1. Analysis & Outlook
Social Media Adoption @ Fortune 500 Companies- @Wal-Mart Labs, Social Genome
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of
revenue according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through the innovative fusion of retail, social and
mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to
the introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies that will help
it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media
conversations occurring online every day and use it to understand consumer trends so that they
can plan their product assortments, including new products to introduce and supply to
secure.Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat,
medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million and
transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create technologies and
businesses around social and mobile commerce.
According to AnandRajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a
social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products
and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post.WalmartLabs
defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships
of the social world." Wal-Mart has been building their own in-house Social Genome since past
few years with both public and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog
posts, You Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs
created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using large clusters of
machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their "crown jewel."Wal-Mart is essentially
looking to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual
transaction history.
Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega player and it is investing
millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new tools, applications and technologies and
also acquire companies who are actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post
Kosmix and its transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale
app maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app company
called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the Democratic National Committee
and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press release the @WalmartLabs team continues to
evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past
year, the group has created Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to
make back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to unearth new
products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use social chatter to select items to
be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next great shopping
experience by melding physical stores with online search and social media input.
Rajesh Prabhakar Analyst Bio @ http://socialmediacases.blogspot.com/