I spoke with Olivier Silvestre of Tealium today – had met Oliver at Emetrics Summit DC about 3 months ago, and at the time he offered to speak about Tealium’s Social Media tracking solution but it wasn’t ready yet – but today he did speak to me of it and it’s quite interesting (note: took the link down to the presentation as it was prepared for me, not to be released to the general public).

First the rational to get involved with Social Media is that it’s cheaper than treditional media or CPC by 56% according to Marketing Experiments , and only 25% of the population uses Social Media today, according to Mediapost.

While Social Media comprises of Blogs, Online Video, Online Public Relations, Social Networks, Micro blogs and viral content, there’s little control over how it’s distributed and even less control over metrics, till now.

Tealium sees Social Media Measurement as a three stage process where you have Output, Outtake and Outcome (see slide 5) and while I’ve used many of the the tools listed on all the stages, I’m not sure about the distinctions being made – I guess diving products based on what kind of information (and decisioning) they provided does make sense, however.

What Tealium has done is pretty darn interesting are fairly inexpensive to implement considering what it gives you in return.

- One line of  Tealium “include” code is added to all pages you want to track.

- Tealium works with you to come up with a keyword phase list that truly describes you social media campaign – then it goes out and finds all the urls that are talking about you with those keywords and stores them on their servers.

Any time your site is visited, information of the other links you’ve clicked on previously is shared with Tealium and if one or more of the urls cooinsides with a link you’ve visited before, it’s counted as Social Media traffic.

Here’s some more information that Oliver provided me with today:

Just a quick recap of the product features and pricing:

Base Solution:

• $2,000 set up fee (with Google Analytics) or $4,000 set up fee for any other web analytics application (Webtrends, Omniture, Unica, Coremetrics, etc)
• $250/month
  • Includes up to 3 keywords (phrases)
  • Default setting: Click-Through (Referring URLs -> Lookup against Social Media URLs Table)
  • Includes Social Media Coverage by Google, Yahoo, & MSN (News/Blogs/Video)
  • Default setting: Social Media URL table is refreshed every day.

Options:

• Add more keywords (~$20/month for additional keyword)
• Add more Social Media Coverage by subscribing to more RSS feeds (Technorati, Metacafe, Twitter, BlogPulse, etc)
• Add View-Through setting (using “visited link” attribute technology) allowing to credit visits/engagement/conversion to Social Media news/blogs/video URLs even though visitors haven’t been directly referred by them to the web site.
• Increase Social Media URls Table update (refresh table) more than once day based on needs and based on Social Media and PR activity.

Here is an example of the code that needs to be place on all or some of the web site page (as you can see, it’s quite simple):

<script language=”javascript1.1″ src=”http://www.mycompany.com/sm/liveManager.js“></script>

I liked what I saw.

Note:  I will say this – I don’t think anyone has done quite what Tealium accomplished, yet -and I don’t honestly know who they compete with in what they’re offering.

This is how it works -

A. You signup for the service and it’s a flat fee to set up tracking (2K for Google Analytics, but they can do it for Omniture and pretty much any Analytics platform, but the initial setup charge will be 4K instead of 2K – since there’s more custom work involved).

B. Tealium works with you to come up with a set of phrases that define your campaign, site, event, person, whatever – and then, once you approve …

C.  Once you approve of the keyphrases, Tealium pulls the data about you using a variety of methods that go well beyond Google Alerts and even Radian6, getting a list of every url possible for them to catalog where your site, campaign, event, person is talked about.

D. The list of urls is updated on a daily basis (for a set fee of $250 per month – but more frequent and involved updates are possible higher fees) and stored on the Tealium server.

E. You place the Javascript on every page of your site or just the pages you want to be tracked for Social Media visitation

<script language=”javascript1.1″ src=”http://www.mycompany.com/sm/liveManager.js“></script>

Tealium then uses the Javascript to capture browser information when visitors come to your site – particularly any url that you have clicked on that you might have visited and is stored in Broswer Cache – (usually these links are have a “purple color” onc e you have clicked on them.

Tealium does a lookup on any url that a visitor has stored in Broswer Cache and sees if it matches up with the list of URLS it has found about your campaign, site, person, event, etc … and if so – writes that data to an event log in Google Analytics (or any analytics solution).

From this point out, any visit where the URL matches one that connected to the campaign, site, person, event is tracked and remembered and counted in the analytics platform and can be charted just like any ohter data being collected.

This solution took about 10 months to program and was just released 2 weeks ago, or so.

I’ll have more to write about Tealium, soon.