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Without Internet access, there are no Internet media—no "social media." Unless you've worked in network infrastructure, you probably don't think about it, but a lot of work and investment go into providing Internet access, whether you connect at work, at home, or at the corner café. As you may have heard, Internet access is not equally available around the world.

A new infographic from Appfrica International, Infostate of Africa, looks at the current state of Internet access in Africa. It's full of interesting information, and demand for the graphic has led to its availability as a poster (wouldn't that be nice as a series covering the world?).

Looking at the map reminded me of a point Hans Rosling (@Hansro) makes in his AIDs talk: Africa is not a country, and characterizing regions oversimplifies the answers to meaningful questions. That observation applies equally to the question of Internet availability.

I thought both the map and Rosling's talks (all of them) were worth sharing with you. We now return to your regular workday, which is already in progress.

One of the more interesting sessions at BarCamp Charlotte was on using social media for social change. We didn't make much progress for the non-profits in attendance; mostly we learned that they need to connect with people who would like to help them. The session did, however, prime me to notice when two different programs focused on truly global issues wandered across my awareness the same day. What started as a discussion about building word of mouth for a fundraiser shifted to something much more ambitious.

zyOzy
I learned about zyOzy (zee-Oh-zee) when @zyOzyfounder followed me on Twitter. For me, at least, that still gets some attention. zyOzy applies a mix of events, social media and entrepreneurship to support efforts to end extreme poverty in Africa and India.

In addition to their blog, the site links to an extended online presence that includes Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and a wiki. Who says you need a budget for an integrated media campaign?

Ushahidi
An old friend who now works in the NGO world pointed me toward Ushahidi, a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information. Ushahidi's original project compiled and mapped incident reports in Kenya during its 2008 post-election crisis. Reports were collected from citizen reporters using mobile phones.

The underlying technology is now being developed into an open-source platform that will be available for public and private monitoring of active situations anywhere. While in private beta, Ushahidi is being used for current projects focusing on Gaza, Congo, and South Africa, as well as a follow-up Kenya project.

What can you do with almost no budget?
"Social media are free" is the first myth to be busted—especially in a corporate marketing context—but most of the costs are driven by the need to spend time building social media programs. Free social media tools and open-source platforms, such as Ushahidi or the BuzzMonitor, put a lot of capability in the hands of NGOs that are more likely to have time and volunteers than a big budget.

So much talk about a few American companies and their adventures in social media. They're good stories, but what's happening everywhere else? I'm looking for some good examples for upcoming projects—both speaking and writing. Do you have a good example to help me avoid relying on the usual suspects?

This request started with an invitation I recently received to speak at SaskInteractive's Summit09 in March. I've accepted, and I think it would be good form to have more Canadian examples. I know there's more than Molson, but I don't have a good list of them, yet. And it's not just Canada; I'd really like to know more about what companies are already doing around the world.

Here's an example of what I'm looking for: Jon Husband wrote last week about the introduction of a community site by the French railroad company SNCF. I want more of those examples, and I know that the people who read this blog know some good ones.

So, all you folks who wonder why the American companies get all the attention, who's doing social media in your neighborhood?

I've heard a lot about text analytics since I started tracking the companies who monitor and analyze social media. I've been particularly interested in the different directions people go with the same basic source data and analytical techniques. It's not all sentiment and PR; once you start extracting opinions and themes from streams of online content, the next step is to look for correlations between online trends and external events. In marketing, you're probably looking for a link to sales; some of the companies I talk to are more interested in stock prices. But if you want to know what's really wrong with the world, you might start with Europe Media Monitor (EMM) from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

EMM pulls current world news from online sources, clustering reports by topic and tagging them with location and language. The real charm of the service is its optimistic focus on themes such as terrorism, communicable disease, political unrest and conflict. Clustering makes it easy to track current news on your specific combination of interests in the language(s) you can read. Of course, everything is multilingual, with "about 19" languages represented (the language filter is always there to keep things readable).

