Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Facebook adds 20 million new users since December 10th

I thought it was my imagination- A lot of my friends have joined Facebook recently and most of us are tailend babyboomers but is this a trend? Now AllyInsider confirms my suspicions: FB is blowing away the other social networks.

Their stats:

• The site just crossed 150 million monthly active users.
• That’s more people than there are living in Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
• 50 million of those users are new since the summer.
• 20 million are new since December 10.
• 75 million use the site every single day.

These are astounding figures. What they mean is that Facebook, along with Twitter, has become a de facto global communication platform. From a marketing perspective this is fascinating, however Facebook is very closed (as it should be, IMHO) so it cannot be viewed as a media source.

SM2 collects both Twitter and Facebook, however because we only collect publicly accessible data, our ability to capture Facebook is limited to those conversations that are public. With Twitter we collect public Tweets but not Direct Messages.

One of the differentiation points for SM2 is our Social Media Warehouse. This is our grandiose database of everything social going back to 2007. We don’t just collect conversations based on our users’ searches, we collect everything. Yes, everything (I know from demos that I am required to repeat this at least three times before it sinks in ;-)). That means that if we keep this up we’re going to have an historical record, with meta data, of a huge amount of global communications going forward. The warehouse currently has over 1 billion (with a B) conversations with up to 40 fields of meta data (demographics, location, popularity, reach, URLs, etc.) for each.

If you or your clients are still on the fence about social media please look at the numbers above again. The world has changed.

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.

Techrigy SM2 has the most Robust Analytics & Reporting

I frequently refer to SM2 as offering ‘the most robust analytics & reporting’.

After three months of working with SM2 it’s easy to express what makes it outstanding in terms of social media monitoring tools. The breadth & flexibility of the tool become apparent as one starts to use it.

Search Structures can range from Simple to Complex

• Categories allow the ability to create ‘buckets’ of information
• Create top level categories
• Subdivide your results into categories that are as granular as needed
• Ability to create customized categories that can be trained to add to them automatically
• Ability to add custom sources
• Ability to ignore URL’s

Results are Easy to Use & Actionable

• Full Historical Data - no special account needed
• Automated Sentiment - results are rated based on a lexicon dictionary
• In-depth metadata for each result
• Results provided in a number of ways making them immediately actionable.

Analysis of the Conversation

• Create word clouds based on themes & author tags
• Compare trends of various categories & charted results show velocity of the conversation
• Compare time periods to chart conversations from month to month or quarter to quarter

Reporting

• Exportable to pdf & html
• Data is exportable to xls
• Daily reports delivered by email or RSS
• Summary Reports available (delivered weekly by email if chosen)

Additional

• Freemium version available - 1,000 results and 5 keywords
• Option to White Label
• No charge for additional users per account
• API is available

You’re welcome to try the Freemium version. If you’d like to have a demo of the Pro version which includes advanced searches and unlimited keywords, send us an email at sales@techrigy.com

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.

Keyword Phrase Refinement in SM2: Some Basics

SM2 is a complex piece of software that accesses a large database of social media results. The key to accessing its power lies in the way you set up your keyword phrases. This is why every user of SM2, including the Freemium users, gets offered a live demo after you sign up. No folks, it’s not strictly a sales call! We understand that helping our users become power users is not only good business, it helps you take full advantage of SM2’s extensive analytics capabilities.

When setting up your initial keywords you open a new Profile, name it after a client, brand or campaign and then you are offered a keyword set-up wizard that walks you through the process of choosing your keyword phrases. You can skip the wizard and simply add them yourself which can be quicker for basic searches. Here are some tips to help you get the most relevant results with SM2:

• Avoid overly broad terms like ‘Google’. You’re going to fill up your account with irrelevant results. Instead use the AND modifier to refine your search like this: “Google” AND “search wiki” (use the quotes, spaces and caps like that). This will only bring back results that include both of those terms.
• If you are using simple keyword phrases and the AND operator, use the Basic search option. Advanced search gives the ability to use operators like NEAR, OR and combinations like: “Google” AND (”search wiki” OR “knol”).
• If you put keyword phrases on their own lines rather than using OR, each becomes a category you can use to sort results in the Reports area in SM2. This is useful for comparing trends, separating out results for a single keyword phrase, etc.
• Keyword phrases are not case sensitive
• Keywords entered in another language will bring back results in that language, however the application remains in English only at this point. Sentiment Analysis in English-only, however we are adding German and will be adding other language dictionaries in the near future.

We monitor the keywords our users are searching. So you may get an email from us suggesting changes that will bring back better results. We also provide assistance in setting up your keywords as part of the testing process for those evaluating our Professional Accounts. Just send us a note at support at…

Social media measurement business models: Human Resources and Recruiting

First in a series on building business around social media monitoring and analysis:

As I talk to people all day about social media and monitoring I’m spending a lot of time thinking about business models, ways companies can use these tools to build their business. One application I have thought is the concept of a vetting service for checking out potential new hires. If you’re in HR or recruiting this could be a valuable service to add to things like background checks and drug testing. Using a service like SM2 you’d enter the candidate’s name and location(s), former employers, etc., into Sm2’s keyword set-up and then parse the results for any troubling (or exemplary) behavior. Kind of like Googling them only seeking responses from social media.

Hiring the wrong person can be very costly in terms of training time, exposure to risk, time to rehire for the position, etc. This service could save employers a lot of time and money.

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The fluid nature of Social Media

Alisa has an insightful post on how conversations in social media are streams rather than locations. This ilustrates a fundemental reason why a monitoring service like SM2 is very different from an indexing service like Google. In essence we are collecting all the information that people are assembling into streams and enabling users to follow streams as they develop- streams that include their brands and reputations. Ordinarily you could only follow a few select users or groups because of time and resource constraints. With SM2 you have a tool that helps track all the streams and analyzes their content, sources and impact in real time.

