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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring

Social
Influence
Monitoring On
a Shoestring
Leveraging what you know and how you
use it that makes Social Monitoring
interesting and insightful.
Covers two sessions and more ….
How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service

Marshall Sponder (Webmetricsguru.com) explains how to


build your own social media monitoring tool using the many
free services available, including Yahoo Pipes, Tattler (a
Drupal module) RSS feeds and Netvibes. This is a non-
technical session. Marshall Sponder
How to Monitor Sentiment & Benefit from the Insight this
offers
Webmetricsguru.co
What do people really think about your brand? In this
m
workshop Marshall Sponder explains the value of sentiment
detection identifies the limitations of sentiment analysis and
now.seo@gmail.co
provides guidance on how to benefit from sentiment
monitoring. m
Special Thanks to Cecilia Pineda Feret for inspiring me to @webmetricsguru
create this eBook, sharing her ideas and focusing mine.

Contents

Copyright© – Marshall Sponder - 2010, Webmetricsguru.com 3/31/2010


Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

First Thoughts about Social Monitoring and why it’s easy and hard...................................................5
What no one tells you .........................................................................................................................7
What this means to me.......................................................................................................................9
Where we are now – Present to near future - Geo location capabilities of Social Media Tools............11
THE NOW - Location, Location, Location...............................................................................................11
Monitoring Opinion and Rating Sites.................................................................................................14
Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.................................................................................18
Crowded Landscape of Paid and Free Tools..............................................................................................18
However, for those of you that did come here to learn how to build your own dashboard – here’s
some ways you could do it....................................................................................................................19
Free vs. Paid Tools.....................................................................................................................................19
Method 1 - Using Netvibes to build a Social Media Dashboard.........................................................20
Method 2 - Using Addictomatic for a Social Media Dashboard.........................................................22
Visualizing what you might measure in a Social Media Dashboard you build yourself......................23
Method 3- Tattler – Build your own” open sourced” Social Monitoring Platform.............................24
Getting your hands dirty with spreadsheets and iGoogle to build your own dashboard...................25
Method 4: Using Social Mention for a quick and dirty way to build your own Social Media
Monitoring Dashboard SocialMention, FeedRinse, Google Reader, and Postrank............................48
Method 5: RealMon9 – yet another free social media monitoring platform, runs on Google’s servers
...........................................................................................................................................................50
Method 6: using Yahoo! Pipes...........................................................................................................53
Free Social Media Monitoring Tools..........................................................................................................57
Viralheat Social Media Monitoring Review and how it compares with other platforms.......................59
Level of Sophistication in Social Media Monitoring...........................................................................65
2 Page

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS...............................................................................................................................67
Introduction into How to Analyze Sentiment and Benefit from the Insight it Provides – Luke Brynley-
Jones..................................................................................................................................................67
Examples of Flaky Sentiment Analysis:..............................................................................................68
Flaky Sentiment Analysis - not accurate or useful most of the time..........................................................78
Towards a theory of influence...................................................................................................................85
Finding Influencers using Social Monitoring..............................................................................................88

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Influencer Method 1 – Comparing Social Media Self serve tools – Radian6, Techrigy, Sysomos,
BrandWatch and Biz360 on finding influencers.................................................................................88
Influencer Method 2: Using Postrank Analytics to find Influential Blogs...........................................96
Influencer Method 3: Using FollowerWonk to find Influentials on Twitter.......................................96
Influencer Method 4: Using Klout to find Influentials........................................................................98
Influencer Method 5: Using TweepSearch to find Influentials...........................................................99
Influencer Method 6: Using TRAACKR to find Influencers...............................................................102
Influencer Method 7: ECairn Conversation & Influencer Mining Social CRM platform –.................104
Note: USE the promo code: Vke4e..................................................................................................104
Influencer Method 8: Using Social Radar to Visualize Influencer Lists.............................................108
APPENDIX 1 – Answers to Specific Questions (will be updated periodically)...........................................112
Q3. How to utilise Smartphone apps for B2B?.................................................................................115
Q4. How to provide ROI on Social Media investments?..................................................................117
Twitter ROI Case Study: Dell Generates $3 Million in Sales Utilizing Twitter..........................117
Measuring Social Media ROI: A Case Study (Plus: Tweet to Beat Winners).................................................117
Q4. How to turn measurement into actionable results...................................................................117
How to use Social Media Marketing and Measurement with Smartphone’s?.................................118
APPENDIX B – SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS REVIEWED (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)..............................118
ADAPTIVE SEMANTICS - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/adaptive-semantics/...........118
Alterian Techrigy SM2 - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/alterian/..............................120
BrandTology - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/brandtology/......................................122
Compete Pro............................................................................................................................................128
First thoughts on Compete.com’s Category Profiles........................................................................130
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Using Compete.com to find unusual sources of Traffic...................................................................131


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Google Wave...................................................................................................................................132
Google Social Media Monitoring - “I’ve been saying this is coming”...............................................134
Big brother and Google’s entrance into social media monitoring...........................................................134
Social Radar.....................................................................................................................................140
Social Radar Comment.....................................................................................................................144
Crimson Hexagon.............................................................................................................................144
ECairn..............................................................................................................................................145

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FollowerWonk.................................................................................................................................145
FourSquare......................................................................................................................................146
Google Local Business Center..........................................................................................................146
Synthesio.........................................................................................................................................150
Identify influencers at post level......................................................................................................151
Viralheat..........................................................................................................................................152
Radian6............................................................................................................................................152
Using Sysomos for keyword research..............................................................................................156
Keyword Research deep dive using Sysomos MAP –.......................................................................161
Facebook Web Analytics Tracking...................................................................................................164
APPENDIX C – CASE STUDIES...................................................................................................................166
Havana Central Case Study – opportunity to use Geo Location to build Social Media ROI..............166
4 Page

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First Thoughts about Social Monitoring and why it’s easy and hard

Imagine this situation:

A drug is denied approval from the FDA and your PR firm represents a multinational drug
conglomerate needing immediate response and insight required even as news breaks all over
the world – the drug manufactures board meets the next day and requires your reports for
insight on what people are saying and thinking now and guidance on what the next steps should
be based on that information.

I face situations like that often enough – and my first thoughts are ……

How can anyone expect the “us” to make sense of a rapidly unfolding event when no
one else seems to be able to? (MSM news, other social commentary often comes up
short or stereotyped, and if all we are asked to do is tally it all up –even that is hard)

The second thought I have is … how can we come up with anything insightful under this kind of
pressure and in just a few hours – before the next cycle of news brakes? What if our analysis is
wrong?

Typical message stream (for example, a “River of News” from Radian6)


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Source: River of News Widget – Radian6

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Information is coming from us from the internet much as light is reflected from a crystal in water – with
thousands of reflections playing off one another – but fundamentally we’re looking at a glass of water is
often lost in the shimmer of crystalline reflections which we often refer to as “noise”.

We get so much news now – it’s not easy to figure out what the story is – in this case– what do people
believe after the drug delay announcement?

Attempts to “summarize” news” range from Google’s Living Stories (a discontinued experiment
with the New York Times), Nielsen’s BlogPulse Key Phrases (Bursty Phases – a listing of all the
most used phases of previous days with the stories and websites associated with the phases).

Blogpulse Key Phrases – March 17th, 2010 – 407 blog posts were assigned to “Happy St. Patrick’s
Day” which assigned those stories a label – something that most Social Media Platforms fail to
do well today. You could tell your boss that this is the chatter about that story and give it a
name. Deriving meaning becomes very challenging if you’re looking beyond reporting and into
insight.
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Some platforms, like Crimson Hexagon, allow you to apply your own labeling to a bunch of stories – once
sufficiently trained, Crimson’s algorithm attempts go to and find similar stories. But – the analyst that
builds the question and categories is the ultimate determiner of the meaning of what is applies –
meaning the analyst provides the true meaning – the platform is just a focusing method.

For example, Barack Obama’s speech to Congress last fall on Health Care was analyzed by Crimson
Hexagon (see below); having used the Opinion Monitor for my work at Porter Novelli – I see it’s
possibilities to summarize information – but it still takes Art to figure out the right questions and the
right categories – along with writing a query that pulls the right data in and then training the algorithm
to properly sort information (just like you train anything).

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Source: Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor

What no one tells you ..


There is a learning curve to mastering what Social Listening tools provide and translating collected
information (or signals) into insights for yourself and your customers - this process reminds me of what I
used to do when painting pictures outdoors -

Often I have tried to capture the impressions of what I saw with my eyes and my mind using oil
pastels or oil paints – often I mixed different colors of blue and green on paper and blending
them – I had learnt over the years what colors I needed to mix and the pressure/touch/stroke to
get just exactly the right color I saw on canvas or paper.  But if took too long – the sky in front of
me changed and I would have to change my colors to match the new sky colors – and if I took
too long – it became dusk. We might end up being like a cat chasing its own tail, something that
could happen with Listening data as well.
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Marshall Sponder – Oil Pastel on paper 2007 Window View.

Learning how to take the online monitoring tools and craft them into a message or statement requires a
bit of skill and intuition that is often not recognized (more akin to art but with a bit of science mixed in –
but not Rocket Science).

In fact, I think Social Monitoring is like that landscape that has so much information that you need to
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understand the story you want to tell (or the painting you want to paint) as you gaze. My favorite artist,
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Paul Cezanne often said…

 Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

"I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as
though I knew nothing."

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What this means to me

Today’s business person or client requires more precision and useable data – instead of a report.

1. Need to see what you’re up against before you commit to how long it’s going to take - a
couple of hours to play with the data and see what we are able to pull up - level of difficulty
involved - tuning a query just to see what we're up against – then we should be able to tell
clients how long it will take.

I think there is a real distinction between administrative type tasks and what
we’re dealing with in Social Media, where many of the questions require “non-
standard” answers.

In a related subject of moving from Web Analytics Reporting into real Analysis with a
division between those who is a practitioner vs. those who are pushed into reporting
(listen to the podcast).

Many times there’s no distinction between what is a “report” from a traffic or


conversation aspect and digging deeper into the data. This distinction in Web Analytics
reporting vs. analysis isn’t much different for Social Media Monitoring and the insight
derived from it.

Gary Angel points out that being aggressive at getting to Analysis will yield a great deal
more insight. Analysis takes some of pretty detailed and focused time – you can’t do
an analysis in one or two hours.

Gary thinks the reason why reporting gets stressed over analysis - too often
organizations don’t give their analysts time to do analysis and the analyst gets
bogged down on reporting requests. If you want those deeper questions to be
answered you need to recognize people within your organization that are capable of
doing deeper analysis and support them. According to Gary…

“… from my perspective, nobody will ever get analysis unless they demand it. It
is just often “easier” to do reporting. The other thing is I see a lot of peoples
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time get “chewed up” in Cycles where they have no time to do anything but
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reporting. One of the things about analysis is it takes some pretty detailed,
focused time where you can sit in front of a computer and really work with the
tool and work with the data.

You can’t do an analysis in an hour or two hours and fit it in between various
meetings. I think for a lot of people out there doing web analytics (as well as
Social Media - Conversation Analysis – Sentiment Analysis) one of the things
that really bedevils them is the organization never gives them space to do
analysis. It’s always “get me this report” and “get me that report” and it’s
really important that organizations recognize that if they do that to their

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analysts they will really they will really keep their analysts from being
productive on a “deeper level”.

You have to figure out within your organization that can do analysis
and you have to give them the space to do analysis if you want those
deeper questions to get answered.

Social Listening Analytics is a similar, but very different beast from Web Analytics in that the
data is even messier (fuzzier) and more non-standard than it is in Web Analytics. What is
common to both - if everything is exactly the same and you have built up a reporting and
routines - quick turnaround is much more likely - but most of the times, a lot more work
need to go into producing and in PR, time often is not your friend.

2. Another issue – lack of accepted methods to produce analysis and reporting in PR and
Advertising firms.

As the results of a query in SM tools depends on the Query itself, the tools getting "accurate"
data report is open to interpretation -  it's impossible to reach that level of precision without a
lot of investment in tools and methodology - investments that many firms are as yet unwilling or
unable to make. I predict by year’s end, this will no longer be the case as the ROI of Social
Media will be much more obvious than it is now.
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Where we are now – Present to near future - Geo location capabilities of Social Media
Tools
Take the case of Foursquare – here’s a post I wrote recently about how quickly the game is changing.

THE NOW - Location, Location, Location

The pace of social media monitoring maturation is accelerating and I’ll even go so far as saying
that many people who don’t use Social Media now, will have incentives to – because of .the geo-
location, real time nature of the platforms

I predict by year end – a lot more people who never were interested in Social Media – will get
into it – possibly for coupon – or some other real time discount they could not get any other
way.

Take the announcement yesterday of Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer
Rewards as that is a big deal (I like the NYT post Starbucks Fans Can Become ‘Baristas’ on
Foursquare as a good source for more  information).

Beginning Thursday, latte addicts who visit Starbucks outlets can get more than just a caffeine
fix. They will also be rewarded on Foursquare with a barista badge.

Foursquare - The Barista badge on Foursquare.


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Location-based mobile services like Foursquare are at the cutting edge of a transformation in
the way offline businesses and their customers interact, by breaking down the barriers between
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the physical and the virtual.

Starbucks has been very active on Facebook, Twitter and other Web sites. In the past, Starbucks
customers could write about Starbucks on these sites, but they were essentially anonymous
when they were in the store.

Starbucks will be rewarding those check-ins – though the rewards haven’t been fully worked out
yet – I bet they will include free coffee, free drinks, free breakfast, etc……  they will infact , get a

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lot of people who don’t mind sharing their location – to get rewarded for that, in real time, –
and that’s a game changer.

Never mind that Starbucks will be able to track all those check ins now with  Foursquare New
Tools for Businesses (NYT article has case studies – impressive) or that Facebook Facebook Will
Allow Users to Share Location

For analytics – this is pretty interesting stuff to be collecting – and yes, you will be able to get
Social Media ROI out of it – if you adopt those systems and promote using Facebook, Twitter,
Foursquare, etc – it won’t be limited to just a few (for example – Hot Potato Tosses A New Site,
API, And iPhone App With Foursquare Integration At  You), but a lot of the action will be on the
main hubs – your application can do whatever – but it will need to tie in to Facebook, Twitter,
Foursquare – to be the most useful (the list doesn’t end there ie: With Its New Release, Gowalla
Expands The Check-In Game (Video) and even Google is adding location when you do searches
both in the mobile version and I even saw it on my desktop/laptop.

So by year end – a whole lot more people are going to be doing what we call Social Media –
things are accelerating faster than predicted and these development are more like the inflection
point of social media and monitoring and online commerce – where now, things are going to
speed up far more rapidly than anyone expected – that’s my 2 cents worth.

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Also consider that Foursquare is providing platform for business owners – platforms that your clients will need to
give you access to.

I think Social Media will become easy to track by year’s end.   This is also the year of
Social CRM - tracking and enablement is coming to us.

It’s only mid-March and it’s already clear.

First – Foursquare is planning to Offer Up User Data with Check-in Analytics – is already testing it -  any
business that wants to will be able to offer coupons to those who check in.   I’m doing an  analytics
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project for a restaurant chain and this offering of Foursquare is big news for this kind of business. 
Here’s more information from Fast Company:
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…. A new staff page feature also allows venue staffers to see who is currently visiting and communicate with
customers. Notice a regular hasn’t been in your store in a while? Tweet them about a cool new shirt that just came
in to entice them back.

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And this is just the beginning, according to the company. Tristan Walker, director of foursquare business
development, tells Mashable that big innovations like weather tracking could allows business owners to offer
specials based on real-time events. Imagine “It’s snowing, so come into Joe’s for a free small coffee with
purchase!” popping up on your iphone when you’re outside freezing and just a block or two away. Hello Joe.

By contacting someone who hasn’t been in your store for a while – and offering them something in real
time is very powerful – I saw that last week when I posted on  Social Media ROI for Restaurants and the
NY Restaurant Show Tweetup and meeting @paulbarron.  Here’s that interaction again:

…. set up alerts that email me every hour (now it’s every 10 minutes as of tonight) when the restaurant is named in
any way.   As I was in the restaurant I got and alert from a customer who was saying she was in the restaurant –
via Twitter.
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As the alert took place in real time – the customer and her friend were given free drinks and discounts – in other
words – we used Social Media and Social Media Monitoring (via Radian6) to reward a customer who was having a
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great time – and we made that time better.


And you know what …… THAT gesture was worth it in my opinion … look what the customer tweeted after the
evening was over …..
TWEET FROM: KIMBERLY819

Name: KIMBERLY819 Posted on: Mar 1, 2010 1:07 AM

Followers: 66 Following: 87

What a GREAT night at Havana Central!!!! My new favorite spot!!

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Lin http://twitter.com/KIMBERLY819/statuses/9811482654
k
You want Social Media ROI – you got ROI – a customer for life.

What Foursquare is about to do will make that event happen over and over again – in fact, life could get
very interesting for people who are actively using Social Media. I expect Twitter to follow suit – so we
won’t just have to depend on using FourSquare (even though FourSquare is great) to be able to take
action in real time.   It could be – that many applications will end up becoming real time in this way
specifically.

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Monitoring Opinion and Rating Sites

Another Trend that’s important to track – Online Rating and Opinion sites such as Yelp, CitySearch, Trip
Advisor to name a few – most monitoring platforms do not crawl these sites at all or in a consistent
manner. A quick question to one vendor about this gap provided an interesting reply –

.. We don’t consider rating and opinion sites to be social media

But if you’re running a restaurant - most of the monitoring services I covered in this guide don’t do a
good job covering sites like Yelp, and that is definitely something that needs to change. A few Boutique
services have emerged to fill the gap Social Monitoring platforms have left open including
ReputationRanger.

Almost every problem we have,  had or ever  will have -   has already been solved by someone,
somewhere who had the same or a similar problem and we just don’t always know it.

Fast forward to the present – I had a problem  collecting restaurant reviews  and a feeling  answers to
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the problem I have/ had, already existed somewhere else.


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It’s like that with restaurants – based on the restaurant I’m working with –
reviewing Yelp, CitySearch, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, to name a few of restaurant review sites into one
place, and adding additional social media monitoring with semantic analysis – this reporting appeared
last year with Boorah reputation reports for restaurants.

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Note: I suspect Boorah was bought by Intuit – as not all the links work on Boorah and there is a link to
the updated reputation monitoring on   Intuit.

One of the reasons to have reputation management automated is to save community managers who


work with social media the task of manually going to rating services and noting reviews for a weekly
or monthly report; this seems like it’s a prime example of a common task that ought to be automated –
whereas, people are much better focused on engagement and customer loyalty – and if you can find a
solution that avoids having to manually compile all the ratings from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable,
SeamlessWeb, etc – into a spreadsheet, so much the better.

Another reason to have reputation management for restaurants automated – most owners and
managers of restaurants don’t know how to work with social media yet, nor do they have the time or
inclination by default.  As a result, the task of monitoring the online reputation of a restaurant or any
business has barely been touched upon by most people.

Besides, I noticed that all the Social Media Monitoring platforms I have looked at do not track Yelp, or
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CitySearch, or OpenTable (reservations manager) – even Radian6 does not track Yelp – and adding
Yelp/OpenTable as sources of traffic doesn’t help (Radian6 allows you to add sources you wish to
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monitor that are not tracked by default).  So, even if  you wanted to use Radian6 to track your
restaurant reviews – you’d be out of luck, today.  The rest of the platforms also fail here  – no one got it
right, yet.

Though Boorah doesn’t appear to work that well anymore – at $99.00 per month,  a service
called Reputation Ranger might be the best answer.  Here’s a description from Reputation Ranger’s site:

Reputation Ranger for Restaurants and Bars tracks review activity on over 40 foods and drink review
websites.  We filter out the chatter and deliver all the meaningful and important customer comments to
you in one, easy to understand, reputation report.

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Another solution to reputation management of restaurants is Google Places – see Google Looks Beyond
Review Sites: Now Aggregates Posts from Local Blogs on Place Pages -
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The Google Places review acts as a hub – providing links to all the other online review sites and a
summary (excerpt) of what some people  have said about the restaurant in each place – but Google’s
service is not designed to be a monitoring solution .

However, by creating these review aggregation pages, Google  magnified a reputation monitoring


problem most restaurants have.

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For users, this means that Google’s meta-analysis of customer reviews is now able to look at a broader
base of reviews. For businesses, however, this means that they now have to pay more attention to
reviews on blogs. For local bloggers, as Blumenthal rightly points out, this means that their reach and
influence could increase exponentially once Google includes their blogs on these pages.”

And that gets back to reputation monitoring of restaurant sites – I suspect Social Media Monitoring
platforms will catch up and capture the data from CitySearch, Yelp, etc – but for now – you might want
to try reporting that focuses just on that – like Reputation Ranger.

But since I haven’t tried Reputation Ranger I can’t tell you how good it is – but I would welcome the
opportunity to try it.

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Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service

I am providing instructions on how to build your own monitoring platform I don’t personally think it’s
worth the effort in most cases. But I wanted to reach out to those who thought there was nothing out
there to help them with their specific needs

Working with a colleague Cecilia Pineda Feret from Havana Central and through the work
we’ve done with www.HavanaCentral.com - we both concluded there are ample free,
freenium and low cost paid social monitoring tools for most purposes.

While I will show you how to create your own monitoring dashboard – I question if it’s worth the effort
except for individual cases where the free and low cost tools don’t provide enough coverage.

However, let’s explore what exists today while acknowledging the field is changing even as we speak.

Crowded Landscape of Paid and Free Tools

Crowded landscape of paid and free Social Media monitoring tools; many platforms have overlapping
functionality but seldom agree on sentiment analysis, volume and geo-location. The Forrester Wave™:
Social Media Listening Platforms released a study early last year measuring market presence, platform offerings
and platform shortcomings, but little else.
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In order to be considered for Forrester’s study vendors were required to have over $10 million per year in
corporate revenue and a substantial base of enterprise sized clients. Most that we would be talking about for
Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp that are excluded from the study.

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However, for those of you that did come here to learn how to build your own
dashboard – here’s some ways you could do it .
19Page

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Free vs. Paid Tools

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Method 1 - Using Netvibes to build a Social Media Dashboard

If you want to use NetVibes you can – here’s a good post on how to use NetVibes for your Social Media
Dashboard - http://blog.michaelleis.com/2009/04/diy-social-media-monitoring-dashboards/

According to Michael Leis –

From Google blog search, to SocialMention to Twitter search to backtype; if you’re


trying to monitor your brand mentions in the social space with or without the aide of
professional tools, you’re quickly buried under a tabvalanche.

Tabvalanche  (tab•va•lanche)  n.
Being buried under so many open tabs that it slows your Web browser and
computer to a crawl.

