Coming to Social Media ROI, Labor Day &Web Journal Sept 3rd -5th, 2010

Actually, the last couple of days I’ve been almost totally absorbed with finishing my white paper and slide deck for the September 28th Webinar on Social Media ROI I’m giving with Compete.com. The paper is called UNDER THE RADAR, OVER THE RAINBOW, Viewing Spectrum Analytics for Social Media ROI (you’ll get to read it in a few weeks, I promise). The paper is literally a Labor of love, and being that I finished it just as Labor Day dawned, how appropriate! In fact, in my paper there be Rainbow Nuggets, but since I could not find good pictures of nuggets, I settled for Rainbow Pancakes; as soon as I finished my paper and sent it off tonight, I celebrated by going out into the late New York night and searching for a place to have Pancakes, which I found a few miles walk away – but I wanted to cement what was, for me, one of the most ambitious pieces of work I’ve written (and you get to read it in a few weeks – with Compete.com & Webmetricsguru.com logos all over it – I’m grinning). In writing the paper (I had a lot of help from Cecilia Pineda Feret in penning and refining first draft, along with some ideas she came up with including Rainbow ROI revolving around the Havana Central work we did) we came up with a discovery, or awareness the biggest issue in Social Media ROI measurement is aligning business goals and strategies with measurement goals and strategies. Usually, these goals aren’t aligned and I give a few examples in the paper. Meanwhile, today I read TheBrandBuilder’s post on Social Media program planning 101: Purpose matters and found we’re pretty much on the same page after all with Social Media ROI and the measurement of it. According to Oliver Blanchard the right sequence is: 1)Business problem ?> 2)Business Strategy to solve the problem ?> 3) Incorporate Social Media into said business strategy I could not agree more. I’m more focused on #2 and #3 than #1, that is the main difference between us (and his “rock star persona” which I wish I had some more of) as far as I can see. I don’t see myself as having much input into what business problems or goals of clients are or should be; usually the client defines what their problem is or what their business goals are, and we can help them articulate them better, but the client or stakeholder owns the business goal. Aligning business processes and goals with web measurement process and goals is more...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-06 10:43:49</div>

How to Track Your Social Media ROI Webinar with Marshall Sponder and Compete.com

In case anyone is wondering - here’s the URL to sign-up for the Webinar and White Paper I’m preparing for the Compete.com Webinar I’m giving on September 28th, 2010 – hope you can make it and spread the word, liberally. Go to the URL above to sign up – I’m just taking the top of the sign-up form and pasting it below to give readers some information about the Webinar. How to Track Your Social Media ROI Tuesday, September 28, 2010 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT Webinar Registration With the explosion of social media, there is no doubt that there is a value-add to any marketers initiatives, but how do they measure it? You want to calculate ROI and you want to see numbers, but how do you tie it in? Web Analytics Expert, speaker, and the voice of WebMetricsGuru.com, Marshall Sponder, will discuss what you need to have in order to measure your social media success. Competitive Intelligence tools, like Compete, offer some solutions, but if you really want to measure ROI, Marshall will show you want you need to have in place. Tue, Sep 28, 2010 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT Show time in my time zone ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-02 21:04:06</div>

Value of Community Management & Web Journal August 27th ? September 1st, 2010

There’s a post about Social Proof from Social Media Examiner that basically says displaying social media widgets from Facebook and Twitter (that are somewhat customized by the person visiting your website) are an effective engagement mechanism. Chris Brogan gets mystical with his The Game You See post which suggests that we always have 3 chessboards in life – what we’re doing now (the game we see), what we understand our game to be (the game we understand) and the where we want to be (the game we want to play). He takes that model and applies it to himself and says that as you master the game your playing now you can sense the next game (the one you might want to play). According to Brogan… … Sometimes, we get these reversed. We think we want to play another game, and we think we have the wrong game in front of us. But lots of times, that?s just an error in perception, or in our growth. A lot of times, the game in front of us is the better game. We just haven?t learned how to play it well. Yet. Honestly, I hope it’s like – maybe we need to define the games we are playing and the one’s we want to play. Anyway, go read his post and see if you get the same thing out of it that I do. Has anyone noticed a new service called Paper.li? It’s kinda a customizable online newspaper you can create for yourself, or subscribe to, on any subject you want – I have been finding my content appearing in a number of Paper.li sites including The Twitter Text Analytics Pros Daily. There are also some self promotion tools built in (you can log in via Facebook or Twitter and spread the news to your friends in both networks). I found the articles (posts) interesting (besides my own appearing there). The biggest theme of the last few days is Google’s acquisition of a few more Social Media Platforms – which I expect will be integrated into the GoogleMe platform by November (that’s a realistic date, I suspect, given the amount of sheer real estate they are snapping up lately). For example, last week Google bought Angstro and this week Google bought Social Deck. My suspicion – if we look at all the recent acquisitions (there be 5 or 6 in all in the Social Space) they probably reflect aspects of the new GoogleMe platform to be. Like I say – I’m seeing “November” in my mind – but I would not be surprised if happens before. Maybe Google will wait till the Facebook Movie...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-02 15:14:07</div>

Playing with the Recorded Future Analytics Platform

I first heard about Recorded Future from Mathew Hurst’s blog The Recorded Future is Here where a brief introduction to this new analytics platform was shared. Basically, Recorded Future is akin to Adaptive Semantics and Crimson Hexagon in that it creates structure and meaning from unstructured data using a combination of machine learning and custom programming. Matthew Hurst picked out this quote from the Recorded Future website “This definitely reduces time in figuring out what may or may not be happening in the future based on what has been happening in the past. It cuts that time in half. “ What’s interesting about Recorded Future, besides the interface, which is somewhat different, is that it has a data structure for the Future – projected things that might happen. Here’s what I mean, I constructed a query based on company layoffs anytime in the future and Recorded Future tried to project some based on content that has been created on the web already. I spent some time yesterday talking with Chris Holden from Recorded Future – I’ll be playing with the platform for the next month or so to put it through it’s paces and see where I might uncover some new application or insight that would be useful both to Recorded Future and my readers. It would be interesting if this platform could actually be predictive – not sure that is what it’s really for -  I get the impression it’s strength lies in research – pulling together information for journalism (ie: a newspaper) but it’s also got uses for the Military – (ie: examples of terrorist activities) are one of it’s pre-built data structures (you can use it with a company or individual’s name and pick a time period in the past, present or predicted future. Here’s a movie you can watch – meanwhile – I’ll go and play with it some more. I really need to get my hands around this platform before I’ll say more about it – often think it takes a good 10-20 hours of looking at a new platform to really get a feel for it – often, to be honest, i haven’t spent that long. But here’s the thing about this one – I need to figure out what I would use it for, myself – then apply Recorded Future and see if the results are better that what I could get any other way. BTW, Recorded Future is a company that has operations in Boston, Washington DC and Sweden, I...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-01 23:48:55</div>

Alterian aquires Intrepid Analytics Consultancy

I got the news today about Alterian and Intrepid, which also covers Lift9 Analytics according to Warren Sukernek. My take is that platforms such as Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, Radian6, which may have started as self serve platforms, are finding they need to build consulting arms fast in order to meet corporate clients whose needs require integrated solutions that are not easy to put together. The details of Intrepid’s acquisition are covered at the Intrepid blog. “….. As part of our integrated launch plan, Alterian has prepared service packages that will immediately add value to customers deploying Alterian?s SM2. Once customers and partners understand what and how to ask compelling marketing and research questions around social data, the platform will become that much more valuable. I?m confident that our social media expertise will be a welcome augmentation to Alterian?s marketing platform for both customers and partners.” Notice the education level – the platforms don’t really provide insight by themselves (actually, I’m not sure a platform, by itself, any platform, provided insight – that comes from analysts culling the data and overlaying meaning onto the numbers). Here’s the Alterian Press Release covering the acquisition Alterian Acquires Intrepid, an international social media analytics firm Acquisition enables Alterian to provide packaged solutions that will help Customers and Partners to accelerate their Social Media strategies London, U.K. – 01 September 2010 – Alterian (LSE: ALN), the leader in customer engagement technology and solutions, today announced that it has acquired Intrepid, an international market research and social media analytics consultancy. The acquisition further strengthens Alterian’s market leadership position in social media marketing, and its application to the mainstream marketing mix. Intrepid is a consulting business with a heavy focus on providing insights using social media data, enabling social media to be integrated as a core element of mainstream marketing. The company has around 40 staff, and offices in Seattle and London as well as a rapidly growing social media analytics team in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Intrepid is a long standing user of Alterian’s social media monitoring and analytics product, Alterian SM2. The acquisition of Intrepid allows Alterian to expand its support for clients and partners in the area of social media...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-01 23:09:18</div>

Brandtology Social Media Analytics Academy

Brandtology is starting a new Social Media Analytics Academy – was just notified about it today and wanted to share the news with my readers (press release)- esp those in Asia. Right now I haven’t seen a course offering – it will be all hands on and in person training, though. Within the various courses offered by Brandtology, participants would be able to learn about the Social Media landscape in the Asia Pacific Region, with focus on the unique characteristics of each market. For instance, although Twitter is wildly popular in most countries, it is banned in China, which has its own version called Sina Weibo, while Taiwanese prefer a micro-blog with a timeline by the name of Plurk. More importantly, the courses would also touch on the measurement and evaluation of Social Media Success, and the use of data analysis tools and services for identifying what creates viral effects online, as well as determining top influencers and key engagement channels. ?Data without analysis is meaningless. What?s more important is to be able to go beyond simplistic statistics such as buzz, views and re-tweets to find out the driving factors of internet word of mouth, and the overarching concerns of netizens about a brand and its products,? Dorothy Poon, Programme Director of Brandtology Academy, opined. ?Extracting actionable insights and using social media analytics to create an effective feedback loop is more important than merely finding out what?s being said and not doing anything about it.? At the end of the course, participants will be required to undergo a rigorous certification process and demonstrate sound understanding of the key concepts taught in the course. The first two runs of the Social Media Analytics courses in September are already fully booked and the third run will commence in October. For inquiries, please email academy@brandtology.com or visit http://www.brandtology.com/academy I spoke with Dorothy Poon a few weeks ago over lunch and dinner where she was visiting New York for Brandtology meetings – the Academy was a hush rumor then – it may have been alluded to in our conversations, but not actually discussed. I was also speaking with Jay Vasudevan who who introduced me to Brandtology and is my primary contact. According to Jay, Brandtology Academy will provide sessions in September and they will be in person, open for anyone who is interested in learning about Social Media ? analytics, monitoring etc. It’s...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-31 00:24:22</div>

Intelligent Word Mapping and the Wonder Wheel for Organic Search and Social Media Monitoring

So many things going on for me that it’s sometimes hard to focus – often I look “outside” to see what is going on in Social Media that’s interesting ( my Web Journals); other times, like this one, I feel the need to touch the data personally in a different way – that’s the substance of this blog – touching the data and look at it differently (hopefully, than anyone else does). If you read this post all the way through I promise you’ll get methods you can use to improve the information your gathering from Social Media Monitoring and Organic Search (but you don’t have to stop there, Site Search would work just as well under this model, etc). Note: I haven’t worked close enough with Text Analytics platforms like Lexalytics and Clarabridge - it’s possible they might supply aspects of this functionality – just to be sure – check them out in case they do offer it (though I doubt they offer it in the way I’m presenting it here). I started with my own Organic Search Traffic from Google this month (you can download the entire spreadsheet here). My Search traffic now comprises 40% of all the traffic to WebMetricsGuru.com and seems to be going up more and more – almost all of it is “long tail” – and how does one make sense of it? Along with the Search Query I sorted by City as the secondary dimension and the report became a lot more usable to me all of a sudden. It’s as if, by sorting by city, I could not see a pattern in the information that wasn’t as clear before – and it became the takeoff for this long, and I hope, rewarding post for you to read. Here’s a chart I created around two subjects I found in my search logs – Restaurants and Social Media. I could have picked far more – could have spent days on this – but that’s not the point – the point is to evolve a way of working with data – if you want to spend days working your data – or mine, be my guest. As I looked at my own search logs for this month – I saw patterns (the artist in me) – it’s as if the data was speaking to me – people were asking about weather there was a net promoter score for restaurants, or if I was doing any more comparisons between social monitoring platforms, or even if I had a quick and easy Social Media Scorecard to share. I saw patterns, such as Social Media + “how...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-29 19:11:57</div>

Social Media Dashboarding and Web Journal Aug 24th-Aug 26th 2010

Reading Gary Angel’s post on Social Media Dashboarding ? Q& (I missed the webinar on it) got me thinking about my own issues with various monitoring platforms I’ve tried. The first point is in order to get interesting data to dashboard you almost always have to categorize data differently than what the listening platform provides by default and it’s a considerable amount of work to set up accounts, pull the data, classify it and then dashboard it. And, while most clients seem to want sentiment analysis – the recommendations are not to include it for a variety of reasons. …to get interesting dashboard metrics, you need to classify and trend the basic metrics in interesting ways. Hitwise, for example, provides a list of up-stream and down-stream sites. But only by classifying the sites and then aggregating and trending the data can those reports be turned into interesting dashboard metrics. …. Most of these tools are fairly restrictive in the way they let you collect and produce information. So you can?t usually setup a single profile/account and then aggregate the data in the ways you decide are interesting. You have to collect much of the data based on the way you intend to use it. ….Another issue that drew quite a bit of attention was our discussion of sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is so interesting and contextual that our clients nearly always demand that we include it in dashboards. But we often push-back since the data can be problematic. Neil Beam from AT&T added this comment: ?At AT&T, we are moving away showing automated sentiment at the exec level. We only show manual scoring at the exec level. Our engagement team uses sentiment to determine the queue for responses.? To me, this is best practice all the way around and it?s what I?d like our clients to do more consistently. I think the biggest bombshell from Gary’s post on Dashboarding was a point he made at the end – that most listening platforms are not designed for Measurement – they were designed to Monitor conversations – the measurement overlay is often difficult to apply… especially when what we’re asking for is, in fact, accurate measurement. … tools (like Radian6, BuzzMetrics, and SM2) that are used for social measurement started life as tools dedicated to social monitoring and are still used that way much of the time. Like web logs, the ?river of news? used to help PR and Customer...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-27 15:27:45</div>

Total Coverage Analytics for Social Media ROI ? are you capturing all the data you need?

