Steve Broback _Parnassus Group talks about Brand Monitoring in a Web 2.0 World.

Google Reader propergation ( writes notes and share with friends ). Blog Business Summit. Launched Sentimine in 2008. We recently began to supply sentiment to other marketing and engagement dashboards.

1-Search Results are a big priority
2-80/20 Pareto principle
3-All exotic technology will become cheap later.

Goals- Product Dev, messaging or Competitive Analysis?

Budget? How much delay? What do you need to capture? How much structuring is needed? Dashboard? Do you an engineered response system (alerts).

A lot of companies got into Dashboards but most end up generating reports, instead. What people want is analysis and acting on the information.

Most businesses do ad hoc monitoring now, and if that is all you need, that’s fine.

-Good Companies
Visible Technologies
Nielsen Buzzmetrics
Umbreia

Monitor110 went belly up this year because it tried to do it all. They tried doing Dashboards and ended up with reports.

Whitelists- a select set of domains you look at vs trying to capturing the entire web.

What you can do inhouse, yourself:

Google Reader: you can subscribe sites, blog searches, tweets, etc. Navigating through the listings and use J key to scroll down, or the V key. Share content. The shared items have a webpage and a feed.

But the main problem with this approach is the cesspool, lack of wall gardens such as facebook ?(bit there’s a workaround). Google and Yahoo both are worried about Splogs, and what you pay a professional services for.

And, if you are just searching Google, your missing good information. Google custom search does not sort on date and provides ads, which we don’t want.

Delicious Bookmarks.

Case for Whitelisting. Uploads Urls. Webcommuniryforum.com

How to get information on pages that don’t have feeds? Yes. Secret Weapon - use Firefox Plugin called Update Scanner. You can get list of things have changed on each site.

Getting a feed from Update Scanner using Dapper as a Firefox Plugin ( get URL with search perm so it will reload and get a RSS feed - using DappFactory-add to basket- senses zones, save the field. )

Tony Russo

Still at the IAB Leadership Council today - I don't know, though it's interesting to look at the new metrics of "Brand Virility" which is something that Nielsen came up with in conjunction with the New York Times - IAB Internet Leadership Council - Quantifying Brand Influence in Consumer-Generated Media - A Publisher’s Story (NYT).

I was trying to get into Facebook sessions, and it was filled up, I'll try again, this afternoon; instead, I went over to Quantifying Brand Influence in Consumer-Generated Media - A Publisher’s Story (NYT) which I wrote about in The Analytics Guru.   

It sounds to me like "Brand Virility" is one way a publisher can argue to an advertiser that publishing an ad with the publisher is more effective (by a certain percentage) than advertising that same ad somewhere else.

I don't have a deck from the New York Times / Nielsen presentation yet - but the basic idea was to use Buzzmetrics to collect the blog posts (in aggergate) vs. those that point to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc, and show that the Publisher's Brand is a strong indicator in why Bloggers would look at the New York Times content, vs. say, the Wall Street Journal.

But later, it was revealed the data came just for the month of Feburary 08 and only for MySpace, and it was also clear that the revenue models of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is different - in that WSJ has protected content while NYT doesn't.

At this point, it seems to me that "Brand Virility" is another example of a metric defined to validate an idea that some one already has (about themselves) and doesn't really help much to tell you where you should advertise - just what your doing is effective, or not.

And it's a "soft" metric.

Just thought my readers wanted to read it today so I posted it right away rather than waiting for later in the day or later this week to post this at

IAB Internet Leadership Council - Quantifying Brand Influence in Consumer-Generated Media - A Publisher’s Story (NYT)

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I saw a chart on Conversation Agent that I liked Conversational Index is Reputation-Driven where it's stated that it's easier to talk to people (or Brands) that are likeable.   In other words, you going to have more conversations happening when people think they can talk to you (and vice versa).

And, by the way, blogs help - blogging helps - because blogging is a conversation and people, and blogs are often read and syndicated - so I think what Valeria is saying is that blogging is a good thing to do, especially for branding and for conversations.

