Been so busy at Social Media week that I didn’t have a chance to sit down and write the next post of this series on Geo-Location.   The feedback I got on Sentiment Analysis was excellent – and I need to circle back and retest Sentiment with a more polarizing subject, like the IPAD or Health Care Reform – something people love or hate, and I didn’t do that.

Not sure it’ll make that much difference, but I have listened and will do a deeper dive later.  Looks like I’ll have more platforms to test too, including Visible Technologies, possibly Crimson Hexagon Opinion Monitor (still up in the air) and Tattler (and open source Social Media Monitoring Platform that runs on top of Drupal).

According to The Street Insider, this year Social Media Week NYC has twice as many events as last year (last year 5000 people attended in some form or another) and it’s reasonable to assume that at least double the number of attendees in 2010.

Also, I am going to be including the raw data results for now on starting with this post, as links at the end of each post as (separate tabs in one spreadsheet).

Having said that – looking at Radian6‘s Geo-Location, at first I was  surprised I didn’t see  more volume of posts. Radian6 doesn’t attempt to Geo-Locate beyond the  Region/Country level – but it’s just as well, as Geo-Location is pretty hard to do well, almost as much of a problem as Sentiment Analysis – but for different reasons.

I mean, there’s no way to tell how much of the United States traffic is really New York City based.  Visually, however, it does look like most of the information may have come from around NYC – still, you could not really isolate it today in Radian6, if you wanted to do that.

I checked Search.Twitter.Com for “Social Media Week NYC” and found only 20 or so Tweets a day coming from NYC and had I been able to use #SMWNYC as part of my query, I might have had a lot more to look at.

But, last I checked (about 4 months ago), even if I wanted to do a query of Radian6 or Techrigy/SM2 with #SMWNYC I’d be out of luck as both platforms ignore the “#” character – and only by exporting into Excel or Access a ton of data can you filter out the hashtags.   So while my query didn’t have #SMWNYC in it, for any of the platforms, it probably would not have done me any good to have tried to include it in.

I looked at Alterian/SM2/Techrigy results – and since the last update on February 1st, the Geo-Location looks good – possibly better than I expected. as I wrote about Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 Social Media Monitoring getting better last week – and part of the update addressed Geo-Location – maybe I should not be surprised.

I looked at Techrigy’s Geo-Location last July in a post about Finding Local Blogs and Bloggers where I wrote:

The Social Media tools I’ve used, so far, seem to be next to useless for this kind of thing – on Aaron Newman’s suggestion (see Two Interesting Meetings and the insights from them) I tried an SM2/Techrigy search for food bloggers located in New York City (my searches included New York, New York City, NYC, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island and Queens, along with food items).

But when I looked at the results of New York Queries that where soposed to be Geo-located in New York, I found only one in 30 were, on average; some of the posts I found using SM2 were even in China.

Using that same profile I cited above, for a Local NYC Cuban Restaurant whose buss about Cuban food almost certainly is coming NYC – I wanted to see if what Techrigy would show now.  Of the total of 1679 items that Techrigy/SM2 tracked of that profile about NYC Cuban food, there were only 200 that were located in NYC, which seems kinda low (especially since this is not a very well known food chain outside NYC) and only a couple of hundred items, in total of the 1679 were shown as being within the United States.  As a result, while there was improvement for Social Media Week NYC, I don’t think the change was retroactive to information pulled in the past.

Sysomos MAP displays what you’d expect, a pretty map of the world for which I was able to apply a Geo-Filter down to New York City.

When I did that – I got 19 blog posts – but they looked like they came from NYC.   What I think is happening is Sysomos only shows you information when it has it – it was able to determine, through a variety of methods, the 19 blog posts were from NYC, and not somewhere else … but there’s plenty of other stuff it didn’t know for sure about – and therefore, did not assign it a location – even if those posts could have come from NYC.

In total, I came up with 19 blog posts, 33 tweets and 2 videos Sysomos absolutely knew were from NYC – but there vast majority it didn’t attempt to show me – I noticed this platform is more conservative in what it’s willing to assume.  But my point in an earlier post – Sysomos was designed by Computer Scientists – Programmers – they are more cautious by nature – whereas Marketers – in designing platforms, I feel, tend to be more willing to stretch a point.

Could it be that “less is more” here?    Are we better off staying away from assuming anything that we aren’t pretty well darn sure about? I think so, at least, in terms of Geo-Location.

BrandWatch appears to have a similar approach to Radian6 and shows data down to  the Region/Country level – the United States and not more granularity.

As far as I can tell, the information looks plausible – that it came from the United States – that is.   Exporting the data I observed a few things that looked nice an different to me including MozScore (from SeoMoZ) and a listing of other profiles on the the BrandWatch system where the same urls are included – I have no idea why I’d want to know that – but maybe there’s a reason for it.   You can take a look at the spreadsheet at the end of this post and judge for yourself how accurate the results are – I think they’re pretty good, actually.

In terms of Biz360, correct me if I’m wrong, and I hope I am wrong, there did not appear to be a feature where you could select Geo-Location – at all.

I went back to create a new dashboard, just to be sure I had not missed anything – but sure enough, I don’t think, based on what I see, there is any option to Geo-Locate.   Maybe I missed it – or maybe it’s just not there.

This is as good a time as any to mention Biz360′s strengths and weaknesses  – it’s strong in how you can configure dashboards for stakeholders that care mostly plug and play and have some degree of customization.   On the other hand, it seems to me that if Biz360 doesn’t have the options you want – your out of luck.

My takeaways, so far, is that Geo-Location was better than I expected it to be – based on what I saw 7 months ago in Techrigy – but, getting down to a country isn’t good enough and getting down to a city level is only going to be done (by Sysomos) when it can determine the location based on data in the page, not just the IP Address (which is prone to error).

I wanted to use Google Insights for Search to compare what I could get that way – but the volume of searches on “Social Media Week” or “Social Media Week NYC” was too small to get anything useful.

By the way, here’s the link to download the spreadsheet with the data I pulled – remember there was nothing to put in for Biz360 as they don’t appear to offer Geo-Location.

Geolocation – SMWNYC10

Also, I want to take this opportunity to invite you, again, to join me in London on March 31st, 2010 for Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp – where I’ll be sharing how you can build your own monitoring solution from scratch and how it compares to the established vendors in many respects.

My next post in this series will be on Influencer Lists – in a couple of days or nearly next week.