NewsNew Google Buzz API features, including a hose of fireMonday, July 19, 2010 from
Since we introduced the Google Buzz API at Google I/O, we’ve been working hard to make it better, broader, and more useful. Today we're introducing several new features that are the direct result of your feedback. We're launching the Google Buzz firehose — our top developer feature request. With the firehose, all public activities are available as they are published with a single subscription, thanks to syndication via PubSubHubbub. We’ve had some fun coming up with cool things to do with the firehose. For example, Bob Aman coded up Buzz Mood, an App Engine app inspired by Twistori. By scanning for posts that contain certain keywords, Bob’s able to give us a sense for the mood across all of Google Buzz in real time. Definitely take a look at the the source to get ideas for your own apps! For more inspiration, also check out our firehose launch partners. Integrating with the firehose today are Collecta, Gnip, OneRiot, Postrank Analytics, and Superfeedr’s Track. *** 20 Top Twitter Monitoring and Analytics Toolsby Pam Dyer on 04/26/2010 18:30 0 comments , 1289 viewsHere’s why Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for listening:
There are many powerful social media tracking and analytics tools available that can monitor your performance on social media sites like Twitter. They can help you judge the effectiveness of your efforts and keep track of what people are saying about you. Here are a few to help you get you started with sentiment and behavioral analysis so you can maximize Twitter’s benefits: *** How To Use Social Media Monitoring Tools To Aid Product DevelopmentApr 20, 2010 at 12:49pm ET by Joe HallUnderstanding your marketplace and target audiences are important to product development. Whether it is concept creation or refining your feature list social media monitoring can help with the necessary research in building the perfect product. *** Scaling Social Mediaby Chris Brogan, March 22, 2010 ·If you’re a company considering using social media tools for business communications, marketing, sales, etc, you’re no doubt wondering about how much time it will add to your already busy day, especially if you’re a smaller business. The answer varies depending on how you’re using it, how many platforms you’re engaging, your goals, and more. But we can still walk through some potential recipes and give you a sense of what will take time, how you might budget for it, and how to consider your engagement efforts. From a business perspective (and you can stretch this for non-profits and other organizations), it comes down to a mix of prioritizing and satisfying customer needs. Here are my thoughts on scaling social media. First, let’s level-set what we’re talking about here. When I talk about scaling your efforts, here are the efforts I’m talking about:
*** Listening To The Right Conversations?by Scott Gold, 11 hours agoFew Clients are Disciplined Listeners. Unfortunately, our clients and prospects are not disciplined about social media listening, and they're not alone. A recent CMO Council survey showed that just 16% of senior marketers surveyed monitor message boards and blogs. Finding the ConversationsOngoing. Monitoring Required, Especially Competitors. *** 8 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools You Probably Haven’t TriedBy Luke Brynley-Jones ⋅ February 28, 2010Here’s a list of 8 free (or very cheap) social media monitoring tools we’ve tried out in the last few weeks. They are all pretty light-touch, but great for anyone starting out in social media monitoring – and a lot of fun into the bargain. (We also reviewed 5 top budget social media monitoring tools a few months back). 1) Trackle 2) TweepSearch 3) FollowerWonk 4) Klout 5) Realmon9 6) Tweetreach 7) Cligs 8) Ubervu Interested in learning how to monitor social media? Tickets are on sale now for our social media monitoring master-class: Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, 31st March 2010, London (UK) *** New Chart: What Social Metrics are Organizations Monitoring and Measuring?By Sergio Balegno, Research Director, Feb 23, 2010Honing in on Target Audiences and Quantifying the Impact of Social Media  Organizations use a wide variety of tools, and use multiple tools in tandem, to monitor the dialogue related to their company, brand and competitors across blogs and other social media sites. Not surprisingly, free tools such as Google Search, Google Alerts, Twitter Search and Yahoo! Search, top the list and are used much more broadly than fee-based tools. *** Trackle Goes Pro; Launches Premium Version Of Realtime Tracking AlertsPosted: 08 Feb 2010 03:56 AM PSTTrackle, the personalized web and realtime feed tracker, is going pro with the launch of premium tracking services aimed at marketing and PR professionals looking to track mentions of clients across the web. Trackle.com’s web service lets users create personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, updated job listings, sports scores and more. But the premium service will face competition from the plethora of social media and web tracking services in the space, including Viralheat, Socialseek and others. *** Customer experience and sentiment analysisBy Nancy Davis Kho - Posted Feb 1, 2010 from KMWorldThe notion that listening to your customer’s voice is important is well entrenched. Companies have long depended on data from customer surveys, call center transcripts and focus groups, captured in structured formats and handled through business intelligence applications, to help point the way to improved customer service, product enhancements and competitor vulnerabilities. But the sheer volume of the customer choir in the Web 2.0 age often leaves companies scrambling to keep up. Publishing is now in the hands of the public, who have a vexing tendency to post with blunt honesty in unstructured formats via blogs, tweets, e-mails and forums about products and services that delight or disappoint them. And those opinions hold weight. A 2007 study by Jupiter Research (since acquired by Forrester), called “Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape,” found that 30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, compared to the 10 percent who trust advertisements. As Andreas Wiegend, former chief scientist of Amazon.com, predicted in a blog post for the Monitor Talent Group, “In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.” Companies face a very real need not just to acknowledge the impact of unstructured social media on brand and product perception, but to understand and filter it sensibly, and to integrate it with structured customer data and get it into the hands of the right people to make it actionable. For many companies, the burgeoning text analytics approach of sentiment analysis is becoming a critical component of their overall strategy, giving them a much-needed assist to stay responsive to customers, market opportunities and trends. *** Few Hospitals Use Social Media Effectively, Says StudyJohn Commins, for HealthLeaders Media, January 25, 2010Nine in 10 hospitals use social media to some degree, but most of them say they're having little luck attracting new patients with it, and only one in three has a formal social media plan in place, a new study by Greystone.Net shows.Monitoring social media is handled by relatively few people within a hospital's Web department—70% report they have three or fewer people monitoring. Hospitals are struggling to find success with other goals of social media, with only small numbers reporting that they have been successful improving community relations (16.7%), customer service (8.7%), employee engagement (8.7%), and crisis management (4.5%). *** "Are Your Ears Burning?