I spoke with Olivier Silvestre of Tealium today – had met Oliver at Emetrics Summit DC about 3 months ago, and at the time he offered to speak about Tealium’s Social Media tracking solution but it wasn’t ready yet – but today he did speak to me of it and it’s quite interesting (note: took the link down to the presentation as it was prepared for me, not to be released to the general public).

First the rational to get involved with Social Media is that it’s cheaper than treditional media or CPC by 56% according to Marketing Experiments , and only 25% of the population uses Social Media today, according to Mediapost.

While Social Media comprises of Blogs, Online Video, Online Public Relations, Social Networks, Micro blogs and viral content, there’s little control over how it’s distributed and even less control over metrics, till now.

Tealium sees Social Media Measurement as a three stage process where you have Output, Outtake and Outcome (see slide 5) and while I’ve used many of the the tools listed on all the stages, I’m not sure about the distinctions being made – I guess diving products based on what kind of information (and decisioning) they provided does make sense, however.

What Tealium has done is pretty darn interesting are fairly inexpensive to implement considering what it gives you in return.

- One line of  Tealium “include” code is added to all pages you want to track.

- Tealium works with you to come up with a keyword phase list that truly describes you social media campaign – then it goes out and finds all the urls that are talking about you with those keywords and stores them on their servers.

Any time your site is visited, information of the other links you’ve clicked on previously is shared with Tealium and if one or more of the urls cooinsides with a link you’ve visited before, it’s counted as Social Media traffic.

Here’s some more information that Oliver provided me with today:

Just a quick recap of the product features and pricing:

Base Solution:

• $2,000 set up fee (with Google Analytics) or $4,000 set up fee for any other web analytics application (Webtrends, Omniture, Unica, Coremetrics, etc)
• $250/month
  • Includes up to 3 keywords (phrases)
  • Default setting: Click-Through (Referring URLs -> Lookup against Social Media URLs Table)
  • Includes Social Media Coverage by Google, Yahoo, & MSN (News/Blogs/Video)
  • Default setting: Social Media URL table is refreshed every day.

Options:

• Add more keywords (~$20/month for additional keyword)
• Add more Social Media Coverage by subscribing to more RSS feeds (Technorati, Metacafe, Twitter, BlogPulse, etc)
• Add View-Through setting (using “visited link” attribute technology) allowing to credit visits/engagement/conversion to Social Media news/blogs/video URLs even though visitors haven’t been directly referred by them to the web site.
• Increase Social Media URls Table update (refresh table) more than once day based on needs and based on Social Media and PR activity.

Here is an example of the code that needs to be place on all or some of the web site page (as you can see, it’s quite simple):

<script language=”javascript1.1″ src=”http://www.mycompany.com/sm/liveManager.js“></script>

I liked what I saw.

Note:  I will say this – I don’t think anyone has done quite what Tealium accomplished, yet -and I don’t honestly know who they compete with in what they’re offering.

This is how it works -

A. You signup for the service and it’s a flat fee to set up tracking (2K for Google Analytics, but they can do it for Omniture and pretty much any Analytics platform, but the initial setup charge will be 4K instead of 2K – since there’s more custom work involved).

B. Tealium works with you to come up with a set of phrases that define your campaign, site, event, person, whatever – and then, once you approve …

C.  Once you approve of the keyphrases, Tealium pulls the data about you using a variety of methods that go well beyond Google Alerts and even Radian6, getting a list of every url possible for them to catalog where your site, campaign, event, person is talked about.

D. The list of urls is updated on a daily basis (for a set fee of $250 per month – but more frequent and involved updates are possible higher fees) and stored on the Tealium server.

E. You place the Javascript on every page of your site or just the pages you want to be tracked for Social Media visitation

<script language=”javascript1.1″ src=”http://www.mycompany.com/sm/liveManager.js“></script>

Tealium then uses the Javascript to capture browser information when visitors come to your site – particularly any url that you have clicked on that you might have visited and is stored in Broswer Cache – (usually these links are have a “purple color” onc e you have clicked on them.