To avoid the Tabvalanche, I recommend Netvibes as a way to make your own social


media dashboard. Netvibes is one of a handful of customizable Web-based start pages
that use widgets. In a space with Pageflakes, iGoogle, and My Yahoo, I find Netvibes the
easiest to use.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Sign up for a Netvibes account


2. Click the big green “Add content” button in the upper left of the screen
3. In the sub navigation click “Essential widgets.”
4. On the lower right-hand side of boxes that appear, you’ll see a button called
“Web page.”
5. Enter your search page results URL in the text-entry box that appears (not the
original URL, so instead of “http://search.twitter.com” you paste
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“http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Hong+Kong+Phooey”)
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Many results pages, like the example above, also offer the RSS version of the search
results. In this case, you’ll want to substitute clicking the “Add a feed” button for step
two. Then rinse and repeat for all the services available to search out your brand
mentions. Your computer and productivity will thank you. I have to say, this isn’t an
original idea by me. Sadly, I can’t remember where I read this technique originally to
attribute it, but it’s quite useful.

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This is the kind of dashboard you could build with Netvibes within an hour if you so desire – this
is a Dashboard created by Duct Tape Marketing.

“…I quickly set something up on Netvibes (you could do this in iGoogle, MyYahoo,
Pageflakes too) that would allow me to track various Google Alerts, twitter searches,
Boardtracker searches and backtype searches along with my own Facebook, twitter and
LinkedIn activity. There are lots of pre-build widget for things like twitter, but pretty
much anything with an RSS feed can be added to the page. Netvibes is easy to work with
and this might be a nice way to keep it all front and center.”

This kind of Dashboard works for an individual or small brand – it’s free and fast to set up. Note
– there are no alerts here but this is easy enough to set up in Google Alerts if needed.
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Method 2 - Using Addictomatic for a Social Media Dashboard


Addictomatic replaces NetVibes – it’s actually a one step NetVibes without the work of picking feeds –
Addictomatic does it for you and you can view your custom Addictomatic page whenever you want – but
it’s not private page – so whatever your seeing – someone else can, too.

According to Thomas Trumble

Addictomatic is a nice little tool that I found out about the other day.  It’s a social media search
aggregator that produces a custom webpage of the results and is great for a quick review of
mentions of a term that you input across a variety of social media site.   For example, I did a
vanity search for myself and turned up my name on Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, Bloglines and
Wordpress.

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Addictomatic is not a social media account finder like Spokeo, so it doesn’t turn up all of the
media that I am producing and posting. Addictomatic aggregates mentions of your query
across social media sites, in this case my name, not the footprint of my profiles across social
media sites.  For a quick review of social media buzz, this is a great tool, but it doesn’t provide
enough depth to make it a tool for much more than that.  Use it for snapshots, but look to
other more robust tools for real social media listening and measurement.

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Notice that Thomas mentions Addictomatic lacks depth – you get what you pay for – this is a nice tool
for a simple monitoring solution a small business or individual might want to perform – but is not useful
more much else (but there is a place for this “free” social media aggregation in small organizations and
non-profits that cannot afford much else).

Visualizing what you might measure in a Social Media Dashboard you build yourself

If you want to get a handle on to monitor – take a look at this diagram above. Whatever you build via
NetVibes or other methods, keep in mind you have a vast and ever changing landscape to monitor.
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Method 3- Tattler – Build your own” open sourced” Social Monitoring Platform

I investigated Tattler

Tattler main screen

We found Tattler so difficult and un-user friendly that it would take a true enthusiast of this tool to get
anything useful out of it – but once you get used to it – it’s possible Tattler could, on the face of it,
25

replace Radian6, Alterian or other such Self Serve platform.


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However, since Tattler is open sourced – meaning that the developer communities self develops
a platform, no one is paid to do this, it’s all volunteer work – it’s not clear how often or well
Tattler is, could or will be maintained – and who would you go to when you have a problem
with the platform?

Also, the bar is constantly being raised in Social Media – last year “monitoring” conversations in
Social Media was no so common and people weren’t sure what was good monitoring vs. not so
good monitoring … self serve and high end Social Media tools are evolving past simply
monitoring conversations to acting on them. As a result, much cheaper platforms such as

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ViralHeat.com have evolved that are on par or superior to Tattler at little or no cost – making the
effort of supporting your own Drupal installation of Tattler not really worth the effort for most
people. In this case, there is too much complexities with what is essentially become a
“commodity” – monitoring online data.

Tattler is probably more work than anything you would it get out of it (all Drupal patches need to be
updated and you must run Tattler on your own server) – but it’s possible that some organizations could
leverage a tool like Tattler – but we think Tattler is more suitable for a different audience, I think, than
the people here.

Getting your hands dirty with spreadsheets and iGoogle to build your own dashboard

Let’s say that you do want to build something custom – using iGoogle –you’re somewhat technical –
you could try an approach such as Marty Weintraub’s Reputation Monitoring Dashboard (see
http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/)

Note: I have included Marty Weintrub’s post in this document – I have not personally set this up
but I think it’s doable by most people attending this conference if they are willing to spend a few
hours working though the instructions.

This is what the end result will look like, a tabbed iGoogle dashboard, graphically customizable and suitable for professional
monitoring.
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While there are industry standard paid reputation monitoring tools sporting cool features, any person
or business will made more powerful having someone in the shop able to wire this free puppy up. After

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constructing the dashboard outlined in this tutorial, use whatever feed reader you like. Again it’s
the ethic of comprehensive monitoring by feed that matters here. Let’s get started:

Create a Google account if you don’t already have one.

——–
Open an Excel document and create tabs, segmented by the following reputation
monitoring categories: “Brand,” “Product,” “Personnel,” “Competition,” “Industry
Phrases” & “Intent Words.” We’re going to make theBig List of keywords to monitor.
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——–
Paste “correct” (the way you say it) brand name permutations into the ‘Brand’
tab. This is the easiest step of all.

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——–
Open a web browser and navigate to MSN Keyword Mutation Detection Tool. Set a
bookmark, you’ll be visiting this tool again.

——–
Type in or paste the first brand name keyword on your list. Go
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The returns common iterations of a keyword. Copy them.

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——–
Paste them into the brand tab on the Big List. Run the MSN Keyword Mutation
Detection Tool again on the next correct brand word. Run them all. Paste them into the
Big List.

Trellian Keyword Discovery a paid service has my favorite misspellings engine, which we sometimes use
at this point.
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However you can totally get by without paid tools. Finding hacks of your brand
keywords is pretty obvious business.  Try stream of consciousness brainstorming and
don’t be afraid of being silly. I can nearly always duplicate KW discovery misspellings by
just free-forming.  Add these brand name keyword permutations to the Big List.

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Another great place to find insight regarding brand permutations is the organic analytics
from your site. Here we drill into ever-ubiquitous Google Analytics. (Of course you
actually have to have been running analytics on the site prior)  Click on Traffic Sources.
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Click “Keywords”

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View traffic from paid and non paid brand search keywords. Select non-paid for
organic. [Please note: PPC data on phrase or broad match keywords often yields useful
permutations as well.]
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——–
Grab any heretofore undiscovered permutations by copying.

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——–
Paste in any brand keywords noted from analytics to the Big List. Now it’s safe to say
that we have most brand permutations.

——–
When done with brand keywords, repeat this process for every product to populate
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the Products Tab of the Excel Big List. Sure it’s time consuming, but take the time and it
will be well worth the effort.
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Do the products tab of the Big List now…

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Update on Progress! There are 4 tabs on our big list remaining, “Competition,”


“Personnel,” “Industry” & “Intent.”

“Personnel” Tab of Big List


“Personnel” refers to  C-Level executives, public spokespeople or anyone else we’d like to monitor.
Often times this includes competitors primaries. There’s no need to go crazy with misspellings unless
someone’s name is complicated. Just be sure to call “Russ” “Russell” and other extremely obvious
nicknames. In our experience, overdoing scan-width does not equal finding much more dirt.

“Competition” Tab of Big List


Monitoring your competition is useful for defending your own brands and products. We keep an eye on
competitive brands by the same segments by which we monitor our own: “Brand,” “Product,” 
“Personnel,” etc…
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 Discover competitors’ promotional efforts as soon as possible


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 Find their weaknesses, liabilities and advise your marketing efforts to best exploit the
information.
 Learn about new important products and product categories.

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Finding Industry phrases are by classic keyword research process. Fire up the External


Google Keyword Tool. We’ll this Google PPC inventory tool to find keywords SO
commonly searched for, that they can be considered an “industry category” word. Short
Short Short Tail = Industry

Finding Category Words

Type in as many categories as you know about in regards to your business.  When in


doubt, use a thesaurus (for stemming). Make sure to check the “Use Synonyms” box,
which will add Google’s stemming insight to the results.
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——–
“Get Keyword Ideas” after confirming that you’re human.

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Click on “Sort by average volume.”

Add the top 3-5 to the keyword bucket. They’re your industry category words for the
Big List.
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——–
Export to spread a .CSV file.

Copy From Exported Spread Sheet and Add To  Big List Under the Industry Tab.

The final tab for this dashboard build is for “Intent” phrases. Think about different
ways customers say “you’re great,” “you suck” or ask for information with longer
phrases.  There’s no need to go crazy with variations on the same keywords (singular,
plural, etc…). Intent phrases are very long tail in themselves.
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Page

——–
Building the Dashboard

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Now leave the Big List aside.  Open your igoogle dashboard. (Make sure you’re logged
into Google and go to http://www.google.com/ig.) If you already use iGoogle, you’ll see
your iGoogle homepage. Don’t worry, you won’t lose it.  This is as simple as adding new
tabs in iGoogle, corresponding to the Big List tabs in the Excel doc.

Add a New iGoogle Tab


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Name the Tab “Brand.”


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——–
Create New iGoogle Tabs to Match the Big List Excel Tabs

Now it’s time to set up our keyword feed subscriptions. Set Up First Google Alert. Go
to Google Alerts and click “New Alert.”
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Type or paste in you first word. Sorry you have to set these up 1 at a time for EVERY
word on all tabs. 1 Word at a time, starting with you brand keywords, create alerts.
Choose “comprehensive” meaning all Google channels. Choose the “feed” and “as it
happens” options.

——–
Right click and copy the link location of the of orange RSS button
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——–
To get around a Google bug in some browsers, “clean” the URL you just copied  by
opening new FireFox tab.

——–
Paste in URL copied from RSS button and hit “return.” (This cleaning step is only
needed, for some odd reason, when using Google.)

“Subscribe to this feed using “using Google” as feed reader. Check “Always use Google
to subscribe to feeds” and click “Subscribe Now.”
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Select “Add to Google homepage.” “Google Homepage” is another word for iGoogle.


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Congratulations, you’ve created your first  iGoogle reputation monitoring gadget. You’ll
see the new gadget added to the iGoogle dashboard on whatever tab you have selected.
Cool!

——–
Create Alert for next word on the Big List.
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We’ll review. Let’s go through the steps again to add a Google Alert to iGoogle for your
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second brand word.  Click “New Alert.”

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Paste your next word into Google Alerts. Note: Two or more words require quotations.

You know the drill!


The options are: Comprehensive, Feed, as it Happens, then click “Create Alert.”
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Copy address of orange RSS button with right click


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Don’t forget that pesky Google Bug! Clean the URL, open new FireFox tab and paste the
URL.

——–
Paste in URL copied from RSS button. Hit “return” on your computer’s keyboard.

Add to Google homepage.


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Page

New reputation monitoring gadget in iGoogle

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FYI, There are cool gadget settings, available by clicking on any gadget’s little down
facing triangle. Edit your settings.

Increase the number of feed Alerts displayed.


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One by one, add all the words on the Big List to the appropriate iGoogle tab.

Other search services (other than Google) offer keyword level subscriptions. Twitter is quickly becoming
an essential channel to monitor.  Navigate to http://search.twitter.com.

It’s really easy to subscribe to twitter search feeds using iGoogle.  While there’s
standalone API applications like TweetDeck to watch feeds real-time. Many business
folks want Twitter chatter included in their dashboard next to Google alerts.

Search for your keyword in Twitter Search.

No need to clean, just click on ‘Feed for this query’

Add to Google homepage (iGoogle)


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The gadgets are beginning to add up.

Technorati is another blog search service, where posts are indexed


that sometimes Google does not pick up.  Not every blog is in Google blog search.
Technorati offers keyword level subscriptions by RSS. Subscribe to the entire Big List
in Technorati.

What you can’t see can hurt you. Hidden behind user names and passwords, some 
forums and message board communities don’t allow Google to index them. Some push
to opt-in to board aggregation services making these walled Garden sites’ chatter
searchable and, you guessed it, subscribed by feed.
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BoardReader is a useful search utility, forums opt in to that picks up keyword mentions
that Google does not see.

Search BoardReader for a keyword.

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Once results are returned, sort SERPs by “Freshness.”

Click on RSS button


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The board reader results are on the iGoogle dashboard not too.

There you have it, your sweet reputation management dashboard is beginning to fill
out.

Interpretation tips:

 Skim the dashboard at pre-defined intervals.


 Don’t click on every link.
 Hover over to get text abstract, follow if relevant, use  your brain and check it out!
 Ignore spam as much as possible.
 Set up mission critical keywords as email alerts for archiving and fast notification.
Subscribe to any keyword twice, once by feed and once by Google Email Alert. Not
every channel provides email alerts. Third party tools make it possible in some
channels like TweetBeep does for Twitter.
 Each search channel has a somewhat unique method to generate feed subscription
links for keywords, including 3rd party tools to create RSS feeds for keyword level
searches. Just figure out how to add new channels.

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Remember, iGoogle is just one feed reader. Use the reader of your choice if you
already have a comfort level.
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 iGoogle can be customized graphically with Artist Themes and Developers Tools. It’s


actually pretty amazing to have tools like this totally for free.
This long method of setting up your own reputation dashboard is but one way to do it.

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Method 4: Using Social Mention for a quick and dirty way to build your own Social Media Monitoring
Dashboard SocialMention, FeedRinse, Google Reader, and Postrank

Another way to approach building your own dashboard is to use several free services:
SocialMention, FeedRinse, Google Reader, and AideRSS.

Refer to http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/social-media-monitoring.html

A caveat mentioned is that we don’t know how complete or even “good” the data we’re pulling is –
though we can rank it via PostRank (AideRSS was bought by PostRank a while back).
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Overall, the results of using SocialMention and Google Reader were pretty good – especially when I used
Geo-location (i.e.: Havana Central + new +York+city). With a bit of work and upkeep it’s possible to
also Top Users (for Influencers, Sentiment, Keywords and Twitter Hashtags for further processing).

However, crucial information about users is missing that would make it more useful, and with all the
issues around sentiment analysis, in general, the sentiment of Social Mention is probably not good
enough to go to the bank with.

Once you get your data into Google Reader – or iGoogle or NetVibes, etc , the results aren’t tagged (so
you’d have to do that yourself) and there’s not ability to graph the charts – but if all you need is
reputation monitoring and you don’t have queries that change – and you don’t need alerts – and you
don’t want to spend any money – this solution works.
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Method 5: RealMon9 – yet another free social media monitoring platform, runs on Google’s servers
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/commoditized-social-communications-monitoring-
web2express/

If you just wait long enough – Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space – but in a way, they
already have, indirectly, though their developers using Google’s servers and application frameworks.

Recently I mentioned Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring (refer to my long post with Cecilia
Pinada Feret on  “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media
Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com) but in a way, they have already entered into this space - or, at
least, their infrastructure and code has, via Google Apps, t hanks to a tip from Luke
at OurSocialTimes.com who is also producing Monitoring Social Media BootCamp on March 31st 2010
that I’ll be speaking at (hope you come if your nearby at the time).

…thought you might be interested in this:  http://realmon9.appspot.com/ It’s a Google App for


monitoring (only in test mode) – but cool huh!

Cool indeed!   Mind you, there’s a big difference between a Google Apps Developer getting into Social
Communications Monitoring – and Google – the 900 pound gorilla doing it – but I bet Google is
watching …. waiting … and listening …..

The real question isn’t about what to build to monitor conversations – that’s over; it’s about what to
choose – choice and value.   The information itself is free and potentially valueless (not to say it has no
value – but the only meaning it actually has is in how it’s delivered).
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Think of tubes of paint in the Art Store – before anything is produced – looking and even smelling the art
supplies – that’s marvelous – but once you open up the tubes of paint and apply color to canvas - its
what you do with the information that is meaningful – and it’s part of the factor of weather the Art is
appreciated can collected, or not. Social Information is like that tube of paint you so want to use – but
means nothing without the right context.

So Social Monitoring is a commodity – when you have Viralheat and Andy Beal’s Trackur in the room,
doing good stuff for free or for a few bucks a month – just collecting data is a given – it’s what you do
with that information that now counts, and what I’ll cover in depth in London next month.

Now that we have someone building Social Media Monitoring formally on Google’s Infrastructure – can
Google, itself, be far behind? Does anyone still doubt that Google will dip their foot in our pond?  I don’t
– because they already are – it’s just a matter of degree, now.  Let’s take a closer hood at Web2express
provides the following custom services for social media monitoring:

First, Web2Expres s is powered by  52Page  and is free.

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All the great stuff that Radian6 did with Salesforce.com and WebTrends last year is likely going to be
free, free, free …  this year – the advantage will come from how the data is packaged.  In fact, the only
thing we’re going to end up having to pay for is Time – the time it takes to create meaning from this
data.

As a use case study – the makes of Web2Express are monitoring the monitors themselves, Radian6,
Sysomos, Scout Labs, etc …… just take a look (need to login using your Google Account).  I don’t mean to
make an ant into a molehill here – but we can not but look at this as the attempt of someone who wants
to enter the monitoring space with a free service that others are paying for.  How is that going to play
out later this year and into next?

I don’t see any sentiment analysis – but I do see market segmentation – even though I cannot really do
with this information yet.
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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0iqFhF1o3 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Method 6: using Yahoo! Pipes


I’m not a fan of using Yahoo! Pipes for a Social Media dashboard but thought to include an example of
Yahoo! Pipes for Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp.

Example: http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose

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As you can see – you get what you pay for – the Yahoo! Pipes Social Media Firehouse is entertaining, for
sure, but it’s questionable if such a tool can be trusted (judging from above).

Rather than build any pipes – which run slow (but they do create RSS feeds and/or SMS messages –
there is an excellent collection of Monitoring Pipes available already -
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-useful-yahoo-pipes-to-monitor-your-brand/14320/

Here’s the post my Ann Smarty that outlines the 5 most popular Yahoo! Pipes for Social Monitoring

After Yahoo! SiteExplorer and Flickr, Yahoo! Pipes is the third reason why I love Yahoo! so much.

Surprisingly, I come across too many people who have no idea how to use Yahoo! Pipes and what one
can do with them.

This post is meant remind us of some huge possibilities behind the tool: here are 5 great Yahoo! Pipes
that can be used for brand monitoring for competitive research and reputation management:

Pipe URL Aggregated sites Best feature

yahoo.com, Search for


google.com, technorati.com, multiple terms
Social Media
twitter.com, blogspot.com, at a time
Firehose
youtube.com, (comma
wordpress.com separated)

News sites [Google, Yahoo, Live];


Blogs [Google Blog Search,
Conventional &
Bloglines, Wordpress blog search, Set the
Social Media
Technorati]; Social media [Twitter, timeframe
Tracker
Friendfeed, Youtube, Digg,
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Metafilter, Wired]
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Domain
Social Site
backlinks from
Submission Digg, Reddit
social media
Watch Dog
sites

Content Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, Filters out


Keyword RSS PRWeb, and Google News identical

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content

Del.icio.us, Findory, Flickr, Google


Blog Search, Google News, Google
Meta Search Filters out
Search, Icerocket, Live Search,
Alerts duplicate URLs
Technorati, Yahoo News, Yahoo
Search

Social Media Firehose is a social media search for tracking brand or product mentions on a number of
social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc. It allows to filter your search by location
and to block any domain or phrases from search.

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Conventional & Social Media Tracker combs through multiple blog and social media search engines and
also allows you to filter results based on dates published.
Social Site Submission Watch Dog keeps track of your domain submissions to Digg and Reddit.

Content Keyword RSS aggregates news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo
News, PRWeb, and Google News, compares content, removing same stories and outputting a unique RSS
feed and also allowing you to set how many entries the feed can contain.
Meta Search Alerts aggregates search results from a number of sources and ensures all the URLs are
unique.
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Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

There are a number of free tools that provide a partial solution to Social Media Monitoring – these are
all tools that you had to pay for as recently as a few months ago.

Every day there new stuff happening – take today – Andy Beal announced Trackur  Free Version Of Its
formally paid only  Social Media Monitoring Tool you can use it  free, as long as all your doing is a single
search – that is one smart offer and he’s going to get a lot of people to sign up – and I just did.

Having said that – Trackur’s functionality is so basic, just one or two cuts above Google Alerts – I find it
hard to imagine myself using it – but for someone that is not technical and just wants some basic
information I think the price is right (free).

Maybe I’m missing something  – I’m not even seeing email alerts (which is what Google Alerts does) so
to say Trackur is Google Alerts on steroids seems to be missing the point that doesn’t alert me about
anything.

Would I pay for it if it wasn’t free (for one search) – maybe … but then again, with Viralheat just coming
into the picture – you can get so much more from Viralheat than you can get from Tracker – if I really
only had a few dollars to spend a month – I’d rather spend it with Viral Heat than going over to Trackur –
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but that’s just my opinion.   At least I could do some kind of analysis with Viralheat – not sure if Trackur
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lends it self to a measurement perspective – at least, not today.

But you can drill down and get more information on each item in your feed that your monitoring – and
you can’t do that with Google Alerts – granted.

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I like the  “share this article” link on each item – that’s a good idea and Trackur calculates an influence
score, again, which Google Alerts does not do.

I have a problem with the way influence is calculated – the TrackurRank seems bogus – built on metrics
that don’t really add up to influence, like a bunch of links and blog mentions – at best, both are
extremely shaky proxies for influence.

But … but …. Trackur is free – at least, for one search and if your needs are really basic – and I mean,
really basic – I think this is a good basic package – a very, very basic package.  I’m almost tempted to say
59

that if you are going to use Trackur you could have easily just used Google Alerts – but that is just me.
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Also, I heard about a new tool called SocialWebAnalyzer that just examines your social media presence
and I put in my own website – webmetricsguru.com (this blog).   There’s a lot of link statistics and I’m
not sure how much I’ll use this tool but thought my readers might want to know about both
developments.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0henD2mP3


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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

Viralheat Social Media Monitoring Review and how it compares with other platforms
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I’m currently evaluating ViralHeat and trying to make up my mind on how it fits into the Social Media Monitoring
space, I had an free account for close to a week and was made aware of ViralHeat’s relaunch by Jason Falls who I
saw two weeks ago at Event Camp here in NYC.  Jason wrote a post last week on Viralheat Plants Stake As
Affordable Social Media Monitoring Solution.

