Category archives for

– Social Media Monitoring –

Thank You, Social Media!

by · May 27, 2011

Life is astonishing. Be grateful for every tiny aspect of it!

Social technologies and Web 2.0 applications change us more than we realize. Internet access, connectivity, and social media have changed the landscape of  nearly everything we do.  In the blink of an eye, connections are formed, possibilities become realities, and new relationships are formed.

It’s become almost common that something created  or discovered at breakfast over a scan of a tweetstream can become a “can’t live without” tool by dinnertime.

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How To Pull Insights From Data

by · May 10, 2011

On Thursday I’ll lead a webinar for my friends at NetBase around the topic of research and pulling insights from data. It’s really kind of a fuzzy topic for me because while I know how to do it, I don’t know that I’ve ever tried to explain it to others. But moving through the ideas and trying to come up with some recommendations for folks has been a neat exercise.

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Lessons from the Twitter Love Guru

by · January 25, 2011

When I discuss social media marketing I sometimes call it digital word-of-mouth. It’s apt. Digital word-of-mouth could someday become as powerful at growing brands as its off-line namesake. But hasn’t the Digital Age promised us the ability to accurately measure this type of brand influence? Now that word-of-mouth is in moving to “ones and zeroes,” can’t we quantify these conversations — perhaps even predict their future impact?

In a word: No. But that’s quickly changing, due in part to the work of Kevin Hillstrom and described in his new book Hashtag Analytics. One finding from Kevin’s scrupulously scientific approach to Twitter analytics is this less-than-scientific tidbit: Communities rely on love to grow and thrive.

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Social Media Monitoring Made Simple

by · January 14, 2011

If you’ve been monitoring social media for mentions of … social media monitoring, you’ll likely have noticed more people discussing how to listen better on behalf of your brand.

There are tools. There are services. And there are case studies on how your organization can sift through social media static and glean out useful nuggets.

The overload of information can be a little overwhelming and after a while all the advice on sifting through the static starts to sound, ironically, like more noise.

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Can Content Scale Using Automation?

by · November 29, 2010

StatSheet serves up automated reports of sporting events written, in standard journalistic prose, completely by computers. The sports statistics company in Durham, N.C., produces content pages for all 345 NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams and pumps game recaps and similar content composed by the site’s software which uses the box scores and raw data to fuel its stories.

Never mind that I was a sports journalist and publicity professional for 12 years and this software nearly commoditizes what I once called my profession. What this software does is gives us a peek into the possibilities of content based on data. Bear with me, here. This will make sense in a moment.

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Brownie Charts: Delicious Ways To Analyze Social Media Metrics

by · November 18, 2010

Digital marketing analysts seem obsessed with baked goods. When called upon to show something in percentages, they whip out a batch of pie charts — or doughnuts, such as the one shown below by AnyChart. Can you blame them? They have a high-stakes, high-pressure job. They deserve any comfort available.

These poor souls are expected to make complex behavioral relationships simple to grasp. Anything less is failure. Their bosses have little patience for long number tables or dozens of graphics.

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Sysomos Offers Facebook Page Monitoring Solution

by · November 17, 2010

Sysomos unveiled a new add-on to its social media monitoring platform, this one a feature called Facebook Page Central. The company is billing it as a Facebook Page Management tool. While a matter of semantics, it’s actually a monitoring and workflow solution customized for your company’s Fan page. Useful, but very much a reactive solution, not proactive.

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Social Media Monitoring and the “Likely Voter” Model

by · November 2, 2010

This is not a political post, but as I write this, I am on a plane headed to our election headquarters, as my company prepares to conduct the National Election Exit Polls on behalf of the major news networks. While this is an enormously complex effort, one thing we don’t have to worry about is predicting whether or not you actually voted. After all, if you are interviewed leaving your voting precinct, you just voted.

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The Illusion of Accountability

by · October 14, 2010

This may sound slightly ironic, coming from me, but I think sometimes we fall a little too in love with metrics. The Internet has trained a new generation of marketers and brand managers to expect that every impression, message, action and conversion should be measurable and trackable, and “less measurable” media such as TV, Print and Radio have suffered as a result. Today, social media is part of that conversation, and the tools and techniques to measure social engagement efforts are legion.

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