Title: Web / Social Media Analyst Description: Responsibilities Play a lead role in monitoring social media, site traffic and customer experience feedback. Work closely with the usability/analytics manager to support data gathering and reporting to improve internal and external company websites and online applications. Social media monitoring duties include working with public relations teams to identify and monitor key social media sites that discuss topics relevant to Freddie Mac’s activities and reputation

Title: Web / Social Media Analyst Description: Responsibilities Play a lead role in monitoring social media, site traffic and customer experience feedback. Work closely with the usability/analytics manager to support data gathering and reporting to improve internal and external company websites and online applications. Social media monitoring duties include working with public relations teams to identify and monitor key social media sites that discuss topics relevant to Freddie Mac’s activities and reputation. Track usage of Freddie Mac-sponsored social media, and provide reports to management and PR on traffic and trends. Provide guidance on social media norms and best practices. Support web traffic reporting and analysis using Omniture SiteCatalyst toolset to build and maintain summary dashboards and reports. Required Experience: Required: Experience in analyzing / interpreting / reporting web traffic data to support online site optimization, search engine optimization…
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Web / Social Media Analyst

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A lot was announced, and promised to us in the last 24 hours though the practical effects will take several months to play out.  I don’t want to repeat what everyone else said – though I do need to establish the main points before offering my own thoughts about it. One of the more significant announcements came from Google yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where  Marissa Mayer Showed Off Social Search and Social Results From  Social Networks intergrated into Google ( but, only those reachable via Google Profile) via Twitter , meanwhile Bing is pulling recent status updates from Facebook and Twitter. For one thing, these developments are an indication of the  convergences of Search and Social Media  ( noted that earlier this year , about 6 months ago) where I said: ” ….Just want to close out this post by observing how much “convergence” was taking place at Search Engine Strategies this week – Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics have d e-facto, merged; while the conference is called “ Search Engine Strategis ” it’s really more the intersection between Social Media, Search and Analytics -and so, who can say that Art, Social Networks and Web Analytics are also, not converging.” As information is coming to us in a combined form, skills to handle it and act on it will change, perhaps, with unintended results

A lot was announced, and promised to us in the last 24 hours though the practical effects will take several months to play out.  I don’t want to repeat what everyone else said – though I do need to establish the main points before offering my own thoughts about it.

One of the more significant announcements came from Google yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where  Marissa Mayer Showed Off Social Search and Social Results From  Social Networks intergrated into Google (but, only those reachable via Google Profile) via Twitter, meanwhile Bing is pulling recent status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

For one thing, these developments are an indication of the  convergences of Search and Social Media  (noted that earlier this year, about 6 months ago) where I said:

” ….Just want to close out this post by observing how much “convergence” was taking place at Search Engine Strategies this week – Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics have d e-facto, merged; while the conference is called “Search Engine Strategis” it’s really more the intersection between Social Media, Search and Analytics -and so, who can say that Art, Social Networks and Web Analytics are also, not converging.”

As information is coming to us in a combined form, skills to handle it and act on it will change, perhaps, with unintended results. One example of unintended results, and I’m pulling this from left field, literally, is the new FCC Blogger Disclosure rules – @andrewhazen spoke  about upcoming FTP rulings at a local meetup tonight. Hazen mentioned the FCC could not monitor what everyone was saying even if they wanted to.

But that’s not exactly true, and is less true, every day.

Take Google SideWiki – Google opened up commenting about any website (as long as you have the Google Toolbar installed and updated) and people questioned weather Google could police malicious or brand damaging comments, but you hardly hear a peep about anyone complaining yet about bad comments (Google appears to be suppressing the appearance of  most of the comments or not many people are leaving comments, period) but Google would not have released the SideWiki if it didn’t have the means to police it.  Same thing with the SearchWiki, a year ago.

With the recent investment of the CIA in Visible Technology Social Monitoring tool (and Visible Technology is sponsoring the conference I’m speaking at in London next month, Monitoring Social Media 09) AND the convergence of digital information into Google, it could be means to monitor not just FTC Blogger violations, but any activity deemed significant and worthy of study.  I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing – perhaps, it’s beyond good or bad, it’s probably an inevitable evolution – but still … do we realize the real web will be crawled for behavior trails, due to possible threats, and those threats will erase any privacy we still have left?

