I had a problem to solve around a campaign whose buzz I attempted to track – what is total number of Twitter Followers for individuals that are tweeting about a certain event ( like a Diet Soft Drink launch that happened earlier this month, in Brooklyn )? Well, none of the tools that I had access to publicly, could tackle that – I could get a list of people who tweet about an event – but how about the total number of twitter accounts those people have following

I had a problem to solve around a campaign whose buzz I attempted to track – what is total number of Twitter Followers for individuals that are tweeting about a certain event (like a Diet Soft Drink launch that happened earlier this month, in Brooklyn)?

Well, none of the tools that I had access to publicly, could tackle that – I could get a list of people who tweet about an event – but how about the total number of twitter accounts those people have following?

Radian6, as it turned out, collects that data, and was able to provide me with insight that 115K followers (who could have seen a brand message).  Sure, there’s duplication of followers (some Twitter accounts of people who tweet about the same event might share a certain portion of the same followers – and some people tweet more than once about the same event in a specific time period).

Not withstanding – I thought Radian6 has done an excellent job of pulling together data from disparate systems outside itself, such as Twitter, Compete.com, SalesForce.com and WebTrends, along with Social Graph.

While Radian6 has a lot of room to grow, I appreciate being able to work with their product.

I think, doing Social Media Tracking for Public Relations events – requires more focus on aggregating data than any platform has yet done.   For example, if a bunch of YouTube videos about a product launch took place, say 20 or 30, I want the software platform to go in and count the views of all of the videos and come up with an aggregate number – say ….  500 views from YouTube videos across 20 videos posted (average of 25 views per video).

In a way, the data is already present by most of the platforms, it just needs a little more work to make it usable.   Just a thought on a sunny Wednesday in August.

View post: 
Radian6 now goes where no one else has (to my knowledge)

Popularity: 18% [?]

I just read the The Social Media Promotion Checklist For Internet Marketer s posted at Search Engine Land -it’s pretty darn good – which I could say I’ve done all the the things on the list – but I haven’t.

I just read the The Social Media Promotion Checklist For Internet Marketers posted at Search Engine Land -it’s pretty darn good – which I could say I’ve done all the the things on the list – but I haven’t.

Here’s the parts of the list I think are very important (it’s all important, but some things are extra important).

Thoroughly check your hosting - Make sure that your hosting can withstand a flurry of traffic – that can many times cripple a server. Contact your hosting provider and see if they could handle 25,000 visits in a 5 minute span.  Many people think they are going to do alright, but end up crashing during prime-time, wasting all their work.

Readers of my blog probably know I’m not a happy camper with Dreamhost Shared Hosting environment – that’s an understatement.     Not only would Webmetricsguru.com crash if got 25,000 visitors in 5 minute, it would crash if it go 50 visits in 5 minutes; the shared hosting environment has gotten so unstable, and is policed so arbitrarily that my blog was often down up to 5 of the time – and it’s not as if I run anything data internsive.

As a result, I’m moving up to Virtual Private Server hosting – which is going to cost me a bit more money, and some administration, initially, and hopefully, the move over to VPS will be done this week – so the blog will be down for a day or two, at some point.   But it’ll be worth it.   If I did get the kind of traffic we’re talking about here – I could handle it in a VPS environment, but not in a Shared Hosting Env – you get what you pay for,and,  how true that is.

Think about social voting buttons & badges - One thing that can bring voting to a halt is the lack of voting buttons on a page. If using buttons and badges, make sure that each button is going to the specific place and pre-load as much as possible so that users won’t have to think as much.

People who create content want visitors to engage with it – but often, there’s not much for the visitor to do on a page, so how can you tell they’re “engaged”?    If your running a Social Media site and you have no buttons, badges or other way for visitors to contribute and share content and ideas with other users – it’s fair to say, you won’t find much engagement there, either – regardless of how you choose to measure it.

