Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

US Airforce Flow Chart: Rules of Blogger Engagement

Thanks to StrivePR…

Our tax dollars at work and they get it right (and this flow is not for blog engagement only, any user-generated content):

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.

Social Media Marketing Models: Mischief Marketing

A couple of the lads here at Techrigy engaged in a little mischief marketing today, throwing out a teaser video that was cryptic enough that it had me wondering what it all meant. This past week Burger King put a campaign on Facebook offering a Whopper coupon in exchange for deleting ten of your friends, who would then get a note informing them that you’d dropped them for a free hamburger. Ouch!

Viral or WOM, argue the distinctions if you will, are often predicated on having a little fun. Done well they work because they provide a little respite from the daily drone. With the amazing explosion of Twitter and Facebook activity, these campaigns now have  platforms designed for generating viral exchanges, places where you don’t have to email a joke to dozens of friends (thank God that stopped), instead you can put it out there and people can decide for themselves whether they want to click. This mischief marketing is a tricky balancing act that requires total willingness to fail, or perhaps worse, to sink without a ripple. But it is also fun to do and say something about the companies behind it. Sense of humor anyone?

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.

Phishing Attacks on Twitter

Note: Written by Aaron Newman, President & Found of Techrigy SM2

This morning as I connected to Twirl, I got a few odd DMs. Below they are listed:

• davidlower hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/
• jeffreynew hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/
• bretbernhoft hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/

And:

• AntiqueCellar Hey, i found a website with your pic on it… LOL check it out here http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login

Seeing the exact same 3 Twitter DMs made it clear to me that there was something wrong going on. I clicked through to @bretbernhoft’s timeline and saw:

• bretbernhoft Someone has just hacked my account. I am going to change my password. Sorry to everyone for the hasstle!

This seemed to confirm my suspicions. Of course, being a founding member of the Web Application Security Consortium (http://www.webappsec.org/), I had to start seeing what these links lead to. You should not follow these types of links unless you know what you are doing.

I booted up a clean virtual machine, disabled Java script, and followed the link. The link to http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/ uses a redirect to send you to http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login. This page is an exact copy of the Facebook login page and is a ruse. Many unsuspecting users will see this page and think they must enter their Facebook username and password. This is a big no-no. Never give an untrusted site the username and password for another application.

Note: Within 15 minutes of my first test Google jumped on this and disabled the blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/ as the message now displayed is:

"Blog has been removed

Sorry, the blog at rosalierebyb.blogspot.com has been removed."

The second phishing attack was slightly different as it took me directly to http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login which is a fake Twitter login page.

Once the user enters their Twitter username and password, likely an automated program setup by the hacker uses your credentials to log into your account and start DMing people to get more usernames and passwords.

This is a typical phishing attack. Currently it is not causing any damage, simply spreading itself to more and more accounts.

I decided to investigate more so I went to twitter search and did a quick lookup on hacked.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hacked

I got a ton of results reflecting that there were a lot of people talking about the phishing attacks.

Realtime results for hacked

2 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.  DanielSvedka: @ozzyuk If her account was hacked and she can’t get in… how did she tweet about it being hacked?

1 minute ago · Reply · View Tweet ·  Show ConversationHide Conversation

AcmePhoto: Lots of Twitter dm - Direct message spam from accounts who have been hacked saying to go to blogspot addy. Were accounts phished, or ???

2 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

lattelady: @journey2learn I think you’ve been hacked.

2 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

iwearyourshirt: @melisssah your account has been hacked, just got a phishing DM from you!!

2 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

marismith: Yikes! 7 of those horrid phishing emails in my DM box. Lotsa accts still being hacked. Do not click suspicious links in your DMs.

3 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

PawLuxury: @thomaspower Not sure why you tweeted those fake phishing scam links, but please don’t. If your account was hacked just change your Password

4 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

HourDeal: Sorry if you received a direct message from HourDeal referencing a blog. This was NOT from HourDeal. We were hacked. Our apologies again.

4 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

north100: Just received two fake DMs too from hacked @twinbirch account

5 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

scotthack: @GlenWoodfin Send them a message and tell them to change their password. Their account has been hacked.

5 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

bud_caddell: @jiibe have you been hacked mate? did you mean to send me that DM?

5 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

luckystartups: WOW what is going on with the HACKED twitter accounts? Now I am getting requests 2 check out blogs. Is anyone getting anything weird from us

5 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet

As well, it seems Mashable.com put out a warning last night.