In another way, the merging of real time data into search results will make them richer, but also, more variable – which will both disrupt Search Optimization, and open up new opportunities to rank quickly, drive traffic to sites via waves of fabricated news.  Chances are, Google will quickly develop counter measures, though the inclusion of real time search will open up many new holes for spammers to exploit search engines.

Contextual Search will grow richer, and be able to be targeted against waves of new information, with ad targeting capability  quickly developed – providing new ad inventory and new ways to get flooded with information we don’t want, along with nuggets of what we do want and need.

At the same time, Social Media (in that real time data from Twitter and Facebook updates) being merged into organic search results means many more search results, playing into Google Caffeine, which was just released a few months ago, to handle real time data, and display it along with more static search results in a faster way – all this pointing to the ability to quickly display and monitor results in real time.

You can even see another piece of Google’s thinking and evolution in the latest update to Google Analytics that was just released on Tuesday at the Emetrics Summit DC with  Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent including Email Alerts on changes in your analytics data.

But Web Analytics data is just one form of data that email alerts can be made from, and the current form of Google Alerts could easily be updated to include not just mentions of a selected keyword or keyword phrase, but of pattern – any pattern – including patterns that would be interesting to the CIA or to FCC and FTC.    I’m not even saying this is a good thing or a bad thing – but it is the logical implication of where this is all going.

On the positive side, due to the melding of all the various streams of information (and Google Wave shows promise, from what I understand of it – of inter-operating on several streams of data in one operating environment – even if those streams of data were never designed to inter-operate with each other) marketing, public relations, social media and search jobs and disciplines are about to get super charged.

Social Media, which has been looked at, for the last 2-3 years, as and interesting and experimental approach to marketing and public relations – will suddenly become a cash cow – how can anyone in their right mind ignore Social Media,  now when all this new Social Media inventory is suddenly dumped into Google, along with all the new possibilities to run targeted ads against it – and Google evolves into a real time social search engine?

Steve Rubel wrote that  The Age of Social Search Dawns today, in his personal lifestream (another sign that everything is converging) – here’s what he said/wrote:

During the first fifteen of years of the Internet’s gestation, we searched the web unassisted. In the second era, we’ll do so with the curated assistance of our social networks – and be able to spot trends from friends. As we wrote in our search white paper earlier this year…

“However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that’s meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google.”

Well, Google made it clear they’re not waiting around to get beaten. This is the opening salvo of what will be an all out social search war in in the next few years. Watch this space.

Another implication of “Social Search” is that you’ll want choose your friends more carefully – or, at least, some of us will, because, to a large extent, you’ll be able to see their search results in yours, and vice versa – not exactly what your expected from search.

To some extent, that’s good for people who can produce or uncover valuable information to a community – you’ll want to be the friend to such an individual, and such individuals will be sought after, much as influential blogger are today, and rightfully so.    And as a result, blogging software will evolve to accommodate those changes, as will online newspapers, the first being the Huffington Post Social News – that is just now reinventing online news around social networks.

Finally, with everything going into the Search Engines – Search will finally eclipse, but not entirely replace, other forms of marketing, online and off, but … with the caveat that Social Search and Social Networking will have converged – and with it, comes the death of the current understanding of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization, as it is currently understood,and has been practiced, for the last 12 years, dies – as, shortly, within a year or so, no one will see the same results – personalization of search results will become the de-facto result – and Search and Social Media will merge into one discipline – where reputation management and online social monitoring will be it’s main components.

Instead of going after rankings – you’ll be going after reputations – stuff you can write about urls and segments, in locations who’ll see your listings – predicting what they will see, and how to write copy and generate new real time data to show up in Search Results becomes the new SEO.    Meanwhile, new tools will need to be developed to cataglog and rank reputation in Search.

And that’s good news for Social Media Monitoring platforms – who will naturally want to evolve to cover search.  Meanwhile, the competition will come from Google, itself, with it’s own reputation monitoring – and that reputation monitoring capability will be integrated into Google Analytics – which will, inturn, cause a shakeout  in the Social Media Monitoring platforms on one hand, and the merging of what was called Web Analytics with Social Media and Search – much as Web Analytics has now become absorbed into Data Intelligence functions, according to Eric T. Peterson

If you pay close attention to the marketing you see from Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, and the other “for fee” vendors you’ve surely noticed a dramatic change recently. Nobody is talking about web analytics anymore; the entire focus has become one of systems integration, multichannel data analysis, and cross-channel analytics.

All the sudden web analytics is starting to sound like, gasp, business and customer intelligence.

