Was thinking about something Seth Godin said (or wrote) recently about being easily manipulated which I  briefly covered in my Web Journal a few days ago at the bottom of my post.

Every time I find myself getting so used to Seth Godin – he surprises me with something from the corner of his hat ..  In that case, I hope he lets the hat drop off more often.

Seth Godin said it’s easy to identify people who can be manipulated (see below) and I wondered if you can identify signs and behaviors the way he did – could you also detect those signs in Social Media?

I think so – in some cases – it’s possible to do that – which brings in another question – why would one want to use monitoring tools to identify a certain predisposition or a certain behavior?  Probably because knowledge is power and it can also be a protection.

Here’s a couple of Seth Godin’s points from  Who is easily manipulated? post and how I might filter for it in online media using a monitoring platform (I’ll use Sysomos Map in this instance – but I could have used several others – even Social Mention would work – and I cover that in my ebook).

Believing something because you heard someone say it on a news show on cable TV.

That’s actually the easiest case to filter on, and it also happens to be the first case Seth Godin gave in his post. Here’s the query I came up with to filter on people who believe what they heard on a news show.

(“I watched” OR “I watch” OR “I tuned in to”) AND “Fox News” AND (“I believe” OR “I trust”) AND (“he said” OR “she said” OR “they said”)

Actually, what I found were people who disbelieved – and I’m sure I could have written a much better query that included more things.  I even wonder if there are people “out there” doing this stuff already, and in a much more sophisticated way.

Some of the other signs Seth pointed out would be next to impossible to pick up using Social Monitoring tools.  Here’s some examples:

• Buying penny stocks.
• Repeating a mantra heard from a figurehead or leader of a tribe without considering whether it’s true.
• Being a child (or acting like one).
• Repeating a mantra heard from a figurehead or leader of a tribe without considering whether it’s true.
• Trying to find a short cut to lose weight, make money or achieve some other long-term goal.
• Ignoring the scientific method and embracing unexamined traditional methods instead.
• Focusing on (and believing) easily gamed bestseller lists or crowds

I think the points above, as they are defined and written, would be next to impossible to write an effective search query – and even if you could – the data pulled back would be very noisy.

But, if Seth Godin were to re-define – or reword those behaviors in terms of the kinds of things we can observer and measure online – we probably could isolate and segment on it and create analytics around it.

One of the things that’s been top of mind recently is the need to collect data you can take actionable decisions on.

I’m tempted to start asking clients ongoing questions like “What kinds of actions would you like to take based on your analytics”?   Another way of asking that same question is “What is it that you really most want to know, and what kind of answer are you looking for from me”?

Often, there’s difficulty translating something that’s needed to impress a client with the reality of the data and information we can pull (and the time allowed for that process).

I think the process becomes easier as we get closer, as a team, to speaking the same language – and that takes a  lot of work – lots of work – work that most companies do not yet want to invest it.

But I digressed – the point of my post was it’s possible to find people who display certain qualities online (and collect their blog address, twitter handles, and even email address in some cases) – and I did not do a very good job of it on my first pass – but I bet you anything there are people who have perfected this type of approach much more than I have.

I never know quite where I’m going to end up when I write a post – I started with Seth Godin‘s Traffic Truth Tricks and ended up ………

Well …. it’s nice Seth Godin is giving some value (while getting liberally re-tweeted … nothing against that) in his post about Discover the truth about a site’s online traffic – where he mentions …….

… You can see the referrals and traffic to an individual bitly twitter URL by copying the URL and adding + sign to it. For example, if you see something like this in a tweet: http://bit.ly/870Ry9 just copy it and paste it with the plus and you’ll see http://bit.ly/870Ry9+. I think that’s pretty neat. You can also track top retweets on an hourly or daily basis.

I didn’t know that  … I bet a lot of people did not know about it, either.    If you provide value to the community – you ought to be re-tweeted(and Seth asks for your subscription right at the end of the post)…..

….. .PS You can get updates on this blog in Twitter by following @thisissethsblog. And you can get a free subscription by RSS (the best way) or email.

My observation is what “the community” wants and finds valuable is not often the same thing the individual who is posting, finds valuable – more about that in a minute.  Many of my best posts, by my own estimation,  hardly got re-tweeted, at all, yet a post I just made a comment about (with a list I didn’t come up with – but found value with – and noted it) got re-tweeted 253 (and counting) and viewed more than anything else I’ve ever written – at Social Media Today – this weekend, it was a syndicated copy of my post on 26 Tools for Social Media Monitoring that I spent about 10 minutes writing at 1AM in the morning – more as a quick note and what I read earlier in the day (or the day before).    Notice that Social Media Today “tweaked” my title, I notice editors often do that – don’t know if it helped, or not.   Other posts of mine, that I worked on and put my soul into, often spending a few hours on them, that I thought were more original and better – never got picked up, at all.

