Tonight seems like an “analytics” focused evening as a bunch of new or enhanced platforms have come to light.

I tried out WorkStreamer tonight – as per Workstreamer Is A Realtime Listening And Tracking Platform For Businesses – it’s interesting – a real time business listening system – i put in a few businesses and I was able to get some basic stuff that might be of interest to startups, etc.

Try it out and see for yourself – signing up is free.  I put up their mascot (above) and so far I like what I see but not sure I’d find it useful, but that’s just my opinion.

Actually, I like what I saw of CrowdEye more – TechCrunch reports on CrowdEye Adds Location And Sentiment Filters To Realtime Search.

… new features are the ones that let you sort by location and sentiment. The location filter shows only Tweets that come from a particular city or spot on a map (you can literally just place a marker on a drop-down Google Map to choose the location). The sentiment filter is more rudimentary. It only allows you to boost positive or negative results, but it doesn’t show you the overall sentiment for a keyword.

I tried searching on “Social Media” in various parts of the UK to see how it compared to the default and didn’t find much difference in the results but I think it’s something I’m willing to play with more.

Meanwhile PostRank Launches New Tools to Visualize the Real-Time Web according to ReadWriteWeb with the details explained here. Both the Geo-Trends and Geo-Location are running demos that don’t let you put in a query but do let you see the results of live data coming into Postrank.  As yet, I have no opinion about either tool.

Closer to home, Sysomos is now collecting Public Facebook Updates to Its Analytics Platform – currently, it’s in beta test and not yet available to all customers (don’t have it activated in any account I  can access) but it looks good – and Sysomos would be the first analytics platform to be able to address Facebook in this way (but it won’t be the last).

However, the writer of the post about Sysomos bring up an interesting point that I have thought about myself, from time to time:

Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools?

Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this

True – various social monitoring platforms are storing whatever they can crawl and extract meaning out of – including stuff that you might not want to have remembered.

There’s also a great post on Leveraging Social Media Links to Drive Traffic  at Online Marketing Connect.

Also, there’s a Diesel + Foursquare: NYC Event  today that I might attend.  My feeling is this kind of tactic is similar, but a lot crazier  than what I have in mind for local location based marketing – and I’ve written a lot about that lately.

There’s more … and here’s where the program gets good:

• While they are in store, customers can  pick up a BE STUPID sticker.
• Customers then return home and take a photo of sticker on their forehead.
• They then email the photo to BESTUPID@DIESELCONTEST.COM.
• Customers then receive an auto-reply with an entry form asking them to share their most STUPID story.

The prizes are crazy! In addition to the Diesel Foursquare deal, participants that go one step further and photograph themselves with the BE STUPID sticker can win of five trips!

1. Swim with sharks off South Africa
2. Ride a motorcycle across Europe
3. Fly in zero gravity in Las Vegas
4. Take a train through Mongolia
5. Cut a record in Jamaica

Crazy, but interesting and creative – it’s not the kind of thing you do everyday, but this is how it all starts (what I predicted will happen by years end -when Social Media ROI will not be as much of a problem to solve as it has been).

On the other hand, I’m often amazed and how people  sometimes state the obvious – Sally Falkow, a regular in Search conferences, wrote that Social Media is Invading Search Territory - this is practically common knowledge now – so,  where has she been?

There’s also rumors that FourSquare might sell itself to Microsoft - I sure hope not!

And I’m meaning to download and try Adobe Ideas – Adobe Ideas is A Creative Notebook for Your iPhone according to WebWorkerDaily.

On another note – Trey Pennington (yes, “the” Trey Pennington) is going to interview me next week for a few of his blogs – meanwhile – here’s a podcast Seth Godin that Trey Pennington took the day after he spoke at our DataStories Meetup – see
Trey Pennington @ NY DataStories Meetup.

Two days ago Altimeter released a report on  Social Marketing Analytics (actually, it was a joint effort between Altimeter Group & Web Analytics Demystified) – the report is a framework (industry analysts like to create frameworks for some reason and then connect those things to that framework they came up with – that seems to be the main thing they do).  Having said that – it’s an interesting framework with interesting formulas that appear to be replicable – first look at the chart below:

The framework itself points us to the platforms where certain business objectives can be measured.

On page 5 of the report below it’s pointed out no single platform can measure all the business objectives above and it’s neccessary, often, to have multiple tools – depending on what you want to measure.  Also, on page 7 it’s pointed out Social Media needs Standardized Measures – which I agree with.
Share of voice is a fairly standard metric (page 13)  but Audience Engagement is not – there will be some interpretation of what is  “share” and what is a “view” – but it’s interesting to me that Audience Engagement was able to be defined at all.  Conversation

Conversation Reach is also problematic to calculate -just about all the platforms mentioned can’t really measure “people”, and “audience exposure” is a construct that again, is not standardized – so this report, should you decide to engage in it may end up having the user run back to Altimeter Group to help you implement the measures (can’t really blame them for that – after all, this is business).

Overall, the ideas in this paper are fantastic – but ….. implementation, the ability to do it … well – is where the art lies.  I think I could figure out how to implement most of these measures of business objectives -  I bet a lot of people will end up contacting Altimeter and Web Analytics Demystified for help.  However, the authors do say they have higher purposes in mind in offering this framework:

.. in order to further the industry to come together around a common set of KPIs and metrics, but we realize we don’t know all the answers.  In the spirit of Open Research, we want this to be an open framework (we’ve even licensed this under Creative Commons) to customize it and make your own for non-commercial reasons with attribution.  If you’ve ideas on how to improve it such as new KPIs, vendors, or approaches, we’re listening, and will incorporate and improve this community body of knowledge for all to benefit.

By the way, I’ve often talked about coupons as a way to track ROI – but I admit I don’t know all that much about how coupons are given out via Social Media – here’s a post that explains Coupon Usage – it’s not the total answer to how to use them for Social Media – but it’s a start to give some ideas of how coupons could be delivered, and why.

Notice that Jason Falls wrote a post telling how little SM is being used in many businesses -  Social Media: We’ve Only Just Begun here’s a part of that post …

Citibank asked more than 550 small business owners across American several questions about Internet and social media use for their companies. The survey, which wasn’t conducted by a social media-friendly company using social media tools to ask questions of a social media-adept audience, came back with some results many would find surprising.

Image via Wikipedia

They didn’t shock me. Wanna know what real business are doing with digital marketing? Here’s a few of the findings:

• 81 percent don’t (that means DO NOT) use social media
• 37 percent are not using their website to expand their business
• 84 percent don’t sell their products or services online
• 62 percent don’t use email for marketing purposes
• 65 percent do not use online advertising

To close out this post – what else but some Google Bashing – first by Chris Brogan – WHEN GOOGLE OWNS YOU – A NEW CHAPTER – Google did a great job of tying together web services – but if something goes wrong with your login – you lose access to all of it – but at least Chris Brogan was able to get it back – though Google never explained why he lost access in the first place.  And MarketingPilgrim reports on Consumer Watchdog Barks “Break Up Google!” but it’s anyone’s guess if this effort will succeed.