Eek.

Since it’s late and since this post will be over-shadowed by the hype around Google Analytics releasing more “stuff” on Tuesday I’ll cut right to the chase: I believe that we are (finally) on the cusp of a profound revolution in web analytics and that the availability of third-generation web analytics technologies will finally get digital measurement the seat at the table we’ve been fighting to get for years.

Yes, Web Analytics will get the respect from CMO’s, finally, that we deserved all along – except, we’re not longer going to be called Web Analysts, as Web Analytics and SEO, as they were currently understood, are becoming obsolete.

And that’s what is being worked out right now, as I’m writing this.   A lot of change, a lot of convergence – some of it good, some of it, not.

But, like anything in life, the value is in what you make of it – nothing I said here, even the government’s inevitable monitoring of all the information we put out for them – is necessarily, bad.   But, then, our view of what we consider to be “freedom” and “privacy” are being transformed – almost, in real time.

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Evolution of Search Results turns Social

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I was at The Brandhacker “Who ‘Owns’ Social Media Strategy” Meetup: PR or Digital Creative? There’s a good post on it here – and I just want to add my two cents on it here

I was at The Brandhacker “Who ‘Owns’ Social Media Strategy” Meetup: PR or Digital Creative?

There’s a good post on it here – and I just want to add my two cents on it here.

I don’t think Advertising, Marketing or Public Relations own Social Media – Good Teams, do.   Here’s what I mean.

The value of any company, to me, is the people who are there – when it comes to executing Social Media – it’s the team you work with, are part of, that really makes the most difference.

Original post:
BrandHackers Meetup – Who Owns “Social Media” Strategy

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In a month I’ll be in London to speak at Monitoring Social Media 09 – I looked over the program again (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using code MSM0910 ) and decided to put out some ideas beforehand. BTW, I wrote a follow up post to this one that covers the remaining sessions on Monitoring Social Media 09 that I didn’t cover here – read it after you finish here for more insights – link is at the bottom of this post

In a month I’ll be in London to speak at Monitoring Social Media 09 – I looked over the program again (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using code MSM0910) and decided to put out some ideas beforehand.

BTW, I wrote a follow up post to this one that covers the remaining sessions on Monitoring Social Media 09 that I didn’t cover here – read it after you finish here for more insights – link is at the bottom of this post.

In the first panel the case for investing in Social Media Monitoring tools and methodologies is discussed.

The ROI of Social Media Monitoring
Panel discussion
Social media monitoring produces interesting facts and figures, but how does it impact on the bottom line? In this session we dicuss practical examples of how monitoring makes financial sense to large companies and examine whether this is the case even during an economic recession. We ask our panelists to justify the existence of social media monitoring in the world today.

I don’t think it’s too hard to make a case for monitoring Brands using Social Media, especially after some recent fiascoes like Motrin – Mommy Bloggers debacle a year ago and even a recent post in Social Media Today on Saving your reputation in 48 hours because you might not even have four hours.

The details are in the Financial Times - in short ..

You have 48 hours to save your reputation. People will come to your site when they hear about an issue, but only for a very short period. Peter Warne, Nestlé’s senior corporate internet manager, says: “We’ve tracked traffic to our site when negative stories about the industry have come out. There’s a very sharp peak which dies down in 48 hours.”

Given that, as imperfect as the monitoring tools for Social Media are, if your running a business of any size, you can not afford to ignore the viral spread of information.

In the second session on what’s wrong with Social Media Monitoring Platforms …

What’s Wrong with Social Media Monitoring Services?
Panel discussion
Following on from Asi Sharabi’s popular and highly critical blog post, we analyse the market for monitoring solutions and ask the panel some tough questions: How are these services differentiating themselves? Which are the best? Are the free tools as good as paid ones? In a highly competitive market, is there a temptation to oversell? Is the whole industry living in the shadow of Google?

I think Asi’s blog post (cited in the session notes) does sum up where we’re at today – and one of the reasons I asked to attend and speak at Monitoring Social Media – this conference is the first to openly address the reliability issues with all the platforms – and I look forward to what the panelists will say -though, I have my own ideas about what they should say.

The Third Session, Future of Social Media Monitoring, I’ll be on the panel (yea!) as I have a strong opinion about the Future of Monitoring:

Beyond Listening: The Future of Social Media Monitoring
Panel discussion
With leading brands now seeking to track online conversations and engage with customers in real-time, the future is never very far away. In this panel session we ask where social media monitoring will be two years from now. What are the growth areas? What new techniques are emerging?Will access to data become more open or closed? Howwill large corporates integrate listening into their processes? And, what will the wary consumer make of it?

