This was a long week and the insights keep piling up – in this case, Jeremiah Owyang’s latest matrix on Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights was posted today and had some pretty perceptive comments in what it said and what left out.

I suspect Altimeter Group does a bit more than create matrix diagrams like the one on Brand Monitoring, as I find matrices  both satisfying yet limiting, especially if that’s all we ever get to see publicly (as an unpaid client).   A presentation by Christina Stahler of the Consumer Insights group at Sony Electronics, a Altimeter client how I heard at the Corporate Social Media Summit last week suggests the matrix diagrams we see are very basic compared to what Sony actually gets from Altimeter.

I suspect Altimeter had a lot to do with the strategy of the Customer Insights case study presented last week – but that is just my guess.

Anyway, the Matrix diagram suggests that Brand Monitoring as an application by itself doesn’t cut it anymore and is a commodity – and vendors need to move up the food chain to Social CRM to survive within the next 12-18 months – that’s what the matrix says to me.

I disagree with some of the examples – Alterian bought Techrigy last year but hasn’t added any noticeably new features to the platform while their competitors are constantly improving their offerings every few months.   Buying a platform like Techrigy and fitting it into a larger Alterian Schema does not necessarily lead to any better results for Alterian clients unless Alterian provides hooks from Techrigy into it’s other platforms, and it doesn’t.   Still, I like Techrigy as a platform – I just happen to notice every so often they haven’t really added anything new, just fixed bugs in the original platform they bought last year.

Plus the matrix below is more interesting for companies it left out like Radian6 and Sysomos – companies that are among those rapidly reinventing themselves.  Is Jeremiah implying both companies are among the Brand Monitoring Solutions that are becoming so commonplace as to be a commodity?  I don’t think so – I think this is a limitation of how the matrix was created and a lot was left out that should have been included.

Getting onto the web journal – I think it’s ironic that Apple’s  iOS 4 And iPhone 4 One-Up The iPad considering how much the iPad has been hyped.   I wonder if the iPad is all hype anyway (even though I want one) – my friend Sebastian Wenzel says he can’t do anything useful on his and is thinking of selling it.  On the other hand I hear people swearing by the iPad – I guess it’s all in how your expect to use it.

And – consider Google & Twitter Fight for Your Right to Break the News First so our problems might go well beyond the tablet and back to the content we have to work with.

Consider buying behavior on the web – did you realize Woman buy most of the brand related stuff online – see 85% of All Brand Purchases are Made by Women – Says Unicast Report?

And then there’s a post and video by SeoMOZ that says buying paid links work – but it’s possible that if things go wrong it might be better off not going down that path as Google is policing and it could get information from a number of different avenues.  I personally think SEOMoz and much of the rest of the brood is afraid of angering Google – so they say Paid Links work, then go back and praise Google for catching those who transgress.  In this sense, Google acts as the KGB or Gestapo  – putting offenders in the Gulag and tossing out the key so once having offended a site can sit in Google prison for an eternity.

And my friends at Clickable are now working  to consolidate paid search campaigns SearchManager Consolidates Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & Facebook Ad Campaigns.

When we think about Social Media Monitoring – mostly it’s about a brand monitoring itself or a person monitoring their reputation – but it’s also, increasingly, the Government monitoring you and me – monitoring all of us – The Devil Is In The Details: DHS Monitoring Web & “Wrong” Words – and the truth is the Government – and in fact, many Governments are already monitoring citizens and have been for some time.   What do you think the CIA’s investment in Visible Technologies was for?   Some legitimate reasons to monitor are terrorism  – but it probably doesn’t stop there – the IRS and state governments are monitoring too based on what I have read in the recent past.

Are we all in segmented lists governments are keeping on us?  Probably.  Let’s hope the systems they’re using to identify threats  are much  better than what we’re seeing commercially now – else we’re all screwed.

But on a more positive note – those who survive the DHS spying on us online (which you have to admit is pretty easy for the Government  to do) – if you want to build a Facebook app then KickApps make it much easier to do – see  KickApps Launches Facebook App Development Suite

White label social networking startup KickApps has launched a new development suite that aims to simplify the Facebook app development for marketers, brand managers and developers. The KickApps App Studio now allows anyone, including non-programmers, to create rich media Facebook applications.The suite’s ease of use is obtained through drag and drop functionality, allowing users to create and deploy custom video players, social widgets and rich media ad units. Applications can serve as a Facebook fan page or as a tab on a Facebook page.

That’s all for now – there might have been more to put into this post – had to draw the line somewhere though.