I’m thinking about the webinar I’ll be giving with Compete.com on September 28th (formal announcement will be forthcoming soon) and “ultralight” data not normally collected in your typical analytics implementations. Tried to visualize what that would look like and this is what I came up with I’ll have specific instructions in the webinar and possibly a case study – my main point is to ask the question … “Am I setup to capture activity around my business goals in every way/sense it needs to be tracked”? I’m guessing the answer will be no. How much of the activity around my business am I actually capturing (that’s what the chart above measures)? In the case of this business data is in silos and is often difficult to combine. I know there’s probably a better way to represent this – but right now between all the data sources I have listed in the chart at the beginning of this post and all the campaigns running I count 180 cells – and of those 82% are not enabled (data isn’t being captured) – a lot of that is normal as the data is in silos, after all (for example you would not expect to see Restaurant.com data/transactions showing up in Google Analytics or SeamlessWeb – one could attempt to connect the data – but it would be a lot of extra work and custom programming to do it at this time – or if you had a data warehouse – maybe this could be done). Of all the data there is “out there” to be capture on the business that I based this chart off of, only 9% of it is actually being captured – and most of it is in a silo. On the other hand, can Social Media ROI be represented when so much of the data you’d need to measure it – is essentially “ultraviolet” – hidden from normal site? I don’t think so. The webinar I’m giving with Compete.com will address how one deals with having so much data that still needs to be tracked and how it might be organized. Another way to look at data is comparing data sources to each other Think of it this way – say your business has a community manager – where is the activity of that community management in Social Media going to show up in this scenario above? - Facebook (Fan Page) - Twitter account You probably won’t see activity around community management reflected in your Email Campaign data, probably not even in FourSquare data...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-26 07:08:08</div>

Interesting Search Observations & Web Journal ? Aug 22nd- Aug 23rd, 2010

Today I’m at the Pimp Your Reports training in NYC A lot of search related material came up during this period including an excellent article in Search Engine Land titled Even Lasik Surgeons Have To Pay Attention To Search Behavior that is one of the best articles on Search Engines I’ve read – plus I can figure out how to replicate it – but for other subjects. Point being – for Social Media Monitoring and Analytics – the Search Behavior approach integrates really, really well. Read the article but here’s the reasons why you might want to use an approach like this one for Search. The process is data-driven, and helps you focus on user intent. There is no guessing involved. A categorical behavior model describes your potential customer?s complete research and search experience?you understand everything that a consumer is going to do when searching for your products and services. It provides an information architecture model for organizing a website based upon consumer expectations. It provides a content model for developing content strategy around focused landing pages. It provides a data-driven list of secondary terms that can be used effectively for navigational menus, content labels and page copy. It provides a better opportunity to present users with they want because you have anticipated what they are looking for. Also, JaTiN writes about Raven SEO Tools which I am somewhat familiar with but haven’t looked at for a while. It’s been on my mind to investigate who has the best SEO tools as there are times when those tools are needed – not everything you might want to do is well accomplished with free tools, even though those tools (mostly from Google or third parties) are extremely useful. JaTiN thin,s the Raven SEO tools are among the best he’s used – in fact the Raven SEO toolset now includes an sync up with Google Analytics and Facebook – that’s fantastic! Here’s the information about that intergration from JaTiN” Here are some of the features offered within Raven?s Facebook Tool: Deep Google Analytics integration White label reporting of Facebook metrics Automatic wall post scheduling Fan tracking, customizable by date range Monitor posts, comments, and likes What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what?s working and not working over defined periods...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-24 07:53:57</div>

Search, Web Analytics & Social Monitoring

Thinking about a few things today including my recent meetings with Brandtology, Roger Smith Hotel, PeekYou, Engage121 and a few others. Also thinking of the visit to Edelman PR for an Art Technology meetup earlier this week and seeing a 3D printer that sells for $995.00 (but, you have to assemble the printer yourself, still, you can’t beat the price when the nearest competitor/commercial printer costs ~25K – the 995.00 3D printer is all open sourced – see picture below). I found the rest of the art/technology meetup not engaging (but that’s just my point of view – sometimes the idea of something is more interesting that the reality of it – and vice versa). In other news, It’s not been formally announced yet but I’ll informally I’m doing a Webinar and White Paper with Compete.com on September 27th focusing on the Web Enablement steps we need to take to achieve a Social Media ROI measurement. My talk and paper will build off the “ultralight” social media activity, including WOM and even foot traffic Geo-located, and how that all can roll up to dashboard (provided the data is captured – I’ll tell you how it could be done). Look for official word of the Webinar and co-branded Compete.com white paper in a few weeks. Some observations leading to what i want to focus on today – two years ago, I first touched Radian6, i observed the platform ought to be aimed to Web Analytics (it was then directed to marketing, communications & PR at the time) – 9 months later WebTrends was integrated at the API level to Radian6. Around the same time I mentioned to Compete they should try to categorize traffic the way Comscore does – 3 months ago Compete’s Traffic Dashboard was released – it echoed my initial idea and I got some verbal thanks about it. I’ve put forward similar suggestions to Alterian with the emotions report in SM2 and monitoring ideas for tracking foot traffic using Social Media Platforms (as talked about with The Havana Central Case Study I presented at Columbia University Business School Alumni Club, Read Write Web Real Time Web Summit and Social Media Camp Long Island recently – you can find USTREAMs of the latter on this blog, in the writings/ presentations page. Today, I want focus on how Social Media platforms ought to include Search Traffic & Review Sites in their monitoring and usually don’t (ie: Revinate for...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-21 15:14:47</div>

Facebook Places & Web Journal August 15th ? 19th, 2010

So .. Facebook Pages is here – and it actually worked for me last night – I checked in three times and didn’t even bother using FourSquare until I found Facebook wasn’t responding (guessing Facebook’s backend network is struggling with dealing with all the 500 million who are suddenly able to “check in”). Maybe that’s why FourSquare got more new signups – guessing that is. Some are wondering if Facebook Places will put FourSquare out of business – i think it’s too early to say (for all I know, it might actually help them). Besides you and me and the rest of the 500 million Facebook members checking in – Businesses can now “check in” too … an excellent post on this from HubSpot was posted yesterday – Facebook Places Launches, Allows Businesses To ?Check In? which supports my prediction Social Media ROI will not be that much of an issue in 2011 – and I predicted it would be mostly solved by the end of this year. While so much Social Media activity is “ultra violet” - it won’t show up in your site analytics because we don’t have the tracking mechanisms in place in most businesses that engage in some form of Social Media outreach. Social Media ROI won’t show up today easily because the work flow to track it and tie in ROI isn’t in place yet; it’s not yet part of your Social Media Monitoring, either. But the other day I wrote about China and how it was creating a new Internet of Things - but actually, we see more evidence of it in the UK with the TOTem project. In any case, as we start tracking objects the way we track bits of data on a website – again, the ROI problem will be solved. As a result of the changes happening over the last year or so with Geo-Location tracking, activities that drive ROI, and the ROI derived from them – will, more and more, become attached to sites such as a Facebook Places business location in the rest of 2010 and into 2011. Once the 500 million start “checking in” to your location pages – that’s it – we’re never going back – we’ll have reached critical mass. I know some will still be skeptical (but that question will be answered in our Social Media Monitoring Bootcamps later this fall) - geo-location and mobile will deliver the Social Media ROI that business is asking for - proof that people are showing up at your door and...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-20 12:59:52</div>

PeekYou Initial Review and some thoughts about Online Identity

I had lunch with Josh Mackey and Michael Hussey of PEEKYOU today – and I was really impressed with their online identity service they’ve helped to create. TechCrunch readers might have remembered that PeekYou was reviewed by TechCrunch about 3 years ago – at that time PeekYou was compared to Spock – the search engine. Since then PeekYou has been quietly reinventing itself and I think you’ll hear some interesting news about them in the near future – more than this I can’t say. Also, bear in mind that a new release of the site is due in about a month – and all the capabilities you see today will be improved with the new release – and I’ll let Josh and Michael weigh in on what those changes will be if they wish to comment on this post. Let’s look at what you can do today with PeekYou. 1. Checking someone out – let’s say you meet someone and you want to know a little bit more about them (and your not into asking them directly, either, right?). I’ll take someone fairly well known in niche circles and see what PeekYou picks up. Let’s take Mike Grehan – he’s public enough and easy going so he won’t care I wrote about him – but not everyone knows who he is – so a service like PeekYou helps us by taking all the information about Mike Grehan, and all the urls he’s associated with and creates one record out of it (that might be an oversimplification – but it works for this example). The record aggregation reminds me a lot of TRAACKR and it’s influencer identification – hmm. The authority level of 6 is calculated much the way Sysomos comes up with it’s Authority Score – but in this case the founders will admit that their authority level algorithm does not yet calculate one’s authority based on the subject matter and it’s relationship to a person, and it should. This just tells me whatever advantage anyone has can be quickly erased by another technology or entrant. Also, if I was Mike Grehan, or had access to his PeekYou account (I don’t) I could edit and correct the information that PeekYou has on him. 2. Want to find Influencers – say, Art People in NYC - Here’s your influencer list – sorted by authority. Granted, most of the queries you’d want to ask PeakYou on influencers will come up with blank – nothing – there’s clearly a lot more work to be...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-19 09:34:42</div>

Attending Stratigent?s Pimp Your Reports NYC Event

I’m attending a New York session of Pimp Your Reports led by Jennifer Veesenmeyer, VP of Analytics at Stratigent next Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant in Manhattan. Last year I was on Jennifer Veesenmeyer’s panel on the Future of Web Analytics at MIMA Summit 09 – I’ve known Jennifer since I’ve attended several EMetrics Summits and through Web Analytics Association work when I was a Board Director in 2007-2009 (in total, I’ve known Jennifer for 4-5 years). According to the invite for the event – Pimp Your Reports workshop teaches …. ….. how to use dashboards and analytics reporting to drive your company’s competitive position and enhance its performance. By getting it right, you can save time and resources and begin to reap the benefits of your effective messaging right away. This workshop provides marketing and analytics professionals with concrete techniques for applying strategies and tools to their overall dashboard design. You’ll return to work with ready-to-use job aids, tips, tricks and instructions. Essentially, if you want reports that people can act on, they have to be meaningful and if you want to drive action in your company, you have to go beyond canned reporting options and learn how to Pimp Your Reports! I attended a mini version of this workshop a few years ago in San Francisco and it’s been, consistently, one of the most popular sessions at Emetrics. Here’s the agenda Workshop Benefits Determine and analyze data that drives action Gain insights into writing effective analysis with clear and consice messaging Discover how all components of a business can come together in a cohesive dashboard Learn dashboard design best practices that communicate effectively with the C-suite Captialize on professional feedback specific to your company Enjoy an invaluable peer-to-peer learning experience Tentative Agenda 8:30 – Registration Begins 9:00 – Welcome and Introductions 9:15 – Identifying and Highlighting Key Metrics 10:15 - 20 Minute Break 10:35 – Meaningful Visualizations Clear, Concise Messaging 12:00 – Plated Luncheon 1:30 – Principles for Dashboard Layouts Dashboard?related Excel Tips 3:00 – 15 Minute Break 3:15 – Pimp Your Reports: Tips & Specific Feedback 3:45 – 4:00 - Wrap up and Q&A As I’ve been doing a lot of Social Media Metrics – the...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-18 08:13:29</div>

Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp Boston, New York, San Francisco and London this fall

