December 2007 Archives

links for 2007-12-28

links for 2007-12-21

Top 10 posts of 2007

The most widely read posts on this blog for 2007, sorted by unique visitors.

  1. Bloggers of social media analysis (June 11, 2007)

  2. Defining social media relations (November 10, 2006)

  3. BuzzMonitor - open-source blog monitoring (June 1, 2007)

  4. Visual text analysis (April 6, 2007)

  5. Analysts of social media (September 11, 2007)

  6. Guide to Social Media Analysis (June 6, 2007)

  7. Sorting out social media measurement (July 26, 2007)

  8. Human vs. machine analysis (April 30, 2007)

  9. Irony 2.0 (November 19, 2007)

  10. Does Facebook want grown-ups? (August 3, 2007)
Trends? Older material gradually moves up the list, as the steady trickle of search engine traffic adds up. Lists of bloggers drive traffic as the bloggers track their own inbound links and referrals. And it's pretty easy to figure out what my niche is from the list.

Hat tip to Dennis McDonald for this idea.

links for 2007-12-14

So, you want to embarrass your company with your efforts in social media, and you don't have a lot of time. You could invent an original way to screw up and let everyone else learn from your mistakes, but that would require effort. Instead, you want something easy that you know will work. What you need are best practices identified by early adopters. Follow their examples, and you can have your very own blogstorm.

10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media

  1. Create a fake blog. Nobody will notice, and even if they do, they won't remember.

  2. Dare bloggers to complain about you. Because, you know, nobody reads blogs.

  3. Broadcast your press releases to bloggers. They love that.

  4. Flame a blogger critic in email, because that way it will stay between you and the blogger.

  5. Impersonate someone else in blog comments. That transparency stuff is overrated.

  6. In any dispute, lead with the lawyers. They can take care of everything for you.

  7. If you want good reviews of your expensive product, send free samples to bloggers. You don't need to mention anything about disclosure.

  8. Oh, heck, just review your own products. You know them better than anyone else, anyway.

  9. Make improvements to your company's Wikipedia entry. After all, it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, right?

  10. Tout your company's stock on the message boards. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.
Once you've mastered these techniques, you'll be ready to move on to advanced topics, such as bomb jokes and bad music. Really, there's no shortage of ways to screw up. Between the honest mistakes and the creative scams, we'll eventually discover all of them.

All we ask is that you let us be the first to blog about it when you invent a new one.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

  • 11 December - Scout Labs opened their public beta. Public launch is expected in the first quarter. (via TechCrunch)

  • CyberAlert invites applications from US and Canadian non-profits for one-year grants of free news clipping service using its CyberAlert 4.0 service. (via Katie Paine)
New research and papers

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Trading on social media

Some forms of ROI are inherently easier to track. While so many focus on the marketing & communications uses of social media, two companies are putting social media analysis techniques to work for institutional investors. What they do is simple: they look for reliable information online, before it shows up in mainstream media and moves the market. By going to the source, they can identify potential trading opportunities for their clients.

Buy on the rumor; sell on the news.
Collective Intellect and Monitor110 offer market intelligence services to the Wall Street crowd (CI also offers a version tailored to marketing and communications). The basics are familiar to anyone who's looked at social media monitoring services—they watch blogs and other online sources for interesting bits of information. The difference is their purpose: to find information that has the potential to move stock prices, before everyone else finds it.

Collective Intellect describes three different use cases:

  1. Traders need to know everything going on with a stock in real time. They don't want a tap on the shoulder, a few minutes after a trade, to hear “didn’t you see that thing on the Internet about their product problem?”

    Traders deal with a lot of information, so there's an emphasis on filtering to find the best information and the best sources.

  2. Portfolio managers and research analysts usually have more time to think, but they need a comprehensive view of activity associated with a stock, an event, a technology, an individual executive, or an industry.

  3. Quants dig through the rich data available in social media for tradeable correlations. If there's predictive power in a social media metric, they'll find it—but don't expect them to share. They know how to make money with math secrets.
Monitor110 shares some enlightening examples of how this works. They have the blogger who beat the Wall Street analysts and the discussion forum that pointed out a company's problems. It's not all social media, though. I was particularly struck by the example of clinical trials results posted on a government site four hours before the company announcement.

If online market intelligence leads to a profitable trade, the ROI is easy to determine, without any arguments about how to translate outcomes to money.

For more on social media/2.0 technologies in the financial sector, check out Christopher Rollyson's notes on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in Capital Markets (via David Teten).

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News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

  • 23 November - UK-based Sentiment Metrics launched their social media analysis service, which starts at £159 per month. A free, 14-day trial is available.

  • 3 December - Cymfony announced its Super Bowl Advertising Audience Impact report, a syndicated series of reports on media coverage and consumer discussions about Super Bowl advertisers. press release

  • 4 December - CustomScoop launched Media Bullseye, a web site/newsletter on current trends in communications for media, public relations, and marketing types. (via Chip Griffin)

  • 6 December - KDPaine & Partners and BuzzLogic announced a partnership to offer KDPaine's tonality and sentiment scoring to BuzzLogic customers. press release
Events
New research and papers
  • Umbria released a white paper on consumer perceptions about product recalls following recalls of Chinese-made goods (registration required). The paper features demographic analysis and profiles of four consumer segments based on their reactions to the recalls.

  • Katie Paine announced the availability of her book, Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success.

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links for 2007-12-05

Wikipedia grabs the spotlight

Just in time to relieve us from the overexposure of Facebook's problems, Wikipedia gives us this: Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia, now playing on Digg and TechMeme. If you like your controversy with a soundtrack, try this entertaining version. Betrayal, a secret cabal, and an alien legal code—who needs TV when this on?

I'm not going to try to summmarize things—the Register's article does a nice job of that. What's going on is an argument about politics and arcane processes, wrapped in principle and spiced with murky power structures and secret mailing lists. The volume of opinion is amazing, and it gives a sense of the amount of time people have to spend there.

Awkward adolescence, indeed.

To me, the interesting bit is that the focus of the controversy, the pseudonymous Durova, has been a useful inside source for marketers, with her dark side opinion piece and SEO tips & tactics from a Wikipedia insider, which appeared under her nom de wiki on Search Engine Land. It's interesting to reconsider her advice on how to interact properly with Wikipedia, in light of the current complaints and revelations.

The Animal Farm reference is obvious. In fact, it's already shown up in comments on other posts several times.

More on Wikipedia:

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About Nathan Gilliatt

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  • Voracious learner and explorer. Analyst tracking technologies and markets in intelligence, analytics and social media. Advisor to buyers, sellers and investors. Writing my next book.
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