In my the last few weeks I have been hearing of ways to improve the results of Social Media queries by finding out words that often appear near each other in documents that are crawled and indexed.  While some platforms don’t allow that information to be extracted, others do, including Sysomos.

I wanted to be sure Sysomos did, in fact, do this (provide the numerical association number between any two commonly associated words in a topic, and you know what?  It does (see the spreadsheet excerpt below the buzzmap).

Here’s an expanded “buzzmap” on the keyphase “Influence” that Sysomos produces.  But what you don’t know is that it can also take that information in “plain form” and then exported to .csv and provide a better query.  I’ll go into what makes this the raw material for a much better query in a subsequent post – but just keep this in mind.

I used such a wide word that I think there’s still a lot of things that could be refined before getting to this stage – but it’s possible to make much better queries with this information.

I noticed features of Radian6 and Sysomos that are goldmines if used in a certain way, and this post is about something I noticed in Sysomos Social Media monitoring that absolutely blew me away.

Take, for example, the Social Media Week NYC work I’m writing about this week – how could I use Sysomos to get keywords to build pages around, to advertise around?

Well ……..  I have been saying for a few years that Social Media doesn’t have Keyword Tools the way that SEO and SEM has, but Sysomos has done something that is somewhat similar – but it’s hidden away in it’s Text Analytics for Blogs, Twitter, Message Boards and News data sources.

The exact selection is “Entities” which is a collection of persons, places or things that Sysomos Map was able to isolate from all the web pages it scanned for a profile.   While the extracted Entities (see below) are somewhat useful – and can be drilled down for more detail …

….. it’s the “Popular Phrases” that were pulled out of all the Social Media content that Sysomos crawled that got me very excited (see below)…

If we compared this to the kind of “garbage” stuff that Google AdWords Keyword Tools and WordTracker give us – you’d see sheer difference in SEO/SEM keywords you can get by pulling phases from pages that exist – based on your “interested” and “engaged” communities, instead of Google’s desire to have you spend money of AdWords and AdSense… which is what you get when you use their tools.

And you can drill down on a Phrase, like “Social Media Mastermind Conference” and find the pages that phase came from (see below) as you might need to know the context from which a phrase arises so you can determine if and how you want to use it in your own copy.

By the way, here’s all the keyword phases Sysomos extracted from Social Media Week NYC.  So if your tired and stuck using the typical keyword tools we’ve all had to live with, try something new.  So far, I haven’t seen any other platform offer this particular capability – and it’s hidden, under the hood, so to speak.

Social Media Week advances
Social Media Business Council
SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK PRESENTS
Social Media Club gatherings
Social Media Week Registration
Weekly Social Media Event Guide
International Social Media Week conference
New Social Media Mixer event
Social Media Week play
Social Media Week Story
Best social media programs
Annual Social Media Week conference
Social Media Business Summit
Own social media strategy
Social Media World Forum
Social Media Week Berlin
Social Media week Toronto
Social Media Week NYC
Global Social Media Week
Social Media Week schedule
Social Media Mastermind Conference
Worst Social Media Campaigns
Special Social Media Week celebration
Live Social Media Experts
Top 10 Social Media
Social Media Week website
Social Media Week differentiates
Social Media Week brand
Social Media Week London
Upcoming Social Media Week
Media Week New York
Social Media Week Registration
Social Media Week Event
Tweetmeme Social Media Week NYC
Media workshop
Jewish Week
Media Week NYC Registration
New voice
Social Media Week extravaganza
New York
Future Journalist
Digital Media
Rich media
Media practices
Media consultant
Canadian Film Centre Media
Social Media Week NEW
Media Week Toronto
Media editor Shirley Brady
Media journalist
Media accounts
Media Group
Business Week social media editor
Media communications agency
Media experts
Media community
Media Week program
New social engagement program
Media partner
Inaugural Social Media
Annual Social Media
Media sponsors
Media Week NEW YORK
Global media
News media
Media Week events
Creative Media
Film Centre Media Lab
Media users
Traditional media
Media outlets

Compare this to what Google gives you ………

How totally useless Google’s AdWords data tool for Social Media – cause all Google ever wanted you to do with this tool is use it to craft advertising – they’re suggesting if you are interested in Social Media Week NYC you also might be interested in “nyc bars” and “nyc nightclubs” … and it’s true, a lot of the parties for Social Media Week NYC are happening in nightclubs and bars – but that’s not what it’s really all about.

So … there ….. for maybe Social Media Optimization – Sysomos is a good platform, esp if your interested in keyword planning.