I was waiting till the dates became public to announce I’ll be speaking at various Social Media Monitoring conferences and bootcamps taking place in Boston, New York, San Francisco and London this fall/winter. Not sure yet if I’ll be part of the San Francisco conference. Here’s the schedule. First up is a one day conference on Monitoring Social Media in Boston on October 5th. The conference takes place at John Hancock Hotel & Conference Center, 40 Trinity Place at Stuart Street Boston, MA 02116 Following the success of our events In London, Influence People is hosting a one-day social media monitoring conference in Boston on 5th October. Monitoring Social Media (Boston) will bring together leading brands, PR and marketing experts to discuss the latest ideas, trends and techniques in social media monitoring and measurement. Though a series of presentations, panels and expert-led discussions, we will explore the critical issues that marketers and PR professionals are facing in their efforts to monitor their social media interactions. Topics we will cover include: Social Media Monitoring Tools and Services Brand and Reputation Management Sentiment Detection and Analysis Data Quality and Filtering Identifying and Connecting with Influencers Beyond Listening: Measurement and ROI The Future of Social Media Monitoring Case studies and Best Practice Second, New York, where I live is hosting an event on November 4th and half of a day on November 5th on Monitoring Social Media – and I’ll be speaking both days. It’s taking place at 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013. It warms my heart to see Monitoring Social Media here in my home town – happening at the 92nd Street Y, no less. The program is more or less the same as Boston, but it has the additional bootcamp on November 5th – well worth attending. Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp is the ultimate ?how to? training event for companies and organizations seeking to monitor the social web and measure the effects of their interactions. Through a series of practical workshops, hosted by some of the world?s leading social media monitoring experts, attendees will learn how to use the latest technologies and techniques to maximize their returns from social media and minimize the risks to their brand and reputation. The Bootcamp is a half-day event taking place on 5th November (the day after the conference). You can buy a ticket separately, or with...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-17 09:54:36</div>

Aquisitions & Web Journal Aug 11th ? 14th, 2010

IBM buys Unica and Web Analytics Demystified has a post about it which adds to my own insights – what’s happening in the Web Analytics space is also happening in the Social Monitoring space as both types of tracking are seen as analytics firms and more and more, analytics firms are being acquired to beef up larger businesses – and that’s basically a good thing as in most cases, the analytic firm, social media or web analytics, provides value mostly when it’s combined with actual business data, but not so much, otherwise. Heard the news yesterday that Oracle is Suing Google Over Patent Infringement Of Java Within Android- this refers to Oracle‘s acquisition of Sun Micro-systems and the patent for Java, which arose at Sun. Since Oracle technically owns the patent and Google is using Java in Android – Oracle wants to be paid (big time). I’m not sure how much this suit will come to as Google seems to always manage to have a “Teflon” persona – where hardly anything thrown at Google ends up sticking. Still, I’m sure the lawyers at Google will be busier than usual for a while (which is probably a good thing for the lawyers – right?). As Andy Beal best put it … Oracle?s Revenge on Google is a Dish Best Served Cold. By the way, did you know that if you live in Indonesia your more than twice more likely to be using Twitter than if you live in …. the United States - according to Comscore – I got the info from Web Analytics World in a post on Twitter Penetration by Country: Top 20 Markets by Twitter Penetration June 2010 Total Audience, Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations* Source: comScore Media Metrix Location % Reach Worldwide 7.4 Indonesia 20.8 Brazil 20.5 Venezuela 19.0 Netherlands 17.7 Japan 16.8 Philippines 14.8 Canada 13.5 Mexico 13.4 Singapore 13.3 Chile 13.2 United States 11.9 Turkey 11.0 United Kingdom 10.9 Argentina 10.5 Colombia 9.6 South Korea 9.3 Ireland 8.4 India 8.0 Malaysia 7.7 New Zealand 7.5 Talking about the world – did you know that China is Moving to Dominate the Next Stage of the Web which comprises the Internet OF Things? The Chinese municipality of Chongqing and telco giant China Unicom have announced a multi-billion dollar partnership of investment and tax breaks aimed to create as much as $7 billion in annual revenues within five years from what’s called the Internet of...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-15 05:12:38</div>

SNReach ..ing for Facebook Viral Pass along Measurement

I’m trying an experiment on this blog by using a new Social Media Measurement Platform called SN-Reach (and I wrote about SN-Reach a few weeks ago). Look at some information on how SNReach works – then I’m going to explain what I’m doing with it and I’ll share the data with my readers. There’s also a video presentation here. SNReach – How It Compares View more presentations or Upload your own. Along with a portal that gives detailed metrics on who comes to my social multiplier page (see below) and shares a special white paper that I did just to test this platform. I was given by 3 snippets of code by SNReach to use for Promotions (see below): This one was for my blog and I placed it in the sidebar. This one was for my email footer and I put it my Gmail Signature file. Finally I got a file for Twitter - and as you can see in each case SNReach tracks the different Social Media Channels where the message originated from with a different link. When SNReach formally launches there will be a portal page where all the data for your (my) campaign(s) is displayed in real time – in beta, as it is now, that information will be manually shared with me – and I’ll probably have something substantive to share with my readers by early September. I created a special paper on Data Mashups which you can get by clicking on my “application” or Share button, and what I’ll look to share with my readers are the following. How many people actively read and then shared my paper with their friends on Facebook (age/sex/location/number). Who where the influencers that led to my paper being spread the most. What other parts of my “Social Multiplier” page did visitors interact with, etc. Whatever else SNReach reports on – since I’m new to this myself – and they approached me to show me the platform – rather than show someone else’s metrics I decided I wanted to share my own – so that’s how this got started. Figured it was more interesting and genuine if I spoke about data I actually touched rather than just mouth off someone else’s work – so look for that post in early / mid September – once there is enough results – and share my paper liberally with your friends – so we can get a good swath of data to talk about next month! ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-13 07:15:00</div>

Heat & Online Privacy Concerns ? Web Journal August 7th ? 10th, 2010

I read about Rising Temperatures, Rising Food Prices in TreeHugger – wondering how rising tempetures are going to affect the price of food ongoing. According to the post …. …. During the two month span between June 9th and August 9th, the world price of wheat jumped by 66 percent. The USDA’s August estimate will show the world harvest shrinking further. But by how much? And how will it affect world grain prices? … That intense heat waves shrink harvests is not surprising. The rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent. With global temperature projected to rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century, this effect on yields is an obvious matter of concern. Now, A Confidential Report Outlines Google?s Plans for Your Data, which I noticed on MarketingPilgrim about how far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels-the vast trove of data it possesses about people’s activities took place recently at Google – the story was covered in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I expected Google to have such discussions for some time and had wondered if they have …. well, they have. ….. The founders believe they are improving the Internet user’s experience, said Alma Whitten, who leads Google’s privacy engineering, in a June interview. “What’s good for the consumer is good for the advertiser.” ….. The changes at Google reflect a power realignment online. For years, the strongest companies on the Internet were the ones with the most visitor traffic. Today, the power resides with those that have the richest data and are the savviest about using it. So, it’s all about the data, isn’t it – it’s not traffic anymore – but how you use what you have. And how will Google use that information? ….. But Google’s revenue growth has slowed dramatically. And social-networking powerhouse Facebook is a widening threat with its ability to sell highly targeted ads to its more than 500 million users. Facebook fears run deep at Google, which is designing its own social-networking service. In a sign of how quickly things change, the 2008 vision statement scarcely mentioned social networks. Now we know why Google wants to take on Facebook with GoogleMe …. they’re afraid in a few years...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-11 15:14:56</div>

Nielsen?s Global Trends in Online Shopping Report and what it means

I found a lot to like and not like about the Global Trends in Online Shopping - A Nielsen Global Consumer Report - June 2010. The report seems to have good, useful information, but doesn’t give you enough of it to do anything much with it – and that’s what I don’t like. … The Nielsen Company conducted a survey in March 2010 and polled more than 27,000 Internet users in 55 markets from Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America and South America to look at how consumers shop online: what they intend to buy, how they use various sites, the impact of social media and other factors that come into play when they are trying to decide how to spend their money. For example, a chart on page 4 of the report shows how the average respondent was affected in their buying behavior by online reviews such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, etc. The report spends a lot of time talking about the consumption behaviors of various countries throughout the world but fails to break down this chart by region and country – would have been nice if they did because then we’d know how important a bad review of a hotel was in Thailand vs. France vs. Japan that might tell us how to invest marketing money – but the report really doesn’t do that. Funny thing – Nielsen probably had the data and just didn’t bother to go all the way with it. Then again, Nielsen is in business to make money and doesn’t want to give away too much – so maybe you have to pay them to give you useful information – and the rest of this is just to whet our appetites. While the information Global Trends in Online Shopping - A Nielsen Global Consumer Report - June 2010 is interesting – the charts between Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, Middle East/Africa and Latin America aren’t in parity – I expect the same information is going to be presented about each region individually – but that’s not what actually is in the report. It’s interesting to see just how much people spend online based on where they live: I guess it makes sense that Americans and Europeans have the greatest proportion of their active online populations spending less than 5% of their income shopping online – again, not really sure what to do or what you can do with the information even though it is interesting to know how people spend money. Overall, the Global Trends in Online Shopping - A Nielsen Global] Consumer...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-11 06:58:39</div>

WeePlaces Review ? FourSquare Historical Visualization Platform

I was contacted by WeePlaces today about their new FourSquare Historical Visualization Platform which does exactly what Fred Wilson was looking for when he tried to visualize his recent European trip (wonder if there is a connection?). Above – Fred Wilson’s travels around London last month. It was kinda nice to go back in time and see my own London / Torquay / Bath / Exeter trip a few months ago. . …. and StoneHenge – which was in the middle to the countryside Having said that – most of the venue pages on Weeplaces do not appear to have much information, and what information there is only appears on some of the more popular venues, but not yet on the rest – WeePlaces does one thing well – it charts the historical locations and sequences of any FourSquare account – but right now, it stops short of doing anything else. That’s not to say that what is present in the platform isn’t value – it is – I’m actually thinking it’s more like the beginnings of a much fuller experience (ie: if Weeplaces were to pull in other people who checked in around the same times I was in a location – or pulled in pictures of the locations and photos off of Flickr and videos off of YouTube related to the locations) it would improve the platform vastly). On the other hand, for all we know, WeePlaces was created very quickly, perhaps in a few weeks – and is amazing in that it does this one thing, visualizing a users history, well. And when you get tired of looking at the stops you visited but still want to replay your FourSquare check in history – you can just hit the replay button and see it play for you all over again. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-10 06:30:32</div>

Neat Trendrr Mashups with FourSquare, Twitter & Facebook + Roll your own datasources

I wrote about Trendrr before though I often found it difficult to understand how to use it – well, no more of that. Trendrr has added some interesting data sources to mashup, like FourSquare. In this case, I charted how many times the Havana Central Times Square location has been checked in via FourSquare (though honestly, I have to wonder that it’s fully accurate as I would think it’s been checked into way more than 420 times since 2009. I also noticed multiple listings in FourSquare for some of the same Havana Central restaurants – so maybe that has something to do with the numbers being less than expected. What’s interesting is you can also chart the number of Shares, LIkes and Clicks on Facebook for a given account – which is really interesting. You can also upload your own data sources using REST or Excel spreadsheets. I think you can even combine a couple of charts together. Very Nice. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-09 06:29:08</div>

On Twitter Influencer Quality and Follower Followers

I read about the HP Lab Research on the quality of Twitter Followers - it’s not the number of followers it’s the number of followers you have that re-tweet your messages. According to research which was based on several million tweets …. “There’s an enormous amount of passivity in the social network,” Dr. Huberman goes on to say, explaining that some people can have an enormous number of followers, but not much influence, while others can have fewer followers but much more influence. The study finds that “the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.” I wanted to find a quick way to use this information so I extracted all my followers using MyTweeple.com and then sorted them by the most followers each had and then ran it through Radian6 (normally, I’d like to run all my followers through the same test but it would take too long – I’m just working proof of concept here – I’m sure if I want to analyze a large swath of twitter accounts it’s doable – but just takes time and work). It was pretty easy to do in Radian6 – I just made a query that included the twitter handles of my top 20 followers (sorted by the number of followers they each had) and then used a Topic Analysis Widget where each Twitter handle was a query ANDed with “RT @”. I also tested my query with a River of News. However the above chart only shows which of my followers Re-Tweets the most – it doesn’t show how much they are Re-Tweeting my messaging. In order to do that I then changed the queries of each to include my twitter handle, @webmetricsguru which showed none of them re-tweeted about any of my content over the last month. My feeling is this measure of influence is probably more accurate than followers and I could remaster Radian6 to show who are the friends that are most valuable to me (those who follow me) but the tool makes it too hard to enter all 4000+ of my followers (what I currently have). It seems like the idea of followers who are active to your message, rather than passive, would be valuable to a brand – there are probably easier ways to figure this out than what I did with Radian6, though...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-09 05:20:22</div>

Long Tail Search Keyword Strategy Works!!!

