Recently in Blogging Category

When I started looking at the year's most-read posts a couple of years ago, I noticed that the list always includes a lot of older posts. So, I started a new post last year: a list of the past year's posts that didn't make the 2011 Top 10, but that I think are worth another look.

• Like Means What People Think It Means and The Rise of the "Influence" Peddlers
  The labels attached to the metrics we get from social networks are a big part of the challenge of interpreting the data. Do you "like" your "friends" on Facebook, or are those just arbitrary labels for something else? I'll have more on this topic soon.

• Top-Level Numbers Are Candy
  I've always thought that one of the analyst's most important characteristics is curiosity. Being satisfied with the top-level metrics your tool (any tool) spits out isn't sufficient.

• Twitter Best in Events and Emergencies
  Emergency management pros started paying serious attention to social media in 2011—tsunamis, tornadoes, and popular uprisings command attention, after all. While they sort out how to add social media to their plans (hint: there's more to it than communicating with the public), regular people are already making effective use of the new channels.

• Four Simple Thoughts, What If Intelligence and Analytics Are the Same Thing, Applying Intelligence and Analytics to Online Statements and Driving Intelligence and Analytics with Omniscience
  2011 was the year that I started telling people about my Omniscience Framework, a model for identifying information needs and driving requirements into analytics and intelligence systems. This goes well beyond social media and customer interactions, and I plan to explore its implications with clients in 2012. I know of at least one company who's already thinking about products based on one of those posts.

I don't really do predictions—at least, not publicly. I do, however, find it interesting to look back and see which posts have drawn the most attention in the past year. As in previous years' lists (2010, 2009), some of the most-read posts are old ones—going all the way back to 2006 (!).

Remember these?

1. New Dashboards Blend Analytics Sources - September 2010 (#9 in 2010)

2. Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget - May 2008 (#1 in 2009 & 2010)

3. What Does Salesforce-Radian6 Deal Mean for Everyone Else? - March 2011

4. Global Social Media Usage Patterns - January 2011

5. Human vs. machine analysis - April 2007 (#4 in 2010)

6. Visual text analysis - April 2007 (#2 in 2010)

7. The Specialization of Social Media Analysis - March 2011

8. Professional-Strength Social Media Aggregators - June 2010 (#8 in 2010)

9. Text Analytics in the Cloud - February 2011

10. Defining social media relations - November 2006

Happy New Year.

Fred Wilson posted a simple request yesterday and got an amazing response. He wrote that he was experiencing Blogger's Block, and he asked his readers to suggest topics. The response? Over 360 comments (so far), suggesting and discussing more topics than Fred will be able to write about in a year. Obviously, people—a lot of them—are interested in Fred's opinions. I think this is great, and every blog ought to do it.

As I see it, asking the question invites two main risks: you might get no response, or people might suggest topics you don't want to write about. As for the former, I've invited responses that never came. While it's not fun, it doesn't leave a scar. No response means that the post didn't land with your readers, so they're unlikely to remember any of it.

If your audience is interested in something you don't want to write about, that probably tells you something you need to know.

Why are we here?
I sometimes wonder what people really want or expect from this blog. It accomplished its original goal a long time ago, and now it's a blend of what I'm finding around social media analysis and other topics I find interesting. The list posts tend to draw a lot of traffic, while the thought posts (where I think the real value should be) mostly don't.

Increasingly, I'm working on new topics that might surprise you if you think I'm interested primarily in marketing. I haven't yet worked out how much of that I should include.

Now for the scary part
I think every blogger could benefit from hearing what readers want more of. So, what do you want to see from this blog? Don't leave me listening to crickets.

And if you have your own blog? Tag, you're it.

Photo by WSDOT.

I don't try to post every day. That might be good for building audience numbers, but I'm much more interested in working out new ideas, and so I post when I have something to say. At year-end, it's curious and a little upsetting that so many of the year's most-viewed posts are from the past. So here's a quick list of posts from 2010 that I'd like to see people discover.

• Five Modes of Listening
  I keep seeing dismissive references to "just listening" this year. Every time, I want to say, "of course you don't 'just' listen. It's a metaphor; don't limit it with a simplistic interpretation." Breaking out five modes of listening expands the definition in one dimension; how many more can you think of?

• Tell Me Your Metrics…
  The latest on measurement silos and the clubs who work in them. This is why we started AnalyticsCamp. Have you gone out to lunch with an analyst from a different specialty yet?

• And Not Or and What's Just Outside Your Focus?
  Expanding our interpretation of the listening metaphor is just one example of applying divergent thinking to find more opportunities. I don't have anything against focus, but if nobody explores the edges, we won't discover anything new.

• Applying Social Network Analysis to Social Media
  Not only is SNA different from SMA, we're really just getting started at using them together.

• The Importance of the Analyst, Learning Curves for Social Media Analysis, and Can Analytics Be Taught?
  When people complain that the software doesn't automate the analytics role, ask them when software ever replaced insight. Analytics is a power tool, which works best in the hands of a skilled specialist.

• Whose Ethics Apply in Social Media? and Ethical Standards for Listening Vendors
  Big, unanswered questions. What will happen in 2011?

