Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Chris Abraham brings Techrigy SM2 to life on YouTube

There are definitely some challenges to showing off a powerful tool like SM2. When we do so, we try to:

• put it in your context
• talk about how to personalize it to your needs
• share ideas that will help grow your business

Chris Abraham has put a video on YouTube where he takes us on a tour of SM2. It’s great hearing his take on using the tool. He emphasizes how easy it is to use. And I totally enjoy his sense of humor!

Chris makes some great points about not being shy in digging around through the information. I love how he shares his exploration and encourages you to do so too. We welcome you to do similarly with the Freemium version of SM2.

We’d love to see your videos of how you use our tool!

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!

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

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.

AdAge: Survey says few CMOs think they’re effectively tracking social media

This article should be viewed an indicator of an approaching tipping point in social media monitoring and marketing:

“The survey of 400 executives found that 56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth; 59% don’t compensate any employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction; and only 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve customer complaints.”

“One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said marketing should take the lead in overseeing the customer experience and satisfaction. And he said addressing deficiencies in tracking and analyzing consumer feedback and buzz may be the key way CMOs can stake a claim to leadership.”

“From our standpoint, if there’s anybody who needs to be accountable for the customer experience, it’s the CMO,” Mr. Neale-May said. “Clearly what marketing needs to do to cover a lot of ground we’ve lost in the organization is more analytics, predictive modeling, and data integration and aggregation.”

That’s exactly what SM2 was designed to do.

(From Advertising Age)

(BTW, AdAge, why do you have a splash page? Don’t you know that it kills traffic by 50%?)

Why do I get duplicate results in SM2?

This is a common question and a legitimate concern- however it is inevitable that you’ll get some duplicates in your SM2 searches. Here’s why:

If you enter multiple keyword phrases in SM2 and a source like a blog post or Tweet has more than one keyword in it then SM2 will pick the source up multiple times, once for each keyword it contains. So if I’m tracking ‘Techrigy’ and ’social media monitoring’ as separate keyword phrases and a Twitter Tweet contains both, I’ll see that Tweet twice.

Reblogging and ReTweeting can also generate what look like duplicate results, however if you look at the permalink URLs in View Results you’ll see that they are different. The content is repeated, however the source is not the same. It can be useful to see these because they give you an idea how rapidly and widely a conversation is being disseminated.

SM2 from Techrigy Gets Emotional: Sentiment, Tone and Emotion in Social Media

SM2 has always had a sentiment analysis tool designed to help users track positive/negative opinion on brands across conversations in social media. This week we took the sentiment analysis to an entirely new level by adding tools that measure tone and emotion.

Tone measures the overall tone of a social media conversation on a scale from very positive to somewhat positive to neutral to somewhat negative to very negative. With this tool you can now view results sorted by these criteria and combine them with other metrics like Popularity. If you are doing reputation management, for example, you might want to focus on high Popularity sources that are very negative for your initial engagement efforts.

Emotional Tone is a different kind of look. We offer the ability to view results that show strong emotional and even physical responses:

The emotive states we cover include:

Anger, Sadness, Social, Family, Friend, Anxiety, Bio, Body, Sexual, Ingest, Achieve, Home, Money, Religious, Death and Leisure-related. For example, Ingest-related would include references to eating, drinking, dieting, etc. The chart above is from a search on Obama’s Renew America campaign done with the AD Council so it accurately has emphasis on Social and Achieve-related emotional tone. The initiative is a volunteer service so those talking about it in social media are generally very positive and interested in the social and achievement aspects of the campaign.

As we continue to add additional features we’re always interested in feedback, ideas and examples of how you are using SM2 and what would be useful to you. Just shoot a note to support at techrigy dot com.

SlideShare: Techrigy’s CEO Aaron Newman on Social Media Marketing 101

SM2 Social Media Monitoring Sources Updated

SM2 is built on a constantly expanding database of all social media conversations that we refer to as our Social Media Warehouse. We started collecting, via a variety of methods, in 2007 and have what we believe is the largest database of social media conversations and associated meta-data (demographics, location, popularity, etc.). The Warehouse currently has over 1 billion records and we are adding millions daily.
The sources (which we are constantly updating and adding to) include:

• All major and minor blog platforms including WorkPress, Typepad, Live Journal, Blogger, Blogspot, Sphinn8r etc., including comments
• Any other blogs with RSS feeds, ping servers, etc.
• Any publicly available social network content including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Ning, LinkedIn and more
• Any comments and meta-data associated with user-generated rich content like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, etc.
• All public wikis
• Non-password protected boards, forums and review sites including everything from BoardReader
• Yelp
• Microblogs including Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca
• Commenting systems: Backtype, Disqus, Intense Debate

As new sources appear they are incorporated into our collection systems.