Here's the chart

In Thoughts on the Definition of Branding from Duct Tape Marketing - Part 1 I worked through the beginnings of my idea of what Branding is and how it would be measured.  

I like my definition because it enables me to measure branding, partially with Web Analytics while the definitions I hear about, like the one from Duct Tape Marketing (which is quite good, by the way) don’t.

If we’re talking about me – for example (that’s the easiest case) how’d we collect the data to measure branding?

a.       Measuring a brand, via web analytics, has to start from measuring communications (or else, what could we measure – attributes from qualitative data – I suppose you could add that in – ie: questions my friends said about me – or a business – and that could now come from Social Media – Social Networks could collect that data, Buzz Measurements tools could collect it, depending on how focused they are).

b.      We’d have to define the meaningful difference an co-relate it to the messaging campaigns being run to communicate the meaningful differences.

c.       Once we settled on what messaging to track, what creative that’s running in a website or other media (online commercials, display advertising, outdoor advertising) we can attempt to measure exposure of that messaging before, during and after it’s released on.

d.      The audiences that a brand is trying to get the attention of (could be existing customers – that would be a good place to start – friends or acquaintances, if we’re talking about a person (say, me).

A problem with most definitions of branding, they’re not defined in a way that allows branding to be easily measured. 

Web Analytics requires the ability to take information and re-define it in way that can be measured in order to make some kind of finding or determination that gives value to the individuals or organizations that want to know the information (and hopefully use it).

Recently I had to do the same thing for an campaign for a client of mine that sells Blade Servers – there was plenty of TV campaigns, banner advertising, email  campaigns, etc.  In that case, I measured

Reading about John Jantsch’s The definition of branding - video version, and viewing his video on Branding got me thinking about my own definition of Branding.

When I was at the Future of Television conference earlier this week and shared my own insight about what branding is (http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2007/11/observations_from_the_future_o.html) it seemed, to me, that I had figured out what is the fundamental basis of branding – and idea, a belief, about something different that is being offered that can be communicated:

A Brand originates as a "philosophy" about a product/service, that, through it's execution and attributes, communicates meaningful differences to one or more of the Brand's target audiences.

That presupposes

(a.) suppose I’m taking about myself or specific company that I know (b.) a meaningful difference and can

(c.) communicate it (brand messaging) to

(d.) people that I want to direct those messages to (target audiences).

I like my definition because it enables me to measure branding, partially with Web Analytics while the definitions I hear about, like the one from Duct Tape Marketing (which is quite good, by the way) don’t.

Now, here's Duct Tape's video on Branding - in the next post I'll go more into how I think Branding could be measured via Web Analytics:

The term "micro celebrity" has been around for a couple of years -but I'm surprised I never heard of micro celebrities before; there's even someone trying to figure out a micro-celebrity taxonomy created by Terri Senft.  According to GigaOM

"…in a social network, micro-celebrities who are well known within their network of micro-communities could prove just as effective and potentially even more so, particularly if such campaigns are able to generate buzz, excitement and a cool-factor.

Turns out my Online Identity Profile is an 8 out of 10 according to a new Beta tool at Career Distinction.

Online Identity Calculator (beta)

Your online identity score is 8 out of a possible score of 10.

Congratulations. You are digitally distinct. This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity. Read Chapter 11 of Career Distinction for more ideas on how to continue to build your brand online.

According to Steve Rubel:

"…it's easier than ever before to become a micro celebrity. It still takes talent and hard work, but really anyone can do it. The benefits are certainly nice, yet it certainly does come with challenges - usually in the form of external detractors (whom I call distractors).

Beyond "micro fame" if you will, the rise of personal brands really reflects something deeper in society that's changing. In American culture in particular we have always been proud of individualism and expression. Before Web 2.0 we might dress a certain way or do something to stand out. Nowadays, that happens online and it's being driven in large part by the maturing of the Net Generation - Gen Y."

What's interesting  - today you don't need to reach a ton of people - just the right people and a Micro Celebrity might be one of the best ways to do it.