The other day I wrote a post on Thoughts about Influencer Identification and why it?s not good enough and mentioned the names of 4 wines I tasted at a Corked.com wine tasting I was at. Well, it turns out my blog post now ranks on the 2nd or 3rd page of Google search results for each wine. Go try it for yourself, just take each wine I wrote about it and pluck it into Google – I bet over time the rankings will get higher (closer to the first result). True – each wine label/year that I wrote about had between 10000-17000 pages indexed in the search results – but considering the post isn’t even two days old – that’s not bad! What kind of traffic did I get by mentioning those 4 wines? Well .. nothing much from Google and 27 visits to the post in the last 2 days (as of this writing) but it tell me that if we use names of niche and boutique brands a lot more often – we’ll pick up a share of the traffic on them and if you do that alot – it can add up – which is the long tail concept. Just a thought on sunny Friday in New York City. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-06 22:51:12</div>

Web Curatorship Thoughts & Web Journal Aug 3rd-6th 2010

Was thinking about the proliferation of Social Media content, mainly user generated, and realized we need to move past producing content (which is now a commodity) to curating and containing the content – that’s why I found Read/WriteWeb’s post on Hunch interesting today. Here’s a quote from the post: The so-called Web 2.0 era of the Web was based on user-generated content and social networking around that. Services like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr (which was co-founded by Caterina Fake) were the success stories of that era. But now, in 2010, there is too much user-generated content to manually process. What’s more, social networking is practically dominated by one company: Facebook. We no longer rely so much on niche sites like Flickr, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon to connect to other people socially. Another aspect to consider is that there’s a lot of new data streaming in from sensors, RFID tags and other Internet-connected objects. The upshot is that we need web services that can help us process all of this data and connect us to the parts that are personally relevant to us. I like the idea of Hunch.com – had signed up and tried it earlier this year, apparently, they have updated the site and will try it again shortly: We’re early in this era, but both Hunch and GetGlue are busy building up extensive databases about people and what they like (their “taste” data). Not only that, they’re slowly perfecting recommendation engines that process this data – ultimately filtering, structuring and personalizing it. Social CRM is cropping up more and more – it’s clear that Social Media ROI needs a CRM backend – and this week I wrote about how much Social Media activity is undetectable by most site analytics – but it needs to be – and for that – we need to change how business is wired up. Duct Tape Marketing had a post on Connecting the Dots With Social Surfing which mentions appending your customer and prospect lists with social network data that got my ears perked. Here’s one example of wiring up of data that will soon be commonplace: … This form of social surfing will enjoy a major boost when a visitor can stop by any real estate agency or law firm web site and turn to the listing of agents and attorneys and bypass the pretty pictures and fluffy bios and simply hit a button to see who in their LinkedIn of Facebook network knows any of these...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-06 20:21:56</div>

Thoughts about Influencer Indentification and why it?s not good enough

I’m at a wine tasting tonight at the Roger Smith Hotel for Corkd.com and as i’m tasting the 2009 La Vielle Ferme Côtes du Luberon care of @garyvee, I’m thinking about something I experienced earlier today- just how difficult it is to find influencers using Social Media Monitoring tools - to be honest in a lot of cases I’d have more luck using Google (and that’s not to give Google a pat). I think the problem is social monitoring tools are too keyword based (as I’m sipping the 2009 La Vielle Ferme Côtes du Luberon I’m thinking I don’t like it as much as the wine I just had – the NV Domaine de La Taille aux Loups Brut Tradition which I gave a 87/100 at http://corkd.com/~3w @corkd. Drinking the 2009 La Vieille Ferme Cotes du Ventoux Rose which I was less than enthusiastic about despite it getting close to the Red Wine, which is my favorite (but hey, Gary’s selling in and tasting it at Wine Library TV, I bet) I was thinking how constrained social media platforms are by keywords and how we need to move past that – and that’s what I thought earlier today. Would have had more luck with Comscore or Compete (if it went all the way and categorized everything) than the tools we’re using now to identify influeners. For example, say I want to know about Automotive Influencers, and then Hotel Influencers, and Restaurant Influencers – for some reason I’m seeing the same list of blogs, more or less, even though I changed the query so it’s entirely different. I noticed the same issue with multiple platforms I’ve worked with – I’d change the query and still get the same stuff, and the majority was spam, anyway. Won’t signal out which platforms I used today – since I’ve seen this in multiple platforms and I had the thought as I actually work on this stuff – and I get my thoughts and insights by touching the data – that’s how my mind works. Ah, now we’re getting to Red Wine, 2009 La Vieille Ferme Cotes Du Ventoux Red Wine, and hearing about the issues with wine harvesters buying land and harvesting grapes (sounds like harvesting Influeners – ha! – this wine isn’t bad at all!) I was thinking about what would have made my searches for Influeners better. The reviews of La Vieille Ferme Cotes Du Ventoux Red Wine were compared to the host like new Nike shoes. Getting back to Influencers - it seems to me...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-05 02:44:47</div>

Defining Styles of Analytics and Creative Work @Work

Lately I have been thinking about approaches towards Analytics work and personality style / tasks – defining my own while trying to put it into some kind of framework. I looked for frameworks online and did not find anything describing my own approach that I can relate to. It’s a hard subject to describe, hopefully I’ll make some sense in this post. For me by reflecting on the past, looking back, I’m able to see where I was happy, where I wasn’t and what I was doing. Decided situations where there are high priority Analytics problems to solve and no one knows how to solve them conclusively yet, but where good ideas reign is where I want to be; a lot of people would be uncomfortable with situations like that because it’s too undefined and open-ended. Conversely, I tend to feel constrained once a situation becomes too defined, too process oriented. Occurred to me that most tasks exist in several states, objects also. Take milk as a metaphor for work – we turn milk into sour cream and butter by churning it, we can take water and turn it into gas, liquid or ice by applying different temperatures to it. However, we may prefer one state of a task, one type of work over another - even though the same task or work can exist in several states (of completion). Thinking of types of analytics work – say, a task of implementing site analytics tagging to capture the full spectrum of activities on a business or corporate website (just as a quick grab – I talked about capturing the ultraviolet activities of Social Media in Google Analytics the other day) there’s the research work to figure out how to do it, inventory work to figure out where to do it, the actual work of doing it, testing the implementation, finishing it up, documenting what was done and then repeating it as needed. Maybe I even left out some steps, but the implementation task had several stages – with some parts more fun than other (for me). In the past I would have thought that the right way to work is to master all the stages of any project or task and be able to complete them as neccessary be happy you have the tasks to complete, at all (tall order). I see things somewhat differently today. In any kind of work there exists several states that exist in a continuum of undefined/open-ended to fully processes oriented and automated, and defining where we want to work on that continuum will define how happy we are with the work and how...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-04 09:58:54</div>

Google Analytics Hacks ? Web Analytics Rock Stars Post

I wrote a post published earlier today on IQWorkForce, an IT Placement firm that is a sponsor of WebMetricsGuru on Google Analytics Hacks – here’s the post in full plus some comments. Google Analytics is a great platform for tracking what is actually happening on a website (providing there is enough enablement of the advanced features of Google Analytics to track everything you might want to capture). Most of the time people fail to properly set up Google Analytics and there are a few things you can do to make it easier to get the more out of your analytics implementation without too much extra effort. Hack 1: ? Install Google Analytics Tracking Script I have been using a tracking script for several of my clients that I found is very useful and fairly easy to install. Immertia has a great script that tracks all downloads, all email links and all outgoing links automatically for you as events ? that is very helpful and very cool and something I think everyone should install. The complete instructions are at Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads on Stephane Hamel?s blog in a post titled: Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads::immeria::web analytics blog::Stephane Hamel One thing you?ll have to keep in mind is all of the events tracked can not be made into Goals within Google Analytics ? I understand this is a functionality Google Analytics may enable at some future time ? but today you can do all the same tracking as virtual pageviews (which an be made into a Goal) but without the Goal tracking. Hack 2: Build Advanced Segments so you can use them across site profiles I have a couple of Advanced Segments I often use in all my profiles, regardless of the client ? one of them is the Social Media Advanced Segment which is a regular expression that is easy to update ? here?s what I have for my Social Media Segment ? if more that should be in there, it?s easy enough to update the segment. Source matches regular expression : linkedin\.com|foursquare\.com|blogspot\.com|wordpress\.com|youtube\.com|facebook\ .com|delicious\.com|digg\.com|flickr\.com|ning\.com|twitter\.com What this is great for is giving a client a quick and dirty assessment of their social media traffic ? here?s a link to my advanced segment in case you want to start off right away ? I hope you enjoy using Advanced Segments and if any of you know of many more social media sites that ought to...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-04 08:31:25</div>

Online Games and Web Journal July 28th ? August 2nd, 2010

Among the patterns I noticed over the 6 days investing in online gaming seems to stand out – take Disney acquiring Playdom for 563 million dollars. Speculation is on using Playdom to crush Zynga. Earlier last month Disney acquired Tapulous, a developer I’m familiar with though the iPhone. Buying a online gaming application is one thing – buying two in the same month seems more like a long term strategy to own the space. Last week I noticed a post on What are the Web’s Top Sources of Referral Traffic on ReadWriteWeb. I did not find any surprises there, but from what I’m hearing, the reference guide is worth looking at to find the areas websites that generate the most referrals. Then there was the post on SEO I saw in JaTiN’s blog that said SEO was not all about Technical Changes – if the content doesn’t have business value, Google may be devaluing it. …. I have a prospective client who wants me to fix his traffic loss. He has 20 domains each one for each brand. No real info on any of his sites and he is selling some information on each brand. I can see some value to his service but I am sure Google considers it a spam service. 20 sites all the same linked selling the same product. No amount of tweaking to this site or that site is going to fix his problem in my opinion. Pertaining to the above, I have to wonder what signals Google can pickup. I did not know they can get the business model as signal – but maybe they’re looking for proxies for it appearing together, and at allowable distances. But if that were true – why don’t they just publish a site usability report on Webmaster Tools?Yet another post on Search Engine Land is What Keywords Am I Missing it recommends finding keywords your competitors are coming up for but you are not. Also found two services that analyze Financial Sentiment (for stock trading) – one is Sentigo and the other is Finif – not to sure about either platform and wonder what is actually being analyzed for sentiment – what the traders say, how the market reacts? Since I’m not a trader, I didn’t find myself attracted to use either. Then again, Laughing Squid, a blog I often read, had a post on someone who blows giant soap bubbles -its amazing to watch – here’s a video of the guy doing just that – blowing giant soap bubbles – ha! There was also an interesting study by Nielsen showing how we spend...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-03 08:42:04</div>

Social Media Scorecard & what Social Media is Good For ? and ultraviolet light

I’m working on summarizing tracking Social Media Outreach for the Havana Central Restaurant chain – the same Restaurant chain I did a case study of a few months ago presented at Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York. In talking with Cecilia Pineda Feret (Online Marketing & Community Strategist for Havana Central), especially over the last week, while looking over the Social Media progress over the last month - we enabled Google Analytics tracking on the website to include all downloads, all outgoing links, all email links (via Google Analytics tracking scripts), all reservations to OpenTable, Tell A Friend, Get a Quote, VIP Guest List, etc. Though the interchange with Cecilia I was able to come up with what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t been able to accomplish, and why. I did promote myself in this post – I didn’t intend to – but it appears to go with what I’m saying in this post – if your going to track ROI, you going to need a much more thought out strategy for metrics than most businesses have been willing to consider – and may be that they need help with this. Update: As I thought more about this post I realized that much of the activity thought of as “Social Media” is invisible – similar to infra-red or ultra-violet light. As we know, both types of light do not register on our visual spectrum, but we know they are present and some animals can detect one or both frequencies – but most humans can’t. I think the same thing can be said for Social Media activities today – we know they are present but we do not have the necessary, calibrated tracking in place most of the time – so that activity is invisible – yet we do see some tangible results – (much as bread rises due to yeast activity) – but we don’t get enough information to actually operate with the data that way. This post addresses my insight into the main issues in tracking and how to address them – it will also be a the subject of a white paper, shortly. While a few more things could be done – much of Social Media isn’t going to show up in site analytics, as I pointed out last week, unless the website is part of the transaction, and we have a way to segment the activity – we’ll never know if all the activity that happens as tweets, check-ins via FourSquare, promotions on Social Media, or even the Facebook Fan page...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-02 12:58:30</div>

Social Media Scorecard & what Social Media is Good For

I’m working on summarizing tracking Social Media Outreach for the Havana Central Restaurant chain – the same Restaurant chain I did a case study of a few months ago presented at Columbia University Alumni Club. Up to now we enabled Google Analytics tracking on the website to include all downloads, all outgoing links, all email links (via Google Analytics tracking scripts), all reservations to OpenTable, Tell A Friend, Get a Quote, VIP Guest List, etc. I did promote myself in this post – I didn’t intend to – but it appears to go with what I’m saying in this post – if your going to track ROI, you going to need a much more thought out strategy for metrics than most businesses have been willing to consider – and may be that they need help with this. While a few more things could be done – much of Social Media isn’t going to show up in site analytics, as I pointed out last week, unless the website is part of the transaction, and we have a way to segment the activity – we’ll never know if all the activity that happens as tweets, check-ins via FourSquare, promotions on Social Media, or even the Facebook Fan page – translate into more reservations being booked, more people showing up at events, more money being spent in the restaurant locations. We know that’s what most businesses want -  certainty that social media results in more money being made – and it can’t be shown conclusively unless certain steps and planning are done beforehand (and there most likely needs to be a good strategy in place in order to make that all happen). But maybe we’d be better off, as many have been saying, if we did not try to make Social Media into an ROI mechanism – even though it might sometimes turn into an ROI Generator. I think we’re better off admitting that most of the time, for now, what you’ll get out of Social Media outreach is soft metrics – and if you want more than that, hire someone like me to figure out how to make all the pieces fit together so you can track everything down to the last dollar. Let’s look at what happened at Havana Central due to Social Media Outreach over the last 14 months as an example of what’s possible and what’s not so easy to do. I used Radian6 to chart what I call the “OTS” or “opportunity to see” metric using Twitter Followers – Radian6 has some very nice reporting...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-02 07:58:30</div>

