Here is the BIG list :
Columns are the rank, name and url of the blog, then the trend since last Nov and at the end, the trend since Feb 09. On the top of the list, we got the usual suspects: C Brogan, J Owyang, B Solis, D Armano, S Godin, V Maltoni, J Falls.
The top movers/new entrants are:
- Here is the list:
Two weeks ago we mentioned that big changes were coming soon.
Today we’re excited to launch eCairn Conversation™ 3.0!
Now it’s easier and faster to find and use the critical features needed for your community and influencers marketing activities.
With it, users get:
- A brand new user interface
- A Online Self-Help Center with hundreds of FAQs, a complete user guide and video tutorials
- Many improvements like:
- View trends on Search or Topics
- Create an RSS feed on Search or Topics
- Date range for search
- Export up to 5000 conversations at once
These changes are available now. To see them in action, log into your workspace.
Or if you’re not yet a user of eCairn Conversation™ take a look at this demo and check our very competitive pricing.
Also, we’re having a Webinar 3/10 9:30 am PST: demo of a new innovative approach to find, listen and engage with social communities and key influencers.
To register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/278917336
On March 8th, we are excited to launch eCairn Conversation™ 3.0!
This major release comes with a brand new User Interface and some amazing new features. We worked closely with customers for months to integrate their requests. We are very proud of our product.
This new release will change how you access the application features, making them easier to discover and use. The new navigation will allow you to:
- Add and manage sources in your project – In particular, you will see the ‘Blog’ tab renamed as ‘Community’. This is to illustrate the fact that many different kind of sources can now be added to your project besides blogs.
- Access and manage conversations – In particular, you will see the ‘Posts’ tab renamed as ‘Conversations’. Again this change is to illustrate that you can aggregate posts, tweets, facebook updates, linkedin Q&A, mainstream media content and so on in one single place.
- Filter conversations to zoom on what you’re interested in – This functionality ‘Filter’ is now called ‘Topic’. Both the list in the Community tab and the Conversations tab can be filtered by topic.
- Find ‘network’ information – The functionality within the current ‘Networks’ tab will then be available under the ‘Community’ tab.
Other improvements are:
- Navigation:
- Action buttons at the top of each tab to access critical functionalities.
- Filter pane on the right side to narrow the list against a wide range of critical criteria.
- Navigation between projects in one single click.
- Overall look n feel: New fonts, color, styling, improved dashboard.
- New Self-Help Center with plenty of FAQs, User Guide, tutorials and videos.
- Other enhancements specifically requested by our customers:
- View trends on Search and Topics (previously available topic only)
- RSS on Search and Topic
- Date range for search (in addition to all time, day, week, last login)
- Export up to 5000 conversations at once.
We hope you’ll enjoy this new release and our team look forward in working with you! Please, join us to a 45 minutes product demonstration on Wednesday March 10th at 9:30am PST: Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/278917336
Below are screenshots of the 3 main tabs:
1 – Dashboard
2 – Community
3 - Conversations
eCairn releasing Top 500 Social media marketing blogs with a $100 prizeWhat’s in it for you: You’ll be eligible for the $100 prize and your blog will gain valuable exposure; our November 2008 top 150 blogs received over 12,000 unique visitors. It’s a win- win for you. So what are you waiting for. Give us your picks!!!
Terms and conditions
· Picks must be submitted on Facebook, LinkedIn and blog
· One submission per blog (trust me we will be checking)
· Obscenities will not be tolerated
· If there is a tie, winners be entered in a drawing
· Winner will be notified via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and eCairn Blog.
That’s it. The revolution has happened, is happening, will continue to happen. Social media is everywhere. It’s changing how human work together.
Last week end, I went for a sweet bike ride across the beautiful and very wet Santa Cruz mountains (quite a rainy winter here). I caught up with a group of Rock Lobsters crawling swiftly up the road 
.
One of them is the soul and heart behind Rock Lobster cycles, a custom frame and bike manufacturer, located in Santa Cruz-California, who specializes in Scandium frame. His main marketing is himself and it’s word of mouth (and a bit of press and trade shows of course).