Look for events to avoid - Even the most awesome content in the world would have gotten lost during Michael Jackson’s funeral, when all of the social networks were crippled by the bandwidth. Many events are impossible to avoid, but there are so many others (elections/ceremonies/holidays …etc) which can be avoided.

Good point – remember how Obama’s Health Care proposal got “hyjacked” by the debate over Michael Jackson’s untimely death this summer?   That was a fluke that could not be avoided as there was no way to know Michael Jackson was going to die just in the middle of getting consensus on a vital Health Care bill – but there other times where you’ll not want to do a campaign because your audience will be engaged with something else and you’ll be competing against that.

Analytics check - This is a no-brainer, make sure that you are tracking as much as possible during a campaign.  Having instant access to traffic stats is ideal, as you will be able to find out what is working well and try to exploit similar outlets.

“Everything” is a lot to track – I don’t believe you need to track everything – but you do need to figure out what is important to track, beforehand, and enable it, in Analytics.     At LeadsCon East, which I just attended today, emphesis was put on optimizing a conversion path, not so much optimizing a landing page (or layer of you path).    When you think about things to track, it can get overwealming, all that you could track – but if you cover the important things you need in order to show progress, you probably have covered most, if not all, of what you need to track.

Track overall pickups - Before launching, make sure that you have the proper resources to track all mentions of the campaign so that you will be able to justify the chatter about your campaign. SocialMention, WhosTalkin & Raven SEO Tools all have built in monitoring (as well as many others out there) that will allow you to really find (and save) what people are saying about you.

There are so many tools to use, and more coming out each day, it’s almost impossible to keep track of all of them – I’m starting a list of all of the tools I use commonly and will publish them, once I feel the list is comprehensive enough.   Overall, I find the tools that do exist are incomplete – with an emphesis on Twitter – as Brian Solis says in the Conversation Prism, you need to track conversations wherever they happen, but the tools only capture information they can get out of a few social networks – and they don’t usually summerize the full effect, or do an adaquate timeline – so, it’s still the “Wild West” when it come to tools – but of those out there now, it’s important to know which ones to use for the reports you need to create around Social Media campaigns.

URL ranking report - One of the main results that you will see from a successful social news site is a quick lift in the SERPs. Tools like SEMrush allow you to find out what a specific page is already ranking for (if ranking for anything at all). Then, 30 days after your campaign has ended, you will be able to show hard evidence of increases that your Social Media Campaign has made on your SEO efforts.

I don’t see any intergration between “Organic Search” and Social Media mentions – in any tool, and yet, you’d think this would be a “no brainer”.  After all, Social Media now ranks better than before, due to Google Caffine, and Google’s Real Time Search capabilities is going after microblogging and recent blog posts in a way that is more aggresive than before.

Also, Social Media is now the main way back links are developed for a site – yet no tool does a good job intergrating organic search rankings on keyword phases with the rest of a Social Media campaign.

I’m sure a lot will change over the next year or so, and some of these issues will be resolved – but the hosting thing cought be by surprise – it’s so basic, and yet, often, it’s taken for granted.

In fact, a few years back, one of my SEO clients had their site redesigned and tracking was enabled – they also regularly ran campaigns in TravelZoo which could generated 50,000 visits in a day – but their site would go down – they paid 25,000 twice a month for an email blast to 9 million TravelZoo email recipiants – but they would not spend the money to make their site handle that traffic – and ended up taking most of their orders on the phone - I kid you not.

Read more:
Social Media Checklist

Popularity: 10% [?]

I just read the The Social Media Promotion Checklist For Internet Marketer s posted at Search Engine Land -it’s pretty darn good – which I could say I’ve done all the the things on the list – but I haven’t. Here’s the parts of the list I think are very important (it’s all important, but some things are extra important).

I just read the The Social Media Promotion Checklist For Internet Marketers posted at Search Engine Land -it’s pretty darn good – which I could say I’ve done all the the things on the list – but I haven’t.

Here’s the parts of the list I think are very important (it’s all important, but some things are extra important).

