Here’s a short video about it

In this update, you get:

• A completely revamped influencer-centric community tab so that you can:
  • Browse at a glance your favorite influencers.
  • Research influencers across multiple parameters such as influence rank, relevance, location, social networks and more.
  • Identify relevant influencers in a few clicks thanks to enhanced filtering options, located in the left bar.

  

As this is a major user experience leap, we’ve kept the existing UI which is accessible through the Source button located above the list.

• Real time Twitter Firehose so that you can:
  • Follow and Research community and influencers twitterstreams with access to full twitter firehose (1 month tweet history):
    • Visualize trends & sentiment for your brand and competitors.
    • Analyze the river of tweets in one click to understand the chatter.
  • Engage your favorite influencers across blog posts and tweets and track your engagement.
  • Understand the Influencers’ Twitter interconnections.

  

• New Facebook Page analytics:
  • Benchmark your pages’ engagement against your industry competitors.
  • Understand how content impacts engagement with post by post analysis.
• One stop status monitoring of your listening, outreach and research projects with Improved Dashboard and Reporting.
• Manage large deployments with Improved Role Based Administration.

Last, eCairn built-in directory now spans 427 communities and 211k influencers across various countries from Americas and Europe.

( at 55m40s if youtube does not bring you right there)

As a thank you back, here are some data points about the share of voice of three top brands in the Cocktail community.

Diageo comes first with 0.55 share of voice, then Pernod Ricard with 0.53 and 0.33 with Bacardi. Pretty interesting to compare with respective 2011 revenues.

This is a few weeks after the team at eCairn France also moved to a beautiful location in Grenoble.
Here are a few paparazzi shots from the move.

Now we are settling in to the new office!

It’s been an exciting six years for eCairn, and moving to this new location is the start of a new chapter in our history.

Our new address is 465 Fairchild Drive in Mountain View.

If you’re in the area, please stop by to say hi, and possibly challenge one of us to a game of ping pong .

In Brian Solis‘s new report, “The Rise of Digital Influence“, he sheds new light into the realm of influence. As one of the hottest trends in social media, influencer marketing is often misunderstood. The constantly evolving landscape makes it difficult for companies to find points of engagement in the social web, but at this time we seem to have reached a renaissance era in digital influence and engagement. As Brian Solis states, “The problem is that many companies are looking at influence backwards, unknowingly or lazily relying on scores rather than understanding how influence is actually created and used.”

The core of Brian Solis’s report focuses on the problem of misinterpreting the various influence scores and assuming that a score is enough of an indicator to evaluate engagement decisions. Brian states that at a minimum, these scores represent social capital, which arises out of many varying factors.

As an enterprise or agency seeking to target influencers you must identify people who will give your content and messages resonance. Resonance is defined by Brian as the “duration, rate and level of interactivity” around your content. Resonance dictates how many people will see your content/message and how long it will stay in their minds.

Interest Graph showing Brian Solis's reach within his closest peers.

Resonance arises through the other pillars of influence, reach and relevance. You can read more about the pillars in David Armano’s post here or in our subsequent post here. In eCairn, we identify the reach of influencers through the number of followers, their level of connectivity with their peers and the unique visits to their website. In addition to reach, eCairn captures relevance by looking at communities by vertical and spotting the tribes and clusters of influencers who have their own niche within larger communities.

Social Graph of a small excerpt of the Music Community. Notice the colored clusters designating sub-communities/tribes.

Brian references several services that attempt to score influence, but the problem is that they only seek to measure reach or relevance, not resonance. Reach and relevance determine resonance, which (as Brian states) is the true measurement we need to make engagement decisions.

The benefit of eCairn is that we identify people who can provide you resonance in an efficient and focused manner. Through discovering the level of connectivity and activity of person in his/her community, we help you target by reach. Through analyzing the expressions and relationships of a person against those of his/her peers, we help you target by relevance. By being noiseless and letting the natural order of the social web filter out the noise, we save you time in your targeting effort and allow you to spend your energy doing engagement. And by allowing you to zoom into the social web from various levels (social web, community, tribe, influencer) we allow you to vary the scope of your target community to suit your campaign needs.