We chatted a bit about biking and the conversation moved to social media as he asked about my work. I was happy and surprised to discover that, on top of running his business, building and riding the bikes and all the admin around it, he has time to maintain 3 blogs (here is one of them). No need to say that he is passionate about what he does and wants his customers to know it. Blogging feels natural and right to him.
Of course those are only a few in an ocean of 1000’s bike blogs (I don’t know the exact number but I know there are more than 500 for sure .
Now read this (well it’s more like listen)…and don’t miss Seth’s piece at the end in which you’ll hear:
“From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.”
Rock Lobster is a tribe. Their togetherness is real and fueled by strong emotions for the product, the people and the love of biking. One tribe amongst the many many that are out there and are, as Seth said, the future of all web content.
Small(s) is the new big.
On September 22 I was fortunate enough to have an exchange with J. Colony Forrester at the time when J. Owyang left. I believe that Forrester is defiantly making the best decision for his company. (http://blogs.forrester.com/colony/2009/09/ceos-your-changing-customer.html).
Not only is the new Forrester policy right, but it’s also a call to action for corporations to start looking at the “social capital” of their employees, as an asset that needs to be protected and nurtured.
As part of this asset Forrester could even go one step further and manage the interactions that its bloggers have on other social media properties.
This is why at eCairn,
- We let people interact in their name
- We make ourselves efficient by working as a team
- We trace and measure every interaction our team members have in the Social Media Marketing community.
———— forrester blog policy – moronic policy —-
Marketers are trained to understand the customer and social media has become a wonderful
playground to fulfill this purpose.
Let’s look at how information analysis and visualization can help.
I will pretend I’m a knowledge and information Expert (which I’m not) and summarize a discussion I had lately with a marketer
“Are tag clouds useful?” – asks a Marketer
“Sure” – I answered.
“By showing what’s important in a very concise manner, it helps you find your way to what’s most relevant to you” – “It’s a navigation/organization tool”
“But in order to understand, you need more”
“Why do I care?” – asks the Marketer.
“Because we, human beings, have 2 basic communication needs (amongst many): To find something and to understand or study that same thing. As marketers, you are trained to understand the customer.” – I replied.
To find something, we use signals like right, left, here, there, behind.
One signal at a given time is enough.
Applied to information, those signals will be the most frequent words found. Many ‘one world’ makes a tag cloud.
To understand something, we use a combination of signals: A sentence made of several verbs, nouns, adjectives…The meaning will augment as more words are combined together.
At eCairn we believe in expression clouds, as clouds of multiple words which helps discover patterns of meaning. Indeed we have the algorithm to produce expression clouds from a set of highly relevant conversations taking place in social media communities.
eCairn has many examples to share so here is one:
- Community = Beauty Blogger in the US (~600 bloggers – 40k conversations over the past 6 months)
- Topic = Anti-aging (4k conversation over the past 6 months)
And here’s the corresponding tag cloud:
Clearly the expression cloud offer more meaningful information which can be reused for messaging as it represents the essence of the conversation as seen through the eyes of its beholders (the community).
Today, we introduce the ‘Add RSS feed’ feature.
eCairn Conversation(tm) users can now track conversations taking place on relevant Facebook Wall pages, LinkedIn Q&As and Network updates, forums and sub-forums or even general news and traditional media sites.
Basically every RSS can be added.
Click on the link below for 2 minutes demo:
Is there such a thing as a do it all real time search? Probably not.
Something happens, let’s call it “small bang”.
In order to “real time” search it; you have to know about it, right ? You can only search for something that you already know about.
But if you already know about it, that’s no longer real time. Hence, real time search is an oxymoron.
We should rather name “the need to be on the top of something as soon as it occurs”, real time listening or real time discovery.
And this opens several interesting challenges:
1) One can listen to so many sources at a given time.
Although one can talk/ tweet to millions in one click, listening, and even automated listening does not work the same way.
The consequences is that people and brand have to prioritize and organize who they are listening to. That’s what Facebook Friends, Twitter followers, RSS lists are all about.
I remember attending one Robert Scoble talk where he was mentioning having a 45 mn advantage over CNN learning of events like plane crashes, earthquakes …
To do that, whether on purpose or not, he was relying on a network of people spread across the globe and counting the repetition of the same tweet to validate the information and judge its importance. He also had trusted sources he could count on to double-check. Even implicitly, there was an organization around his listening effort.
