I’m speaking at Monitoring Social Media 2010 London today and presentations are great ( mine is posted in the post previous to this one). one piece of news is the Announcement about BrandWatch. More later.

Here’s a playlist of the Small Business Monitoring Panel I spoke on today http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=476DB8826EB7AFDA

I’ll also be speaking shortly on Social Media ROI.

Main release

DURRANTS INVESTS IN BRANDWATCH

Durrants, the UK’s leading media intelligence business, has taken a stake in Brighton-based social media monitoring company Brandwatch after being “blown away” by the company during a trial to find a social media monitoring partner.

The deal will enable Brandwatch, which already operates in 10 languages, to expand its current offer in the US and extend its service to cover Russia and China.

The investment in Brandwatch is the latest in a series of big deals in the social media monitoring space as companies gear up to tackle the challenges of monitoring brand conversations and reputation online. The social media marketing industry is growing by 34% a year and is expected to be worth $3.1bn a year by 2014.*

The investment comes after Durrants went to the market looking for a specialist social media monitoring company and Brandwatch came out on top following a rigorous trial period alongside several other leading international monitoring firms.

Jeremy Thompson, Durrants MD, said: “During the trial it quickly became clear that Brandwatch was head and shoulders above the competition. We were blown away by their relevant and timely coverage, strong account management and technical support, robust platform and user friendly service. It really was a case of liking the company so much we wanted to invest in it.”

As well as the investment, Brandwatch’s social media monitoring data will be used by Durrants’ sister company Metrica, the award-winning global media analysis and evaluation company to track brands and conversations online and offer an enhanced social media service.

“There is a baffling amount of choice for PRs when it comes to tracking brand or client conversations online and our own research tells us that most PRs find social media monitoring one of their biggest challenges.** We’re confident that Brandwatch, working alongside Metrica, will help PRs cut through the confusion and provide meaningful analytics,” Thompson said.

Giles Palmer, Brandwatch CEO, said: “When it comes to monitoring social media it is important to find a supplier and data you trust. We’ve always been confident about what we provide but this move by Durrants provides a ringing endorsement of our service.”

“We operate in a competitive space and I’m very proud that we were able to beat off stiff competition from several North American providers and managed to impress Durrants so much they wanted to invest in the company. The investment comes at an explosive time in the social media monitoring market and will help us push our product to the very top of the global pile.”

Notes to Editors:

About Brandwatch:

Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com) is one the world’s leading tools for monitoring and capturing social media. Today, social networks are a massive indicator of consumer influence and brand positioning online. So for companies to know what and where discussions are taking place surrounding their brand online is imperative. Brandwatch captures, digests and translates this data into meaningful and useful information; armed with this information, Marketers and PR professionals can structure and track the direction and focus of their social media campaigns. Launched in August 2007 Brandwatch is used by customers around the world to monitor, capture and analyse trends in social media.

About Durrants, Metrica and Gorkana:

Durrants, the market leader in media monitoring (www.durrants.com), Metrica (www.metrica.net), the global media analysis and evaluation specialist and Gorkana, the UK’s most trusted media/journalist database and community network (www.gorkana.com) are part of Discovery Group. This latest investment in Brandwatch supports Discovery Group’s ambition to deliver greater insight to the PR and Marketing communities. The integration of intelligence from these services will deliver unique insights to help companies plan, monitor and analyse their PR more effectively than ever before.

Discovery Group is based on Old Street near the Silicon Roundabout, an area of East London where more than 100 tech and design companies have set up over the last five years. Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced that he wants to establish an East London Technology City and lure Google, Facebook and Microsoft to new offices in Olympic Park, a few tube stops from the Silicon Roundabout.

Metrica was acquired by Durrants in October 2009 and Gorkana was acquired by Durrants in April 2010.

For more information and interviews please contact:

Giles Palmer
giles@brandwatch.com
+44 1273 234290

Richard Bagnall
Richard@metrica.net
+44 20 7664 0800
*Forrester Research

**Gorkana survey of 205 Social Media Panel Event attendees, June 2010

Last year as I worked on the analytics (social media & web analytics) for a mens grooming site dedicated to removing extra unwanted facial hair (details omitted). I marveled at the work that went into the Flash modules that took me into a virtual grooming party and by looking at the tracking code, Google Analytics JavaScript tagging that was put in place for the grooming website) saw what I expected I would find, a basic tracking script with no calls to any Flash tracking, calls built into Google Analytics that could have provided a lot of information on how the website was used by visitors.

All it took was adding some code here and there, not a big deal if you knew what to do.

It was so dumb, people put so much work into developing “flashy” content then decide to omit any real tracking; either they didn’t know or did not care most of the grooming site was invisible to any analytics tracking.

It happens way too often.

That situation is beginning to change, at least, if the developer has the latest version of Flash Professional CS5 and is adding the SiteCatalyst Extension. Hat Tip to my friend and consultant Dean Landsman for pointing me toward this information.