Note to myself: This week I was thinking a lot about  what it takes to effectively work with and use a social media monitoring platform
and decided it takes a bit of time and working out on practical applications to get a real sense of how useful it would be to own it or
what the full limitations are. To be fair I had that opportunity withRadian6 and Sysomos and not so much with Viralheat.
However, Raj and Vishal who started Viralheat.com have given me another month to evaluate their platform and I will put it through
it’s paces, but also talk about what I actually see and think of it.

Given Viralheat is a lot less expensive than any of the other Social Media Monitoring platforms I’ve
reviewed- almost anything they come up with makes them a better value for the money than the others if price
were the main issue – but it’s not as simple as that, not a black or white situation.

For example, Google Alerts is free, and essentially provides the same functionality as  ViralHeat (minus the
dashboards, historical data once the profile is running and community sharing) but replicating the dashboard
feature manually with Google Alerts would be  lot of work and time is money.

Still, if it were all about 29.00 per month for 20 profiles/keyword searches vs. several hundred per month  for one
topic profile per month (Radian6/Alterian/BrandWatch, etc) no one would buy anything – since it’s all free – and
there is a lot of added value the platforms I just listed.

And then there’s Google, the eight hundred pound Gorilla and big Pink Elephant in the room  – I bet you anything  some smart
programmer at Google is creating the PR Dashboard of the future in a Mountain View office right now, using their 20% free time,
plugging in using Google Alerts with a nice charting application – and it’s all ready to drop into public view just as soon as Google
Corporate decides to release it - and it will be totally free and will have alerts, have charting – have Google Analytics, forecasting and
trending and draw upon Google’s Industry Segmentation information (in Google Analytics now) – and be better than many of the
platforms on the market now.  I said as much in the article I cowrote with Cecilia Pinada Feret  at MyCustomer.com a few weeks ago
and republished on my blog “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from
MyCustomer.com.
60

So, my first impression is that Viralheat looks really good – at this moment – but remember – as information
becomes a commodity it can quickly evolve to the point when no one will want to pay for  anything, much as
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Google Analytics is priced today (free) and supported by advertisers and publishers indirectly.

Still, what does Viralheat offer and why is it a bargin and the low prices it’s being offered at?

I created a few profiles and noted the data did not update immediately – that threw me off at first, since I’m used
to getting information back from Radian6 immediately and from Techrigy within an hour or so, though
BrandWatch.com can take up to a day, and so with Viralheat, nothing comes back right away – at least, not for the
profiles I set up – but within 24 hours, data was being collected and displayed regularly.

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On the face of it, this dashboard looks good.  Digging in deeper I examined  the details of the profile I set up (yes,
it’s a Cuban restaurant) I didn’t see anything on the Facebook page for the restaurant  (Radian6 would have shown
me this) and I could add the Facebook page as a source, which I can’t do in Viralheat.  A quick question to
ViralHeat’s Customer Service, Raj Kadam, CEO of Viralheat – replied within 30 minutes of my request told me what
I needed to know:

Hi,
Can you give us the link to the Facebook page? By the way, why are you not using Facebook Insights for your metrics? The sole purpose
of Facebook Pages in Viralheat is for you to discover new pages or posts where you can engage audiences and give you a general lay of
the land. For example, if you are running a Cuban restaurant, you can put “Cuban food” and then discovery influential places on
facebook where people hang out talking about Cuban food. That gives you a chance to engage those audiences and drive more
business.
Let me know your thoughts?
Regards,
Raj Kadam
CEO, Viralheat Inc.

Viralheat is not going to try to replicate Sysomos which can get at the Facebook Fan pages you administer (via
Sysomos Heartbeat) or Radian6, which can get the public postings off the same page – they assumed if you care
about your Facebook metrics, and it’s your page – you have access to Facebook Insights and can get the data for
61

yourself.  Rather – Viralheat is focused on helping you uncover content where you as the content creator, can
reach out to and grow your brand presence online.
Page

But then, Viralheat doesn’t offer you any CRM, Workflow administration and tracking that a more expensive
system might offer – but since this is a very low priced, inexpensive platform – perhaps having workflow and CRM
modules is not as important to the audience who would use it.   And, you can still share a social media mention
with a friend via email and contact the author of a social mention in Twitter or Blog, etc – but that’s not Social CRM
(still, it’s pretty darn good for the money).

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And in that sense, Viralheat is a good deal – it’s cheap and it does what it was designed to do – it’s just not the
same exact thing that some of the more expensive platforms do – but that’s maybe that’s ok if your getting started
and don’t have the budget for more.

I found one area ViralHeat is superior to the other platforms  –they freely open their API to anyone who wants to pull data from it - 
ViralHeat is much like Compete.com – in the sharing of it’s data with several application vendors – and this feature has proven to be
very popular and drive api calls to Compete.com and links back from the services using it (I know Ask.com used Compete.com for stats
a while back, but several others have since).
In fact, I’ll go on record -  Compete.com should approach Viralheat and ask them if they can use the Viralheat.com API to pull in
Social Media data to complement Compete.com.
I know Compete is owned by TNS – which could have done the same thing for Compete – except, by doing so they’d be undercutting
their paid intelligence whereas using ViralHeat, they would not have that same problem.
I’ve discussed this idea of merging a buzz monitoring platform with Compete  before with them (but with a different vendor in mind)
but I have no idea if they plan to implement it – but it would be great if they did.

Viralheat is also monitoring Google Buzz, as is Radian6 and several others – here’s a video of the features of
Viralheat:
62Page

There are Influencer lists, which it strikes me is really the same thing as what Radian6 River of News and collecting
the follower/following count and other statistic (from Compete.com, ironically) where you can rank influence -and
in the Influencer Widget that Radian6 provides.

Also, there is sentiment analysis – but upon closer examination – it has the same problems most of the other
platforms I’ve looked at have – and Viralheat is careful to phase negative sentiment as “potentially negative
sentiment” – they won’t come out and declare it since they know they will be wrong a good deal of the time – and
so it is  – look at the results below for negative sentiment and Cuban food – how many of them are really negative

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about Cuban food?

I can’t really say any of the tweets above are negative – in fact, most of them are just the reverse- maybe what we
should be measuring (since we can’t do sentiment well on these platforms) is intensity of emotion - that kinda
can be done -and at least you can decide to look at “intense opinions” and decide what you want to do with them,
if your so inclined.

Noticed you can also get details on what the system considers to be influencers.
63

The Viralheat influencer list is probably not any better than what anyone else can come with but – again, if cost is
your main consideration – than it’s good enough.   And at the lower price of 29 dollars per month I can see my data
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on a weekly basis only – I have to upgrade to get a monthly view.

I also noticed I could add other public profiles to my own – and the data is updated quickly and I’m noting again
how much more of a community platform this is than, say Radian6, Sysomos or Biz360 (though BrandWatch does
appear to have a community aspect built in as most of the queries are public).

But then again, there is no definitions or standards  around what Viralheat is publishing as metrics – and this could
be a problem.

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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

For example, what is the “weekly impact”?  How is it calculated – is this the total amount of content that Viralheat
monitored over a week’s time with my keywords in it?  If so, how does that help me – what can I do with that
information?

Jason Falls weighs in:

The sexy metric I noticed that isn’t as easy to find, though is probably available in other services, is the “Total Impact” which seems to
essentially be an eyeball count. While that metric alone is flawed and not something you should focus on, the C-level folks like telling
their chums over lobster bisque, “Our Tweeter presence reached 14.5 million people last month.” (Which is what Dell’s “impact”
was according to the charts I saw during my demo.)

But then, Viralheat would be playing into the the problems we’re trying to escape from – of viewing Social Media
as a broadcast medium and counting impressions and eyeballs – they’re offering you this flawed metric in case you
want it.

Since I can’t  compare my brand with someone elses in this platform unless I export my brand and my competitors
into Excel and spend a few hours mashing up all the comparisons myself  (you get what you pay for, essentially)
- how would i benefit by knowing how much of the total mentions of my keywords are from me  - esp if I’m a
small business that can’t afford to spend more than 29 bucks a month, or a little more for the deluxe version?

And because small businesses that would buy a Viralheat probably aren’t into spending a lot of time messaging the
data – the good stuff it could provide probably won’t be accessed – since anyone that buy this platform will
probably not be willing to hire an analyst to get insight from it – the same thing that happened with Google
Analytics, by the way.
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When we get to the point where a platform costs next to 0 dollars, with data as a commodity, there is no incentive to drive deep
analysis from it – no desire to staff up for it – no investment in the process – essentially Google fueled that trend by making all it’s tools
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appear to be free.
By we know, as my friend Avinash Kaushik pointed out many times before, that it’s the analyst that creates value and meaning in the
data – but what kind of value and meaning will anyone want to put on cheap data that costs nothing but which you must put a lot of
work into to get much meaningful – in the context of your business?  Nothing – that’s right – 0.  If you buy Viralheat, you don’t care
about investment – you just want charts and alerts for next to nothing – intelligence …. well …. maybe in version 2.

Unique authors might be more helpful – except I’m getting all the authors about Cuban food, though I suppose I
could have written my query to include the brand name (in fact, I did, but it’s still updating the data – I’m thinking
it might take a day to reflect the changes).

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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

And while Viralheat says they are covering Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Videos, in practice, I’m not seeing all that data
coming in yet – and my profile for the Cuban restaurant was running for almost a week – and with alerts too
(which I can setup).  Mind you, my query was quite simple and should have picked up something – the other
platforms did – I have  a similar one running on Radian6 for the last year.

So at the end of the day – how useful is a platform like Viralheat?

I think, today, I would not use this platform if I cared about the accuracy of the results or the dependability or getting all the
information out there – it’s a good first attempt at reaching out into the territory of the other platforms I reviewed, but it needs
another 6 months to a year to mature.

Also, I don’t want to close without talking about Geo-location.  In my profile I can select the nearness to a certain
location I want to see results on.
65Page

First, I don’t know how well this works – and second – changing the radius doesn’t update the results in real time ..
again, I got what I paid for.

In other words, I can’t do any serious analysis on the data – and qet questions answered in real time – because I’m
paying for el cheapo package – which hampers my analytics “what if” skills and abilities.

So this platform isn’t really for me – it’s too basic, too rigid in it’s ability to recast the data in any kind of real time
so I can work through some ideas – and  unsuitable, at this time, for serious analysis work.

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But, if you don’t need to do alot of analysis – maybe this platform is OK.

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Level of Sophistication in Social Media Monitoring

Just read Jeremiah Owyang’s Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Broad vs. Specialized vs. Do It Yourself
where he mentions another way to look at purchasing web technology such as listening systems (I’ve
been spending a lot of time looking at listening systems such as Radian6, Sysomos, Techrigy,
BrandWatch,Biz360, Viralheat, Scout Labs, etc, etc, etc).

Didn’t occur to me to look at Radian6, for example, and say – this platform is the way it is because it’s
aimed at a broad market (it has a lot of features and reports – maybe the one you want, maybe not –
but it can fit in a lot of organizations) vs. something more specialized that is better at a few things but
not really for everyone such as INgage (which I have no experience with – or a solution like
HotGrinds.com, which is mostly for hotels and automotive businesses).

I think it’s worth categorizing the solutions I’ve talked about so far that way, as well as in the more
technical comparisons between their features.

Here’s the grid that was presented in Jeremiah Owyang’s post.

Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Self Serve vs. Broad vs. Specialized vs. Do It Yourself

What it is Examples Benefits Downsides


Get platform
Self Serve Radian6, Alterian/Techrigy,
and provide Flexibility Lack of intelligence
& Free Sysomos, etc.
own analysis
Broad Technology or Buzzmetrics, Radian Wide deployment ensures Configuration and
service vendors 6, Visible Technologies, that the scope can spread specialization for
66

that serve a Cymfony offer a range of to a large set of sites to your particular
variety of services that can be use crawl. In most cases, these market may require
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industries with any variety of companies can scale, and setup costs and
without a industries. On the have a broad base of configuration
specific focus, community platform clients to learn from. efforts. While
side, Jive, Telligent, features may go
Mzinga, Awareness, wide –not all will be
Liveworld* can meet the needed for your
needs of many enterprises. specific customer
socialgraphic
behaviors and

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industry usage.
In the brand monitoring
space, Revinate offers
Technology or Vendors may not be
specific brand monitoring
service vendors Faster deployment and able to go broader,
for the hospitality industry,
that offer features and deployments feature set may
and Kickapps*, Pluck, and
vertical (or are pre-customized for become limited
Cisco EOS*, offer solutions
Specialized industry) deployment.  Experienced when it comes to
for the media vertical and
specific skills, teams that truly get the scaling. Sometimes
recently rebranded INgage
honed in on a nuances of your particular specialization
networks has long history
unique market industry. increases costs of
of serving Government –
need. goods and services.
although they are moving
to the broad category.
Constant rejiggering
Rather than A variety of brands have of features as the
rely on bolted on social features to outside technology
Reduced up front cost and
vendors, many their corporate website space innovates
custom tailored integration
companies using BBS systems, quickly. Often the
with existing systems. A
prefer to build Wordpress, or Drupal like soft costs and
Do It controlled environment
their own social platforms with extensive internal
Yourself not dependent on the
media tools customization.  Or, maintenance isn’t
(DIY) product roadmaps of
and processes developers that build always accounted
other SaaS companies and
and integrate custom installations on for up front, and
increased security
with legacy .net, jsp, php, and other innovating new
measures.
CMS and WMS software languages and features are often
systems. frameworks. not native to
corporations.

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SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Introduction into How to Analyze Sentiment and Benefit from the Insight it Provides – Luke
Brynley-Jones
With just two weeks until Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, we thought we’d give you a taste of the
event with a series of posts about the workshops we’ll be having. First up is Marshall Sponder’s session
called “How to Monitor Sentiment and Benefit from the Insight this provides”.

Marshall has spent much of the last ten years trying out various social media monitoring solutions and
sentiment is one of his favorite topics. In this workshop he aims to explain, in layman’s terms, how best
to use the sentiment analysis features of social media monitoring tools, how to make sense of the
results they produce and how to create value from this knowledge.
First off, Marshall will analyse the different approaches to sentiment from some of the leading
68

monitoring solutions on the market, including Brandwatch, Scoutlabs, Radian6, Sysomos, Crimson


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Hexagon and Alterian (SM2). He will also demonstrate the differences in sentiment analysis results that
these solutions can produce from essentially the same data. Scary stuff if you’re paying good money for
comprehensive results!

One of the other key questions Marshall will be addressing in this session is: when is sentiment analysis
useful and when isn’t it? He will explore which aspects of social media are best analysed numerically and

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identify those where sentiment can offer genuine insight and value, citing examples of how – right now
– businesses are benefiting from each approach.

Marshall will also look at the accuracy of sentiment analysis. In other words, are the results produced
related to the topics we’re interested in? And to what extent can results be improved by filtering out
noise? He will demonstrate how to remove non-relevant search results and how, using your social media
monitoring tools, you can construct queries that produce accurate results.

One of the hottest issues in sentiment analysis is always the “human” or “machine”


intervention question. Should we employ humans to analyze results and rate the sentiment, or should
we develop sophisticated reading technology to rate sentiment for us?
Marshall will offer his view on which works best (in various case studies) and suggest which option is
best for what situations and how accurate you can expect the data from either option to be.

Finally, Marshall will prophesize what we should expect for sentiment analysis over the coming few
years. As one of the worlds’ most experienced social media monitoring analysts – I would expect his
opinion to be around 89% accurate ;)

Examples of Flaky Sentiment Analysis:

1. Most Sentiment Analysis is incapable of connecting what you’re monitoring (the subject for
which you want to know about) and the social mentions the platform picks up and rates for
sentiment. One example was a monitor I set up using a monitoring platform (Crimson Hexagon
Buzz Monitor) for employees of a well known PR firm that went on TV to talk about the
economy.
69

The person said the Economy was going through a “rough patch” and the sentiment analysis
was ranked as “negative” but what we were monitoring is not the economy, but reputation of
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the PR firm – in that context – the remark was neutral (certainly not negative).

2. In a somewhat related way voice translation software has the same problems as sentiment
analysis software – in fact Google Voice – especially in a noisy environment – is as bad at
understanding what you’re saying and transcribing it as Sentiment Analysis that is often used
in Social Media monitoring is bad at understanding what people feel. In my mind, I connected
both things and it made sense that translation software is looking at and having the same issues,
I think, that Sentiment Analysis has, especially around

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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0jQDvyMGZ 
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3. Because there are no standards set in Sentiment Analysis – each platform may process the same
exact information and come up with different sentiment scores – the “quantum” nature of
Sentiment Analysis today make it too unreliable to depend on without human review. Recently I
wrote about how the development of Social Media Standards for Sentiment Analysis might have
a silver lining for profitability – much as the IAB’s VAST standards have enabled profitability for
Online Videos

a. “Development of standards for Social Media Measurement. As I mentioned in slide 11 of


my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring  where Social Media does not
have a standard set of definitions for measurement of conversations, sentiment, or
share of voice to guide vendors in implementation, hampers interoperability of social
monitoring platforms with each other, even though they are monitoring the same
conversations online. Furthermore, implementing standards leads to more profit for
vendors. One example is the IAB’s VAST Video Advertising Standard which
further monetized third party Video Ad Platforms such as BrightRoll.

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4. Lexagraphics provides the Sentiment Analysis engine used in many Social Monitoring platforms
– logic would suggest using the same engine should produce similar results but just the reverse
happens – and I wrote about it recently in a post
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/comparing-social-media-monitoring-
platforms-on-sentiment-analysis-about-social-media-week-nyc-10/ and I came up with the
suggestion that … Sentiment Analysis – buyer beware – for the time being, if you’re going to
have large amounts of data you need to score with automated sentiment analysis – I think you’ll
be best off with Sysomos or BrandWatch, all things being equal.
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I’m open to discussion and reexamining my results (I don’t know a lot of what goes on behind the
interface)- clearly – a lot more deep dives into the data of all the platforms are needed – but that’s
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precisely what most Social Media Monitoring Platform make it hard to do – and yes, a couple of analysts
types have looked at these platforms, including Forrester and Nathan Gilliatt who will be at Monitoring
Social Media Bootcamp with me in London in two months and a sample of his ebook is encouraging (and
the new book he’s working on is going to be even better).

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/comparing-social-media-monitoring-
platforms-on-sentiment-analysis-about-social-media-week-nyc-10/#ixzz0jQGqitpN 
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5. Social Media, in particular, is dominated by people who have often express complex emotions
such as sarcasm, especially in Tweets – and often in blog posts – people like Hugh McCloud of
GapingVoid – are known for their wit – but how could sentiment analysis handle someone like
Hugh McCloud? Think about it

I tried Sysomos Map - one of the best platforms out there to analyze the pages where Hugh McCloud’s
best work is housed, on his blog and guess what?
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In this case, what is being expressed as “negative” (and bear in mind Sysomos is better at
sentiment than most of the platforms I have worked with) isn’t really negative – and any human
could tell that – but it is currently beyond machine learning to tell.

Take Twitter-

Raaphorst: RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq


4 hours and 32 mins ago
72 Page

kenji_rikitake (Kenji Rikitake): Tried to buy a @gapingvoid book on Kindle - very VERY easy. No wonder why Kindle is going to replace paper
books.
6 hours ago

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erdina (Ferdi Zebua): From @gapingvoid: Brands don't need Agencies http://bit.ly/d5sblL
7 hours ago

WhtMttrsNow (K h): gapingvoid - no point stressing out http://gapingvoid.com/2010/03/25/no-point-stressing-out/


26 Mar 2010 18:03:26 EDT

JRWilner (Joe Wilner): RT @gapingvoid people matter. objects don’t. | Gapingvoid http://bit.ly/oEezc
26 Mar 2010 18:03:21 EDT

IanSanders (IanSanders): @gapingvoid that's cool. i'm waiting for sight of the front cover of my first book 'Leap!' in Turkish....
26 Mar 2010 15:10:16 EDT

Rrrrohini (Rohini Pandey): ROFL RT @gapingvoid: Hollywood: Why people don't watch your films any more: http://bit.ly/cfWt3L
26 Mar 2010 15:02:55 EDT
73Page

CatMonahan (Cath Monahan Clink!): RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU


26 Mar 2010 14:43:54 EDT

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jakedavidrohde: Also arriving is @gapingvoid book - Ignore Everyone. Been looking forward to this one for a while now... #HughCrew
26 Mar 2010 14:38:21 EDT

intersection1 (Mark Smiciklas): No point stressing out | gapingvoid http://ow.ly/1rjKt


26 Mar 2010 13:45:02 EDT

vincekamp: @gapingvoid #HughCrew er....well, I'm still waiting for delivery of my first piece 'intoxicated', I guess you need at least 2 pieces,
huh.
26 Mar 2010 12:15:46 EDT

luigipalooza: It's pink. It's nasty. It's pink n' nasty! http://bit.ly/cmXsuW /via @gapingvoid // My feelings exactly?
26 Mar 2010 11:19:55 EDT

theMentalMob: @gapingvoid I'll grant...it's pink...but like I posted on the pic...nasty...unless it's vanity plates on a '71 hemicuda...is suspect.
26 Mar 2010 10:57:12 EDT
74 Page

deannie (Deanna McNeil): gapingvoid cartoon #49 'Poisoned' March 26, 2010 http://eepurl.com/lzL9 Does the world expect us to conform or
do we do that to ourselves?
26 Mar 2010 10:01:11 EDT

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shelisrael: "Poisoned" by @gapingvoid http://bit.ly/9OdAGz http://bit.ly/9Fw8L2


26 Mar 2010 09:58:19 EDT

vincemcgrail (Vince McGrail): RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq


25 Mar 2010 19:40:18 EDT

Soulsailor (Ant Clay): Laughing at: "no point stressing out | gapingvoid"( http://twitthis.com/giesei )
25 Mar 2010 18:58:49 EDT

simonebernhard: Who's that drawing that nasty cube? GAPINGVOID.....RT @gapingvoid: pink 002: http://bit.ly/cmXsuW
25 Mar 2010 18:28:40 EDT

chrisrat: gapingvoid daily cartoon March 4, 2010. http://bit.ly/9BjCL1 /cc @feedly <---mediocrity
25 Mar 2010 17:14:10 EDT
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davidebowman (davidebowman): Have you read Ignore Everybody by @gapingvoid It is freaking amazing!
25 Mar 2010 16:25:05 EDT

lyrois (The Alexander Becker): Exactly. F**k burnout! RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU
25 Mar 2010 15:38:46 EDT

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NewfieGirlplus4 (Catt): RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq


25 Mar 2010 15:37:41 EDT

rtrentthompson: RT @gapingvoid: no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU


25 Mar 2010 15:34:46 EDT

Nospheratt: RT @gapingvoid: no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU // Indeed.