Tealium does a lookup on any url that a visitor has stored in Broswer Cache and sees if it matches up with the list of URLS it has found about your campaign, site, person, event, etc … and if so – writes that data to an event log in Google Analytics (or any analytics solution).

From this point out, any visit where the URL matches one that connected to the campaign, site, person, event is tracked and remembered and counted in the analytics platform and can be charted just like any ohter data being collected.

This solution took about 10 months to program and was just released 2 weeks ago, or so.

I’ll have more to write about Tealium, soon.

Often think about how programs/platforms I use could be improved; I had ideas over the last day or two to improve KickApps.com platform by adding features similar to Going.com's friend recommendation engine…..why?  I'd like the new WAA Social Network, build on KickApps platform, to have a feature like that.

But another improvement that would be great is … adding a Spokeo Widget that I could either run off my desktop/laptop, or, perhaps, embed in my blogs or other websites – showing the activity of my friends (since all the information that Spokeo collects is in the public domain, anyway).

Intrigued by Spokeo, which I found out about through a post on Fleet Street PR titled Spokeo – Cool or Creepy? (also, listen to the embedded podcast).  Right now, it's taking quite a while to read in all my Gmail contacts (over 1000).

I'm curious to see if assembling information by contact (even if all the data that Spokeo is assembling is public, that you could find if you just knew where to look or had the time to assemble it yourself) makes a noticeable difference in how useful the information is.

In a way, I would suspect how information is organized is more important, than the information itself.  

One example is from Art Composition – it's often been observed that simply arranging figures in a painting using pyramidal themes imparts feelings of monumentally beyond what's being depicted.

The Raft of the Medusa, 1819.

In Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, taken from the Wikipedia entry on Théodore Géricault, the composition dominates and actually creates meaning beyond the horror of what's deplicted (In fact, I spent some time looking at The Raft of the Medusa while I was in Paris this week, see At The Louvre today – enjoying Art, - going over twice to the Louvre to look mainly at the Géricault and Delacroix large paintings – as well as hang out under the big glass pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre).  In this case, I should point out, the double pyramidal structure was used (two interlaced triangles).

Compare that to Paul Cezanne, my favorite painter, treatment of Bathers, done near turn of the century that a fairly ordinary scene where composition, in color and brushstroke, is, itself, the main reason for the painting.

Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906: the triumph of Poussinesque stability and geometric balance.

Still Life with Apples and Oranges, 1895-1900.

Cezanne knew that structure, and in fact, the space around objects (often called "negative space" in art school) is as important, if not more important, than the space of the objects deplicted.

I don't want to discount the role of color here – but my main point is not really about art, it's about Social Networks – that the topology, design, taxonomy of how information is collected is actually more important than the information, itself.

Getting back to Spokeo.com, or Spokeo, potentially, organizing the data of my contacts, by each name, gives me a way to get at information I might not have ordinarily seen, which could give me ideas on how to relate to them or what they like.

Going back to another example, chemistry and physics, the idea of what an atom is, what electrons are – it's pretty much a basic unit of something, at least, as far as we can conceive of it.  When you organize the atoms and electrons in certain patterns you get one element or another – you get molecules – yet the data, itself, is, if we have the correct notion of this, essentially just electrons, protons and neutrons assembled in a certain pattern or sequence – and one change, can make glass in plastic or lead into gold.

Looking at Spokeo, I don't yet see all my contacts and all the places they could go, but in some cases, looking at certain one's, I've found out additional information I'd not have known.  Spokeo organizes each contact it finds by social network and shows me a profile of that contact, if one exists in any of the social networks it monitors.

I'll continue to play with Spokeo when I have the time to see if there's more insights that I can gleam from it.  For one thing, in certain profiles, I can find out what books on a wish list were ordered or being considered to be ordered from Amazon for that individual, which could be useful in terms of having a dialog with them.

But then again, there seems to be a lot of information, and some names I'd expect to be present, missing and the program is sluggish and might be better if it was a desktop client pulling the data than running it remotely on a website.