Home»Archive for July, 2009

Public Relations Measurement 2010: Five Things to Forget & Five Things to Learn

Jul 29th, 2009 Comments Off

social-media-model-pptxFrom a terrific post on public relations campaign measurement by Don Bartholomew, Principal of Acumentics Research,  a social media and public relations research and measurement consultancy.

“Public relations measurement is at a crossroads.  Old techniques are no longer sufficient.

Old metrics are no longer applicable.  Old thinking must be replaced by new.

The need for accountability,and to prove the value of PR and social media programs,

has never been greater.

As we look to the next year, here are five things to forget and five things to learn about

public relations measurement in 2010.”

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Is that blogger review really a paid ad? The FTC wants you to know.

Jul 28th, 2009 Comments Off

050727_mb_Payolacolor_tnThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is stepping into the practice of paid posts on the blogosphere and it’s about time. I have personally been solicited by mommy bloggers willing to write for cash.  Pay to play schemes among mommy bloggers have been commonplace, it is akin to payola in the record industry, and it does a disservice to other bloggers.

Decades ago there was a crackdown on payola in the music industry as record promoters paid off radio DJs to spin their records and popularize artists. The practice has largely been curtailed, although payments are still made under the table to DJs in major markets. Brands have been willing to shower freebees on bloggers in exchange for editorial coverage that fails to attribute the gifts and their influence. It stinks and it’s corrupting the blogosphere.

According to Consumer Reports:

“The FTC is updating its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” which were last refreshed in 1980. What this has to do with bloggers is a new form of advertising, called word-of-mouth marketing, in which advertisers pay your favorite bloggers to “review” their products. The bloggers get paid, for example, with free product samples; gift certificates for JCPenney shopping sprees; cash payments; or the loan of a $30,000 Ford Flex for a year.

The bloggers are supposed to write whatever they want about the product—pro or con—but the payments put into question whether they would be inclined to seriously bite the hand of a “friend” lending a car or giving other valuable goodies or cash.

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HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics

Jul 28th, 2009 Comments Off

pack_iconos_sociales_freakgroupFrom Ben Parr at Mashable:

“Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but Delicious (Delicious), Digg (Digg), StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon) and other social media websites have become an increasingly important source of website traffic. This also creates a massive demand for data related to social media. Where are users coming from? What topics excite them? These are questions that, when answered, can be the difference between a successful website and a failed social media campaign. But social media analytics is young, and not many people know where to start.

Read Ben’s guide which is designed “to help you get started with some of the best tools and habits so that you can effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.”

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Leveraging Predictive Analytics in Marketing Campaigns

Jul 28th, 2009 Comments Off

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Excerpts on Predictive Analytics from CRM News in 2004 and still relevant:

“While creative ideas and good marketing instinct will always be important, effective marketing requires a thorough understanding of customer behaviors and motivations.

Predicting customer product preferences and purchasing habits — and crafting the most relevant marketing messages around this information — requires a carefully orchestrated mix of intuition and an analytical framework that supports fact-based decision-making. Without an analytical structure in place, even the savviest marketer or marketing team will have difficulty analyzing the high volume of complex customer information.

For example, why do some customers make multiple purchases? How can companies ensure long-term loyalty from high-value customers? How can you attract and retain different types of customers? This level of detailed customer knowledge enables marketers to develop relevant, compelling messages and offers for each customer, and to adapt their approach as customer needs and wants change throughout the customer lifecycle.”

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Monster Merger: IBM Buys SPSS For Approx. $1.2 Billion In Cash Deal

Jul 28th, 2009 Comments Off

From Tech Crunch

IBM is buying analytics software and solutions provider SPSS in an all cash transaction at a price of $50/share – a 42 percent premium to Monday’s closing price of $35.09 on Nasdaq – resulting in a total cash consideration in the merger of approximately $1.2 billion.

SPSS Predictive Analytics software captures and analyzes data about people’s attributes, attitudes and behaviors to gain a full understanding of anticipated future behaviors, so companies can make smarter decisions for improved business outcomes.