25 Mar 2010 15:26:23 EDT

dinotarantino (McPuffin): RT @daveschappell: no point stressing out. one day you'll be dead and none of this will matter... http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq
(RT @gapingvoid)
25 Mar 2010 15:26:18 EDT
76 Page

daveschappell (Dave Schappell): no point stressing out. one day you'll be dead and none of this will matter... http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq (RT
@gapingvoid)
25 Mar 2010 15:24:53 EDT

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botanicalgarden (Carlo Balistrieri): Here's one for all the taxonomists of the world: RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU
25 Mar 2010 15:23:32 EDT

LorenSan: RT @DavidGibbons: RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out: http://bit.ly/ayDXpU [exactly, in fact none of it will matter long b4 we're
dead]
25 Mar 2010 15:22:09 EDT

bronwynsf (Bronwyn Saglimbeni): RT @gapingvoid no point stressing out http://bit.ly/9ZFJTq


25 Mar 2010 15:21:58 EDT

Sysomos has scored all of the tweets (the top 4 only are shown above) as negative – but does
anyone see anything truly negative in any one of those tweets? Sarcasm, yes, wit, humor – yes,
but those are not negatives.

Top keywords around Gapingvoid’s “negative rated tweets” may be considered negative, in some cases,
but out of context they mean nothing.
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And details around Gapingvoid – as depicted excellently by Sysomos MAP show a man full of humor and
sarcasm

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6. Search Engines have not had much success understanding what people mean when they search
(even Google, with all its scientists – is often showing poor results and people have to search
over and over again to find what they are looking for). Google faces the familiar human
problem – humans don’t often say exactly what they mean (and don’t know what they mean
half the time) – and the search engine is guessing what they really mean.

If Google can’t serve the content people are looking for in many cases (because they are unable
or unwilling to articulate it) then we might end up with a situation of a dog chasing its tail –
we’re doing Sentiment Analysis on content that doesn’t even represent what it’s authors really
feel – and then with the noise created by the inaccurate machine interpretation – it’s almost as
if there is a total disconnect between what a person says, what they express, and what a social
media monitoring platform interprets it to be.

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SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
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Image care of Rick Osborn - http://rickosborn.com/images/tailchase.png

What about foreign languages – if it’s hard to understand emotion in English – how much harder
it must be in Japanese, Chinese and other languages where symbols are used instead of letters.

While it may be possible someday to process human language with a high degree of accuracy for
Sentiment Analysis using Quantum Computing (to simulate the complexity of the human mind),
those advances are still 20 years away, according to the Singularity Summit speakers I talked
with last year.

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Flaky Sentiment Analysis - not accurate or useful most of the time

Did two posts this year on on Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms for coverage of Social
Media Week NYC and Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on content about Social Media
Week NYC 10 examined volume and media types captured by each platform – with very different results
in each case.

What about Sentiment?

Radian6 – 81% Positive and 19% Negative Sentiment

I used “Widget Keywords” which is to say, I told Radian6 to use anything that had “social media week” in
it for sentiment analysis.  I could have used Topic Profile keywords which would have broken down the
results differently, similar to what Techrigy does with “Tone”.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – 91% Positive and 9% negative sentiment


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Considering the number of posts each platform considered, the results for sentiment, on the face of it –
between Radian6 and Techrigy are not as far off as I’d thought they would be.

Sysomos – had 76% Positive and 1% Negative with 23% neutral - again, not as far off as I thought
they’d be.

But BrandWatch was really far off from the rest with only 1% positive and 1% negative – and the rest
of the data was “neutral”.
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It’s clear BrandWatch is more strict with assigning sentiment

Biz360 had 16% Positive and 4% Negative with 81% Neutral - quite a difference from the rest.

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Of course, we need to look at what each platform considers to be negative vs. positive.  More to the
point – would the same content be found in each platform to be negative – or might a negative post or
comment in one platform be considered to be positive by another?

Whew ..that is a hot !!!  How far off can these platforms be?  Remember – same exact query (Social
Media Week New York City) same time period.

Radian6 – none of the 22 tweets that were flagged negative -  were actually negative  when I read then
visually.
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Look – Radian6, to their credit – added Sentiment Analysis by keywords just last month. I want to say it’s
not the platform’s fault that people (me) don’t know how to configure or use it might be intended.

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On the other hand, I put in “Social Media Week” as the keyword to do sentiment around – on a topic
profile about Social Media Week NYC – so …. You figure it out.    Let me put it another way – if you really
care about the accuracy of your results around sentiment – best to look at them by hand and reclassify
them to what you think they are – Radian6 may not be smart enough to tell sentiment.  There- I tried to
be nice.

Alterian/SM2/Techrigy – total wash out - most of the results don’t make sense – only one or two
actually have any connection with Social Media Week New York City – and they’re not negative – at
least, not negative about Social Media Week -

Sentiment Permalink
Negative opinion http://lorimacvittie.ulitzer.com/node/1196850
Positive opinion,
http://jeremygeelan.ulitzer.com/node/665165
Negative opinion
Negative opinion http://yehudaberlinger.ulitzer.com/node/1171610
http://makethelogobigger.blogspot.com/2010/01/one-more-
Negative opinion
thing-about-detroits-problems.html
http://blog.taragana.com/sports/2010/01/23/cammalleri-
Positive opinion,
gets-4-points-halak-posts-shutout-in-canadiens-6-0-win-over-
Negative opinion
rangers-68489
Positive opinion,
http://nytm.org/2010/01/22/january-newsletter
Negative opinion
Negative opinion http://www.megite.com/technology/1264044453/41#item_1
http://kittenlounge.onsugar.com/Sippin-Saturdays-
Negative opinion
Reconnect-Yourself-6965071
Positive opinion, http://kittenlounge.onsugar.com/Wearable-Wednesdays-
Negative opinion Mind-Games-6944987
http://blog.taragana.com/sports/2010/01/19/record-tying-
Negative opinion
53-non-seniors-apply-for-nfl-draft-67110

I realize the Sentiment Analysis part of Techrigy is going to be updated on February 1st, and it will be
interesting to look at these results – then.

People I know at Techrigy have been very nice to me and bend backwards to please – and I really
83

appreciate their support for me over the last two years - on the other hand, as an analyst, a blogger
whose opinion people respect in this area,  for this query – the results Techrigy returned were less than
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useless – they actually are a detractor.  I’m glad there’s an update in a few days – Sentiment Analysis
needs an update, badly.

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BrandWatch – 2 negative results – both were negative

Yes, let’s call a “spade a spade” - these two tweets do have a negative tone. 

Congratulations Giles Palmer – you  and your team won this challenge -  maybe the English got this one
right – sentiment analysis -  at least in this case – the results make sense.

Sysomos - the sentiment results were generally good -  I did not find any negative blog posts according
to Sysomos, so I looked at the positive and neutral posts and I found them to be reasonable in their
classification of Social Media Week Content – many of the Mashable posts about Social Media Week
were listed  and it’s fair to read that as “positive” since they support and give attention to Social Media
Week.
84Page

Unlike BrandWatch, Sysomos didn’t find any negative tweets and classified them all as
neutral - perhaps that is not far from the truth – I would rather have a result be classified as neutral than
have it be flagged as positive or negative by the system when it’s clearly not, having looked at it
visually.   Sysomos treated news stories in mainstream media as either neutral or positive – again,

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Sysomos assignment of sentiment was reasonable – so maybe it’s a tie between BrandWatch and
Sysomos.

What about Biz360? – the negative sentiment selections were pretty poor and looked like the same
things that Sysomos flagged as positive, Biz360 flagged as negative.

It’s really hard to imagine most of what was picked up by Biz360 could be negative – just look at the
titles of the content it selected.  I do like that Biz360 qualifies the reach of a piece of content while the
other platforms that are being looked at here do not offer that feature, today.

Taking this all in – I need to say that I seriously question a “marketer” who builds a Social Media
Monitoring platform is going to come up with a satisfactory solution for many of the things that are
really important to measure – and to accurately gauge.

Radian6 is getting better – but the problem is, as far as sentiment goes – there’s too much that has to
be done on a configuration level to get sentiment right – I know they  will continue to improve – but
85

they also come from a “marketing” background and the Flash Interface, that makes their product look
better than the others, is also, at time, frustrating to work with.
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Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 – well …. they know Sentiment isn’t their strong point – they have a good
technology and have improved alot over the years – yet they too, are built from a marketing perspective
– and that can be a problem, because marketers aren’t that good at technology – that’s the same issue
as Biz360, in my opinion – but look – I could be wrong – hell, I hope I am.

BrandWatch – I don’t know what their origins are – but I have met and spoken to Giles Palmer – who
founded BrandWatch several years ago – and they consider themselves to be the #1 platform in Europe

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– their sentiment analysis seems to be better than most, based on my experience with it so far – and
from what Giles tells me – they do a lot of work to make it and keep it that way.

Sysomos, the more I work with it, the more I like – Sysomos was built by a programmer and a university-
the University of Toronto – and their backend is able to splice and dice data very well – Sysomos is more
like a programming think tank that grew into marketing – yes, their interface could improve – but the
sentiment analysis and noise suppression are excellent.

So, there you have it – Sentiment Analysis – buyer beware – for the time being, if your going to have
large amounts of data you need to score with automated sentiment analysis – I think you’ll be best off
with Sysomos or BrandWatch, all things being equal.

What I found is the results of Sentiment from various platforms examined here usually didn’t agree (the
collection and processing methods vary from vendor to vendor) which highlights the "quantum" nature
of Sentiment Analysis in various social media monitoring platforms today.

What are some examples (from the audience) of Sentiment Analysis you’d like to know
about?

And look, I’m open to discussion and reexamining my results (I don’t know a lot of what goes on behind
the interface)- clearly – a lot more deep dives into the data of all the platforms are needed – but that’s
precisely what most Social Media Monitoring Platform make it hard to do – and yes, a couple of analysts
types have looked at these platforms, including Forrester and Nathan Gilliatt who will be at Monitoring
Social Media Bootcamp with me in London in two months and a sample of his eBook is encouraging (and
the new book he’s working on is going to be even better).

Nathan’s approach, as far as I can tell – is to look at these platforms more as a “buyers” guide – similar
to what Phil Kemelor does with Web Analytics platforms for CMSWatch.

My approach is hands on – how well does these platforms work for what we use them for?

I don’t think anyone else in the field actually does that - and this post alone – shows that.
86Page

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/comparing-social-media-monitoring-
platforms-on-sentiment-analysis-about-social-media-week-nyc-10/#ixzz0hYaIGExO 
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Towards a theory of influence

This is going to be a long post and the ideas have been building up in my mind and everything I’m saying
now came me as a result of drafting my Monitoring Bootcamp presentations in  London late this month
and taking a long walk (like J.J. Rousseau, many of my ideas come to be while I’m walking – sometimes, I
have all I can do to jot the ideas down before I lose them).

Measuring Influence Online

Influence is a very deep subject and I’m sure I am missing parts of the puzzle – I’m hoping  readers weigh
in.

Influence has a number of components which can be calculated independently and often with entirely
free tools; scores can be weighted and an overall influencer rating can be assigned based on what is
found.

First, I hold individuals are influential on select subjects, mainly, and determining online influence
requires the ability to categorize websites and backlinks by subjects.   By extension, we can categorize
87

individuals through the content they author and who links to that content and websites can be
categorized by the following factors, at least:
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1. Web Directories (Yahoo! Directory, Google Directory, to name 2 of the main directories)


2. Analytics Platforms (Such as Compete, Quantcast,Microsoft AdLabs, Comscore, Nielsen, Hitwise)
3. Blog Directories (such as Technorati)
4. Twitter Analytics (Tweetlevel, TweepSearch, FollowerWonk, Klout,  to name a few)
5. Frequency of Keyword Usage
6. Categorization of Keyword phases into categories/segments
7. Twitter Lists

First Deduction:

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Registering for a web directory is a good thing to do now.

Why?

While Yahoo Web Directory sucked and does not drive traffic it is still used by search engines to
categorize your site – and can also be used to categorize conversations and backlinks – therefore….. it’s
a good thing to be signed up to Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory again, but more for
categorization purposes than anything else.

As web directories are often categorized by human beings – it’s going to be more accurate then
automated analysis to segment sites into categories.  I suspect, however, that if your perceived to be an
expert in to many categories it degrades your overall influence.

Here’s what I’m considered to be an expert in (and this can probably be confirmed by the amount of
times I mention those topics in my online content and the backlinks coming to my site)

Note – My readers (Webmetricsguru.com) consider me to be an expert on Web Analytics and Social


Media while readers of my ArtNewYorkCity.com might consider me to be an expert on Art.

But what if I had 10 areas of specialist instead of two or three – would the extra levels water down the
overall importance of any category?

I reason that it would - just like the case of having 300 links on a web page – they all pass pagerank but
it’s diluted by the number of links on the page (think back of “pagerank sculpting” that some have talked
about in SEO circles – though I think Matt Cutts came out against doing Pagerank Sculpting).

Also, those who design algorithms to detect influence make them in their own image – the human mind
may not be normally (with a few instances) be able to hold into short term memory more than, say, 8
88

numbers – it’s not that people can’t have longer phone numbers, for example, but most people could
not remember them if they were, say, 15 digits instead of, say, 7 digits (again, with some notable
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exceptions such as idiot servants).

I believe that we, as human beings, try to make search engines, influence mapping based on how our
own minds work – even though we, as individuals, are far richer – we may not, at our present state of
evolution, be able to “contain” more than a few things at one time.
So – as we function as people – I think online reputation mapping tools are based on the same
“limitations” we as people function on – even though the algorithms technically don’t need to be limited
that way.

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It seems to me – unless there is some other way to do it that I’m not aware of – identifying Influencers
must, by definition, include Categorization that is done on a vast level.

And,  if we have something like this weighting schema – we might be able to test out and see if we can
just get our own influencer list – even out of Google, or Trackur, or any number of free tools that’s
every bit as good as anything we can get somewhere else (providing we take the time to vet the list).

There’s more factors to be sure – but I don’t want to make this first post too long and this at the idea
level right now – I’ll show you examples soon enough.

Do want to say something before closing – I picked a Six Month rolling average rather than 1 year or 1
month or 2 weeks, etc.   A lot of Twitter Influence calculations (i.e.: Klout.net) is too much based, I feel,
on what you’re doing now – in the last day, week, two weeks ,etc – because that’s what Twitter is all
about – the moment – and that’s fine.

But …. real influence is built over time – and Klout’s approach is too much based in the moment.   Take
one example – I go to museums alot  – including Modern Museums like MoMA – there’s all kinds of stuff
in MoMA that is interesting – but it hasn’t been tested much over time – and the whole point of Art in
MoMA and other modern museums is to interact with it today what’s in Museums might be considered
Influential by someone who curates a show.

On the other hand, I walk into the Metropolitan, see Art where there is a general consensus over time
from many curators, alive and dead, and many communities, that value what’s hanging on the walls –
that to me, is more valuable than a bunch of curators who think something is valuable or influential
today (because it may not be, tomorrow, or next year, or 10 years ago).
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Someone may do a lot of posting on a subject for a few days or weeks – then be silent – I think a 6
month rolling period is good enough – anything less might not do it – anything  more (a year, might
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diffuse activity too much).

Yes, this is all very general and hazy – but you need a framework first – before you build concrete
examples.

Reader Comments: Considering twitter bias is a good point. Twitter can be tweaked easier than
blog posts/backlinks/attendances, using RTs, automatic following, etc. Writing two or three blog
posts to a special topic isn’t such a big thing but building a blog and reputation over several
months is a good deal of work. So keep going in that direction 

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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0hXmnhgvd 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Finding Influencers using Social Monitoring


Influencer Method 1 – Comparing Social Media Self serve tools – Radian6, Techrigy, Sysomos,
BrandWatch and Biz360 on finding influencers

I did post about Finding Influencers – based on the idea that being influential is function of

…. being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high
betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles,
or  social scenes, a person is connected to.

What kind of influencer list can we get from the tools I have access to?

Radian6 has an influencer widget that provides a list of sources that are considered influential for the
keywords provided in a Topic Profile (or a collection of Topic Profiles).
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However the Influencer ranking is somewhat dependent on how sliders are set up in the Influencer EQ
dashboard in the Topic Profile configuration (see below).
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Rather than explain what each of these slider bars means – but on the face of it the influencer list
provided by Radian6 in this case, looks good.    You can also drill down to the social profile of the
blog/website owner (if Radian6 has information) (see below) and get various stats like website traffic on
the far right (if you purchase theCompete.com site data).

The Social Profile information is a best guess, I’ve found, it’s often sketchy and inaccurate  – but it’s
better than nothing.  On the other hand, you’ll almost always have to go to the website and get the
91

contact information anyway – so having some information from Radian6 doesn’t hurt.  Unfortunately,
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the Social Profile isn’t exportable, even though the Influencer list, itself, is – a feature I wish Radian6
would add.

I’ve tried to get a blogger list out of the Influencer widget, but found of the 250 sites provided – I had to
throw out about 95% of them – upon close inspection.   The list has often been way too noisy to be
useful in building lists and I concluded the Influencer Widget, despite the name, was never intended to
be a blogger relations list – and had Radian6 wanted to implement such a feature, it could have – the
Influencer Widget is more like a Prizm that reflects all the influential sources (or light) that it found – and
ranks them by Influence (which you define, partly, by the Influencer EQ settings).

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According to this Influencer list SocialMedia.biz, Mashable and SocialMediaWeek.org were the most


influential sites and while there are many good measures here, defining betweenness (Influence) is a
measure of how many social circles, or  social scenes, a person is connected to is  missing – because

1. The Influencer Widget measures the influence of websites, not the individuals who write them
– which is the information most people actually wanted.   Also, you need to drill down to the
actual posts that are influential to find out why that site is considered influential, and
the author of the the posts in question would be considered the “influencer”.
2. The information about “who” wrote the post that is considered influential is buried deep in the
Influencer Widget, making pulling out any kind of useful list of Influencers very time consuming
– and the vast majority of sites usually have to be thrown out – in my experience of using this
widget.

If you have a good clean topic profile, expect to spend 4-10 hours  of hard work to get about 10 – 20
names of influencers out of it.

Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 does have an Influencer Report of sorts and it does identify individuals rather
than websites, and is immediately more useful, in this sense, than Radian6’s Influencer Widget –
however, Radian6 was never designed to create a influencer list – so i see that just as an oversight that
could easily be corrected in a future release.
92Page

According to Alterian/Techrigy, I’m considered the 6th most Influential “author” – and I intend to use
the Techrigy Top Authors report more often.   However, a closer look at this report shows it’s flaw,

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Influence is a function of how many posts an author has done, which is a misleading metric, in my
opinion.   Never the less, you can get the top authors my media type and by sentiment.

For example, if you wanted to get the top authors by negative sentiment you can do that with Techrigy
(see below)

But when you drill down (as I did with Mike Moran, who wrote 1 tweet that Techrigy said was
“negative” – it turned out to be, not negative at all).
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So …. Techrigy problem, to me,  it’s good features are riddled with the same problems all the vendors
are having -  the technology is immature and there is a lack of standards that are not yet in place for
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vendors around influence and sentiment, etc.  But Techrigy Top Authors report could be useful as an
Influencer list for a subject if the noise is filtered out of a profile and you’re willing to accept volume
(posts or tweets) as the measure of influence.

Sysomos Map Top Influencers (based on authority + recent posts) looks right on to me – and the first
blog on the list is the same as for Radian6, SocialMedia.biz – but the rest are mostly different.   Being
familiar with many of the blogs and individuals who write them I think Sysomos Influencer lists are right
on.

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Authority (which I equate with Influence, according to Sysomos) is determined by the following features,
depending on the type of website being looked at:

Blogs

 The number of unique in links to the blog over the last year
 The number of bookmarks at social sites such as Delicious
 Readership information if publicly available
 Posting frequency
 Number of follow-up comments

Twitter

 Followers and Following data


 Number of tweets
 Number of re-tweets

Forums
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 Reach
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 In link count
 Posting frequency

Traditional Media

 Inlink count
 Reach (if available)

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Clear enough – and not bad, since Sysomos does a very good job with noise suppression – but it’s also
not a measure of Influence that I defined at the beginning of this post as a measure of   a measure of
how many social circles, or  social scenes, a person is connected to.

First of all, like Radian6, sites are the unit of measurement, not individuals.  Also, there is no real
attempt at Social Mapping, much as Google is doing with Social Search (see the Social Profile, below).

My sense it that “influence” could develop the kind of “mapping” that Google has just released the first
version of, but hasn’t yet figured out if and why it should.

Perhaps Google’s entry into the Social Monitoring Space(read plus read my long article about Google
and Social Media Monitoring (Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0evICP23S ) will
galvanize vendors in this space to try harder to reinvent themselves -  Sysomos should follow Google’s
lead and start building social profiles with its vast collection of data.

BrandWatch has a Top Sites report that is the closest thing I can find to an Influencer List – esp. if the
sites are filtered by high credibility.
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Honestly, this list isn’t bad and most of the sites make sense – without too much trouble you can get the
names of the authors and their contact information.   The problem here is this report is just a proxy for
Influence, and it’s really designed to be a list you can use to find influentials connected to a profile –
also, there is no social mapping, as I described above.

I would not use BrandWatch to find Influencers as it clearly wasn’t designed for it – neither was Techrigy
– but… at least Techrigy does have a top authors report, which does do influence based on number of
posts where as BrandWatch doesn’t appear to do influential lists, at all.

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Biz360 does have a Top Authors report/widget as well, but not a influencer report – but the Top Author
report is decent, as far as it goes (see below).

… And I can’t argue with many of the names on the list above, except 2 – John Q. Public and Admin.

In fact, by clicking on any author you get a drill down of all their posts for a specific time period:
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Sentiment is also broken down by author


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But it’s not clear if content is being rated by the number of postings or some other factor – and mapping
individuals is missing from this package.

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Influencer Method 2: Using Postrank Analytics to find Influential Blogs

But one other approach to finding influencers is using PostRank Analytics – a free report can be
generated and if the subject is defined (on their lists) you can get good stuff – but if most of the subjects
I’m interested in knowing about – there is no category for.  Still, the list for Web Analytics was / is
impressive (see below).

Social Media Week NYC did not exist as a list of blogs I could get, so I tried Web Analytics, and found my
blog up near the top.   But for those subjects that do exist, Postrank provides the “wisdom of the
crowds” with a change on engagement with a post by the audience.

Still, Postrank and the other platforms examined lacked the ability to map interconnections – and
therefore, are immature.

Klout.com also has an influencer list – or Topic List which is very useful.    However, many words aren’t in
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any list – for example, Klout knew nothing about Social Media Week but does know a lot about Web
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Analytics.

Influencer Method 3: Using FollowerWonk to find Influentials on Twitter

You can enter a search that has both subject, Geolocation and a range of followers or friends  – I was
thinking about helping come up with a list of people to reach out to for #msmbc10 (Monitoring Social
Media Boot Camp) on March 31st (hope you can join me if your nearby). In fact, I supplied Luke with a
list that was close to a thousand names (his was in the middle) in about an hour – and most looked
pretty good.

