The Net-Savvy Executive

• Building a complete blog program
  (tags: blogging)
• Brand Tags
  Play the word association game with brands, see what people think.
  (tags: brand marketing reputation)

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 1 May - Nielsen Online launched its Digital Strategic Services group, led by EVP Pete Blackshaw. The new group will provide consulting services built on Nielsen's online research capabilities.

• 5 May - While Microsoft was busy not buying Yahoo, TNS and GfK confirmed rumors of a proposed merger of equals. Following the announcement, TNS rejected an unsolicited $1.9 billion offer from WPP Group, and GfK announced that merger discussions remain on track.

• Martin Edic joins Techrigy as Director of Marketing.

• 14 May (London) - MeasurementCamp, 10:00 AM to noon. Register at upcoming.

• 21 May - Satmetrix is presenting a free webinar, Making the Most of Your Relationship with Your On-line Community Members, 21 May at 11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4). The session will focus on interacting with customers in online communities.

• 22 May - Visible Technologies is presenting a free webinar, Unlocking Social Media’s ROI through Engagement & Participation, 22 May at 10:00 AM PDT (GMT -7). Visible's Blake Cahill hosts Forrester's Peter Kim and Microsoft's Marty Collins in a discussion of current trends and the benefits of social media engagement.

• 16–17 June (Boston) - 4th annual Text Analytics Summit. Social media analysis is prominent in the agenda, which also covers other applications of data mining and text analytics in business.

• Peer Media Manager, Text 100 (New York)

• Web 2.0, please meet your host, the Internet
  It's boring, it's too technical... and your business is running on it.
  (tags: web2.0)
• How to think like E
  If ever you quote movie lines, it doesn't get much better than Edna Mode. She might even help you think big.
  (tags: fun)
• It’s all about the BBS
  Old tools rule in China.
  (tags: china socialmedia)
• How to pronounce Myanmar
  According to Apple's built-in dictionary, it's pronounced "Burma."
  (tags: fun)

It's Twitter's fault. No, it's Facebook, or email, or—wait, social media is about people, so it's our fault. There's just too much to keep up with these days, and more people are pointing it out. Rubel crashed. Scoble cried uncle. Calcanis went bankrupt. And everyone is talking about signal-to-noise ratio. As in, if you want to get the good stuff (the signal) in social media, you have to pick it out of a lot of junk (the noise). They're right, but that's just the start.

Yes, words are useless. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble! Too much of it, darling. Too much! That is why I show you my work. That is why you are here.
Edna Mode, The Incredibles

(RSS subscribers, click through for the video.)

The signal-to-noise metaphor is all about source selection and filtering—finding the information you care about amid all the other stuff. The chocolate factory is about scaling processing capabilities—what you do with the signal once you've separated it from the noise.

Bodies or tools
Improving S/N is crucial, but it's only the first step. As the total volume of relevant, useful information increases, you have to increase your capabilities to keep up. Your options are the usual suspects: bodies and tools. Adding bodies is easy to understand, if a bit unworkable on an individual level. Even the most diligent worker can't work more than about 28 hours a day.

Which leaves tools. On an individual level, that includes email automation and using RSS to bring information to you. The new lifestream aggregators, such as FriendFeed may fit this description, though honestly, I've been too busy to try them.

In organizations, you get to choose between bodies and tools, but you're still limited by that 28-hour day thing. Do you add people or invest in better tools to know what's going on (or do you declare market intelligence bankruptcy in the face of the overwhelming riches of available data)? Do you hire an outside company to track it for you? How do they answer the bodies vs. tools question, and what does that mean to you?

(If it's all too much, these questions go to the heart of the research and consulting that I offer.)

What do you do?
This topic is perilously close to the human vs. computer analysis question, which we'll come back to soon. For now, what tools do you use to keep up with the growing flood (at the individual or organizational level)? Is it still about improving signal-to-noise for you, or have you reached the point where the signal itself is too much to handle with your current methods?

I have too many feeds in my RSS reader. Every once in a while, I clear some of them out, but more often, I add new ones. It's crazy, but at this moment, I'm subscribed to over 700 feeds. RSS is my preferred power tool for keeping up with too many sources, and I've found a lot of ways to put it to work.

Here's what's in my feed reader now:

• My own blogs
  How else would I know when I need to fix a problem?

• Alerts
  From blog and other service providers. Mostly quiet, but it's good to know if one of them is having problems.

• Blogs
  A mix of friends, professional acquaintances, and interests, both personal and professional. OK, I have too many of these—the downside of trying to know everything.

• PR feeds
  For the companies I follow. Their feed if they have one, Page2RSS monitoring if they don't. 60 feeds, which means I've missed some (some don't have news pages to monitor).

• Search and tag feeds
  Google Blogsearch feeds to track current news events (these don't stay around long). Del.icio.us and Technorati tag feeds to let other people do some of my discovery for me. The tag feeds have been especially helpful.

