as a new social curation tool in its product portfolio.

Arktan’s flagship product SocialStreams has been enhanced to include the ability to curate real-time Social Web and Blog content based on language. The new language filtering feature is powered by Arktan’s recently developed and highly scalable natural language processing (NLP) framework. 

Our customers are using SocialStreams to extend curated real-time content and conversation from the Social Web to their sites, mobile apps, and TV, to build interactive experiences for users. Showtime is an example of a customer, who is using SocialStreams’ new natural language processing feature to curate relevant social content for their Social TV microsite called “Socialize”.

The new language curation product feature allows customers to use the Arktan Dashboard to filter a broad set of Social Web and Blog content based on language. These include tweets, Facebook posts,  GetGlue checkins, Tumblr blogs; Blogs and articles; and native comments and chat on brands’ own sites and apps.

Arktan has built heavily trained specialized classifiers for various languages. SocialStreams product uses these classifiers to allow customers to curate Social Web content based on language. The language filtering scales in real-time, similarly to the rest of Arktan’s filtering and curation capabilities, and covers most European languages, including English, Spanish, and French.

The Social TV landscape continues to evolve. The space is rapidly becoming a magnet for innovative companies and their products. Everyone is competing for the attention of TV viewers. In the not so distant past, viewing of the shows was possible only on TVs, and shows were broadcast at specific times dictated by TV networks. Now the choices for TV viewing have proliferated, ranging from TVs to mobile apps to web. The addition of social networks to this new Social TV landscape have completely changed the rules of engagement between TV networks and viewers.

According to a recent survey by TV Guide, TV viewing habits are greatly influenced by social media buzz. For example, positive commentary about TV shows on social networks have been shown to translate into increased viewing of TV shows, and there’s a significant correlation between positive social impressions about the shows, and whether people decide or continue to watch the shows.

A Nielsen study has documented this as well, noting a correlation between social media buzz and TV ratings across all age groups, most notably among 18-34 -year-olds. A ReadWriteWeb study in the meantime noted that a whopping 94% of U.S. adults e-mail, talk on the phone, send text messages, or chat on social networks while watching TV, while 38% of them on mobile devices search the mobile web for content related to the shows they’re watching.

How can TV networks integrate their programming with the social media landscape that is now part of the Social TV landscape as well? How can they engage their viewers with programs that capture the viewers’ attention not just for one show, or for one season, but for a long term? How can they build an interaction so engaging that it would turn viewers into loyal fans of the shows? The roadmap for monetization in the Social TV space starts becoming clear, when these questions are addressed.

These are among the questions that will be discussed by an expert Social TV panel during a webinar on Wednesday, March 30. The webinar is titled “Monetizing Social TV: Bolstering Returns in Real Time”. The presenters will be Arktan CEO Rahul Aggarwal, Jennifer Kavanagh, SVP, Digital, Oxygen Media, Jeff Weber, VP, Video Products, AT&T, and Gayle Weiswasser, VP, Social Media, Discovery Communications. We’re pleased to be part of this exciting Social TV panel discussion. Please join us! Here’s a link to register for the event.

The SXSW conference in Austin, TX, earlier this month was a success by any measure. According to data provided by eCairn, SXSW ranked as the No. 1 social media event in 2011, and the event may be able to hold onto the top spot again this year.

Here’s a graph courtesy of Kred that illustrates just how much SXSW has grown as a social media event from last year.

The graph shows the number of mentions at SXSW Interactive festival during the first four days of the event, indicating an average increase of over 600% from last year, and over 500,000 #SXSW tweets during the four days. Arktan, eCairn, and SBV Solutions co-hosted the “Social Media and Brands” cocktail party at SXSW, where many leading brand executives came to share their social media experiences, and to learn from the social media experiences of other brands.

The event had a good turnout, and provided a welcome break from the hustle and bustle of SXSW. Arktan CEO, Rahul Aggarwal, who was present at the event, said that the event had been a success. It had provided the brands a venue for exchanging ideas and tools for the social media space, and opportunities to learn from other brands’ social media experiences. The brands were also able to share their thoughts on the growing importance of finding and curating relevant content, reflecting a key theme at this year’s SXSW.