The Net-Savvy Executive

It seems I'm not the only one thinking about the labels we use around marketing and social media. I asked your opinion on what to call the group of activities around monitoring and analyzing social media a few weeks back (already? wow). Now, Rohit Bhargava and Cameron Olthuis are refining the distinction between social media optimization (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM). So here's my opinion on the labelling question.

I like social media analysis.

I like social media research, too, but analysis sounds to me more approachable than research, and some of these activities don't come off as research. Besides, isn't SMR taken? :-)

I like online market intelligence, but it's very broad, and I don't think many people would associate it with what we're talking about. Reputation monitoring, on the other hand, is only one application.

Monitoring may the basic activity, but it misses some of the more interesting work. Measurement is interesting, but some of the activities—such as monitoring—don't necessarily involve measurement. Analytics is just too geeky for a non-technical audience.

The idea is to come up with an inclusive term to describe some similar services offered under a variety of labels. It needs to encompass these activities (and possibly more):

1. Monitoring social media—blogs, discussion boards, online product reviews, newsgroup, et al—to find mentions of the client (company, products, brands, messages, people...)
   
2. Software-aided analysis of the data gathered to identify trends, sentiment, influencers, and associations.
   
3. Presentation of the data in an analytical framework with some sort of reporting interface (web, PDF, Powerpoint, Braille...)
   
4. Human analysis of the data and tactical/strategic recommendations.
   

Tags: social+media blog monitoring

Matt Hurst posted a new visualization of the blogosphere last week, reminding me of a question I've wanted to ask. Has anyone looked at social media in terms of the degree of interconnection between languages?

The question comes from discussions I've had with social media analysis companies. If a client wanted to monitor social media worldwide, issues like language capability and cultural knowledge are obviously important. I've heard opinions about the relative merits of local specialists versus larger companies with global services. That's a choice I plan to leave to clients to make for themselves.

But here's more of a technical question: has anyone looked at links (and, by extension, influence) that cross languages? Let's make the question more relevant to a business audience by supposing an analysis focused on a particular topic—something global, such as avian flu, or a global company, such as Toyota.

If we were to chart the connections on a topic of global interest and color-code it by language, would we see much connection between language clusters, or would they be largely separate? Does the analysis identify influencers who connect communities across the language barrier?

I would think that would be an interesting exercise for a client interested in global perceptions. The results might suggest how a company should coordinate its efforts in disparate geographies.

Tags: blogosphere visualization influence social media analysis

I think people are too busy working to blog this year. While I was contemplating how to break my own silence, Susan Getgood and Coolz0r posted similar stories about being too busy to blog. That's a nice problem to have, isn't it? Something similar is happening here.

I alluded to my new project when I wrote about terminology and asked about Korea. I'm working on a guide to social media analysis companies, which I hope to complete by the end of the first quarter. It's a buyer's guide to companies that monitor and analyze social media, intended for marketing executives and agencies looking for a vendor or partner.

The project is seriously international, with 33 companies in 7 countries participating so far (another 9 haven't responded yet). It includes specialists in this new field, as well as companies based in technology, PR and marketing. What they have in common is that they offer social media analysis services using their own technology. Companies that use partners' technology or off-the-shelf services are not included—otherwise, I'd have to include every search marketing or PR firm who understands search and RSS.

At this point, I'm spending my days—and nights—on phone calls, email, and IM in time zones from Bulgaria to China, tracking down leads and establishing contact with new companies. So please excuse me while the content on the blog is sparse. You're going to like what I'm working on.

Update: The Guide to Social Media Analysis is now available.

The most challenging aspect of working with international companies for the guide to social media analysis is language. My college French is good enough to get me in trouble, and I can generally figure out if a company fits within the scope of the guide if their web site is in a European language. Chinese, Japanese and Korean, on the other hand, are Greek to me.

For the first time in my life, I was addressed as "Nathan-san" this week, after Sam Flemming tipped me off to the Japanese memetracker Kizasi (translate). Most of the people I talk to slip comfortably into the Internet-standard first-name mode, regardless of their nationality, and it was a pleasant shock to be reminded of the more formal style.

Fortunately for me, English is a common second language. Still, I can't help wondering how many companies are doing social media analysis in their own countries, exclusively in their own languages. Blog growth in Asia, in particular, suggests that more companies should be offering these services there. I know about CIC Data and GALA (translate). Where are the others?

Tags: blog monitoring social media analysis Asia China Japan Korea

It's been a busy week at Social Target World Headquarters. We're making the final preparations for next Wednesday's panel on listening to social media in Raleigh, and I found out about one person coming to the event from Maryland. That's a long way for lunch. The first responses are coming in for the Guide to Social Media Analysis, and more companies are hitting my radar. If you haven't responded yet, it's not too late to be included.

A few companies have been hard to reach. Are you monitoring your own brands, bc.lab, Gala, and Infonic?

Tags: social media blog monitoring

How do you use a blog to reach an audience that doesn't read blogs? Be found by a reporter who does.

I talked to Travel Weekly's Andrew Compart last week after he found my post on the fallout from AA flight 1348. His timing couldn't be better, given the heartburn JetBlue is feeling this week. Andy's article, Blogged upside the head (free registration required), takes the message of listening to social media to travel industry readers:

So what is a company to do?

For one, the ability of consumers to air their grievances to a worldwide audience has made it more important than ever that companies respond quickly and appropriately to consumer complaints.

It's probably not realistic, however, to believe even the best companies can identify or satisfy every unhappy customer before he or she tries to exact revenge via the Internet. That means they need to be proactive by closely and continually monitoring what's being said about them in cyberspace, or hiring someone to monitor it for them, so they can nip trouble in the bud.

Tags: travel airlines SMA blog monitoring

Lots of news in social media analysis this week. The Cymfony acquisition got the big headlines, of course, generating a healthy selection of articles and some useful analysis. One thing really amuses me, though: the notion that there are only seven companies in the business. If you want to buy a social media analysis company before they're all gone, you have more than five choices left. And if you're looking for a vendor or partner, please note that the field is bigger and more varied than some of the articles suggest.

In the process of developing the Guide to Social Media Analysis, I've found 48 companies in 11 countries so far (Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States). I'm referring to the headquarters locations here; some of these companies are multi-national, and their staffs are frequently international, too.

I'm sure there are more; I learned of four in the last 24 hours (Echo Research, Ethority, Primelabs, and Sports Media Challenge). No doubt language barriers are hiding even more. And if there's really only one company in China, look for others to enter (sorry, Sam).

Not all of the companies I'm talking to are direct competitors to Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Umbria, et al. In fact, their differences are part of what makes this interesting, and it's an area I'll explore here and in the Guide. After I finish with the company briefings.

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring

I'm still finding new companies to add to the list, and on my initial conversation with one of them today, a fun question came up: Who's participating? Between the responses and the responses promised soon, it's an interesting assortment. I started with the goal of surveying the services from different types of companies, and it's working.

People want to know if the big companies—the social media analysis names everyone knows—are participating. Yes, they are. Cymfony, MotiveQuest and Umbria are in; the others are scheduled. I'm also talking with the companies that aren't so familiar, like CoreX and Kaava (which we finally learned to spell).

But what about variety? Companies come into social media analysis from different directions. Agencies—Waggener Edstrom is in. Media analysis—BurrellesLuce is scheduled. Technology—Visible Technologies is in; BuzzLogic is on its way. Research—Millward Brown is scheduled. The list grows every day.

Skype is my new best friend, because it enables an international approach without the crippling telephone bills. I just finished talking with Scanblog (France), and yesterday ended with CIC (China). Tomorrow starts in France and ends at a soccer practice (hey, it can't all be work). Others from Germany to Australia are in there, too.

Where's yours?
The biggest and smallest companies are responding, even though everyone mentions how busy they are. If you haven't gotten around to your response, it's not too late... but the clock is ticking.

Around the time of the TNS/Cymfony acquisition and NewComm, Katie Paine commented on the lack of tools to measure blog comments. Since I'm making the rounds talking to the tools and analysis folks, I started asking about comments. It turns out that the tools are out there, if you have a budget.

Actually, you don't need a budget, if all you want to do is find comments; Google search can help you with that. But if you want to measure comments (which is what Katie is looking for), prepare to spend some money. The free blog-monitoring services—and most feeds—miss the comments.

The seemingly simple question about tracking and measuring blog comments turns out to be a little tricky. Some of the companies rely on human analysts to interpret what the automated systems find, so asking what the software measures misses the point. Others focus on qualitative analysis, so measurement really isn't the deliverable, anyway. Some of the companies don't measure blogs, preferring online communities as a source of insight.

CoreX, Integrasco, Radian6, Umbria, and Visible Technologies track comments. As I catch up on the big writing project, I expect to write more about the companies here, and I expect to learn that more companies include comments in their analysis.

The bottom line is that the vendors are aware that tracking and measuring comments could be useful. There are interesting questions about monitoring comments (how many times do you go back for comments, and for how long after the original post?), but the measurements are available.

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring measurement

Some companies are harder to write about than others. The problem is, I want to avoid writing "X offers the usual services"—even when that's what they do. It's no more a criticism than to say that an airline provides the usual airline service. But it does make it harder to write an interesting profile.

Some approaches are showing up enough that I'm starting to think of them as the Usual List:

• Word/brand associations
  
• Topic detection
  
• Sentiment analysis
  
• Influence analysis
  

Having a Usual List is a good thing. It helps clients and agencies up the learning curve faster, and it frees vendors from explaining every bit of what they do for every prospect. When clients understand the Usual List, vendors can focus on what makes them different. And that's where it gets interesting.

Tags: social media, blog monitoring

I'll post about my developing model of the social media analysis value chain soon, but today, the first link in the chain—content aggregation—is making news. Tailrank launched Spinn3r, a blog aggregator that anyone can use (via Matt Hurst).

Here's the short version from the Spinn3r blog:

Spinn3r is a web service that companies can use to index the blogosphere instead of having to write their own spider.

Instead of spending months designing a scalable backend infrastructure and fighting spam you can just start using our spider tomorrow.

From talking with companies who are doing their own data collection, I was about ready to start a pool on when people think spider and crawler traffic will become a majority of Internet traffic (kidding, people, really). If the aggregators do a good enough job, maybe the analysts won't feel the need to compete on aggregation.

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring Spinn3r

Is fear the leading motivator for clients who want to monitor social media? A new BusinessWeek article focuses on companies' fears of online attack, but most of the people I talk to are more focused on using social media for market research. Even defensive monitoring activities aren't necessarily motivated by fear.

Most companies are wholly unprepared to deal with the new nastiness that's erupting online. That's worrisome as the Web moves closer to being the prime advertising medium—and reputational conduit—of our time. "The CEOs of the largest 50 companies in the world are practically hiding under their desks in terror about Internet rumors," says top crisis manager Eric Dezenhall, author of the upcoming book Damage Control. "Millions of dollars in labor are being spent discussing whether or not you should respond on the Web."

I'm not sure grouping social media analysis companies with ReputationDefender under a "counter-vigilantes" label is much of a compliment, either. I can read it as "opposed to vigilantes," but I think most readers in a hurry will interpret it as "the vigilantes on the other side."

B2B presents a more representative view of social media analysis as a tool for reputation management:

While public opinion surveys and media analysis have been traditional tools for measuring reputation, monitoring and analyzing online blogs and forums increasingly is important.
...
Blogosphere sentiment also can constitute leading-edge intelligence, since bloggers tend to pick up industry trends almost immediately and, unlike mainstream media, flog them heavily.

Tags: social media SMA blog monitoring reputation

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

Can't say that this was much of a surprise. BuzzMetrics and The Nielsen Company announced today that Nielsen will acquire the rest of BuzzMetrics. Given that Nielsen already owned most of BuzzMetrics and had put its name on the service, this should reduce some confusion. I guess it explains an offhand comment about the challenges of integration, too.

Upon completion of the BuzzMetrics and NetRatings transactions, Nielsen's premiere Internet information services—which are marketed as Nielsen//NetRatings and Nielsen BuzzMetrics—will be consolidated into a single service unit.

Tags: social media analysis, blog monitoring, brandmonitoring, Nielsen, BuzzMetrics

How do you like your social media analysis? Do you want the speed and scalability of an automated process, or do you prefer the subtlety and insight of a human analyst? Companies offering these services disagree on whether software or people are better at the task, and they're taking different approaches to answer the question.

First, let's define analysis. For this discussion, I'm talking about the process of rating individual items—posts, comments, messages, articles—on things like topic, sentiment and influence. Summarizing the data from many items and creating charts and reports come later.

The extremes
One end of the spectrum is fully automated analysis. Some companies have invested significant time and capital in systems that automate text analysis. They use terms like patent-pending and natural-language processing to describe software that "reads" and scores social media. Automated processes are usually—but not always—behind client dashboards.

The other end of the spectrum is human analysis, for those not convinced that computers can accurately rate written materials. These companies talk about human insight, subtlety and the ability to identify sarcasm. Some make a big deal of the quality of their employees, which makes sense, since their services are the product of their analysts' thought processes.

That's a fairly clear contrast, but it's not that simple. Human analysts benefit from the speed of computers, and automated processes benefit from occasional oversight. Which brings us to two hybrid forms that a number of companies have adopted.

Software-assisted human analysis
The essence of human analysis is the decision making. It's not necessary to make the analyst do all the work when insight is the critical component. So some companies use software that organizes items and provides a user interface for the analyst. The system may even suggest preliminary scores for the analyst to confirm. Software-assisted human analysis uses the computer's speed to increase the efficiency of the human analyst.

Human-assisted software analysis
Software analysis is about speed, scale and predictability. The question is whether the resulting analysis is accurate enough to be useful. So some companies have human analysts audit the results. The process provides confirmation and feeds into machine-learning processes. Human-assisted software analysis uses human insight to check and improve the accuracy of the software.

Trends
In practice, most companies hedge their bets. Those with major software investments sell the benefit of automated analysis in their dashboards while offering human analysis and interpretation as separate services. In essence, they offer computer speed and scale and human subtlety and insight in separate packages. The human-analysis companies tend toward the software-assisted model for its efficiency benefits. Almost everyone offers custom research based on the combination of human insight and analytical software. When it's time to crunch the data, everyone seems to agree on that particular combination.

