Archive for the 'social media' Category

What is going on with Twitter?

Published on July 9, 2008 in consumer insight, digital, marketing and social media. 0 Comments

This week has been really interesting for me. I started a new job and left an old one behind. I made some great friends and really enjoyed my time at Nielsen. It was a lifetime of learning in a year. Thanks to all my Nielsen friends.

I guess the last few lines has you wondering where my career has taken me. The answer is to Atlas Solutions as a TAM. I am super excited and have been there three days but learned so much its amazing. I am looking forward to this path and all the challenges it has to offer it.

But, I digress. This post is about Twitter and the recent influx of followers I have recently received. As Twitter gains in popularity, I expect to see more notifications from people with backwards followers ratios but this week has seen a influx of dotcoms following me.

Is there something in the water that is making these folks think intruding into my lifestream will make me follow them back?

Nielsen Online Blog Launched!

Published on June 24, 2008 in analytics, digital, engagement, social media and websites. 0 Comments

Today, I wanted to do some shameless self-promotion. I have been working very closely with some great talented folks in Milpitas and New York to launch the Nielsen Online Analyst Blog called “Connecting the Dots.” Its been a really fun project and they even allowed me to post on the Blog!

We already have some great post up from many of the analysts, I have been working with at Nielsen Online. I look forward to all the great insights to come in the future. So, I want plug anymore just head over to “Connecting the Dots” and browse some really cool information.

Special thanks to everyone who worked so hard on this project with me.

The Digital Walt Whitman Theory

Published on May 30, 2008 in buzz, community, digital, keywords, networks, personal and social media. 3 Comments

In the days of BI (Before Internet), poets would scrawl in their notebooks chosen words that would carefully compose a masterpiece of creativity. It was an age-old tradition, and these notebooks are sacred testaments to the accomplishments of man. Their notebooks would wither, rip and turn into relics of a past time; the knowledge passed down to the next generation to inspire in a creative cycle.

Those days are long gone and a new trend is emerging in its place. What is this trend? I am tentatively calling it the Digital Walt Whitman Theory. Its analysis based on my observations as both a creative person and researcher of sorts.

The main gist of the theory is: the creative arts adopt new technologies at a much faster rate than the general public due to above average overlap between technology and art. For example, artists are problem solvers, which leads to experimenting with new technologies as forms of expression. This insistence on experimenting for solutions to creative problems is common in artist and creative folks from all fields.

Furthermore, as society becomes more connected and digital adoption rates amongst artists’ trends higher than the general publics rate of adoption, will we see more artistic folks take leadership roles as inventors? Consumers are savvier then ever and no touch point is safe yet the fine arts remain a beacon of experimentation into these new technologies. While consumers slowly grasp at the new world, artists are experimenting with Twitter, YouTube and other social networks and learning what works and what fails.

Is Damien Hurst the next Bill Gates?

Tweetniks

Published on May 16, 2008 in creative, digital, networks, personal, social media and social networks. 0 Comments

A quick post to shout out about Pete Blackshaw’s latest post for ClickZ. In it, he discusses Twitter segments and different classes of individuals on the site. As the micro-blog evolves it will be interesting to see all the different types that join up and further the analysis.

One interesting footnote, Pete actually used Twitter to gather his data by proposing this tweet to this followers, “ok i think im going to write my mkt column about twitter “types” (user segments) send thoughts 03:55 PM May 08, 2008 from web.” The tweet stoked some thoughts in my head. As I have been thinking about that very thing for quite sometime and was happy to help. I added a few segments including: TweetSquatters and Tweetniks.

I wanted to talk about the Tweetniks, or someone who uses Twitter to write 21st Century prose. Listed below are a few examples of these modern day Whitmans.

Society’s becoming more connected and much more digital. Artist are sometimes the first to adopt new technology for purposes of expression. Social platforms provide a natural fit for artist to express themselves and explore new mediums. How will digital change creative endeavors? Tweetniks might be blazing a trail of digital creativity that is a game changer but only time will tell.

What do you think?

FYI - Here is Pete’s website dedicated to the topic. Please visit and leave him some feedback on users you have encountered. Additionally, if you would like to add me to your twitter list feel free to do so @stemato.

