Been trying to find something to post about today – but for some reason that’s been tough.  I hoped to write more about Compete.com‘s new offerings – but most of them are not working for me, yet; however, I was contacted by Compete yesterday and they will be giving me access to their full  Enterprise account capabilities some time next week.

Still, I looked at Compete.com Keyword Destination Tool for some keywords and found thinks that really surprised me.  For example, when I searched on my own name, I found the only destination Compete.com showed was one I’d never, in a million years, have found, using my site referral logs:

Further investigation found this photo of me at the Roger Smith Hotel for a Charity Event I went to recently.   You would have thought that Compete.com would have picked up the main traffic on my name as going to one of my blogs – but it gave me this, instead.   Hmm.

I also found it interesting that, according to Compete.com, the singular and plural form of a word like “entrepreneur” has different results in terms of where traffic ends up at – probably a function of how Search Engines work – take a look

Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs

Interesting musing for a Friday.

Compete Pro Enhancements were just announced today by Compete.com, and I can’t wait to try them (I have a Compete Pro Account- though it doesn’t allow me to view all the enhancements annouced here – and I’ll ask Compete to allow me to view the new features so I can write about them).

Here’s the new features as announced by Compete.com:

New Compete PRO Enterprise Enhancements Launched!
Exciting news today from Compete, as we take another leap forward in delivering the actionable data that you need to drive business decisions.

We’ve made some major enhancements over the past few months to Compete PRO Enterprise, our most powerful PRO offering, and continue to roll out new consumer and competitive data that make it easier for you to discover, take action, and measure online marketing performance.

Our latest addition: Category Profiles, that provide a web wide view of traffic, search, and engagement metrics across 220+ industry categories and 45 Behavioral Segments.

As always, our goal is to make complex data simple to use. Categories does just that, transforming a complex universe of digital data into a solution that is simple and actionable:

“Clients rely on us for timely and comprehensive insights into what is happening in their markets…Having access to a tool that makes it easy to spot more effective customer acquisition partners or to stave off threats from a new competitor in their industry helps ensure that we’re always meeting clients’ needs.” – Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of i-Crossing

How Compete PRO Enterprise can help you:
Track Market Share: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to track market share and understand daily changes across your competitive landscape. For instance, the graph below shows how market share of visitors has changed over a two-year period for five leading car rental companies in the Car Rental category.

Benchmark Performance: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to benchmark your own traffic and engagement performance against the industry and identify fast-moving longer tail sites within the group. The graph below shows how trends in page views of four different cooking websites compare to all page views captured by the Cooking category.

Take Action: Use Compete’s Categorie Profiles and Behavioral Segments to understand and design specific media plans and campaigns to reach unique consumer groups. For instance, you can see all the search keywords that are driving traffic to sites in a specific category (Cooking Industry keywords shown below) or behavioral segment and make sure you have incorporated them into your SEM campaigns.

Now I have access again, I found it refreshing to work with Radian6 and find things that I asked for last year, were added, and then some (see my last post on Radian6 New Enhancements plus Social CRM, WebTrends and SalesForce Intergration).

First off, you can now add a set of keywords to a “keyword group” and use it with three of the 5 widgets that require keyword data – before you had to add the keywords manually to each widget.   I asked for this feature last September (see screenshot below where I added a set of keywords to a preset set group called “Brands“):

While it may not be a big deal with a small Topic Profile and a few keywords – for a big Profile with many keywords, having a way to group and use keywords (found under “advanced configuration”) is extremely helpful and avoids operational “fatigue”, by eliminating tedious configuration tasks ,that aren’t really necessary, and tend to fog our minds, leaving less room for analysis and insight.

Also, while your setting up a Topic Profile in Radian6, you can purchase Compete.com traffic data connected with the profile -this was a good move (and something I heard about a few months ago from Compete.com in a meeting with Aaron Prebluda, Director of Market Development at Compete.com, who I briefly met with a few weeks earlier at Search Engine Strategies conference in at the New York Hilton).

You can see that data you just purchased in the Influencer Widget (probably the more powerful feature of Radian6 that makes it stands apart – it’s not that SM2/Techrigy can’t show you, more or less the same thing, it’s that doesn’t yet have the integration, but I’m sure Techrigy will try to match this and the CRM capabilities announced yesterday – and the industry could use some healthy competition – (which is what America is all about, anyway, right?).

Influencer Widget – notice the “Compete.com” traffic data on the far right, in the last 4 columns.  What’s being added from Compete is the

1 – Unique Visitors per month for every influencer

2- Visits per month for every influnecer

3 – Average monthly time spent on site (which in may cases, seems kinda low, but hey, this is “Social Media” and visits are often very directed and of short duration – viewing a page from Twitter or Facebook, you might look at what you want and then leave).

4- Monthly Site Views (Pageviews)

The Compete data intergation helps a Radian6 user decide if an “influener” found in a profile is “worth” going after – in other words – if my client is a translation service that wants Social Media Traffic – would an influener have the traffic I needed to make the effort of contacting them and getting a relationship or link, worthwhile (since this all takes effort to do, it’s worth putting on the table anything that can make your decision of who you want to have a relationship with, as accessable as possible, and the Compete data helps to do that)?