I’m thinking about what I’ll say next month, now.  I think Crimson Hexagon’s approach to determining opinion is interesting technology, even though they haven’t carried it nearly as far as I’d like them to; I wrote a post last month on what  Crimson Hexagon ought to  evolve into.  I see matching up opinion and identity (esp with Twitter – where pulling a twitter handle is fairly easy and common, but hasn’t been done against opinions – this would give us real time online polling – even down the district level.

In my opinion, the growth areas are the integration with with Web Analytics, CRM and Search Marketing and I wrote about it in Entrepreneur.com earlier this year in an article titled Learn to Measure your Web Presence; since then, the Omniture – Comscore deal happened, Omniture was purchased by Adobe and Nielsen is doing a deal with Facebook to share marketing information.

I suspect the data will be more open, not closed, and I do think many more businesses and Brands will set up listening services and people to react  quickly … hopefully in less than 8 hours, but certainly, no less than 24 hours.

In the next session, Alan Moore, who I met this spring in NYC, will be speaking on who owns the data about us that’s on the Web:

Refined Social Data Changes Everything You Ever Thought About Marketing
Alan Moore, Author & Speaker
In the networked society we leave data trails; plumes of information – the personal exhaust from our digital interactions. These are the shadows and footprints of our daily lives. In the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce, this data is moving centre stage, with companies desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine it. Yet our destiny with data is complex.There are legitimate concerns about who actually owns this information and, when our identities can be pieced together via data flows, privacy becomes a key battleground. This requires companies to rethink how they create value. In the search economy, the old way of doing things just won’t do.

Over a year ago, I attended a PodCamp in Brooklyn PolyTech that had an interesting session on Identity Management – when I think about who owns the data – I think about who manages Identity Management on the Web?  As far as who owns the data, I think no one actually “owns data”, even when they think they do.  Let’s see what Alan Moore has to say about Identity Management.

The next session reminds me of Michael Cayley and his Social Capital Value Add. I met Michael Cayley last spring in Toronto

After Brand: Listening and Organisations
Antony Mayfield, VP, Head of Global Media, iCrossing
The social web is the edge of the massive, disruptive wave of innovation that is the Web. Brand is an excellent place for organisations to start from in surveying and understand the changing world they now live in, but there are significant challenges and opportunities for brands beyond marketing alone. This session will discuss how social media represents a strategic business challenge and how how active listening (measurement, monitoring and storytelling) by organisations will not only be the heart of communications but a key business process that touches finance, IT, customer service, product development and beyond.

I think the point, here, is Social Media is affecting the value of  corporations, positively or negatively.  Michael Cayley came up with a method to analyze the social media value in a corporation that led to changes in the company’s valuation on the Stock Market.

In the Business Case for Buzz, I’m looking forward to hearing what Ann is going to say about doing research using Social Monitoring tools to figure out what the strategy of a Brand’s messaging ought to be.

The Business Case for Buzz
Ann Longley, Strategy Director at Mediaedge: CIA
Social media is creating new challenges and opportunities for brands including a bewildering array of new touch points and potential approaches. How should brands approach this media landscape? This session, based on real case studies, builds the business case for using buzz research as the ideal starting point for social media engagement and integrated planning.

So who is actually an influential?   The following session attempts to find out:

Knowing Who Matters: Discovering and Analysing Influence
Marshall Manson, Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman EMEA
Marshall advises clients on digital strategy, online reputation management, crisis management, advocacy, engagement and viral marketing. A pioneer in the field of online strategy, communications and reputation managemen, his clients have included Shell, HP and English Heritage. He moved to the UK in 2008, having previously worked in Edelmans’ Washington DC office as Vice-President of Online Advocacy.

That’s only half the sessions and this is already a log blog post, so I’ll stop here.   If you want to know more about Monitoring Social Media 09 , check the site.

Also read the following post that covers the rest of the session at Monitoring Social Media 09 -Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – Part 2 – November 17th

My second post is even more filled with insights, than this one.

By the way, I’ll be in London between November 15th and November 22nd.

