Compete.com launched their new Search Analytics product and my original post - which I've now amended, was harsh and critical - but I didn't have the whole story (nor was it communicated till a week later)

However, here's story I've received today - and as I'll now have access to the entire toolset , I can evaluate it - and I'll write about it in a couple of days; meanwhile, this is the information I've been given by Compete - which I'll evaluate:

While the front end of Compete Pro doesn’t look like much of a change, it represents a MASSIVE reworking of our backend, specifically in member management. I won’t bore you with details, but the fact that you ended up with no credits was actually a result of your inclusion in a list of folks slated to get enhanced access, and a miscommunication on how this was going to get done. Having found out about the hiccup this morning, I’m currently in the process of getting this in place (though your access is currently available).

Couple points I want to address on your post:

Compete Taking away everyone’s credits: With the move to a subscription model, credits had to be converted into Pro access. We did this conversion based on the number of credits each member had at the time of launch, and gave substantially more value away than people purchased. As a matter of fact, even non-paying members with at least 1 credit were given a free month of Compete Pro. For paying members, we typically gave around 10X the value of their credits.

Minimal announcements: Because of the timing of our launch, and the fact that we are rolling out additional tools very soon after launch, we decided to hold off on aggressive promotion until later on in July. However, starting in May, we were informing our members about the transition, and let all of our paying members what the transition meant for them well before launch.

Pricing: Compete Pro is about 10% of where we plan on going by years end. Instead of ramping up pricing as we add more features, we will be adding increasing functionality at every plan level throughout the year. I’m sure that you’re view of our pricing will be dramatically different by the end of the year, as we will be adding more metrics, and stronger data than competitors changing 10x our prices. Just a few of the things slated for inclusion in the coming months:

• Paid/natural search breakouts
• Referral/destination sources (i.e how are people getting to a site, and where are they going when the leave)
• Robust ranked lists (such as search related lists, rankings by category, sub-domain inclusions)
• Sub-domain data

OK, so I wrote about  at Using Radian6 to predict the Presidential Election - Part 2 at The Analytics Guru and I started seeing how you can use tools like Radian6 if your a Search Marketer or SEO firm, though I don't think the tool was really built with that goal in mind and I created an outcome "spreadsheet" that I embedded into a PowerPoint slide that you can download - see my outcome spreadsheet

I based the spreadsheet on the Radian6 New Topic Widget with the idea I'd get the main phase or keywords for each of the topics above, especially those that were "hot" (red, tan or yellow and larger).  But as I went on to other keywords, I found the a sentence or two necessary, and I increasingly found myself wanting to use Radian6 as a news summarizer to News Intelligence tool, more than a Keyword tool.

And yet, based on the configuration of the New Topic Widget (below)

there should be plenty of keyword phrases that you could pull - if not so much that people will search on those phrases, they'll still be looking at the content - which means that having the phases and ideas distilled into a phases, are valuable for contextual search - especially when you contrast my spreadsheet with what typical SEO/SEM Keyword Research tools give you like Google AdWords Keyword Planning tool:

Typical Keyword tools don't really deliver conversations - they look more at descriptive term - but that's not really telling you much about sentiment or influentials - or even, where to advertise - hence, their weakness or deficiency in this area.

If you take Column E of my spreadsheet (see my outcome spreadsheet) which is embedded in the PPT slide you can download from the link, above, you'll see what Google makes of it:

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Because, on the face of it, much of what I picked up, especially as I went on with this exercise, are the questions both candidates need to answer -as I outlined what I found over at The Analytics Guru in Using Radian6 to predict the Presidential Election - Part 2 with these issues that are bound to come up and needed to be addressed, and that, to some extent, are being addressed by both campaigns.

And I have argued these tools, things like Radian6, ought to be in the Web Analytics groups, not just Marketing or Communications - as the involve sentiment analysis - which affects web measurement and the weight one puts on traffic, in other words, it's meaning - which is the domain of Web Analytics.

For example, I see a need for semantic analysis of the content around the keyword phases - with an eye towards "who" is saying what - then crawl back and build an opinion database that will show the likelihood, based on who is saying, what, the sentiment of the the text.

Rank the text by Radian6 Influence algorithm and give us an overall sentiment for each set of terms in a profile - and also give me the spreadsheet of terms, along with who said them - which can be used both for Keyword Planning AND, Intelligence.