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71 Percent Say They Can't Live Without Facebook

Jul 22nd, 2009 Comments Off

whisperFrom MEDIAPOST: Could you survive without your social networks? Perhaps underestimating their own ability to adapt — or pick up a telephone — just 29% of Facebook and LinkedIn users say they could “probably do without” the popular networks, according to a new study by Anderson Analytics.

Apparently a somewhat less vital recourse, 35% of the 5,000 U.S. social media users surveyed in May said they could do without MySpace, while a more modest 43% thought life still worth living without Twitter.

Under 35, people rely on social networks for “fun” and contacting friends, while older consumers increasingly view them as indispensable for staying in touch with family and close friends.

Correspondingly, the majority — 75% — said Facebook was their most valuable network, followed by 65% who cited MySpace. Only 30% said the business centric LinkedIn was their most valuable network, followed by the 12% who gave it up to Twitter.

New Twitter Stats

Jul 8th, 2009 Comments Off

tf-tweetstatsSysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:

  • 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
  • 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
  • 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
  • 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
  • 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
  • New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
  • More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
  • There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
  • Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

“We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter’s use, growth and demographics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ co-founder and chief executive. “While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter.”

Marketing ROI & Measurements Study Shows Advantages for Companies with Financial, Analytics, Measurement, and Operations Support

Jul 6th, 2009 Comments Off

marketingCEOs and CFOs are making greater demands than last year for marketers to show a potential return on investment (ROI) as part of securing budget, according to 65% of the 601 marketers surveyed in the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere 2009 Marketing ROI & Measurements Study.

Current economic conditions are putting pressures on marketers to better understand their marketing effectiveness as 8 in 10 marketers (79%) report that the need to measure, analyze, and report marketing effectiveness is greater in 2009. However, budget pressures are evident with 6 out of 10 (59%) indicating that this higher demand for measuring marketing effectiveness is not budgeted for the necessary measurement efforts and the other 2 out of 10 indicating they are appropriately budgeted.

The full 35-page report with detailed findings and Lenskold Group recommendations is available at www.lenskold.com/2009mROIstudy.

More Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Tools

Jul 3rd, 2009 Comments Off

Excerpted from Jon Bishop’s excellent post, “Keeping Conversations on Your Radar,” which includes links to several interesting social media monitoring and measurement tools.

Social Media

SocialMention.com allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

KeoTag.com searches some of the most popular social media sites for tags that match your search term.

BackType is a “conversational search engine”. They index conversations scattered across the web to make following comments on a post or article a lot easier to manage.

CoComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response.

YackTrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content.

Blog Flux is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet.

Twitter

Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the Twittersphere.

Backtweets finds all Tweets linking back to an article or blog post. Site does a good job of archiving older tweets where tweetmeme only shows more recent tweets.

Twitrratr helps you distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

Tweetmeme is similar to Backtweets except it only shows tweets that link to a post from the last 7 days.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon lets you compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term on Facebook each day.

Discussion Boards and Forums

BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker is a search engine that only displays information from their extensive database of forum threads.

Blogs

Blog Search is a Google search technology focused on blogs. You can do a lot of the normal advanced Google search commands to get optimal results.

BlogPulse is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. It organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time up to three months ago up to today.

A Little Something Extra

I’ve been using the free version of FiltrBoxG2 which has been amazing. It’s very slick and easy to use. I highly recommend checking it out, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Jonathan Bishop is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Magicomm, LLC in Amesbury, MA.  He specializes in Web 2.0 technologies.

8 Twitter Analytics Tools

Jul 1st, 2009 Comments Off

twitter-tools1Here are 8 Twitter analytics tools suggested by Social Media Today:

1. Twitalyzer: a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

2. MicroPlaza: a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. MicroPlaza delivers the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It’s a discovery engine and a personal newswire.

3. Twist: a way to see trends of keywords or product names, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. See frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph.

4. Twitturly:  tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

5. TweetStats: shows tweeting behavior of Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs.

6. TwitterFriends: explore the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you, see who among your Twitter friends are online at any moment, read stats about your own Twitter account and identify the Twitterers posting the most links.

7. Quickrate / Thummit: harvests the rich content of the Twittersphere to synthesize opinions on hot topics of the day (recent movies, buzzing memes).

8. TweetEffect: enter your twitter name and analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.

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