On my way to Providence for the weekend and using this time to catch up with some notes on interesting posts I read this week. Bear with me, I am writing this on my iPad and its a real effort to include links – but still managed to add a few.

First, ComScore released a Total Universe report anyone can signup for, and if your company is approved, will be able to get a personalized dashboard showing where all the traffic comes from – here’s the link < a href="http://direct.ComScore.com">Total Universe Report. I used ComScore often in the past and have missed some of the capabilities that I feel web Analytics platforms lack out of the box including categorization and audience profiling. My guess is startups and small businesses that qualify might not get those offerings (except for their own sites).

Also read about Personyze that allows site owners to create personalized segmentation much in the way Analytics platforms allowed for Visitor Segmentation; the difference is Personyze is forward looking – creating content and actions around a visitor (including Facebook data from visitor’s profile information). Also, the obvious advantage of creating personalized segments is the Analytics reporting Personyze is also providing on those segments. As mentioned in TechCrunch, Personyze allows for an entire site to be customized, not just the ads. There is a certain level of opt-in required though.

A Text Analytics Summit is happening in Boston on May 18th and 19th that looks pretty interesting; I briefly debated attending but decided I would be spreading myself too thin accounting for London and Norway visits later next month. However, some of the sessions look interesting enough I might change my mind.

The latest Google update (Panda) went after Content Farms like Demand Media, according to a post by Aaron Wall at SeoBook.com and from what I’m reading several big websites got hit (so much for the Google Economy).

Can’t say I’m sorry about Demand, feel if a people ( and businesses ) have essentially nothing to say and create content just for content sake (which search engines tended to reward) but I wonder if the reason why content is valuable is because there is such a hunger for new information. But… Your not really getting new info from Demand Media. Then again, it was Google that created much of this problem by creating the ultimate means for monetizing content, and now we have a society full of garbage content, where it is challenging to fine something real.

Talking about the economy I read about a Harvard study cited at CalculatedRisk.com saying 26 percent of renters spend over half their income on housing – ugh! That’s 10.1 million people according to the study.

Last, NewCorp finally decided to throw in the towel and sell MySpace.com yesterday – The Wall Street Journal says NewsCorp is looking for $ 100 million; ha! They paid $580 million for it in 2005. So much for solid investments – just shows that some types of businesses can’t be run well from a corporate hive, and changes needed require a nimbleness that’s really hard once a business gets beyond a certain size. Then again, maybe it’s just how NewsCorp is run is incompatible with a property like MySpace, which was built, originally, around Musicians, Artists, Actors and Models, where the assets are creativity (or the flip side – Spam). Maybe Google ought to buy MySpace – at 100 Million, it’s a steal… And who knows, maybe Google can fix it.

While the Radian6 Summary Platform was released at the Radian6 User Conference earlier this month the dashboards themselves weren’t yet available to most accounts – now they appear to be available (however, I am  not able to utilize the Summary Dashboard yet on my Influence Account at Radian6, assuming this will eventually be enabled, as will some of the free insights such as Demographics and Radian6 Insights add-ins).

You access the platform by logging into  with your normal Radian6 login and password (except, as I mentioned, with Influence accounts, where the option of doing so is not yet available).

So here’s a video of what the Radian6 Summary Platform provides – I noticed it myself, recently, as an extension off the Engagement Console that Radian6 provides (an Adobe Air application).

In some ways I’ll go so far to say as what Radian6 produced in the Summary Dashboard now replaces many types  of  monthly and quarterly  reports.    Clearly, as the bar moves upward, more data, more actionable data and insights should be provided by Analysts – while the basic reporting is handled by the dashboard.   Of course, the results will only be as good as the keyword groupings provided in the profile setup.

There were a couple of features I wish the Summary Dashboard had such as

1. Customizable Dates (right now I can select one day, one week, one month, three months and that’s it – can not control the start/end dates – that’s a wrinkle in the offering but I realize Radian6 is making vast improvements in it’s platform and it can only move so fast.   I’m sure, at some point, it will make sense to give users options to customize  the reporting period.
2. Dashboards on Keyword Groups (I brought this up at the user conference) – most profiles I’ve seen and set up have keyword groups set up in order to compare categories – but what about giving a user the option of making a grouping from a set of keywords associated with a profile, instead of the whole profile, as it does now?   I think this idea has a lot of merit and, with a slight addition of that feature, pretty much does most of the work of a competitive analysis for Social Media.  In the current setup, you’d have to have a separate topic profile for each competitor.