If let’s say, 95% of his contacts were in Silicon Valley, then he would have a hard time spotting a new event happening in Italy or Brazil.
For a brand, the implication is that they have to map their target communities and align their listening efforts and resources to their strategies and to “who matters”.
They also have to give up the dream of real time listening to a few billion people real time. The “more is better” approach of listening is a root cause for “systemic intelligence failure” as Predident Obama just named it.
2) Any discovery process starts with a definition of what is supposed to be discovered: “patterns”.
Pattern can be simple ones
- mentions of brand & product names, executive names, competitors … (yes/no, number, frequency)
- lack of mentions of brand name in their target communities… which is usually a much bigger issue for mid-size brands.
or more complex ones.
- expressions that have surfaced recently in a given community
- changes in the structure of the community (let’s say top influencers start linking back to your competitor blog, following an outreach effort this competitor just performed)
- changes in the tonality of the conversations around your brand in a given community
Poincare (early 20th century French Physicist) once said: ” to find something without looking for it, one must have looked for it without finding it for a long time” (“Pour trouver sans chercher, il faut avoir beaucoup cherche sans trouver”).
Back to Robert Scoble example, he was not just looking for “anything” but discovering potential already known phenomenas. He also had to have an idea of normal versus abnormal frequency of events.
This is the same for brand. They need to get an idea of what they should be searching for in order to instruct the discovery process.
This is best done with a non directed listening for a while; to get an idea of the events that are usually of interest and a generalization into “patterns” that can be looked for.
After community mapping and strategy definition, listening is a mandatory step before setting up any “automated” discovery.
Shouting vs Sharing: Every person having SM experience will say it’s one big difference between traditional 
marketing and social media marketing.
Any fundamental change, such as social media, requires a change in both tactic and strategy. Using an old strategy with the new tactic will not work.
In this case, shouting through the SM megaphone will either get you 1) ignored (that’s if you’re just not relevant but with a flawless execution or 2) hurt (that’s if you piss off people at the tactical level).
So when I hear stories like Pizza Hut has more than 100k fans on Facebook or that TGIF got 900k fans, I’m in awe. On the surface they look like awesome social media success as they’ve built a huge and visible social proof that way.
But then, I ask myself: Are they sharing or shouting? Are people sharing back with them? What kind of relationships are they building with all those fans?
This is the case where your common sense tells you “No, it can’t be”.
So I went and looked under the hood, more precisely at TGIF’s facebook page (>900k fans!).
Woody (the TGIF persona) is basically a special offer machine, which to me is more shouting than sharing. Not really anything engaging, it tells nothing about TGIF as a company.
But I was also very intrigued by the number of comments as they were tons of them.
There comes the real big surprise.
The comments range in the categories of:
- People really pissed of at TGIF for not getting their free burger coupons (which is truly what got TGIF to “pay for” >900k fans..Read “pay for” because they ran a very traditional marketing campaign to get people to sign up)
- People encouraging others to boycott TGIF
- Random nonsense
- Spam
Basically I think they screwed up. They achieved their goals by getting an amazing number of fans (but to be honest it’s not hard when you giveaway something). Again this is the big debate between quantity and quality. Huge number of fans, large number of comments but zero in quality (no blame on the hundreds of people unhappy who want others to know they’re unhappy)
Bottom line, I think it’s a big failure. What they got is a lot of shouting back and tons of angry people. Their FB page looks like a mega crisis and their reputation will take a hit as they can’t erase the mess.
While it’s true that brands have to be where people are and Social Networks/FB/Twitter/Blogs is where people spend more and more time according to the latest surveys, you can’t go there with the same agenda as before.
What could TGIF have done differently?
First, change the strategy.
It’s half of their problem.
I’m not an expert in their business but instead of trying to shout, they could have empowered employees locally to create their own SM properties (consistently with some corp guideline) and share with people that matters locally and leverage blogs/twitter/etc to find them. Find local people who have a passion for, I don’t know, but for example: party, budget dining, sports and so on…and adapt to their agenda.
They could have thought “target” (can’t be everything to everyone), “network” (network have structure), “relationships” (relationships brings loyalty).
