The Net-Savvy Executive

School started today, and I'm getting ready for a rush of productivity: new projects, new clients, and new writing projects. But first, let me recommend a few books I read this summer. It's not exactly "what I did on summer vacation," but they might just kick-start some ideas that aren't part of your typical day.

I read Jeffrey Carr's Inside Cyber Warfare back in the spring, so when Richard Clarke's Cyber War started getting mainstream coverage, I knew I needed to read it. Carr made the point that we need better computer security on systems that do important things, but Clarke really bangs the drum and demands attention. Plus, his background guarantees that he gets attention when he wants it.

Clarke emphasizes the nightmare scenarios—power outages, train wrecks, and refinery explosions—so it's not bedtime reading, but if you stick with it through the scary parts, he makes some good points. If you've never thought about how quickly the lights can go out, this might be a wake-up call.

Over dinner at a conference (what do you mean, cyber attacks aren't dinner conversation?), Clarke's book drew a laugh and the comment that I was reading science fiction after starting with the science (Carr). But the real science fiction scare came from Daniel Suarez's Daemon, recommended by my old friend Dave Thomas. Daemon is the story of an AI (articial intelligence) from the world of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) that takes over the world. If you believe this is possible, you might change your mind about the Internet off switch. Or at least check your offline contingency plans.

And oh, look, there's a sequel. Who needs sleep?

Vinnie Mirchandani's The New Polymath celebrates innovation in, and especially at the intersections of, various technology specialties. It's loaded with examples, and if you're like me—interested in too many topics to pick just one—it provides affirmation that that's ok.

The only problem I had with this book is that Mirchandani makes a major point about And not Or thinking, and people might think I got that from his book. It's really just something that becomes obvious when you regularly share ideas that cross boundaries. The New Polymath is great for pointing out ideas from many fields and connecting them to meaningful outcomes; read it and you'll be challenged and inspired, whatever your usual niche.

The summer's been long and hot—and realistically, we have another month to go before fall weather arrives here—but these books started the gears moving. Now we'll see what happens as a result.

What happened to giving credit in blog posts? I was just working on another post, and as I inserted a link, it struck me that I'm not seeing "via" and "hat tip" links as much as I used to. It's a nice way to give credit to the sources who point you to useful links, and it's useful for readers, too. Has giving credit to blog sources gone out of style?

Courtesy is the best kind of self-promotion, in that is costs nothing and wins you everything.
—Jim Durbin

Maybe I'm not seeing them because I skim so much more than I read lately. But maybe it's not just me…

@gilliatt - think the time for crediting seems to have passed…I always credit where possible, keeps everyone sharing as per today in IMHO
—Gray Dudek

Crediting sources in blog posts is a good practice. I'll keep linking to my sources; I hope you will, too.

What can you learn online? How about where someone is? Or where they live, where they work, where they hang out… One of the interesting ways to segment social media data is by the contributor's location, but it's a rare feature in social media analysis platforms because of the difficulty of doing it well. More than they realize, though, people are publishing their locations.

I've heard of two main methods to assign locations to social media sources. The easier method, which initially sounds more accurate, tracks down the IP network address of the associated computer. Every computer on the Internet has one, and in principle, the address corresponds somewhat to location. But the goal isn't to find a server, it's to segment online contributors by geography.

If addresses matched locations in some mythical past, they're useless for location now. Facebook is Facebook, wherever an individual user is. Blogs are hosted by a few big players; even with private domains, there's no guarantee that the web host is anywhere near the user. This blog, for example, is hosted on a machine in Pennsylvania—a long way from where I'm sitting. I have accounts on lots of social media sites, none of which are here.

So IP addresses might help you locate a computer server, but they're not a reliable indicator of where an individual user of that system may be.

Revealed deomgraphics
The more interesting process, which I've heard from a handful of SMA companies, is to extract information revealed by the user, linking profiles across services to develop a profile of the person. If someone links a blog to accounts on services like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, then the combined profiles can build a better picture of the person. Location is one of the major components of that picture.

People have lots of opportunities to announce their location in social media, especially in all those member profiles we fill out. The location field in Twitter might be misleading (remember all the people who changed their location to Tehran in a show of support last year?), but if it agrees with Facebook, Linkedin, or the About Me page on the blog, you have a location.

That's without getting into location-based services like Foursquare. Everyone using those is building a personal tracking database on purpose.