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One reason I like FollowerWonk better than TweepSearch – it’s much easier to export the list into a
spreadsheet.   TweepSearch has great search functionality but isn’t designed to create a nice report or
list you can give to someone else – and yes, if I was a programmer – that would not be a problem to me
as I could use the TweepSearch API – but I’m not a programmer and it makes a big difference
using FollowerWonk because it cut out 90% of the work I did have to do with manually formatting the
TweepSearch data in Excel.

Here’s what the results look like and just in time to send to my friends in London.
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I saved the entire list in Excel – here it is ….  Social Media Contacts for London- and it took me about 30
minutes to do the whole thing – and to be honest – the information looks pretty darn good.

Why?

Paradoxically, many people use Twitter for business – and so many people are getting on it –
and filling out their profiles dutifully and truthfully, that Twitter is a far better and easier place to
draw up a list of Influentials than any other platform I’ve seen.
Also, try going to a party that’s packed and trying to figure out the occupation of everyone in the
room by  listening to what each person is saying – you’d be wrong 9 times out of 10.

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Listening Systems are like listening to people’s chatter at the party – there’s too much mis-
information the platform can’t decide about.

Therefore, it is much more direct, efficient and simple to believe people describing themselves,
including what they do for a living.  Even if a person is misrepresenting themselves you’ll still
have a lot better information this way than  by using one or more of the  Listening Systems.

There are other aspects of FollowerWonk that I won’t explore (such as Comparisons between
any two or three Twitter accounts)

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Influencer Method 4: Using Klout to find Influentials


Klout.net is another way you can find Influentials on Twitter

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I am not sure how Klout calculates the Influencers.

Also wrote about Traackr last month and it does a good job at identifying  influencers.

But Stowe Boyd is right – none of these tools maps Influencers as well as it could.

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By the way, here’s the Influencers for Social Media Week NYC

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Influencer Method 5: Using TweepSearch to find Influentials

Around Christmas time in 2009, I gave a gift to my readers.   

Finding influentials isn’t that hard if you use Twitter and the right approach – and since it’s Christmas …..
here’s an example of how to find Influential Social Media Analytics individuals – but of course, it’ll work
only to the extend a individuals’ twitter profile has that information in it (and if we get to point where
Semantic Analysis will fill that information in, even if it’s not entered anywhere in the profile – but it’s
accurate – we’ll have something even better)!

– go to www.TweepSearch.com
and enter “Social Media Analyst”

Use Excel Web Query to pull the entire page into Excel (will work with 2003 or 2007 versions)
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Notice that I checked the entire page in the upper right – pull in everything.-

Press “Import”.  The entire page is imported minus any pictures.   You can guess the rest.   You can
collect all 14 pages of data, paste it on the same page then do some formatting magic, which I won’t go
into here, and the collect the data into a nice, neat table.

Let’s step back and talk about why I found influentials this way.  Why didn’t I
use Radian6 or Sysomos or Alterian/Techrigy/SM2?  I have access to all of them – and I use them
a lot – and I tried Sysomos Map, and got some good stuff – but what I pulled
from TweepSearch was actually better than anything I could get from any of the platforms
above.

Here’s why – my holiday gift.

What people “say” when they speak, or when they write, isn’t often an accurate description of 
“who they are”.   Radian6, Sysomos,  Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 and almost all the platforms for
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Social Media Monitoring work by canvassing the stream of conversations – but that doesn’t tell
us who they are – and we know – so we can decide if we want to contact them, or not.
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What a person puts in their Twitter Profile, may or may not be accurate, but at least, it’s a self
identified deceleration of what they say they do, what they say the believe – and it’s much
easier to work with that than work with the “overall conversations”.

It also makes me think I should update my own Twitter Profile to better reflect what I really do –
and maybe, you should too.

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Hey, it’s Christmas, and I might not be able to give in every way I should – and …. Maybe, in my own
way, I came to the awareness, a long time ago, that the more we give, the more we receive – and the
supply of knowledge is limitless.

So if you can’t share money, share knowledge – give some ideas away, because there’s always more –
the supply of knowledge is inexhaustible.

Happy Holidays - Here’s a painting I did last year, at this time.

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Influencer Method 6: Using TRAACKR to find Influencers

Note: TRAACKR is a paid service that is high end influencer datamining application – Porter Novelli has a
partnership with TRAACKR and Crimson Hexagon.

Note:  Crimson Hexagon uses TRAACKR for Influencer identification.

The service is boutique and not inexpensive, but I found it difficult if not impossible to replicate the list
of influentials with any of the tools I have access to – though I think many of the names TRAACKR comes
up appear to be individuals I might come up with in a conventional search, on Google, or using a Social
Media Monitoring tool, like Radian6 or Sysomos – both which have reports that attempt to identify
influencers.

The list above is one that TRAACKR shared with me – it’s part of the top 25 Authorities, according to
TRAACKR, that influenced Public Relations …. and guess what … the names seem to be people that I
know, all of them – in fact, I know almost everyone on the list.
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The Aggregated information for the Influencer List takes a few days for TRAACKR to collect and there is
some human intervention that’s needed – about 70% is automated, and 30% comprises of a person
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double checking the information collected and filling in the blanks, when  necessary.

I thought the lists could be replicated, and I tried one using Radian6 against a Health Care Influencer List
that TRAACKR provided me; after a few hours of looking at the data, I concluded Radian6 was never
designed to produce a report like this, and the amount of work needed to produce an influence list as
clear as this one would be more expensive and exhausting, than just paying TRAACKR to produce one for
you.

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However, the real value of TRAACKR is to produce an Influencer List for areas you know nothing about –
also it would be nice if TRAACKR could produce a geo-targeted Influence List – but maybe that’s asking
for too much.

According to the marketing notes on the TRAACKR website - they do a lot of heavy lifting to come up


with the Influencer List. TRAACKR says it calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to
help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these
influencers.

Methodology

Search
Iterative keyword crawling of social media platforms search for most active users

Identify
Aggregation of user accounts across multiple platforms to build their profiles

Qualify
Scoring algorithms using performance data to calculate reach, buzz and relevance.

Report
Presentation of the data to marketers ranking top influencers and suggesting course of action

Relevance
Ability to cover specific topic/market

Metrics

Reach - Ability to generate views.

Resonance - Ability to spark conversations.


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You can see the list of keywords being used in each list, so you can try replicating the results using other
platforms, but honestly, I doubt you could -though, as I said, you can often come up with many of the
same names in other ways – but not all of them.
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According to TRAACKR – their Online Authority List is a list of individuals steering online conversations
about a specific market or topic. Traackr’s scans the social web to identify the most influential and most
relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List.

Here’s some facts about TRAACKR  – my point being – yes, you can get something useful from
generating your own influencer lists in whatever platform you choose … but – it’s actually more cost
effective to use TRAACKR if your an agency.

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Personally, I’d like to test TRAACKR using a subject I do know about, like Web Analytics – test it
nationally, and test it locally, in, say, NYC – see what it comes up with – would be very interested in
trying that.

 types of media tracked: blogs, micro blogs, photos, videos, reviews, music, social
bookmarks, social networks

 key parameters to qualify influencers: reach, buzz, relevance, quality, network

 average number of sites where Traackr’s influencers and opinion leaders publish regularly
average number of posts by influencer are tracked using Traackr’s proprietary technology

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Influencer Method 7: ECairn Conversation & Influencer Mining Social CRM platform –
Note: USE the promo code: Vke4e for a 10% discount if you sign up

Note: I am an affiliate partner for ECairn because I like what I see in their platform – if your
thinking of taking ECairn for a romp – use the code VKe4e when you sign up to get a 10%
discount – which is a great deal.

When Dominique Lahaix reached out to me about his new platform, ECairn Conversation I wasn’t too
sure what his platform was till I saw it and now I’m playing around with it in a Demo account that was
created for me.

With a thick French accent – Dominique hailed from San Francisco and told me what ECairn
could do (I had a little problem at first understanding parts of what he was saying) – but once he
showed me the platform it began to make a lot of sense – and got me thinking how much Public
Relations, in particular, needs platforms like his.

You can see the main points of ECairn Conversation in the YouTube video below: pretty good results
using Sysomos Map to determine for Influentials and am pretty happy with it’s Geo-location capabilities-
I’ve found it better than other platforms for this – but getting a list of bloggers for any topic is just part of
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the work.

The list still needs to be vetted – contact information needs to be added to each record – a social profile
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of how each influencer can be reached on each social network they are on needs to be compiled. A
contact manager is needed to track outreach to the blogger or influencer and a way of tagging and
categorizing the contact needs to exist – plus a way of sharing a list or series of lists and having parts of
your team work on it – is needed.

I have found most Social Monitoring platforms don’t have those capabilities – but ECairn does. It’s also
true that Radian6’s new Engagement Console will offer some of those capabilities – and so there is an
overlap and a good play by Radian6 to stay on top of Social CRM – but ECairn is really for list building
and it appears to be better in that, than anything else I’ve seen.

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What’s more, ECairn is much less expensive than other options I’ve seen for building lists – and the lists
you build are reusable and can be shared across your organization. In fact, this method of building a list
makes a lot of sense over what I heard last summer from Chris Abraham and the blogger lists his PR firm
built which I describe in detail – here.

Radian6 would not have been suitable but now may be (using the Engagement Console).

I took a romp around ECairn tonight and liked what I saw so far – since I’m using the demo account I
can’t add anyone else, but I could add a list of urls that I pulled on NY Food Bloggers using Sysomos Map
– and in that way I see the use of multiple tools necessary for me as ECairn doesn’t have geo-location
capabilities yet.

Adding the list was easy enough – I also saw how to put in contact information for each blog
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You add this information but when you do so – you have it forever – it’s part of your Social CRM.

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There’s also trending lists and I think a whole lot more.

You can find new conversations from within ECairn – and you can build your list directly there – no need
to import anything if you don’t want to.

I saw more features than the demo allows me to look at – ECairn already has categorized
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many blogs into segments – you can build your own segments from lists you create or use theirs – and I
find that very useful.
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Also, once you build segments – you can analyze the conversations from within those segments – and
the more comprehensive your lists are- the better. In fact, a system like ECairn would be a perfect
acquisition, believe it or not, for Comscore.

Why do it say that – and maybe I’m wrong on this – but Comscore has built this big dictionary of
websites that it categorizes – the list would be perfect to import into ECairn as a starter or seed list – but
what if you could also build the contact information as well – what if Comscore did that? and then
offered it as an add on product?

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At any rate – if your need to build a blogger or influence list – this is probably what I’d use to actually
create the list. Sure – would still use Sysomos to find the influencers – but ECairn is where you want to
store the data.

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Influencer Method 8: Using Social Radar to Visualize Influencer Lists

Recently I spoke with Dave Reed of Social Radar  and we had an interesting conversation about using
Social Radar to visualize influencers. 

I decided to replicate what we discussed using food bloggers in New York City.

First, I used Sysomos Map to find blogs in NY, NJ and CT to find food influencers for Havana Central.

After eliminating duplicates and any blogs that weren’t pretty close to NYC   – I had about 150 urls to
work with.   While Social Radar excels in a certain type of visualization – most have strengths the others
don’t and it’s often neccessary to have access to multiple monitoring platforms for those things each
does better – that works out ok for an agency – not so well for individuals – lucky for me that I have
access to almost any platform I want to look at.    I have found combining them often works better.

Often – I’m curious to see how some of the ideas that pop into my head actually will look like when I try
them out  - that’s the case here.  Armed with my geo-located food blog/blogger urls I fired up Social
Radar and created a Watch list for the url list.   Social Radar took the urls and was successfully able to
add most of them to my Watch list.
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There is a lot of power to the visualization part of Social Radar that really is what makes it stand out and
I figured I could use it to see what kind of insight could come out of the visualizations of network
influence and interconnection of my list.

The first question I have is – who should I first contact?  The answer is…. Eater, Midtown Lunch and
Serious Eats blogs

What I wish for is a way to make a list out of what Social Radar visualizes  – I find the tool interesting but
it’s quite manual to really hone in on influencers in this way – still – there are some nifty and useful
diagrams and visuals Social Radar produces I haven’t seen anywhere else.

For example – here’s a visualization of all the blogs and how they interconnect with each other
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In fact, Social Radar has a unique strength in that you can set up queries that can be answered visually –
such as the interconnected blogs that feature the exact content I’m looking for in my query – I’m
assuming red means – they don’t have the content, green means they do.

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It would be nice if there was a legend that says that that means – I guess there is a lot that Social Radar
can still to improve their visualization engine even more.

The downside – as I mentioned -the visualizations are wonderful but the process of isolating information
is very hands on and manual – it’s good for analysis but maybe not so great when I have several blogs I
want to investigate individually – say 150 of them.  I suppose you could argue that the visual aspects of
Social Radar makes it possible to just hone in on the most important blogs – but in my mind, the entire
list is important – so I’m not sure that just because a few globes are brighter and have more of the right
color halo around them – that they’ll end up being more useful to me than others that don’t have those
things.

Nor does clicking on the globes serve as a hyperlink to the sites – so while you have the actual sites in
your watch list drawn out in an atomic diagram – you can’t really see what your looking at without going
to the site yourself.
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Getting back to the list – I still don’t have any contact information against the blogs – and they haven’t
been fully vetted – but let’s say I could get the heavy lifting done without manually having to go to each
one – it’s not so much the time involved – it’s the tediousness of it – and there is a partial solution – one
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that I bet is used more often than not – using a Web Extractor to pull the information off of the blogs –
when a bot can find it – a program like Visual Web Ripper, for example – which has the following
capabilities -

 Very user friendly visual project designer.


 Extract complete data structures, such as product catalogues.
 Repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values.
 Extract data from highly dynamic web sites including AJAX web sites.
 Data extraction scheduler with email notifications and logging.

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 Custom post-processing and comprehensive API.

To be honest with you, while Social Radar is an interest platform to use – it’s visualizations didn’t
actually make what I was trying to do easier – at best, it added dimension to what I was doing – but it
didn’t simplify it, yet, Social Radar is not the only way to skin this cat – there is another – ECairn – and I
will be exploring ECairn in another post, shortly.

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APPENDIX 1 – Answers to Specific Questions (will be updated


periodically)

Q1. How to best utilise and promote blogs?

A1. The best way to treat blogs is as influencers - I wrote a post mentioning
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/07/two-interesting-meetings-and-the-insights-
from-them/ how Abraham Harrison PR builds and treats blogger lists and how they are used in
PR.

I met Chris Abraham, for the first time (see E.Factor Presents – DO IT YOURSELF PR w/ Chris Abraham) –
I’ve known of Chris Abraham through his internet writings and the work he’s done with the Fresh Air
Fund and, would you know it, SM2/Techrigy.

Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison


Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public
relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation
management. A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for
anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor
to the industries’ leading firms. He specializes in web2.0 technologies, including content
syndication, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.

Prior to starting Abraham Harrison, Chris was a member of the Interactive Team at Edelman
Public Affairs in Washington, DC, consulting clients such as Wal-Mart, Shell, and GE on blogger
and social media strategy. Before Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media
Strategies, a pioneer in online brand promotion and protection with clients including Sci-Fi
Channel, Buena Vista, TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA,
RCA, and NBC.

The presentation was supposed to be about do it yourself PR – we ended up having a one hour
presentation, mostly in the dark, disco club like atmosphere, about the secrets to Blogger PR.
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A Social Media campaign, as Chris Abraham’s company evolved to do it – comprises mainly of Blogger
Outreach and here are the basic steps, as I understand them from what he explained tonight:
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1. In order to run a Social Media Campaign, you must first build a list of Bloggers to outreach to  -
this list should be in the several thousand. His list now has 40,000 blogs and is growing, exists in
several languages and localities.

Note: Chris Abraham suggests using Google to find the bloggers and using search queries such as “best
Cuban restaurant blogs” or “best photo blogs” and manually reviewing the results using hired offshore
workers – digging deep into the search results, building up a contact list.

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Chris off shored this work to India and Russia, saying that automated platforms like Radian6 or
SM2/Techrigy, or an in-house developed tool, are more expensive and less useful than human labor.

2. During a campaign, develop an idea and send it out to 2,000 – 4,000 bloggers on the list  (he
has several lists, developed based on subject/topic/locality) and observe results – at this point, if
bloggers reject the message – the messaging is immediately changed and tried again – till it
works.
Chris goes backwards to make sure the bloggers are happy and always offers the bloggers an
incentive for blogging about his campaign.

In most cases, the outreach to bloggers is accompanied by an offer  - like a discount on a product


and a widget to place on the blog that allows a discount to be passed on to the blog readership.
My guess, is the discounts and widget usage are measured and recorded as metrics to be
delivered in a dashboard of some sort to the client – Chris didn’t talk about that part – but it
seems logical to extend his idea out – if he’s going to go though that much trouble to offer
incentives – he’s got to be tracking the results of the usage of those incentives. If he’s not, it’s
clearly a missed opportunity.

I expected to hear that Chris Abraham and Company, use an automated database contact manager – of
some sort, turns out it’s mostly done manually – and if a blogger on the list doesn’t respond back – he
contacts them the next week, and the next, till they respond – and if they respond negatively, he
engages them, transparently.

I’m sure it makes sense to have this kind of work done manually – I’m not an expert in PR like he
is – but I think we should automate this task in the future – the sooner, the better.

3. the metrics, from a public relations point of view, would be “Media Mentions” along a time-
line.

I’m sure Chris has a lot of other metrics he uses, but the main one, for this kind of outreach – is how
many times bloggers have written about the campaign he’s pitching. Using a time-line of roughly, 90
days, from campaign start to finish – he shows the client, in a dashboard, just how many times, and
when, blog posts and articles resulting from the campaign, occurred.

In any case, short emails are sent out, with brief pitch and a link to a Social Media Press Release where
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all the details are contained – but little else, so they can pass by spam filters on one hand, and, make
come on easy, to begin with, on the other hand.
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Chris feels that when people ask for too much, provide too much detail in the first meeting, it turns
them off. Better let the conversation evolve gradually, than to use it all up in the first email. I agree here
– and it was refreshing that Chris found a way to email bloggers in a non-invasive way.

Chris Abraham was clear to point out that his firm works with all levels of bloggers – he believes that
focusing on A List Bloggers on sites like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web (my examples) would be
ignoring the much larger number of legitimate bloggers who can add value and media mentions – and
who are less jaded than, what he believes, the A-List bloggers may be.

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My take is that if you run a Social Media Campaign, and focused only on A-List Bloggers – you’d have an
very hard time showing a client that many results- you could either get the A-List bloggers, or not – and
if you failed, he’d have nothing to show at all. In a way, this reminds me of Search Engine Optimization
by companies that promise results.

In SEO, it’s known that you can get results on a longer phrase, very easily. For example, if a
client’s business was debt consolidation – getting a first page listing on “debt consolidation”
would be next to impossible – there’s so much competition.

But you could get the client a first page search result on “debt consolidation counseling
services”. True, hardly anyone is using the phrase “debt consolidation counseling services”, so
the traffic benefit of having a top listing, is almost meaningless – but the SEO firm delivered
(something that was easy for them to deliver).

I think the same argument could be made here – you go after low hanging fruit of bloggers that
just want content to write about – and don’t worry about their readership much – then you can
deliver 4,000 bloggers, many of them who’ll write about your client or pitch.

At the end of the evening, and meeting many new people, I thought about how much SM2/Techrigy and
Radian6 should, even now, be able to provide the Blogger list – and how Chris would rather hire people
to use Google, which I question.

Social Profile of an “Influencer”


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That’s enough for one post – one of my longer “rants” but hopefully, with insights valuable to the
community of my readers.

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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0isMEYkdu 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Since I wrote that post last summer, I realized that most Social Media platforms would not supply all the
information needed to build a list – and certainly they can’t house it since most are not built to be Social
CRM platforms (yet). Sysomos Map is my choice for finding influencers but to build and maintain a
blogger list I’d also use ECairn (see http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/ecairn-
conversation-influencer-mining-social-crm-platform/ )

Q2. How to create and maintain B2B Social Media relationships?

A2. Social CRM works for B2B and B2C – in B2B you’re looking for other key businesses and
influentials you can partner with, collaborate with and sell to. I wrote a post about
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/22k-and-altimeter-groups-social-crm-
paper-plus-a-gap/ Social CRM recently.

I also think that Entrepreneur type organizations like The Hatchery, Ultra Light Startups, various
business meetups and presence at key conferences in your industry are the best way to create
and maintain B2B relationships.

In the same way, memberships in professional organizations such as the Audience Research
Foundation (ARF) and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) as other ways to create and
maintain B2B relationships.

Finally, partnerships and strategic alliances are sometimes forged between businesses that help
them support one another. The local Chamber of Commerce is another way businesses are
marketed to prospective customers –with the customer being a consumer or it can be another
business.

Social Monitoring can aid in both the identification of businesses an opportunities for Businesses
to collaborate and

Q3. How to utilise Smartphone apps for B2B?


Refer to http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/11/b2b-mobile-marketing/ for the entire post – as I don’t
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focus as much on B2B in my writings – I needed to find authorities that do such as SocialMediaB2B.com
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1. Location-Based Integration with All Mobile Applications – Integrating location-based


functionality into B2B mobile applications in 2010 will begin to set a trend that will
become standard in years to follow. I will be writing a more in depth post solely about
the implications of location-based applications soon. Meanwhile, in the B2B space we

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continue to hear about consumer location-based applications


like Foursquare and Brightkite. While these applications clearly add a valuable layer of
experience to social networking, the true power of location-based applications sits with
B2B.Social media connects people online, but adding location-based applications to
mobile devices helps to foster online relationships offline. On this blog we have talked a
lot about the power of relationships for B2B. If your organization values relationships,
then location-based is a logical step in cultivating digital customer relationships.
2. Location-based functionality will become common place in CRM applications, B2B social
networks and other applications. I don’t think wide adoption will occur in 2010 but it will
certainly be the start.
3. Multifaceted Customer Service Applications – For years now B2B customer service, a
critical customer retention and acquisition tool has been relegated to a 1-800 number
and an e-mail address. Recently things like real-time chat and user groups have surfaced
as an extension of customer service. In 2010 B2B customer service will begin to go
mobile in a significant way. Not only will customer service begin to go mobile, but it will
also create new customer touch points in the form of mobile applications, text
messaging, mobile chat and more. In the coming year it will not be uncommon to have a
distributor use a mobile application, not just to check on the status of his order from the
manufacturer, but to get push notifications about shipping or production delays, to ask
a customer service rep a question via mobile chat, or see the top questions about a
product in a user-forum.
4. Integrating Mobile Into Tradeshows - Industry tradeshows are not going away anytime
soon in the B2B space. They are a staple cost in most annual budgets for B2B
organizations. However, what has already started to change is the increased focused on
maximizing cost of event sponsorships and employee travel, while at tradeshow events.
Mobile is a major catalyst in helping to boot this ROI. In 2010 B2B organizations will
begin to use mobile communications tools, like text messaging to spread word-of-mouth
about tradeshow parties and events while building new opt-in databases for mobile
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marketing.
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Q4. How to provide ROI on Social Media investments?

