Social Media Integration: Monitoring and engaging 600+ blogs on social media marketing

May 29, 2008 — domlah

As part of our day to day, we collect, organize, listen and engage with blogs and social media that talk about .. social media :-) and we’ve build and organized a list of 600+ blogs that relate to this topic.

We use this list (in our application) to:

  • spot what’s going on the larger social media community,
  • engage in a few conversations ( while keeping track of it)
  • engage in one to one discussions via email, Facebook or LinkedIn,
  • and advertise towards the blogs/social media properties that are “ad friendly”.

We’ve seen from time to time people asking for such kind of list : i.e a list of recommended social media marketing blogs.

There is obviously the excellent list from Adage and also numerous blog catalogs you can look at to build your own list .

Still, we’re wondering whether & how we could help.

Would you rather get

  • the blog list ?,
  • widgets that expose the posts that match your preferred topics ? (i’ve one in my Facebook profile)
  • searchable feeds

Do you think it makes sense to provide a sublist of blogs focused on: “Marketing with social networks”,” Adwords and web2.0″, “Verticals” …

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What is Conversation?

May 21, 2008 — ecairn

How can marketers operate in the highly diversified, community based, conversation driven social media world?
(and, by the way, how do we help them do that too)

There has been tons of writing about it on social media marketing blogs and, to summarize, the bottom line looks like: They need first to become part of it (not just monitor on the sideline but join them as someone else said) and, second, they need to adopt a new engagement model (listen to people first). And it’s hard work.
Can they ignore it? Nope….it’s not going away.
Social Media is becoming mainstream everywhere, so companies are struggling with:

  1. How to find a large number of relevant communities where to engage
  2. How to organize active listening; and this spans from product marketing teams to PR
  3. How to develop social marketing campaign that mix blogger outreach, buzz, viral marketing and more traditional online advertising on web2.0 properties.

Conversation, our online application to find/listen/engage with communities, enables a marketing team to get better at 1, 2 and 3. Conversation is designed for collaboration and sharing thus its work group ready and you can have multiple users working together and sharing at the same time.
To get started, you create a custom database of relevant social media based on your target. This is done through a combo of blogsearch/bookmark/upload features. Social media is a very dynamic world thus having an integrated way to populate and maintain your list of target communities is critical. For our own usage, we’ve built a database of 600+ blogs talking about social media marketing and it’s growing over time as we discover new blogs we hadn’t seen before.
Once you’ve populating your database, you’re automatically subscribed to all the communities and you can listen to them using a composite view of the content that has been published by them (using the same example as before, we store 20 000 posts in our database and get more than 200 everyday). Of course this is a massive amount of information but the trick is that if you do it as a team with the right tools, it’s doable. Our list is easy to scan and, when you find something relevant, you can read the details and reply to it or just share it with a note. By the way, the list is searchable. You can even set filters to make your favorite topics stand out.
Though the debate is still on, we suspect the right social media engagement model will mix direct interaction with influencers, participation in conversation, and use of buzz/viral and mass traditionnal online advertising mecanism. Conversation provides useful data on social network profiles, advertising network profiles and more so you can plan and manage your ‘campaign’ saccording to your need.

Voila, a picture is worth a 1000 words so here’s a demo of the beast.

And a few screenshot based on a wireless project a client is running on our app:

Blog list —

Post list —

Posted in Conversation App. Tags: , , . No Comments »

Conversation™ updated - Welcome Media tab

May 8, 2008 — ecairn

Yesterday, we released a new version of Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers. It contains an exciting new feature, the Media tab, and a few improvements we’re eager to discuss with you.

The Media tab

First of all, each project gets a new Media tab where marketers will find useful information about advertising. Click on the tab and you get a summary view of:

Media tab - Summary

  • the presence of advertising
  • the ad networks available

On the left, the Presence section shows you the percentage of blogs that accept/don’t accept advertising from the most common ad networks (Google AdWords/AdSense, Yahoo Content Network or Federated Media just to name a few among the twelve ad networks we detect).

On the right, the Networks section lists all the networks that appear on at least one blog in the project. They are listed from the network that appears the most to the least.

Click on any link in this view and you jump in the Find Placements view.

Find Placements

Here you can filter down the list of blogs by the ad network you want to use. You can select blogs with a few or no ads at all. And you can combine those criteria with other filtering capabilities using labels and star.

The Media tab will soon get better with additional useful information like the social profiles of bloggers.

Better search in the Postolist

Search PostolistA couple of weeks ago, Conversation™ got a brand-new search engine. We use a customized sphinx full text search engine; it is well integrated with our environement , a lot more faster that the mysql full text search and has nice features such as english and french stemming.

Yesterday, we pushed out some improvements over this capability:

  • better highlighting in results, particularly for phrases
  • better filtering by keywords

Better UI design

Last but not least, the UI design has been improved. If you’re already used to Conversation™ , you might have already spotted the differences on the previous screenshots: A few targeted adjustments on header/tab styles or the layout for a more pleasant user experience.

Posted in Conversation App. Tags: , , . 1 Comment »

First Post

May 7, 2008 — ecairn

Bim bam boum….
Some noise somewhere in the blogosphere. Perhaps a big bang. It sounds like an “Hello world!”

Blogosphere: Who are you?
Noise: eCairn

Blogosphere: What do you do?
Noise: A company of a few (for now) building stuff that helps marketing organizations
understand and influence relevant conversations taking place in the world of social media.

Blogosphere: What kind of Stuff? Is it useful?
Noise: It’s a secret. Of course! (answer to the second question)
(big laugh from Blosophere who just opened ecairn.com in her browser …she knows better…you can’t keep a secret
anymore)

Blogosphere (now seeing what the noise looks like): What do you have on your left shoulder?
Noise: It’s a cairn.

Blogosphere: A what?
Noise: A c.a.i.r.n (slowly spelling it); it’s made of stones. Click here

Blogosphere: That’s wierd, I’ve never heard of such a name. I know more about google, twitter, facebook….
Noise: Yeah, I know. Our Cairn hopes to become as useful as those guys sometimes.

Blogosphere: Yeah right, keep hoping little Cairn. But why did you choose a cairn?
Noise: We’re about communities, collaboration, knowledge capitalization, ease of use, mash-up. In barren terrains where its easy to get lost, cairns will show you the right way, it’s built and maintained by people over time as a contribution to those future adventurers who will try to get across, it’s useful; Oh and and it can be fun, look at what people did here

(for those who enjoy the outdoors, this amateur picture was taken in the needles area of the grand canyon of Colorado)

Blogosphere stare at the picture with a mix of amusement and wonder…then says: Ok folks, welcome to my world, you’ll find a lot of friends eager to learn and share here
I wish you a long life.

End of the story for now…

Our blog will be part factual content, part thoughts about what we see happening around us, part about where we’re going. With an adventurous spin and a dash of humor ;-)

Hope you will enjoy it.

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