Thoroughly check your hosting - Make sure that your hosting can withstand a flurry of traffic – that can many times cripple a server. Contact your hosting provider and see if they could handle 25,000 visits in a 5 minute span.  Many people think they are going to do alright, but end up crashing during prime-time, wasting all their work.

Readers of my blog probably know I’m not a happy camper with Dreamhost Shared Hosting environment – that’s an understatement.     Not only would Webmetricsguru.com crash if got 25,000 visitors in 5 minute, it would crash if it go 50 visits in 5 minutes; the shared hosting environment has gotten so unstable, and is policed so arbitrarily that my blog was often down up to 5 of the time – and it’s not as if I run anything data internsive.

As a result, I’m moving up to Virtual Private Server hosting – which is going to cost me a bit more money, and some administration, initially, and hopefully, the move over to VPS will be done this week – so the blog will be down for a day or two, at some point.   But it’ll be worth it.   If I did get the kind of traffic we’re talking about here – I could handle it in a VPS environment, but not in a Shared Hosting Env – you get what you pay for,and,  how true that is.

Think about social voting buttons & badges - One thing that can bring voting to a halt is the lack of voting buttons on a page. If using buttons and badges, make sure that each button is going to the specific place and pre-load as much as possible so that users won’t have to think as much.

People who create content want visitors to engage with it – but often, there’s not much for the visitor to do on a page, so how can you tell they’re “engaged”?    If your running a Social Media site and you have no buttons, badges or other way for visitors to contribute and share content and ideas with other users – it’s fair to say, you won’t find much engagement there, either – regardless of how you choose to measure it.

Look for events to avoid - Even the most awesome content in the world would have gotten lost during Michael Jackson’s funeral, when all of the social networks were crippled by the bandwidth. Many events are impossible to avoid, but there are so many others (elections/ceremonies/holidays …etc) which can be avoided.

Good point – remember how Obama’s Health Care proposal got “hyjacked” by the debate over Michael Jackson’s untimely death this summer?   That was a fluke that could not be avoided as there was no way to know Michael Jackson was going to die just in the middle of getting consensus on a vital Health Care bill – but there other times where you’ll not want to do a campaign because your audience will be engaged with something else and you’ll be competing against that.

Analytics check - This is a no-brainer, make sure that you are tracking as much as possible during a campaign.  Having instant access to traffic stats is ideal, as you will be able to find out what is working well and try to exploit similar outlets.

“Everything” is a lot to track – I don’t believe you need to track everything – but you do need to figure out what is important to track, beforehand, and enable it, in Analytics.     At LeadsCon East, which I just attended today, emphesis was put on optimizing a conversion path, not so much optimizing a landing page (or layer of you path).    When you think about things to track, it can get overwealming, all that you could track – but if you cover the important things you need in order to show progress, you probably have covered most, if not all, of what you need to track.

Track overall pickups - Before launching, make sure that you have the proper resources to track all mentions of the campaign so that you will be able to justify the chatter about your campaign. SocialMention, WhosTalkin & Raven SEO Tools all have built in monitoring (as well as many others out there) that will allow you to really find (and save) what people are saying about you.

There are so many tools to use, and more coming out each day, it’s almost impossible to keep track of all of them – I’m starting a list of all of the tools I use commonly and will publish them, once I feel the list is comprehensive enough.   Overall, I find the tools that do exist are incomplete – with an emphesis on Twitter – as Brian Solis says in the Conversation Prism, you need to track conversations wherever they happen, but the tools only capture information they can get out of a few social networks – and they don’t usually summerize the full effect, or do an adaquate timeline – so, it’s still the “Wild West” when it come to tools – but of those out there now, it’s important to know which ones to use for the reports you need to create around Social Media campaigns.

URL ranking report - One of the main results that you will see from a successful social news site is a quick lift in the SERPs. Tools like SEMrush allow you to find out what a specific page is already ranking for (if ranking for anything at all). Then, 30 days after your campaign has ended, you will be able to show hard evidence of increases that your Social Media Campaign has made on your SEO efforts.