Continued here: 
Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – November 17th

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Google is taking over more of what used to be an SEO Job – Reputation Management, according to a new post at the Google Webmaster blog titled Managing your reputation through search results : ” … Think twice before putting your personal information online . Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you’re publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don’t normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don’t assume that just because your mom doesn’t read your blog, she’ll never see that post about the new tattoo you’re hiding from her.” “… Create a  Google profile

Google is taking over more of what used to be an SEO Job – Reputation Management, according to a new post at the Google Webmaster blog titled Managing your reputation through search results:

” … Think twice before putting your personal information online. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you’re publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don’t normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don’t assume that just because your mom doesn’t read your blog, she’ll never see that post about the new tattoo you’re hiding from her.”

“… Create a Google profile. When people search for your name, Google can display a link to your Google profile in our search results and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.

• If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
• If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
• If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we’ve gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)

The last example isn’t as far fetched as the Google blog post makes it out to be; it’s been known large newspapers like the New York Times, in an attempt to bolster their organic search traffic, search optimized much of their archived news stories, and in some cases, it had a noticeably bad effect on the reputation and finances of individuals who had old stories written about them (court cases that were later resolved in their favor) that were harmful to their reputation – getting that stuff taken down is a real headache, and often not easy to get at or accomplish.

Google’s advice falls in line with what we already do for many areas of our lives, such as our medical health, it asks us to be proactive and take responsibility for managing our own reputations by thinking about everything we write down on the web, first, anywhere.

The concept that elements of a webpage can be taken out of context by the search engine, I find, intriguing - though it’s quite evident that it’s true, not only for Search Engines, but for Social Media, as well.

In two cases this year, both on Facebook, I commented on what someone else wrote in a Facebook post,  and due to the way the original content was written (in the first person, yet without the author penning their name in the content) when I shared that story, it appeared that I authored the content.   It was quite amusing to me that Jeff Pulver created Soccom in NYC – as I shared it – people started to contact me and ask if I would include them in my conference……. which got me thinking that someday … maybe I ought to have a conference … if it’s as easy as that (except I’d have no way of paying for the setup, so I stay away from creating my own conferences, for now).

But what Google is saying about Reputation Management for Search AND Social Media also applies to the rest of life – because people create meaning in their own minds by taking elements of information surrounding them.  With the atomization of content and Twitter’s 140 character snippets of information – we are all now predisposed to collect snippets of information, just as Search Engines do (after all, it’s people who create Search Engines to emulate the way people process information, much as God created Man/her/its  in his own image   – and if we step back and realize what that means – and then turn it back, inside out – it looks like we can take whatever we see in life, and make it any color or meaning we want – which echos modern psychology, actually.

Information is out there – we put out information about us, others write about themselves and us too, and search engines, made in the image of it’s creators, us, assembles the information in ways that are programmed (by us) but in a much less sophisticated manor than we can – therefore, it’s easy for us to take what search engines present to use, out of context – because we’re now creating our own context and meaning.

My main thought about all of this – if everyone is telling us – be responsible for your own health, reputation, income, social life, etc – how come more and more people feel they can’t cope?  Especially with their Reputation – they can’t cope ……. why?  Easy ………. in every other area of life, you can talk to someone about your problem (i.e.: go to a doctor to talk about health – go to a financial advisor to talk about your finances, go to a lawyer to talk about a case for or against you) but when it’s your Reputation, delivered by Search Engines – who can you talk to at the Search Engines?  A web form?  A SEO person – probably, but they aren’t in control of Search Engines – the computer scientists who run Search Engines, they are the responsible ones, and they don’t want to talk to you or me, in most cases.

So, Google’s post on Managing your reputation through search results is good advice – but it also means it’s one more thing we have to do, manage our online profiles and crawl the web to figure out what stuff people are saying about us, so we can correct it.      Just as we do in other situations, we have to constantly generate good information about ourselves so the Search Engines and Social Networks pick that up -and augment our Reputation, proactively, wherever and whenever we can.

Welcome to the 21st century.   I’m almost tempted to think of that Social Media Guru movie I posted last week - at the end of it, the Social Media Guru says to the potential client …. you have to do everything yourself -since it’s Social Media – ha,ha.

Maybe, the same thing can be said for Search Engines – they want you (us) to do most of the work – they don’t want to manage your reputation for you – but in a way, they are – because, unless your proactive, what ever information people get on one another, is delivered, for the most part, by Search Engines and Social Media, and both may present snippets of information, leaving it up to each individual to make meaning of it.

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Google Reputation Strategy and Public Relations works for Search and Social Media

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