A couple of days ago I met with Collarity's chief technical and marketing officers (Levy Cohen, Deborah Richman and the chief engineer / programmer, Emil Ismalon) in New York for a long and spirited dinner near Times Square and I noted it later that evening with a post on Dinner with Collarity tonight at The Blue Fin.  I promised to spend some time discussing ideas from that meeting here - I'm doing that now.  I don't take notes and let whatever I remember come back to me.

In fact, after a couple of glasses of red wine, I doubt my notes would have been any good to me.   Let me start by noting the visit was planned a couple of weeks ago and Collarity was here meeting with Advertisers and Publishers - but we did not discuss those details.  I am aware Collarity is running on Fox News in many local markets (ie: www.myfoxny.com vs. www.myfoxtampabay.com, etc - there are several local Fox sites and each has a version of Collarity running on it - set to community mode).

Levy Cohen and Emil Ismalon suggested that Collarity Relevance Engine has many uses beyond Search - and not all the functionality is enabled yet - but even now, they said, I could use Collarity on various MyFox.com affiliates to gauge local attitudes on pretty much any subject in the news.  So…. I did that with the query "IRAQ WAR" which is in the news today anyway as there was a big protest in New York City this afternoon.

Click on the image to expand it. 

Cohen suggested that I'd get a different result for every Fox affiliate city … and I did - which I show you above.   What Collarity is doing is taking all of the visitors to each Fox Affiliate and categorizing them by the communities they belong, on the fly, plus Collarity Relevance Engine is able to determine the most prominent communities and which pages they prefer to go to.

Notice that while most of the results are similar, the order varies somewhat which reflects the attitudes of the communities that visit that local Fox Affiliate.  Also, the keywords, and therefore, the concerns of visitors to Fox News differs based on municipality; in NYC it's about "Iran, leader, president" while in DC it's more about a time line to get the troops out - "Iran, troops, time line".  In Tampa Bay the concerns run on the Iraq War being a Democratic Issue with "Democrats | Bush | Dems, plus bringing the troops home " troop | people | Baghdad".   Finally in Saint Louis, there's a similar concern as Tampa Bay, but with more emphasis on the Senate and the "Jacko Report".

How does one use that information … I'm not sure - but I think if your into politics …you could use it, perhaps, to gauge where each area of the country stands on critical issues your running on. 

No book has ever been written on this …. if I had my way….I'd be the one to write the book on Political Campaign Metrics, but I think someone like Lee Odden of TopRank would know what to do with Collarity Relevance Engine as a marketing tool - and why I say that …. it's just my intuition.  I have a gut feeling Lee Odden know how to use it for all kinds of Social Media Marketing, and maybe when I'm at SESNY next month - I'll speak to him about it.

In my next post I'll go deeper into this example of Collarity Relevance Engine as a Research Tool to find out what your audiences think.