The result is a customizable news service available to government and private users through web-based dashboards, RSS and email. The site has three major components:

• NewsBrief, a quick view of the most active stories and themes, updated every 10 minutes. In addition to the global summary, NewsBrief has current news for 13 EMM themes, EC Directorates, selected international organizations, and a handful of topics focused on the European Union.

• NewsExplorer, a global news dashboard with drill-down analysis on nations, individuals and other entities. Detail ages show a breakdown of recent news by theme, plus excerpts of current articles.

  

• MedSys, a real-time dashboard and alerting system for medical and health-related issues. Detail views focus on specific diseases or bioterrorism threats, along with a volume trend chart and interactive map for drill-down analysis. In addition to email, MedSys can send alerts by SMS.

Registered organizations (governments?) get additional filtering and reporting options. There's also a restricted version of the MedSys site with additional information.

If you're a news junkie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to throw your productivity out the window, but this is worth checking out. The question I'm finding most interesting lately is, "what else is this good for?" Given the history of interest in text analytics by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, it's no surprise to know that they're still looking for ways to predict the future. It is a surprise to find such interesting sources available to the public.

Hat tip to Penny Herscher, who pointed out the article from Wired.

An article in this week's BusinessWeek is stirring up a good discussion about social media and ethics in China. People aren't thrilled with the unfortunate choice of metaphor in the title, either: Inside the War Against China's Blogs. Since I linked to the original article, it seems only fair to point out some of the thoughtful responses.

• Sam Flemming, Thoughts on recent Business Week article on IWOM in China
  
• Will Moss, Is it "war" against Chinese blogs?
  
• Paul Denlinger, The PR Problem for Chinese Online Public Relations Firms
  
• David Wolf, China's war for the soul of online corporate communications
  
• China Web2.0 Review, The PR Problems of China’s Social Media

Do you remember Randall Munroe's map of online communities? Is it printed and posted somewhere in your office? It is in mine. Here's another poster that can add some color to your wall: a conceptual map of French blogs (the language, not the country), courtesy of blogger Ouinon (via Loic Le Meur).

The map, while more visually stimulating than the rest of the document, is only the packaging. The rest of the document describes 200 French blogs, grouped into categories and ranked several ways. And, of course, there's a list of all the blogs in the map, so if you want to explore, say, French art blogs, this is another way to start. Plus, it'll look great on the wall.

Tags: French blogs visualization

I've been thinking about languages again. I talk to a lot of companies, many of them outside the US. Fortunately for me, English is very popular as a second language, which makes the conversations possible. It doesn't always help me with their web sites and blogs, however, and so I find myself making regular use of automated translation services. The piece I'm missing is a reliable way to translate RSS feeds.

Rafe Needleman posted a quick, easy, and—when I tried it—ineffective method of translating feeds using Yahoo Pipes. The titles get translated, but the body stays in the original language. Not much help. I didn't get any farther with Google Translate, although I'm still experimenting with other combinations of translation and RSS services. If you've found a combination that works, I'd like to hear about it.

What we need is a feed translation service, which takes in a feed, translates it, and creates a new, translated feed. With the acquisition of Feedburner, Google has the pieces. Any chance they'll do it?

If the whole idea of machine translation goes against everything you know about language, I know. I'd rather be able to read all those languages, too, but there will always be languages I can't read, and I can't justify proper translations. I can do a minimally acceptable job reading the French blogs, and I can get the general idea with other Romance languages. There will always be more languages that I can't read, and for those, machine translations are a great service, even with their flaws.

Science project challenge
Speaking of languages, I haven't heard from anyone who's tried my translingual influencer analysis science project. If your company has multilingual capabilities and does influence analysis, this could be a powerful demonstration. Can you identify relevant, influential sources who pick up a topic in one language and write about it in another?

