Posted by Marshall Sponder on December 12, 2009 | Link It
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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/870Ry9just copy it and paste it with the plus and you’ll seehttp://bit.ly/870Ry9+.I think that’s pretty neat. You can also track topretweetson 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)…..
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.
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 linkbit.ly/6kLto6
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
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.
Nick started by showing me Sysomos Map which is an analysis tool used to produce reports and insights (see image 1) and contrasted it to Sysomos HeartBeat (see image 2), a real time search trend tool used to keep track of what is happening now.
I got an appreciation on how Sysomos is somewhat different than the other Social Media Monitoring platforms I’ve worked with so far -
87% accuracy in sentiment analysis of general text
91% accuracy in sentiment analysis of product reviews
85% accuracy in sentiment analysis of movies and celebrities
That’s not bad! What I mean to say, at 87% Sentiment Analysis accuracy you an almost do what most people wanted to do with Social Media Monitoring platforms, in the first place, score sentiment of a large amount of information in an automated way, with a certain degree of confidence (that’s not possible to do with Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, Radian6 or any of the free tools out there – though it may/may not be true of Crimson Hexagon).
Besides identifying influencers, Sysomos can map influencers - the map can be added to in realtime and altered while the pages automatically refresh.
Because information is collected and stored atomically, extremely rich reporting can be done, including geo-demographic profiling, isolating influencers by city and state level with a high degree of confidence – this seems to be entirely missing from the capabilities of anything else I’ve worked with. For example, I mentioned that Alterian and Radian6 are next to useless for geo-location queries, regardless of what the companies tell you and wrote about it in a post on finding local blogs and bloggers where I gave up on Alterian and Radian6 for hyper local searches as the platforms were not designed for it. In the future, this may change as more geo-local data is transmitted (ie: using mobile devices with geo location turned on – we’re seeing this appear first with Twitter – but it will NOT end there)
While Radian6 and Alterian technically do have the same capabilities – for example
- drill down by location, age, sex, (Sysomos can also break down traffic by industry)
I suspect, it’s not so much what Sysomos does, but the way in which it does it, where it’s strengths are.
The “BuzzGraph” looks similar to what some tools like Crimson Hexagon produce, though the style of the map is somewhat different – and the inclusion of Facebook and MySpace data (data that can be gotten from public crawling of profiles where they can be found on Google, for example, is powerful, and features people are asking for, more and more.
To sum up this post on Sysomos – I was impressed with how much thought went into the data architecture and reporting capabilities of Sysomos. It’s a powerful platform and an example of how fast the Social Media space is evolving.
I’m happy to say that Nick Koudas will be at Monitoring Social Media 09 in London and the Influence Scorecard gathering in New York during November – and I’m looking forward to that.
To read more about Monitoring Social Media 09 – check out these two posts
In The Truth about Social Media Data – I’m expecting to hear “who” is collecting the data and partnerships where the data is being resold or “white labeled” ….
The Truth About Social Media Data Giles Palmer, Founder and Managing Director, Brandwatch
With leading brands increasingly turning to social media for insight, feedback and guidance, social media data is under the spotlight. Questions about it’s origins, accuracy and scope have the potential to undermine the whole monitoring industry. In this session Giles Palmer, who has successfully led more than a hundred organisations through the murky world of social media data, explains where it comes from, who controls it, how it is filtered and categorised, its inherent flaws and limitations, and how to avoid misreading the information you are presented with.
In fact, white labeling of monitoring platforms is happening and has been happening for a while – and it might be there are only a few companies pulling the data in the first place off the web. I know that Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 is white labeling their platform (though I never saw an example of it) and I know Radian6 white labels CisionPoint (I’ve personally seen this) and some contact management platforms, and CRM platforms, like SalesForce, are using Radian6 as a “gigantic EAR” and wrote about it in a few posts at Webmetricsguru.com where Social Media and Web Analytics are going to be merging more and more (which hearkens back to my session on The Future of Social Media Monitoring panel, earlier in the day).