I expect this is not the end of the spreading, but I imagine the people at Twitter ought to be able to shutdown the spreading fairly quickly. AS well, this is not the first attack we have seen on social media. We saw a worm on MySpace a few years ago call the Sammy worm (http://namb.la/popular/tech.html).

These attacks are dependent on people not being cautious about entering their username and password. This is not helped by the many social networks that ask for your Gmail or Yahoo email password so they can "invite" people in your address book. You should never give one of these services the username or password for a different application.

You can follow Aaron on Twitter:  @AaronNewman

ReBlog: 42 social media pundit predictions for 2009

Here’s a nice round up of the various blog pundits’ predictions for Social Media in 2009.

Thanks to Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 for putting this together.

Wall Street Journal on Social Media/web 2.0 Marketing

They actually really get it right. Based on interviews with 30 marketers. No subscription required at the time of this posting.

There’s a sea change going on!

Social media is not a ‘tactic’

Everyday I read through a fairly large number of blogs, some general, some tech, some marketing and some social media pundits. I get alerts for various keywords mentioned on Twitter and I get my daily SM2 reports. I’ll respond if someone connects with me on LinkedIn or Facebook but I’m definitely not a power-user. One of the things I see people grappling with in these places is an ongoing conversation about how to market in social media. One recent column repeatedly referred to social media as a ‘tactic’ like PR or advertising or guerrilla marketing. Social media is not a tactic, it is a medium. A very unique medium.

A medium is defined as (from Random House Unabridged via Dictionary.com):

1.	a middle state or condition; mean.

2.	something intermediate in nature or degree.

3.	an intervening substance, as air, through which a force acts or an effect is produced.

4.	the element that is the natural habitat of an organism.

5.	surrounding objects, conditions, or influences; environment.

6.	an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished: Words are a medium of expression.

7.	one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, as newspapers, radio, or television.

8.	Biology. the substance in which specimens are displayed or preserved.

9.	Also called culture medium. Bacteriology. a liquid or solidified nutrient material suitable for the cultivation of microorganisms.

10.	a person through whom the spirits of the dead are alleged to be able to contact the living.

11.	Fine Arts. a. Painting. a liquid with which pigments are mixed. b. the material or technique with which an artist works: the medium of watercolor.

12.	a size of printing paper, 18 1/2 × 23 1/2 in. (47 × 60 cm) in England, 18 × 23 to 19 × 25 in. (46 × 58 to 48 × 64 cm) in America.

13.	Chiefly British. a size of drawing or writing paper, 17 1/2 × 22 in. (44 × 56 cm).

14.	Also called medium strip. Midland U.S. median strip.

15.	in medium, Movies, Television. with the principal actors in the middle distance: The scene was shot in medium.

–adjective

16.	about halfway between extremes, as of degree, amount, quality, position, or size: Cook over medium heat. He is of medium height.

---

Origin:
1575–85; < L: the middle, n. use of neut. of medius middle.

Let’s look at #6:

-an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished: Words are a medium of expression.

An Intervening agency. I like this a lot. It is a layer that enables communication that is global, public and free. If you buy this then the idea of marketing to a medium is a conundrum. You can market to people, you can’t market to a tool. What social media is, from a marketing perspective, is a strategy. Your social media strategy answers the following question: How do I leverage the power of this new medium?

Nobodies are the new Somebodies: Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter

Guy’s post on how he uses Twitter is priceless: a brief but complete manual on using the service as a promotion tool.

Here’s my favorite part:

“Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt. In the online world, these influentials include Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, and to some extent me.

Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.

One more point: if enough nobodies like what you do, the somebodies will have no choice but to write about you. In this way, the buzz of nobodies begets the attention of somebodies and not vice versa.”

Take that Scoble.

Pondering Parallel Universes in Social Media

I like to think of the Internet, mobile and other information sources in terms of layers. With each new iteration of web technology we’re adding layers and dimensions to the way we communicate online and off. Call web 1.0 the information and transaction layer, web 2.0 the communication layer and social media the human layer. These parallel dimensions intersect each other in ways that defy our 3 dimensional way of perceiving things. The mashing together of intent, info, geo-location, time-shifting, crowdsourcing and all the other memes emerging out of the networks has created something much larger than anyone could have envisioned only a few years ago.

This helps me understand the degree of resistance those of us in Social Media encounter when pushing new concepts into people with a traditional media mindset. It is very difficult to accept that a world like marketing has changed irrevocably. No more broadcast. Everything personalized. Instant movement of reputations. Instant celebrity (boy was Andy Warhol on the money! Fifteen minutes indeed…).

This is not a matter of thinking outside of the box. We have to think outside of our comfortable universe because we’ve expanded it exponentially.