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!

The People Behind Techrigy SM2

One of the best parts of my job is the social aspect. Last week I flew out to the home office to spend time with the Techrigy team in Rochester, NY. In case you’re not aware, I work remotely from northern Minnesota, land of the moose (I thought it was lakes, but I let the guys think that). Techrigy is a total Web 2.0 company. I totally appreciate everyone’s flexibility in working remotely with me daily online!

I always take my camera when I travel, so I can introduce you to the Techrigy guys.

Techrigy is co-founded by Aaron Newman. Aaron’s a serial entrepreneur with 2 successful startups to his credit, DBSecure and AppSecInc. Aaron is also the author of Enterprise 2.0 Implementation. He has said that I work more than he does, but I have to say that he works a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jay Mari is other co-founder. He created the engines that power SM2. Jay is always very patient with my tech questions. I’ve learned a lot about the internal workings of SM2.

Jim Schwab is our VP of Sales & Marketing. He recently joined us from Harris Interactive. He looks really serious here. (I heard some great lines out of him though, so I think he was avoiding the camera)

Ahad Kamal & Jim Reynolds are everywhere: on the phone with customers on Twitter. They rock! When I took the photo I noticed the banner & had to ask. Ahad & Jim have worked across from each other for four years (prior to Techrigy) so there was definitely a story there.

And behind every great company is an awesome tech guy. Bob Pease does it all! When I was sitting across from Bob, the lack of eye contact was a bit too much for me, so I moved his monitors apart during my time there.

Where’s my photo? Well I was behind the camera. This was taken at the meetup.

A couple of fun lines from my visit were: 1) The first morning at the office Ahad & Jim were pondering the fact that I was ‘real’ rather than ‘virtual’. Jim had the greatest line, “ ‘Connie’ is the code that Aaron wrote”. 2) When Jay came to work they told him that I arrived in a server box labeled ‘Fragile’.

Follow us on Twitter – we’re a very sociable group!

@AaronNewman

Jay Mari

@JimSchwab

@Ahad_Kamal

@JimmyRey

@Bobbo0521

@cbensen

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.

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.

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.

Exciting New Features in SM2!

Over the past months I’ve been gathering suggestions for feature requests. Being involved in product development is an exciting part of my job. When you can evolve the product for the customer’s needs & wishes it has to be going in the right direction!

Aaron Newman & company created prototypes of the features. It’s awesome to have access to them along with the instructions, ‘See if you can break it’. *grin*

Techrigy SM2 was updated today and we have new features!

1. The sentiment engine was updated & we’ve added ‘Tone’ in addition to ‘Sentiment’. I documented them not long ago so I will be sharing that in an upcoming post.
2. In ‘Compare Trends’ you can now filter by Category!
3. In View Results, you can now select ‘All results’ and perform actions on them (whether that is deleting them or assigning them to a new category).

I will highlight numbers two & three in this post.

Compare Trends has new functionality

In Compare Trends you can now filter by Category.

This was my idea because intuitively I wanted to view the Media Types for each particular Category. You now have the Category drop down menu to do just that!

Ability to do Bulk Actions in View Results

Before the addition of this option to Apply to All Filtered Results you had to do actions in batches of 250 at a time. Now you can do as many as you’d like by clicking this box. I called it the magic button when I was testing it. You can use it to affect the 1,620 results in the following ways:

• delete the results
• mark them as spam
• assign them to a category
• remove a category assignment

We are always open to suggestions & ideas! Please let us know what your wish list is.

Sizing the Social Media Marketing Market: How Many Brands are There?

One of the things we get asked frequently, from a business POV, is how big is the social media market? Before I tackle that elephant, let me define what the questioner is asking. We sell a tool used by social media marketers and researchers. That’s the market we’re sizing: How many potential customers are there for social media marketing vendors like Techrigy?

We know social media itself is huge and expanding like a nuclear reaction, literally. The early adopters of technology like ours tend to be agencies, particularly PR, communications and digital agencies (the ad people are still pretty far behind). So if we say there are 100,000 agencies (a made-up number) then our market seems to get capped at some fraction of that number (we won’t get all of them obviously). This is not the case because agencies don’t represent a single client or a single niche market. They represent brands, lots of brands. So the operative question is ‘How many brands are there?’ and the answer is millions.

So how big is the market for social media monitoring? Big. There millions of iterations of brands, localized versions, international variations by language and culture, sub brands like Swanson’s Chicken Broth, Swanson’s Canned Chicken, Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pies, etc., and things associated with brands like celebrities, executives, issues and influencers. It is a virtually unlimited market when you consider that all of these brands will be migrating some or all of their marketing to social media.

And this does not take into account the rapidly emerging concept of personal brands…more on that in another post!

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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