” …. you’ll be alarmed at a new article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that outlines how third parties are getting access to your personal information. Sites such as CareerBuilder.com are utilizing cookies from up to ten different tracking domains. These sites are using hard-to-delete cookies that remain on your computer system long after you’ve browsed the site.
Yeah, never liked CareerBuilder.com, but then, I used to work for Monster.com – so why would I? … and that’s what I’m hoping he’ll tell us, and what we can do about it. Yes, I’m looking for conspiracy theories in this session (after all, doesn’t the title of this session suggest that?) – lets see if Giles comes out and says that. We’ll see.
If Giles Palmer says what I hope he’ll say – and more – it’ll be worth the plane trip, hotel and conference admission price, in London, even if I wasn’t speaking (but I am speaking). I’m tired of going to Social Media conferences that just repeat what we already know, give me something new – Giles. I bet he will.
In the next session, I’m expecting a Case Study – my guess is it’ll be sufficiently detailed to glimmer at some truths we all need to apply with Social Media Community Building ….
The Power of Listening & Responding: Skype Robin Grant, Managing Director, We Are Social
Robin will talk about how We Are Social helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme. He will provide insights into the tools and methodologies used and explain the impact social media monitoring had on Skype’s business. He will also describe how it helped them to manage a major crisis.
The key to this session is finding out what they did, specifically, and how it actually turned things around – I’m not expecting to find out anything that revolutionary here, but if I did, I’d be glad – if I found something about community building, reacting quickly, etc, that is generally not well known or understood, but could be ground breaking - I’ll just go on the record as saying – I’m not expecting that level of insight from this session, but if it happens, it’ll an added bonus for being at #msm09 .
In Surviving in iPhone Territory - I hope Chris Thomas gets into the nitty gritty of what platforms he used (I’m thinking Crimson Hexagon – sorta suggested by the title – but maybe I’m wrong) and how hard it was to come up with the insights – how many hours did it take, how many people worked on it – what kind of problems they came across when pulling the data – and what they learned about the HTC and how to launch it against the iPhone that they’d not know about unless they ran this study (in other words, Social Media ROI came out of it).
Surviving in iPhone Territory: A Competitive Analysis of the Launch of the HTC G1 Chris Thomas, Head of Research, The Conversation Group (TCG)
Chris Thomas presents the findings of a TCG research project covering the launch of the HTC G1 – the first smartphone to use the Google Android operating system. The project showcases the contribution of social media research to competitive intelligence, brand positioning and strategic communications. Covering a three month period around launch, and including almost 100,000 unique items of discussion content. The presentation offers lessons for the effective blending of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, and evaluation of the relative contributions of a range of free and licensed monitoring and analysis tools.
So far, Crimson Hexagon seems to have gone the farthest, of all the entrants in this Social Media Monitoring arena, with the potential implications and applications of merging qualitative with quantitative data, but they have yet to carry it out nearly as far as they could, or should, in my opinion. It would be nice is someone from Crimson Hexagon was in the audience – or even, on a panel, but I don’t think they’re going be there – they should be.
Developing the idea of merging – what if Crimson Hexagon‘s analysis of Obama’s HealthCare Speech last month to Congress, using Twitter accounts only, captured not only the opinions about how people felt (qualitative data on sentiment and opinions- see below)
… but what if Crimson Hexagon also collected the Twitter accounts of each opinion along with the opinion mapping? I know they have the data, they have a 75% to 80% accuracy, at this time, of mapping snippets to the actual opinion categories, and a 3% error rate in drawing out the percentages of each category – why couldn’t they take a stab at matching it up – or … we’d find out the match is pretty noisy …. maybe we’d contact half the people we could identify who said Obama’s speech was great and find out they don’t agree – or maybe we’d find out to what degree they did agree. Maybe we’d approach the people who said Obama lied, see if that categorization is accurate. We’d go to the next level or two with this data – because that’s what is logical to do.
