Social Media Listening in a Marketing Workgroup.

August 27, 2008 — ecairn

Our baby has grown again! In the last few weeks, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers:

  • Collaboration and sharing has never been better with the new annotations.
  • Finding the information you really care about has never been easier with the new filtering mechanism.
  • Our combo of ‘finding blogs’ features has been greatly enhanced.

A picture is worth a thousand words so here it goes:

Annotations:

Choose the action you want to take and view a record of all actions:

  • Recommend a post (To share with your team members)
  • Add notes (To keep a record of your own analysis)
  • Track comment (For your record and to do some follow up later on)
  • Forward (To notify someone in / outside of your team)
  • Plan action (To record a ‘todo’ )
  • Star a blog

Filters


Thanks to filters, you can narrow the posts’ list to what you really care about (it’s helpful when you have created a project to listen to x00 blogs and you have x00000 posts in your database). You can refine the results even more within a specific filter (for exemple, in a filter on social media marketing you could refine on twitter to get all the post talking about twitter). We also provide an RSS feed to those filters. With them, you can share with a broader audience on specific topics or create some very cool widgets or get an alert whenever something new has been publishing within them.

Add Blogs

mmm I think we should call it Add pages with an RSS ;-). Though our primarily focus is tactically on blogs, it’s possible to add other type of content sources into Conversation(tm). We have users adding stock ticker headlines like Yahoo AAPL healines or twitter search like Obama or McCain twittering.

The key addition this time is what we call ‘preferred search’. You can now save your searches (save only those that have brought back enough relevant results). When you do, Conversation™ will run them in the background and create a ranked list of suggested blogs that you can analyze at any time. We recommend you find 4 or 5 good searches combinations, save them and come back to check your suggested blogs once or twice a week.

So here is the new Add Blogs page:

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Blog Posts Frequency: How much?

August 21, 2008 — laurentpf

Has any of you wondered what’s the average bloggers’ posting frequency? Does it vary from niche to niche?

The information could be very valuable if you’re trying to estimate the time & resource you will need to put in listening and engaging with many relevant blogs in your target segment.

On a sample of blogs’ lists that we manage, we looked at the number of posts we received in the last week and, by dividing by the number of blogs in the list, we arrived at a rough estimate of the posting frequency for each of them. Here’s what it looks like:

So the average is .35 post per blog per day. Indeed each list has an average number between .30 and .40 post per day. Note the 2 exceptions in blue: For wireless and premier league soccer, its more around 1 blog per post per day.

Blogs are definitely something that any company looking at listening to social media should have on their radar screen. If you want to do it well, you have to go through a huge amount of content (look at the size of the blog list above) in order to:

  • spot what’s going on your communities.
  • engage in relevant conversations.

Make sure you are ready to invest the time required for it. It does take time!

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Dell Hell: the Symbolic web learning

August 8, 2008 — ecairn

I find it amazing that the very story that made “social media”  known to a broad audience was made possible by the invention of an expression, a community code: “Dell Hell”

By coining the expression, “dell hell”, Jeff Jarvis made it possible to track the spread of his story around the blogosphere and measure its impact on Dell sales, share price aso.

Some data points:
Buzz and Jarvis represent a 25% market share of the “dell hell” search in google, for a total above 44K articles, way above “hp hell” or “apple hell“.

( :-) sound like if you’re a consumer electronic manufacturer, a 3K range in Google for “yourname hell” is a decent score which is quite a number, just compare to walmart hell )

With his story getting momentum, J Jarvis also created a symbol that signals whether someone belongs to the social media community or not. As you read this post, either you already know the story behind “dell hell” and this is a strong indication that you’re deep in social marketing or you don’t and you are probably not spending your life in social media.

So what’s the learning there:

- one of the paradigm shift of the social web, is that people are writing for communities and no longer building one size fits all articles. This means using symbols & styles to discriminate who’s in and who’s out, things that only community members (and our patent pending search algorithm) will spot and decode.
- people also collectively build “explicit routes” for the content to flow. Using trackbacks and blogroll to name a few, writers creates community maps that overlay the web structure and take an active role in a process that used to be left to search engines

This, to us, means that symbolic web is the best candidate for web3.0 in a context where the internet is transitioning from universal to social.

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