Related:

• Debating Human vs. Computer Analysis
  
• Teaching the Computer to Read—in Stages

Part of the fun of social media is the way it touches so many disciplines—or, for you corporate types, so many functional silos. Word-of-mouth and all the forms of online media challenge the traditional divisions, so we get to see how different specialties approach them. An article in PRWeek discusses the view from public relations (via Sally Falkow):

While appraising and evaluating social media is often complex, it has impacted the profession in three specific ways (in order of increasing importance): it has added a new medium and hundreds of thousands of new outlets PR pros must ponder when pitching; it has provided companies and their agencies an inexpensive way to push their unfiltered message out into the increasingly cluttered media space online; and it has opened up a heretofore unimagined conduit of conversation between corporation and customer.

Given the likelihood that clients are becoming increasingly interested in the space, agencies from multiple disciplines are competing for digital and social media accounts. PR agency executives say that since they are increasingly included in pitches that also feature pure interactive and advertising shops, the industry, as a whole, needs to evangelize about why PR is the best discipline to handle the social media space.

Tags: social media, PR

Joshua Sinel brought up an important point in a comment today: social media analysis involves more than blogs. So much of the hype has centered on blogs and their role in stirring up trouble, but that's only part of the story. You might also look at online communities for insight. As usual, the question of what to analyze (and how) goes back to what you're trying to accomplish.

Conveniently, today's xkcd cartoon deals with a similar topic. Do these names look familiar (click through for a larger view)? Blogs are only part of what's going on.

Blogs get a lot of attention, because interesting things are happening in Blogistan. Mainstream media stories sometimes originate on blogs, so paying attention online can provide an early opportunity to take corrective action. We have case studies to encourage blog monitoring. But blogs have some limitations if you're looking for insight into the general population.

Bloggers aren't representative. Even with easy-to-use blogging platforms, blogging requires knowledge, effort and commitment. Bloggers are outspoken and opinionated, and most probably have an agenda. So while bloggers may be insightful or opinionated, they (we) probably aren't a good sample.

Josh's company, Kaava, was the first I interviewed for the Guide to Social Media Analysis. Kaava does its research on online communities—newsgroups, discussion boards and such—which have lower barriers to participation. As Josh wrote in his comment:

Threaded message boards have been around for a very long time, truly represent the most massive deposit of consumer insights online, and also truly represent an ongoing, mixed-constituency, consumer conversation.

Blogs have their use, even in the context of research in communities. They can give a preview of topics that may move into communities. But those communities may be the better place to performs research that attempts to gather insights that traditionally came from survey research.

Or, to summarize the roles of blogs and communities as Josh and others have described it:

• Blogs for awareness.
  
• Communities for consumer insight.
  

I like questions. They're frequently more useful than statements.

Tags: social media analysis, communities, Kaava

There's an interesting discussion of the value of social media analysis services going on in the comments to this TechCrunch post. Duncan Riley started it with a challenge: Why not use free tools to track social media? Judging from the comments, a lot of people don't know the difference yet.

Whilst the continued growth in companies tracking consumer generated media is a positive indication of the continued maturity and acceptance of one of the most important drivers of Web 2.0, the question must be asked: why?

Why do PR Professionals need a service to find out what bloggers are saying about their clients by a third party? ...

Many PR Professionals contact and read TechCrunch so perhaps we can get some answers: is it that some PR Professionals can't type “Insert Client's Name here” into Technorati or Google Blog Search?

How difficult is it to set up feeds from services such as Google News, Yahoo News and Topix which deliver results based on corporate brand names?

Hey, I know! Let's talk to everyone in the business and put together a clear picture...

Tags: social media analysis, blogmonitoring

I observed a while back that a few forms of analysis have emerged as industry standards in social media analysis. Just as clients typically start with the same question (what are people saying about us?), social media analysis companies use some of the same lenses to view the online world. There's a pattern in the way they package their services, too. After months of talking with the companies, I've identified six basic categories.

Monitoring
Tracking social media sources (and, sometimes, traditional media) to know when the client’s keywords (company, brand, people, etc.) are mentioned. Monitoring is an ongoing activity with its focus on identifying individual items of interest (posts, comments, messages, articles) to which the client may choose to react. Frequently, but not always, delivered via client dashboard. Monitoring deliverables include clippings, metrics and alerts. Monitoring is fundamental, and many people use the term to describe the entire range of activities.

Research
Analysis, measurement and interpretation of social media data, usually as a form of market research. The focus is on aggregate opinion and market segmentation. The product of research is insight, which is typically delivered in the form of analyst reports, presentations and briefings. The distinction between monitoring and research is somewhat arbitrary, but it reflects different purposes. Monitoring is more likely to be defensive / reactive, while research is more likely to be proactive.

Consulting
Advice and suggested plans of action. Distinguished from research by the willingness to answer questions like “what should we do?” It doesn't sound like much, but the line between interpretation and advice marks a clear distinction between the services of some vendors.

Agency
Campaign planning and execution. Takes the step from suggesting to doing. Social media analysis is the first step in a full-service social media marketing service for some companies. They're usually easy to identify.

Dashboard
Web-based client interface for self-service monitoring and analysis. Some dashboards are used to deliver analyst reports. Dashboards are a delivery mechanism for monitoring and research, but I list them separately because not everyone offers one.

Software
Client software (typically web-based SAAS) for clients and agencies to use in building their own social media analysis capabilities. Services are typically limited to training and support—getting the client up and running.

Tags: social media analysis, blogmonitoring

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.

Does your organization have more time (and technical chops) than money? The World Bank today launched The BuzzMonitor, an open-source social media aggregator that provides a platform for monitoring and participating in social media in multi-user environments (via Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski). The catch is, you have to install and run it yourself.

The Buzzmonitor promises some handy features:

• Elimination of duplicate items from multiple search feeds.
  
• Automated keyword extraction & tag cloud generation.
  
• Embedded Alexa and Technorati rank information.
  
• Digg-style voting within your user base.
  
• User tagging and bookmarking.
  
• Internal commenting (visible only to other users on your system).
  
• Internal tag and search feeds.
  

The Buzzmonitor's sponsors at the World Bank suggest the program for "non-profit organizations, NGOs, foundations and think-tanks to see and hear what people are saying about them, their programs and understand the perception around important issues." Its GNU General Public License makes it free for anyone who wants to try it.

Now, here's the catch. The platform requirements put The Buzzmonitor out of reach for marketing managers who want something quick and easy. You'll need a server (preferably Linux) and someone to configure it, so this is a do-it-yourself job only for the technically skilled. More likely, this is something for your IT department to experiment with before you roll it out to users.

If all you want to do is see how it works, take the tour, which offers limited access to a live demo. I'd post a screenshot here, but if you really care, you'll go through the demo, anyway.

Tags: buzzmonitor blogmonitoring social media analysis

It's ready. After 5 months and I really don't want to know how many hours, the Guide to Social Media Analysis is complete. This is my guide to the companies who monitor, measure and analyze social media for business worldwide. It's the most complete reference available, and it's available for download today. Finally!

The Guide to Social Media Analysis is geared toward answering three questions:

1. Who offers social media analysis services?
   
2. What do they really offer?
   
3. What makes one vendor different from the others?

What's in it:

• Profiles of 31 vendors based in 9 countries. Each profile includes a description of the vendor's services, investor information, company stats and full contact details.

• An overview of industry services and trends.

• A table summarizing which services each vendor offers.

• A matrix of vendors' language capabilities across 37 languages.

• Over 30 sample graphics and screenshots.

Update: I posted more details on what's in the profiles. A sample profile is available on the product page.

18 August 2008: The Guide to Social Media Analysis, Second Edition is now available. The new edition includes 63 vendor profiles, observations on trends since last year, and a new table summarizing vendor coverage of different types of social media.

Tags: social media analysis brandmonitoring blogmonitoring social media marketing pr

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
—Mark Twain

I imagined a marketing executive, interested in the value of following the online conversation, assigning a staff member to investigate the available services. The Guide is the finished report that staffer could deliver—if the company wanted to spend 5 months of staff time to collect the information.

The core of the Guide is the company profiles, which collect information beyond what's available on vendor web sites in a convenient package. It's meant to accelerate the initial information gathering steps for a company looking for a vendor.

Each profile includes:

• A brief statement of the company's business and 4–5 highlights for quick scanning.
  
• An overview of the company's services, including a discussion of what analysis they provide and how they do it.
  
• A checklist of which of the typical services the vendor offers (also summarized across all vendors in the overview section).
  
• A closer look at the deliverables and, when provided, pricing.
  
• Investor information: identifies ownership and announced investments in the company.
  
• Player stats: company size, when it was founded, how long they've offered social media analysis, percentage of revenue from social media analysis, geographical scope, language capabilities and company bloggers.
  
• Contact information, including office locations and direct contact for potential clients.
  

Tags: social media analysis brandmonitoring blogmonitoring social media marketing pr

Here's a little information overload for you. Links to blogs associated with social media analysis companies. Most are linked to companies in the the Guide to Social Media Analysis. Some are more work-oriented than others, but there are some good sources in here.

(This is not a ranked list—it's alphabetical by blog title. The entries are numbered for convenience.)

1. 1000heads, Staff, 1000heads
2. Andiamo Word of Mouth Marketing, John Hingley, Andiamo Systems
3. Applied Disruption, Jeffrey Stewart, Monitor110
4. Attentio, Simon McDermott, Attentio
5. Beyond Dante, Tim Wolters, Collective Intellect
6. BlogPulse Newswire, Sue MacDonald, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
7. Blogs et IE, Tarik Mousselmal, Scanblog (French)
8. Buzzcentric, Severin Wilson, Buzzcentric
9. BuzzLogic, Todd Parsons, BuzzLogic
10. CGM, Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
11. China IWOM Blog, Sam Flemming, CIC
12. Collective Intellect, Staff, Collective Intellect
13. Converseon, Staff, Converseon
14. Customer Listening, Laurent Florès, CRMMetrix
15. CustomScoop, Staff, CustomScoop
16. Data Mining, Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs
17. Data World, Paul Alexander, Wigborough
18. DK the Business Guru, Darren Kelly, Collective Intellect
19. Converseon, Staff, Converseon
20. DIGtrends, Staff, Digital Influence Group
21. Distilled, Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris, Distilled
22. dna13, Staff, dna13
23. The Dooley Complex, Kevin Dooley, Crawdad Technologies
24. EmPower Research, Staff, EmPower Research
25. ethority, Sten Franke, ethority
26. filtrbox, Ari Newman, filtrbox
27. GottaQuirk, Staff, Quirk eMarketing
28. A Human Voice, Tom O’Brien, MotiveQuest
29. Implementing Web 2.0 in the Enterprise, Adam Steinberg, Techrigy
30. Influence 2.0, Staff, Cymfony
31. Information Arbitrage, Roger Ehrenberg, Monitor110
32. LexaBlog, Staff, Lexalytics
33. Market Sentinel, Mark Rogers, Market Sentinel
34. MarketIQ, Staff, Biz360
35. MediaMeter, Staff, BlogMeter
36. Media Philosopher, Marcel LeBrun, Radian6
37. Mouthpiece, Jonathan Carson, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
38. Musical Entrepreneur, Rob Crumpler, BuzzLogic
39. New Media Strategies, Staff, New Media Strategies
40. Observatoire Présidentielle 2007, Guilhem Fouetillou, RTGI (French)
41. On Innovation, Michael Osofsky, Accelovation
42. Onalytica, Flemming Madsen, Onalytica
43. Ondernemer in Gent, Bart De Waele, MetaTale
44. Own Your Buzz, Al del Castillo, NetEquity
45. Pardon the Disruption, Chip Griffin, CustomScoop
46. The Power of News, Matthias Hoffmann, Dow Jones & Company (German)
47. Power Shift, Staff, Radian6
48. PR Measurement Blog, Katie Paine, KDPaine & Partners
49. PR meets the WWW Constantin Basturea, Converseon
50. Primelabs (also Swedish blog)
51. Read Between the Mines, Glenn Fannick, Dow Jones & Company
52. RelevantNoise, Staff, RelevantNoise
53. RepuMetrix, Joseph Fiore, RepuMetrix
54. Reputation World, Andrew Jordan, Reputica
55. RepuTrack, Joseph Fiore, CoreX Technologies
56. Scanblog (French)
57. Scout Labs, Staff, Scout Labs
58. see i see, Staff, CIC (Chinese)
59. SentimentMetrics, Staff, SentimentMetrics
60. A Surplice of Spin, Melanie Surplice, Dow Jones & Company
61. Turning News Into Knowledge, Brett Serjeantson, MediaMiser
62. tweetpr, David Alston, Radian6
63. unstruc..., Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones & Company
64. Veille2Com, Cyrille Chaudoit, Scanblog (French)
65. VICO Research, Staff, VICO Research
66. VisInsights, Staff, Visible Technologies
67. Young PR, Paull Young, Converseon

Tags: social media analysis brandmonitoring blogmonitoring

Today marked the first feedback on the Guide to Social Media Analysis. Havi Hoffman made my day with her summary— "immersed" is such a nice way to say that she's reading it. We haven't even met, but I think I have a new best friend.

Along with her kind comments about my work, Havi Hoffman wondered if half the money is wasted in social media/word of mouth metrics, too.

What if we really need to throw out half our metrics, half our assumptions? Which half would you pitch?

At least audience metrics are generally defined. In the social media/WOM measurement discussion, the definitions of some important terms aren't quite settled (quick, what's influence, precisely?). So, for now, we have qualitative measures and intuitive definitions that may vary across vendors. It doesn't mean they're not useful, but they're not yet standard.

Alan Wilensky's post raises some thought-provoking questions on the usefulness of social media metrics (read the related posts while you're there and at BlogWhine). Be sure to see Matt Hurst's response, including the comments.

Evaluating the current state of this young industry and its practices is an interesting topic, but for client decisions, three steps really matter:

1. Understand what you're trying to accomplish. What information do you want to collect, and what do you want to do with it?

2. Look at the existing companies and what they actually offer—services, analysis, deliverables and applications. That's what the Guide to Social Media Analysis is all about.

3. Look for potential matches between available services and your objectives. Those are the companies to ask for more information.
   

