Information overload: Everyone tries to get meaning, detect trends and spot key events.

We have ran a few experiments showing that focusing on influencers within a niche community and using eCairn’s conversation application, it is possible to :

• learn faster than using Google Trends or any bottom up monitoring application
• learn things that are invisible to Google Trends, although they are critical for a given community

Experiment 1: Android

First, on a hot topic that has hit main street not so long ago: Android, Google’s mobile platform aimed at competing with windows mobile, iphone’s platform, symbian and so on.

They’re 4 top device manufacturers in the open handset alliance: HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung.
HTC has released the G1 in September and got tons of buzz but everybody did at this time as a rising tide lifts all boats.

Since mid September, leaks have pumped up the buzz on Motorola’s Android plan though their device isn’t yet on the market, not much info exists (from a mobile blogger’s knowledge) on LG or Samsung plans yet.

The charts coming from Conversation(tm) are based on a community of +400 mobile bloggers.

Here’re the charts (and by the way, we put together, as a comparison, trends from our application and google trends for HTC and Motorola - it’s not super pretty as we had to make the Google trends charts narrower):

The Conversation(tm) and Google trends look the same for HTC which is normal because they announced the G1 in September (i.e “the niche community of mobile bloggers and the public had the same information available to them). Looking at the Motorola charts, we can see that there was quite a few conversations in September, visible in the spike on the Conversation(tm) trends but not on the google trend. We also noticed that the second spike is super sharp in google though it’s not in Conversation(tm); as soon as mid October, the second buzz starts in Conversation(tm) though it’s only when Motorola confirmed they have an Android plan in the making that Google trends start to spike. Within the mobile blogger community, when HTC generated tons of conversations, there was at the same time quite a bit of speculation on Motorola; Based on our reading, several bloggers found some information making them think a big team was being put together at Motorola. While the conversation slowed down a bit, it restarted as soon as the rumor came back this time because some bloggers spotted interesting information on the web.

If one can draw a conclusion from this example, listening to a niche community enables an observer to understand inter-related stories as they unfold and to anticipate upcoming buzz. The more relevant your community to what you’re dealing with, the more of these effects you get…tools that gather data from the broader web will somewhat have a tendency to be reactive and tell stories after the fact.

Experiment 2: The Age of Conversation II

We ran the same trends on a very niche topic very relevant to social media marketing ‘The Age of Conversation II’. Unfortunately, google trends says that there isn’t enough search volume activity to display a chart.

But Conversation(tm) trends, ran this time against our list of ~1000 social media marketing blog, shows that the buzz has been growing lately on this topic:

By the way, if you’re interested to read what they say about ‘The Age of Conversation II’, here’s an RSS feed from Conversation(tm)

Conclusion:

One of the major payback of closely following influencers is that you can

- See the story unfold,
- See a story that you wouldn’t see otherwise.

This is a critical know-how for companies that not only want to measure what just happened but make decisions relative to what’s about to happen and influence in return if they can.

Last week’s post dubbed ‘Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs’ generated several thousands visits in the last 2 days and a slew of comments.

This short post is attempting to answer most of your questions, starting with two words of advertising

eCairn and Social Relevance

eCairn is a software startup with a differentiated approach and technology around social relevance. We help marketing teams and agencies to focus and cut their relevant slice of the blogosphere, build and execute engagement strategies (learning, buzz, outreach, and advertising) and measure progress towards their social engagement goals.

Mapping a community is not an easy thing and, if you’ve looked at lists and catalogs that pop up all over the web, you know what we’re talking about. That’s where our Conversation(tm) solution comes in and let you rank your own list. If your interest is to get a similar list on a different community or vertical, please go ahead and register (1 month free-trial) or contact us from this blog via the “Contact us” page.

Measuring influence - Algorithm, Approach

Our list is built from our own definition of the social media marketing community and our technology to identify and aggregate relevant bloggers within that community - which we will not disclose.

The influence algorithm we use is purely link based and pretty straight forward. Its uniqueness is that we’re only counting the links within the dataset of 1000 relevant blogs, both blogroll and direct links. We have tried a few algorithms playing with

• differentiating blogroll versus direct links,
• weighting the links based on the influence of the «source»,
• weighting more reciprocical links,
• counting links at blog or post level.

We did not find major differences on the top of the list whether using one algorithm or the other. The list is very dynamic however and watching it for a couple of weeks, we have even seen changes within the top 4 (these top 4 tend to be really stable).

The list is subjective and brought few questions and surprises – btw influence is subjective. It’s actually the list of influential bloggers in the social media marketing community more than a list of social media marketing blogs.

Agreed that R Scoble or Search Engine Land as an example, do not talk much about social media marketing. But, these bloggers are heavily referenced by people that are influential in social media marketing and hence make it to this list.

We welcome suggestions and feedback and will incorporate them for a future release.

Do we read the blogs ? (twitter question)

The short answer is yes. We read our « star » blogs (top influencers plus a few others) on a daily basis and we also look for conversations on all the 1000 blogs that discuss our favourite topics.

Next steps

We plan to deliver some additional value; as an example we are seeing that the social media interest that started with PR and SEO is now expanding to product marketing and strategic marketing. We will look into measuring this.