I don’t see any intergration between “Organic Search” and Social Media mentions – in any tool, and yet, you’d think this would be a “no brainer”.  After all, Social Media now ranks better than before, due to Google Caffine, and Google’s Real Time Search capabilities is going after microblogging and recent blog posts in a way that is more aggresive than before.

Also, Social Media is now the main way back links are developed for a site – yet no tool does a good job intergrating organic search rankings on keyword phases with the rest of a Social Media campaign.

I’m sure a lot will change over the next year or so, and some of these issues will be resolved – but the hosting thing cought be by surprise – it’s so basic, and yet, often, it’s taken for granted.

In fact, a few years back, one of my SEO clients had their site redesigned and tracking was enabled – they also regularly ran campaigns in TravelZoo which could generated 50,000 visits in a day – but their site would go down – they paid 25,000 twice a month for an email blast to 9 million TravelZoo email recipiants – but they would not spend the money to make their site handle that traffic – and ended up taking most of their orders on the phone - I kid you not.

See original here:
Ths Social Media Checklist

Popularity: 16% [?]

Sometimes news takes a while to sink in - I reported on a Prediction - Social Media Spend to grow by +600% by 2014 - Forrester on April 24th.   A lot more coverage is popping up now supporting news that  47% Of USA CMO’s will Increase SMM Budgets according to a Forrester report on the USA Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014 - 71% of USA CMO’s say their budgets have decreased. But 47% of total USA CMO’s will increase their spend on social media marketing

Sometimes news takes a while to sink in - I reported on a Prediction - Social Media Spend to grow by +600% by 2014 - Forrester on April 24th.   A lot more coverage is popping up now supporting news that  47% Of USA CMO’s will Increase SMM Budgets according to a Forrester report on the USA Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014

- 71% of USA CMO’s say their budgets have decreased. But 47% of total USA CMO’s will increase their spend on social media marketing.

The Forrester Analyst who authored the Marketing Forecast, Shar VanBoskirk has a blog post in about it:

We expect marketer spend on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to reach nearly $55 billion by 2014.

This growth is due to marketers seeking lower cost, more accountable channels which are also widely used by their customers.

In fact, Marketing spend on Social Media is estimated to increase by 716 Million dollars this year to 3.1 Billion Dollars in 2014!   Consider what that means.

We know that Social Media’s main cost isn’t the tools, it’s time and energy.  Tools are fairly inexpensive, and everyone can be a content creator, right?    But Metrics and Meaning have yet to be in place, as I covered in Forrester Wave™: Social Media Listening Platforms, Q1 2009.

This information suggests the needed information and more spend is beginning to fall in place, THIS YEAR, during the Global Recession/Depression, and that Marketing  spend on Social Media is increasing faster than any other category (at ~34% a year).   What if that is a conservative estimate?   What if, in 2014, the true spend on Social Media is closer to 5 Billion Dollars?   What should we do now?

The Forrester Forecast also predicts the amount of total budget  spent on Interactive, as a percentage of Total marketing spend, will double in 2014 from what it is today - if today it’s ~10%, by 2014, it will be 20%.

While the news has been out for 3 months - it’s now making headlines in MarketingVox, Mashable, to name a few, because there’s a propagation delay between market conditions and the willingness to spend money  - and I think, now, CMO’s are more willing to chance Social Media, because so much less expensive than any other form of online marketing - and it may scale, which was one of the main complaints.

Also, Metrics are evolving quickly and we’re likely to see much more growth in this area in 2010-2011 (see At Buddy Media Tweetup and Twitter Mangement System Launch where companies like Buddy Media are integrating Twitter Metrics into Marketing Dashboard).

More here:
47% of the CMO’s will spend more on social media marketing - good to know

Popularity: 15% [?]

