Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Getting Techcrunched: “Like Google Alerts with dual-overhead cams”

It’s been a pretty crazy day today at Techrigy world headquarters. I was greeted this morning by 1400 emails in my inbox, about ten times the usual. Turns out that that Jeff Widman over at Techcrunch had given us a nice present in the form of an extremely generous review.

Having been through this before with another company I knew what to expect but my expectations have been surpassed- thousands of new SM2 Freemium signups and inquiries from some impressive potential customers.

The downside is a temporary slow-down in the Freemium searches due to the very high traffic we’re experiencing. We expect this to be back to normal in the next 24 hours. If you just joined us thanks for your patience!

Kudos to Connie Benson, 2009 Fellow of the Society for New Communications!

Our own Community Strategist, Connie Benson, has been selected as a 2009 Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). I’ll let her share the details but big congratulations are order for Connie!

Here’s a snippet about Connie’s plans for her fellowship year:

“During 2009, my research project will focus on how organizations are using social media monitoring, the related metrics and best practices and standards. This will be part of a larger collaboration project with the Web Analytics Association.”

Head over to her post and join the party going on over there in Connie’s blogosphere.

Seth Godin: Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising

It’s all social and social is exponential:

“The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they’re the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It’s not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can’t convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the Super Bowl.”

Seth Godin from a Wired interview.

Techrigy News: SM2 from Techrigy now offers Real Time Alerts in your inbox

First in a Series of SM2 Advanced Workflow Solutions Offer Users the Ability To Engage in Social Media Conversations in Real Time

February 4, 2009 Rochester, NY Techrigy is pleased to announce that SM2, our best in class social media monitoring solution, has been enhanced with the addition of SM2 Alerts. With Alerts you can set up a keyword search in SM2, enter email address(s) for those you want to receive the Alerts and start getting new social media results in real time.

“Alerts are critical to developing a powerful engagement strategy in social media,” says Techrigy founder Aaron Newman. “With SM2 Alerts you can develop lead generation models, manage risk and reputation, track mentions of competitors, products and more- all in real time. Alerts come into your email inbox as they are posted in social media applications like Twitter. This gives you the ability to respond quickly with relevant answers and input.”

SM2 Alerts are the first in a series of product enhancements that focus on managing Workflow for social media engagement with SM2. SM2 already provides the ability to search very large data sets of historical social media conversations, to analyze those results in great detail and  directly engage with people discussing your brands and product online. Our Advanced WorkFlow Solutions now give your team the ability to manage the engagement process within SM2.

About Techrigy, Inc.
Founded in 2006 by Aaron Newman and Jay Mari, Techrigy ’s SM2 is the premier social media monitoring and analysis tool for public relations and marketing professionals. Designed to provide visibility into social media for anyone managing brands and reputations online, SM2 combines a massive database of online conversations with state of the art search and analysis tools.

More information at www.techrigy.com
Freemium Version of SM2 at http://sm2.techrigy
Techrigy Blog at http://blog.techrigy.com
Follow us on Twitter @techrigysm2
585-586-0160
Martin Edic, Director of Marketing

Social media is the new marketing nexus

Joe Marchese of socialvibe has a great Mediapost column on why social media agencies will become the new Agencies of Record for brands.

I take his prediction a bit further in my comment to his post:

Social is becoming the central hub that connects marketing, customer support, product development and reputation management. This is a primary change in the way companies interconnect with markets and customers and the new agency of record has to be prepared to wade into all of these business divisions and unite them. My guess is we’re going to see an entirely new agency model emerge that is not hampered by the silos you describe. Among our customers we’re seeing the early adoption and growing understanding of this new nexus- and interestingly most are either PR or ‘digital’ agencies. Very little uptake with the media-focused agencies so far. As with PPC/SEM/SEO adoption, they tend to lag a bit in adopting new models. This time around lagging could prove disastrous because the move into social media is happening very quickly

Twitter activity during the Super Bowl, a visualization

This is very cool.

Next Iteration of Social Software: Automated Connection Mining Software could form ad hoc social groups

This would be a very interesting functionality to emulate down the road:

IBM looks at a matrix of connections across various social platforms and tells how valuable a connection a suggested friend would be to help you manage friend requests.
A little speculation…

Next stage of the social web: development of cross-platform communities based on shared interests that are ‘discovered’ by social ‘connection mining’ software.