Finding Great Keywords in the Blogosphere

Published on May 9, 2008 in CRM, SEO, consumer insight, digital, keywords, marketing, social media, tools and websites. 1 Comment

Keyword research can be a daunting task. Relationships between consumers and brands can be like the difference between Japanese and English. Finding an appropriate starting point for setting up your first search campaign can be the biggest roadblock. After determining what product or products to build your campaign around putting together a great set of keywords is the next step.

Keywords form the spine of the your search campaign; getting these relationships right is important to your success. Where do you begin? Corporate websites, brochures and other marketing materials can be a good starting point for relevant terms being used to discuss your brand but they sometimes lack closeness to the consumer. Don’t be alarmed though because consumers have left a virtual digital treasure chest of keywords waiting be discovered in blogs, message boards and forums.

Here is my 5 step process to begin to gain insight in the blogosphere to what is being said and using it for keyword research:

  1. Compile a list of blogs that talk about your brand - Perhaps the most important step is to explore the blogosphere and see who is talking about you. Del.icio.us, Google Blog Search and Technorati are a great place to search your brand and see who is talking about you. Then put together a list of the ones you find to be have the most scope and activity. Look for plenty of comments and large readership. Check for hints including RSS subscribers and comments counts.
  2. Read and look for patterns of conversation - Pay particularly close attention to the comments and specific language being used to talk about your features, models and brands in them. Do they use model numbers or branded terms* to discuss products? Comments are insights straight from consumers about the language that is being developed around you. Tag clouds also hold interesting patterns.
  3. Make a list of terms - Compile a list of terms that you see in multiple places. Segment the list and make sure you don’t forget the long tail.
  4. Rank terms on list - Once you have a master list of all your consumer-driven keywords# put them in order of importance. Focus on consumer talk and how they might search for you not how you would search for your product.
  5. Decide how much to bid on terms - Should you bid more on terms that are from consumers or same? Should they be contextually driven or keyword? For instance, Chevy is used more in conversation than Chevrolet according to BlogPulse. Does this chart mean you should invest much more into contextual advertising for the term “chevy”? One thing is certain you would get more placement due to its increased term use.

These 5-steps are starting points for introducing consumer-driven keywords into your paid search campaign. You can not only increase your paid clicks but gain valuable CRM insights into your brand by adding them into your web strategy. The only question left is. When do we start?

* I remember when I worked at a satellite radio manufacturer we had one radio that was called: XTR1, Jimi and Stream | Jockey. Combing through forums, blogs and message boards would have yielded consumer preference for its name.

# Keywords that originate from consumers of a brand and are not necessarily brand driven.

London Mayor’s Race Analytics

Published on May 6, 2008 in analytics, blogpulse, buzz, digital, social media, tools and websites. 0 Comments

Building from last week’s story about the London Mayor’s election, I wanted to look at some baseline analytics behind the race. Keeping in mind that Boris Johnson eventually wins the race all these charts seem to take on an interesting look. Is it possible to predict an election based on buzz, volume and traffic? If you believe these charts the answer is yes.

Buzz

First look at the below Blogpulse chart (query here) showing the buzz leading up to the May 1, 2008 results. Conversations appear equal through the second week of April but after that they begin the initial spike in Boris Johnson’s favor. The old adage goes “no publicity is bad publicity” and although I have not looked at sentiment it seems to bare true here as Boris peaks much higher than Ken in the buzz chart. (Additionally, Boris Johnson also shows up on the Key People chart here at number thirteen.)


Volume

Volume is an interesting metric online. Ultimately it is about your brand popularity and reach. Or how much the press is talking about you. This Google Trends chart shows that Boris Johnson outpaced Ken Livingstone in news volume too. How did an incumbent so quickly lose press mentions? Did all the online squatters have an effect on Mr. Livingstone’s ratings?

Traffic

Finally, looking at traffic can show you interest about a candidate’s platform. Compete.com’s analytics tool shows backboris.com getting much more traffic than kenlivingstone.com. Which actually did not even register on their graph. Does this mean people were just not intrigued enough about the incumbent to check his website?