Another feature that is, in my opinion, a “deal breaker“, and that is presently unmatched by Techrigy or anyone else, is the “Social Graph” of a Influener, or any source that comes up as a River of News source (the River of News is one of the 5 Widgets that Radian6 provides and its akin it’s name – a stream of news related to the Topic Profile at a certain point in time).

Social Profile of an “Influencer”

Consider what this means – even though you can isolate influencers – figuring out how to contact them (and which channel to do so – Twitter vs LinkedIn, vs Google Profile, vs Facebook profile, vs email, to name a few, and having that on hand, for any influential – makes Social Media CRM so much easier and more effective).

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that, just because you can isolate an influencer in this way, using Radian6, in this case, that you should automatically go and contact them.

Gary Vaynerchuk mentions, at the 140 Character Conferecne, which I attended last week, and I was sitting right in the front and to the left of Gary, as he gave this talk, 1.4 minutes in, that he owns a company with is younger brother, and he contacts a lot of people, using Social Media, but this come under fire, because, you still have to form a relationship and get permission first, before going off and contacting anyone, and that’s what makes this an Art, not a mass promotion techinique.

I bring it up because, the temptation is – if you can get this data off of Radian6, stick it into a Social CRM via SalesForce, and now see the traffic come in to the site using WebTrends, and estimate Influencer traffic using Compete – your all set, and can go and contact whomever you want.   Except – you still need to find a meaningful and valid way to interact with the influencer, in the first place.  These tools don’t do that for you – you have to figure out a way to do – all the tools can do is identify possible to contact and give you their addresses, you, as the marketer, must decide the right way to connect with that person – and if you can’t do it in a non-invasive way, you many not want to engage with that influencer, at all, because it can backfire, as it did, I’m told, to Gary Vaynerchuk and his brother.

I’m not saying – don’t go out and contact people – I am saying – figure out how you can do it in a way where that contact, identified by Radian6, is going to be welcomed, or don’t bother contacting the influener, at all.     Since the Social CRM tools now make such contacting “easy” we need to figure out the right way to “engage” with that customer, influencer, what ever you want to call them.

Another feature which might be new is the “On Topic Forum Replies” – i don’t think that was in the versions I was using last year – but it is now.   One the reasons why the “On Topic” features of Radian6 is useful is for linking strategy and SEO. Here’s why.

Sopose you wanted to get a lot of links from Social Media to your blog or corporate website – and you were doing SEO on the site, but you knew that Google (still the main Search Engine, but Bing is starting to move up and challange Yahoo!) would rank your site higher if it determined the backlinks your page (either the homepage or a specific page on your site) were more relevent – but how do you find the relevent link (where you might want to leave a comment -even if it ends up being a “no follow” link back to yoru page) – well …. here’s where find that specific comment, specific webpage that is relevent to what your own content is – and that’s the page you want to go after – and get the link from.  While there is still debate on the value of “no follow” links (see Duct Tape Marketing Social Media Profiles as Tools for Links and Traffic)

Radian6 could be very useful for SEO, using Social Media for backlinks, even when they are “no follow” links (which isn’t always the case, btw) – by helping the SEO person identify the right pages to the get the links from.

Getting back to another feature of Radian6 that I mentioned above, the you can add keywords to a list, and then use them for Topic Analysis or Topic Trends Widgets, where this process of adding keywords used to manual, for each widget (and painful) – here’s that this looks like.

To end this long, long post of mine – there’s  a lot to like about Radian6 and it seems to be getting better, and justifying the cost for many firms, as long as you use it as part of a strategy, and you know what your doing and want to accomplish.

Which gets me on my last point – the work it takes to reach out to people – to identify those individuals you want to reach out to.

One thing is becoming more and more obvious – and it can’t be ignored – that Radian6, or any tool with similar intentions – to identify information that is meaningful to your business or cause – has to be sifted through – processed, understood (by you) and responded to – and the Social CRM aspects that are being added with SalesForce and being confirmed, by WebTrends, certainly do help with the task of storing and structuring the data – they don’t really address the nagging question of … do I need to hire people to do this kind of work?

The answer is, Yes, and you need to pay them well.   Here’s why (one more “rant” of mine, before I sign off)

We know that all this “Social Media” content is now being created, much of it “worthless” but parts of it valuable – and as more people engage in Social Media – more and more content is created – at an ever increasing rate – we know we need to “engage ” with that data, but only a human mind can truly analyze it and intelligently respond, and even if we end up inventing positronic brains (like Data, in Star Trek, The Next Generation), we will never be able to replace the human element of what makes communication satisfying and neccessary.

Because we can now sift through the data – we need the right people to understand what to with it – how to build relationships from it – the tools are rapidly maturing – but the human element is atrophying in that, in many cases, we forget to make the effort to reach out and listen.

We need to have insight and wisdom in the use of these tools – experimentation, perhaps making some mistakes, breaking a few plates, so to speak – to learn valuable lessons on how to approach and engage people.   But having said that – you need to sift though this data, and it’s massive – and you need people, good people, great people, and the right strategy to do it.

That’s what I plan on focusing – perhaps the next incarnation of  ”me”, of Webmetricsguru, to be one of the people who figures that out, who “gets it”.

Social CRM is useless without Heart, Compassion and Understanding.