Tags: social media analysis influence analysis language translation rss Google

A new Weber Shandwick survey on advocacy by consumers (via Simon McDermott) provides support for the idea of paying attention to online conversations, although traditional media still outrank online for their ability to reach and influence consumers. The survey confirms the role of word of mouth advocacy as it reaches an eye-opening conclusion about international markets.

Key observations:

• Decision-making among global consumers has accelerated.
  
• 45% of global consumers identified as Advocates.
  
• High-Intensity Advocates are critical to reach.
  
• Badvocates waste no time.
  
• Advocacy is more common in Europe and Asia.
  
• Both traditional and new media play critical roles in forming Advocates' opinions.
  

When I started asking social media analysis companies which languages they can handle, it seemed a simple enough question. English is ubiquitous, and a few predictable languages show up over and over again. Then I started seeing more obscure regional languages and dialects, and the language matrix started growing dramatically:

Arabic Bengali Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Chinese (Mandarin) Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish

Flemish French German Greek Hindi/Urdu Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Lithuanian Malaysian Norwegian Polish

Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Shanghainese Spanish Swedish Taiwanese Thai Turkish Ukrainian

Update: The Guide to Social Media Analysis (2nd edition) includes a table that summarizes the language capabilities of 63 vendors across 55 languages, from Arabic to Zulu.

As Dave says, it's that time again, and in the wake of the new Technorati report (now know as The State of the Live Web), I'm once again wondering about international social media analysis. Specifically, I'm curious about support for Asian languages, which are better represented among bloggers than among the companies that monitor and analyze blogs.

One of the more interesting bits in the Guide to Social Media Analysis is the language matrix, which is now 28 languages wide. It's no surprise to see English on everyone's list, but the overall range is eye-opening, from Arabic to Ukrainian. The most widely used languages in the blogosphere are well represented, with two exceptions: Farsi (#10) and Japanese (#1).

Eight companies support Chinese, including one company in Shanghai (some companies use translation services, which I'm not including here). With the third most popular language in the blogosphere and the most feet on the planet, China's interest is obvious. Richard Edelman observed last November:

In general, there appears to be quite an active anti-corporate, anti-multinational voice on the blogosphere in China. The average blogger is a 30 year old male, of modest means, venting resentments. Japanese companies are the #1 target, with US companies just behind.

Japanese, on the other hand, seems to be under the radar, despite its position as the leading language in the blogosphere. Only two companies I know of support Japanese, including one company in Tokyo. Japanese Internet users clearly know how to use blogs to express themselves—although they may have a preference for flames over discussion:

While anonymous writers have long used third-party online bulletin boards such as "2 channel" to criticize individuals and corporations in a phenomenon known as matsuri (meaning "festival"), the difference between matsuri and enjo [flames] is that with enjo, there is "no escape route" for those under attack, as it is their own blogs that are being targeted, Ohya noted.

Korean blogs remain off virtually everyone's radar. Technorati and Edelman gave up, and only one company I've heard from supports Korean (remember, not counting translations). I've heard that Korean culture treats social media as more personal, and there's that issue of missing ping support in Korean blog platforms. Korean representation at the WOMMA Summit suggests that we're missing something, though the attendees I talked to knew of only manual blog monitoring in Korea.

The newest addition to the Technorati Top 10 Languages, Farsi, is flying below the radar, too. At 1% of blogs, it's tied with German and half the level of French, Portuguese and Russian—all languages supported by multiple social media analysis companies. Nobody I've heard from supports Farsi... yet. Anyone wonder what 60 million native Persian speakers might be talking about in those blogs?

Maybe I need to make my own chart comparing language usage in blogs with language support in social media analysis. Hmm...

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring China Japan Korea Farsi

I heard from Sam Flemming today that he's moving his China Word of Mouth blog to the new CIC blog platform, SeeISee. The server also hosts a new staff blog, so we'll be able to hear from the others there—if you read (mostly) Chinese. Sam's China IWOM blog remains (mostly) English.

New office (translate), new logo, new web site, and a streamlined name (no more "data")—not a bad way to start the year.

Tags: cicdata