Now, I’m familiar with STA Travel - I used to have a client who I did web analytics for that did Irish, Scottish and English vacations – STA is one of the biggest travel firms Europe, but getting travel agencies to use Social Media has been …. well, as fruitful as getting Architects to use it …. travel agencies have been, mildly stating it, un imaginative and not willing to take risk, at all, which is what Social Media, today, requires.
Getting Started with Social Media: STA Travel case study Celia Pronto, Marketing Director, STA Travel
Most brands know they should get involved in social media, but where should you start? Hear from STA Travel how they moved from traditional marketing to placing social media at the heart of their business, including: Getting internal buy-in, How they developed their strategy, What measures they use to define success.
That’s why this session should be so interesting – think about it – there’s so many opportunities to get user generated content from people who take trips using travel packages – of using YouTube and other video data to augment views of a particular hotel, travel attraction, even a particular travel package that is still running – along with the TravelAdvisor reviews of hotels and restaurants that we’re already able to use for the last couple of years.
IN booking this trip to London next month, I used Expedia and got a good deal on a 4 star hotel and RT flight – because I read those reviews and looked at the pictures, and looked, and looked … in fact, I visited Expedia on at least 5 occasions to do research before I booked. What do you think I got in email box a few days ago – contact with a personal team that will answer all my questions about London and a custom mini guide to London, sent to me as PDF – I didn’t get that two years ago when I was last in Paris for LeWeb07 and I booked my flight and hotel with Expedia. Here’s Dave Sifry explaining it, himself (hint: maybe Dave Sifry ought to come to #msm09 and explain his custom travel guides in person)
Dave Sifry has been doing just that – custom Travel Guides – and testing it out at LeWeb 07, which I attended – though I didn’t come in contact with Dave Sifry there (but Scoble and Sifry had dinner – I wasn’t invited – ha, ha – and that was half the reason I went – to hang out – and go the Louvre, of course). Maybe Dave sold his technology to Expedia – or maybe what he does is a much more customized version of what Expedia is now trying to do.
Maybe it’s not just for the publishing industry – but for the Travel Industry …Duh!
” … This could be a game changer for book publishing. A new company called Offbeat Guides produces personalized travel books based on your itinerary and travel details. It was founded by Dave Sifry, a serial entrepreneur (and friend) from San Francisco who previously led Technorati and LinuxCare. Dave has participated in our We Media conferences for many years. He’s steeped in knowledge and awareness of how the web is changing behavior and creating new opportunities to inform the planet. Here’s Dave’s blog post on the new business, which just opened for public beta, and more about personalized publishing from the company blog here.
I may add, the Travel data is pulled of the Web, in real time, and customized to you (maybe I’ll get one, just to compare with what Expedia gave me). Ideally, Dave ought to just supply it to Expedia, STA, etc, for a fee – but that’s a creative use of Social Media – since some of this information might come from user reviews and insights – and I can see where it could be made even better by adding personality type matching with YourUniverse or something similar – I think YourUniverse – http://www.youniverse.com/ had a fascinating – I took a bunch of tests last year but then lost touch with it – but coupled with Sifry’s guide – it could be a very, very, powerful combination.
In fact, using http://www.youniverse.com/ with Travel Agencies Social Media could be a “Killer Application” if done well. Just another one of my insights – fortunately, YourUNIVERSE has done the bulk of the work - so messing this one up really will be in how the data is matched up with your itinerary – I suggest a partnership with them – they have the best network for personality testing with images – maybe the only one – best to build on it.
Travel agencies have clearly been late to the game, yet Travel Agencies, have the most to gain, in many ways, from Social Media – due to the wealth of content and the willingness to share it - so I’ll be looking at what Celia Pronto says about the Social Media program STA put in place. I’m expecting a very good case study here on the value of Social Media for STA, in terms of bookings, customer satisfaction, loyalty – Net Promoter Score, even – this is what I am hoping to hear. It also would be nice to hear about how STA “enabled” customers to share their data with each other.
In Social Networking Data – I’m expecting Paul to talk about, and begin to summarize what has been discussed earlier in the day and pick up on the Crimson Hexagon example I gave above.