If you want to successfully target influencers worth engaging, eCairn provides the tools necessary to identify those with the social capital to provide resonance to content, messages and conversations you want to deliver to your audience and then track and manage your engagement in an integrated relationship management system.

You can read more in the report below:

Director of Search Strategy at Acxiom. andreas.com
facebook.com/andreas.work

Andreas Ramos develops strategies and tactics for social media at Acxiom. Author of “Search Engine Marketing” (McGraw-Hill) and six other books on web technology.

His book was also published by Tsing Hua University (Beijing), which also uses his courseware.

Andreas has been in Silicon Valley for 15 years, where he has worked at SGI, SUN, Brio, and other companies.

——————-

On March 1st, Facebook (FB) rolled out the biggest change in several years. This isn’t just a change to the interface; it’s a fundamental change in their advertising strategy. This also changes how companies use FB to reach their target audience. It also changes the revenue model of social media.

Up to now, FB tried to be an advertising platform. Companies placed ads in FB to reach their target audience. But FB performs poorly compared to Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

If you show 100 ads in Google (i.e., 100 impressions), you could count on average to get two clicks (a 2%
click-through, or CTR). In FB, you need to show 4,000 impressions to get two clicks. That’s a 0.00005% CTR. It’s abysmal. The CPLs (cost-per-lead) was correspondingly poor: FB CPLs were generally 10X over  Google Adwords CPLs.  FB doesn’t work for advertising.

The same with ecommerce. FB also tried to be an ecommerce platform, where companies build online stores in their FB pages so customers could buy products. A year ago, many of the large brands had ecommerce sites within FB. These are all gone now. The revenues don’t justify the expense. FB doesn’t work for ecommerce.

Up to now, there were fan pages in FB, which were mini-websites for companies. Companies could create a landing page, where not-yet-fans arrived and were encouraged to click Like (get a discount, a gift, a coupon, etc.).
These were called “fan gates” (the fan had to enter via a gate). FB also allowed companies to create additional pages as tabs, where companies could place games, widgets, videos, photos, contests, polls, etc. A number of companies sprung up to create software for those tabs.

This was all great fun, but it didn’t produce sales for companies nor advertising revenue for FB. Companies and social media strategists tried many things but these didn’t work. Many industry insiders have known that FB works poorly. FB’s IPO is coming up, which means FB has to show an actual revenue model that also works. So it was time for Plan B.

In short, FB abandoned the advertising model. FB has switched to an entirely new model.

FB noticed that people like to follow their favorite companies. Many people also interact with those companies: post messages, add photos and videos, etc. In return, a number of companies interacted with their fans: they wrote postings, they replied to people, and so on. FB’s new strategy builds on this model of interaction based on messaging.

Gone: Fan Pages and Tabs

• FB removed fan pages. Tens of thousands of fan gates, built at a cost of millions of dollars, are now irrelevant.
• Tabs: FB lowered the significance of tabs. Few people clicked on those tabs anyway. There still are tabs, but they don’t matter. This means no more polls, contests, games, etc. Buddy Media’s tools are now irrelevant. The vertical list of tabs is now a row of three boxes which looks like decoration. Most fans will not know they can click on these. (You can change the order of the boxes. Click Edit and then the pencil icon at the top of each box. You can swap its place with other boxes.)
• Photos and videos also fall off the table. Few people clicked on those.