Building the Realtime User Experience Book Review

Recently I asked for a reviewers copy of Building the Realtime User Experience by Ted Roden and published by O’Reilly as I thought it would be an interesting read and relevant to much of the social media monitoring work I’m doing. I reviewed Ted Roden’s book this weekend and found it very useful – though I’m not a programmer and probably would not use the book to implement anything – I could follow most of the examples well enough (and having done Unix Programming and Administration in a past life, along with some semblances of C Programming – I got the gist of what his programs did – and could implement them thought with a bit of difficulty). If anything, the book explained why somethings are more difficult than they seem – such as old ways of using HTTP messaging vs. new ways of using HTTP messaging that support long polling and a large number of simultaneous connections that use newer technologies. In Chapter 4 of the book Server Push is explained as it was implemented in the past and how it would be implemented now with newer Protocols such as Bayeux, Cometd, Tornado (Chapter 5), Twitter Realtime Streaming API, etc. Building the Realtime User Experience also does a good job of explaining SUP (Simple Update Protocol and PubSubHubBub Protocol that was created by Google. My overall sense of what these protocols and technologies do is simply aggregation and caching of data and making messaging (and routing messages) much more intelligent and flexible so that many more users can get data instantaneously without clogging up network pipes with polling requests that traditional HTTP and TCP/IP depended on. In order to program the real time web, it’s necessary to understand and work with the new protocols and the book does a good job to taking a programmer though simple applications that can created fairly easily in Python with the right software libraries installed on your computer. In addition – Google App Engine is used to create simple applications a user can interact with. Sample projects that were undertaken in the book include building a dynamic homepage, building instant messaging, online chat, SMS messaging and some homegrown analytics. I found the chapter of Analytics particularly interesting (Chapter 9) which is titled – Measuring User Engagement: Analytics on the Realtime Web. One idea that occurred to me was combining ChartBeat Analytics with FourSquare and Twitter...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-02 03:32:36</div>

Revinate Social Media Monitoring for Hotels

Through my monitoring of Roger Smith Hotel via Radian6 I noticed Roger Smith Hotel is using a platform called Revinate to monitor all their social media and create a customized metrics dashboard around it. Alert from Radian6 that told me about Revinate. Tweeting for travel Author: laurasmith Posted on: Jul 30, 2010 02:29 PM Facebook fan pages ? with 14.2 percent having no page to manage at all. Forty-two percent don?t use Twitter and if they do, only 25 percent tweet for less than an hour a week. The Roger Smith Hotel in New York recently adopted Revinate, which is a tool to facilitate active social media management strictly for the… Link http://blog.collinsonmedia.com/?p=45 I got very curious about Revinate since I just spoke to Brian Simpson a few days ago at the At Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup! which I wrote about previously – he had not mentioned Revinate in our conversation (but Radian6 picked it up – ha!). The use of platforms like Revinate fits in well with my prediction that Social Monitoring would go more Niche and Vertical this year and next - and that, in fact, might be the only viable way to improve the quality of the monitoring and derive actionable insights from it. Because it’s about the hotel only – and the interface is customized for people who own and run hotels – they can simplify and delve into Social Media in a more useful way, than perhaps, a general insights or market research tool that has overlapping functionality – but is too far removed from how a hotel actually works. Here’s what I said at the end of 2009: 1. As highlighted by OurSocialTimes ? Social Media Monitoring will go niche, in a big way, in 2010 - the first few entrants already emerged ? and it?s just the tip of the iceberg. I wrote about one of them in a post titled stories I didn?t write about, yet ?, a monitoring tool for pharma was released in Nov 09, called ScanBuzz - the first platform for life sciences companies that monitors online mentions of their brands and products in the social networking arena. Another entrant I just became aware of today, HotGrinds, a monitoring platform built around the hotel and pharma verticals ? I?ll do a post on HotGrinds soon, I expect many Social Media Monitoring platforms to specialize because the sentiment and textual analysis is fairly poor now, but improves quite a bit when it?s focused...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-31 15:48:20</div>

At Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup!

I was at the Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup! at Roger Smith Hotel tonight. I would not have known about the book signing had it not been for a Radian6 alert I have on the Roger Smith Hotel that tells me most of what happens there (that’s tweeted or blogged about, etc). Never been a DeadHeat but everyone knows how famous The Grateful Dead are, and when I saw the book signing was going to happen I made a point to be there and got to speak with David Meerman Scott, who introduced me to his publishers at Wiley (hopefully this will be the beginning of the book I want write on Social Monitoring – at least I can see the path to it is a detailed book proposal, a proposal I feel ready to write). By the way, I bought a copy of Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead tonight – thought that was the least I could do after getting the personal introduction to Wiley from David (that was very nice of him, if I do say so, myself! – true, I did ask him – and he was very nice and personally made the introduction as the editors where there in the room) Join us in our Follow the Band Book Tour (hashtag #GDbook) as we conduct book signings, host virtual events, and follow Furthur (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh) and Rhythm Devils (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann) this summer! Brian and I are out to have some fun, meet fellow marketers and Deadheads, and boogie at some shows. We hope to see you at one of these events. The Grateful Dead book is good – I really like what I’ve read so far “…. Because the concert tours themselves were the main source of revenue, the Grateful Dead ran their concerts in a very different way from the other bands. For example, each show had a unique set of songs, and each song was played in a unique way, giving fans a strong incentive to see the show for several nights in a row (or weeks, months, or years), because every night you were treated to a different musical experience. This is the exact opposite approach ot that taken by other bands. Since the concert tour was at the heart of their business model, the Grateful Dead didn’t tour periodically to promote an album; with few exceptions, they were permanently on tour. The Grateful Dead invested heavily in their light show and sound systems, both of which were the best in the industry, and in doing so made the musical experience much more powerful for their fans.” Page 4, Marketing...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-29 07:45:27</div>

Inception of an Idea & Web Journal July 27th, 2010

Trying to bring together a bunch of ideas from my last post which will end up being a White Paper along with a test of a new tracking system for Facebook type viral spreading and lift using a new product called SN Reach (which I haven’t talked about yet, but will in a week or so). I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to seek out innovation and the best ideas, they tend to come to me, more and more – and I’m happy to receive the gifts. You can take a look at SN Reach’s website but I’ll cover it in more detail in early/mid August when I have some of my own data to display and talk about. This goes along with my strong bias to talk about data that I touch. Everyone I know, and me, especially, are sick and tired of slick marketers that talk about the same stuff, over and over, but don’t really say anything and don’t really have the data. While you digest the above – lets talk about Inception – not just of this idea, and the case study/whitepaper that is coming up, but the movie, Inception, that I saw recently (and so did everyone else I know for the most part). The other day I wrote a post about using Compete.com to gauge the popularity of recently released movies (or other media properties) – see Comparing major movie popularity using Compete.com. As days go on, Inception the movie is getting to be more talked about and at the same time, plays into the ideas I’m developing and gets me to think about creating off of ideas (ideas feeding on one another). Here’s some high level charts of how the conversation about Inception is progressing (and how it’s broken down). Using Sysomos MAP, I noticed most of the action is in Twitter – but I checked all the social media channels for spam and didn’t find much (simple query: Inception AND movie). Meanwhile – here’s some of the more notable sharing of information I found about Inception the Movie, over the last few days (haven’t heard of anyone who saw the movie who did not like it). First, I found the Inception Infographic on Jason Calacanis’s blog Inception infographic source: http://dehahs.deviantart.com/#/d2unnlj Then again – here’s Inception‘s musical secret shared by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing. According to Cory: … Here’s a YouTube clip showing some of the nice attention to detail in the film: the two major musical stings in the movie (a...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-28 08:28:13</div>

Coming full Circle and Web Journal July 22nd-26th, 2010

I was thinking about the idea of things coming full circle – i.e.: remakes of old movies (that often turn out not to be as good as the original), fashion styles that reoccur and website ideas that come back into vogue after a time. Like it’s said that good ideas aren’t ever used up (I don’t know where that is said, exactly) – it makes sense that certain ideas would be tried again. The insight – from a Social Media Monitoring standpoint – is the same conversations, are more or less, repeating – and because they are defined – with the right concept – which i’m laying out here – you can monitor for them. Read the rest of my post and keep that in mind. Sometime soon, I will show my readers examples of what follows. One idea that got tried again was Ask.com – which now looks like it’s going back to it’s origins as a question and answer Search Engine – the same Jeeves that used to be your butler now wants to again, be your butler – but a more intelligent one – a few have written about it today including Greg Sterling in Search Engine Land. I’ll be playing with the service, along with it’s vast historical database of questions shortly. Another thing that seems to be back in the news – or being redone is the Pentagon Papers – instead they’re now Mr. Obama’s Pentagon Papers of the war in Afghanistan. Like before, war needs a propaganda machine but also has others who feel the truth isn’t being told (or being told fairly) and suddenly – a “leak” appears, like it just did. It’s not like anything here was that much a surprise – you expect governments to not tell the truth – so that idea came back into vogue. Yet another idea that seems to keep coming back and then going away is making websites mobile – I haven’t done it to my site yet but played with a few programs to show me what webmetricsguru.com would look like as a mobile site and it was awful – though Robin Good’s article on the subject was fantastic – I just didn’t get results I liked and doing it right would cost more than I want to spend, judging from the entrants in the article. Oh yeah, then there’s the 1000 buck wing bolt – saw a story about that in the New York Times yesterday but I can’t find it today – same idea that cost overruns are caused by military...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-27 14:12:50</div>

Linking it all up and plus #SocialMediaRoi ? Web Journal July 22-24th 2010

I worked on the analytics of a clients’ site most of today; we did a lot of Google Analytics enablement to track visitors to this popular restaurant site in New York. We have most of what we want to track handled by virtual pageviews and an event tracking script – but one thing I can’t directly control is how the site is used, or not used; that’s true of any site/project. For example, all the analytics enablement work won’t tell us much about current or future marketing campaigns if the campaigns bypass the website. The only way Google Analytics (or any analytics knows about anything) is when people visit a site enabled with tracking code, etc. Google Analytics can pick up Social Media traffic (I have a social media traffic filter set up I’ve used on a variety of profiles) – but if, in designing and executing campaigns, we don’t design them to so they interact with the website (where the tracking code is) at key points – I don’t see how Google Analytics will tell anyone much about the campaign – or anything about it. So … when people say … “show me the ROI” – I invested “X” in this program – show me the “Y” of it ….. and nothing much of what they did had anything to do with the website (say, we did a WOM campaign and got 100 more people to visit one of the restaurant locations and spend “Z” amount of money – nothing of that has anything to do with the Analytics enablement of the website – unless we make it about that … that’s right – unless we design programs to use the analytics tracking we set up … we might as well forget about setting it up in the first place – because it’s not going to tell us much. So, I’d suggest – figure our your goals – then outline your strategies – and write down the campaigns and tactics that fall under the strategies … do any of them go through the website you just enabled? If not – collect 0. On the other hand, having a well enabled site for site analytics – it doesn’t take all that much to set up landing pages and design campaigns and tactics that make people use those pages. Or maybe we just make the process “fun” – read Beth Kantor’s post on How To Make Social Media Experiments Fun! There’s also a post on What Do We Really Mean By Art? that I need to...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-25 08:34:40</div>

Davos ? Communications on The Top ? World Forum for Top Managers in Davos

As alluded to last week, I’m formally announcing I was invited to speak (and accepted) at the next Communications on The Top Forum of Top Managers on February 17th, 18th 2011 in Davos, Switzerland. Last week I mentioned ….. new Communications on the Top conference in mid February, 2011; the details are still being worked out. ( I always wanted to go to Davos for the WEF but must have somehow dreamed up Davos after the WEF ? just as well, from what I heard the global elite are as clueless about where the world is going as the rest of us and Jeff Jarvis?s accounts from the WEF in Davos and Dubai the last two years strongly supports that). Interestingly, one of the first things the Keynote presentation at the Communications on the Top will cover is the feedback from the 2011 WEF. This week, with the first batch of speakers for next years’ conference being announced it hit home ….. details of my presentation topic are still being worked out – you can see some of the people who’ll be joining me in Davos next year (and I hope some of my readers are among those who attend). On the Top happens a few weeks after the WEF - Ok, so here’s the program for next years conference in Davos – I’m listed in the program for the first day … EXCITED!! · Integrating SM internally - How organisations should apply collaborative and interactive social media tools to enhance productivity and communication? · Multinational SM campaigns Marshall Sponder, SM Metrics, Web Analytics and SEO expert, owner of www.webmetrics.guru: - “How can multinational organisations create a social media campaign to target a number of markets?” · SM into existing PR campaigns Kerry Bridge, Head of Digital Media Communications, EMEA and Global Sector at DELL: - “Best practices of integrating social media into an overall PR campaign” · SM and the emerging markets - Social media impact on PR. Focus on the emerging markets: How far has SM advanced? How is it is currently being used by PR? How is it different from the West? Forum Program 2011 ? Draft Version * This draft version is subject to further changes 16 February 2011 – arrival 19.30-22.30 Shatzalp Hotel: Mulled wine welcome party (informal) 17 February 2011 – Day I 09.00-09.30 Registration, coffee 09.30-10.00 Welcome speeches: organizers, partners, VIP guests 10.00-10.30 Keynote speech/presentation: · What did WEF 2011 teach...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-24 17:53:20</div>