Generally speaking – a lot of businesses should start with a broad attempt across all social media
channels and find the ones that work the best – focus on those and build out. In every business there
are strengths that are often taken for granted – but this is the place where it’s best to start.

Here’s a case study about DELL and it’s Social Media ROI
http://innerarchitect.com/2009/06/13/twitter-roi-case-study-dell-generates-3-million-in-sales-
utilizing-twitter/

Twitter ROI Case Study: Dell Generates $3 Million in Sales Utilizing Twitter

Tim Ferris who wrote the 4 Hour Workweek has another post on how he generated 29,585.00 using
Twitter at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/11/measuring-social-media/

Measuring Social Media ROI: A Case Study (Plus: Tweet to Beat


Winners)
Here’s another set of 3 Social Media ROI case studies from ViralHousingFix -
http://www.viralhousingfix.com/2009/11/09/the-roi-of-social-media-marketing-3-case-studies/

The ROI of social media marketing: 3 case studies


Q4. How to turn measurement into actionable results

Suggestions for getting started / choosing the right tool:

Present a comprehensive guide of the social media monitoring tools so that we can easily compare their
benefits. I'd like to go away from the camp with a clear winner of which monitoring tool to choose.

Suggestions for Sentiment / How to build:


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Are we wasting our time with the sentiment debate?

Suggestions for Influence:
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Comparison with off line media world - eg how much is a journalist worth versus someone on Twitter
with 1000 followers?

I think it's quite clear on how to spot the influencers, but what's not so clear is how to engage with them
to ensure they pass on your content

What criteria would you use to define an influencer?

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How to use Social Media Marketing and Measurement with Smartphone’s?


Check out Stomper Mobile - http://stompermobile.com/

APPENDIX B – SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS REVIEWED (IN NO


PARTICULAR ORDER)
ADAPTIVE SEMANTICS - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/adaptive-semantics/
Note: I was invited over to the Huffington Post and seen Adaptive Semantics platform in action at the
Huffington Post last month – but haven’t yet written about what I saw, which goes a bit beyond the
original post. Adaptive Semantics would be an example of a online datamining application that can
increase business productivity.

I’ve known Elena Haliczer for a few years, first at one of my co-chairs of the Social Media Committee,
based in the Midwest, and the Web Analytics Association (2007-09) when I was a Board Director.  
However, since then Elena and her business partner, Jeff Revesz (a brilliant programmer) started a new
company  called Adaptive Semantics, and have landed some very impressive clients, including the
Huffington Post, which is now a part owner of the Adaptive Semantics Platform (see a demo here).

The story of Adaptive Semantics is covered in detail at SemanticWeb magazine in an article


titled Huffington Post Invests in Slice of Semantics and I’ve been honored to have seen how this
company is growing and providing my input and feedback, from time to time.

Elena has told me what they’re doing with the Huffington Post and how much money Adaptive
Semantics is saving – it’s cutting down on the number of editors by half this year (now, I’m not out to see
jobs eliminated, that is the last thing I want, but I do believe work moves up the food chain and with all
the user generate content being created, the human resources to moderate it can’t keep up, not if you
have to put those editors on a payroll).

Here’s more from the SemanticWeb article:

“…..  The online publisher has a minority investment in a company called Adaptive Semantics, Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry
recently told Semanticweb.com. One of the problems content providers have to deal with is effectively moderating postings to
their site, which sometimes can cross the line in terms of the kind of language used or in the expression of extremely offensive
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sentiments. In fact, the co-founders of Adaptive Semantics heard Huffington Post co-founder and editor in chief Arianna
Huffington give an interview in which she asked the technical community if they couldn’t come up with a way of solving that
problem. At the time they had been working on problems around movie review sites, to automatically parse what was being
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said about films.”

I read the New York Times OP-ED articles, particularly Paul Krugman, but I notice that not all of the time
are comments enabled for his articles …. there is a limit to what editors can monitor – and there are
many instances of great content where a newspaper like the NYT doesn’t have the resources to
moderate the conversation.

Enter Adaptive Semantics.

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” …. Editors also have to generally create a whole list of keywords they consider illegal on their sites, including some that are in
and of themselves inoffensive. For instance, they may need to add the president’s last name to the list, because comments
related to political personalities could be abusive and so require a human to take a look before they go live.
The linguistics algorithms inherent to Adaptive Semantics’ technology get around these issues. Jeff Revesz, also a co-founder of
the company, notes that what makes Adaptive Semantics work is that it learns by example. “When someone comes up with a
creative way of getting around filters, the algorithm sees it and learns the vocabulary they use,” he notes. “It is an arms race
between the algorithm and the commenter’s, and the algorithm wins because it learns the commenter’s’ tactics.
Online content providers must train the system, called JuLiA. The Huffington Post, for example, supplied historical data in the
form of comments that were deleted from the site by editors and those that were published, acting on the assumption that
both sets were trustworthy. Its staff went through the set and according to the publisher’s own standards tagged those that
included objectionable content. Following a spot check to ensure the tagged ones are really the abusive ones, it feeds the
information to the algorithm, which then creates a model, or classifier, that based on that data can look at new comments
coming in and determine which are publishable and which are abusive. Of course, this can be tuned based on the publisher’s
feedback.”

Elena described the process of training “JUliA” to me – it’s not easy and it’s very time consuming and
customized to each client – but once it’s done, that engine (with some monthly upkeep) is able to flag
malicious content automatically with a high degree of accuracy.

“…..  The models Adaptive Semantics uses usually have databases of about 250,000 features, single words and keyword
combinations it pulls from the text submitted to it. Publishers’ can choose all the trust thresholds’ when JuLia looks at a
comment it gives a percent abusive score.
“At 80 percent abusive we trust JuLiA to auto delete and at 80 percent clean we trust her to publish,” says Haliczer. “Everything
in between may go to a set of human moderators, which is where the editorial process keeps going. As JuLiA gets more
trustworthy and as editors have more faith in the system, they can adjust trust levels so that at 50 percent abusiveness JuLiA
auto-deletes a comment and at 40 percent automatically publishes it. So that lessens the number of comments human
moderators have to go through and makes sure the ones that do go to them are the ones they can legitimately argue about
what the real decision there should be.”

At my last meeting with Elena and Paul, about 6 weeks ago, I was told 50% of the content could be
moderated right now this way, with JuLiA, in reality, about 25% is being handled by JUliA now – more
likely, by year’s end, half of the content will be moderated by JuLiA:

” …. Currently the system is performing about 25 percent of the total moderation for the Huffington Post, she says — the
equivalent of a job done by three or four moderators, and Haliczer expects that to go up in time as the algorithm is continually
retrained and refined for the publisher’s purposes. It’s been implemented there for just about two months, starting at about 10
or 12 percent of moderation to where it is now.”
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In our meeting several weeks back were talking about taking this model of JuLiA to Product Review sites
like Trip Advisor – and then, possibly Search Analytics / SEO and SEM – and perhaps, Social Media.
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” … Revesz says they are working on ways to apply it to identify product reviews to judge whether they are legit or not. Sites
such as Trip Advisor have problems with ‘planted’ reviews by hospitality companies, for example.”
“….  The semantics of a fake review vs. a real one are discernable,” he says.”

If you stop to think about it – with the migration to Social Media and the large amounts of participatory
data that is being generated – the need for intelligent systems for determing the quaility and intent of
content is growing rapidly.

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Actually, I wanted to work Adaptive Semantics in on of my articles for Entrepreneur Magazine – still
looking for the right approach for Small Business – it’s likely to be that when your growing a business
you want to concentrate of creating great content and interacting with real people – and a company like
Adaptive Semantics is creating a means to do that, and that even applies to small business owners and
Entrepreneurs via the WordPress Plugin for JuLiA.

There’s an Adaptive Semantics Blog where you can also read about the newest developments of JuLiA.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Adaptive Semantics is going – but bet, it’s going to go far.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/adaptive-semantics/#ixzz0jO3EaQbk 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Alterian Techrigy SM2 - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/alterian/

This is more of an idea, at this point, finding the “Sophisticated” or “Intelligent” customer
using Alterian/Techrigy/SM2; the SM2 platform, unfortunately, doesn’t make it easy to export data
necessary to do this simply – but it’s doable.  Is it accurate?  I don’t know – it’s never been tried before,
to my knowledge.

Here’s the situation – you’re a business that caters to a level of sophistication – but how do you isolate
that?   Proxies for “sophistication” might be “education level”, “income level” etc (you can get that
from Quantcast if you really want it).   Another measure of sophistication might be “emotions” –
specifically, emotions surrounding a specific profile that is focused on a business or of an event nature
(for PR purposes).

Most Social Listening platforms will break down sentiment to “positive” or “negative” with about a 60%-
70% accuracy level (last I heard) and a few will do “Tone” (i.e.: strongly positive, strongly negative, etc)
and one of them, I know of, attempts to do “emotions” - Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 – the problem is – we
don’t know what emotions correspond to the customers we might want to reach.
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In this case, I examined people who might be interested in a certain type of restaurant experience  – and
if I looked at some of the results and identified “sophistication”, for example, maybe I could take all the
results and sort them for customers who expressed a certain combination of emotions, and then
“segment” those results and call it “sophistication”.

This would be trial and error, though the main problem – Alterian doesn’t export results on “Content
Emotions“  (there is a work around in Excel using Web Queries, but its ugly and very time consuming to
pull the data this way) nor does their comprehensive reporting include the emotion breakdown – and it
should.

If Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 could export the Emotions report in this format – you could select “buzz” you
liked and see if there was a pattern by just browsing results – then I could sort my “emotions” table,
above, and get combinations.
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What I want to see – in short – say I defined, by looking a series of results that listening package picked
up that my ideal “customer” has the following profile:
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I sort my results to get anyone who fits in with these settings – keep on testing and refining the “master
table” or “lookup key” till I’ve defined setting that consistently give me decent results.

I’m not claiming this kind of “emotion” report is accurate – though I suspect a lot of the quality of this
kind of reporting will depend on a few factors:

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1. “Tightness” of the profile – how specific you’ve set up a profile so you get only relevant results in the first place.
2. “Nature of the query” – I found food and consumption easier to gauge in terms of emotion – than, say, complex
situations, like an election, or health care, or energy, etc.  The more “grounded” the query, the more likely that
emotions will equate to feeling we have, say, in our “gut”.
3. “Accuracy of the emotion algorithm” – it’s been noted by me, and others, that positive/negative and emotion
detection in content is pretty tricky to gauge  well – my guess is that people don’t normally say what they mean,
anyway, and often emotions are conflicted – so we’d assume that what we’ll see is a number of emotions that are
present – we just want to get the right ratios.
4. Traffic of the source url – right now, Alterian uses Alexa whileRadian6 uses Compete, which is probably a better
source – but neither can deal with individual urls – say a blog post – or tweet – they can only deal with website traffic,
and that’s an estimation – usually not the real traffic numbers.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/alterian/#ixzz0jO4jJLHD 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

BrandTology - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/brandtology/

I spoke with members of the Brandtology team over the last week – they are a one of the largest Social
Media Monitoring / Online Intelligence service providers in the world (so they claim – but what is
“large” in this field?) with well over a hundred employees who focus on serving  global organizations
across the world.

Until recently, had no idea Brandtology existed or who they were.

In fact, if I had been looking more closely – would have noticed Brandtology was nominated for  the Always On fourth annual
OnMedia Top 100 Private Companies competition under the Web and Media Analytics category.  Also mentioned Brandtology a
few months ago, without really focusing on them in a post about Edelman’s Tweet Level tool – see Tweet Level – my post also
got picked up by Social Media Today because of the Brand Digital Index work they are doing with Edelman.
Finally, Brandtology is attending Re:think 2010, The ARF 56th Annual Convention + Expo in NYC in a few weeks – as they are a
member of the ARF – I may meet with them when they are in town.

Brandtology is among the “high end” platforms  (also, one with an odd name, just like  Synthesio  which I
wrote about the other day).  My guess is that Brandtology and Synthesio would not see themselves as 
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similar – and maybe they are not – both are high end platforms for large companies -  who require 
precision and structure not obtainable  with self serve platforms like Radian6, Alterian, Sysomos and
BrandWatch, to name a few.
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Nothing against the self serve platforms – it’s more that once you get past the exploratory stage – a company might need to
have data that is organized in a very specific way.  For example, many large corporations use custom metatags to drive
automation and high end features of their sites – I know IBM.com does this because I worked on aspects of it when I was part
of IBM’s Web Effectiveness team a few years back.    I noticed in Brandtology, aspects of their reporting that could support and
work within that customization. Also, Line of Business reputation monitoring – by country and language – not that easy to do in
self serve platform – it seems to me that when you need reporting on that level – your going to have a platform like
Brandtology.

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Of course, everything come with a price – to get really meaningful reports with highly accurate
sentiment analysis that is focused just around your Brand is going to be more costly.

The Brandtology experience is much more structured than you might be used to  -  keyword analysis
being done up front (they have use of a “Workbench” tool for research that is used internally to do ad-
hoc analysis that support configuration and set up of accounts) and a ticketing system that is probably
more elaborate than your average vendor – but the main thing they offer that structured data – where
every bit of it is verified and fully vetted before the client sees it.

As a client logs in, here’s an example of what they first see –


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As Brandtology strives to organize reputation monitoring to mirror the clients’ web presence,
internationally, they are able to mirror it with a greater degree of insight – see below:

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This doesn’t look much different,  on the face of it, than Radian6 – a self serve tool – but there is an important difference –
Radian6 doesn’t attempt to mirror your actual website in it’s selections – Brandtology, to my understanding – does.

Now, if this walk-through seems a little vague – it is -  Brandtology is very protective of it’s client list
and did not want to go into too much detail - they showed me what their platform can do – but I can’t
evaluate their claims since I can’t set up their system and test it myself (though I could get them to let
me use Workbench  – their internal ad-hoc query tool, but I didn’t do that)  – it just doesn’t work like
that – similar deal with Synthesio.
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You, the client, can drill down very atomically into the data with confidence a few people have already
touched the data and make sure it’s relevant to your company and brand – obviously, Brandtology
works closely with your Brand (hence the name) so they know what you want – that’s the “high end”
model they use – and apparently, it must work well as they had a lot of multinational corporations based
on the list I saw; they are big enough, infact, to want to be intentionally, under the radar – and that’s
basically, where they are.

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Drilling down to the item level – again, doesn’t look that different than any of the platforms I looked at
previously – there is work-flow management to some of the other platforms like Radian6, Sysomos
Heartbeat, Scout Labs now has work-flow management, Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 has it – what they lack is
the human vetting – all of this data – checked and re-checked – when the Brand sees it – it’s as clean as
it can be.

You can also drill down but what they term as  a “channel” and see viral growth of the messaging around
your brand (hopefully, your message is growing) and you can also drill down on that growth.  By the way
– based on Brandtology’s categorization – a blog is a channel and in the case of  review sites – they can
be broken down to the sub channel level – again – here’s where the human interaction with the data
makes the results more immediately useful to the Brand.
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Talking about metrics – Brandtology has a visualization of data that is very close to the Digital Footprint
Index model I wrote about last year (see A Social Media Scorecard based on Digital Footprint Index) – in
fact, when I  tried to create my own DFI Scorecard with data I collected from a non-profit and then chart

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it in 3 dimensions – I was stumped  - I didn’t know how to represent changes in height/width/depth in a


meaningful way based on the data I collected – but Brandtology has such a visualization (see below):

I bet Ryan Rasmussen of the Zócalo Group would be interested in this diagram above – it’s how
Brandtology represented the changes in three dimensions over time – the main thing that’s missing here
is an “animation” of the data – which I brought up to Brandtology as a nice to have feature they ought to
develop.

I asked Brandtology to show me an “Influencer List” and here’s what they presented (below):
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The “influencer list” doesn’t appear much different, on the face of it, as any of the other platforms I
reviewed - I pointed out that most people, when looking for Influencers – want a list of people, not
blogs – along with contact information.

Similar to channel growth – but different – is “voices” growth – and this chart shows how your
messaging is growing by counting a source of data (such as a blog) only once -you can say that voices
chart is similar to counting unique visitors in Web Analytics.

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I suppose, you can get from Brandtology an influencer list if you wanted it – just by drilling down on the
voices chart (below):

To summarize this long post – I can’t tell you how well this platform works – I can’t really compare it to
anything else I have used as I cannot load it with my own query and compare the results. At some
point to sell a platform like this – there is probably a bit of a coordinated sales and marketing along with
recommendations that are important when going after larger clients.  In their own words …..
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We are one of the largest Business and Brand Online Intelligence service providers that combines technology, processes and
trained professionals to deliver accurate and relevant intelligence to global organizations.
We have more than 100 Social Media Specialists in 10 locations around the world who are able to verify and enhance our
automated machine analysis in more than 9 different languages. This ensures very high accuracy and relevancy of the analysis
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reports provided to our clients who do not have to waste a moment sieving through irrelevant data.

Brandtology has what it takes to get the job done  - but in this case Nathan Gilliatt is in a better position
to evaluate  Brandtology than I am (Nathan Gilliatt wrote the Guide to Social Media Analysis, the
worldwide buyer’s guide to tools and services for listening to social media) and I’ll be presenting with
Nathan at Monitoring Bootcamp later this month in London and at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in
New York on April 13th.

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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/brandtology/#ixzz0jO64sN7G 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Compete Pro – note: I have been an advisor to Compete.com for at least two years and am
credited with supplying them ideas which they have at times used to develop their platform.
A new release is coming on May 15th 2010 with an idea I supplied them with that becomes a
new feature of Compete.com – stay tuned.

Compete.com has had a great platform for some time, and they’ve been very supportive to the blogger
community and open to ideas I’ve floated to Compete over the last 3 years – so I want to round off this
year and decade with a thankful post, to Compete.com and some of the newer features they provided
(and in February 10, there will be more, I suspect, some which I’ve influenced).

Paid Search Traffic reporting – only available in Compete PRO – allows the comparison of paid search
referrals between one or two websites as far back as two years and I find it very useful, and fairly
accurate, based on my own experience of using it on sites whose analytics I had access to, including Paid
Search traffic.
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Compete.com comparison of paid search traffic between Met Museum and MoMA

Lately, as part of a Social Media Audit of a client sites and their competitors – Organic Search rankings
AND Paid Search traffic have become relevant additions to the Audit – but getting the Paid Search Traffic
has been difficult – using tools like SpyFu, it was possible to estimate campaigns, to some extent – but

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Compete’s PRO Paid Search solution is the best overall offering – especially as this shows the spending
habits, overall and down to the keyword level using Compete’s intelligent filters (see below).

I picked the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA because they are not clients of mine – one can never be
too careful about writing about sites where there is a paid connection – best to avoid it – even when the
information is positive and useful – as it’s not always taken that way,  er … nuff said.

Getting the amount of Social Media Traffic is made easy by Competes’ filter for it – though they do not,
as yet, allow us to compare traffic between two sites specifically on Social Media – it’s easy enough to
get the same information – and that’s useful to chart progress in Social Media campaigns – an additional
improvement would be to include trending lines going back 2 years, like they do for Web Traffic and Paid
Search traffic, etc.

While the traffic information you get from Compete PRO isn’t as accurate as what you could get from
site analytics, when it’s properly set up, the ability to get readings on competitors, more than makes up
for it.

Another part of Compete that comes in handy, at times, is the Industry Profiles – I have access to some
of them and, when dealing with client sites, for example, as part of PR, Social Media or Search Audit, it
can be very useful to see how a site compares with it’s own industry (when a site is categorized – which,
in many cases, it still not).
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Here’s a Industry Profile of the Dating Social Network segment up through November 09.


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You can see the individual rankings of the 269 sites currently categorized in this category by Compete
(note: you cannot, currently, categorize sites, yourself – but you can request that a particular site that is
currently not in any category, be added to a specific category).

Overall, there’s a lot to like about Compete.com’s search and referral offerings and I’m looking forward
to the next update, soon, as the platform keeps getting better and better.

First thoughts on Compete.com’s Category Profiles

Recently ,  Compete.com released it’s Industry and Behavioral Category Profiles I looked at the Web
Analytics Industry Profile first:
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What the chart tells me is that traffic (Unique Visitors) is going significantly Y2Y (+31%) and, in the
performance tab, you get average stay, average visits and average pageviews per visit for the entire
category.  What’s valuable to me, first off, is that you can compare any company on the list in a
category, to the average, for that category, which is helpful in finding deficiencies and strengths.

You can also look at keywords used most by the Industry Category (see below)

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Using Compete.com to find unusual sources of Traffic

I looked at Compete.com Keyword Destination Tool for some keywords and found thinks that really
surprised me.  For example, when I searched on my own name, I found the only destination
Compete.com showed was one I’d never, in a million years, have found, using my site referral logs:

Further investigation found this photo of me at the Roger Smith Hotel for a Charity Event I went to
recently.   You would have thought that Compete.com would have picked up the main traffic on my
name as going to one of my blogs – but it gave me this, instead.   Hmm.
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I also found it interesting that, according to Compete.com, the singular and plural form of a word like
“entrepreneur” has different results in terms of where traffic ends up at – probably a function of
how Search Engines work – take a look
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Entrepreneur

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Entrepreneurs
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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/compete-search-analytics/#ixzz0jO7nQGJ8 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Google Wave – why it’s not ready yet - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/google-wave/

While in Montreal  recently, coming in from the cold, warming up from icy temperatures outside, I
found myself intently reading Howard Greenstein’s post on   Google Wave’s Massive Potential for

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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

Business Users and found it masterful (especially, tying the ideas of Daniel Levy on  Group Dynamics  of
teams).

Howard made me want to run back to my hotel room and play with Google Wave (which I’ve been
neglectful doing over the last two months I’ve had a Wave account), perhaps finding a way to tie Google
Wave to Social Media and Web Analytics,  but as I logged in to Wave, noticed quickly that there was no
compelling reason  to use it (yet).

Plus, using Wave in  Firefox, crashed it (but a lot of applications crash Firefox).     Still, I myself thinking
about critical mass and inflection points, that not enough people are using Google Wave, yet, but as 
more people use  Wave – it will become  a dominant platform for communication and collaboration and
transform our lives.

I think it makes a lot of sense that Google Wave has the capability to  unify every part of  a project, and
all it’s modes of communications, under one grouping or unit (which can also be broken down in several
ways with out losing it’s cohesiveness); and, I’m  wondering if Google Wave could be part of a larger
answer, tying together strategy and  Social Media return on investment.

So how would Google Wave do anything for Analytics?