Buzz, traffic and volume metrics give us different insights into online behaviors and working in tandem they can help complete the story. They give us an interesting look at the Mayor’s election in London and how a candidate swung the tide in his favor. Was it his online savvy or the help of other’s acumen that helped Boris Johnson?

Miami Dolphins Draft

Published on May 1, 2008 in blogpulse, buzz, digital, marketing, social media, social networks, viral, websites and word-of-mouth. 0 Comments

Saturday was the NFL draft and my favorite team the Miami Dolphins had the top pick. I was naturally curious about the level of discussion in the blogosphere and then something interesting happen. The Dolphins announced early that they had signed Jake Long as the top pick ending months of speculation.

This buzz chart identically follows the way the story broke. His name is first mentioned very sparingly and then on April 10 we see a small spike due to speculation about negotiations beginning. And on April 22 you see the announcement that they had signed him four days ahead of the draft. Then Miami Dolphins buzz spikes again on the actual day of the draft.

Actionable Data for the Miami Dolphins

The Miami Dolphins could use this chart for marketing in a variety of ways. Qualitative and quantitative analysis lies within this study. The Miami Dolphins could make operational decisions such as whether a Jake Long jersey would be a viable choice for the coming year and how many to order. Marketing decisions like promotions and which brands may be interested in using Jake Long are also a viable options.

Deeper qualitative drill downs are also available via clicking through to the points on the chart. For instance, scoring some of the listings from draft day yields valuable PR insights that could overt misinformation. Below is one of the quotes:

  • “Now that the Dolphins have signed their #1 pick, Jake Long, it’s now time for the organization (and the trifecta, to be specific) to move on to other things….And as CBS Sports’ Clark Judge writes, the Dolphins are already working hard on moving Jason Taylor” http://www.thephinsider.com/2008/4/22/2155/03979

Social Media Speeds Up Reaction Times

In the old world sports model a reporter would find out about negotiations and write about it to be published for the next day. Then the team’s official PR department would issue its statement regarding the draft pick. Relationships have changed and the world has become much more social. Media has cut down on its delivery times and PR departments are scrambling to keep up. Measuring social media and listening to your fans is crucial to keep up with changing relationships in an increasingly social world.

How will the Dolphins react to this buzz-touchdown and help further their PR strategy for next year?

My guess is they may have a small team devoted to “listening.” I have not seen many sports teams actively using social media as a viable means of listening and reacting. The Colts (mycolts.net) have a social network but I have not seen much feedback to its success for the team. I would suspect that they have an amazing amount of data and hope they are using it gather valuable insights. Insights that could be quickly gathered and analyzed to facilitate on the fly changes to the marketing and PR strategy.

The Future

Social media is predicted to evolve into a vertical driven space (ie. mycolts.net). Leaving little room for brand invasions to drive consumers to trust them less. Mining your base for crucial insights to help evolve your marketing plan can become social overnight. Will you take advantage?

Pope Benedict & Recession

Published on April 21, 2008 in analytics, blogpulse, buzz, marketing, social media, tools, viral, websites and word-of-mouth. 0 Comments

Yesterday I watched the Papal Mass on television and I started to wonder how much buzz the trip received. Here is a Blogpulse chart, comparing the Pope’s visit to the US, with American Recession.

Here is a link to the actual query.

Pope Benedict

China - Tibet - Olympics Torch Chart

Published on April 10, 2008 in blogpulse, buzz, community, digital, social media, tools, websites and word-of-mouth. 3 Comments

Blogpulse Chart

With all the news about the trial and tribulations of the Olympics torch this week, I thought to run a chart and see the blogosphere’s reaction to the issues. It is interesting to see that the torch is driving much more buzz than the issues. I cannot help but wonder if the events have actually overshadowed the reasons leaving no one to gain.

Protest is patriotic but just make sure your ideas, do not get lost in your methods.

Social Networking Users

Published on April 7, 2008 in community, consumer insight, digital, personal, social media, social networks and websites. 0 Comments

A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.

Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.

But, have they reached critical mass?

This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.

Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.

Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:

Social Networking Users

Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.

Further refining your chart to something like this:

Social Networking Users Profile

Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.

In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”