In fact, you'll find that as you move up the Web 2.0, Web 3.0, whatever you want to call it, continuum, many of the tools being created have multiple purposes - perhaps they were created for one thing, but are adapted to others, like Twitter - look at what people are doing with it … far more than the founders ever intended or imagined.

And the same for tools like Radian6, Comscore AdMetrix and ComScore Segment Metrix - all three tools are being promoted as marketing tools - or PR Tools, but they are also useful for other things - perhaps even more useful, give the right hands, than what they were created for, initially.

I'll have more to say about this in a later post as I'm not done here yet.

I promised recently (Presidential Politics - playing with Radian6) to explore the 2008 US Presidential Election, using Radian6, to see if I could find a Marker that could indicate which way it will end up going and tonight I wrote a post on The Analytics Guru, after reading Frank Rich's latest OP-ED in the New York Times on Rocking the Election, titled Rocking the 2008 Election - Frank Rich voices what many are thinking  .. and that post took me back to using Radian6 (see my post on Radian6 Demostration in NYC, June 26th, 2008 for more info on what Radian6 is used for) to see if the Terror card is the marker I'm looking for.

And I found something pretty scary - the election, according to Five Thiry Eight, is pretty darn close - much closer than we think - according to a post titled - Should we be discounting Obama's lead? The next and hopefully last Big Change,

 "….As for Barack Obama's lead right now, the correction required is not quite as dramatic. The regression equation specifies that a 5.9-point lead held 130 days before the election should be discounted by about one-third — to 3.8 points to be exact. That is our new projection for Obama's margin of victory.

In fact, by the current projections, Obama would win the popular vote by 3.8%, but that 3.8% could actually be erased by a "terror" attack 

.… Rather, there is a fairly strong tendency for national polling to tighten as one approaches election day. National polls are not equally likely to move upward or downward at any given time. Rather, they are more likely to move in the direction of the candidate who is trailing in the race.

This tendency is actually fairly easy to eyeball if you look at some historical polling data. Below is a table containing the largest lead held by each candidate in any public poll in my database released within 200 days of that year's election. For 1952-1984 and 1996, the database consists of Gallup polling only; for the other years, it consists of a variety of national polls.

Largest leads for each candidate in public pollreleased within 200 days of general election.

....  Biggest         Biggest        ......Year  GOP Lead        DEM Lead       Result---------------------------------------------------1952  Eisenhower +28  None*          Eisenhower +111956  Eisenhower +27  None*          Eisenhower +151960  Nixon +6        Kennedy +4     Kennedy +0.21964  None*           Johnson +59    Johnson +231968  Nixon +16       Humphrey +6    Nixon +0.71972  Nixon +34       None*          Nixon +231976  Ford +1         Carter +33     Carter +21980  Reagan +16      Carter +8      Reagan +101984  Reagan +21      None*          Reagan +181988  Bush +17        Dukakis +18    Bush +81992  Bush +16        Clinton +30    Clinton +61996  None*           Clinton +23    Clinton +92000  Bush +14        Gore +17       Gore +0.52004  Bush +13        Kerry +11      Bush +2* In 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984 and 1996, one candidateled in all public polls in my database taken within 200days of the election.  The *closest* that the trailingcandidate came in those years was as follows: Stevenson(1952), 2 points; Stevenson (1956), 10 points; Goldwater(1964), 28 points; McGovern (1972), 16 points; Mondale(1984), 1 point; Dole (1996), 11 points.

According to the projections right now, Obama and McCain are only 6 points apart.

There's a lot more at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ and the projections are 

constantly being re-adjusted.  According to Radian6 New Influencer Widget - 

the top influencers (conversations about this debate) are going on in 

the sites listed below: Looks to me like 

Taylor Marsh and Huffington Post is where this conversation 

about Terrorgate is going on.

Interesting.

Rather than write about it all over again - I put a few posts with video content over at The Analytics Guru today.

Party on 6-26-08

A party I went to on Thrusday night after the Radian6 Demostration in NYC, June 26th, 2008 with @tamar @dingman @brett and a few others.

Also, a pretty scary report (but not unexpected) on future gas prices, given by a fairly reliable source says it's going up, and up and up, while ownership of cars is going go down, down, down - in the next few years  -

7 dollar a gallon Gasoline - here we come - I think it’s going to be even higher

And then a post on ComScore - which I already referred to earlier today -

Playing with ComScore Segment Metrix - anyone what questions answered?

I'll write more later -I think I need a break from blogging for a day or so.