Are you uncomfortable yet? At least this is all based on information that people shared intentionally—so far.

Oops, too much information
The New York Times has an article today, Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live, which discusses the location metadata attached to digital photographs now. Sarah Perez wrote on the same topic a few weeks ago (Researchers Warn of Geotagging Dangers - Are You Concerned?). Cyberstalking, meet cybercasing: how to reveal your home address on Craigslist.

Both articles emphasize the privacy concerns, as they should. In aggregate, the data creates what Marshall Kirkpatrick calls your new superpower; applied to individuals, it's just creepy.

So, how much location information do you want? Where's the line between constructive location and demographics data and creepy/dangerous? Finally, whose ethics apply to analyzing this data?

Photo by Silver Smith.

Just in time for the social holidays, Seersucker Social Media introduces social promotion, a powerful new social marketing tool for your social media toolbelt! Our advanced social intelligence and buzzword-compliant social functions will help you build social capital in your social networks—

Bingo!

I don't know about you, but I'm about done with prepending social to every word in the business vocabulary to "invent" a new, socially enhanced concept. A few years ago, Web 2.0 led a rush on 2.0 Jargon, and before long everybody was sick of it. All we need now is Social 2.0 to complete the cycle.

But that's just hype, and we can filter that. What's really bugging me is how the social buzzword generator is running roughshod over existing concepts—expropriating perfectly useful terms that had the temerity to get there first.

It all started with social marketing, meant as a more manageable contraction of social media marketing. The problem is that social marketing was an existing specialty, having nothing to do with social media. You could probably even make a case for social media social marketing, but I'll deny it if you tell anyone I said so.

I'm seeing more social takeovers lately, and to help you keep up, I'm collecting them here. Just to speed things along, I've taken the liberty of making up some that haven't shown up in the wild yet. See if you can tell them apart.

Just remember, social x is not the same as social media x. We've been social a lot longer than we've had the Internet to mediate our connections.

</curmudgeon>

Photo by greeblie.

Add to the list. You know you want to.

I had a long lunch today with an old friend who's active in the social media space, and I mentioned that to me, Twitter is now the water cooler. His first reaction was that I was using some new social media site called Water Cooler (Watercoolr?), and he had somehow missed it.

Not quite what I meant. Is social media buzz turning us all into hamsters, trying to keep up with the wheel?

Photo by sualk61.

"Build your own listening tool" has been a popular topic, with suggestions usually building on free combinations of search feeds and RSS tricks. Twitter, especially, has inspired a whole constellation of free tools. But "build your own" has a deep end of the pool, too. Whether you're building a customized tool for specific, internal requirements or realizing your vision of the perfect entrant to an overcrowded market, building your own tool involves a series of build-or-buy decisions, starting with where you will get your source data.

There's a list below, but first, some background.

I first wrote about the building blocks of social media analysis in 2008. The short version is this: any system for monitoring or measuring social media has three basic components: data collection, analytics, and application. The differences are in the details, and each component can be the subject of its own build-or-buy decision. If your goal is to beat the industry standard in a particular area, you build, but if industry-standard is good enough, you don't have to.

At the time of the original post, all of the components were available separately for companies who were building their own systems, either for their own use or for commercial product development. Now, more options are in the market, especially in data collection. Lots of search engines offer RSS feeds. This is something else: services that aggregate social media data from multiple sources for business or commercial users.

More than just aggregation
The data collection step is about more than mashing together multiple search feeds. For the professional-strength aggregator, the finished product—like paid products in other categories—does something the free tools don't offer.

• Sources
  Social media comes in lots of flavors, and aggregators need to keep up with the introduction of new services. Commercial aggregators can also deliver content that simply isn't available without a subscription, such as full feeds from traditional media.

• Filtering
  Once you fill the pipe with incoming content, it's time to screen out the junk. Removing duplicate items is a start; removing near-duplicates (such as syndicated content or press releases) helps, too. Spam removal is a big deal.

  Another kind of filtering is prescreening the content for relevance to the customer. How that works is part of the aggregator's secret sauce and will differ by provider.

• Metadata tagging
  We spend a lot of time thinking about analyzing the unstructured text in social media, but most of the content also has structured data around it (such as the source, publication date, and number of comments). Aggregators can also pull information about posts from third-party sites to complete the picture.

