Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Eyes on the Future May 2nd

We invite you to check out Eyes on the Future this Saturday, May 2nd, from 10-11am on Rochester radio station 1180AM WHAM.

We will be covering “How Businesses Are Using Social Media”. Our own Aaron Newman, President and Founder of Techrigy, will be on a discussion panel with Neil Hair, Assistant Professor of Marketing at RIT and Susan Barnes, Professor of Communications at RIT.

You can call in to ask questions at 1-800-295-1180. We are hoping to hear from you!

Also, a must-attend event in Rochester is going on the same day – Imagine RIT. Running from 10am-5pm on Saturday, go check it out. Here’s a link for more details: http://www.rit.edu/imagine/.

Webinar: Questions Answered

As many of you know, We held our first webinar on December 16th. I believe the official turnout was 53 viewers (pretty good for our first one). We allowed viewers to ask questions to panelists during the webinar, but we had some mix ups and they went unanswered, so I wanted to take a few minutes to address them.

*If you would like to download the video (windows only) and slideshow, visit the Techrigy Webinar Page.

Question: I’d like to hear more about exporting the permalinks for community managers, as mentioned

Answer: The View Results page of SM2 allows you to export results in XLS format. You have full control of what aspects are exported, such as: Blog URL, Permalink, SM2 Categories, Author Name, etc.)

Question: What do you do if you are Motrin and you know you have negative responses but your tool [SM2] doesn’t show anything negative?

Answer: It is important to understand that sentiment is a human characteristic. A computer cannot identify tone, sarcasm, slang, etc. This being said, measuring sentiment in your SM2 results will take a bit of leg work. A result with the phrase “Tom sucks down a soda” will be marked as negative, because it has “Tom sucks” in it.

If you know a result is negative or positive and it does not appear in the appropriate category, you will need to edit the result and manually add the sentiment. Unfortunately, there is no software available that can guarantee accurate sentiment analysis across the board.

Question: We had 10,000 views from the Us but your map tool shows only 2 sites in the US.

Answer: This question is a little harder to answer without some more specific information from the user.

A lack of input from the author could explain this issue. My blog, for example, shows up in SM2 as an Arizona blog. I am however, in New York. The issue here is that I haven’t put any information in my blog that tells SM2 otherwise, and my hosting company is in Arizona. So the SM2 results are correct from a technical aspect.

Question: Are you able to identify influencers?

Answer: We are able to identify influencers, and we display this as “Popularity”. Popularity is assigned based on a number of sources, including but not limited to Technorati, Alexa, Compete, Google Page Rank, Inbound Links, Comment Counts, and Followers (Twitter).

If you have more questions, or would like more info than given in this post, feel free to leave some comments on this post.

Using SM2 Themes to Track Conversation

Using SM2 themes is a great way to visually see a whole conversation in the social media world. I used my SM2 account to search my Twitter account (bobbo0521). It pulled back 693 results. After my search, I ran a theme to see the trends in my conversation.

We have 2 themes in SM2: Basic and Advanced. A basic theme will take popular words or terms from content, and display them as a Cloud. An advanced theme detects groupings of topics or themes. An advanced theme graph will provide insight by displaying groups of blogs clustered around common themes and the relationships between the clusters.

I prefer the basic theme, as the visual representation is more useful to me. Below is an image of my Twitter Theme.

(The bigger, bolder words appear more often than the others in my Twitter conversations)

Some of my more popular words include “blog”, “plugin” and “wordpress”. If you drilldown into the “Wordpress” term, I made a few posts complaining about wordpress issues, and asking for help. If you were a wordpress employee, this would give you the ability to see that I was having issues, and directly engage to resolve the problem.

This cloud also displays other Twitter users that I most often communicate with. The value here is not only knowing what I am saying, but who I am talking with, which would allow you to engage in a conversation with a broader spectrum of users.

For my Advanced Theme Graph I chose a search on Woopra, an up and coming web analytics tool (my twitter example above doesn’t have enough variation to really show the value of an advanced theme).

Here we see a cluster in the bottom right which contains “wordpress”, “posts”, and “plugin” keywords. Another cluster contains “blog”, “wordpress” and “site”. These two clusters are relatively close to each other, signifying that they have content that is similar.

At the top of the graph we have a small cluster with the keywords “search”, “back”, and “blog”. The distance between this and the previous two indicates that the results have little in common. Glancing over the keywords, the bottom/right of this graph seems to be mostly conversation about how Woopra works with websites. The top/left of the graph is conversation about how Woopra compares to competitors.

The value of theme graphs is visual representation of online conversation. Using a basic graph you can see the individual words that are most used in a conversation. Using an advanced graph gives the ability to view a conversation by common topics.

New Techrigy Blog

Hey everyone, I wanted to take a minute and introduce myself and tell you of some new things going on with the Techrigy Blog.

I’m Bob, and I’m the web designer here at Techrigy. Martin came to me a week or two ago and asked if we could upgrade our company blog. We started adding all our employees to the blog so you will start to see posts from more people, dabbling in more areas.

You may notice some changes in the look of the blog as we hash through some different ideas. We should be done by mid-week!