• Vanity feeds
  Search feeds on my name (and the most common misspelling), company name, blog title keyword, and URLs. Feeds from del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and a few others to let me know when (and how) someone tags my sites. 50 feeds—I'll consolidate these when I get time.

• Social network feeds
  Updates from LinkedIn, FaceBook and Dopplr. Twitter @replies (DMs go to email) and a Tweetscan search on the misspelled version of my name (correct spelling is picked up in Twhirl). Comments on my pictures on Flickr. A wiki watch feed, which I'm ready to delete.

• Q&A feed
  New questions on TechDirt Insight Community. I had LinkedIn Q&A feeds, but the volume was overwhelming.

• Event feeds
  Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us tags. Event blogs. CrowdVine new member feeds. The good news is that traffic falls off once the event is over, and the feeds are an easy way to remember next year.

• Job search feeds
  Keyword search on Indeed, feeds from job boards related to social media (including my own job board to let me know when someone posts there). You can learn a lot about who's doing what by their hiring needs.

• Humor and other creativity enhancers
  Hey, it's not all work. You need xkcd.
  

I have too many sources, and I need to clean house (again). But my feed reader is where I direct as many incoming sources as possible, and it saves me a lot of time visiting blogs, search engines and social networking sites. I couldn't do what I do without it.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 1 May - An undisclosed party bought Attenalert for $4,000 in an online auction.

• 18 March - Morgan Stanley's recent look at Internet trends (PDF) focuses heavily on social media and the growth in consumer Internet use.

• 6 May (Rome) - Digital PR is presenting its annual workshop on social media and marketing, Il Nuovo Potere dei Consumatori sul Web (The New Power of Consumers over the Web). The free event is cosponsored by Dow Jones & Company.

• 7 May - Satmetrix is presenting a free webinar, Taking Net Promoter to the Next Level with On-line Communities, 7 May at 11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4). The session will focus on how to build an interactive community to create brand promoters.

• 14 May (London) - MeasurementCamp, 10:00 AM to noon. Register at upcoming.

• 21 May - Satmetrix is presenting a free webinar, Making the Most of Your Relationship with Your On-line Community Members, 21 May at 11:00 AM EDT (GMT -4). The session will focus on interacting with customers in online communities.

• 22 May - Visible Technologies is presenting a free webinar, Unlocking Social Media’s ROI through Engagement & Participation, 22 May at 1:00 PM EDT (GMT -4). Visible's Blake Cahill hosts Forrester's Peter Kim and Microsoft's Marty Collins in a discussion of current trends and the benefits of social media engagement.

• 16–17 June (Boston) - 4th annual Text Analytics Summit. Social media analysis is prominent in the agenda, which also covers other applications of data mining and text analytics in business.

• Social media identity: personal vs. professional
  Good discussion of the distinction between personality and company affiliation in social media. This is why early adopter views from startups don't always apply to big companies.
  (tags: blogging reputation)
• Dumb as we wanna be
  Thomas Friedman on US energy policy. I like Peter Schwartz's summary: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
  (tags: energy solar)

• Marvel moves to shut down our Iron Man screening
  How long for PR to go clean up after the lawyer this time? Good thing geeks don't go to movies based on comic book--oh, wait.
  (tags: pr casestudy)

• On managing a community
  Another take on the social media role, focusing on the community manager variant.
  (tags: socialmedia community corporate)
• Track distributed conversations with YackTrack
  Find comments on 3rd party sites (Digg, StumbleUpon et al) based on a source URL.
  (tags: aggregator socialmedia companies)
• Strategic direction in social media
  Jay Moonah's take on the social media role, with a drill down into tasks involved in executing social media strategy.
  (tags: strategy socialmedia corporate)

A study published by the (US) National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that email, at least, follows a meandering path to large audiences, rather than a short path via online influencers. Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data, by David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg (via IntelFusion). The choice of email as the channel guarantees the deep and narrow result.

Although information, news, and opinions continuously circulate in the worldwide social network, the actual mechanics of how any single piece of information spreads on a global scale have been a mystery. Here, we trace such information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters. We find that rather than fanning out widely, reaching many people in very few steps according to "small-world" principles, the progress of these chain letters proceeds in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, continuing for several hundred steps. This suggests a new and more complex picture for the spread of information through a social network. We describe a probabilistic model based on network clustering and asynchronous response times that produces trees with this characteristic structure on social-network data.

Deep and Wide
The more interesting question—and the more challenging—is to track the spread of information and opinions across the many channels people use, both online and offline. If you think about the interaction between mass media and offline word of mouth, it's clear that dissemination can alternate between wide (mass media) and narrow (interpersonal). Online media work the same way, with some sources reaching large audiences while other channels move information among friends.

The transition from wide to narrow can happen at any time in the process and can go in either direction:

• Narrow –> Wide
  Email to blogger, low readership blog to A-list blog, blog post picked up by mass media, interpersonal to media (conversation with a reporter)

• Wide –> Narrow
  Mass media to blogs, online media to email, media to interpersonal

Suddenly, I want to go play in the creek. I'll call it work-related.