• Speed
  Oh, and do all of the above quickly, please. Financial applications go to extremes to reduce latency (the lag between when content is posted and when it shows up in the aggregator), but it's a factor in less demanding environments, too. If you're monitoring Twitter, for example, you need to know in seconds or minutes, or you'll be too late to respond in that near-real-time environment.

The list
Oh, yeah, this is a list post. Companies who offer social media content aggregation as a service:

• 80legs
  
• Collecta - for public apps only
  
• Collective Intellect
  
• Context Voice (UberVU)
  
• CyberAlert
  
• Dow Jones
  
• Effyis (Boardreader)
  
• Extractiv
  
• Gnip
  
• Moreover
  
• PostRank
  
• SocialMention
  
• Spinn3r
  
• Superfeedr
  
• Viralheat
  
• Yahoo

Photo by identity chris is.

One more blog post came across the radar today, making it a trend. Companies in the social media analysis business are showing the growth of their business by expanding their presence internationally. Other companies have grown an international footprint when they were acquired.

Announcements that hit the screen recently:

• Attensity360 launch in Europe
  
• Attentio in Singapore
  
• Infegy in Europe (7/2010)
  
• Synthesio in London
  
• Visible Technologies in London

I'm seeing a lot of job openings with the vendors, too. Hey guys, get your free job listings (including international) at SMA.

The aquisitions of Scout Labs, Biz360, and Filtrbox so far this year have people talking about what else is coming. Actually, I count seven acquisitions so far this year—apparently we need a score card.

If you weren't aware, I post industry news at Social Media Analysis. If you care about what the companies in SMA are doing, you should read it.

The M&A list is at SMA, too: Acquisitions in Social Media Analysis.

Let's pick on one of the social media crowd's favorite buzzword bingo entries: engagement. Amber's thinking about what engagement means, so I'm going to bypass that question and move directly to the follow-up questions. Who is the object of your engagement? Why do want to engage them online? How does your relationship with them affect your engagement tactics?

Is this the party to whom I am speaking?
—Lily Tomlin as "Ernestine"

Engagement—responding, conversing, connecting, sharing—it sounds like a good thing. Whatever you mean when you say it, I'm sure I support it. In the spirit of and not or, I want to suggest that you consider some different types of people you might engage online.

This isn't an academic exercise. In my recent review of social media analysis platforms, I found engagement features with implicit assumptions about the object and purpose of engagement tactics. Click on the Engage button in one product, and you're in a tool for managing responses to customers. In another system, the button takes you to a media relations tool. The different objects require different tools, which will be used by different groups for different purposes.

Before you can decide which one works for you, you have to know what you mean by engagement.

• Customers
  Well, duh. This is probably what everyone assumes engagement is all about—using social media as a channel for building a stronger relationship with customers (past, present, and future). Good stuff, but not the whole picture.

• Influencers
  People you value because of their presumed ability to influence others. They may be customers, but the goal and approach are different when you think of them as influencers.

• Media
  Professional influencers with different motives and expectations. You're probably already engaging reporters, but how does that play out in social media?

• Employees
  You remember these people, right? How do they figure into your social media environment? Did I miss the memo that says that engagement means external?
  

If you want an answer other than "it depends," ask a more specific question.

Here's a simple tip that leads to thinking bigger thoughts: when confronting a list, think and, not or.

If we've talked in the last few weeks, you've probably heard a version of this. It's central to how I think about things, and it's why I'm having trouble with most of the usual labels for listening tools and services—the labels imply boundaries that limit the potential applications.

Most people seem to approach things as a series of or questions. I see a lot of it in social media circles:

• Just social or just media?
• Monitoring or measuring?
• Analyzing or responding?
• Marketing or customer service?
• Software or human intelligence?

The thing about or questions is that they expect right and wrong answers. What if both choices are right (possibly in different contexts)? What if options not on the list are also right?

Focus with Or; Explore with And
Or questions simplify things, which makes them easier to understand. They're great when you need to be very clear about what you're doing or what you need. When choosing between a hammer and a screwdriver, it helps to know if you're driving a nail or a screw. Once you know your objectives, or questions are invaluable.

On the other hand, I do a lot of exploring around the edges of the market. I want to know what change is coming, and where it's coming from. Approaching the market as a series of and questions helps me find the adjacent spaces that the or questions exclude. A typical yes, and question is "what else can it do?"

I find that most questions are more interesting if we replace the or with and, and see where it leads.

Soapbox photo by Steve Rhodes.

Searching for a title made up entirely of Boolean operators: priceless.