Tags: social media analysis brandmonitoring blogmonitoring

This reminds me of a background display in the villain's office in a James Bond movie. A real-time view of blog posts on a spinning globe visualization. All that's missing is the holographic display that projects the globe above the coffee table.

This is a visualization of blog traffic from the Swedish social media analysis firm Primelabs, based on data from their Twingly blog search engine (via visualcomplexity). The real application for Twingly is discovering blog links for newspaper clients, but the visualization is fun (see the demo video).

As for the villain's lair—fire up Twingly, put a Digg visualization on another screen, add a real-time weather map, FlightAware and a few competing news channels (preferably international), and you've got Global Command Center 2.0.

Except Twingly doesn't run on my Mac. I guess world domination will have to wait.

Tags: social media analysis blog visualization Primelabs

Here's a question that goes straight to the point: How do you decide when to spring for social media measurement?

Scott Bauman poses the question on his blog:

It's still so damn expensive and is especially prohibitive for smaller companies who could benefit, but can't yet spring for formal measurement. So my question is when does it make sense to start? What "value" does a client expect before the investment is worth it?

For small companies with relatively low exposure (mine, for example), vanity feeds from free search tools are adequate. I deal with the redundant items and noise, because the overall volume is low. I don't worry about metrics, either. At the low volume, all I really want is to read everything that mentions or links to me. An agency can provide this service with off-the-shelf software and entry-level staff.

At the high end—major consumer brands—the volume is overwhelming. Metrics become interesting because (a) there's enough volume to generate interesting data, and (b) it's the only way to digest potentially thousands of daily mentions. You're a long way from free services in this category.

Somewhere in the middle, there's a decision to make. To complicate matters, there's a wide range of services, with a rough, inverse correlation between cost and the amount of effort required of the client/agency. Let's meet over at Scott's post for that discussion.

Tags: social media analysis pr

News of social media analysis.

New companies & services

• BlogMeter launched June 13th at Web 2.Oltre. A partnership of Me-Source, CELI and Convey, BlogMeter is a software platform specialized for monitoring and analyzing Italian social media (it also handles French and English). Emanuele Quintarelli interviewed Me-Source cofounder Sacha Monotti for Apogeonline.

• Critical Mention announced the beta release of a CGM monitoring module for their CriticalTV platform.

• "An analysis of aggressive online behavior targeted against corporations, their products, services, and brand," TNS MI/Cymfony. Results of sponsored research conducted by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey of Harvard Law School. The paper describes three types of online behavior, provides examples and recommends strategies for online engagement.

• "Influencing Technology Decision Makers," Hill & Knowlton (via Melanie Surplice). "The power of the blog" is one of three trends identified.

• "Responding to crisis using social media," Market Sentinel (PDF). Follow-up look at Dell's experience with blogs and how the online conversation has changed.

Doing something interesting? Tell me about it!

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

Today must be the day to think about online product reviews. With all the buzz about blog monitoring, it's important to remember other ways people share their opinions online. Monitoring product reviews is harder to automate than monitoring blogs, but their relevance is all but guaranteed.

Riva Richmond's article in today's Wall Street Journal points out the importance of online reviews to small business: Look Who's Talking. The key lesson here is that you don't have to have a high-profile brand to be reviewed online. Customers are reviewing local service businesses, too. The article includes practical advice on dealing with negative reviews (starting with fixing the problem).

Meanwhile, Greg Howlett relays key points from JC Whitney's Geoffrey Robertson in four things you should know about collecting user reviews:

1. User reviews have a huge impact on sales.
   
2. Companies need to aggressively solicit reviews.
   
3. User reviews do not necessarily improve customer loyalty.
   
4. User reviews do not necessarily drive more organic search traffic.
   

I wrote about an unhappy example of what you can learn from product reviews last October. Hasbro discovered a serious product problem by monitoring reviews on Amazon. At the time, the social media analysis vendors I was talking to generally didn't track product reviews. I still don't know of any tools to automate the process for do-it-yourself monitoring (aside from web-to-RSS services), but a number of companies in the Guide will monitor them for you.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring reputation product reviews

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 28 June - London-based Reputica launched ReputicaRating, a social media analysis service with an emphasis on defensive monitoring and reputation management.

• 22 June - The Nielsen Company completed its acquisition of NetRatings, moving a step closer to the announced combination of NetRatings and BuzzMetrics in a new Nielsen service unit.

• Digital Influence Group chairman Larry Weber has a new book: Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business (aff). You can read an excerpt from the first chapter on the book site and early reactions on the DIG blog.

• "The Talk About Phones," CIC. An overview of community and content around mobile phones on Chinese BBS. The charts that go with this brief paper are the real find. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Dopod should look over this free sample that focuses on their market.

• Chinese blog search engine Blogool released its first report on blogs and consumer WOM (via Luyi Chen). This report focuses on domestic brands in China, or so I'm told (you'll need to read Chinese to get anything from the report).

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 25 June - Lodging Interactive, an interactive marketing agency for the hospitality industry, announced Chatter Guard for online reputation management. The service combines full-time monitoring of social media, a metrics dashboard and a response service.

• CustomScoop CEO Chip Griffin offers his take on the major trends affecting media in a free ebook, The New Media Cocktail.

• "Best Practices in Media Measurement" (PDF), Factiva from Dow Jones (via Matthias Hoffmann). A sponsored white paper by Paul Argenti of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

Let's play a quick game of word association.

Reputation

...

Did you say "PR"? Certainly, that's one group that has a major concern with reputation in business.

If you spend too much time online, as I do, you might have come up with "search engine," especially now that mainstream media have picked up on the existence of search engine reputation management.

Our grandmothers might have thought about what the neighbors think, but these are all the same thing. They're concerned with what others think about us.

Turn it around
What if a company were to apply reputation-monitoring techniques in evaluating potential business relationships? They could use reputation, not as it reflects on themselves, but as a source of insight into the other party.

Enter Ecofact, a Zurich-based consulting firm that advises clients, mainly in the financial sector, on business risks associated with global issues: the environment, social issues and human rights. Their new RepRisk service is a web-based due-diligence tool that evaluates potential reputational risks associated with proposed business deals.

You've probably seen charts like this based on sentiment or message volume. But this chart indicates the target company's negative associations with major issues as an indicator of the risk involved in a particular deal or project. The metric incorporates quantitative and qualitative views of exposure on pressure group web sites and in the media (social media evaluations are more experimental for now).

Imagine you're a commercial bank evaluating a loan prospect, or a manufacturer looking for offshore production partners. If Human Rights Watch or the National Labor Committee had targeted your potential borrower/supplier for its practices, would that factor into your decision? Reputational risk is contageous, you know.

Media analysis, but not marketing
RepRisk is an example of something I think we'll see more of: practical applications of media analytics for market intelligence outside of marketing functions. The source data and analytical techniques have much in common with typical practices in social media analysis—the difference is in the customer base and objective of the analysis.

In the end, an appreciation for reputational risk in business decisions means that the traditional concern for one's own reputation—and its potential financial impact—has been fully internalized. RepRisk is an application for businesses who've realized that one way to protect their own reputation is to choose carefully the company they keep.

Tags: RepRisk social media analysis

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 18 June - Brighton-based Magpie launched the beta of its Brandwatch service. The automated service tracks clients' brands in context of a broader industry view. Value-added consulting will be through agency resellers.

• SentiMetrix now has a web site (via Matt Hurst). Should be no surprise from the company name, but the work-in-progress web site shows an emphasis on sentiment analysis, including measuring the intensity of sentiment (as opposed to the basic positive/negative/neutral scores).

• Andiamo Systems is ramping up beta clients for its self-service brand monitoring and analytics service. The $275 monthly base price includes a "no buzz" guarantee for clients who find nothing to monitor.

• Forrester analyst Peter Kim dropped by the Net-Savvy Executive for a round of comments on near-term developments in social media analysis.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• Bilbao-based Socialware expanded its presence in June with new offices in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris. Their ASOMO service covers the usual areas of social media analysis, with one unusual twist: the client interface is a PC-based viewer, in place of the more common web-based dashboard (screenshots).
  

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

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

I've seen a lot of discussion of social media measurement lately, and some of the conclusions don't look anything like what I've learned about some of the services out there. If you put some of these posts side-by-side, you might think there's a debate going on. It's actually something more fundamental: they're speaking different languages. Social media measurement has multiple competing definitions coming from the various specialties that have an interest in understanding social media.

The problem is that social media measurement sounds like a generally descriptive term, but to the specialists, it suggests very specific meanings. Unfortunately, the meanings vary by the background and function of the writer or reader. Now, before I start linking to people, I'm not saying that they're wrong, just that they're talking about different things.

I've seen four basic applications:

1. Measuring online audiences
   A lot of the talk about measuring social media comes down to the desire for standard audience data for advertising. Changes in web design and function challenge existing online audience metrics, so we see ideas like replacing page views with time spent. It takes me back to my radio days and time spent listening, which never seemed to come up with media buyers.

   Advertising is the only application where standard metrics actually matter. Media and advertisers want a reliable ratings system for pricing and tracking online ad buys. Other applications need reliable data to generate KPIs, but diversity in sources and methods shouldn't be a problem.

2. Tracking social media content
   Another type of social media measurement is a challenge for web analytics—measurement focused on a company's own online content. The social media challenge is tracking a company's content on 3rd-party services, such as online video and social networks.

   Web analytics seems to be primarily focused on management of a company's web sites (and now, its content as it travels the social web). From brand-building and online commerce to direct-response online advertising, metrics like clicks, conversion rate and engagement are all about understanding the behavior of web visitors and performance optimization within the company.

3. PR measurement
   PR measurement looks a bit like ratings research and a bit like market research. Audience metrics contribute to influence analysis, along with links (or not) and other factors. PR can use social media measurement to identify outreach targets, emerging issues and opportunities for communication, and to measure its own effectiveness afterward. Traditional metrics like message volume and share of voice are easily adapted to social media, so the PR challenge is more a function of technology and scale than definitions.

   PR is a natural home for the measurement/monitoring tension. It's also a great environment for the human vs. machine analysis debate, since meaning is so much more interesting to measure than activity.

4. Market research
   Social media provide an opportunity for online ethnographic research methods, based on the unprompted opinions of—well, everyone on the Internet. It's the world's largest focus group, combined with a greatly expanded media environment, where companies can explore opinions, needs and ideas. This is the home of observation and analysis, not standard metrics, although some typical forms of analysis are available. And yes, I realize that there's potentially a really entertaining argument with the research establishment about things like selection bias, but there's value there.

   This type of research feeds back into the other specialties I mentioned—advertising, interactive and PR—but the insights are more strategic than the routine metrics that dominate the measurement discussion. I think it's important to remember that sometimes, research—including quantitative research—is conducted based on what can be learned.
   

So, before we declare anything dead or crown a victor, let's think about what we mean by social media measurement, and what we're trying to achieve. Are we buying or selling advertising? Trying to influence customers? Selling product online? Tracking opinion and message penetration? Or are we just trying to learn from the massive pool of online opinion? Standard metrics can only be standard within the relevant context, and these reasons to measure social media aren't going to boil down to one metric, no matter how well designed.

Tags: social media measurement analytics

Lisa LaMotta has an article for Forbes on PR for startups (via Giovanni Rodriguez). Along with a look at how PR can benefit new companies (but "PR types often promise more than they can deliver, so manage your expectations"), she delivers a summary of PR measurement:

While PR remains a squishy science, there are ways to loosely measure progress. The most common is the number of media references to your company in a given month. But there are subtler metrics, too, such as how many of your "core messages" were expressed in each article.

The other interesting data point from the article is pricing information:

Average monthly fees for an established U.S. shop are about $10,000, according to a recent survey of 100 firms around the country with revenues over $3 million. Some firms charge by the hour, and still others offer a la carte services—say, for running a special event or triaging a corporate snafu. Rodriguez charges start-ups a monthly retainer from $8,000 to $15,000. That's not chump change, but it's far less than many print ad campaigns.

Tags: PR social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• PRWeek: Factiva partners with EveryZing (press release). Oh, and there was that little item about corporate parent Dow Jones & Company this week—maybe you saw it.

• 1 August - CoreX veteran Joseph Fiore is now president of the company and has changed the name to RepuMetrix Inc.

• 2 August - Visible Technologies CEO Adam Selig presented in a CEO showcase on next-generation media tools at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit today. (Video)

• CIC released their half-year review of developments in Chinese social media. Many of the trends will be familiar to the English-speaking (reading) social media crowd, but the report gives Chinese examples that you probably haven't seen.

  News flash: Chinese bloggers don't like press releases much more than American bloggers do (but keep sending me your news).

• Dow Jones and PRSA released the results of a survey of PR pros and students on new technologies in the communications environment. Respondents were generally optimistic about the impact of new technology, though most pros feel their own organizations are behind in their use of technology. Online news sites, blogs and social networking sites were identified as sources of both challenge and opportunity.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 9 August - BuzzLogic rolled out a new release that adds blogger relationship management features and a tone rating widget for customer rating of posts (file under sofware-assisted human analysis). A new Blogger Profile view includes watch/engagement status, customer-entered engagement notes, tone rating and a list of other conversations the blogger has influenced.

• Nielsen BuzzMetrics CMO Pete Blackshaw was interviewed on Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's For Immediate Release. Pete talked about "defensive branding" in advance of his company's August 10th webcast on the topic.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

People

• Former Brandimensions SVP Dan Kidd has joined Biz360 as VP of sales.

• Dow Jones has released a white paper (PDF) on social media measurement based on their roundtable discussion last December (via Jeremiah Owyang and Daniela Barbosa).

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 23 August - Crawdad Technologies announced Wonkosphere, a free public site dedicated to analyzing blog buzz around the 2008 US presidential campaign. (via K.C. Jones, via Daniela Barbosa)

• 29 August - Visible Technologies showed their TruCast tool on the Scoble Show (via Blake Cahill). The 48-minute video is available for download, but it's a big file.

• Jeremiah Owyang announced that he will join Forrester Research as a Senior Analyst focused on social computing and interactive marketing October 1st. Have any of the other tier-one analyst firms noticed that Forrester is cornering the market for social media?

• Update: Here's a list of analysts covering social media and their (public) blogs.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring Crawdad Technoloogies Visible Technologies Forrester

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 6 September - Craig Carroll's students at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication will learn media monitoring and analysis with services donated by CustomScoop and KDPaine & Partners (press release).

