Blog highlights

Welcome, new readers! If you recently discovered the Net-Savvy Executive, you may find some of these older posts helpful or interesting. Jump in anywhere with comments; your participation is definitely encouraged here.

    - Nathan

Most-read posts: 2011, 2010, 2009

My picks of the year: 2011, 2010

Lists

• Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget
  Free versions, free entry-level accounts, and free trials of commercial social media analysis tools

• Global Social Media Usage Patterns
  A roundup of research on how people use social media in different parts of the world

• Social Media Analysis for Workgroups
  Software platforms designed to support in-house social media teams in corporate and agency environments

• Professional-Strength Social Media Aggregators
  When you're building an application to monitor or measure social media, you don't have to collect your own data.

• Text Analytics in the Cloud and The Rise of the "Influence" Peddlers
  You don't have to write your own text analytics or influence analysis software, either.

• Acquisitions in Social Media Analysis
  Keeping a scorecard of M&A activity.

• New Dashboards Blend Analytics Sources
  A new crop of startups offer web-based dashboards that combine web, social media, and internal data sources.

• Mining the Internet for Investment Insights
  Companies analyzing social media activity or content to discover investing signals.
  

• "Listen" means more than you may think
  Every social media strategy starts with "listen," and if you do it right, you'll learn a lot more than today's headlines.

• Five Conversations You Should Care About
  "What are people saying about us" is a good starting point, but it's only one of the questions you should ask.

• 10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media
  Perfect for learning by counterexample.

• Customer service is marketing
  PR alone can't fix a problem that the operation created.

• Corporate social media specialists and Defining social media relations
  How do you organize to engage effectively with your markets through social media?

• Crash course on Wikipedia
  Look, but be careful about how you touch.
  

• Why You Can't Measure Influence
  Measurement requires observation. What we're doing with influence—as well as engagement and reputation—is modeling, which introduces subjective components, such as objectives, to the process.

• Applying Intelligence and Analytics to Online Statements
  Beyond customer opinion, what could you find online if you were to look for it?

• Forms of social media analysis
  6 categories of service offered by social media analysis companies.

• Listening Platforms and Professional Services
  4 categories of services that you may want to go along with your social media analysis platform.

• Human vs. machine analysis
  A major source of disagreement, but posing the question in absolute terms is misleading.

• Visual text analysis
  Quick examples of different ways of visually summarizing text.

• The Role of IT in Social Media Analysis
  Sooner or later, social media needs to integrate with other processes, which will require IT involvement.

• The ethics of listening and Ethics, open sources and CI
  Some people have ethical concerns about monitoring social media, but the law (US) appears to allow it.

• Copyright and social media monitoring
  Is it legal to aggregate social media content for commercial purposes?

• Social Media Analysis
  My weekly news posts about the companies in this space grew into their own site.
  

• Sorting out social media measurement
  Before insisting on standard metrics, understand what you want to learn by measuring.

• Derivatives in media measurement
  Thinking about math and trend analysis.
  

• RSS Tricks for Non-Programmers
  
• Using Delicious to Find, Save and Publish Content