With the release of Adobe SiteCatalyst extension for Flash Professional CS5 a Flash developer can implement web analytics tracking of Flash content as they are developing a website.

In the past i’ve written about the lack of analytics tracking for websites, particularly Flash sites. I suggested tracking should be addressed by baking it in as sites are built. However, it was not easy to implement tracking for at least a few reasons (see the 4 reasons below):

1. Analytics has almost always been added as an afterthought, once a site is rolled out. Even if a developer wanted to add tracking scripts to Flash files they would not know what tracking to add and where or what data reports should contain.

2. Following the first point, there has been no easy way to add tracking before hand because different teams handle site development than analytics almost never talk to each other (even more true when the web content is developed by a third party).

3. The creatives/marketing group that put in the RFP don’t understand analytics tracking well enough and would not have known what to ask developers to implement, even if it were possible to request analytics tracking be added.

4. Analytics enablement for Flash files has been looked at as somewhat exotic addition few developers knew to add, if it were added it would significantly add to the cost of developing a website and that’s something no one is eager to do.

I looked at the Adobe supplied tutorial and it doesn’t look like that big a deal but it also doesn’t look that implementing tracking is easy, either.

For one thing your shop has to have Omniture (or at least, whoever is paying for the site needs to be running Omniture) and your Flash development tools need to be up to date. If you meet both conditions you can use the SiteCatalyst extension to “bake in” analytics tracking as I suggested earlier. If your shop doesn’t use Omniture, but instead, Google Analytics, WebTrends or something else, your out of luck (but you can still do the same enablements it’s just a little more complicated getting all you need into place).

Eventually Adobe will add Flash Extensions for other analytics platforms (though they don’t own the other platforms while they do own SiteCatalyst). It’s not clear to me if creating a Flash extension for SiteCatalyst only happened because Adobe owns the analytics now, or if adding the extension was just a marketing enhancement they made to sell more of the Flash Dev and SiteCatalyst platforms. Would it be just as easy to add a Google Analytics extension had Adobe wanted to? My guess is yes, and when they figure out it’s profitable enough, Adobe will add support for more analytics platforms.

It’s also timely Adobe is enhancing site analytics tracking just as Google announces full support for text crawling of Flash SWF files (not that there’s that much text in most Flash files, often being glitzy, multimedia movies). But think of one case this new tracking helps — it’s Radian6, a Social analytics platform written entirely in Flash.

Ha, just think of the widget tracking Radian6 can do if they want to, by using SiteCatalyst now.

On the other hand, to close out this post, nothing the SiteCatalyst Flash extension does is entirely new, the same enablements could take place manually in SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics or WebTrends, it would just have to be a more deliberate, time consuming set of tasks, but still doable. The SiteCatalyst Flash extension just streamlined the development process by adding Analytics enablement.

No small feat!

This is pretty good news and something I wanted to happen for a while – Comscore has pretty good categorization of audiences into Audience Segments, but their measurement technology, panel based, is often inaccurate.  Omniture, and Web Analytics, in general – measure traffic well enough – but have no method to analyze audience.   But that is about to change – today.

The alliance with Comscore along with Omniture’s acquisition by Adobe show the “convergence” I’ve been talking about where analytics, social media, search, content creation and management – is hastening – speeding up – forcing profound changes in how we’re going to measure and roll out information and services, perhaps, faster than we think.

According to an article today in Tagagana.com ….

ComScore, Omniture join up to measure digital audiences

“….ComScore and Omniture plan to announce Monday they are launching a unified digital audience measurement system. It will combine Omniture’s method of analyzing Web traffic by looking at data collected by Web servers with comScore’s estimates of what’s happening across the Web using panels of Internet users recruited for the task.

This, the companies say, will give Web sites and advertisers a single source for measuring how many visitors they attract, how often and who those visitors are.

The two companies often came up with different sets of numbers because they had disparate goals and used different ways of collecting data.

Omniture CEO and co-founder Josh James said Web site operators sometimes would read a report on their traffic going down, even as their own server data showed an increase.

The two companies hope to address that by giving Web content creators and advertisers a consistent set of numbers.

By joining forces, Omniture and comScore could also shed new insights into digital audiences. For example, comScore’s panel may not fully represent the proportion of Macintosh users out there, and those users tend to visit video Web sites at a higher frequency than their PC counterparts, comScore CEO Magid Abraham said. Omniture’s server-based data collection could track a visit regardless of the computer or device used.

Omniture, meanwhile, doesn’t have demographic data on the users visiting, and it couldn’t tell that the same person visited both Facebook and MySpace, for instance. That’s where comScore comes in.

James said the timing of the announcement near the Adobe acquisition was just a coincidence. The deal, which is expected to close by November, will combine Omniture’s services for figuring how to best deliver messages and Internet advertisements with Adobe’s tools for creating these Web sites and ads.”