The New FB World: Messaging
FB changed the fan page layout to match the Timeline layout. The goal is encourage companies to post messages and interact with their fans with postings. This is important: You post messages. Your messages get pushed into your fans’ news feed. They comment on your message. You encourage engagement with messages. You pay to get your message distributed. Here are the new tools for this:

• “Pin a Story”: This lets you move a message to the top of your page for seven days. After that, it goes back to messages. You can use this to feature new products, sales, events, etc.
• Highlight a Message: You can expand a message to fill the width of the screen so it stands out better.
• Private Messaging: Your fans can send private messages to you. Customer support issues can be handled quietly. To do this, go to Manage | Edit Page| Turn on “Messages:Show “Message” button
• Message Moderation: You can turn on moderation, which means a fan’s postings have to be approved by you in order to appear. This will stop negative comments. However, it will also stop the conversation when fans post and it doesn’t appear. To do this, go to Manage | Edit Page | Turn on “Post Visibility” (“Show only posts by…”)

If you want, scroll to the bottom of your Timeline and write about your company’s beginnings. You can set this back to 1800.

- Write up to three lines of text, but not more. Data shows that two or three lines of text works best.
- Add photos or video. Data shows you’ll get 2X response.

On average, your posting will be seen by 16% of your fans. If you have 100,000 fans, only 16,000 will actually see your posting. FB’s algorithm shows your message only to fans who interacted with you or are likely to want to see your message. It won’t annoy your other 84,000 fans.

• To reach your remaining fans, you can use “Reach Generator” (i.e., you pay to use Reach Generator.) With payment, your message will go out to 50% of your fans weekly and 75% of your fans monthly.

Reach Generator has a downside. Many companies have paid hackers to add tens of thousands (or millions) of fake accounts in order to inflate the company’s reputation. As much as 80% of fans of the major GOP candidates are fake. If a company bought a million fake accounts, they will now have to pay to send messages to those fake accounts just to reach the few real accounts.

• There is also “Facebook Premium”, which allows you place your messages as ads on the side of your fans’ page. FB promises a 10X response improvement.
• Modify Your Fan Page’s Layout

About the only thing that you can do in terms of layout is the banner image at the top of the page. You can add a large image at the top of the page (see e.g., facebook.com/harley-davidson). You can also turn this off(as I did at my page facebook.com/andreas.work)

You can also add your logo, your face, or your cat.
- The banner image (also called the Cover image) should be 851×315 pixels
- The banner image is NOT allowed to have text. This means No call-to-action, offers, ads, information, nor text. I suppose FB teams in India will review banners and block the offenders. It’s interesting that they’ll block banners with text. They are pushing companies to use messaging.
- The portrait photo can be 180×180 pixels or less.

• Change/Update the name of your page

By now, many companies want to rename their pages. Use the following URL to request a name change:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact_us.php?id=262629790471076

• The Log Out Splash Screen

You can also pay to have a splash image appear when people log out of FB. However, most people don’t log out; they simple shut down the browser page. I doubt this will have any impact.

Terminator Day: March 31st
Companies have until March 31st to switch over. Until then, the old display is still active. At the end of March, everyone will be switched over.

In Summary:
The change is radical. FB has abandoned pay-per-click advertising and switched to interaction based on messages. This makes sense: Social media is engagement, so the new model works with that. And advertising didn’t work anyway.

Companies and social media experts are going to have to change directions (and horses). It’s no longer about polls, games, contests, and other gimmicks. It’s no longer how to get the most fans. It now becomes a matter
of writing messages that engage.

It’s a good question as to what this means for other social media companies. Their results were also equally bad. Will they continue on a ad-based model? Or switch to FB’s new strategy?

Don’t abandon FB. Millward Brown found that Facebook was the most efficient form of media at driving desired brand perceptions and overall brand equity when compared to other online, out-of-home and television advertising. It’s just not clear on the best way to do this.

Finally, this is the perfect example for why you should not use FB as your main digital platform. FB, which is run by kids, owns your company’s presence in FB and they can do whatever they like and they won’t even notify you. You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, hire people, etc., and then FB changes everything. Build your own website. Don’t rely on FB.

As the Republicans are in the process of choosing their candidate for the presidential race, let’s dive into the Republican blogosphere and see what the metrics are telling us about the campaign.

