First, the basic stuff – a report that small businesses are collapsing like wild fire around the Gulf of Mexico due to the Gulf Oil Spill that was largely caused by British Petroleum – while this is not unexpected – it’s also grimly illuminating. Then another story we probably already forgot but was big news early this week that the Pentagon ‘Discovers’ Huge Lithium Deposit in Afghanistan.
When I heard that I immediately wondered how long we really knew this and why we were getting this information just now – draw your own conclusions – mine are that we are building the case for a long and protracted war in Afghanistan, and now the West has a reason for that war – though, to be honest with you – if the world economy continues to be depressed, as it is, we’ll have little use for those Lithium under those mountains (unless we’re all manic/depressive). And if we are all collectively end up building up the world economy by making Afghanistan into a giant slice of Swiss Cheese as the Taliban and Warlords are taking sniper shots at miners – welcome to the 21st century!
Then again, maybe what we really need is Personal Fuel Cells thaOffer Pocket-Sized Power from Water (Video) while digging all those holes – or powering our mobile devices.
Then again – we still need to carry water or be nearby it – but that’s usually not a problem if your in New York or some other place where there is plenty of water but not a power outlet you can get to – Ha!
But if we’re going to chop of Afghanistan in some future war – or an expansion of this one – as the data above might suggest – we’ll need plenty of charities to clean up the damage – and one platform is evolving that looks quite promising – Nadanu’s Fundraising Platform Streamlines E-Giving.
Think I could really get into dropping virtual pennies into the pot!
OutSpoken Media came up with 52 Questions To Ask When Hiring A Social Media Company many I thought were quite good and could in fact be used to create a working doc, offering or case study if they were answered – of course they’d be your answers. And then, last week Trackur Launches White-Labeled Social Media Tracking for just $297! - but this week – we already forgot that and don’t care anymore. Fact of the matter – a lot of companies might want to offer Social Media Monitoring but don’t want to go with Radian6 or Sysomos – they want something a bit “cheaper” and I guess Andy Beal figured he’d go after those people – and maybe he’s right. We’ll see. BTW, some news that Jive Software just bought access to the entire Twitter Firehose – ha!
Gary Angel‘s post on Further Thoughts on Data Warehousing was one of the best he’s written and told me why Public Relations might want to invest in a Data Warehouse approach instead of ad-hoc reports. Many of the questions that are asked of me, at the end of the day, can’t be answered by Web Analytics or Social Monitoring, or Internal Customer Data – by themselves – and Gary makes a good argument that if you need to answer issues revolving around velocity and interest, and even sentiment - you may want to build you own warehouse – except the amount of money and resources spent will be gigantic – but then – I think this may well be the investment everyone is “resisting” but really needs to make – at least, those who win in the long run – they need to make that investment – I will say no more abut this subject. Read Gary Angel’s post and see if you agree with me.
The big news this week was Coremetrics, a leading Web Analytics (and Social Media monitoring?) firm was bought by IBM. I haven’t really worked with Coremetrics since I left IBM.com in late 2007 and I don’t know what they added since – but …. I know that Coremetrics bought IBM Surfaid 4 or 5 years ago and now IBM has bought Coremetrics to bring it all back home. Also, most analytics platforms have added some Social Monitoring – if only as an after thoguht – but I haven’t heard of anything interesting there that Coremetrics is doing – but as far as IBM goes, the acquisition makes a lot of sense since their whole company is now wired up to Coremetrics – might as well own them!
Also, the news that Twitter is allowing us to tag our tweets by location is interesting - though I haven’t tried it yet – I can imagine that this information will be collected by Social Media Monitoring platforms soon enough. But for those people who want to justify Social Media as an investment for marketing purposes – look no further than a study that came out this week saying more than 20% of our collective online time is spent on Social Media – and I think that is a conservative number. Also – Sysomos came out with a study that I find extremely interesting and I will attempt to build off of, around conferences – here’s the study.
The full report can be found here.
Meanwhile, a post by Paddy Moogan that appeared in JatiN’s blog was one of the best for link building I have ever read – and really tells you why you have to dig in and build relationships – and if your not willing to do that – then just go out and buy links – because it’s really down to either a combination of relationship building which is time consuming – with some paid links possibly, or just go out and buy links if you can’t spend time building relationships – or just forget about SEO – that is what it’s really become. I suggest reading the entire post which is very long and very detailed and covers a lot of categories.
Thought a post on How Facebook EdgeRank Affects Your Visibility would be intresting to read in detail as well. Here’s what the factors are:
As Jason Kincaid explains in EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick on Tech Crunch, three factors influence the EdgeRank of your content:
- Relationship, i.e., your relationship with your potential audience as perceived by Facebook. The more you interact with Facebook users, the higher the EdgeRank of your posts, and the higher your posts appear on their walls. Facebook rewards you for building personal relationships. Invest time reading, commenting on and sharing other people’s content.
- Engagement, the extent to which people engage with your post. A strong interaction will drive up your Facebook Edge Rank. Of course, someone has to see your post and react to it in the first place. This can lead to a Catch-22 situation. If necessary, send a message to some of your good friends in order to get the ball rolling. By the way, the most engaging posts are status updates that ask questions.
- Time Elapsed – Over time your post loses EdgeRank, which makes room for newer posts to appear. No one post gets to hog the news, so keep your creative juices flowing.
Getting to the “Lizard Brain” – Seth Godin had a good post on it and in fact I wanted to end my post on this. Earlier this week I spoke at the Corporate Social Media Summit and moderated a panel on Social Media Analytics (#csm10). I threw out a statement that decisions are not made on metrics, logic or numbers overall, but inspired by something entirely different – base emotions – for the most part – that’s the disconnect I see between the metrics we supply – and the fact no one really makes a decision on metrics.
Reading Paul Krugman today – it’s obvious to me why he’s been 99% right on everything since I have been reading his column since 2001 – yet over and over – decision are made that are just dumb and stupid – read That ’30′s feeling – and then consider this -
The way I look at this – Posturing by governments world wide – inspired partly by Germany to be “Strong” and austere by slashing aid to unemployed and aging populations – is essentially an emotional response by those groups to a global slump they don’t truly understand or want to deal with.
As i said in my panel at #csm10 this week – no matter how many numbers you throw in front of people – just about every decision made by humans including strategy, campain and budgetary matters is based on emotion. Numbers are mainly for justification or confirmation of a decision already made or about to be.
People generally don’t make deciosions on basis of metrics or the actual situation, and in this case – German Officials and US Republicians and Democratic moderates are not interested in the actual facts – metrics will not move them and Truth will not change their mind – because their minds were already made up based on their emotional response to a situation the world has no idea what to do.
By the way – here’s a video of me taken right at the end of #CSM10 this week.
