Tag Archive for 'reputation'

Key People in the Blogosphere

Published on April 3, 2008 in blogpulse, buzz, digital, marketing, reputation, viral and websites. 1 Comment

Key People

This interesting chart from Blogpulse, shows key people being buzzed about in the blogosphere. It culls the data from over 70 million blogs and outputs the chart daily with most citations at the top. You can also dive further into the actual citations or the amount of spots they climb or descend daily.

An interesting takeaway for me, is that Obama is in 20th place. Does that put some merit into Hillary (who ranks 1st) supposedly saying Obama cannot win? Anything seem alarming to you? Perhaps Dolly Parton’s high ranking? Or, Britney Spears still hanging around?

Confessions of a Creative Mind

Published on March 20, 2008 in community, consumer insight, creative, digital, engagement, passion, personal and reputation. 2 Comments

What does it take to invent a new tool, product or idea? Ideas are born from somewhere deep down inside of us and can be as simple as Bellsouth’s Caller-ID or as complex as Google’s PageRank algorithm. Both of these inventions have something in common that is much less publicized - failure. That is right, it takes persistence and failure, to make something that improves our lives not some great creative mind.

Humility is most often learned the older you get because when you are young ego rules. I remember as a kid trying to come up with the most original and creative drawing in art classes. Its was the true test of whether you were an artist or just some hack with charcoal. We would debate incessantly classmates with great draftsmanship but poor ability to think in an agile and creative way. The reality of our situation was we were not original either. We did have one thing that set us a part drive. Because as we pontificated about the virtues of original thought we continued to test the boundaries of our own minds without fear of failure. We were free from the constraints of rigid academia to develop ideas, drawings, paintings, websites and more.

With retrospect I learned that age makes you more rigid and less willing to fail. Maybe its the reality of bills. One thing I always tried to keep in my core set of operational values is drive. Because with drive anything is possible. Dreaming big and performing agile is the combination that sets the passionate apart from the rest. I have also never lost the ability to turn my creative fire into well developed originality towards executing a better idea. Because eventually better will become original.

Don’t believe me ask Edison, Ford and Page?

Buzz heats up as Election Day gets Closer

Published on February 19, 2008 in blogpulse, buzz, community, engagement and reputation. 0 Comments

Today was a holiday for me (Happy President’s Day), so I decided to run some Blogpulse queries on hot issues and the coming elections. The top three candidates were picked with the operators of three major issues to see how closely associated to them they were in the blogosphere. Now onto the data.

This first chart, is not one of the top issues, but of the current President linked with the Candidates name. Interestingly John McCain is not overly linked with Bush but Obama seems to index higher with Bush. A number of factors may be at work, but McCain may be successfully fighting the “third-Bush term” moniker.

The next chart shows the candidates linked with the term “health care.” Notably, Hillary is indexing highest in this category with Obama having a few peaks. Its probably related to her history as First Lady and the health care push of the Nineties. Reputation and how long consumers can be influenced by a candidates history lingers long after the issue moves to the backburner.

This chart shows “iraq” as the linked operator. I think the interesting finding here is that chatter seems to be on the rise even though violence is on the decline. Does this mean that conversation is the best way to solve a problem? Neville Chamberlain, famed negotiator during World War 2, may disagree but it seems to work in the blogosphere.

I saved the best for last. Finally, we see the linked operator as “recession.” The pattern is that talk in the media of the recession in the last couple months has caused significant spikes of recession chatter in the blogosphere.

All very cool data and a fun tool to experiment with and listen to about your brand.

Disclosure: I just want to state that Blogpulse is a free tool provided by my employer. The opinions here in now way reflect my company’s thoughts but are my very own ideas of why these charts say what they say.

Social-Network Funnel Effect

Published on January 28, 2008 in digital, reputation and social media. 0 Comments

The growth of the FB economy has created an unlikely division amongst my online social contacts. I see it is as an social-network funnel effect, where the top funnel represents opted-in spam (friends, emails and newsletters) and the bottom your your close friends (real-life contacts and favorite influencers). While the middle portion usually contains varying degrees of friends, all adding some measurable value.

While sorting through this social-network funnel has become an everyday battle to gleam useful content or information for me. Everyday it seems to get bigger and I am constantly looking to cut the time I spend searching for valuable information. This is where a funnel process helps.

If I could apply an overall funnel or class system to contacts based on their history of providing me with value it would help me to quickly indentify quality. How would this work? I am imagining an engine that aggregates all my social media into one spot.

From there an algorithm based on certain factors including history, real-life relation and inbound links would identify users, contributors, and influencers. These contacts would then be broken down into three buckets. For this blog lets call them levels one (most important) to three(least important). You could either sort these buckets individually or apply another set of algorithms to that content.

The next algorithm would then filter content by text-analysis for certain tags similar to Google Alerts. For instance, I would set socia-media as a tag and anytime a mention from a real friend or favorite blogger used social media online it would sort into a “social-media” bucket.

How are we to process all this content? As we progress into digital citizenry honing our filters to maximize utility across all platforms will become an overriding tool of workplace success. And quickly filtering content value will be the best weapon to have in your arsenal.

Facebook Notification Spam & The Emergence of a Model

Published on January 14, 2008 in digital, engagement, reputation, social media, social networks, viral and websites. 0 Comments

Why are my so-called friends spamming me? I open my notifications in Facebook to find this monstrosity and it is only a portion of the tower! The really amazing thing is that most of these notifications come from the same 2 or 3 people. As I think conscientiously about my social connections managing them will become ever more important as I seek to filter the best data from this spam.

Which part of the importance filter are you? Our reputation economy is eroding quickly and I suggest you stay on the side of value. Needless notifications will only serve to invalidate your reputation and further erode your social networks trust. Its the essential “boy who cried wolf” model.

Think about the content you choose to disperse and make it useful to your network. We are all dealing with so much information and your reputation will be the defining factor of whether you wind up being a digital loudmouth or important addition to a network.