  Talk about small world: I live about 30 minutes from UNC, both companies are in New Hampshire (I spent my college years there), and Prof. Carroll came from USC Annenberg, where I got my master's. [Cue Twilight Zone theme.]

• TNS MI/Cymfony released a new white paper on social media strategies for pharmaceutical companies (download here). The authors will discuss their framework in a free webinar on 11 September.

Political types are fond of saying that only the one poll really matters—I don't know, maybe I just heard that on a TV show. But an election is a prime opportunity to show off your number-crunching skills. That color-coded map may be the most widely viewed data visualization around. So if your business is analyzing online chatter, and an approaching election is generating lots of it, it's only natural to analyze some of that data to show what you can do.

If you want a peak at some of the capabilities of social media analysis companies, just look at their showcase political buzz analysis:

US presidential election

• BlogPulse Campaign Radar (2004) - Nielsen BuzzMetrics
  
• BrandAdvocacy08 - MotiveQuest
  
• Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse - Dow Jones Insight
  
• Issue Coverage Tracker - Washington Post, powered by Daylife
  
• Political Streams - Microsoft Live Labs
  
• PoliticalTrends - Lexalytics
  
• Presidential Watch 08 (English) and US and us (French) - RTGI
  
• Shifting The Debate - Morningside Analytics
  
• US Election 2008 Web Monitor - ECOresearch Network
  
• US Presidential Elections - Omgili
  
• What's the buzz? (2008), America Votes (2004) - CNN, powered by Umbria
  
• Wonkosphere - Crawdad Technologies
  

• Buzzwise - powered by Attentio
  
• Observatoire Présidentielle - RTGI
  

• Buzz Politico - Buzzdetector
  

• Elecciones Generales 2008 - BuzzTrend/Attentio

• Attentio: Belgian election blog buzz (24 July 2007)
  
• Onalytica: US Presidential Candidates in Social Media (8 April 2007), Clinton, McCain Leading Online Race (12 May 2007)
  

All of these special reports from metrics and analysis vendors create an opportunity to compare audience data and online buzz with election results. Any guesses on which will be the better predictor of the outcome? Or will the dartboard win?

Did I miss your campaign coverage? Add it in the comments, and I'll add it to the list.

Update: If it's in the draft folder, someone else must be working on the same topic. Matt Hurst wrote a similar post on tracking political buzz yesterday. We're going to see a lot of blog aggregation this time around.

Tags: social media analysis blog buzz election politics

Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) added a "community sentiment" section to the front page of Yahoo Finance yesterday, showing stocks with increases of bearish or bullish messages in Yahoo's own discussion boards. Collective Intellect performs the analysis and gains a persistent endorsement on the Yahoo Finance site.

Yahoo describes it this way:

Community Sentiment shows the stock message boards with significant increases in bearish and bullish message board activity in the last 24 hours when compared to the board's 30-day average. The data is provided by Collective Intellect, Inc., a social media intelligence company.

Tags: collective intellect yahoo finance social media analysis

I posted a sample profile from the Guide to Social Media Analysis last night. For new subscribers who weren't around when I announced it in June, this is an independent reference to the companies that monitor, measure and analyze social media worldwide, based on an RFI and briefings with each company. There's much more detail (and that free sample) on the Social Target site.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 17 September - Radian6 launched SparkUp, a Facebook application for tracking posts and shared items.

• 21 September - Nielsen BuzzMetrics talks about all the hot topics before Advertising Week in a webinar this Friday, BuzzMetrics' Guide to Advertising Week.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 24 September - Visible Technologies announced its second round of venture funding: $12 million from Ignition Partners and WPP Group (press release, links to additional coverage).

• 25 September - Converseon won the OMMA Award for Best Use of Virtual Worlds for their Second Chance Trees project.

• Connected Marketing has an interview with Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel.

• Brian Glover is leaving Biz360 to pursue a career in music with Parker Street Cinema. The band's first full-length CD is being released on Dec. 4; a 5-song EP is available on iTunes today.

• Umbria announced a new study of consumer attitudes and behaviors on environmental topics as expressed in social media.

Several of my sources mentioned Website Grader yesterday. It's an easy-to-use tool for evaluating blogs and websites for search engine friendliness, and it gave me a few helpful suggestions. It also pointed out something that I knew: this blog is not dumbed down. Fair enough, since I've been wondering about the role of calculus in social media measurement. Specifically, what can we learn by taking derivatives of the metrics in social media?

Sorry, this is going to be long. There will be math, but no numbers, and for the pedantic, I'm going to be a bit loose with some definitions.

On readability
One of the things that Website Grader does is evaluate the readability level of a site. A lower level means that a larger population will be able to read it, which is generally a good thing. My company site scored an 8th grade readability level, so any potential clients who dropped out of high school should be able to read it.

The blogs showed a somewhat higher reading level. I guess that's what I get for talking with people who do data mining, machine learning and natural language processing for a living. That jargon probably explains most of the "advanced degree" rating—I don't think my writing is that opaque, although I do have a vocabulary and like to use it.

Since you're all apparently capable of reading at an advanced level, let's talk about some math. Not at a PhD level, though. It's just a little first-semester calculus, and to further spare the pain, we won't deal with any numbers, just the ideas.

Bring on the math
Social media metrics have been the topic of a lot of discussion lately. It's on the agenda at the IPR Summit on Measurement today, to take the latest example. But instead of taking another swipe at what to measure, let's think about what you can do with the metrics you do collect, beyond sorting and charting them. Remember derivatives?

The first derivative
If you recall, the first derivative is the rate of change—velocity. Any report that includes the change of a metric since the last period is reporting velocity, but have you considered looking at velocity over time? Do you have top movers lists to go with your top 5 lists? Do you have a view into how long a trend has been growing?

The interpretation of velocity is straightforward. It provides trend information on how much a metric is changing, so it's useful for identifying areas with the biggest change. By extension, it can be a leading indicator for items that will move to the highest/lowest values, such as a top topics list. Here are a few ideas for applying change measurement:

• Topics: Top-moving trends, growth history of emerging trends
  
• Sentiment: Improvement/worsening trend, change of contribution of topics/sources to overall sentiment
  
• Influence: Growth/decline trend of a source's influence, shift of a source's focus
  

The second derivative
The second derivative is the rate of change of the rate of change—acceleration. While velocity can be visually apparent from the slope of a graph, acceleration is harder to see. Its application is less obvious, too, but it's a leading indicator of changing directions in trends. Acceleration will show the slowing of a top trend before it starts to drop, or the beginning of a turnaround in a negative score. It will also show if a trend is snowballing, if both velocity and acceleration are either positive or negative.

If you're measuring continually—daily or more often, for example—large acceleration values can trigger alerts. A fast-growing (1st derivative) trend with a large, positive accceleration is something you want to understand quickly. Negative-trending sentiment with negative acceleration indicate a problem that is getting worse.

First + second = Priority
Just as velocity is a leading indicator for absolute values, acceleration is a leading indicator for velocity (assuuming that your metrics don't bounce around willy-nilly). Put them together, and they show where things are going. If both are positive or negative, a trend is accelerating—great if it's positive, potentially a crisis if it's negative. When one is positive and the other is negative, things are beginning to change, and acceleration shows the direction. You don't want to get too twitchy in responding to changes in acceleration, but big changes may be trying to tell you something.

Regardless of your choice of metrics, are you doing the (simple) math to evaluate trends over time? What other uses have you found?

Tags: social media analysis measurement metrics

An article based on my post on sorting out social media measurement appears in the October 2007 CW Bulletin from IABC. Articles from Christopher Carfi ("Social Networking for Business: Measuring the results") and Caroline Kealey ("Web 2.0: The medium is the message, but what's the result?") round out the issue on social media measurement.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 10 October - The Nielsen Company announced Diabetes*Buzz and Healthcare Marketing Mix. Diabetes*Buzz packages Nielsen BuzzMetrics data on perceptions and attitudes of diabetes.

• 11 October - Dow Jones & Company introduced Factiva Insight: Agency Analytics, a research tool for multi-client agency or corporate communications environments. (press release)

• 11 October - Reputica announced ReputicaCEO Search Report, a due diligence service that profiles the online reputation of very senior job candidates. The service is targeted to executive search firms and companies filling board of directors and CEO positions.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 15 October - The Nielsen Company launched Nielsen Online, which combines BuzzMetrics and Nielsen//NetRatings. (press release)

• Umbria is presenting a free webinar, "Your consumers are talking online. Are you listening?" on November 7 at 3:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The webinar features Forrester analyst Peter Kim and Umbria CEO Janet Eden-Harris.

• David Michaelson and Sandra Macleod of Echo Research have an article on best practices in PR measurement and evaluation systems (PDF) in PRSA's new Public Relations Journal. (via Alan Chumley)

• In a new SNCR survey of senior PR and marketing communications pros, 45.4% cite inadequate metrics as an obstacle to increasing their budgets for "conversational marketing." (via Marketing Charts)

• 62% list insufficient metrics as a barrier to change in the ANA/IAB/AAAA/Booz Allen Hamilton CMO study, Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010. (PDF, press release). (via Tarik Mousselmal)
  

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 19 October - Andiamo Systems launched their web-based social media analysis service. Andiamo offers a 14-day free trial and starts at $275/month.

• 19 October - RelevantNoise launched their updated Sonar dashboard at the PRSA International Conference. (press release)

• 25 October - Collective Intellect launched ther Media Intellect service for marketing and communications.

• Primelabs released Twingly Report - Sweden, a profile of blogging in Sweden. The report is in Swedish, but the graphics and underlying data (xls) provide some hints.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 2 November - W2 Group announced it has received a $30 million investment from the private equity firm Monitor Clipper Partners to fund organic growth and acquisitions.

• 1 November - Visible Technologies announced the addition of Amir Amirmansoury as VP of product management and Mike Albainy as director of data strategy. (press release)

• 29 October - i-merge and Sinomonitor released the results of a survey on word of mouth and media influence among Chinese internet users (PDF, press release). (via Sam Flemming, Kaiser Kuo)

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 5 November - BuzzLogic unveiled Conversation Targeting, which applies the company's influence-oriented social media analysis software to placing advertising on influential social media sites via Google AdWords. Discussion from Andy Beal and Peter Kim.

• CIC released a new white paper on the auto industry in China, What's Driving Auto Buzz. (press release, download)

• A new Netpop study compares China and the U.S. in a Web 2.0 World. One interesting finding is that user-generated content influences 58% of all purchase decisions in China, compared with 19% in the US. (via Marketing Charts—more snippets on their post)

News from the companies of social media analysis. Late this week because of all the activity at the WOMMA Summit.

Companies and services

• 14 November - Weber Shandwick and Radian6 announced the largest deployment for Radian6, in WSW offices globally. press release, AdWeek, NB Business Journal

• 14 November - CyberAlert announced the launch of CyberAlert VDO, a monitoring service for video clips posted on video sharing websites and online news sources. press release

• 14 November - Primelabs announced the expansion of Twingly into Finland, indexing 35,000 Finnish blogs for Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily newspaper in Finland.

• 15 November - Following the acquisition of parent Adverb Media by Zustek Corporation, RelevantNoise is now part of the newly created Zeta Interactive. press release (PDF)

• Nielsen marketing VP Max Kalehoff moves to search advertising startup Clickable in a similar role. Must have been tough, not talking about that at Ad:Tech.

• CIC CEO (EIEIO) Sam Flemming is now contributing a column to iMedia Connection Asia.

• Paper submissions for ICWSM 2008 are now open (via Matt Hurst).

• IBM Global Business Services released a new report, "The End of Advertising as We Know It," forecasting greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50. press release (via Flemming Madsen)

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• La Netscouade, iPol and RTGI launched US and us, an outside view of the US presidential election on the Net (via Guilhem Fouetillou). Who will be next on the list of campaign-monitoring sites?

• Cymfony is presenting a free webinar, "The New Influencers," on 28 November at 1:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The webinar features Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers, and Cymfony CMO Jim Nail.

• Socialware's Jonathan Moody contributed an article on listening to social media, "Sense and Online Sensibility," in IMRO's Journal of Online Research. Jon was kind enough to suggest the Guide to Social Media Analysis as a useful starting point for companies, which is just what it's intended to be.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

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

• 11 December - Text 100 and Converseon present Social Media Breakfast NYC with Reuters virtual world reporter Eric Krangel on how social media has impacted journalism and communications. (via Paull Young)

• 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.

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)

• McKinsey Quarterly has a framework for thinkinkg about differences in the environment for PR, advertising, product development and customer service in "Marketing with user-generated content (free registration required). (via Sam Flemming)

The end of one year, the start of another. It's time for everyone with an opinion to (a) summarize 2007 or (b) predict 2008. My summary so far: I'm surprised so few social media analysis companies have jumped in with their own Year in Review posts.

Reporting 2007

• Random Snapshot: The Hottest End of Year Conversations - Valerie Combs, BuzzLogic
  
• 2007 Buzz Leaderboard - Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online
  

• Official 2008 Buzzword Forecast - Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen Online
  
• Top 10 Trends in Social Media and Business for 2008 - Will Beresford, beyondanalysis
  
• Measurement Industry Predictions 2008 - Katie Paine, KDPaine & Partners
  
• Internet Word of Mouth Trends in 2008 - Sam Flemming, CIC

News from the companies of social media analysis. Awfully quiet out there...

Companies and services

• Umbria is presenting a free webinar, "The Blogosphere: Greenfield or Minefield," on 30 January at 1:00 PM EST (GMT -5). The presentation focuses on sustainability issues and how some brands succeed or fail online with their sustainability messages.

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• RTGI launched a US affiliate, Linkfluence, to manage PresidentialWatch08 and potential business in North America. (via Matt Hurst)

• Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) announced Trackur, an online reputation management tool with data filtering, sorting, bookmarking and sharing features. A closed beta is planned for February, with launch expected in March.

• CyberAlert announced the recipients of its grants to not-for-profit organizations for 2008. 29 organizations in the US, Canada, and UK will receive one free year of the company's online news monitoring service.

• BuzzLogic moved to new office space, just down the street from their old offices.