Comparing major movie popularity using Compete.com

Searching around for something to write about today and it occurred to me that Compete.com could, with some limitations, be used to see how well a major movie being released is being promoted or watched online. Take 3 current releases, Inception, Who is Salt (which might be a TV show for all I know) and The Last Airbender. This approach doesn’t work for movies that Disney releases because they use two level deep subdomains to hang their movie site urls off of that Compete does not currently track. I looked at daily attention and daily reach for the movies (we could compare up to 5 at one time – again, with the way the urls are written out – not every movie can be compared this way – unless Compete.com adds deeper Subdomain tracking). In fact it looks like a lot of the media properties of Warner Brothers could be tracked in Compete including many popular TV/Cable shows Which gets me to a point I want to make – the only reason analytics is interesting – I think – is that relates back to a story – something we know about and want to measure – something we can make an emotional connection to (gee… that almost sounds like Art – like Paul Cezanne‘s famous saying about the only thing worth painting about is something he had an emotional reaction or connection to). Most of the time, without that connection – it’s hard to see how the analysis is going to be all that interesting – but that’s just me. Compete.com also has a Behavioral Profile for a “Movie Enthusiast” – you won’t be able to get to the url without the full Compete Subscription, though. Here’s a breakdown of the Miscellaneous traffic that comes to this category – you can’t go down any further than this in a category profile currently – but I wonder if that will change in the future – my guess is it will. Anyway, this post was more to spur a line of thought – I could spend more time on this post – and maybe I will, offline – and if I come up with anything further to say about tracking movies or media properties marketing promotions or popularity online – I will share it here. The only thing I’d add is there’s a whole different analysis that could have been done in Sysomos or Radian6, etc, using these media properties – and it would be interesting at some point to superimpose them. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-23 15:02:09</div>

GeoTechnology and Web Journal July 19th ? 21st, 2010

Didn’t find much that much happening just now – but here’s what I looked at that stands out to me. One theme that stands out in the last few days is Geo Location – or Geo-Technology. One post I read was on How Geo Technology Can Be Used for Control ….. I want to pose a different situation though. One where instead of checking into locations for fun, it becomes a requirement. ….. Mix geofencing with rfid technology, and you can come up with some crazy stuff. My friend Alex Tan gives a great example: ?Imagine my refrigerator knowing that my rfid tagged milk was just thrown away, syncing to the cloud and telling my mobile device about my updated shopping list. Then when i get to the store, using geo-fencing, it launches an app to tell me what I need to buy and where it is in the store.? This IS the future. The potential to use these technologies to enhance our daily lives is immense. But the potential to control out daily lives is equally immense. What if, instead of using technologies ability to track everything in your life for fun, or for utility, it was used by an entity that had authority over you? With RFID?s, you won?t even need to have a smart phone. Anything can be tagged. RFIDs can be implanted in people. What if police implanted these chips in criminals? My point isn?t to come across as one of those ?Big Brother is coming? freaks. Rather, it?s to get you to think about the technology you?re using today and realize its potential. Realize it?s capacity for entertainment and utility, but also its capacity for other things?for less benevolent things. When control isn?t in our hands, how will geo technology be used? It looks to me the near future will change things a lot – 5 years from now – it’s hard to imagine what we might be required to do via Geo-Checkins – and I’m all for checking in (but we don’t know all the ramifications of that). Then again, maybe people will end up wanting to sell their data, including their Geo-Local check ins – see Consumers Have Something New to Sell ? Their Data. Which takes me to Fred Wilson who just got back from a vacation in Europe and wanted to show people where he’d been - so he combined FourSquare and Google Maps (he’s giving that data away for free – ha!)- It is so simple and easy to do. Here is the visual that I wanted to create: Speaking for myself, I’d like to do the same thing when I go on my next trip...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-22 14:56:20</div>

Dreaming up Cloud Computing & Future of the Desktop + Web Journal

As I awoke this morning literally out of a dream it occurred to me Cloud Computing and Cloud Computers are going change how we access our information and how easy it is to retrieve. No sure why the Cloud was on my mind – maybe reading Robert Scoble’s post that Rackspace ends cloud lock-in as I dozed off did me in. Here’s part of what Scoble announced – OpenStack: …. That?s exactly what Rackspace is doing today in announcing OpenStack. But that?s not the only big announcement we?re making. Already 25 companies, including NASA, have already started using the OpenStack code to build some impressive things, but more on that later. This is the biggest strategic announcement we?ve made since going public. Why? 1. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. Don?t like Rackspace for some reason? Take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. We already have competitors who are using OpenStack to run their own cloud infrastructure. Compare this ability to ANY other cloud infrastructure available on the market today and you?ll see we?re the only one who has absolutely no lock-in. How will Rackspace compete? Plain old customer service and fanatical support. So now that your Cloud applications that live in RackSpace‘s cloud can easily move off to another cloud – what else might come our way soon? Well, besides getting ready to release the first Cloud OS computers later this year Google is investing massively in building it’s Cloud Datacenters up – see Google Doubles Spending for Cloud Infrastructure… But Where? in Read Write Web Cloud.  Google has been spending about 2 Billion Dollars a year, on average, the last 3 years on building Data Centers – this year the costs were less but are beginning to go up again (see chart, below). My take needs to build up it’s ability to serve applications and data in the Cloud and it’s building those datacenters in order to do that. But it also makes me think about what we’re actually seeing being built and what benefits we’ll get out of it. For example – today people occasionally have a PC they run at home that they can log into remotely using products like PC Anywhere, etc. With the Cloud – your entire desktop and run and own is in the cloud – you don’t have to worry about having to run anything – it’s all online, running and waiting for us to interact with it. Imagine there will be less emphasis on...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-20 09:04:05</div>

Who killed my SEO Internet Experiece and Web Journal July 15th-18th, 2010

Read a story today about how SEO Has Killed The My Internet in Search Engine Land – it was quite good… can almost hear music going in the background…ha.. ” …. Everywhere I look, I see bad websites. I see hideous design, poorly designed technology, flash implementations that render websites invisible, information architectures based on a company?s organizational chart, copy that looks like it was written by my six year old, cluttered layout, garbled code, ugly interfaces, and worst of all, sites that forgot they were there to serve a purpose.” “… SEO has left me in such as state that I can no longer look at a website like a normal person. I see flaws in websites everywhere I look. Here?s just a taste of what my warped little mind sees as I browse the web.” Reminds me that when someone takes up a discipline they tend to see the world in terms of it – can probably think of all kinds of examples. Could be too much SEO works poisons the ability to just enjoy a typical dysfunctional website. Mark Cuban is in the news again- TechCrunch covers Mark’s earlier post on The End of Location Based Applications ? … I just invested in a company that takes video of an area and can tell you exactly how many people are in the capture area at any given time. It?s great for traffic patterns, security, and much more. We are posting cameras in certain environments where anonymity is required, and we don?t and won?t capture faces or anything that could identify an individual. We will simply provide incredibly accurate traffic information and patterns. A great application with great opportunity. The next extension is to install it in places where we can add facial recognition software. So rather than someone checking in to a specific application, we would already know you are there.” I’m pretty sure I know of the company (or at least, a company that does the same thing) as I viewed their applications in Lower Manhattan last year. No big deal, it’s not the hardware – but more software drivers – most of the hardware is relatively low tech – a cheap video camera is all that is need for input – it’s the software that interprets faces, sex and age – and can both tie into Social Networks such as Facebook – but I also suggested feeding the data into Google Analytics – which I was told is quite doable. Trying to remember the name of the company but...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-19 04:15:38</div>

Taking a look at PlacePop and ?On The Top? in Davos

One of my readers asked me to look at PlacePop, a location-based social app that aims to be a loyalty ‘punch-card’ for every local business in the world. I certainly hope it is, or someone comes up with something like this as it plays into ideas I developed working with local restaurant chains like Havana Central and Social Monitoring, fulfillment and customer service coming out of Social Media. One of the problems was just knowing people are at your location (while they are there) or were just there or are coming soon – another, more difficult problem is acting on it once you know – that’s actually harder to do because you have to put systems into place (or have someone else do it for you) that can respond quickly – staff that can respond while they are serving customers for example, or systems that alert managers that someone is in the venue now. Last week I wrote about what FourSquare was doing with RFID - but it might be a year or two before we see enough of those kinds of systems in local venues to make much of a difference (I guess it depends what one means by “much of a difference”). It also is appearing to be more likely that I’ll be speaking about the communications of this at Davos next year at the new Communications on the Top conference in mid February, 2011; the details are still being worked out. ( I always wanted to go to Davos for the WEF but must have somehow dreamed up Davos after the WEF – just as well, from what I heard the global elite are as clueless about where the world is going as the rest of us and Jeff Jarvis’s accounts from the WEF in Davos and Dubai the last two years strongly supports that). Interestingly, one of the first things the Keynote presentation at the Communications on the Top will cover is the feedback from the 2011 WEF. What about Loyalty systems now? What can you do even without FourSquare’s RFID and other attempts to wire up local businesses to geo-location services? My take is that PlacePop has what it thinks is an answer. Julia Graham from PlacePop contacted me last month and asked me to take a look, and I’m just looking into it now. … To put it simply, PlacePop is a location-based social app that aims to be a loyalty ‘punch-card’ for every local business in the world. The app is designed to be fun and extremely straightforward to use, but unlike other location-sharing apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla,...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-18 20:18:22</div>

Easy Seo Tracking review

From time to time people reach out to me to review their tools and platforms and that was the case with Dmitry Gushchin who hails from EasySeoTracking.com. I spent a little time testing EasySeoTracking against a few keywords where I might expect to rank on like “social media monitoring” and “social monitoring”. The tool can be used for free but the paid version only costs $5.95 which is almost too low a price (I wonder why Dmitry didn’t charge $19.99 or something inexpensive but would denote EasySeoTracking was a serious, quality tool). EasySeoTracking found a page of my site in position 59 at Google and for Social Monitoring at position 54 (though I found it at position 63). While I didn’t signup yet for the paid version of EasySeoRanking I liked the description of the backlink tool for any of your competitor urls (assessed in the Niche Analysis Tool) because it includes the backlink pagerank which is really useful – considering for the time being – Google is largely governed by links – especially links with high pagerank (PR5 and over, according to advice I found on this site). Used the SEO Recommendations tool and got some basic stuff – good information but easy to get by must looking for myself – in fact the advice might be over simplistic. The Crawler Simulation tool wasn’t particularly useful for me except for one thing – it captured all the links on a page (in this case, the New York Times homepage) and that could be a real time saver when looking at sites and possibly scraping content – if your into that kind of thing). At the end of the day, I found EasySeoTracking perhaps a little too basic for my uses, but I could see myself using it in a pinch if I needed an SEO Ranking Checker. However I want to take a moment to talk about the changing nature of SEO. For one thing, my search results in Google (the tool doesn’t look at Yahoo! or Bing, or anything else) are going to be different than EasySeoTracking’s or for that matter, anyone else, due to the increasing incidence of personalized content – Social Media Streaming, Universal Search (based on all of that), Paid Search targeting. A simple rank checker might not be a very useful tool anymore – even if it was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago – things are totally different now. Also the position your site is listed in is not as important as the probability and frequency of showing up...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-18 01:58:50</div>

Online Gaming Hi5 & Web Journal July 13, 14th, 2010

Notice that Hi5 (whose t shirts I wear at times, though I don’t have an active profile on Hi5 and haven’t logged into it for close to 2 years) just raised $14 million dollars in additional funding according to a post on TechCrunch. Based on what I’m hearing – maybe I ought to take a second look at Hi5 The new funding will be used for hi5?s continued expansion into social gaming and virtual goods. Hi5, which has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry, just bought gaming startup Big Six. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revampedsite that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. Another interesting post in TechCrunch was about The Old Spice Man answering Tweets on YouTube Videos in almost real time. For instance, Digg founder Kevin Rose Tweeted out that he was sick, and in response the Old Spice Man created the video embedded above, in which he tells Rose that he has never had a fever himself because his body is ?98 percent muscle.? He even talks to Rose in binary code so that Rose can understand, to which Rose responded on Twitter: I think this is one of the most creative things I’ve heard of – merging Social Media and Commercials – get this persona’s in ads to actually respond as real people would and in real time. Whoa … did a new industry just get birthed? Came across a site that has created an open specification for Menus – something that would probably help SEO of many eating establishments – it’s called OpenMenu. Open Menu has created a standard that will change the way restaurants store and share their menus over the internet by standardizing the menus’ structure and format. Open Menu will give out access to the Open Menu Format menus and the menu information to other companies, developers, restaurant based websites and iPhone App creators. We are going to let them consume this data into their ideas. One menu to maintain, in one location, shared everywhere. Pretty smart idea if you ask me. Also I was at the Bizzy.com launch event two days ago – it’s a little bit different – take a look at the “What’s Happening” section of the site for the few cities where Bizzy is active. I’ll do a more in depth post on Bizzy shortly. Finally, this caught my eye yesterday – MIT Creates Cloth That Listens in Read Write Web MIT scientists...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-15 14:43:35</div>