Earlier today I read how Google is ranking Twitter feeds (see  Want Your Tweets on Google? Get More (Better) Followers in Marketing Pilgrim) and thinking about equivalencies – that Google equated  Twitter Followers to website backlinks and, as in Pagerank, the more people who follow you, that you don’t follow back, the better Google will rank you (just like web pages are ranked).

Imagine then, what would be the equivalent of “keyword research” in Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing ……. for Social Media?     Somehow, my mind must have been inclined to think this way today – as I suddenly realized that “researching conversations” or “conversations research” is the direct equivalent of researching keywords for Social Media.

How would that work?

To test the idea out, I’m using Sysomos Map, one of my favorite Social Media Monitoring platforms – and one of the best for filtering out noise and focusing on essentials.   I suppose you can say, in this context  “Sysomos” is the equivalent to “WordTracker“, but that would not be doing justice to Social Media Monitoring – which does a lot more than WordTracker and similar platforms  were created to do.

Take the query “Social Media” AND ROI – lots of people are talking Social Media ROI thesedays – and searching on Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, WordStreams free Keyword Tool, Google Insights for Search, etc, will give you one type of view, while “Conversation Search” or “Conversation Mining” as my friends at Converseon call their platform, will give you something entirely different, and perhaps, more useful.

What I’m looking for are keywords in conversations that could be included in our own conversations about “Social Media ROI” much as you would have done for SEO, but with a 2 dimensional keyword tool like WordTracker.

On first pass, words such as “analytic”, “market”, “measurable”, etc occur most frequently, and so …. are they part of your communication or marketing material …. if you talk Social Media ROI, if not, maybe … they can be …. if you want to increase the changes your conversation will be picked up by more listeners.

Taking a second pass, by including all the words in the right column I get the following chart, that looks different than my first.

Now, I get “integrated”, “investment” and that integrated investment is connected with “facebook” you might want to creatively add those phases to what your writing – that is, if there is a legitimate reason to do so – otherwise your just “keyword stuffing”, and I don’t recommend anyone do that.

Only use the phrases that “fit”, that you mean to use – my point being – you probably aren’t aware of all the phrases you could use in your “conversations”.

Going one more level – we get “Successful Companies Value“, etc.

You can also get information about each word and how it appeared in all content that Sysomos MAP crawled; take the word “tactic” for example:

The practical implementation of this strategy which I’ve just shared with you will take time – I’ll need to play with it some more.  Maybe you will, too, and share with me some of your insights.    I like to say, the more we give, the more we get back.

We should never be afraid of sharing ideas, as more ideas come to replenish the ideas and I believe, there is no limit.  Even if you took this idea way beyond what I’ve done, or will do with it, that’s fine.   I’ll get 10 more, no, 100 more ideas for every one I give to you – so I’m very happy with that arrangement.

I will leave you with one more thing from Sysomos – Influencer Search – it’s pretty decent – I was able to use it on obscure subjects and in about an hour come up with the names and contact information for 20 influencers (out of three times as many).  For Social Media ROI – the 5 most authoritative blogs are no surprise (specific posts that were most influential were linked to in every case).

1. TechCrunch
2. Mashable
3. Read/WriteWeb
4. BusinessInsider (this is a blog I don’t read – maybe I should)
5. Chris Brogan

However, while those blogs are the most authoritative that came up in the search for Social Media ROI, they might not be the most relevant for it. Sysomos has another filter that includes frequency to mentions to authority – and that gives a list of 5 very different blogs – probably the one’s you should read if you want to know more about Social Media ROI:

1. OnlineMarketingConnect (with a post on Social Media Snake Oil, no less)
2. Jatinmahindra (never heard of this blog – maybe I should take a look at it)
3. Jacob Morgan – one of the smartest people I’ve read – he’s right on the mark on every post.
4. Mashable (ok, they’re still in the list)
5. Blogfully

So, to finish this long post – the ideas I share with you need to be developed – do you have a campaign that is not getting talked about much, that maybe, ought to be – and while you also need to put in the strategy work (aka Jacob Morgan) and then do the outreach – might you not also be needing to do your basic “Conversation Research” – not just what people are talking about – but the other things surrounding it – that maybe “you” ought to be including in your conversation.

So, let’s test this idea – let’s mine “conversations” and see what we come up with – and if you don’t have Sysomos, there are other tools to do it with – even Google Insights for Search could be a proxy (but not as good) – maybe a Free account with Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 will work (they give you a limited # of searches though – but it will be enough for a test run).