For one thing – there’s so much duplicated communication in email now – often so many virtual team
members working on a project over different time zones, containing all of that work in one unit, called a
Wave – is a marvelous thing – and if we have some kind of tracking mechanism we might be able to
135

“optimize” Google Wave – perhaps Google Wave will have plug ins to tell us what the optimal resources
for any Wave project … based on the activity taking place within that Wave; that might, in turn lead to
staffing changes.
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Another possibility for Analytics is tying different “silos” in companies together using Google Wave, in a
new way – and Wave clearly isn’t there yet – but if we have data and sales information in different
formats – all over the enterprise – and it’s difficult to assemble it now, it’s possible within a few years –
Google Wave will become the “glue” that makes it much easier to pull all that “disparate” data into one
view – and up to an executive level scorecard (see my post on Influencer Scorecard, The Chief Influencer
Officer & the transmutation of Social Media and PR).

What about Social Media?

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As there are often many efforts underway by a Brand at any moment – tying blogger relations, campaign
management, online video management, event planning, marketing, etc, together could be done within
Google Wave.    Perhaps the Social Media ROI debate that is likely to begin gelling in 2010 – will take
place with Google Waves.

That’s one Google Wave, I want to surf.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/google-wave/#ixzz0jOKaJp6J 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Google Social Media Monitoring - “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s
Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/ive-been-saying-this-is-coming/

This post is an enhanced adaption of an article that just appeared at MyCustomer.com that I wrote with
an associate, Cecilia Pineda Feret.   While the text is identical, I added images in my post that do not
appear at MyCustomer.com as I was concerned this article was already very long (but I’m not as worried
about it here at Webmetricsguru.com).   I asked for permission from Neil Davey who publishes
MyCustomer.com, a Sift Media Property based in Bristol UK,  a to publish my article here.

– The text is identical and to view the original go to MyCustomer.com and sign up.

Big brother and Google’s entrance into social media monitoring


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As a web and social media analyst I am predisposed toward any service that merges customer data with
site analytics information and online conversations – which leads me to the following bold, as some say,
prediction. At the Monitoring Social Media 09 conference last November, my presentation included the
statement: “Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space within the next 2 years.” (For more
information see Slide 15 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring).

Google, the largely Orwellian company that claims to “Do No Evil,” takes web site traffic data and
correlate it to news, search trends, purchasing activity, search activity and browsing activity throughout
the entire web. As I will be discussing Social Media Monitoring as part of my one-day conference in
London on March 31st, 2010 at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, I have further developed my
thoughts from last November.

Based on my own assessment by looking at the available platforms today, there are no Social Media
Analytics vendors or Online Reputation Management Services capable of matching Google yet. I think
Google’s entrance into this area would be mostly helpful to some of the current entrants, many of them 
could end up going out of business or being swallowed up by others. For a recently updated list of Social
Media Monitoring Vendors see  StephenDebruyn.com.

Data that could be used for Social Media Monitoring is collected from our search history, websites and
web presence. Google collects 18 months of Web History (down from 24 months of a few years ago) and
can view and search from the full text of the pages you, or anyone else who has ever logged into Google.
Once it acquired DoubleClick, Google integrated DoubleClick’s browsing pattern tracking with Google’s
web history tracking to have a full spectrum of access to our web experience at its fingertips, including
what sites we ultimately visited after leaving Google’s site, and what products we purchased
subsequently.
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Note: Google added Twitter updates on some queries in early December 09 as shown in the above screenshot (blue box
appearing on the right).

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A natural fit?

By logging into my own Google Dashboard, I can see all the information Google collects about me
including the number of Google Analytics accounts I have access to, my Google Calendar data (so they
know where I have been and where I’m going), my purchasing history via Google Checkout, if I use that
for online purchases, all the people I know via my Google Contacts/Address Book plus the information in
my Google Documents, the textual analytics around my Gmail correspondences, my Google Reader
habits and what I liked and shared on it, whom I’m following on Google Reader and who follows me. In
addition to information it collects about us via our Google Accounts and websites, Google Search now
displays real time data from Twitter and Facebook highlighting relevant search results.

Above: logging into my Google Dashboard offers a vast array of Information Google has on me or anyone else with an Google
Account, yet they are still not showing everything they have.
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Google also knows my age, zipcode and activity (ClickStream) giving them a 360-degree visualization of
me and anyone else like me who spends a lot time interacting with the world via the web. Magnify the
data Google collects on me by the number of Google Accounts (unknown at this time) and you end up
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with an unparalleled collection of information – what John Battelle calls The Database of Intentions as
he describes in his book, “The Search.”

In addition, Google’s real time information about us has been improving exponentially, especially for
business activity. Google knows our location in physical space via Google Mobile (and our movements,
where we were, are and where we went next), our advertising activity and our profit or costs on Google
AdWords.

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According to an analysis of 4 million websites done late last year by Factual, 28% of all websites are
being monitored by Google Analytics. As of 2007, 108,810,358 websites existed — the way things are
going, the number has probably more than doubled by 2010. Using 2007 numbers, Google Analytics was
likely to track about 29 million websites then, and tracks probably closer to 60 million sites by now
assuming the rate of growth has at least remained consistent. In all likelihood, it is much more than my
conservative estimate.

Keeping in mind all the information Google collects on us, why shouldn’t it enter the Social Media
Monitoring space with their own suite of solutions? After all, they already have entered many other
areas where they are considered one of the top or THE top application for that area: Advertising,
content, health, commerce, mobile phone, power monitoring, news, and web analytics tracking. It
would be a natural fit for Google to enter Social Media Monitoring.

A vision of the future?

While Google has yet to formally compete with Comscore, Quantcast, and Nielsen in audience
monitoring on web platforms, they can easily draw upon the categorization of services, create their own
categorizations, and, to some extent, already have within Google Analytics Benchmarking and with
Google AdWords. Any website owner can compare their own traffic with other websites in the same
category – the data is anonymous, but highly indicative and useful.
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Note: Google’s Benchmarking is available when you share your data autonomously within Google Analytics.

What might a Google Social Media Monitoring platform look like and what features might it have?

Free, easy to use, and accessible to anyone who has a Google Account.
Any website monitored by Google Analytics would also be monitored for mentions against specific pages of the site, much
as WebTrends reports referral logs to Radian6, but, in this case, it will be Google Search feeding Google Analytics seamlessly
much as Yahoo! Search feeds Yahoo! Pipes.

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Google Alerts, which have already been built into Google Analytics, via its Intelligence features, could list any mention or event
that surpasses a preset threshold. Google Analytics already does this for site events such as more page views, visits or time
spent on a page than normal based on trending algorithms that Google has employed and maintains for each Google Analytics
account.
Google’s entry in Reputation Management could also take the form of a coordinated response to online mentions using a
version of Gmail, with preset templates already set up for the site owner to respond to negative or positive buzz.
Specific solutions might be offered using an advertising campaign with AdWords, including on YouTube where links would be
provided in response to a specific action or mention, so that the site owner or business could take immediate follow-up action
and have the information appear in Google’s properties counterbalancing or supporting mentions as the case may warrant.
Google could or would charge the User for running advertising against the responses, but the User, for the most part, could or
would use Google’s Reputation Monitoring service for free. Google could create and maintain a PR/Management Dashboard for
individuals and entities.
Reputation Management could also be added to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Now a site owner can monitor how often
their websites are crawled by Google, any problem encountered, and is able to use a response form to communicate directly
with Google when there is a problem with their site. Google can find information on the web relating to each page of the site
and place it in Webmaster tools for response by the owner while still passing the data to Google Analytics for analysis, trending
and alerts.

Note: Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard could be enhanced to handle Reputation Management on a page and site level.
Paid Advertising via Google AdWords (or AdSense, if you’re a publisher) could be integrated with brand mentions in Social
Media that appear in Google Search and tied to landing pages monitored by Google Analytics. ROI could be calculated, perhaps
for the first time, for Social Media efforts across most or all of your marketing channels.

As Google has almost all the pieces in place to do a better job of social media monitoring than anyone
else, why hasn’t it formally entered this space yet?

Simply put, until now, the Social Media Monitoring space wasn’t big or important enough for Google to
get involved, it was still a niche market in its infancy, according to Forrester.
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So far, much of the online marketing budget for Businesses has been focused on Search (Paid and
Organic) and not Social Media. In addition, Google may be hesitating until the market grew big enough.
Page

Meanwhile it has been increasingly viewed as Big Brother; where Google’s entrance into monitoring is
likely to amplify fears that Google knows everything about us and will use that information for its own
best interests at own expense.

But, in 2009 the tide began to turn in favor of Google dipping its foot into Social Media Monitoring
as conversations began to be viewed as markets with a whole class of technologies emerging to help
companies keep track of the online conversations. Last October two key events happened which helps
Google justify enter the Social Media Monitoring space.

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 First, In-Q-Tell, the investment arm of the U.S. government that also serves the C.I.A  bought a
stake in Visible Technologies, one of the largest Social Media Monitoring vendors. This action
sent a signal to Google and the business investment community that Social Media Monitoring
was on the verge of becoming a big business (one that Google may want to be part of).

 Second, the FTC released its Blogger rules defining the scope and penalties around monitoring
blogger payola and Social Media endorsements.  As more and more businesses and individuals
seek to monitor online reputation the market for Social Media Monitoring is becoming much
more crowded with bigger profits for the main players such as Visible Technologies, Radian6,
Buzzmetrics, et al.

I suspect Google has considered entering Social Media Monitoring for some time now and has been
quietly working on its own offerings, poised to enter the market at any  moment and dominate it, as
Google has proven over and over. Often Google acquires companies to enter a space such as the recent
purchase of AdMob to enter the Mobile Advertising space.  

The Google acquisition I am most familiar with is Google  acquiring Urchin in 2005 and making   it a free
product to anyone who opened a Google Account. However, I do not believe Google needs to acquire a
Social Media Monitoring Platform as their own products are at least as good as anything they could
acquire and they have everything they need to launch their own solution and tie it to their existing
products.

How would Google’s entry in the Social Media Monitoring be good for the existing players in this space?

 Google’s entry into any business area raises the visibility of that sector  and further legitimizes
the business model of that sector.

 Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring will force monitoring vendors to cooperate with
each other and improve their offerings, just as Google’s entrance into Web Analytics encouraged
vendors to differentiate themselves from Google Analytics,  focusing on features such as event
correlation, segmentation and rich media tracking, features Google Analytics did not initially
offer, but does now.

 Development of standards for Social Media Measurement. As I mentioned in slide 11 of my


presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring Social Media does not have a standard
141

set of definitions for measurement of conversations, sentiment, or share of voice to guide


vendors in implementation, which hampers interoperability of social monitoring platforms with
Page

each other, even though they are monitoring the same conversations online. Furthermore,
implementing standards leads to more profit for vendors. One example is the IAB’s VAST Video
Advertising Standard which further monetized third party Video Ad Platforms such as BrightRoll.

 Most vendors prefer not to share information with each other, however, with Google’s presence
in this space, they will have more reason to do so.

These are just some of the reasons for Google to formally enter the Social Media Monitoring space. Of
course, the usual suspicions regarding Google’s intentions as they enter any business are likely to

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surface again. Accusations of being BIG BROTHER haven’t stopped Google before, and it probably won’t
stop them now.

Marshall Sponder is the founder of  Webmetricsguru.com, an industry blog about  Web Analytics, Social
Media and Search  Marketing. He also writes a monthly column forEntrepreneur.com on helping
businesses to leverage  online marketing  technologies successfully in a challenging economy.  Marshall
maintains his own Analytics Consultancy, Now-Seo, working with small to large marketing agencies. He
is also producing NY DataStories , events offering networking and analysis of business metrics. Follow
him on Twitter: @webmetricsguru

Marshall will be presenting at the Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp in London on 31 March. A one-
day master class hosted by Our Social Times, MyCustomer.com readers can receive a 10% discount by
quoting the discount code ‘mycustomer’ on registration. For more details on the Bootcamp click here.

Cecilia Pineda Feret is an Online Marketing and Community Strategist at Accent Resources Online
Presence Development where she provides online and social media strategy and creates content and
engagement for entities such as Havana Central and StupidCancer.com. She also chairs the Social Media
Committee for Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York as well as co-producing NY
DataStories. Find her blog: splashthenripples.com and follow her on Twitter: @cecipf

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/ive-been-saying-this-is-
coming/#ixzz0jOMMeWMe 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Reputation Ranger – already covered in this eBook - here’s the original post
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/reputation-ranger/

Social Radar – already covered in this eBook – here’s the original post
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/using-social-radar-to-visualize-influencers/

Social Radar - also see http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/social-radar-update-and-


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romp-around-first-impressions/
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Here are my first impressions of Social Radar – a Social Media Monitoring platform that I’ve heard good
things about but had yet tried.   I noticed that many of the monitoring platforms (Radian6, Biz360,
BrandWatch and now, Social Radar) have tried to improve the interface where a customer interacts –
most often, the platform hasn’t really changed much but interface (user experience) is improved.   That
was certainly the case with Radian6’s recent Widget Update and that’s also the case with Social Radar’s
update this weekend.

When you first open up Social Radar – there is a variety of things you can do.

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I picked “Health Care Reform” as it’s a pretty “safe” query for me to use plus everyone knows what is
going on with it, for the most part.

I first noticed the Query Builder – which reminds me of Sysomos and BrandWatch – both have nice
interfaces and tools to build and store queries.
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It was easy enough to build a trend chart around Health Care Reform – and that chart can be absolute
(number of unique posts) or Normalized (this is a seldom seen feature of monitoring tools – in fact this is
the first time I’ve seen that functionality in any SM tool – not sure why it’s needed though, maybe
Page

someone from Social Radar can explain why they offer it and how it can best be used).

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Running Analysis – I notices some very nice features that expand on the basic functionality of Word
Clouds but it’s the visualization tool that is the most engaging aspect of Social Radar.

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I have a healthy distrust of flashy diagrams and visualizations but it seemed like Social Radar did a pretty
good job tracking Health Influencers – to be honest – I recognized a few names in the diagram as well.
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There’s a custom report builder that lets you pretty much create your own report the way you want it – I
haven’t seen any equivalent in another Social Media monitoring platform and the closest analogy for it
would be Google Analytics Custom Reports.

You can search for RSS feeds and get the details of any feed you find – but – this functionality is hardly
unique – Radian6 does the same thing, more or less – the thing that makes Social Radar interesting. to
me, is the interface.

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There are some other nice features that I’ll write about in a few days – I liked what I saw so far, yet
nothing that I saw was that different from what other platforms provide- but the interface might be
nicer.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/social-radar-update-and-romp-around-
first-impressions/#ixzz0jOPBUnCO 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

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Social Radar Comment

Brooks Morgan 03/10/10 @ 1:37 am

Thanks for the informative post Marshall. To answer your question about the normalized post
result -

We normalize posts as a percentage of overall conversations collected each day. We do this


because we use our own proprietary crawler to collect data rather than APIs (this allows for
better data consistency & reduced duplicate posts/spam among other things). Our crawler
started collecting content from a mere few thousand sources in January of 2007 and has
crawled from link to link to find new sources ever since. We are now pulling data from millions
of sources all around the world.

When you are taking a look at short time ranges (a few months or less) the differences between
normalized and absolute post counts are difficult to distinguish, but when looking at long time
ranges (the tool allows 3 years on any topic) you see an overall increase in post counts for any
and all topics because of the increase in the number of sources we are tracking. Hence the
option for normalized post counts.

Thanks again Marshall! Looking forward to the rest of the series

Best,

Brooks

VP, Biz Dev


Infegy Inc.
brooks[at]infegy.com
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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/03/social-radar-update-and-
Page

romp-around-first-impressions/#ixzz0jOPnSn9Y 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Crimson Hexagon – Note: I work at Porter Novelli at the time of this writing and Crimson Hexagon is a
strategic partner of Porter Novelli – I use the Opinion Monitor frequently, as well as the Buzz Monitor –

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in my work for Porter Novelli. My opinions about Crimson Hexagon are my own and do not represent
Porter Novelli in any way (since I’m working for them I have to say that).

Note: this is a segment of a post done last year -


http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/10/looking-forward-to-monitoring-social-media-09-in-
london-part-2-%e2%80%93-november-17th/

So far, Crimson Hexagon seems to have gone the farthest, of all the entrants in this Social Media
Monitoring arena, with the potential implications and applications of merging qualitative with
quantitative data, but they have yet to carry it out nearly as far as they could, or should, in my opinion. 
It would be nice is someone from Crimson Hexagon was in the audience – or even, on a panel, but I
don’t think they’re going be there – they should be.

Developing the idea of merging – what if Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of Obama’s HealthCare Speech last
month to Congress, using Twitter accounts only,  captured not only the opinions about how people felt
(qualitative data on sentiment and opinions- see below)

But what if Crimson Hexagon also collected the Twitter accounts of each opinion along with the opinion
mapping? 

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/crimson-hexagon/#ixzz0jO9w34R4 
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Under Creative Commons License: Attribution


Page

ECairn – already covered in pages of this eBook – but here’s the original post
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/ecairn/

FollowerWonk – already covered in pages of this eBook – but here’s the original post
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/followerwonk-and-influentials-is-it-better-than-
tweepsearch-yes/

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FourSquare – already covered in this eBook – but here’s the original post -
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/foursquare/

Google Local Business Center – with associated social media analytics -


http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/mobile-qr-codes-and-google-local-business-center-
perhaps-the-missing-link-needed-for-social-media-measurement/

When I read a MobiAds post stating Google Puts QR Codes On 100,000 Stores , I got an intuitive flash  QR
Codes could be the missing link to social media monitoring attribution, the one we’ve been looking for.

QR Code for Webmetricsguru.com - note: the second QR code is a special gift to readers.

We know 2010 is said to be the year of Mobile according to EMarketer, or was it 2009, with a statement
that ..

… The fusion of mobile and social and the appetite for apps (among both consumers and brands) will continue unabated. In
fact, location- and social-aware apps and utilities will be a key avenue for brands looking to engage consumers on the go.
Cheaper Smartphone’s and smarter feature phones will help marketers bridge the gap with consumers, but the onus is still
on marketers to provide consumers with a measure (and measurable degree) of utility, relevance and entertainment.
148

Enter Google’s Local Business Center which every business ought to sign up for AND an interesting


factoid that is not generally known ….
Page

….In a move to link online content to real world locations, Google has launched a new QR-code based Favorite Places on
Google program. Google has identified the top 100,000 most searched stores in the US, and has sent them a window decal that
includes a unique QR code. When consumers scan the code with their phone, they go directly to a Google mobile web Place
Page about the business.
…. After a company is registered in the LBC, Google identifies the most popular by keeping track of how often consumers search
for that business, how often they ask for directions, etc.
Periodically Google will send out an additional wave of window decals to a new set of “most popular” businesses. There is no
way for a company to request such a decal, it has to be earned though consumer interaction.

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Consumers can then interact with the Place Page in various ways. For example, they can read reviews to see what other users
think about the business, they can find any coupons that the business may be offering, or they can leave their own review of
the business.

This program, which is currently running only in the US, is based around Google’s Local Business Center. Companies that have
registered and added their information to the LBC are eligible.

When I read that – immediately, I saw it’s potential to link back to the Social Media ROI, the part
everyone wants to have using that QR code.  I’ve maintained for years that technology isn’t really an
issue, the means exist to track just about anything you want, now, in full Technicolor details,  including
cross channel conversions, and even, engagement.

If it’s possible to track Social Media ROI, why haven’t we?

It’s hard.   You have to agree with what you want to measure and set up your tracking for
every possible circumstance ahead of time – and who is willing to do that?     Most people
aren’t aware of all the things it’s possible to track, much less how to track them
using Analytics.

With the QR codes linked into the Local Business Center – where you can also add a lot of your business
information and list coupons, you now have a way of tracking Social Media, if you want to think
strategically.

I also think Google should let every business listed generate it’s own QR code and link it into Google
Analytics, as it appears to be doing for the 100,000 businesses it has already generated codes and decals
for.

The issue isn’t really reading the QR Codes as most mobile phones are capable, with the right software,
of doing so.  Since Mobile Phone adoption is so widespread, it seems likely that Social Media ROI will be
plugged into Mobile Phone and Mobile Application growth – meaning that the two will converge and
have been with applications like FourSquare.  According to MobiAds …

… One current barrier to adoption is that a consumer has to have a barcode reader installed in their phone in order to scan the
code. However, with the proliferation of App stores and free barcode reading apps, this should not be a problem at least for
owners of Smartphone’s.
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So how would it work?    How could you take a brick and mortar business, say a local restaurant chain,
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and turn it on to Social Media ROI using Google’s Local Business Center and QR codes?

A local restaurant (as shown in the introduction video) can list menu items, hours and coupons (all which
are tracked by built in Google Analytics, based on what I’m seeing in the video).  Since Google is now
including Twitter’s real time feed into Google’s Search Results AND is trying to do the same
with Facebook (to the extent that privacy settings allow for updates to be published) the analytics in
Google’s Local Business Center should be able to co-relate community advocacy with social media
activity driven by it.

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When the customer prints out a coupon from Google Local Business Center … OR … shows up as the
restaurant for a meal … and uses the QR Scanner on … say, the menu items, or a special offer … they will
be tied in directly the promotional efforts and ROI from the Social Media activities will be established.

All we needed, then, was a way of working, of conceptualizing how to tie Social Media and the enabling
technology to tie in the actual act of taking part in Social Media – of being influenced to show up at try a
meal – all of that, I think, can be tracked using the QR codes.

Now, that doesn’t mean most businesses are doing that now – they aren’t – but they could.      The
answer is not technology by itself, but strategic thinking AND technology together.

Now what we need are some use cases and I will work on producing one or two this year – one that can
be shared with online community.

Right now, we need to go and try it – let’s see what happens when we think up of a program we want to
track and get the pieces in place.  While Google doesn’t generate the QR codes for 99.9% of the
businesses that need them, you can still generate QR codes easily on your own with QR Generators such
as QR Stuff.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/google-local-business-center/#ixzz0jOILfHRA 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Note – a reader left this comment

Tom Miller

01/11/10 @ 11:59 am

QR is an open standard. You can find QR code generators online. For example: This
one from Kaywa.

Marshall,
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I worked on a campaign for CES that used QR codes and developing tracking for them isn’t
always a simple exercise. The code gets more complex (higher data resolution) with the amount
of data within it, so longer URL’s (such as those that have been tagged for analytics) produce QR
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codes that are more difficult to machine read. Also, you can’t use URL shorteners because of
differing support for redirects within mobile browsers. Also, you (obviously) need to account for
mobile browsers in your landing pages.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/mobile-qr-codes-and-google-
local-business-center-perhaps-the-missing-link-needed-for-social-media-
measurement/#comments#ixzz0jOJZqhq3 
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Synthesio – here’s the original post http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/synthesio/

Had not planned on writing a review of Synthesio tonight but after talking with and “seeing”  Michelle
Chmielewski, Synthesio’s Community Manager, on the Agency Video for Synthesio,  figured now was a
good time to write some brief but nice things.