- 20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing"By Merle, Friday, January 8, 20101)http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See who's tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings. 2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others , you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You'll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic. 3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks several different websites to bring you what's "hot" right now. 4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic. 5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies you of any findings. 6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds. 7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only. Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use. 8) http://www.google.com/alerts : I've been using this "secret weapon" for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice. 9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00. 10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine. 11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out what's being said about you. The results returned are gathered from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and many more. 12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands, companies, even the ompetition. Sign up for free weekly updates on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old "press clipping" service. 13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services. Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account $88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a "personal" account free for 14 days. 14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources, Twitter and others to find out what's being said about you or your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there is a free version that provides "5 filters" and 15 days of what they call "article history". 15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more. 16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results. 17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a "conversational search engine" they index millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media. 18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000 results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond, or Platinum. 19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out everything there is to know about you online, and if negative information is found they try to have it removed. Different types of plans are available such as "My Reputation", "My Privacy", starting at only $14.95 a month. 20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who's been sending you all that "link love". Type in your Twitter user name and you'll be amazed at what you find. *** ARF: Consumer Opinions Online Still Seen as Curse, Not GiftMarketers Still Rely on Survey Research Despite Free Discourse on Webby Jack Neff Published: January 11, 2010 BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- "Listening" ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age's biggest gifts to marketers -- the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion -- as more of an added expense item than a blessing. The ARF, looking to give the nascent science of passively tracking word-of-mouth and behavioral cues a boost, has put together a new book, "Foundations of Listening," that encapsulates the state of the art of listening and recounts its strongest case studies. But it finds that tuning in to the millions of people freely sharing their experience with brands in ways that are relatively easy to track isn't anywhere near ready to replace the old system of "asking," i.e. survey research that serves as lubricant or "decision support" for marketing processes throughout the more analytical reaches of the marketing world. "Listening is scary. ... It's a big change from our traditional way of thinking. So, the single biggest opportunity in the history of consumer marketing lays dormant. The singular opportunity to tap into the brain of today's newly empowered consumer in such a natural way that what we hear is the purest 'research' ever is buried in nay-saying." Forrester Research released a list Monday of social computing prediction for 2010.The report suggests that companies that create social councils -- cross-functional teams aimed at sharing ideas about social media -- will begin to get serious about budgets and structure for these groups. Expect the teams to become strategists. Efforts will likely include policies. The report also suggests that an increasing number of marketers will adopt listening platforms to monitor social media. From Mediapost: Forrester Research released a list Monday of social computing prediction for 2010.The report suggests that companies that create social councils --
cross-functional teams aimed at sharing ideas about social media --
will begin to get serious about budgets and structure for these groups.
Expect the teams to become strategists. Efforts will likely include
policies. The report also suggests that an increasing number of
marketers will adopt listening platforms to monitor social media.
From Aberdeen Group: Report "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring: Why It Pays to Listen to Online Conversation"
Survey: Most CMOs To Boost Social Media Budgets In 2010 (And It Had Better Pay Off)Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 5:59 PMby This year, only 36% of companies tracked the impact of social media on conversions, and only 22% on revenue. But next year, 81% of CMOs expect social media investments to account for 10% of sales.From eMarketer: Social Initiatives: B2B vs. B2C DECEMBER 4, 2009Six in 10 B2B respondents used Twitter search to monitor mentions
of their company or brand, compared with just 35% of B2Cs. The
difference in usage of Google Alerts was slightly smaller, at 59% of
B2Bs versus 40% of B2Cs. Consumer-oriented firms were most likely to
keep tabs on mentions via Google search, at 61%, just edging out B2B
companies, 60% of which googled themselves for this purpose.
***
Your Subscribers Are Talking. Are You Listening? By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ
Some Blogs:
| Free Social Web Information (SWI) Server for your OrganizationFirst Google App for Monitoring Social Media: Realmon9Real time monitoring of social media topicsHow To Monitor Social Media?Free tools:
Other free tools can be found on these big lists of tools:
Commercial tools:
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