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• Listening Tools (proactivereport.com)

Over the last two years it’s become more apparent to me that while I’m associated with Web Analytics – I’ve moved beyond just doing Web Analytics (and Web Analytics, to be honest, has evolved as well).

Still, alot of times friends will run this or that opportunity by me and say …  your the metrics guy … your the Web Metrics Guy.

But the truth is I’m even more the Social Media Metrics Guy, and the Art Guy as well .

So, I’m embarking on getting WebMetricsGuru.com blog redone, perhaps, redesigned is a better word and one part that is essential is a good logo – so I paid a design firm to create a few logos for me and I chose this one ….

First, there aren’t many “Marshall’s” in Analytics, period and advice from some forward thinking friends led me to think in terms of re-branding.

Anyway, more in a few weeks………

Today I presented at the Social Media Camp Long Island on Social Media Monitoring for Local Restaurants using solutions and approaches evolved from my work with Radian6 and Havana Central Restaurant chain. Originally, I was to co-present this with Cecilia Pineda Feret, but she could not make it I presented it alone.

None the less, I did not come up with work entirely alone – Cecilia and the folks at Havana Central weighed in on this presentation yesterday and helped me fine tune it for today.

I hope you listen to the whole thing as a lot gets covered and if you go past the beginning you’ll find a lot of depth – it’s actually worth listening to all of it – but that’s just my opinion.

Here’s the presentation I gave which is washed out in the video ( I guess in order to get the audience to see the video we had to sacrifice getting it to appear online – oh well, in this case it was a neccessary sacrifice).

There were a couple of other thoughts I had today given the material covered in the two other sessions I attended.  First of all – the material and the level it was covered at were very basic today – almost too basic for me (but I’m not the target audience).   Still – there’s so much effort being made to reach out to people that don’t understand what Social Media is and a what it’s for or how to operate within Social Media -that little effort or time is left to do anything else than cover the basic stuff, over and over and over.

Having said that – sometimes the basic stuff has some hidden ideas far beyond what the presenters realize they’re giving out – and I think I got one insight but decided not to share it at the conference – but I’ll hint at it here.

It goes something like this ……

1. You promote a business in Social Media (say …. a Facebook Business page .. you know, one where you can have people who used to be able to become Fans but now can just “like” a page, join.   One such page being cited had 400+ people who liked the page over the last few months.
2. It occurs to me (and was not something the speaker realized, I bet) those 400+ people who are liking the business page are also people you can market to.
   1. 1. ……. But so are many of their friends!
3. In the old days, before Social Networks – you’d just sign up people on a list – then you would market to those people – because that’s all you knew about – the people on your list ………. but that’s no longer true.

With Social Networking we not only know who “you” are – we also know who all their  friends are – with a few more turns of the key we could also figure out which of those friends are more likely to be interested in the same things the people in your list (or the fans of your page – those who said they liked the page).

So … let’s say you had a page with several thousand “fans” or people who liked the page – and it was a subject that was clearly identified – say … fighting BP and the Gulf Oil Spill …..

Let’s say that you have a pretty good idea that just about every one of the 18,500 fans has strong feelings of dislike about BP and a belief against offshore drilling.

With a bit of work you could take those people, get the total list and then figure out how many friends they all have – Radian6 does something similar with Twitter Followers  but no one I know of does it for Facebook.    If you had enough data you could expand your list of people several hundred times simply by looking at the likelyhood that someone who signs up for a page like Make British Petroleum (BP) PAY for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill also have many friends who feel the same way ……. get my drift?

This is one way Social Media tracking and lead generation is so different than it’s  traditional equivalents.

Why?

I think it’s related to the affinity – people will tend to gather with others who have similar values and beliefs – and to some extent, that’s even true of virtual friends or hybrid relationships.

As “Affinity” is such a power force in human behavior – it also corresponds to a natural force – cohesiveness – the binding energy that holds molecules together.

It occurred to me while listening to a very simple presentation about Social Media for people who were largely just getting started – could be valuable because it got me to think about a very familiar subject in a somewhat different way.

And while few companies have the wherewithal to figure this all out (but I have a pretty good idea of how to do it) and produce useful results – no doubt, there are a few companies that have figured it out – and my guess is they are flying under the radar – quite happy and quite prosperous.

And, I have to admit – I’m hearing about cases like this more often lately  – we are tempted to think that some issues haven’t been solved yet – yet hidden from view there often exist business entities that have largely solved the problem but aren’t particularly interested in having you or I know about it.

Oh well … who knows, maybe that’s the right way to do it …. not sure.