1. Top concerns expressed in the Republican tribe week-to-week

1.1. Weekly expression clouds

Looking back at the weeks leading up to Super Tuesday, we took a weekly snapshot of the posts published in the GOP-leaning community and identified the top concerns expressed in the tribe since the end of January. Here are the expression clouds for the last five weeks:

• week 1: Jan 30-Feb5

Word cloud of the top concerns expressed in the GOP-leaning community from Jan 30 to Feb 6 2012.

• week 2: Feb 6-Feb 12

Word cloud of the top concerns expressed in the GOP-leaning community from Feb 6 to Feb 13 2012.

• week 3: Feb 13-Feb 19

Word cloud of the top concerns expressed in the GOP-leaning community from Feb 13 to Feb 20 2012.

• week 4: Feb 20-Feb 26

Word cloud of the top concerns expressed in the GOP-leaning community from Feb 20 to Feb 27 2012.

• week 5: Feb 27-March 04

Word cloud of the top concerns expressed in the GOP-leaning community from Feb 27 to March 3 2012.

1.2. Week-to-week comparison

Next, we compared the top expressions from one week to the next to see which topics became popular and which ones disappeared from the radar.

From week 1 to week 2, the following topics gained significant traction in the GOP-leaning tribe: religion (with mention of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and of an “attack on religious freedom”) and birth control (with expressions such as “access to birth control”, “free birth control” and “contraception coverage”). Two events which occurred in week 2 received a lot of attention that week: the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Whitney Houston’s death, before losing momentum the week after.

Among the topics getting a lot more coverage in week 3 than previously are the economy, and specifically gas prices, unemployment (“longest stretch of high unemployment” is a frequent expression that week), and taxation (with the acceleration of the debate around the “payroll tax cut”). The debate on religion gained ground that week again, with more mentions of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and of Santorum’s criticism of Obama’s “phony theology”.

Week 4′s conversations were concerned with the burning of copies of the Koran on a military base in Afghanistan, prompting an official apology (“Obama’s apology”). Commentaries on the campaign focused even more than the week before on gas prices, but less on unemployment. The debate on religion saw a new concern emerge in the “separation of church and state”. The release of the movie “Act of Valor” made it a hot topic that week.

Last week (week 5), most of the hot topics from the previous week lost momentum and were overshadowed by Andrew Breitbart’s death. Other popular topics last week included Obama’s birth certificate, Sandra Fluke and Rush Limbaugh.

2. Share of voice of the broader issues expressed in the Republican tribe

Let’s take a step back and look at the broader picture. The top expressions used in the GOP-leaning tribe point to a number of general issues. Despite the fluctuation in the attention they get from one week to another, these issues seem to make up the bulk of the political debate in the tribe. Among them are unemployment, education, religion, and health care (and specifically birth control).

Interestingly enough, religion and birth control have taken center stage in the political debate among Republican-leaning bloggers since the end of January. The two topics became closely related in mid-January in the debate around the “contraception mandate” of the Affordable Care Act, requiring that all employers, initially including religious institutions, provide insurance coverage for birth control to their employees.

2.1. Religion

Since then, there have consistently been more conversations about religion than about unemployment (in orange). Our graph also shows that religion (in blue) has been given more attention than education (in green) throughout.

Share of voice for unemployment, education and religion in the GOP-leaning tribe in the last six months.

2.2. Birth control and health care

As we can see in our next chart, birth control became a hot topic across the board at the end of January. The spike in the share of voice, however, is more visible in the GOP tribe than in the other two tribes: the share of voice of birth control in the GOP tribe (in orange) jumps from 1 or 2% until the end of January to as high as 7.5% in the second week of February, when it reaches a mere 4.1% at its highest in the Democratic tribe (in green).

Share of voice for birth control in the Republican, Democratic and Third Party tribes in the last six months.

It is also worth noting that the debate about health care largely revolves around birth control. Over the past month, almost two thirds of the 6000 some conversations concerned with health care in general have actually been about birth control, as shown in the following pie chart.

Share of voice for birth control and health care in the GOP-leaning tribe for Feb 2012.

Who is the candidate the most in tune with these concerns? Will this candidate be the Republican nominee for the presidential election?