The addition of Insights Partner data into the Dashboard at no extra cost was a nice touch.  What’s more, if you add more insights to your profile, you may end up getting more information in your summary dashboards than by default.   Also, if you just created a topic profile – do you get to see 3 months of data via the summary dashboard while you can only get one month by default, in your topic profile – these are questions I don’t have the answer to yet.

I have been playing with the Radian6 Insights platform for a few months now – and  many users aren’t yet aware you can, in many cases, use it by simply logging into www.insights.radian6.com with your normal credentials – in fact, you can be logged into the current Radian6 platform and the Insights platform at the same time and what you do in one place is copied over to the other as soon as you log out.   That’s a nice touch – at least, I find this is the case for me – I can’t vouch that everyone yet has their access to Radian6 set up that way, but I’m sure that will eventually be the case, even it it isn’t now universal.   With that in mind I embedded the video for Radian6 Insights into  the this post, above.

And then there’s the Mobile part  – I haven’t played with that part  yet but there’s a video on it, below.

I’ll keep an eye out on iTunes for when the Mobile App becomes available – this is a feature (mobile) that many have asked for and again, here it is.

And finally -the most powerful part of Radian6, the Engagement Console Extensions Gallery – is more geared to office automation and open programming – allows a user  to  piggyback different insights and data that Radian6 provides with JavaScript and creating new combinations and acting on them in an automated fashion.  If you can imagine the possibilities – you’ve got imagination.. let’s put it that way.  We still don’t know how well the new platform and configurations will perform – only time will tell that part – but the possibilities here are really exciting because there are many insights that lend themselves to automation and can you can end up with some really powerful mashups, potentially.

I think this last video you should watch a few times over – just  to get the full breadth of what this offering can create – all it needs is solutions architects, like myself, and someone talented as a programmer to implement.  Of course, you need the business requirements in order to create the darn thing in the first place .. but for that … more than anything else,  imagination is called for.

An that … Imagination – is in short supply.

Yes,  understand the business – but visualize data can do and how to do it .. that’s applied imagination in context.

By the way – Radian6 just released at free ebook on training your company for Social Media – take a look.

Was thinking about my last post about  Influence Mapping – comparing TRAACKR to mPACT – both platforms gave reasonably good results if what your looking for is online influencers, particularly business to consumer (and I’m in the exact same position in both lists, last I looked)- but what about those who are influential but are not primary online?

Even for people online, like Seth Godin, these tools (say Klout) will give him a low score simply because he’s not active in that channel.  If that’s the case – perhaps the only way Online Influence Lists will truly define offline influence is when everyone is fairly active online – and these tools can crawl and gather the data …. and I think we’re about 25 years away from that.

For B2B contacts it’s more likely information is much more likely going to be shared in closed communities, linkedin,  or otherwise offline – the whole point of using online influence tools to define offline influencers may be a mute point since offline influence does not appear to map closely to online influence.

Here’s some examples:

1. Medical - Pharmaceuticals are so regulated by the FDA it’s hard to imagine any drug company or, in fact, any physician or health care professional (except alternative medicine)  openly stating their opinion on anything controversial (that might get them sued).  As a result, even if a doctor does feel a certain way towards a drug, they are unlikely to come at and say it publically, anywhere, including online.

Take cardiology – for example – your more likely to find influencers by looking though Cardiology magazines and doing primary research than any online tool is going to provide.   We might not even have the right keywords – we’d probably want to monitor what a bunch of professionals in the field said and then try to discern that the keywords are they actually used, and how often, and then tune the online influence platforms to those words and then see what we come up with.

Besides, many professionals, including doctors, aren’t that active online, though that is changing.   You’d be more likely to find influencers by looking through closed communities and forums than anything Klout or the other platforms I work with can get at.   But the problem is, with the closed communities, most people use pseudonames and aren’t directly reachable.

2. Real Estate: Again, as much as we like to think everyone is online I suspect LinkedIn is probably more important than Facebook in order for actually connecting up with people.

3. Professional Services – I think it’s to be very successful in a field or discipline entirely via Word of Mouth (photographer, speaker, consultant), that is “offline” word of mouth and reccomendations.    Perhaps there are individuals who are very successful and what they do, but do not generate much or any online content … It’s hard to image these individuals will ever show up on any influencer list.

But, in many cases, I think the people we really want to find are precisely the real influecners – the ones that are often, offline.