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Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring

by webmetricsguru on 12/10/2009 23:41   10 comments , 8534 views
Categories: Surveys & Research, Social Software

As far as the Traffic Truth, via Compete or Quantcast vs. Alexa – they’re all wrong compared to site analytics, as much as 40% under or over counting – but we’ve been down that road before – it’s not a new topic – most people know Compete is better for overall trending and competitive intelligence when you have site analytic data (we almost never do have it).

But, Seth Godin’s Traffic Trick doesn’t really go far enough – because it’s only about Bit.ly, and that’s not enough to cover the whole universe of where content is being created and shared.

1. BackType to the Social Media Today post shows several bitly URLs that were tweeted -

http://bit.ly/info/6DG3Mi which, when expanded … turn out to be 1001 clicks as of now (I checked the other bitly urls listed.

1,001

Total Clicks

All clicks on the aggregate bit.ly link bit.ly/6kLto6

Long Link:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/155299

Conversations:

Tweets 72; Shares 10, Likes 2, Comments 2; Shares 0; Comments on Page 10; View All

Locations:

United States 488; Canada 125; Other 103  View All

And not all the urls listed were from Bitly – like http://tinyurl.com/ybmkjh8 , http://short.to/10bvd , http://ff.im/-cO8l9 , http://j.mp/6wBhvK –

Have no idea what the traffic from TinyUrl, Short.to, Ff.im or j.mp was – and I don’t know, off hand, of anyone integrating that traffic – Seth’s traffic trick doesn’t really work, unless you want a quick Bit.ly fix.

Plus, let’s not forget my original post – at Webmetricsguru.com – shouldn’t my content be “summed up” … it is, more or less, the same thing … right?   What’s the combined views of my content, including all syndication?   Who’s able to answer that question?   I should think Seth Godin would care about that much more than I do, since he’s syndicated all over the place – way more than I am.  How come he doesn’t provide a quick trick on that one?  He can’t – he can’t solve this problem – he would not even try – it’s not a quick fix.

My post on Webmetricsguru.com

WebMetricsGuru » 26 Tools for Social Media Monitoring

http://bit.ly/7l8b3h

30

ClicksThe bit.ly link bit.ly/7l8b3h was added by tweetdeckapi

72

Total ClicksAll clicks on the aggregate bit.ly link bit.ly/61AKVc

Long Link:

http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/12/26-tools-for-social-media-monitoring/

Conversations:

Tweets 22; Shares 2, Likes 1, Comments 0; Shares 0; Comments on Page 0; Searching… View All

Locations:

United States 11; Russian Federation 6; United Kingdom 3  View All

We’d have to add the 72 clicks from my post to the 1001 from Social Media Today and get something like 1073 clicks, plus whatever else was at the other shorted urls – which aren’t easy to collect (but maybe someone ought to try).

Now, Compete, Alexa or Quantcast don’t give stats on individual urls – and Compete is at-least a month behind – so they’re not helpful here.

On the other hand, Social Media Monitoring Tools, like Radian6, Techrigy, Sysomos – don’t pick up the slack and they ought to try – they’re all keyword based, but … not url based or topic based, but they ought to try to be.

For example, let’s take Radian6 – if I put a url in the source filter – will it take care of all the other url shortening and syndication?   I’m trying it right now – Seth Godin might be into Traffic tricks – I’m not.  What will Radian6 comes up with?

I put all the urls I could possible get into the source filter – suppose I could add Google  Sidewiki urls on my site and Social Media Today (but SideWiki doesn’t work on the url level, yet), since Radian6 now tracks those, but I left those out, for now.

I created a topic profile that would be sure to pick up anyone talking about my post, in either place.

And I added “Sentiment Keywords”, a new feature Radian6 added that allows them to do Sentiment Analysis by letting a user tell Radian6 the phrases or entities they think are important – VERY NICE – Kudos to Radian6 for adding this … real stuff – that we can use – not Seth Godin’s Traffic Tricks … intended for a quick marketing pickup and some additional subscribers to his blog (who could end up being his clients or buying his books, stuff, down the line).

I also set my Influencer Settings to be thus (see below).

Last, but not least – I ensured that only keyword relevant content from the sites I am using in my source filter would be considered.

The results – didn’t work too well – didn’t aggregate the traffic but it did make the “Influencer List” and the “Word Clouds” more accurate – in a general way.  I know Radian6 and the rest of the tools, wasn’t really designed to answer the questions I’m asking – to be fair – and neither is Seth Godin, to be fair – again – he’s a Marketer – don’t expect good analytic from him – he sells ideas  – makes you feel good – and then he’s collects his money, and walks away – to the next gig or speaking engagement, or book.

Honestly, that’s OK, I don’t expect any more from Seth Godin, than that.

Getting to the Word Cloud – much better – not that I added Source Filters and Sentiment Keywords – “Social Tools”,  “Social Media Tools” and “online reputation listening”  are the basic focuses  – it doesn’t do “meme analysis” yet (covered that in my slideshare presentation at Monitoring Social Media 09, below) – but it’s not bad, for what it is now.