Medallia Real Time Customer Feedback and Analytics

I had a very interesting conversation last week with members of the Medallia team about their platform that is able to identify at risk customers in real time and alert customer service representatives so they might heal the relationship immediately. Medallia reached out to me, they see themselves as akin to Web Analytics solutions but much better as Medallia provides a 360 degree view of customer experience that Web Analytics alone was not built to or can provide. There’s several surveys you can deploy along with deep dives – they have a personalized customer experience page for each customer. … Integration with web analytics data Web analytics provide a lot of data about website behavior, but not the ?whys? behind it. Medallia Web Experience is designed to complement web analytics data in two ways. First, it triggers survey invitations to customers identified by web analytics as engaging in behavior that business managers want to decipher. Second, it appends web analytics data to customer survey records for later analysis. Two other features of Medallia cought my eye: Automatic integration of other data sources into the Medallia application, if desired. Companies can choose to add operational data such as call resolution time, financial data such as purchase history, web analytics data, data from later or earlier visits, and much more. Alerts about unhappy customers and customer recovery workflows to help companies save at-risk relationships. I wish I could embed the videos that explains their services, beyond metrics, but all I can do is give you links. Overview: http://www.medallia.com/resources/video/overviewr/ Web Exp: http://www.medallia.com/resources/video/webexperience Here’s some more information about Medallia. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-15 07:45:11</div>

Surfing The Forrester Wave Listening Platforms, Q3 2010

I wrote about the Forrester Wave?: Social Media Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 a year ago and just found out today a new wave has been released from a friend - The Forrester Wave?: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 - Converseon, Nielsen, And Radian6 Lead A Fragmented Market by Zach Hofer-Shall with Suresh Vittal (who I saw most recently at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in NYC a few months ago), Emily Murphy, Michael J. Grant. Nine vendors were included in this Wave – Alterian, Collective Intellect, Converseon, Cymfony, evolve24, Dow Jones, Nielsen, Radian6 and Visible Technologies. Criteria for being included in this Forrester Wave included Products that scale to several business functions. Proprietary Dashboards, Analytics and In-House Consultancies Large Presence in Enterprise Market (either clients with more than 1 billion in revenue or vendors that had 85% Enterprise customers or more than 200 such customers). Thanks to Rob Key and the good folks at Converseon, I have a copy of  The Forrester Wave?: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 in my hands and can write about it (though I do not yet have permission to reproduce the Wave Diagram on page 6 of the report. I surfed over this Wave this afternoon and here’s what I think). First, this Forrester Wave establishes Converseon as one of the leaders in Social Listening Platforms – and last time, in January 2009, they weren’t even on the map – impressive! Converseon‘s gain may have come at the expense of Biz360 and J.D. Powers, which dropped off the Wave this time (perhaps it was due to Biz360′s recent acquisition by Attensity – don’t know about J.D. Powers – heard it’s a white labeled solution from another vendor – I’ve never used it so I can’t say for sure). The Forrester Wave for Listening Platforms, Q3 study is based on the premise technology and infrastructure to mine social media data and make meaning out of it has become essential to many businesses though platforms are still very immature and social media use cases are evolving faster than the platforms’ ability to adapt (stress was put on the “enterprise” type business, suggesting Forrester did not take a position on small/medium sized businesses need this service, or don’t need it. Besides, these systems are too expensive for many businesses to purchase and run today and widespread adoption is a mute point at this time). Remember that saying...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-14 07:40:50</div>

Google Places is Local Search plus Web Journal July 11th-12th 2010

Working with one of my clients that cares a lot about local search (I’ll leave out names today – but you can guess) it’s a wonder why every business isn’t all over Google Places given that Google Now Highlights Local Businesses in Top Search Results according to a recent post in Read Write Web. However it was Mike Blumenthal at Understanding Google Maps and Local Search blog that first notice the change earlier today and posted about it in Google SERPS Now Showing New OneBox “…Blumenthal noted that the map has increased in size, and reviews of the business are no longer shown unless they meet certain criteria. The link offered next to the OneBox result also brings you to the Place Page instead of the company’s website, which is offered (in our brief tests) as the first result before the OneBox result. In a separate post, Blumenthal also noted the “resurrection” of Google Coupons from the dead. Alongside our reporting earlier this month on Google’s mobile payment solution, all of this news seems to point toward Google’s continued efforts to take a piece of the commercial pie. Why simply point users to services like Yelp and PayPal when you can provide these functions yourself? Decided to go one box hunting looking for more prominent local search results – it didn’t take me long to find one. In order to get a listing like this your probably going to have to have a Google Places page set up though to be honest, it doesn’t look like DaVinci Art Supply actually did that yet -it’s not that big a deal to get one set up if your a local business, but I bet most businesses haven’t caught on yet – it’s still too new. I think there’s no point of doing geo-local SEO if your not going to first go after a Google Places page for your business. Hand Book Artist Journals (enlarge) I had been in DaVinci’s last week to pick up some new sketchbooks which I buy in certain sizes only (above, it takes me several months to fill one up, I carry my Hand Book almost everywhere I go) – so their name was top of mind for me. When you consider you can also include coupons on Google Places pages for businesses that are authenticated- it’s dumb not to go for it. Also read how Extractiv Launches “Semantics as a Service” Platform and I did sign up and tried it, ran 2 jobs though I did not know what to do with the results – still the...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-13 07:01:36</div>

The World Cup ? The Psychic Octopus ? Web Journal July 9th-11th, 2010

Well, the World Cup is over and Spain won but it was already predicted by  The Psychic Octopusb- I guess all we needed to do is watch the Octopus, forget the games – oh well. . …No need to wait another day, because Paul the Octopus knows exactly who is going to win. Yes, that?s right. An octopus. In an effort to predict the outcomes of the games, the octopus has become a big internet hit. But, who is going to win that World Cup, Paul? There was also a Social Media Playbook released this week by Eloqua that looks promising – I just wonder if I’ll get time to read it – there’s so much information with much of it redundant – but I’ll take a look at the playbook for sure. Trey Pennington thinks it’s quite an impressive manuscript – so I’ll have to read it for sure. Also Stowe Boyd had a post on Social Trails that I find fascinating. Also found an On-Page SEO Cheatsheet – I like the “under the hood” section the best. Lee Odden had a post he published over the weekend that explored why search engines might favor fresh content SEO Basics: Telephone Game & the Fresh vs. New Content Debate. Didn’t have a chance to read as much this weekend – too much client work going on – but one thing I noted – really be careful in how you configure your analytics – it’s easy to misconfiguration data collection and lose a lot of valuable information – which is what happened to a client (before I had a chance to look at their configuration). Ouch! ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-12 05:55:50</div>

Social Habits of Frequent Social Networkers ? Edison/Arbitron Study

About 3 weeks ago Edison / Arbitron released a study on the Social Habits of Frequent Social Networkers based on 1753 telephone interviews done in February 2010 from a national random sample of landline and mobile phone consumers. Results of the survey are interesting and noteworthy yet I question if 1753 interviews can be extrapolated to map to precise numbers of hundreds of millions of Americans which this study does (that might be standard practice). Here’s what I found significant Twice as many people (48%) have a personal page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social networking site this year than two years ago; that’s an entirely plausible result. Over the last year people who use social networking sites or services frequently (several times a day) increased by 12%; however users who infrequently use social networks (a few times a week) stayed the same. The study makes a claim that seems to contradict point 2 and states 39 million users go to social networking sites several times a day, more than double the 18 million users who did so in 2009. They get the numbers by working off the 1753 interviews and equating it to some the total number of social network users in the US based on panel data that Edison / Arbitron must have based on panel data. The study says more woman are on Social Networks than men (57% vs. 43%) – again, based on 1753 interviews. I think the percentages are probably not too far off but wonder if the sample size was too small. Students are most likely, as a group to be frequent social networkers (25%). I suppose it makes sense that people who are on social networks a lot will also be more aware of brands who are present there. There’s a lot of mobile behavior stuff in the study including an interesting 55% who have played games on mobile devices – which may explain why Google is getting into Mobile Gaming and Online Gaming, in general. In fact, frequent social networkers are more likely to credit mobile phones as having the greatest impact on their lives as opposed to the general population overall. Also interesting is that frequent social networkers are much more likely to give up watching TV than the general population and are far more likely watch TV programming on the Internet (which makes it easier to give up watching TV altogether). People who are frequent Social Networkers will be twice as likely as the general population to purchase music by digital downloading it and are much...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-11 08:17:38</div>

Realtime User Experience, acting on Real Time Data and Web Journal July 6th-8th 2010

O’Reilly is publishing a book on Building the Realtime User Experience that looks good and I’m looking forward to reading it when it’s published soon or in advance (reviewer copy). “…The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurs?on smartphones as well as computers. Building the Realtime User Experience (O’Reilly Media, $34.99 USD) shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You’ll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser”. Real Time data collection and action is where I’m focusing a lot of my attention lately and this reminds me of a post I read yesterday about what FourSquare is doing with custom hardware devices for recording venue check-ins. I have often envisioned the need of QR Codes on mobile phones with QR Readers and built in online coupons as ways to harness real time data, store it in a easy to read format and act on it. In Foursquare Extending The Physical Reach Of Offers And Hints At Hardware Integration I got a glimpse of what FourSquare and Facebook have been doing in this area. “…Foursquare hints that in the future, the service will try to tie-in Foursquare with pieces of hardware to make it more seamless to use. For example, they mention barcode scanners as one possibility. A barcode scanner with Foursquare capabilities could be useful for both users and partners, as it would definitely reduce the friction for using the service, as Foursquare puts it. This type of system would be a bit like the Facebook Presence system that Facebook has been toying with for a while (notably with their keg). This system requires people to carry around a card with an RFID chip (such as on an employee badge) that a scanner can then read and automatically check a person in someplace. While some will be offended at Facebook’s Presence System’s RFID tracking I think this tracking makes sense and devices are being evolved to make real time data tracking and actions easier to compile and act on. Meanwhile, FourSquare also updated their Loyalty Programs and published a post on the company blog titled – The loyalty program system within foursquare continues to...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-09 08:16:39</div>

BeerDiplomancyTV appearance ? June 28th, 2010

Early last week I appeared on Beer Diplomacy TV Episode 34 which had Cathy Brooks, Stuart Tracte and I in a 3 was discussion on a variety of issues that were chosen beforehand. Tonight the video of Episode 34 was released and it’s embedded below. There’s a lot I could comment about in this interview – but I’ll skip commentary and just let you enjoy this episode on it’s own merits. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-09 06:58:28</div>

Compete.com Traffic Dashboards for Behavioral Categories ? Fashion Enthusiast

Did you know that Compete.com‘s Traffic Dashboard works not just on individual websites- but also on industrial and behavioral categories that Compete has predefined? I didn’t know that – and it makes Compete a much closer competitor to Comscore Media Metrix than I initially thought (because industry categorization and rankings are aspects that Comscore offers that often sets it apart). Figured I’d work with the Fashion Enthusiast behavioral category as some of my readers have asked about online metrics for the fashion industry. This month (covering June 10) the Fashion Industry segment gained 2.5 million visits, and increase of 8.3% with a total of 32,463,664 visits. Would you guess that besides Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing (all search engines) the next biggest referrer is Womansday.com with 369,000 visits, an increase of 94% from May 10, and my guess is this gain is due to a promotional campaign that was running at the time. looking at miscellaneous sites, elledecor.com and swagbucks.com stand out and are probably among the sites a Fashion business would want links or traffic from. As far as email goes – it’s Yahoo.com all the way – which a much smaller role, in this instance, for Google. What about Traffic from News Sites – which one is the most important? Google News followed by the Drudgereport.com – ha! What about blogging services? As it turns out, Tumbler is more important to a fashion enthusiast than WordPress or blogger. There’s much more to the Traffic Dashboard – but what this shows me is the referral analytics on Industry and behavior categories leads to very useful broad categories where we can organize and characterize online behavior via sharable mentions. ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-07 08:05:29</div>

MarketWire aquires Sysomos Social Media Monitoring Platform for north of 25 Million Dollars

I read the news this morning that Sysomos has been acquired by Marketwire. TechCrunch does not disclose the selling price but StartupNorth puts the price at more than 25 million dollars that Scout Labs was just acquired for. Now we can only guess when Brandwatch (Giles Palmer must be happy) and even Radian6 will be sold. According to StartupNorth: As usual, the terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but we do know that, like BumpTop, Sysomos was funded out of the Growthworks Commercialization fund. That would put this deal at well north of $25million, likely landing in at around $35million. Sysomos was also funded by Ontario Centres of Excellence, who were also instrumental in supporting BumpTop. In fact, like Bumptop, Sysomos also originated at the University of Toronto and does retain some useful and unique IP. This is the second exit for Scott Pelton, who only took over managing the Growthwork?s comm fund in 2008. By Canadian VC standards (or any for that matter), he is on fire and, by my estimate, is chalking up one of the best IRRs that the business has seen yet in this country. Who says VC is dead? Sysomos has made rapid progress since taking investment and has managed to consistently raise the bar of social media monitoring standards. No doubt that MarketWire is looking for ways to develop beyond their more traditional media monitoring solution to something that offers more social media coverage. Sysomos? strong analytics capability will no doubt be useful to MarketWire customers as well. Dave Fleet has a list of all the Social Media Monitoring companies that have been acquired of late. In recent months we?ve seen several interesting moves within the social media monitoring/social CRM space. Company Acquired by Date Techrigy Alterian July 2009 Filtrbox Jive Software January 2010 Buzzgain Meltwater February 2010 Biz360 Attensity April 2010 DNA13 CNW Group April 2010 Scout Labs Lithium Technologies May 2010 (Note: CNW Group is a 76design client. Thanks to William Johnson for the DNA13 pointer and Steve Dodd for the Buzzgain tip.) Now we?re seeing another significant player in a similar move, as Toronto-based Sysomos is acquired by news wire service Marketwire. I believe by years end there will be but a few companies in this space that would not have been acquired. In fact, Social Media Monitoring, by itself, will have become a commodity – and may already be one. Only merging with additional data will allow these...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-07 00:39:09</div>