• Financial technology executive Brennan Carley joins Monitor110 as CEO, kicking off a round of executive musical chairs. Former President & COO Roger Ehrenberg moves to the Chairman seat vacated by founder Jeff Stewart, who remains on the board and continues his involvement with the company. press release

• Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun launched a new blog, Media Philosopher. If you haven't seen bloggers of social media analysis since it was first posted, the list is noticeably longer now.

• Experian released The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, which focuses on lessons from 2007, trends in 2008 and critical areas for social media marketing strategies. The authors will host a free webinar on 24 January at 10:30 am GMT. (via The Guardian)

• Edelman's Jonny Bentwood released Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media (PDF). The paper summarizes the discussion of influence and its measurement online at Edelman’s New York office last September.

• Joseph Thornley is planning a roundtable on social media measurement the week of 20 May in Toronto. The exact date is TBD, pending confirmation of the dates for Mesh.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• Dow Jones is presenting a free webinar, "Latest Trend in Social Media: How to Listen Effectively and Engage in the Conversation," on 31 January at 12:30 PM EST (GMT -5). The webinar features Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Dow Jones Product Development Manager Glenn Fannick.

• CIC released Tuning into Notebook IWOM, 2007 Q3, an analysis of Chinese BBS discussions of notebook computers.

• The Institute for Public Relations released Using Public Relations Research to Drive Business Results, by Katie Paine, Pauline Draper and Angela Jeffrey. The paper focuses on using PR measurement systems to demonstrate business outcomes and includes six short case studies.

Generating quantitative observations from unstructured data in social media is new. So, surprise, it's a field that doesn't have mature standards yet. Really, we don't even have accepted definitions yet, because mainstream marketers—who are still hearing that they need to start listening—don't know enough about social media practices to drive standardization. It's not too early for challenges to the validity of the data, however.

Social media analysis is not (usually) survey research
Because it's not widely understood, and the discussion has tended to focus on the benefits of listening, social media analysis is sometimes criticized for not following the standards of other types of research. George Silverman wrote a good example comparing online and traditional focus groups, for example.

Justin Kirby took a different swing at social media measurement, comparing data mining to survey research:

Just look at buzz monitoring practitioners who place great stock in sentiment analysis, but have none of the usual checks and balances (such as standard deviation) that underpin data validity within traditional research. If you can't calculate any margin of error, let alone show that you're listening to a representative sample of a target market, then how can you really prove that your analysis is sorting the wheat from the chaff and contributing valuable actionable data to your client's business?

Traditional research is based on sampling, where tests to determine the validity of the sample data are crucial (and, typically, poorly understood). Most social media analysis vendors are using automated methods to find all of the relevants posts and comments on a topic, which go into their analytical processes.

Testing the results
I won't argue against the idea of tests to validate the data, but tests created for surveys and samples aren't necessarily relevant to new techniques. The question is, what's the right test of a "boil the ocean" methodology? Here are some of the challenges, which are different from "is the sample representative?"

1. How much of the relevant content did the search collect (assuming the goal is 100%—if not, you're sampling)?
   
2. How accurately did the system eliminate splogs and duplicate content?
   
3. How accurately did the system identify relevant content?
   
4. How accurate is the content scoring?

Here's one way to validate the results of your social media research: follow it up with a traditional research project. I was talking with Sangita Joshi from EmPower Research this morning, and I learned that some clients are using social media analysis is just this way.

Using both social media analysis and traditional research methods to explore the same topic may seem (a) redundant or (b) an admission of problems with social media analysis, but the combination has the potential to play to the strengths of each.

• Social media analysis can uncover new issues. The usual examples in support of listening to social media involve problems that companies didn't know about. Identifying topics in social media may raise issues for further exploration.

• Conclusions from social media analysis can be restated as hypotheses for traditional research. Critics who don't accept the validity of results from text analysis won't mind if the results are presented as hypotheses.

• Traditional research methods bring established techniques for determining the validity of the results. The Old School will be happy.

• Combining traditional research and social media analysis creates an opportunity to compare the results of both methods. What if you measured the degree to which the online universe mirrored the real world?

Funny thing about "conversations" on blogs, sometimes you have to bounce around different sites to follow along. Yesterday, I wrote Combining social media and traditional research, a follow-up to Validating social media data (it got a little heavy, I know—go watch the video again if you need a break). Today I'll give you a few links to posts that I think are related.

• Guy Hagen posted at length on the strengths and weaknesses of social media research, as well as some specific ideas on combining social media and traditional research. If you wanted to outline the arguments around the new techniques, these will give you a good start.

• Jim Nail responded to Peter Kim's Predicting Super Tuesday winners with brand monitoring with Is prediction even the point of social media? Clearly, some companies are more committed to the use of social media analysis as a research methodology than others. The differences are what make the space interesting.

• The question of how well blogs (especially) and other social media represent the overall population came up last year, with several companies preferring to study online communities over blogs for just that reason.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 8 February - Gianandrea Facchini launched Buzzdetector, an Italian social media monitoring company.

• 7 February - Sentiment Metrics launched a hotel review monitoring service that tracks major travel and hotel review sites as well as the overall social media environment.

• Biz360 and Visible Technologies were recognized among this year's OnMedia 100.

• Aberdeen Group released Social Media Monitoring and Analysis: Generating Consumer Insights from Online Conversation, a sponsored report on client objectives and practices in social media analysis.

• Admap published "Customer advocacy metrics: the NPS theory in practice," by Justin Kirby and the Alain Samson. The report on the usage of customer advocacy metrics in UK companies is available for a limited time from DMC.

• Collective Intellect released mini reports on Super Bowl advertising and the Super Tuesday primary results.

• The list of accepted papers that will be presented at ICWSM, 31 March–2 April in Seattle, is now available.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 13 February - SkyGrid launched its real-time information platform for institutional investors. The service tracks online and traditional media sources, adding reputation, sentiment and other media metrics. Coverage is limited to publicly-traded US companies for now. (via GigaOm)

• Todd Friesen joins Visible Technologies as VP of Search Strategies. Friesen will lead the company's reputation management and SEO activities and contribute to product development. press release

• TNS MI/Cymfony is presenting a free webinar to discuss the results of their recent study on social media in business, 28 February at 1:00 PM EST (GMT -5). Cymfony's Jim Nail leads the session, which focuses on incorporating social media tools in marketing strategies. announcement

• EuroBlog 2008 will be held in Brussels, 13–15 March. The conference theme is "Social media and the future of PR," and the program is dominated by agencies and academics. A session on the first day includes discussion of how to measure social media.

The March/April issue ofTechnology Review has an interesting piece on visualizing social networks (via Matt Hurst). All of the examples would make appropriately geeky wall charts or desktop backgrounds, but the one that caught my eye is the one that adds color to a social network chart to illustrate comment activity.

The layout is typical social network analysis—hubs and spokes. But the Comment Flow visualization, created by Dietmar Offenhuber and Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab, is based on communication:

Offenhuber and Donath created these images by tracking where and how often users left comments for other users; connections are based on these patterns, rather than on whether people have named each other as "friends." As the time since the last communication grows, the visual connection begins to fade.

Nice of 'em to point out some of the researchers working on this stuff, isn't it?

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 25 February - Acccelovation changed its name to NetBase and announced illumin8, a research tool for scientific and technical users. Illumin8 combines NetBase text-mining and search technologies with Elsevier's archives of scientific journals, patents and web-based content. press release (via Michael Osofsky)

• 25 February - Andy Beal launched Trackur, an online reputation monitoring tool. Separately, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, the book he wrote with UNR professor Judy Strauss, has just been released.

• 28 February - Filtrbox announced it has closed its seed financing round and opened its private beta.

• Changes at Brandintel: Bradley Silver now shares the CEO role with Roberto Drassinower, who takes operational leadership as Silver focuses on strategy. Sherry Harmon joins as senior VP for sales and marketing. Harmon was previously president of NextNine, a remote support automation provider.

• TNS MI/Cymfony released Harnessing Influence: How Savvy Brands
  are Unleashing the New Power of Blogs and other Social Media, a report based on interviews with 71 marketing executives in the US, UK, Canada and France. Highlights in AdWeek and New Communications Review.

• If you're a Super Bowl advertiser (or agency involved in advertising at this year's game), Collective Intellect wants to give you a Super Bowl Advertiser Scorecard. A public report will be released in about a week.

• ICWSM organizers have created a CrowdVine social network for the event.

Are you paying attention to The Associated Press v. Moreover Technologies, Inc. et al? I heard about it while interviewing the founder of a different company for the Guide to Social Media Analysis, my reference to the companies who monitor and measure social media. He was telling me that his company provides summaries and links back to original sources, in order to avoid the risk of copyright infringement issues. The interesting thing is, I had just heard from another company that they selected a data vendor specifically because of the full text clips in their feed.

So, what's the deal with aggregating media content for a commercial service? Does blog aggregation with full content feeds violate copyright? Is it a question of fair use (US—fair dealing elsewhere), or is there more to consider? I asked Eric Goldman, Assistant Professor and Academic Director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, who started by telling me, "the law in the area is complicated, multi-faceted and unclear."

Great. So much for wrapping things up with a tidy stroll through fair use considerations.

In addition to copyright, Goldman suggested these areas of potential concern (the usual disclaimers apply: this is not legal advice; check with your own lawyers):

• Common law trespass to chattels
  
• Computer Fraud & Abuse Act
  
• State computer crime laws
  
• Contracts
  
• Trademark

Still with me?
So far, this is just the US perspective on an inherently international activity. My blog post was threatening to turn into a book, which I'm not even qualified to write (but I might want to read). So, let's go back to the current case that opened the topic, AP v. Moreover, or the Case of the Purloined Press. For extra credit, read the complaint (PDF).

This case isn't about social media monitoring; it's about redistributing traditional media content without a license. But it has similarities to other forms of media monitoring, in that a company is aggregating content for commercial purposes. How can a company avoid trouble while providing commercial content aggregation, and how does this translate to social media content with its millions of independent sources?

Potential solutions
One possible solution is to license the content. It's an established practice with traditional media that sets the terms of use, but it's not practical for decentralized, online media. Excerpting is another potential solution, which is being tested in the current case. The addition of metrics to raw content may help support a fair use/fair dealing argument. But with the unsettled state of the law, solutions are likely to be complicated and unclear, too.

When you get into the wilderness of social media sites, you encounter copyright, Creative Commons and terms of use that vary by site. This could be interesting. Oh, and complicated—and risky. We're not done with this topic, but for now, there's an ongoing case worth watching. I have my search feed running. Do you?

IMHO, IANAL, YMMV. I took an excellent course on communications law in grad school, and I enjoy a good conversation about policy, but I'm not a lawyer. You'd be an idiot to take anything I write or say as legal advice.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 5 March - Dow Jones & Company introduced a text-to-speech capability to its Factiva service. The new feature, provided by VoiceCorp, converts text to spoken English, French, German, Italian or Spanish, based on users' existing preferences. press release

• BrandIntel released "Collective intelligence: Understanding the mindset of the online consumer through predictive insight," a new paper by Co-CEO Bradley Silver (PDF).

• TNS MI/Cymfony is presenting a free webinar on generating business results from social media, 12 March at 1:00 PM EDT (GMT -4). Cymfony's Jim Nail and Aberdeen Group's Jeff Zabin will discuss the recent Aberdeen report on corporate adoption of social media monitoring and analysis.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 10 March - Attenalert launched its online monitoring service and, at 27 minutes, set the record for quick response to my RFI. (via Charlie Anzman)

• 11 March - Cape Town-based Quirk eMarketing launched its BrandsEye online reputation monitoring tool. Priced at $750/month, BrandsEye incorporates manual content scoring, a proprietary reputation score and reporting capabilities.

• Attentio is co-hosting a free, half-day social media marketing event, Social Media in Marketing: what is the added value for companies with Emakina, March 21 at Place Flagey in Brussels (A second session is scheduled on April 17 in Ghent).

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 26 March - Networked Insights announced an updated version of their software, featuring a redesigned user interface and a new influence metric based on engagement. press release (DOC)

• 17 March - Additions at Monitor110: Brian Roberti joins as head of sales from EdgeTrade; Terry James, former head of global hosting operations at Radianz, joins as head of service delivery and operations. press release

• CIC released its IWOM Watch Half-Year Review of trends in China during the second half of 2007. via Sam Flemming

• BrandIntel announced a new report on consumer attitudes about green technology in automobiles. press release

• Satmetrix released the results of a new study, "Net Promoter Economics: The Impact of Word of Mouth" (PDF). This first report in a series looks at the value of promoters and detractors in the computer hardware industry. press release

• Veljko Fotak, a PhD student at the University of Oklahoma Price College of Business, examined The Impact of Blog Recommendations on Security Prices and Trading Volumes. His research covers both the types of investment-related discussion in blogs and their impact. The paper was presented at the 2007 meeting of the Financial Management Association. via Penny Herscher; also summarized at CXOAG

• Nielsen Online is presenting a free webinar, Greenwashing: Who’s Winning the Green Race Online, 1 April at 2:00 PM EDT (GMT -4). Nielsen's Jessica Hogue will discuss the Internet's role in increasing awareness of sustainability issues and what sustainability bloggers have to say about company efforts.

• Benedict Koehler is planning a discussion of social media research (and a possible working group) at re:publica, 3 April in Berlin. via David Nelles

• The next round of the discussion on open source standards for measuring social media will take place at The Coach & Horses in London, 8 April. Details on the MeasurementCamp wiki.
  

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• Infegy recently started selling SocialRadar. The web-based social media monitoring service has been in development since 2006.

• 28 March - Buzzdetector launched Buzz Politico, an election tracker for the Italian election.

• Market Sentinel released a case study on social media results for Avis UK (PDF).

• Ofcom released a study on attitudes, behaviours and use of social networking in the UK. via Metrica

I've been thinking about the management issues involved in social media for some time, and I enjoyed David Churbuck's posts on Social Media 201—taking the discussion past freshman level. So here's an organizational question for companies getting serious about social media: Where's IT? I talk with people who manage their companies' social media engagement efforts, but I haven't heard much (if anything) about their corporate IT departments' involvement. As processes mature and the use of tools gets more sophisticated, that needs to change.