• Social Buzzword Bingo
  I went for a humorous approach, but the point is that social is a seriously abused buzzword, especially in the hands of trendsetters who are unaware of the existing language.
  

Another year gone, another post or two in the archive. And now it's time to see which posts got the most attention this year.

1. Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget - May 2008 (#1 in 2009)

2. Visual text analysis - April 2007 (#4 in 2009)

3. Sentiment Analysis is Not a Mood Ring - March 2010

4. Human vs. machine analysis - April 2007 (#7 in 2009)

5. Corporate social media specialists - September 2007 (#5 in 2009)

6. 5 Manly Things - February 2009

7. Comparing Social Media Analysis Platforms - March 2010

8. Professional-Strength Social Media Aggregators - June 2010

9. New Dashboards Blend Analytics Sources - September 2010

10. Guide to Social Media Analysis - June 2007 (#9 in 2009)
    

Some of the biggest ideas are stuck in draft—or hidden in business plans—but there's another list of my favorite idea posts of 2010.

Ugh. Yahoo is killing off Delicious, the social bookmarking service that I've used since 2005. This is inconvenient. I don't need to spend my time rebuilding stuff that already works.

First priority is saving all the bookmarks. Frank Gruber posted a list of backup options to cover the basics. At least I don't have to worry about losing the bookmarks entirely. The challenge here is to replace what Delicious does in my publishing workflow. Just saving links doesn't meet the requirement.

I don't have the answer for that, yet. So far, I'm collecting names of services that might work. Here's what I've seen mentioned:

• Diigo
  
• Google Bookmarks
  
• Kippt
  
• Licorize
  
• Pinboard
  
• Rinnku
  
• YourVersion
  
• Zootool
  

I don't suppose anyone thought of offering Delicious Pro accounts. I do pay for some of the other services I'm using. Would revenue make a difference to Yahoo?

Update 12/17: Now Yahoo says they're selling Delicious, not shutting it down. That would be better.

Note to self: Figure out which other Yahoo properties I use. Migrate. Don't look back.

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.

Only a few hours left in the year, and I haven't fulfilled the apparent obligation of bloggers to post some sort of year-end list. Best of, worst of, predictions... you've seen 'em all by now. I have my predictions, most of which are embedded in my business plan, but the prediction that is most on my mind is this: 2010 is looking big from here. So, before the ball drops and the fireworks go up, here's a look back at the most-viewed posts in 2009:

1. Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget - May 2008

2. The Sentiment on Sentiment Analysis - September 2009

3. Defining social media relations - November 2006

4. Visual text analysis - April 2007

5. Corporate social media specialists - September 2007

6. Sorting out social media measurement - July 2007

7. Human vs. machine analysis - April 2007

8. Social Media Analysis for Workgroups - August 2008

9. Guide to Social Media Analysis - June 2007

10. Companies Downplay Online Reputation Risk - March 2009

I'll keep focusing on quality over quantity, but I'm not about to stop writing here. Any topics you want to get into?

While the archive looks back, I'm definitely looking forward. '10 looks big from here. I hope it's big for you, too.

I turned off the automatic tag posts from Delicious today. Murphy being on the job, the post linking to the recent New York Times article on sentiment analysis promptly got a comment when I did that—a good one, too. But the tag posts are gone. The list of recent posts was overrun with "links for [date]" entries, and I lost some email subscribers who were probably tired of them, too. So they're gone.

I'll continue to use Delicious; it's part of my publishing workflow, as well as my bookmarking service of preference. I'll also continue the practice of adding editorial content in the comments to my tags. Depending on the tag, these items will continue to appear on my web sites. If you want to see all of them, they're also available as an RSS feed.

I have some good stuff in the drafts folder. I really don't want it to be lost is a sea of links posts.

I don't know if this is one of the recognized corollaries of Murphy's Law, but I've long known that you can't game the system. If you count on Murphy to make something work out in the end, it won't.

I'm not even going to ask if it's happened to you. If you have a blog, it has. You work on a big idea and a great blog post, and while it's stuck in the drafts folder, someone else posts on the same topic. Man, I hate when that happens. It makes it look like the other guy thought of it first and I'm just echoing. So let's do something about it.

Would it help to have a little extra motivation? A challenge, perhaps? Here's the plan:

1. Pick the two best topics spending too much time in your draft folder and give us the quick version in a new post.

2. Tweet your post and tag it with #stuckindraft so we can find it and encourage you.

3. Commit to finish that post! within a week.

4. When you finish the completed version, update your StuckInDraft post to link to the completed posts.

5. Tweet it again to let us know you've finished.

Now, you know where he is. Go! Confront the problem! Fight! Win! And call me when you get back, darling. I enjoy our visits.
—"Edna Mode," The Incredibles

Oh, yeah, my list.

• Questions to ask before shopping for listening tools and services
  I've heard from social media analysis vendors that clients are issuing RFPs before knowing enough to ask the right questions. This is a list of questions that clients should ask themselves to discover their own requirements.

• Opportunities in the intersections of analytics
  What value is hiding in the overlaps between social media analysis, web analytics, text analytics, business intelligence, customer relationship management...? What are the important connections in business processes and at a systems level?

No, actually, this post didn't spend much time in the draft folder. Why do you ask?