Compete.com Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard Webinar & Coverage

I’m liking what I’ve read about Compete.com Referral Analytics offering that went live last month – there was a webinar that took place about 10 days ago conducted by Compete.com?s Product Manager, Eric Austrew, (I missed it) that describes what you can do with the Referral Analytics offering including the new Traffic Dashboard. I also want to say, again, Compete’s Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard was first born as an idea almost two years ago in a coversation I had with Eric Austrew where I suggested Compete.com had the potential to improve quite a bit by adding categorization (similar to what Comscore has). About 3 months ago, at SES NY, Eric Austrew meet with me for about 30 minutes and described Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard and credited me as one of the first ones (or the first one) to come up with the idea, though others asked for it as well. With that in mind, I’m particularly happy to read certain articles such as those cited in the Compete Blog about the Traffic Dashboard on Compete Competitive Analysis Tool Turns Marketers Into 007-esque Double Analytics Agents. That’s something I’d truly want to have inspired. Perhaps the reason I bring this up at all – is to highlight a role in influencing, positively, how analytics develops. In a way, analytics evangelist Avanish Kaushik has influenced how Google Analytics dashboarding has evolved – his hand is in a lot of the improvements that have taken place over the last 3 years in Google Analytics. In the Social Media Monitoring realm – I’ve had access to many of the best tools and platforms – and I’ve had opportunities to help shape them – Compete’s Traffic Dashboard was an example of one of those times where that happened. Here’s Compete.com instructions on how to read the Traffic Dashboard: How do I read the “Channel Map”? Open FAQsWhere does the data come from ? Compete’s Channel Map is a unique visualization tool that can help you explore and discover traffic composition and aquisition opportunities at-a-glance. The Channel Map lets you look at hundreds of traffic sources to a site or category in one view, and will help you understand what exactly is driving the change and makeup of a site’s traffic. Colored Rectangles Each colored rectangle represents Categories or individual sites if you zoom in. The rectangle’s size is representative of the number of...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-06 09:07:28</div>

Social Monitoring & Web Journal ? July 1st ? 5th, 2010

I’m not going to be at the Social Media Marketing 2010 – San Francisco – July 8th, 2010 but several of my friends are going to be and some of speaking, including Chase McMichael from UnBound Technology (unboundtech.com); his session sounds intriguing – A/B Testing for Social Media - I don’t think anyone has ever covered this before – at least, not in the terms of the same kinds of A/B testing that PPC ads have been tested (ie: with Google Website Optimizer). Here’s more. Social Media Marketing 2010 – San Francisco – July 8th, 2010 A/B Testing for Social Media Panelist: Hiten Shah ( @hnshah) ? KISSmetrics, Dan Martell ? FlowTown and Chase McMichael (@chasemcmichel) – @InfiniGraph Overview: Over the past decade or more, A/B testing has proven an invaluable method of marketing testing to optimize landing pages, emails, ads, and text. Learn how to apply the A/B testing methodology to your marketing campaigns for increased social media engagement. Find out what the experts are currently using as engagement metrics, learn major pitfalls to avoid, and hear their take on everything from optimizing blog post lengths to optimizing websites for most searched keywords By the way, it’s been confirmed I’ll be a speaker at these series of conferences (focusing on Social Monitoring) in New York (November), Boston (October) and San Francisco (September, I believe). Also, Social Media Monitoring is going to be taking place in London on November 22nd (plan to be there) and Paris (December 6th – hope to be there and at LeWeb 10). There’s also a possibility I’ll be the guest of honor at a PR/Communications conference in Davos next February – but that hasn’t been fully confirmed yet. Fred Wilson wrote a very interesting post on getting funding for your startup during the summer months and came up with a intriguing finding. . .. I just did a quick query on our portfolio and we made our first investments in eight of our twenty-seven active portfolio companies during the third quarter. Three of our investments were closed in July. Three of our investments were closed in August. And two of our investments were closed in the first couple weeks of September. Eight out of twenty-seven is thirty percent of our portfolio, and that is north of the twenty-five percent of the year that the summer represents. So our firm has been more active on new investments during the summer than...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-06 07:48:37</div>

My6Sense Review

I have had My6sense on my iPhone for over a year but only started using it actively once after I met Barak Hachamov at TechCrunch Disrupt about 6 weeks ago and he convinced me to give it a real try – since then I’ve used it constantly every day – and probably put about 20-30 hours of solid time into My6sense. Also, I wrote about it TechCrunch Disrupt(d) and my Interview with Barak Hachamov ? Founder of My6sense Inc – you can find most of the initial details about My6sense. Barak mentioned if I used My6sense for 3 or 4 weeks solid I would notice the quality of incoming data (from my RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook) would be sorted by what is important to me and it would greatly simplify the information flow coming to me. So far, that goal hasn’t really happened and I’m in level 4 for about 2+ weeks and have no idea when I’m going to progress (see below). What I’m finding is the information I get from my Google Reader is easier for me to digest then what I got out of My6sense – even though My6sense is supposed to learn from me and re-order the information based on what it thinks I want to see. I think I’m not the typical reader – I have already taken a lot of care in selecting my data feeds – I already know the information I want to read about – My6sense, as far as I can see, so far, offered little improvement and a lot of duplication in what I read. IN theory , I should only need to read the first few pages of My6sense filtered by relevance – but ended up, most of the time reading the same stories twice – once in Google Reader and once in My6sense. Also, My6sense had one limitation that Google Reader – via Byline does not have – I can store stories ahead of time and comment on them – My6sense requires an active internet connection to function – which has often been really annoying. Since I’ve been at “Mastering” level for so long (several weeks) I can’t even tell if I’m progressing – or when I’ll get to the final, 6th level – or what I’ll get at that level than I’m not getting now – all of that is unclear. It’s possible that in a few more weeks I’ll be at level 5 (if I’m willing to continue to work at My6sense) and will be able to say – Wow! But after 6 weeks I’m wondering what it will take to even get to level 5 much less, level 6. Another...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-06 05:35:08</div>

New Users & Facebook plus Sucky Data and Web Analytics ? Web Journal

Note that much going on this weekend – it’s a quiet time for the 4th of July – and even the message streams seem to suggest this but I think, in the background, this is actually an exciting time where Analytics Developments are accelerating – even as we celebrate the weekend away (or with family and friends). First – Facebook Unveils One of the History’s Most Powerful Recommendation Engines according to a post at Read Write Web that I just read now. It’s about time Facebook began constructively using the data it’s collecting on members to make being in Facebook a better experience – this might just be the beginning of that: For example - …. these recommendations are surfaced before you fill out your profile information. Facebook is using some seriously magical secret sauce to figure out who your friends might be, then what you might like based on your shared demographics, before asking you anything more than your email, name and age. That’s pretty amazing. Presumably they are pinging 3rd party email databases – but that would be an interesting story to dig into! Here’s more: Facebook just announced the availability of a new feature for users creating accounts on the social network: Suggested Interests. Facebook will now recommend that new users sign up for updates from (“Like”) publishers with high reader engagement and subscribed-to by people demographically similar to themselves. That’s unique combination of factors that only Facebook could offer. If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more – the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it’s worth betting they’ll be center stage in the future. User demographics, audience engagement metrics and syndicated feed subscription are each data plays that can change the way software intersects with users. Put them all together and there may never have been a platform that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for such an incredible number of people. I’m not a new user so I don’t see these screens – a new user would. But, I think this is where the web is going – this is what we’re...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-02 23:31:29</div>

Google Me FourSquare & Facebook- Web Journal

In a recent development FourSquare secured an additional $20 Million dollars of VC Funding from a variety of top VC funds – see TechCrunch‘s Foursquare Closes $20 Million Series B From Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square, And O?Reilly but what I didn’t realize is – Facebook was also just about to acquire FourSquare – which I’m glad didn’t yet happen. GigaOM had a different slant to this story – see Sounds Like Facebook and Foursquare Will Be Partners, Not Competitors suggesting Dennis Crowley didn’t want to make the same mistake twice (selling too early and losing control – we never know what Dodgeball may have become it not been sold to Google). But the deals might not have happened this week had FourSquare Privacy Issues that just cropped up not been partly dealt with according to a post in Boing Boing. ….The company asked the white hat, Jesper Andersen, to give it nine days to deal with the problem that it was publishing all users? location data to the entire web despite its privacy-policy promise to users that ?You can opt out of such broadcasts through your privacy settings.?At the same time, the company was wrapping up a protracted and very public finance round that stalled for a while as the company reportedly almost sold itself to Facebook. I want to talk about that last two paragraphs for a second – we’ve been dancing around the privacy issue with check-ins on FourSquare all year. I have met at least a few people at FourSquare in New York and discussed if they are for or against scraping venue pages for check in information because FourSquare does not publish the entire list of people who checked in, just those in the last 3 or 4 hours. Some companies have dealt with similar limitations with Facebook Friends by scraping Google’s Search Results over time for the same individuals to get the total list of friends since not all of them are displayed – this data mining information is used to answer high end marketing questions – and from what I’m told is perfectly legal and doesn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service. I discussed this idea of scraping content off venue pages with FourSquare at least twice – and no one batted an eye – then .. it wasn’t till someone with the skill to do it – went ahead and took the idea I threw out and went with it – and that it just so happened to occur when contract...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-01 15:05:01</div>

BackType Analytics Update ? analyzing Social Impact

I was reading comments on Krugman’s The Third Depression yesterday (which has gotten a lot of attention as he used the “D” word to describe the world economy) and wondered if the OP-ED could be analyzed – remembered that BackType can look at specific URLs or websites and determine the recent conversations around them – but I haven’t found the BackType particularly useful because of it’s limited scope and time-frame. As soon as I got to BackType, I noticed some changes which are moving in the right direction and now allows comparisons between up to three URLs ac cross more Social Media Channels (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace – etc). Going from the general to the specific – I compared The New York Times with The Huffington Post and then saw I could add The Wall Street Journal; initially I thought of my friends at Adaptive Semantics and the reality Huffington Post may be surpassing the New York Times in traffic, as I mentioned in a previous post. I’m able to look at 6 months of trend data in a new visualization I don’t think they did not have before. I also was able to add more URLs to my comparison by manipulating URL string in the browser address bar (not sure what the limit is). There’s another report on Audience that wasn’t there before. The chart above implies that the New York Times “community” of Twitter users actively shares more links with each other about the New York Times stories than users who go to the Huffington Post. There’s also a link on the BackType site to sign up for a private beta account to test their new analytics platform – this looks promising. I already had a regular account so I logged in and found what looked to be new measurements – if they were there before I didn’t notice it – in this case, shared links across several Social Media Channels related to my Twitter Account. But what I really wanted to do is analyze the impact of Paul Krugman‘s article in comparison to other stories or articles going on at the same time or in a related time frame – this is more like a problem that you might want to solve in PR (not that I’m particularly tied to Public Relations – I’m not – it’s that I see opportunities and insights in any field I get involved in). One application would be to look at all the OP-ED articles at New York Times over the last two days (there are...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-29 12:15:32</div>

Web Journal ? Weekend Developments ? Cookie Values

A couple of things cropped up over the last day including a New U.S. Federal Policy on Web Measurement and Customization that I heard about from the Web Analytics Message Board on Yahoo!. Yesterday, OMB announced new U.S. Government policies on “Web Measurement and Customization”, rescinding the long-standing prohibition on persistent cookies on Federal web sites. That change should go a long way to help get actionable data from site analytics monitoring government websites. The permission to go forward and retain cookie data is being balanced by privacy concerns …. At the same time, OMB is acutely aware of, and sensitive to, the unique privacy questions raised by government uses of such technologies. Any such uses must not compromise or invade personal privacy. It is important to provide clear, firm, and unambiguous protection against any uses that would compromise or invade personal privacy. Of course, that warning had to be in the letter. Also, is anyone aware of what “Geo Fencing” is? It turns out to be one of the “new things” that are cropping up quickly… according to Read Write Web in a post on Is Geofencing the Next Evolution for Location Apps? Location Labs Thinks So - … To get an idea of how geofencing technology could improve on existing location-based applications, just look at the current popular apps. Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla could implement this infrastructure to allow users to automatically check-in when entering the geofence of a particular location. I can’t even count the times I’ve been out and forgotten to check-in at various locations, robbing myself of precious Foursquare points. With geofencing, I could have been automatically checking in as I went from place-to-place, or perhaps a push notification would have reminded me after I was within the perimeter of the geofence for a certain amount of time. Additionally, geofences could allow for a feature of location apps that Robert Scoble advocated for earlier this month. As Scoble points out, it is helpful to location app users if they can tell if their friends are still at a location, and determining how long users spend in businesses can have a significant impact of location-based marketing.. Also, here’s a study by Edison Research on who uses Social Networks – the result below is not surprising- Also, what’s this about Woman dropping out of IT? A study by the National Center for Women and...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-27 22:41:46</div>

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