The View from Across the Table
The topic came up when I saw John Soat's article in InformationWeek, Don't Let Tech-Savvy Business Execs Do An End Run Around IT. More of us outside IT have some level of computer skills, and IT managers have learned to be concerned about "rogue" technology purchases and projects. The growth of web-based technology services makes it easier than ever for a reasonably tech-savvy manager to buy needed services without dealing with an IT department that may have different priorities.

When the topic of rogue IT projects comes up, I would normally assume we're talking about databases or critical operations-support systems (such as customer relationship management or sales-force automation systems). But one of the examples was a "digital age boot camp" for a marketing group at Heinz North America, and that sounds a lot like a social media workshop. The CIO was concerned that IT barely found out in time to send a representative.

Hmm. Apparently, IT's sensitivity toward digital/ online/ technology topics extends well beyond custom software deployments. I wonder what they think of social media analysis services, or whether they think about them at all?

IT and Social Media Analysis
Media monitoring and measurement are services that marketing and communications groups have bought for years, and it's natural to assume that their extension into online sources shouldn't change that. If we look at the range of available tools and services, I think that's correct as a starting point, but it depends on what you buy and how you use it.

The services you might buy to monitor or measure social media activity are delivered in a variety of formats. Your choice of delivery will suggest how much involvement IT should have. In increasing order of technology integration with a client's own systems, delivery options include:

• Analyst reports and briefings delivered by any method
  
• Single-user online dashboard
  
• Automated alerts and reports delivered by email
  
• Web-based dashboard used by a workgroup
  
• Web-based social media analysis platform with workgroup and collaboration features
  
• Installed social media analysis software on enterprise server
  
• Social media analysis system with links to CRM, intelligence or collaboration systems
  
• Custom social media monitoring and analysis platform linked to other enterprise systems
  

What about dashboards and the more involved web-delivered services? Where does it become something IT will want to know about? The line will vary by company, but in general, IT leaders should start paying attention early, because the maturation of processes around social media monitoring and analysis will lead to integration with other systems and processes.

Processes will drive integration
Listening to social media is useless in a vaccuum. The value comes from what a company does with the information it develops, from customer opinions to new market opportunities. Making effective use of the information requires connecting across functional silos and with existing processes, even if the initial integration is essentially manual.

When monitoring uncovers customer problems, the information needs to go into a customer service function, which has its own tracking systems. Market insights might feed into other business intelligence or collaboration environments. Reports may roll up to broader executive dashboards. As social media proves its value as a source of intelligence, companies will be motivated to integrate it with other enterprise systems, which is where IT involvement is essential.

Some of the available options already live at the intersection of social media and enterprise applications. Web-based services from companies like Visible Technologies and Radian6 support billable work in agencies that sell social media services. A direct link between a new technology and revenue is a good definition of mission critical, which should get CIOs' attention. A manually-created buzz report that goes directly to the CEO of a product company (a real example) should be equally attention-getting.

Steps for CIOs
As companies set up social media listening capabilities, CIOs should be part of the process. At a minimum, IT leadership should understand the goals behind social media listening and engagement initiatives, even if functional groups select services with low technology demands. As practices mature, IT needs to be prepared to lead the company to extract more value from these services and should begin thinking about how to use the insights from social media analysis in other enterprise systems.

Leaders in adopting social media practices are already making the connection between, for example, online communication and customer service. Integration at the systems level is only a question of timing and leadership.

News from the companies of social media analysis.

Companies and services

• 16 April - Collective Intellect closed its second round of institutional funding at $6 million. Grotech Capital Group led the round, which includes existing investors Appian Ventures and Croghan Investments and new investor Crawley Hatfield Capital, LP. press release, coverage on TechCrunch and Paid Content

• 16 April - Cold Blue Labs is offering Attenalert for sale at auction site Sitepoint. The service, launched in March, has no paying customers. Attenalert domains and source code are included in the offer.

• 17 April - Dow Jones & Company announced that it has acquired Generate Inc. Generate combines web mining, relationship mapping and event detection to give clients a view of competitive moves and business opportunities in changing environments.
  I'm spending too much time with PR bloggers—I immediately translated the company name to "generate ink."

• Metrica released Metrica Numbers 2007, examining media trends based on meta-data from over 3 million articles mentioning 700 organizations since 1997. In addition to 10-year trends, this first report focuses on 2007 to establish benchmarks for PR in the UK. Metrica plans to update the report annually.

• The IAB released User-Generated Content and Social Media Advertising Overview (PDF). If you were wondering how advertising people think about social media, here's your chance. press release

Tags: social media analysis brand monitoring

FirstRain recently ran an item indicating that Netflix might be expanding its offerings. It culled the info from a blogger who had posted details about his experimentation with game downloads for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that he’d pulled off Netflix. A large mutual fund manager in New York City who had a stake in Netflix read the piece in his FirstRain news feed—and immediately called Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. The investor hadn’t known that the movie rental service was developing a game console strategy...

David Rosenfeld, the director of research at New York-based William Jones Investment Management, is a FirstRain client. “We try to get information from [a company’s] management, but they are...restricted on what they can actually say,” he said. “So that makes secondary information that much more important.”

Greg Parsons of CP Capital, a SkyGrid client, said the sentiment tracker can prove invaluable. A number of times, he noted, “a shift in sentiment has preceded negative news” coming from companies.

• Trading on Social Media (Collective Intellect and Monitor110)
• Jodange Mines Sentiment for Investors

There's a difference between "we don't have any money" and "we don't have a budget for that (yet)." The usual advice about monitoring social media for comments about your company ends with pointers to free tools and a few of the commercial options. But if you're a manager trying to make the case that your company should listen to social media, these free services from social media analysis vendors will help you justify the budget to keep going.

Free tools from social media analysis companies:

• BlogPulse (Nielsen BuzzMetrics)
  
• Trendpedia (Attentio)
  
• Trendrr
  

• CustomScoop
  
• Filtrbox
  
• InfoNgen
  
• Techrigy
  

• Attentio (7 days)
  
• BuzzGain (15 days)
  
• Crawdad Technologies (30 days)
  
• CustomScoop (14 days)
  
• CyberAlert (14 days)
  
• Dialogix (7 days)
  
• Distilled (1 month)
  
• eCairn (1 month)
  
• Lexalytics
  
• MightyBrand (14 days)
  
• Scout Labs (30 days)
  
• Sentiment Metrics (14 days)
  
• StrategyEye
  
• Trackur (14 days)
  
• VibeMetrix (14 days)
  

If you already have a budget and need to explore your options, the Guide to Social Media Analysis is for you. The second edition features profiles of 63 vendors, along with an overview of the market and tables to help find specific capabilities.

I went through everybody's web sites, but I might have missed some. Mention yours in the comments if I did, and I'll add it to the list.

Have you watched a movie in the last 15 minutes? Have you reviewed it yet? On Twitter? For an increasing number of Twitter users, the answer to that question (which question?) is yes, and a free site now summarizes their instant movie reviews for us.

At last night's Triangle Tweetup, Chad Etzel (@jazzychad) showed his new project, Twitter Movie Reviews. The utterly descriptive name—how non-2.0!—tells it all. TMR pulls tweets mentioning current movies from the public timeline and graphs the balance of sentiment.

The main page summarizes all of the reviews in the system. A more detailed view for each movie lists all of the tweets, grouped into good, bad and indifferent categories. RSS feeds abound, making it easy to monitor the rated tweets for any given movie.

Human analysis, increasing automation
The primary method of categorizing the reviews is human analysis. Volunteer moderators read the individual tweets and rate them as good, bad or indifferent (Chad's looking for more volunteers, if you want to help). From the demo, the process appeared quick and easy. Considering the subject matter, finding volunteers shouldn't be too hard, at least as long as the site is free.

An automated prescreening system eliminates non-review mentions of movies (going to see, waiting in line, want to see), and some keywords trigger automated ratings. More automation is planned.

My first reaction to this is that I'll probably use it to look up movies I'm considering. There's an apparent positive bias in review tweets, but a quick glance at the full text can provide useful hints as to why people like a movie (or don't). Naturally, if you have a business interest in movies, this is another site to monitor. If you have an entertainment site, you might want to talk with Chad before someone else does.

Opinions are everywhere; tools are democratizing
It's interesting that this isn't a product or feature from a company in a social media or data mining business. It's a project from a software developer who likes making things. So, besides a new place to look up movies, here's what I got from the demo:

1. Opinions are everywhere. Anywhere that people can express themselves online, they will eventually start talking about things they buy. It doesn't matter if you want to care about Twitter (for example); if your customers are using it, you need to pay attention. Monitoring social media is a task that will grow as long as new social applications are being created.

2. For someone with programming skills, barriers to entry for creating new sites are nonexistent. Human coding of the reviews eliminates the hard part of building an analytical site and gets the ball rolling (but will be hard to sustain if the service becomes commercial). The initial version proves the concept and supports further development.

3. Free tools for analyzing content and trends mean that the forest is no longer hidden in the trees. If the public has access to sentiment metrics and begins to consider them in their purchase decisions, is it possible for companies not to care?

4. New sites that provide open APIs will eventually be mined for useful information, which will be available to the public. If your product is interesting to software developers, it will happen sooner.

5. Has anyone considered a consumer-oriented social media analysis site? One that explains itself to a non-technical, non-business audience?

Update: The site now has a name and domain: FlixPulse.

Monitor110 is over. The company web site displays the company's statement on the decision to cease operations and shut down the company in the wake of its failure to arrange additional funding.

Clients, employees, and investors:

I regret to inform you that, effective July 15, Monitor110 has decided to cease operations and shut down the business...

Regards,
W. Brennan Carley, CEO

Interesting space, little information
In the process of writing the second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, I've talked to several companies who are mining media content—social and otherwise—for investment purposes. I've found almost as many strategies and analytical approaches as companies, so it's an interesting specialty.

Several competitors I talked to thought that M110 either wasn't selling their services or wasn't finding success in the market. Nobody likes to talk about their revenue, so I never know what to believe absent win announcements or customer references. In the financial space, that's especially sensitive, so there's no real information. I'm going to work on that.

Brown pastures?
Some blog comments (discussion on paidContent, SAI) have made the point that, if it really worked so well, M110 would have started their own hedge fund. Given some of the backgrounds at M110, that's an interesting point and a possible outcome. The company's announcement doesn't mention anything about liquidating assets, but I assume that they're thinking about how to extract the value from the development work they've done.

M110 isn't the first company to abandon the financial services market. Others have started with similar goals, only to switch focus to the broader corporate marketing and communications market. M110's failure suggests that the others may have made the right decision. I am, however, hearing from competitors who contrast M110's trial customers with their own paying customers. It's too soon to declare the financial market dead.

Going deeper
At the moment, I'm closing in on the completion of the second edition of the Guide, which should be out by the end of the month. Now, there's one less company to include, but others focused on financial applications are included.

Once the Guide is completed, I plan to take a closer look at the information arbitrage specialty. As usual, even the companies in the space tend not to realize who else is in their market, so this should be fun.

Related posts:

• Financial Week on Info-Arbitrage 28 Apr 2008
  
• Jodange mines sentiment for investors 29 Jan 2008
  
• Trading on social media 12 Dec 2007
  
• Yahoo Finance adds sentiment analysis 13 Sep 2007

If you're building an in-house social media capability—whether in an agency or corporate environment—your needs for social media monitoring and analysis are a bit different from other companies. The basics of collecting data and generating metrics and reports are the same, but hands-on workgroups have special requirements.

On some level, many social media analysis companies can help you build your own capabilities. The nearly ubiquitous interactive dashboard is a hands-on tool for clients who want to interact with the data, but they're a better fit for individual analysts. Some companies really focus on developing platforms for companies building their own capabilities.

What's different
On top of the core analytical and reporting capabilities, social media analysis platforms for workgroups tend to include features like these:

• Multi-user environment
  
• User account management
  
• Multi-client awareness (for agencies)
  
• Delegation and tracking features

The other distinction is harder to see, because it's embedded in the business: these companies are oriented toward supporting in-house social media capabilities. Many dashboards, on the other hand, are a secondary service from companies whose clients typically want finished reports from their vendors.

The list
Vendors with monitoring and analysis platforms for the in-house social media team:

• Attensity
  
• Attentio
  
• Brandtology
  
• Brandwatch
  
• Buzzcapture
  
• BuzzGain
  
• Buzzient
  
• Digimind
  
• dna13
  
• Dow Jones Insight
  
• eCairn
  
• Filtrbox
  
• InfoNgen
  
• Lexalytics
  
• Linkfluence
  
• MediaMiser
  
• Metrica
  
• Netemic
  
• Radian6
  
• ReputationHQ
  
• Scout Labs
  
• Sentiment Metrics
  
• Smmart
  
• StartPR
  
• Synthesio
  
• Sysomos
  
• Techrigy
  
• Visible Technologies
  
• Vocus
  
• Whitevector
  

I can just hear people shouting, "you missed us!" Go ahead, leave a comment, and I'll add you to the list.

The second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis is finished and available on the Social Target web site. The new edition weighs in at 145 pages and includes more than double the profiles of the original. If you're ready to track social media discussions that are relevant to your business, this reference will help you find the tools and services that fit your needs.

These 63 companies are profiled in the second edition:

Is this your first time here? You'll get more insights from Social Target research, plus weekly industry news highlights, when you subscribe by RSS or email.

A key component of listening to social media involves knowing where to listen. Monitoring blogs is an important step, but what if the real action around your company is in product reviews? Your listening plan needs to include the types of media that are relevant in your market. If you use an external social media analysis provider, they need to cover the relevant media types for you.

Last year, it was easy to assume that blog monitoring was social media analysis—the discussion was all about what consumers were saying on blogs. Almost all of the vendors tracked blogs, but there was a question about measuring blog comments. This year, things are different. New types of social media have emerged, and vendors have increased their coverage.

As I collected information for the new edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, I asked vendors specifically about the media types they cover in their monitoring or analysis. 58 companies answered the question. Here's a summary of their responses:

*A few companies listed other sources, such as transcripts of analyst calls, price-comparison sites and proprietary research sources.

The details—along with 63 vendor profiles—are in the second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis.

Major events create prime opportunities for social media analysis companies to show their stuff. The election coverage continues, but this week everyone's looking at the Olympic Games in Beijing. In keeping with the competitive spirit of the event, we've even had an analytic thumb-wrestling match (Cymfony vs. Collective Intellect).