See my presentation to find out how this word map could have been a lot better

Meanwhile, the Influencer List got a lot better – even though it’s not about my post – but just people who would be receptive to the topics in my post.

If I wanted to create an Influencer List with this basic data – I could – it take a few hours, but much of the noise, I think, is eliminated by limiting the sources of data and putting sentiment in around keywords I define ahead of time.

And I’ll argue the people on the bottom of the list are probably more likely to be receptive to me (if I wanted to contact them, than the people on the top of it).

However, to end this long post – no tool really can do more than get part of the answers – simple Traffic Tricks from Seth Godin don’t work well in this , nor to the Social Media Monitoring platforms, though I think, this is an area they ought to tackle next year, for 2010.

On Reading Finally delivering the Social Media playbook at BrandBuilder, today,  I feel (felt) somewhat skeptical, but upon listening to Oliver’s video about RedChair (which I liked), I’m interested in seeing what he and his partners will actually deliver.

To be fair, no one really owns this space, today, but many people would like to (own it, or parts of it) and are staking a claim on it now, even a friend of mine, Gary Angel in his post on How do you Measure Social Media ROI? – whose webinar  I’ll try to attend, and Jim Sterne is now writing his next book on Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which will be out next May (I wrote a short blurb for it).

I have a lot of respect for Jim Sterne’s work and his first book on Web Metrics was largely responsible for getting me involved in Web Analytics – and he has good track record – I know him well – so I believe his book will be an excellent resource for Social Media when it’s published.

Last June, Steve Rubel spoke at Mediabistro Circus about Brand All Stars (I wrote about it and was in the audience – Using Social Media to promote your brand- Steve Rubel (Brand All Stars) on what I think, most of what Olivier Blanchard is aspiring to promote with his  RedChair, though Oliver’s vision is larger and involves the underpinning and surrounding parts that Steve Rubel didn’t specifically address.  Still, at the end of the day, I’m not sure about what is actually being delivered.

I think one of the main sticking points for me with Oliver’s premise, for me, – there’s only a few people in the world who can execute on a social media program and all it’s parts – and then suggests, his group is one of them -  ….. I have an open mind – or will try to.

I mean, he has an excellent team – and Jacob Morgan, seems to have a lot of good things he writes about – and just the other day came up with the real cost of implementing a social media program (see his presentation on Social Media ROI – see slide 18), which I read about while I was in London last week – and he gave prices and timelines in slide 18 – and I was very impressed- that he was willing to come out and publicly admit what the real time line is, and what the real prices for a social media program would be (200K+ and over a year to get results – measure them – not for the faint of heart).

The reason I’m thinking back to Steve Rubel – at the time he talked about PR 2.0 and Brand All Stars – I thought about how nice it would be to go into companies and teach them how to do Social Media by identifying their “stars” or teach them how to create their own “luminaries” and then, inject them into relevant conversations and monitor the results – but it’s yet my thing to go around and actually train companies to do that – maybe I’d like to but just don’t know how.

Still – I’m seeing how much of what I’ve done, from a measurement, and, also, strategy part, become one of the next areas that is being “staked out” with a lot of people now wanting to “own” social media – who want a piece of the pie, along with the web analytics community, the PR community – well … just about everyone.

My only advice is to look at track record – see what people who want to teach social media have actually done ….. and judge them from there.

I know Gary Angel pretty well from the Analytics field – I’d trust whatever he comes up with on a measurement perspective – same thing with Eric T. Peterson; I’ve seen their work and know what they’re capable of – they have good track records, as far as I’m concerned. I know K. D. Paine pretty well – I trust what she says.      Oliver .. I just don’t know enough – I havent’ seen anything really, yet, besides the presentations – and I was underwhelmed by the delivery, outside the fluff – but that’s just me – maybe with a little more time …. I’d see more and could express my own opinion based on what I’ve actually touched.

The main “hook” with Red Chair – is that few people can deploy Enterprise programs from within large organizations – but (and I have worked in many of these “large organizations” myself, so I have an idea of what Oliver is talking about) is not so much they are frustrated – is that they are largely  SILOED – and could not execute a Successful, Authentic Social Media program, even if they wanted to!

Weather RedChair can go in and suddenly teach some enterprises to do it now – will depend largely on the corporate culture and will that current organizations have towards Social Media – when he goes in there – and that’s hard to predict.

I don’t blame anyone from wanting to “stake out” a piece of the pie of Social Media – that’s what’s business is all about – I just think results ought to stand on their own - and the best endorsement of your brand is other people praising your brand for you.

Anyway, last week I noted a post from Marketing Pilgrim Cup of Joe: How Not To Go Viral and Look Like an Idiot thought it was good as it pointed out that good social media for a large brand (if it’s not original – needs to be really, really, really GOOD) – and when RedChair goes into large organizations and teaches them Social Media – I wonder if he is going to deal with that Pink Elephant – the one that says – you better be really good if your not going to be authentic – but if you are authentic – you don’t have to worry overmuch on your presentation as your content will carry the rest of your message for you.