Comparing the SM2 Freemium Account and SM2’s paid Professional Accounts

As part of Techrigy’s outreach to the growing social media marketing community we offer a Freemium (free) version of SM2, our best in class social media monitoring and analytics solution. SM2 Freemium is a fully functional version of the Pro paid versions of SM2 with several minor differences:

• Keywords are limited to five keyword phrases. Pro Accounts have unlimited keywords. Both accounts have unlimited search Profiles.
• The number of Results (conversations) you can have in your SM2 Freemium Account is limited to 1000 while the Pro Accounts start at 20,000 results. With both types of accounts results can be cleared and new searches run.
• Freemium Accounts do not support Advanced Boolean search operators. They do support the use of the AND operator and excludes.
• Freemium Accounts do not have some of the board and review site sources included in the Pro Accounts.

We designed the Freemium SM2 version to provide robust search and analysis capabilities nearly identical to our paid versions. They carry no expiration date and there are no limits on users. Freemium accounts are an excellent way to evaluate SM2 by monitoring small brands and campaigns or for sampling results and analyzing those sample sets.
Freemium users considering an upgrade should contact us for a product demo and a fully featured Pro Test Account at sales@techrigy.com.

Twitter lead generation workflow with SM2 Alerts

I thought I’d write about how we use Twitter in conjunction with SM2’s Alerts function to generate interest, book demos and communicate with people in the social media marketing community, in other words, for lead generation.

First, we only focus our attention on Twitterers who have shown an interest in our specific business sector, social media monitoring, analysis and engagement. We don’t pitch people who haven’t identified themselves as having that interest. We did this by setting up an SM2 Profile with a set of keywords that target mentions of our business, our competitors and keywords associated with social media like ‘Brand Monitoring’, ’social media measurement’, etc. The search runs constantly. We then set up SM2 Alerts in the application. These Alerts are sent to the in-boxes of our team members as keywords are mentioned in real time. With Twitter these mentions are captured as they occur with very little lag.

When I get an Alert it often contains many duplicate results because multiple keywords are mentioned in the same Tweet, however even without dupes we get a lot of Alerts throughout the day. I go through the Alerts as do our sales team, our CEO Aaron Newman and our Community Strategist Connie Benson. We respond to questions, offer demos, etc., generally trying to add value as we respond.

Is this effective? In a word, extremely effective. We are booking many meetings daily via Twitter. It is so effective that I believe that this is the future of marketing and will replace many outdated models of lead generation including spamming email lists, broadcasting ads that have no context, cold calling etc. Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO and SEM and social media engagement are the marketing communication and sales tools of the future- and we have them today.

Techrigy News: Techrigy’s SM2 Social Media Warehouse Hits One Billion Conversations Saved

For Immediate Release

Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Leader Adding 10 Million Conversations Daily from Blogs, Twitter, Wikis, Social Networks, User-Generated Content including YouTube, Boards, Forums and More

January 20, 2009, Rochester, NY Social media hit the tipping point in 2008 with millions of people carrying on billions of conversations across the globe. From quick updates on Twitter to breaking news on blogs, social media has become the de facto communications layer of the Internet. Today Techrigy Inc, developers of SM2, the leading social media monitoring and analytics solution, announced that their historical database of social media activity has collected over one billion conversations.

Known as the Social Media Warehouse, this database comprises a huge array of conversations, each with up to 35 fields of associated meta-data including profile information, sentiment and tone, demographics, links and much more.

“Understanding this much data and how it affects your brands requires a powerful search and analytics tool”, says Techrigy co-founder and CEO Aaron Newman. “When a keyword search has the potential to uncover hundreds of thousands of brand mentions, marketing managers and agencies need to be able to quickly parse those results. That’s why we built SM2. It provides visibility into social media.”

The one billion mark is only the beginning. SM2 adds tens of millions of new conversations daily, creating an essential resource for understanding what people are saying about brands and reputations. Social Media is the new marketing medium and entirely new marketing models are being built around it. Techrigy’s rapidly growing warehouse of data reflects the dynamism of social media:

• Over 140 million Twitter tweets
• Over 800 million blog posts
• Millions of social network conversations, wiki entries, reviews, etc.
• Meta data and millions of comments associated with rich content sites like YouTube and Flickr

And much more.
It’s an entire universe of marketing insights that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

About Techrigy, Inc.
Founded in 2006 by Aaron Newman and Jay Mari, Techrigy ’s SM2 is the premier social media monitoring and analysis tool for public relations and marketing professionals. Designed to provide visibility into social media for anyone managing brands and reputations online, SM2 combines a massive database of online conversations with state of the art search and analysis tools.

More information at www.techrigy.com
Freemium Version of SM2 at http://sm2.techrigy
Techrigy Blog at http://blog.techrigy.com
Follow us on Twitter @techrigysm2
585-586-0160
Martin Edic, Director of Marketing