(Most recent first)

• Lenovo and Visa are the big winners at the “Advertising Olympics” - Collective Intellect, 29 Aug

• Glittering Gold, Viral Birdies, and Other Olympian Buzz Charts - Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen, 22 Aug

• Olympic Sponsors Achieve Social Media Lift - Collective Intellect, 21 Aug

• The Temperature Keeps on Rising with Michael Phelps Fever - Nielsen, 15 Aug

• PR Week: Olympics Score Blogger Gold - BuzzLogic, 13 Aug

• Pre-Olympic Buzz Analysis of Sponsors: Keyword Association Mapping of Chinese IWOM - CIC, 11 Aug

• VISA 42% Share of Olympic Sponsor Discussion? NOT! - TNS Cymfony, 8 Aug

• CI slices into positive and negative sentiment surrounding 2008 pre-Olympic advertising - Collective Intellect, 7 Aug

• Beijing Olympics as seen through Social Media - Collective Intellect, 5 Aug

• Olympics Countdown - ImpactWatch, 5 Aug

• Olympics Media Pulse (blog) - Dow Jones Insight

Add BackType to the list of useful, free tools for monitoring social media (via IntelFusion). BackType, which launched this week, is a search engine for blog comments. The web site provides a convenient mechanism for finding comments by an individual or on a topic, with a social network-style "follow" feature and the now-standard RSS feeds for any search. This looks like a solid addition to the toolkit, useful for tracking your own mentions and for developing an understanding of interesting individuals.

Some ideas for first steps with BackType:

1. Search for comments about your company and products. Subscribe to the feeds.

2. Create an account with your usual handle and complete the profile. You want to give the right impression to people who search for your comments (and use the link to send them to your blog/site).

3. Develop a better understanding of individuals by searching for their comments. What blogs are they reading? What other topics do they find interesting? Influencer profiling is one application; hiring is another.

4. Follow a thought leader (subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be stealthy) to discover new sources.

Following the announcement of the Lexalytics merger, I wrote that the availability of off-the-shelf text analytics and custom software development suggested some questions about technology strategy for social media analysis vendors. The main question is an old one in software: Build or buy? The follow-up flows from a value chain analysis, and it sets up a series of decision points for the build/buy decision. It turns out that a social media analysis platform is built from a few, basic building blocks, and a decision to build a custom system doesn't imply a decision to build every part.

Three basic building blocks
The technology behind monitoring and analyzing social media content fits into three basic categories: content sourcing, analytics, and the software application that provides end-user features, such as dashboards, reports, and alerts. Many service providers add value beyond what is baked into their software, of course, but these are the basic technology building blocks. What makes them interesting is that each generates a potential product that can be offered as the "buy" option to other companies.

• Content sourcing
  The first step in analyzing social media content, sourcing includes source discovery, content aggregation, filtering and metadata tagging. The result is a feed of relevant content data, with duplicates, spam and other noise removed. Feeds of traditional media sources have been available for years; syndicated content sourcing is available for social media types now.

• Analytics
  The next step is analysis of the content, also known as text analytics. The system extracts key words, concepts and sentiment from individual messages; depending on the vendor, it may also evaluate messages and sources for influence, demographics, location, audience size, and more. This is the hard part, which inspires the question of whether computer analysis is good enough.

  Perhaps assuming that text analytics must be homegrown, many vendors skip the analytics entirely, using human analysts or leaving metrics out of their product. But text analytics has its own build or buy decision. The technology is available from software companies in the business intelligence market, and at least two companies focusing on social media, Lexalytics and Leximancer.

• Application
  Content sourcing and analytics constitute checklist features in a social media analysis platform: "Sentiment? Check!" They represent a lot of work, but it's hard to tell whose works better. The application software, on the other hand, is what clients see, and it provides many opportunities for evaluation. Is the user interface dated and clunky or sleek and current? How is content presented? What can users do with it? How easy is it to explore the data or create reports?

  The once clear line between dashboards and social media analysis platforms for workgroups has blurred over the past year. Outside sofware development services will tend to increase the capabilities of dashboards from less traditionally technical vendors.

• Lower barriers to entry. New entrants—startups or established players in adjacent markets—can launch social media analysis tools without building everything from the ground up.

• Higher baseline expectations. Dashboards from companies without strong technology traditions will soon include advanced technologies. Basic monitoring dashboards are becoming commodities (witness the $5/month entry pricing).

• Fewer reinvented wheels. Vendors can compete on their strengths in content sourcing, analytics or application development. External sources remove the need to develop their own capabilities in areas outside of their core strengths.

I've been thinking about the questions companies need to consider when they're looking for tools or services for listening to social media. The obvious first question—which is always the first question— is, "what are you trying to accomplish?" Given an answer to that one, another important question applies to the people who are going to be involved in the process. Who are they, and how will they interact with the data?

I first heard the idea of categorizing people as information producers and information consumers in a briefing with Biz360 for the first edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis. The idea is that some people will take a hands-on approach to tools and data, while others wait for finished analysis and reports. One is oriented to the analytics, while the other just wants the resulting information. Think of an analyst and an executive, and you'll get the picture.

Producers, Consumers and Power Users
I've found the information producers and consumers framework to be useful, but in this year's briefing with InfoNgen, I realized that we need to look more closely at the producers. Some of them are going to do a lot more with their tools than the average user.

Take Microsoft Excel: it's on virtually every office computer, and a lot of people use it. They're information producers when they organize some information or do a little math in a spreadsheet. But a much smaller group really knows how to make Excel sweat, creating what-if scenarios, modeling complex business plans, running Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate uncertainty... At some point, you have to put these users in a separate category, which we usually label power users.

Users of social media analysis tools will fall into the same categories. Producers will use the query, analysis and reporting capabilities of their analysis platform, and consumers will receive their reports. Power users will explore the depths of the end-user features in their platforms, which vary considerably. The line between a producer and a power user is arbitrary, but it's worth considering.

InfoNgen showed me how a user of their system could create or modify searches and filters using a probabilistic model that goes well beyond Boolean queries. In the right hands, it could be a powerful feature, but the average user will never touch it. Other platforms have different features to reward power users, but this was the one that inspired the topic.

Which Types Are You?
When it comes to monitoring and measuring social media, companies need to understand how they're going to work with the data—and how specific individuals and teams will work. If your company doesn't have anyone with an analytical bent, then a hands-on analytical tool may deliver less value than it would to another company.

A powerful tool in the hands of a power user, on the other hand, can be used to create useful tools and information for the other information producers and consumers in the company. If a technically proficient, curious analyst is on your team, you might want to think about the advanced capabilities available in the tools you consider.

When you listen to social media, what paradigm do you bring with you? Are you thinking about measuring media, or are you thinking about people sharing their thoughts? Listening to the discussions at the recent Word of Mouth Research Symposium, this finally came together for me: part of the reason social media measurement is confusing people is the cross-functional impact of social media, and measurement—like everything else—is stuck in silos. Looking at familiar faces at WOMMA, I realized that each silo has its measurement club, and I'm not sure they know about each other.

Measuring Media or People?
As I've posted before, social media measurement means different things to different people. They're bringing assumptions, goals and metrics from work they did before social media, but they don't usually declare their perspective when they set out to "measure social media." That's left as an exercise for the reader, who may not realize that a particular measurement silo is at work.

I'm seeing at least four different measurement silos intersecting with social media:

• PR/media measurement
  Viewing social media as media for their ability to reach an audience.

• Word of mouth measurement
  Viewing social media as online interactions among people (customers, if you're lucky).

• Web analytics
  Interested in people's usage patterns, as both audience and customers.

• Opinion research
  Mining online opinions as the world's largest focus group.
  

Today's measurement discussions recall the blind men and an elephant. Social media content represents both media and people, depending on what's happening and how you want to look at it. Recommendations to start measurement with an understanding of objectives are obviously on the right track. I wonder if we can introduce the measurement clubs from the separate silos and stop talking past each other?

What do you want that you can't have today? Specifically, what would you like to see in a social media analysis tool or service that you can't get (as far as you know)? Most of the vendors are probably reading this blog, so here's a chance to air your wish list while I get out of the way. I'll start with one that Lee Odden mentioned on Twitter yesterday.

SMA for SEM
Lee wants an automated keyword analysis tool for social media sites (process described by Marty Weintraub):

Really need to the social media monitoring industry to step up and come up with a good keyword analysis tool specific to social media sites
@leeodden

What else do you need in 2009?
Open mic time. What's on your wish list? Mention it in the comments, and I can guarantee that companies in a position to offer it will see your suggestions. You might even hear from someone who already does it.

The usual starting point for social media analysis—whether you're more interested in the monitoring or measurement variants—is to ask, "what are people saying about us?" That's a reasonable starting point, but if we take a few steps around to other parts of the elephant, we discover other applicatons. Today, for example, I talked with a marketing exec at a capital equipment supplier who was interested in consumer intelligence as a major account sales tool. I can think of quite a few companies who could do what he described, but I couldn't think of any who have.

The idea is simple. Use a common snapshot report to generate insights about a major customer account, based on what their customers have to say about them. Package the results for your major account team. You could also use a more general view of your customers' industry for your entire sales force.

What are my customer's customers saying?
Start with a typical reputation snapshot report—volume, sentiment, leading topics, trends. Instead of focusing on your own company, focus on your customer (bonus points for finding trends that mention both your customer and you or a competitor). It's a simple keyword substitution away from the traditional question: "what are people saying about them?"

When you get the report, the first benefit will be in growing your understanding of your customer's business. But the eye-openers will probably be in a leading dissatisfiers list (top issues filtered by negative sentiment). How would your sales team like to know about your customer's issues with:

• Problems associated with your products
  
• Problems associated with competitors' products (bonus!)
  
• Problems your products can help solve
  
• Emerging opportunities for your customer supported by your products
  

I did a lot of this kind of demand-chain analysis in my previous career—looking at consumer trends and their impact on customer demand for my products. This is valuable intelligence for any company whose customers use their products to deliver their own products or services. If you do this for sales, just remember to share the results with your marketing and product groups.

(Update: It may be more accurate to describe this as industrial marketing, as opposed to B2B.)

Nice theory, but who's doing it?
I suspect I could dig through my files and find examples of vendors who offer this type of report, but off the top of my head... nothing. The usual, $10–15K report is overkill, but a package of basic customer snapshots focused on identifying sales opportunities might have potential. Is anyone doing this with clients now?

I'm also curious what this topic does to your comfort meter. Does the thought of running analytics on your customer's market make you uncomfortable?

For those of you in the business, this came out of a casual conversation, but if it were a live request from a client, it's the kind of question I would send out on my new mailing list for vendors. If you don't have your invitation, drop me a note and I'll add you. And yes, I do plan to follow up on today's conversation with what I learn.

The standard advice on social media is to listen first, and if you read this blog, you've noticed that I pay a lot of attention to the companies who can help with listening. Despite the articles that group them all together, it's important to note some distinctions. The most obvious is between service- and software-oriented approaches, which differ in emphasis even in companies that offer both.

This is a topic I've been working on for a while (and have a report to finish), but a Friday comment from Joseph Fiore (of the software-oriented RepuMetrix) moved it up the line:

Further to your comments, we have learned over the years that social media reporting is most effective when it functions dynamically. Whether that be for sales automation, or leveraged as a PR device.

For agencies, the advantage with online reporting tools means that any postponed meetings with clients won't require placing a second order for our custom reports, or showing them a week-old report absent of incidents which may have happened in-between rescheduling.

The same applies with our experience in sales automation - the "freshness" factor is where the aforementioned client found the real value of using SM as a sales tool. Again, this may appear to be going above and beyond, but there was one incident where a rep had won an account when he passed his tablet around the meeting room, revealing a timely blog incident that the prospect knew nothing about.

On the other hand, the professional services approach offloads the learning curve and resource requirements that can be an obstacle. You gain the experience and insight of the specialist, in exchange for some loss in response time and flexibility, and the cost structure is different. If your company doesn't have information producers ready to do the analysis internally, you can still benefit from listening strategies with outside help.

The right tool for the job
It's a tradeoff—both approaches have benefits and costs. The question (as always) is, what are you trying to accomplish?

So many times, I've heard that (pick one) only humans can identify sentiment in text, or the software is very good now. I don't call it a debate, because I don't see the sides talking. Setting aside the question of software maturity, what is it we want the computer to do, and how far along are the tools?

When I need to explain the concept of text analytics for the first time, I usually summarize it as "teaching the computer to read," which—no surprise—isn't an original phrase. It goes back at least to the early '90s. But reading for meaning is still more of a goal than the current reality. Today, the tools are somewhere on a continuum, which I think looks something like this:

1. Content discovery
   The challenge is social media analysis starts with the attempt to "read the Internet" (all of it). The simple approach to selecting the part we care about is to use a keyword match or Boolean query, but probabilistic and semantic approaches are out there.

   Success criteria: recall (completeness) and speed

2. Filtering for relevance
   Source data is cleaned, removing spam, duplicates, and off-topic items. Company names that are also words make relevance filtering important and a point of differentiation for some vendors.

   Success criteria: precision (% relevant content)

3. Extracting concepts
   Natural-language processing (NLP) yields a list of key words and phrases, which generates those brand-association and leading topics reports. Also very useful for grouping items for end-users of the system. More advanced approaches group related topics and synonyms.

   Success criteria: usefulness (low noise), accuracy

4. Extracting facts
   NLP identifies factual statements based on grammatical analysis of content. This is helpful for understanding the reason behind sentiment and potentially huge for competitive intelligence and finance applications.

   Success criteria: accuracy, useful summarization

5. Determining opinion
   If you want to start a good argument, bring up sentiment (although I never seem to find opposing viewpoints on human vs. machine analysis in the same place). It's popular as a PR metric and useful as a filter, so it's one of the usual metrics in social media tools. Some vendors go beyond tonality (positive/negative) and provide an analysis of the emotional content of the text.

   Success criteria: accuracy, consistency, depth

6. Reading for meaning
   What we really want: the computer reads mountains of text and, after accounting for source reliability and influence, delivers an accurate summary and metrics, cross-references sources, and synthesizes an accurate view of the situation.

   Success criteria: not holding my breath.
   