We also hold our collection effectively forever (that’s the plan) in its original instance. If you Tweet then delete that Tweet, we still have it and if you reference a keyword that one of our users is seeking we will serve up that piece of conversational history along with any available public meta-data you’ve volunteered, any associated data connected with your Tweet by others and we offer up a results page that tells our user quite a bit about you.

Social media is fluid, however SM2 is effectively taking constant snapshots of that flow and and making it possible to return to any given moment.

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• How many results will there be? How big an account do I need?

How many results will there be? How big an account do I need?

These questions are understandably common given that our pricing is based on total number of results in your account. I hear them everyday as I work with prospective customers who are doing proposals for social media monitoring (yes, I do help with developing your business model around SM2- shoot me a note if you’d like to know more).

Given that even a moderately well-known brand can generate large numbers of results, it is important to have some idea of what you’re getting into before you commit to a plan. We have developed a tool to help with this.

First let me define ’search results’ within SM2. Search results are any mention of your keyword(s) in social media. They might be a blog post, a Tweet, a comment on a wall, a forum post, a wiki entry, etc. However, a search result is much more than that. It is also a set of data points that we collect that are associated with that result. These include all kinds of things including any demographic info, tags and categories, Alexa, Technorati and PageRank data, geo-location, etc. Up to 35 fields depending on what’s available in publically accessible places (we don’t violate EULAs).

This is important because we use that data to build our analysis of your results.

Back to the estimator tool. When you’re planning a social media monitoring project you can contact us and we’ll run your keyword phrases through the tool (it’s internal) to get you a ballpark estimate of how many results we have in our ever-expanding database aka the ’social media warehouse’. This gives you, and your client or team, an idea of the expense required to accurately measure the full response in social media- before you commit to a plan.

The wave is breaking

As we start into fall and summer wanes the wave that has been building in social media is about to break and flood us all. To beat the metaphor, the flood is the realization that social media is a critically important business communication tool that isn’t going away. More and more senior marketing people are stating that social strategies are becoming mainstream marketing communications tools for brand development, PR, customer support and satisfaction, and community-building. Companies like Dell are making it central to their marketing efforts. The key word here is ‘central’. This is not a tactic to be delegated to the hinterlands, it is the next iteration of global business communications.

What does this mean?

It means that there is the beginning of a move out of the early adoption phase. In that famous bell curve detailed in Crossing the Chasm new ideas have to break out of the early adopter phase to begin growth into the mainstream. Social media started as something used by an elite few bloggers and nascent social networks created for students. In business the adoption was very slow to take root as many simply questioned the reasons for doing a corporate blog or building an online user-community.

It took some well-publicized PR disasters to wake up the first of the big mainstream businesses to dive into blogging. Dell had well-publicized customer support problems that spread around the blogosphere long before they realized they had a problem. Their response, though belated, was a real turnaround and they now are fully engaged with social media.

I suspect that the turning point is upon us based on my admittedly parochial view of things. 99% of Techrigy’s marketing is social and much of it has been taking place for the first time during this summer when our target markets are typically in vacation mode. Yet, I’m seeing a strong response that is growing as we swing back into fall work mode. Our free community users are increasingly coming to us for professional accounts and service. Agencies are building us into pitches and the brands we’re tracking are growing in stature. Our recent crossing of the half billion mark for results in our social media warehouse is another clue that there is a lot of activity out there.

May we live in interesting times…

SM2 is not a search engine

We had an interesting conversation here at Techrigy headquarters about our technology with a guest who came by to learn about what we do. And we ran into a common misconception about SM2: That it is some kind of search engine. While it has some search capabilities, search is not its primary function.

Search solves a problem: finding specific answers to queries.

SM2 solves different problems: Finding references to specific terms across social media conversations and content and understanding who is having those conversations, what they’re saying and why. Unlike search, which seeks to supply the best answer(s), SM2 offers up all the possible results and then provides tools for organizing and understanding all of the relevant results.

SM2 has two components. There is a collection system that goes out and collects new social media results on an ongoing basis and stores those results in our Social Media Warehouse. Each result, which might be a blog post, a Tweet, meta data from a YouTube video, etc., is parsed for various data within that result. This data includes public information about the person who created the result such as location, gender, age, etc, any tagging or categorization the user has provided, things like DNS records and IP addresses, URLs, Alexa and Technorati data, etc. Each result can have up to 30 or more data fields in SM2.

The warehouse grows every day. We recently bypassed the 500 million results level and will rapidly hit one billion results as social media participation explodes. Each of those billion results will have multiple data fields which SM2 users can access. Obviously understanding all of this is a challenge. That’s where the second component of SM2 comes in.

The SM2 application front end is a set of tools for discovering conversations and understanding them without having to manually go through them one by one. Set-up gives you the ability to tailor the things you wish to monitor by using keyword phrases, excludes (phrases you do not want to find), whitelists (sources you specifically wish to monitor), etc. Once you run your search, SM2 goes into the warehouse and brings back all the results it finds that match your set-up and analyzes them. After the initial search it continues to bring back results as they are added to the warehouse until you terminate the search.

The analysis tools SM2 provides are extensive, comparable in some ways to web metrics tools like Google Analytics- except that they are very focused on the humans behind the conversations rather than traffic sources and patterns. They look at sentiment, gender, age, location, popularity, trends and themes, categories, etc.

For people who are very used to the search engine model, these differences are a little challenging to grasp. The key lies in understanding how social media differs from the traditional or web 1.0 Internet. Once you grasp that social media is primarily about communication the difference becomes easier to understand.