Just wrote about

Playing with ComScore Segment Metrix - anyone what questions answered?

and I was thinking that one of my unique propositions (USP) as a Web Analyst, is that people have sought me out to answer very difficult questions - questions that hardly anyone else has thought of yet, or just answer.

Over the next week or so (June 28th - July 7th, 2008), I have access to Segment Metrix and Ad Metrix, and am willing to try to answer some of my reader's questions on their traffic (up / down) if their sites show up in ComScore, at all (it probably won't be a small site - though some blogs have been showing up in Conversational Media Category) - but many sites, do show up - and I'm willing to answer questions, to the extent that I can answer them, on what ComScore along with free Web Analytics tools, shows.

So if you want your questions answered - and. as I say - I have a reputation for being able to answer very difficult questions (as well as easy ones)- which is what I make my living doing - leave a comment here and, if I can, I will attempt to answer your question - but the answers will be public (I will not hide them or write them just to the person who asked it - all of it goes into my blogs).

Since I have been using Radian6 for Buzz Monitoring I've noticed more and more events where Radian6 has poped up, such a Twitter/Webinar on Social Media which Drew a Big Crowd today (I didn't know about it - it was written up in Social Media Today).

But I did go to an event tonight in Manhattan and taped much of it - it wasn't as detailed a presention as what I have been given personally, but I think it does a good job of showing you what people buy and use Radian6, and tools like it, for.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

While the screen redrawing is choppy, I like the idea of EveryScape (perhaps, better than the reality of it, so far), but Web Worker Daily has a description of what EveryScape is (Unusual Web Work: EveryScape Ambassador) and a job opportunity for people who want to do something different:

When you visit one of their sites, such as their Boston page, you can drive around and see the city in a 360-degree panning window. But you can also enter buildings and see what’s inside - places like the Paul Revere House or the original Cheers. Right now, Everyscape only covers a dozen or so cities, and that’s where the job opportunity comes in. If you live in one of the cities that’s next on their plan, you can apply to be an “Everyscape Ambassador” - someone who drives around with the appropriate fancy equipment, taking the images to be digitized. This requires a team of two and pays on a per-mile basis - supposedly high enough to be a full-time job. 

I think I'll play with EveryScape a little bit - even with the limited selections there's plenty of places I'd like to take a closer look at.

I wanted to publish the videos - all of them really excellent and worth viewing in their entirety -that I've made today while Attending Social Media Business School today  -  put them up at The Analytics Guru -

SocialMedia Business School Analytics Session

  but I think they belong here as well.

Feel free to view them and let me know what you think (be aware, my video taking skills, while improving - aren't the best - I'm a Web Analyst - not a film maker (though I am an artist, as well - but that doesn't make me a great film maker)).

I think it's the content here that you'll find most interesting - especially, the analytics (just as I'm hearing a lady say the last 15 seconds is the new 30 second spot) - Ha.

Enjoy the videos and let me know what you think about this material as it's on the cutting edge of what is known, today, about how to measure Social Media and how to monetize it:

I'm sitting at the Chinatown Brasserie, 380 Lafayette Street today attending the Social Media Business School in Manhattan and it's very good! 

Taking a lot of video footage both on the Analytics and Marketing Tracts, and as I have internet connectivity, may stay around this afternoon for the rest of it.

In fact, I just posted the first three videos on The Analytics Guru -

SocialMedia Business School Anaytics Session

I'll have more to say later on the content of this mini conference - too busy today taking it all in to really write much about it.

However, I would say that I have heard a disturbing trend where Social Media Marketers are using loopholes in Facebook to try to cram their content to users - and of Facebook closing loopholes as fast as they open up.  

Sound Familiar - doesn't Google do much the same with Search?

Well, here's the thing - instead of duping people, why not just focus on creating better content?

Wrote a post on my Thoughts on TechCrunch’s Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks  today - as there was a lot of comments on the TechCrunch post my Michael Arrington Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks.

That was a major post, wish I had wrote it myself - certainly could have - in fact, I could have done better - but I didn't write it, he did.

I think though, I will try to try to do some along the same lines, soon - if he's willing to take ComScore data and mash it up and try to make that data answer what a Social Network is worth - I can take certainly do the same thing - as I have access to all the same data, in this case, that he does.

I think, the answers we get are based on the questions we have - people have been wondering what a Social Network is worth - that's his question, and he got an answer - it was simplistic and 2 dimensional, as many of the comments pointed out - but a damn good piece of work, anyway.