I hear claims of 90% and better accuracy on sentiment, but a test would require a comparison with imperfect, human coding. In any case, one text analytics provider I talked with said that specific accuracy rates are not a client concern. Their focus is on the value of the resulting analysis, and good enough is good enough.

I'm not a scientist, and somewhere out there is a computational linguist whose left eye is twitching over some mistake I've made. Comments are open—go for it.

I'm always curious to see how others summarize the social media analysis market. A couple of weeks ago, Forrester revisited the space, which they now call "listening platforms" (get a free copy from Nielsen Online). No surprises on the list, except that all the companies aren't really substitutes for each other. I was particularly struck, though, by the insistence that software and services should come from a single provider. The market is more interesting than that—in fact, just the range of services is more interesting than that.

I track the market for tools and services that companies can use to listen to, learn from, and engage with their markets through social media. It's a project that has led me to over 170 companies worldwide, and as I explore the edges of the market, I keep finding more. In the process, I've learned a lot about the available options, which I use to help companies understand their own requirements and make decisions about vendors.

Which services do you need?
I learned a key lesson from my first client: grouping requirements by categories opens the door to considering specialized vendors who don't do it all. The value becomes apparent when you consider the range of services that might be labeled consulting:

• Software training
  Software companies typically provide technical support and training for their products, especially for the more sophisticated workgroup platforms. As these products become more tightly integrated with business processes, training and implementation suppport become increasingly important.

• Research and analyst services
  The most common services in the market are outsourced analyst services, which develop insights from the data and deliver them to clients. The choice between software and services is a build-or-buy decision on listening and analysis, which should be based on the client's capabilities and needs. Outside analysts can get a client up to speed quickly, and many companies may never have the information producers to generate their own analysis.

• Strategic marketing/communications counsel
  After listening comes engagement, and clients seem to want help with engaging effectively while avoiding mistakes. They could choose a vendor who offers both listening capabilities and agency services (strategy, creative, interactive, etc.), or they could look at the many marketing agencies and consultants who incorporate a social media analysis platform in their work. For an example, see Josh Hallett's description of how Voce layers agency services over the Radian6 platform.

• Management consulting
  Companies that get serious about making social media listening and engagement part of their business run into a predictable set of management issues. Professional services geared toward process integration and organizational change will help them make the most of their social media investments.
  

Besides, don't companies like to avoid overdependence on a single supplier in any market?

Here's an interesting challenge from the twitterstream. Can you spot mentions of a brand when the writer makes an effort to disguise the brand name?

Brandname obfuscation (e.g. St*rb*cks) is a recognition that twitter has tipped and that the data will be mined. #hardlife for #twanalytics
—Casper Davies (@drepsac)

The entanglement of social media analysis (SMA) and customer relationship management (CRM) is moving right along. It was inevitable, really, as companies realized the need to interact with customers through social media. The interesting question becomes, will they want engagement features in an SMA platform or monitoring and analytics in a CRM platform?

Adding process to SMA
From an SMA perspective, process management is an obvious addition to social media monitoring capabilities—once you find a customer with a problem, you want to fix the problem. Scale that beyond a handful of customers, and you need a system that can track your progress. Pieces to consider:

1. Discovery
   Finding relevant mentions of a company is a fundamental building block of SMA.

2. Tagging
   While we're in an analytics platform, let's assign some metadata to the item for future analysis.

3. Triage
   Decide which items require a response and prioritize. You might filter on sentiment, topic, or influence. Some items might receive an automated response at this stage.

4. Assignment, delegation and reassignment
   Who owns the response? It's not just for accountability, ownership relieves others of spending time on an item. The system should be able to handle ownership changes to support escalation and assignment to specialists.

5. Track to closure
   Classic customer service management—what's the status of an open item? Open-item analysis gives management a tool to manage workload and understand current incidents (the metadata from step 2 will be useful).

6. Measure results
   Now, we're back in the analytics realm and can look at the results through customer-service and media-analysis lenses.
   

The workflow features in some SMA platforms support this type of process, which can also be used in media relations or other contexts (action items aren't just for customer service). Other vendors provide tagging that can be kludged into workflow features. So you could choose to build your processes on an SMA platform.

Adding social media to CRM
The heavyweights of CRM are beginning to add social media features to their products, creating new options. Their existing installations will help them, especially in more conservative customers.

• Salesforce announced Twitter support in Service Cloud, including analytics and interaction. Service Cloud already promised interaction with online communities and social networks.

• SAP demoed Twitter analytics based on BusinessObjects Text Analysis during the Business Suite 7 launch (via KD Nuggets).

• Oracle will have integration of Clarabridge Smart Response with Siebel CRM this fall.
  

You got peanut butter on my chocolate!
Larry Dignan says of SAP's Twitter demo,

...it does show an increasing amount of integration with social networking tools. If corporate data is merged with the anecdotal tips from customers and partners there could be real insight.

This Holy Grail of insight is what a lot of vendors–Salesforce, Oracle and SAP–are chasing.

I've said that opposing viewpoints over human vs. computer analysis of social media content don't constitute a debate, because I've never heard both sides at the same time and place. Now, thanks to an email exchange between Mike Daniels (Report International) and Mark Westaby (Spectrum) for Research magazine, I have to stop using that little observation. It's now—finally—a debate.

Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate

After an exchange of the usual points and counterpoints (speed, accuracy, sarcasm, synonyms...), the discussion really gets going in the comments. Mark makes a point that may summarize why I find this stuff interesting:

Automated analysis should not be viewed as a replacement for human analysis. Rather, it is a different method that is opening up entirely new and tremendously exciting ways of analysing data.

The usual debate: a closed question
If you're looking at it from a media analysis perspective, this question comes down to quantity and quality. How much media can you analyze in a way that you will trust? The new technologies will let you analyze more media sources faster, if you accept the results. In a world bursting with new publishers, that could be a good thing, and that's where we find the usual—reminding myself to use the word now—debate.

Moving to an open-ended question
Speed and scale benefits come from the application of new tools to old questions—not a bad thing, but not terribly interesting. Coming at it from another angle, the rise of automated analysis suggests a question about the removal of obstacles: What would you do with online information if you could "read" all of it? We're seeing some early ideas; what else is it good for?

Which question are you thinking about? Is "good enough for media analysis" your standard, or does the prospect of a different set of capabilities (with new tradeoffs, yes) inspire new ideas?

Update: T.R. Fitz-Gibbon picks up the discussion on the Networked Insights blog: Social Media Analytics, Humans vs. Machines.

Photo by Narisa.

Do you monitor social media for mentions of your brand? Is that all you're looking for? If so, you're just getting started. You'll get more out of your listening activities if you cast a wider net.

If you've heard me talk about listening in social media, you know that I apply an expansive definition to the metaphor. It starts with basic monitoring to detect items that need a response, but the really interesting part is when you start to think of listening for its intelligence-gathering value. Given all of this public sharing of fact and opinion, what can you discover that will help your business?

1. Customers talking to you
   Call it Social CRM, customer service, or just meeting the customer where she is—if your customers are trying to reach you through social media, you want to be there. As for metrics and analysis, consider rolling the data from these contacts into a broader voice of the customer activity for a comprehensive view of what customers are telling you directly.

2. People talking about you
   Everyone in social media preaches this point. If people (not just customers) are talking about you and making it easy for you by using your brand names, you should be paying attention.

3. People talking about your competitors
   This one's easy to figure out, too. You might find immediate opportunities or longer-term insights, but you will find something useful in what people have to say about the competition.

4. People talking about your customers, suppliers and partners
   No business exists in a vacuum—who's critical to your success? If your customers are businesses, what can you learn by listening to their customers? What issues in your supply chain may affect you?

5. People talking about your market without mentioning names
   Tom O'Brien likes to point out that most conversations don't mention brands. Lots of conversations about your market are probably happening without mentioning brand names. If you're looking for insights—and not just complaints that need a response—you'll want to follow these conversations, even if that makes the queries harder to set up.

Update: Here's a twist: how about a category for what your employees are saying? Not necessarily as a Big Brother, monitoring the employees thing, but as a management of company communications thing?

Since the recent New York Times piece on sentiment analysis, it seems everyone has an opinion on sentiment analysis (how appropriate, yes?). Without actually counting, I'm getting the impression that the overall score is negative, although with the colloquialisms and subtle innuendo, I'm not always sure. :-)

This is a round-up post, so I'm going to start linking to posts I've seen in a minute, but first, we have a problem: a buzzword alignment problem on what to call companies who monitor and analyze social media content. The article uses sentiment analysis to refer to the industry, but sentiment analysis is better understood as just one of the types of analysis used in the field.

This industry has a history of picking up a new label almost every time someone new writes about it. Forrester Research has called it brand monitoring and listening platforms, depending on which year and analyst you ask. I picked social media analysis when I had to choose, but even that is more limited than the state of the art tools and services. I don't have an answer to that one that makes me happy just yet.

Scoring the conversation
Oh, OK, I'll count. Really, how could I resist? Isn't this the obvious way to collect the posts on this topic?

Positive

• Sentiment First, Ask Questions Later, Joseph Fiore (RepuMetrix)
  
• Text Analytics for Ye of Little Faith, Manya Mayes (SAS)

• Sentiment Analysis, Scott Berkun
  
• Sentiment analysis for online content: Honest?, Urs Gattiker (CyTRAP Labs)
  
• La tarte à la crème du sentiment analysis, Guilhem Fouetillou (Linkfluence)
  
• Sentiment analysis crap in social media, Laurent François (Ogilvy)
  
• Is Sentiment Analysis Reliable? Andy Beal (Trackur)

• Sentiment mining: new term, new field. A new web? Claude Théoret (Exvisu)
  
• The sentiment analysis party has plenty of elbow room, Christine Sierra (Lexalytics)
  
• Sentiment Analysis, Eric Friedman (Union Square Ventures)
  

This list is an example of document-level sentiment analysis by a human. Anyone want to make the case that it might not be 100% accurate?

One thing about sentiment analysis: it really stirs up the opinions. Apparently, it's good for attention, too, because yesterday's post has gotten a lot of it. So what is it about automated analysis that's so controversial, and what can human analysts do to offset the advantages of automation?

Automation offers four basic benefits:

• Scale
  Keeping up with all of the relevant conversations as volume grows.

• Speed
  Processing new items sooner; computers "read" faster than humans read.

• Consistency
  Software doesn't get less accurate with fatigue or mood, and it doesn't consider contextual knowledge if it's not supposed to. It just follows instructions, over and over.

• Availability
  Automated systems don't sleep, so they won't be the limiting factor in determing your 24/7/365 operations plan.

Competing with automated systems
Scale and speed are related, and the hands-on approach is simple: add more people to the process. Speed (latency) will still be limited by the ability of your analysts to read quickly. You won't compete in the sub-second latency market, but you can get ahead of the daily-update crowd.

Consistency in human scoring comes down to training and process. I won't pretend to teach the media analysis pros how to do that job, but it's going to be more formal than the eyeball ratings I gave out yesterday.

Availability is an interesting challenge, but it's not the first time companies have addressed the issue. If you're going to work through nights and weekends, your choices are to create some undesirable jobs at home or switch to follow-the-sun operations overseas.

The rise of offshore outsourcers
Combine the need for a lot of people (analysts) with the desirability of around-the-clock operations, and a lot of people will reach the same conclusion. From the beginning of the social media analysis business, some of the better-known vendors have had development and analyst groups in India. Now, I'm starting to hear from companies that are offering offshore human analyst services as a specialized service.

The interesting bit is that they're unbundling the content coding, so clients (or vendors) can add human-powered sentiment analysis to any platform that provides user coding or tagging.

This won't be an easy group to track. It's largely a traditional outsourcing approach, and any company that provides full-service social media analysis using human analysts could unbundle the coding piece, too. But if clients end up selecting human analysis over the automated version, expect more offshoring of the manual effort.

Find a topic that a lot of people care about, and you'll find a great pool of data for social media analysis companies to use in a demonstration of their work. Over the last few years, we've seen examples based on Super Bowl ads, American Idol, and national elections. Now it's healthcare reform in the US, where discussions are—uh, generously seasoned with sentiment. Just the thing to show off your analysis chops.

Here's what's shown up so far:

• Obama Health Care Speech: What Did Twitter Think? (Crimson Hexagon)

• Reactions to Obama’s Health Care Speech to Congress (Echometrix)

• How Obama lost the healthcare debate online (Market Sentinel)

• Healthcare debate analysis (MotiveQuest)
  

photo by Rob Stemple.

I'm working on a theme that's all about expanding our idea of listening—it's so much more than defensive monitoring, but we need to get beyond first steps. After the last post, Sam Flemming commented on the importance of distinct terms for communicating outside of the bubble, and he's right. After we expand the concept of listening, we need to break it into manageable pieces. Fortunately, the pieces will look familiar.

As a set of activities, listening breaks down into these five modes:

• Searching
  Search is so familiar that we don't always think about it, but look at the advice on getting started in social media. That first step: find out what people are saying, where they meet—you know, the 5 Ws—when you do that as a snapshot, that's search. Don't neglect the value of familiar methods.

• Monitoring
  The usual starting point for a discussion of listening. Through automated methods (typically a dashboard or RSS reader), find and read new posts, comments, tweets, etc. that are relevant to your business. Focus on individual items for action.

• Alerting
  Similar to monitoring, but the system notifies you through email, instant messaging or text when a new item is discovered. Alerts can also be based on measurement thresholds, such as a sudden increase in negative commentary. No requirement to revisit the platform to receive alerts.

• Measuring
  Add a quantitative element to monitoring. Whatever your choice of metrics or measurement silo, measurement is about aggregation and numbers. For the purposes of this list, I use measurement to refer to the generation of regularly updated metrics.

• Mining
  Add a quantitative element to search, and you have data mining, which looks for meaningful patterns in archival data. Although it has a lot in common with measurement (as used above), I'm seeing different practices and benefits that justify separating the two.

For example, if you're doing routine measurement—you're looking at meaningful metrics on a regular basis—is there an opportunity to find different value by taking a mining approach, looking for insight in a snapshot of historical data? A slim distinction, but the point is to step back, walk around a bit, and look at the data from another angle.

Actually, lots of other angles, but more on that later.

Photo by bdu