There are so many platforms that are in this space, evolving quickly and until recently I was not aware
of Synthesio or what they had to offer.   In the last two weeks I have had meetings with Synthesio
(virtual, viaSkype),  Brandtology (skype) and  HotGrinds (in person, with Claude Vogel and Mark Dingle)
and my mind is almost exploding with all the information that is coming in – and I like it that way, but
sometimes, it is overpowering – but again,  I like that way.

Still, one thing all three platforms have in common – Synthesio, Brandtology and HotGrinds – besides
their odd names (for example, I have a real problem pronouncing “Synthesio”) is they all provide “flashy”
dashboards that are customized for each client and they all rely on human vetting of the data a
customer sees. Another thing they seem to have in common is large Multinational Corporations among
their clients who are willing to pay for data that is cleaned up and categorized by humans.   Prime
Research has much the same thing – perhaps even more so.   I haven’t written about Brandtology yet –
awaiting on their permission to use images from our meeting and on HotGrinds – I may have an update
and post on then soon.

It seems there really is a low end, middle ground and high end in Social Media Monitoring -
and Jeremiah Owyang may have said much the same thing in his post recently on Social Technology
Buyers Matrix: Broad vs Specialized vs Do It Yourself.

From my point of view – the low end is the free tools that anyone can use, some are more sophisticated
than others but can do some amazing monitoring if you don’t need a high degree of precision.   In the
low end are some tools that are power but are inexpensive enough, and simple enough, that any one
can use them or afford them like Viral Heat.   Someone who chooses the low end tools may just want a 
quick answer or maybe they are not sure what they want – and are just searching around and are willing
to take the insights such tools can offer as they come.

The middle ground is filled with do it yourself type platforms for analysis such
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as Techrigy, Radian6, Scout Labs, BrandWatch, Biz360, Sysomos, etc.   The middle ground platforms let


you explore social media monitoring on your own but are generally much more enabled than the free
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stuff you can get a hold of.  But the middle ground is full of platforms that don’t agree with each other in
even the most fundamental measures of amplitude of messaging and sentiment of messaging – and
they are often not easy to customize to the particular needs of anyone’s organization but can do well in
a number of settings, as long as you don’t mind putting in extra work and time to set them up with
specific requirements.

Then there is the “high end” tools – the ones that humans help to filter – like Synthesio and Brandtology
– they are for organizations that want data structured very cleanly and in just such a way as it will be

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useful to them – plus the companies that use it are willing to pay $$$$$$ to get a custom dashboard
with data following in that they can immediately act on.

So … what does Synthesio offer that makes them special?

There’s a “Flash” Demo that shows you want the product might be like for a client once it’s live – I
compared Honda, Audi and Toyota in Italy – I wasn’t offered the US as an option for this demo but I did
see Synthesio is offering US data once you sign up.  I can’t really say that much about the demo except
it’s beautiful – but that’s not neccessary an endorsement from me because I can’t do much with the
demo but type in some names.  In other words – I don’t have any experience actually using Synthesio, so
I can’t say how it would work for me.

On the other hand, since a Synthesio dashboard is created for a client – it’s unlikely that anyone who
hasn’t actually signed on as a client will be able to talk about the platform in depth.   Synthesio has a
Dashboard “wizard” that sets up the request form with details of what you want to track and mails it to
headquarters where someone will reach out to you shortly.   Synthesio also  has some large clients -
most are in Europe and Asia.

At this point – what else does Synthesio offer and have?  Their community manager is very warm –
Michelle Chmielewski and Synthesio is a sponsor of Monitoring Social Media BootCamp in London next
month and I’ll be meeting most of the Synthesio team in London for the conference.

But I do want to say that platforms like Synthesio – because they must be set up for a client, and do
require a bit of human monitoring on the backend – while they often provide superior insight, are not as
easy to compare as the platforms like Radian6 and Sysomos that I can fully configure myself.

As a result – i can’t put Synthesio through it’s paces because I don’t have a working version that I control
– perhaps, when I meet Michelle and the rest of the team in London, they will show me more about
what Synthesio does on the backend, and a live dashboard of a real client.

Finally, I was mentioned on the Synthesio blog yesterday in a post on 3 ways to identify influencers in
social media and I found my ideas described in a different way than perhaps, I would have expressed
them, so I actually read the post carefully to see what Michelle said that she said, I said/wrote:
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Identify influencers at post level


While the site on which information is published online affects how influential the information may become, an article (blog
post, forum thread, tweet, etc.) itself can become more or less influential over time depending on how many times it has been
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shared, where, with whom, etc. Marshall Sponder pointed out that it is the influence of an author that may weigh more heavily
than that of the actual site (and will be speaking about it in London in March) ; why not go to the post itself ?

Here’s how I would say it – much of the traffic that comes to a blog comes from a small number of blog
posts I have written, and most of the rest is long tail traffic from the thousands of other posts I’ve
written over the last 4 years since I began writing at Webmetricsguru.com.  I said as much, years ago.  
But I also said that when using a Social Media Monitoring platform to identify influencers – what we
want is not a list of blogs – but a list of bloggers – or the influential themselves – and some contact
information – the more the better – actually something closer to a list of journalists you’d get out of

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Cision Point – or something like that.   Hardly anyone thinks that way – they don’t think in terms of the
end user – what they want.   I think that’s what I meant.

Michelle also mentioned (and might have referred to my posts) TweepSearch (I’m liking FollowerWonk
even more now) as an easy way to identify influencers on Twitter.

Have to admit, Michelle’s description of what I said might be better than what I actually said or wrote –
I’m OK with that.

As far as what Synthesio actually offers – my feeling is the best place to go is the Synthesio blog as
features and case studies are being shared on the blog.   And if you’re in London on March 31 st I’ll be
there, and so will Synthesio – Join Us at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp March 31st, 2010 in London

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/synthesio/#ixzz0jOSJJsiF 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Viralheat – already covered in the eBook – here’s the original link -


http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/viralheat/ (note – a new “influencer” report has been
released since I last reviewed Viralheat.com)

Radian6 – I’ve published numerous posts on Radian6 – here’s one of the latest posts and a link to my blog where
you can find out more - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/radian6/ Also note Radian6 is
coming out with the Engagement Console in April 2010 which is a complete re-write of Radian6
to facilitate Social CRM

Radian6 announced new features including Quick Start (which was actually present for a few weeks – I
think) according to their newsletter.

New Features in Radian6: Quick start, Widget Gallery and Influencer Enhancements
Radian6 has rolled out some key new features, available in the dashboard, to make it easier to dive into the data:

1. The Quick Start feature lets users create Topic Profiles quickly and easily, allowing them to get started with their
monitoring faster and easier than ever before.
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2. 44 Pre-configured Widgets allow you to pull insights crucial to your business without having to learn to configure
each widget.
3. Influencer Widget Enhancements allow you to do deeper analysis of the entire influencer landscape around your
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business, and help you see both the high level snapshot of who might be important to you, and the drill down into
details on metrics and specific results.

Radian6’s Social Media Monitoring Platform Now Tracks Google Buzz


Google Buzz allows users to generate unique updates both from the web and mobile Buzz applications. Now our customers can
continue to receive a complete view of the discussions about their brands since we have expanded our social media coverage to
include Google Buzz.

We knew about Google Buzz tracking– but I had not explored Quick Start yet – so here’s a Quick Start of
Quick Start.

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1. Create a new profile

2. Enter your brand

3. Enter your competitor (optional)

4. Track your Industry (optional)


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5. You get a Topic Profile Summary – very nice


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Now you get to see a bunch of widgets (45 in total) that Radian6 configured for you – incase you want to
use them – I think this is the kinda of stuff Chris Newton was speaking to me about last year when I had
a talk with the Radian6 CTO on the phone.

Very nice!
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Here’s an example of the Social Media Metrics Widget Collection which has 12 preconfigured/prebuilt
widgets you can plug in – taking a closer look, many of these widgets aren’t hard to build, and many
cases are the same widgets but with a different color scheme.

The Widget Collection is probably more for a beginner to help them see what they can do with the
platform that much faster.

For me, the Influencer Widget improvements are more meaningful

The Influecers are broken down by media type – where they were not, before.

You can also drill down on each influener in more detail – most of that functionality was available before
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– but this is much easier to look at and work with.


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Finally, you can also view the Influencer results as a tag cloud – this is entirely new – not yet sure how
that helps me or not – but I think I’ll need to play with Radian6’s new features.

My gut feeling, based on what I’ve seen, is this upgrade is directed to improve the interface – I need to
look at the actual results and ease of use – but that will be for another post.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/radian6/#ixzz0jOUpNuqP 
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Sysomos Map - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/sysomos/

Sysomos MAP is the platform I use the most lately – found it overall one of the best tools a marketer can
have – and it’s useful for a lot of things besides Social Media Monitoring – such as Keyword Research for
SEO/SEM.

Using Sysomos for keyword research - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/using-


sysomos-to-find-keywords-for-your-seo-and-sem/

I noticed features of Radian6 and Sysomos that are goldmines if used in a certain way, and this post is
about something I noticed in Sysomos Social Media monitoring that absolutely blew me away.

Take, for example, the Social Media Week NYC work I’m writing about this week – how could I use
Sysomos to get keywords to build pages around, to advertise around?
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I have been saying for a few years that Social Media doesn’t have Keyword Tools the way that SEO and
SEM has, but Sysomos has done something that is somewhat similar – but it’s hidden away in it’s Text
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Analytics for Blogs, Twitter, Message Boards and News data sources.

The exact selection is “Entities” which is a collection of persons, places or things that Sysomos Map was
able to isolate from all the web pages it scanned for a profile.   While the extracted Entities (see below)
are somewhat useful – and can be drilled down for more detail …

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it’s the “Popular Phrases” that were pulled out of all the Social Media content that Sysomos crawled
that got me very excited (see below)…
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If we compared this to the kind of “garbage” stuff that Google AdWords Keyword Tools


and WordTracker give us – you’d see sheer difference in SEO/SEM keywords you can get by pulling
phases from pages that exist – based on your “interested” and “engaged” communities, instead of
Google’s desire to have you spend money of AdWords and AdSense… which is what you get when you
use their tools.

And you can drill down on a Phrase, like “Social Media Mastermind Conference” and find the pages that
phase came from (see below) as you might need to know the context from which a phrase arises so you

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can determine if and how you want to use it in your own copy.

By the way, here’s all the keyword phases Sysomos extracted from Social Media Week NYC.  So if your
tired and stuck using the typical keyword tools we’ve all had to live with, try something new.  So far, I
haven’t seen any other platform offer this particular capability – and it’s hidden, under the hood, so to
speak.

Social Media Week advances


Social Media Business Council
SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK PRESENTS
Social Media Club gatherings
Social Media Week Registration
Weekly Social Media Event Guide
International Social Media Week conference
New Social Media Mixer event
Social Media Week play
Social Media Week Story
Best social media programs
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Annual Social Media Week conference


Social Media Business Summit
Own social media strategy
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Social Media World Forum


Social Media Week Berlin
Social Media week Toronto
Social Media Week NYC
Global Social Media Week
Social Media Week schedule
Social Media Mastermind Conference
Worst Social Media Campaigns
Special Social Media Week celebration
Live Social Media Experts

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Top 10 Social Media


Social Media Week website
Social Media Week differentiates
Social Media Week brand
Social Media Week London
Upcoming Social Media Week
Media Week New York
Social Media Week Registration
Social Media Week Event
Tweetmeme Social Media Week NYC
Media workshop
Jewish Week
Media Week NYC Registration
New voice
Social Media Week extravaganza
New York
Future Journalist
Digital Media
Rich media
Media practices
Media consultant
Canadian Film Centre Media
Social Media Week NEW
Media Week Toronto
Media editor Shirley Brady
Media journalist
Media accounts
Media Group
Business Week social media editor
Media communications agency
Media experts
Media community
Media Week program
New social engagement program
Media partner
Inaugural Social Media
Annual Social Media
Media sponsors
Media Week NEW YORK
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Global media
News media
Media Week events
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Creative Media
Film Centre Media Lab
Media users
Traditional media
Media outlets

Compare this to what Google gives you

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How totally useless Google’s AdWords data tool for Social Media – cause all Google ever wanted you to
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do with this tool is use it to craft advertising – they’re suggesting if you are interested in Social Media
Week NYC you also might be interested in “nyc bars” and “nyc nightclubs” … and it’s true, a lot of the
parties for Social Media Week NYC are happening in nightclubs and bars – but that’s not what it’s really
all about.

For maybe Social Media Optimization – Sysomos is a good platform, esp. if you’re interested in keyword
planning.

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Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/sysomos/#ixzz0jPDT5RM1 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Keyword Research deep dive using Sysomos MAP –


http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/01/researching-conversions-keyword-
research-for-social-media/

Read about how Google is ranking Twitter feeds (see  Want Your Tweets on Google? Get More (Better)
Followers in Marketing Pilgrim) and thinking about equivalencies – that Google equated  Twitter
Followers to website backlinks and, as in Pagerank, the more people who follow you, that you don’t
follow back, the better Google will rank you (just like web pages are ranked).

Imagine then, what would be the equivalent of “keyword research” in Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine
Marketing ……. for Social Media?     Somehow, my mind must have been inclined to think this way today – as I
suddenly realized that “researching conversations” or “conversations research” is the direct equivalent of
researching keywords for Social Media.

How would that work?

To test the idea out, I’m using Sysomos Map, one of my favorite Social Media Monitoring platforms –
and one of the best for filtering out noise and focusing on essentials.   I suppose you can say, in this
context  “Sysomos” is the equivalent to “WordTracker“, but that would not be doing justice to Social
Media Monitoring – which does a lot more than WordTracker and similar platforms  were created to do.

Take the query “Social Media” AND ROI – lots of people are talking Social Media ROI these days –
and searching on Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, WordStream’s free Keyword Tool,
Google Insights for Search, etc, will give you one type of view, while “Conversation Search” or
“Conversation Mining” as my friends at Converseon call their platform, will give you something entirely
different, and perhaps, more useful.
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What I’m looking for are keywords in conversations that could be included in our own conversations
about “Social Media ROI” much as you would have done for SEO, but with a 2 dimensional keyword tool
like WordTracker.

On first pass, words such as “analytic”, “market”, “measurable”, etc  occur most frequently, and so are
they part of your communication or marketing material …. if you talk Social Media ROI, if not, maybe …
they can be …. if you want to increase the changes your conversation will be picked up by more
listeners.

Taking a second pass, by including all the words in the right column I get the following chart, that looks
different than my first.

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Now, I get “integrated”, “investment” and that integrated investment is connected with “facebook” you
might want to creatively add those phases to what your writing – that is, if there is a legitimate reason
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to do so – otherwise your just “keyword stuffing”, and I don’t recommend anyone do that.

Only use the phrases that “fit”, that you mean to use – my point being – you probably aren’t aware of all
the phrases you could use in your “conversations”.

Going one more level – we get “Successful Companies Value“, etc

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You can also get information about each word and how it appeared in all content that Sysomos MAP
crawled; take the word “tactic” for example:
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The practical implementation of this strategy which I’ve just shared with you will take time – I’ll need to
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play with it some more.  Maybe you will, too, and share with me some of your insights.    I like to say, the
more we give, the more we get back.

We should never be afraid of sharing ideas, as more ideas come to replenish the ideas and I
believe, there is no limit.  Even if you took this idea way beyond what I’ve done, or will do with it, that’s
fine.   I’ll get 10 more, no, 100 more ideas for every one I give to you – so I’m very happy with that
arrangement.

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I will leave you with one more thing from Sysomos – Influencer Search – it’s pretty decent – I was able to
use it on obscure subjects and in about an hour come up with the names and contact information for 20
influencers (out of three times as many).  For Social Media ROI – the 5 most authoritative blogs are no
surprise (specific posts that were most influential were linked to in every case).

1. TechCrunch
2. Mashable
3. Read/WriteWeb
4. BusinessInsider (this is a blog I don’t read – maybe I should)
5. Chris Brogan

However, while those blogs are the most authoritative that came up in the search for Social Media ROI,
they might not be the most relevant for it. Sysomos has another filter that includes frequency to
mentions to authority – and that gives a list of 5 very different blogs – probably the one’s you should
read if you want to know more about Social Media ROI:

1. OnlineMarketingConnect (with a post on Social Media Snake Oil, no less)


2. Jatinmahindra (never heard of this blog – maybe I should take a look at it)
3. Jacob Morgan – one of the smartest people I’ve read – he’s right on the mark on every post.
4. Mashable (ok, they’re still in the list)
5. Blogfully

So, to finish this long post – the ideas I share with you need to be developed – do you have a campaign
that is not getting talked about much, that maybe, ought to be – and while you also need to put in the
strategy work (aka Jacob Morgan) and then do the outreach – might you not also be needing to do your
basic “Conversation Research” – not just what people are talking about – but the other things
surrounding it – that maybe “you” ought to be including in your conversation.

So, let’s test this idea – let’s mine “conversations” and see what we come up with – and if you don’t
have Sysomos, there are other tools to do it with – even Google Insights for Search could be a proxy (but
not as good) – maybe a Free account with Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 will work (they give you a limited # of
searches though – but it will be enough for a test run).

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/sysomos/#ixzz0jPEmt2tx 
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Facebook Web Analytics Tracking - http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/web-journal-


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feb-22-26-facebook-analytics-tracking-social-crm-theme/

Recently there has also been two separate implementations of Facebook tracking within a Web Analytics
platform – the first way of tracking Facebook is using Google Analytics by including Google Analytics as an
image instead of setting the standard JavaScript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook
pages from within Google Analytics.  You do need to download some code and place it on your web server
– but it’s not that big a deal.  Here’s the information on what to download, etc:

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Facebook – Google Analytics Version 1.1 (Updated 21st Feb, 2010).  For advanced method – Download this code to use on your
server. If you don’t have a Facebook fan page yet, visit our tutorial for code and help on creating customized Facebook fan
pages.

The other implementation of Facebook tracking is from WebTrends, as reported by Mashable.

WebTrends ….  has rolled out new measurement capabilities for Facebook, including the ability to view Facebook data
alongside data for other channels. Tools like this are useful because Facebook’s own platform for this, Facebook Insights, runs
three days behind, doesn’t measure custom tabs or apps, and doesn’t integrate with analytics for other digital marketing
channels. The tools work inside Facebook to provide detailed analytics data about applications, custom tabs, brand pages,
contests and advertisements, among other things. This wasn’t easy to achieve because most of Facebook (Fan Pages included)
doesn’t allow JavaScript, but WebTrends developed a custom API to get around that. Third-party applications built on the
Facebook platform are easier because JavaScript is permitted.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/category/social-monitoring/page/2/#ixzz0jPHxJf7V 
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APPENDIX C – CASE STUDIES


Havana Central Case Study – opportunity to use Geo Location to build Social Media ROI

Havana Central is a Cuban Cuisine restaurant chain located in Manhattan

The potential for Geo Location fulfillment and fan building is great and an often overlooked
tactic for restaurants that takes advantage of a circumstance that happens all the time, anyway
– entering the venue.

Using Radian6 Topic Analysis widget I was able to ascertain the number of twitter followers that
would be able to be reached via Geo-Location – pretty much anyone that comes into one of the
3 Manhattan locations and tweets or foursquare check in from there.
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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

In this case, all geo located queries show a total follower count of 21,431 over the last 60 days –
not as large as we’d like it to be – yet significant enough to pay attention to.

However, the of the entire universe of people who tweet about Havana Central – their total
followers rank more than 10 times as much – or 233,000 – a much larger audience.
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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

There were 4 Tweetups over the last 60 days with an estimated OTS (opportunity to see) of 13219
followers downstream.

To recall what happened recently when we gave a lady a drink who was tweeting in one of the
restaurants soon after she tweeted

I set up  Radian6 alerts set up on Havana Central that sends email status every 10 minutes  when anyone
tweets or mentions the restaurant chain in any way. 

Got and alert from a customer who was saying she was in the restaurant – via Twitter.  When I read my
email alert from Radian6 I immediately realized the customer was in the restaurant at the very same
moment we are.

The alert took place in real time – the customer and her friend were given free drinks and discounts –
we used Social Media and Social Media Monitoring (via Radian6) to reward a customer who was
having a great time – and we made that time better.

TWEET FROM: KIMBERLY819

 Source: twitter.com, Posted on: Mar 01, 2010 9:36 PM by KIMBERLY819


Chillin with my girl Yesenia in the city!! Great restaurant Havana Central!! Great Live salsa band!!
Oooooooowwwww!!!!
Following: 86 | Followers: 65 | Updates: 270 | Sentiment: Positive
170

TWEET FROM: KIMBERLY819

Name:
Page

Posted on: Mar 1, 2010 1:07 AM


KIMBERLY819

Followers: 66 Following: 87

What a GREAT night at Havana Central!!!! My new favorite


spot!!

Lin http://twitter.com/KIMBERLY819/statuses/9811482654

Copyright© – Marshall Sponder - 2010, Webmetricsguru.com


Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

We gave Kimberly and her friend a free drink immediately – thanks to Radian6 -that sends us alerts
frequently (with a picture of the tweeter when it’s available from a profile) we had no trouble finding
her – she was right around the corner from the receptionists table as you enter the 46th Street Havana
Central entrance.

THAT gesture was worth it in my opinion … look what the customer tweeted after the evening was over
…..
You want Social Media ROI – you got ROI – a new loyal customer – perhaps a loyal customer for life –
and you know what that is worth – a lot of money.

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/page/3/#ixzz0ijDzkfdF
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

At least 250 times a month a customer tweeted they were in one of Havana Central’s locations.

And FourSquare new Venue Dashboard will make it much easier to act on customers who check in -.
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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

Read more: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/#ixzz0jQpPVRsI 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

The above chart shows the Topic Trend of people who are actually tweeting or foursquare
checking in at a Havana Central Location over the last 60 days – I produced this chart by
isolating certain phases that indicate the person is at the restaurant.

About 50% of all the content about Havana Central is coming from someone who is actually in
the restaurant!!!!!!
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Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring webmetricsguru.com

Total Number of Posts (mentions) about Havana Central over the last 2 months.

As mentioned earlier in this EBook – we are able to detect immediately when someone says
they are in one of the restaurants (within 10 minutes) but we may not be able to immediately
act on it.

However if we did – according to calculations we came up with that estimated each loyal
customer can be worth between $400.00 - $1200.00 per year of additional business – and an
average of 8 customers a day who say they are at Havana Central – we can make a calculation
that will estimate Social Media ROI on fulfillment.

Average Yearly Value per customer * (number of geo located customers)

Or

$800 * 2920 = $2.34 Million Dollars per year


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Of course, that is a widely optimistic number and if we only actualized 1/3 of that we’d
still have 800K of profit just out of taking care of customers on the spot and creating
loyalty.

See more details about the e v e n t that lead up to this realization here

Copyright© – Marshall Sponder - 2010, Webmetricsguru.com

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