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.

Just want to mention next Monday, February 2nd, please check www.iMediaConnection.com; I’m told my article on “Getting Started with Web Analytics and Social Media” is going to be published.

I’m looking forward to that – the article was written last month, over the holiday.

I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do additional writings for iMediaConnection.com.

Also, SEOGypsy, David Harry, is interviewing me and pointed me to an WebMasterRadio interview he was just on with Bruce Clay and company (embedded below) – I just wrote most of the text for my interview with David Harry, @theSEOGypsy , tonight, but I don’t know when and where he’ll publish it, yet.

David Harry’s sites include www.Reliable-SEO.com – the SEO Handbook 2008 -
www.the-seo-handbook.com -  Web Development – www.vervedevelopments.com – Web Hosting – www.myoshosting.com – Trail of the Fire Horse ; www.huomah.com.

Webmaster Radio
Personalization on Search Results How is personalization going to change how Internet marketers operate, as fluctuating rankings are devalued as a measure of success, plus David Harry of the Houmah Blog discusses bounce rates as a ranking signal and personalized PageRank. Show Host: Bruce Clay Show: SEM Synergy Channel: Search Engine Optimization

Been meaning to write this post for a while – because more and more search inventory is being monetized by running ads including Text Ads in Google Image Search as the latest example.  But lets stop for a second can consider something which no one seems to want to talk about.

Most people, like you and me, don’t have any extra money to buy anything – we’re all, mostly, broke.

It doesn’t matter how many ads Google wants to run and where they decide to run them – we don’t have the money buy anything much – and anything we’re going to buy is probably a considered purchase (meaning less instant purchases – unless it’s a iPhone application for 5.99, or something like that – probably, that’s it, and the pitch for that is going to have to be really, really good or the buyer is going that have to be really, really desperate or uninformed) and it’s getting harder to find uninformed people.

So … here’s my question to my readers and to Google – why aren’t we trying to do in Online Advertising and Marketing what we’re having to do with the Economy? - referring to ideas in Paul Krugmans’s book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 – if we’re in the Bizarro World of World Finance where left is right and up is down - then the normal rules of finance don’t apply, including rules of supply and demand – here’s a  quote from Wikipedia on Bizarro:

“…The concept of “Bizarro” has been ingrained in popular culture where it has come to mean a weirdly mutilated version of anything, not confined to characters in DC Comics publications^[1] and as such, so has the concept of Bizarro World.”

As Krugman maintains in the Economic sphere – the government needs to massively invest and stimulate the economy, perhaps over 2 Trillion dollars will be needed in the next 2 years, just to make up the gap between what our GDP could be vs what it is, now,  and, to have any hope of bringing down unemployment by more than 1/3 (that’s counter to normal theory that Government spending will deplete private spending and investment – but we’re in Bizarro territory now – what would make sense, normally, doesn’t make as much sense now).

So here’s what I’d like to see Google do,  instead, of running more ads.

I don’t want to be pitched to buy stuff every where I go – I want to see people advertise in order to help me, to help us , to be of service.

In the case of the example shown in Text Ads in Google Image Search, how are these hotels going to help me?  I’ll spend money as I have it and where I see people are really interested in being of service to me.

Are they going to provide extra messages?     How about shuttle service and 3 free meals, if I want it, for no extra charge?

Social Media, with it’s emphasis on Community and Transparency, it’s peer to peer nature, is likely, all things being equal, to work better now than a regular ad, if it’s targeted well and delivered at the right time.

In other words, Social Media + Behavioral Targeting – with an focus on what we can do for you, is probably where businesses will thrive.

So, Google – challenge to you …. stop trying to expand inventory to sell stuff on – I’m sick of seeing ads everywhere I go – if I want something, I’m probably going to see the same ads with the existing inventory – let’s focus on benefits and rewards for us, and let sales and marketing take a back seat – because in the Bizarro World – that’s how it is.