Noticed that some of my posts get “re-tweeted” a lot , maybe 30 or 40 times, in a short period, perhaps in an hour or so - that was the  case with my post on Top Twitter Tools tonight.  For a while, I have had a RSS Feed set up on @webmetricsguru  and can usually find out who’s messaging me or mentioning my handle, even after the fact, so that, yes, I can see every mention that way - But … I’m wondering - who’s actually the most influential - who carries this conversation forward, after I’ve blogged about it.  In a few short minutes I found: @ sharondille @ LJMoritz @ ElisaNavarette @ socialmediainfo @ marketingmoron @ socialmediainfo @ Igor_Simanovski @ JamesLDaniels @ tweetlessons @ Mike_Cotton @ tfollowers @ roadmapp @ JBanis @ butch_murray I used Mailana to figure out who might be the most influential - or who of these Twitter friends/followers started the re-treat of my post - so here’s  a map of conversations discussing “ top twitter tools ” http://bit.ly/XcpNz It doesn’t appear that any of the people are connected to each other, according to Mailana - but I find that hard to believe. At any rate, by using Mailana, I was able to get a map, pretty much in real time, of who was talking about my post - and had there been more interrelationships shown, perhaps figured out who was starting the re-treat, and I found a post about 4 ReTweet Tools and Trackers by Darron Rowse where he mentions the 4 tools Dan Zarrella was one of the first and has come up with a number of tools including his ReTweet Mapper which among other things allows you to see a ranking of the most ReTweeted people on twitter (arranged by the last hour, day and week). retweet radar - this tool describes itself as ‘Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.’ It puts together a retweet cloud of terms that are being retweeted, ranks most retweeted users of Twitter and ranks the links that are being retweeted.

Noticed that some of my posts get “re-tweeted” a lot , maybe 30 or 40 times, in a short period, perhaps in an hour or so - that was the  case with my post on Top Twitter Tools tonight.  For a while, I have had a RSS Feed set up on @webmetricsguru  and can usually find out who’s messaging me or mentioning my handle, even after the fact, so that, yes, I can see every mention that way -

But … I’m wondering - who’s actually the most influential - who carries this conversation forward, after I’ve blogged about it.  In a few short minutes I found:

• @sharondille
• @LJMoritz
• @ElisaNavarette
• @socialmediainfo
• @marketingmoron
• @socialmediainfo
• @Igor_Simanovski
• @JamesLDaniels
• @tweetlessons
• @Mike_Cotton
• @tfollowers
• @roadmapp
• @JBanis
• @butch_murray

I used Mailana to figure out who might be the most influential - or who of these Twitter friends/followers started the re-treat of my post - so here’s  a map of conversations discussing “top twitter tools” http://bit.ly/XcpNz

It doesn’t appear that any of the people are connected to each other, according to Mailana - but I find that hard to believe.

At any rate, by using Mailana, I was able to get a map, pretty much in real time, of who was talking about my post - and had there been more interrelationships shown, perhaps figured out who was starting the re-treat, and I found a post about 4 ReTweet Tools and Trackers by Darron Rowse where he mentions the 4 tools

1. Dan Zarrella was one of the first and has come up with a number of tools including his ReTweet Mapper which among other things allows you to see a ranking of the most ReTweeted people on twitter (arranged by the last hour, day and week).
2. retweet radar - this tool describes itself as ‘Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.’ It puts together a retweet cloud of terms that are being retweeted, ranks most retweeted users of Twitter and ranks the links that are being retweeted.
3. Retweetist - similarly this service ranks the hottest links being retweeted and most retweeted people on Twitter.
4. Retweetrank - another tool that simply ranks the number of retweets twitter users have (not sure how up to date it is).

However, none to the tools above actually did what I wanted and honestly, what i have in mind is similar to BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker - but for Twitter - look, maybe it exists, and I just missed it.

My original blog post does show up, but Blogpulse isn’t designed to track for Tweets - that’s the problem, and doesn’t seem to want to pick up shortened urls, either.

See original here:
Top Twitter Tools Map - Following the Conversation

Popularity: 10% [?]