Today I’m at the Pimp Your Reports training in NYC

A lot of search related material came up during this period including an excellent article in Search Engine Land titled Even Lasik Surgeons Have To Pay Attention To Search Behavior that is one of the best articles on Search Engines I’ve read – plus I can figure out how to replicate it – but for other subjects.  Point being – for Social Media Monitoring and Analytics – the Search Behavior approach integrates really, really well.   Read the article but here’s the reasons why you might want to use an approach like this one for Search.

• The process is data-driven, and helps you focus on user intent. There is no guessing involved.
• A categorical behavior model describes your potential customer’s complete research and search experience—you understand everything that a consumer is going to do when searching for your products and services.
• It provides an information architecture model for organizing a website based upon consumer expectations.
• It provides a content model for developing content strategy around focused landing pages.
• It provides a data-driven list of secondary terms that can be used effectively for navigational menus, content labels and page copy.
• It provides a better opportunity to present users with they want because you have anticipated what they are looking for.

Also, JaTiN writes about Raven SEO Tools which I am somewhat familiar with but haven’t looked at for a while.  It’s been on my mind to investigate who has the best SEO tools as there are times when those tools are needed – not everything you might want to do is well accomplished with free tools, even though those tools (mostly from Google or third parties) are extremely useful.  JaTiN thin,s the Raven SEO tools are among the best he’s used – in fact the Raven SEO toolset now includes an sync up with Google Analytics and Facebook – that’s fantastic!  Here’s the information about that intergration from JaTiN”

Here are some of the features offered within Raven’s Facebook Tool:

• Deep Google Analytics integration
• White label reporting of Facebook metrics
• Automatic wall post scheduling
• Fan tracking, customizable by date range
• Monitor posts, comments, and likes

What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what’s working and not working over defined periods of time.

So … there’s more than one way to skin the Facebook Cat, or should I say, Raven.  And, Raven does Twitter – too (see below)

Monitor Twitter Activity and Engagement

If you are allocating resources to Twitter, or being paid by a company to run their Twitter account, then you’ll want the ability to see some pretty juicy stats related to your Twitter campaign. With Raven’s new Twitter tool you’ll be able to see the following:

• Posts
• Followers
• Friends
• Friend to Follower Ratio
• Mentions
• Google Analytics referral data
• Reply and Retweet reach (a great way to see how many readers are seeing the message

Here’s a screenshot of the statistical overlay:

What’s really nice about this is the date range comparisons. It’s a huge time-saver to manage this data mostly in one place, you can truly get a handle on what’s working and what’s not working, as well as why it’s not working or working. The level of detail and integration is really unique to Raven’s suite of tools.

Monitor Tweets Related to Your Account

In addition to viewing tweets from your public timeline you can also see all mentions associated with your account, as well as tweets posted from your account:

Anyway, if I had enough SEO work to justify it – Raven SEO tools is well worth the money – in fact I signed up for the $19.00 per month account with the first month free (no CC required) just to see the up to date Raven Tools for myself.

Also, Google has been doing a bunch of experiments (they regularly run up to 120 search experiments at a time) including one on Google Suggest (see below).

Since I haven’t been able to access this experiment yet and the only thing I have to go on is the video above – which doesn’t look all that exciting.

On an entirely different note - I read a post on how restaurants are in Survival Mode at Calculated Risk.  Being that I’ve done some analytics work for the Havana Central Restaurant chain, I’m more interested in metrics that track the data I’m pulling from Google Analytics for clients – and in this case, the Restaurant Performance Index is one of them.

A reader of my blog also let me know about a Social Media Monitoring Platform for Restaurants called InfoGlutten but I haven’t yet had a chance to evaluate it – though it sounds promising and inexpensive.   Considering Restaurants aren’t doing well, the prices are attractive.  Once I have reviewed InfoGlutten I’ll let my readers know what I think of it.

A post on TechCrunch reports on why most Social Media projects fail -it’s do to a  lack of a clear Social Media Strategy.