If you would like to see how we did this analysis, contact us and request a demo.

We all remember January 14, 2011 — one year ago. Back then started what is now known as the Arab Spring, when, following a month of violent protests against his regime, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia.

——————

After analyzing over 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study finds that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.
Conversations about revolution often preceded major events on the ground, and social media carried inspiring stories of protest across international borders.

Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political Websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals Tweeted from during the revolutions.
The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.

The contributors include Philip Howard, Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari, and Marwa Mazaid at the University of Washington, Deen Freelon at American University, and Aiden Duffy at Amazon Web Services.

Thank you for using eCairn to build this report.

——————

UPDATE

New location for this report here.

Let’s highlight some of the top 5 positive movers by influence from Oct ’10 – Present.

• Neil Perkin (+36)
• Dachisgroup (+29)
• Christopher Carfi (+30)
• Joe Pulizzi (+27)
• PR Guy’s Musings (+20)

#	Pic	Name	URL	Trend	u/d	Twitt
1		Seth’s Blog	sethgodin.typepad.com	UP	1
2		Chris Brogan	chrisbrogan.com	DOWN	-1
3		Jeremiah Owyang	web-strategist.com/blog	-	-
4		Brian Solis	briansolis.com	-	-
5		Jason Falls	socialmediaexplorer.com	UP	1
6		Logic+Emotion	darmano.typepad.com	DOWN	-1
7		Search Engine Land	searchengineland.com	-	-
8		Valeria Maltoni	conversationagent.com	UP	1
9		SocialMediaExaminer	socialmediaexaminer.com	DOWN	-1
10		Jason Baer	convinceandconvert.com	UP	1
11		MarketingProfs	marketingprofs.com	DOWN	-1
12		Internet Marketing	blog.hubspot.com	UP	4
13		Online Marketing	toprankblog.com	DOWN	-1
14		CopyBlogger	copyblogger.com	UP	1
15		MarketingProfs Daily Fix	mpdailyfix.com	DOWN	-1
16		PR-Squared	pr-squared.com	UP	2
17		Web Ink Now	webinknow.com	UP	3
18		Mitch Joel	twistimage.com/blog	DOWN	-5
19		BuzzMachine	buzzmachine.com	UP	4
20		Brand Builder	thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com	UP	2
21		Ducttape Marketing	ducttapemarketing.com	UP	4
22		Shel Holtz	blog.holtz.com	DOWN	-1
23		Search Engine Marketing	searchenginewatch.com	UP	14
24		Neville Hobson	nevillehobson.com	-	-
25		Jaffe Juice	jaffejuice.com	DOWN	-6
26		Scobleizer	scobleizer.com	DOWN	-9
27		ProBlogger	problogger.net	UP	6
28		The Viral Garden	moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com	DOWN	-1
29		Spin Sucks	spinsucks.com	DOWN	-1
30		SEO Blog	seomoz.org/blog	UP	1
31		Christopher S. Penn	christopherspenn.com	UP	14
32		PR Measurement	kdpaine.blogs.com	UP	2
33		SocialMediaMarketing	scottmonty.com	DOWN	-4
34		Internet Marketing News	marketingpilgrim.com	DOWN	-2
35		Peter Kim	beingpeterkim.com	DOWN	-5
36		Influential Marketing	rohitbhargava.typepad.com	UP	3
37		Drew McLellan	drewsmarketingminute.com	UP	3
38		Dachisgroup	dachisgroup.com	UP	29
39		Amber & Tamsen	brasstackthinking.com	DOWN	-4