Social Networking Data – The Vital Ingredient for 360 Customer Understanding Paul Alexander, CEO, Beyond Analysis
Social networks have the potential to provide companies with instant, reliable and valuable feedback – to help them reduce their reliance on expensive market research. But how useful is this new data source? Can “buzz” ever match the quality of traditionally researched data? And how far can casual online interactions be used to map transactional or behavioral shifts? In this session Paul Alexander demonstrates how several leading brands are approaching these questions and found answers to them.
The question becomes, how useful is this data if Sentiment Analysis is only 60% accurate and is often not even related to the Topic our using the Social Media Monitoring Platform to discover? Since the data is so “unstructured” and “noisy” without significant work to clean the data and structure it – might the results be more of a detractor than not?
I think we’ve been there before, and I doubt this session will actually tell us something that new, but it would be good to hear about what measures are used for “Success” and get something actionable (i repeat, actionable) from this session about how we can sell social media to resistant stakeholders and clients that are still afraid to dip their toes into the pond.
In what appears to be the last session (unless the listings are not chronological) we get a discussion of free vs. paid tools
The Price of Knowledge: Free vs. Paid Monitoring Tools Brad Little, Director, Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
When choosing a social media monitoring tool, there are lots of questions to consider: why are there so many approaches and services? How are they different? What justifies the price variances? Can’t we get this for free? What is being measured? What resources should we invest? In this session Brad examines the differences between social media monitoring tools, how they work and what to consider when choosing a provider. He will aim to get beyond the sales hype and look under the bonnet to help you select the right solution for your company.
Personally, I would prefer to see this session and the Future of Social Media Monitoring (which I’m speaking on) switched in sequence. Here’s why.
First, the issue of weather to use Google Alerts, HowSociable, BackType, TweetDeck, Freeninum version of Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, etc … vs. Cision, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Collective Intellect, etc, etc …. is one that every person faces in this field – it comes up over and over – and is best dealt with at the beginning of the day – where we can uncover pros and cons which we can then take to us to the following sessions.
Furthermore – the discussion of “free” vs. “paid” tools mirrors the same arguments going on in the Web Analytics arena - with Google Analytics, with it’s free, but powerful platform, pushing other vendors out of business since buying Urchin, or pushing the like Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, into directions they’d not ordinarily want go in (such as the Omniture acquisition by Adobe last month and the matching up of Radian6 data with WebTrends – plus the SalesForce.com connection with listening platforms).
This week, at Emetrics Summit, Google is going to announce something new with Google Analytics - what if it was the acquisition of one of the Listening Platforms (like Radian6, for example) and it’s merging with Google Analytics data – which would be logical – would that not be a game changer?
I don’t know if that’s what Google is going to announce this time – but who has the most data in the world in one place? Google. Who has the most to benefit from adding Listening Platforms into Analytics and Advertising … Google.
I predict, something like this will happen in the next year or two – and it will change the game – in a big way. I can’t tell you it will happen next week – or next year – but it will happen. Prepare for it. Pro, it will help everyone but will hurt some of the big players. That’s all I can say now – consider it an Intuitive, Prophetic Flash – one that seems logical, given where its all going.
Second, The Future of Social Media Monitoring – should be the last session of the day, because in many ways it’s forward facing and may be impacted by what was said in some of the other sessions – such as “The Truth about Social Media Data” (where are future is going to be data about us being “sold off” or not?) or the impact of new developments in listening technologies like Crimson Hexagon have in Public Relations (after all, several PR firms have been building on Social Media, of late, building Social Media into their campaign pitches – and the Monitoring and Measurement of Social Media, and I should know – because I’m personally involved with that at this moment).
I believe Monitoring Social Media 09 next month, in London, on November 17th, ought to be widely covered – and if your able to make it - (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using codeMSM0910).
Hope to see any of my readers who are at the #MSM09 or a Tweet-up in London, that week – details will be following in a few weeks.
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