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

       ]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/11/answering-your-questions-on-top-150-social-marketing-blogs/feed/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:51:19 +0000 ecairn http://ecairn.wordpress.com/?p=225

We just implemented our “influence ranking algorithm”.

So we ran it against the ~1000 ’social media marketing’ blogs we monitor on an ongoing basis (along with tweets, forums, Q&As…).

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

Below is the top 150 list:
( When compared to the Adage Power 150 reference, remember we zoomed particularly on social media marketing. Plus the list contains only blogs written in English).

Here is an OPML Link, from Matt Shaulis, to the list if you want to import in your reader.

One of the top discussed topic in the social media blogs is the inability for social media to scale.

What people mean by that ? , they recognize how challenging & time consuming it is for marketers to spend hours in blogs and social media  versus online advertising campaigns where a brand can position a value proposition to millions of consumers in one click.

I’d like to share two observations and make my point:

One: Social media has already scaled.

There are 20+ Millions people in LinkedIn, 150+ in Facebook and Myspace, and depending on studies 60 to 80% of americans read blogs. These people (many of them) work for someone. I have collected some data using a LinkedIn question about it. (thanks to participate !)

If you are spending some time in blogs and LinkedIn, you know that a good share of these discussions are work/business related.

Hence, the issue to me is more that companies are not leveraging their people conversations in Social Media.

Two: Does Customer Support Scale ?

I just read a new study mentioning that  93% of customer want companies to interact with them in social media. and there is, to me , some value in looking at social engagement the way we look at customer support:
Customer support does not scale more than social media. At least, before the massive investments in CRM, customer support centers, self help systems aso, one would argue that the Customer Support process was more or less one-to-one personal conversation.

Today, very few people would question the absolute necessity for almost any company to invest in customer support.

I would bet, social engagement will follow the same path as customer service.

Trends, trends, trends. Businesses love trends.
Trends are a valuable source of information when we’re trying to manage or observe an activity overtime.  Are my sales going up? Is my cost going down? Are my customers more satisfied?
As someone told me years ago, “what you can’t measure, you can’t manage” and trends are a critical part of the measure.
So we just added our own piece to the puzzle by releasing Trends in Conversation (because our customers asked for it).

And the result is really very neat. Here’s a couple of examples from our application:

From our ’social media marketing’ project (~800 blogs we follow), we can now create a graph of how often bloggers talk about Obama & social media or McCain & social media.

Obama: McCain:

From our mobile/wireless project (~250 blogs), here’s the trend on Mobile Chrome. Bt they way, there isn’t (yet) a mobile Chrome (Google announced the desktop version a few weeks ago) but mobile bloggers are already speculating about the why/when/what/how

I remember in the early days :-), people teaching social media etiquette using the following example:

” you would not come to a party and start shouting I’m the best or Buy my product ! that’s no difference in social media “

Perfectly true.  Still the same people advocate brand monitoring as THE utlimate social media program people should start with.

Humm… would you come to any party and ask “what do you think about me, is this positive ?, negative”

The truth is unless you’re Obama or Michael Phelps,  or unless you target the community of your very closed friends, nobody would have any opinion. 

Actually, for the people who don’t have an established brand, monitoring is really what they should do  AFTER they have spend a great deal in listening, learning, building connections and trust. I would argue that even major brand should behave the same.

So how should companies leverage social media ?

1. listen
2. reflect & build a real engagement strategy ( Specific- Measurable -Actionable -Relevant and Time-based): one that your entire team can execute upon including: who to target, where to engage, resources/knowledge that we bring on the table, how to move the discussion one on one , what to measure, when to stop…
3. target: time is short and attention is scarce and companies should really focus on the communities they want to reach
4. listen (actively), share and learn. the good thing is that employees are already reading blogs, spending time in Facebook and LinkedIn and participating in conversations, so what this really means is to help them do it better, learn from their peers, align (softly) and leverage
5. build trust and influence, as real people and as a company
6. share the learnings with the organisation at large, from what customers, prospects and non customers desire, fear, request. How they talk, what works and what doesn’t, how diverse they are…
7. monitor results and this may be way different from counting the number of time your product or brand name is mentioned in the blogosphere. There may be countries where ecairn , jumbo or ronaldo is a cute name for a dog !

So does that mean monitoring should come last ?

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:

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!

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.

Someone forwarded me this very good presentation on social media. If, like us, you’re a big believer that business will embrace it sooner or later, it resonates pretty loud. You’ll find plenty of datapoints showing that social media is already big and here to stay.

The truth is that today, most business are unsure yet about what it means to them and what kind of relationships they need to build with the new environment. It’s taking them by surprise and to make it worst, there’s a big cultural gap between what’s happening out there vs what they’re used to inside….control/approval/slow decision making and so on…Bottom line, it’s kind of scary to them.

I particularly like slide 41. Why? Because when facing the unknown, and that’s really what social media looks like to most business today, the best next step is to take action, to make a move toward it. Soon after, it becomes more familiar and we grow more comfortable with it. So I agree: Just F**king get on! Start ‘listening’.

We do it and it really pays off in multiple ways.