40		Edelman Digital	edelmandigital.com	UP	17
41		Danny Brown	dannybrown.me	DOWN	-3
42		How to Change the World	blog.guykawasaki.com	DOWN	-6
43		Strategic Public Relations	prblog.typepad.com	UP	1
44		Geoff Livingston	geofflivingston.com	DOWN	-3
45		Liz Strauss	successful-blog.com	DOWN	-3
46		Servant of Chaos	servantofchaos.com	UP	8
47		B.L. Ochman	whatsnextblog.com	DOWN	-1
48		CK’s Blog	ck-blog.com	UP	11
49		Communication Overtones	overtonecomm.blogspot.com	UP	7
50		John Jantsch	ducttapemarketing.com/blog	UP	13
51		The Buzz Bin	livingstonbuzz.com	UP	4
52		Greg Verdino	gregverdino.typepad.com	DOWN	-3
53		Adverblog	adverblog.com	DOWN	-3
54		Search Engine Journal	searchenginejournal.com	UP	8
55		Peter Shankman	shankman.com	DOWN	-3
56		Arik C. Hanson	arikhanson.com	UP	8
57		Stowe Boyd	stoweboyd.com	DOWN	-10
58		Bad Pitch	badpitch.blogspot.com	UP	7
59		Toby Bloomberg	bloombergmarketing.blogs.com	UP	1
60		Hitwise Intelligence	weblogs.hitwise.com	UP	6
61		SmartBlog	smartblogs.com/socialmedia	DOWN	-3
62		SocialTimes.com	socialtimes.com	UP	19
63		iMedia Connection	imediaconnection.com	UP	7
64		PR Guy’s Musings	stuartbruce.biz	UP	21
65		Social Media Informer	socialmediainformer.com	UP	3
66		Mack Collier	mackcollier.com	DOWN	-15
67		Amber Naslund	altitudebranding.com	UP	10
68		Steve Rubel Stream	steverubel.com	DOWN	-25
69		Ben McConnell	customerevangelists.typepad.com	UP	9
70		Sphinn / Hot Topics	sphinn.com	UP	9
71		Social Media Club	socialmediaclub.org	DOWN	-23
72		The Future Buzz	thefuturebuzz.com	UP	17
73		Brand Autopsy	brandautopsy.typepad.com /brandautopsy	DOWN	-1
74		Media Bistro	mediabistro.com/prnewser	UP	10
75		Joe Pulizzi	blog.junta42.com	UP	28
76		POP! PR Jots	pop-pr.blogspot.com	DOWN	-2
77		Church of the Customer	churchofthecustomer.com	UP	5
78		Simply Zesty	simplyzesty.com	UP	17
79		GlobalNeighbourhoods	redcouch.typepad.com	UP	9
80		Techipedia	techipedia.com	UP	20
81		John Bell	johnbell.typepad.com	DOWN	-10
82		Dave Fleet	davefleet.com	DOWN	-9
83		Dan Zarrella	danzarrella.com	UP	7
84		Ann Handley	annhandley.com	DOWN	-9
85		Outspoken Media	outspokenmedia.com	DOWN	-16
86		We Are Social	wearesocial.net	UP	11
87		Harte of Marketing	theharteofmarketing.com	DOWN	-34
88		Community Guy	communityguy.com	UP	11
89		Ogilvy	blog.ogilvypr.com	UP	2
90		Paul Mcenany	heehawmarketing.typepad.com	UP	14
91		Pro PR	propr.ca	UP	15
92		Andy Sernovitz	damniwish.com	UP	1
93		Marketing & Strategy	blog.futurelab.net	UP	1
94		Edward Boches	edwardboches.com	UP	2
95		Shonali Burke	waxingunlyrical.com	DOWN	-8
96		Becky Carroll	customersrock.net	UP	2
97		Internet Writings	shirky.com	DOWN	-17
98		Phil Fernandez	blog.marketo.com	DOWN	-15
99		Brains On Fire Blog	brainsonfire.com/blog	DOWN	-7
100		Neil Perkin	neilperkin.typepad.com	UP	37
101		Techno//Marketer	technomarketer.typepad.com	DOWN	-15
102		AdPulp	adpulp.com	UP	13
103		B2B Mkting Zone	b2bmarketingzone.com	UP	6
104		Josh Bernoff	forrester.typepad.com/groundswell	DOWN	-28
105		Socialmedia.biz	socialmedia.biz	UP	7
106		New Comm Biz	newcommbiz.com	UP	20
107		Michael Britopian	britopian.com	UP	6
108		Nick Burcher	nickburcher.com	DOWN	-7
109		Drew B	theblogconsultancy.typepad.com	DOWN	-7
110		Christopher Carfi	socialcustomer.com	UP	31
111		Charlene Li	charleneli.com	UP	5
112		David Reich	reichcomm.typepad.com	UP	5
113		Mark Schaefer	businessesgrow.com/blog	UP	7
114		Socialnomics	socialnomics.net	UP	9
115		Shannon Paul	veryofficialblog.com	UP	9
116		Radian6	radian6.com/blog	DOWN	-6
117		Citizen Marketer 2.1	blog.stroutmeister.com	DOWN	-6
118		Abraham Harrison	marketingconversation.com	DOWN	-4
119		Inside Marketers Studio	marketersstudio.com	DOWN	-14
120		Chaos Scenario	chaosscenario.com	DOWN	-2
121		PRBreakFastClub	prbreakfastclub.com	UP	22
122		Sysomos Blog	blog.sysomos.com	-	-
123		Jeffbullas’s Blog	jeffbullas.com	UP	10
124		Josh Hallett	hyku.com	UP	11
125		PR Conversations	prconversations.com	UP	2
126		Communications Consultant	prblogger.com	UP	2
127		Bill Green	makethelogobigger.blogspot.com	UP	12
128		Branding Strategy Insider	brandingstrategyinsider.com	DOWN	-21
129		Adliterate	adliterate.com	UP	11
130		ConverStations	converstations.com	DOWN	-22
131		Tara Hunt	horsepigcow.com	UP	15
132		FeverBee	feverbee.com	UP	15
133		Going Social Now	goingsocialnow.com	-	New
134		Brendan Cooper	brendancooper.com	UP	2
135		Noah Brier	noahbrier.com	-	New
136		Seroundtable	seroundtable.com	UP	6
137		Chuck Hemann	chuckhemann.com	DOWN	-8
138		Connie Bensen	conniebensen.com	-	New
139		Marshall Sponder	webmetricsguru.com	DOWN	-8
140		Webbiquity	webbiquity.com	DOWN	-8
141		Fresh Networks	freshnetworks.com/blog	UP	3
142		Personal Branding	personalbrandingblog.com	DOWN	-17
143		Katie Chatfield	katiechatfield.wordpress.com	-	New
144		Emergence Marketing	emergencemarketing.com	UP	5
145		Conversation Marketing	conversationmarketing.com	DOWN	-7
146		The Flack	theflack.blogspot.com	-	New
147		Start With a Lead	blog.startwithalead.com	-	New
148		Advertising Lab	adverlab.blogspot.com	-	New
149		Savvy Sisters	savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog	-	New
150		Julien Smith	inoveryourhead.net	DOWN	-20

The full Social Media Marketing tribe is 1000 influencers and is one of the 400+ available in the application.

To learn more on our application to target your outreach or segment your research, please sign up for a customized demo.

Please feel free to connect with us through Twitter: @ecairn, or email us at conversation@ecairn.com. The team here at eCairn always appreciates any feedback!

References:

• Post on Answering your questions on ‘Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs’.

Becky Carroll

We would love to go to all of them but it has become impossible as there are too many and we’re all too busy.

So we need to pick the right one. Social Media can provide an unbiased insight into the popularity and nature of each of them.

We ranked the following conferences by volume of conversations:

1. SXSW
2. Blogworld
3. Womma
4. LeWeb
5. Pivot

Our analytics are based on the last 6 months of conversations produced by the top 2000+ influencers in Social Media (english speaking). Therefore the bulk of conversations from SXSW show in March 2011 does not count in this analysis. SXSW is ranked number one by a long shot.

Here are the important dates:

• August 16^th, 2011: grand opening of SXSW PANELPICKER 2012 (the event is held in March)
• Sept 22^nd, 2011: WOMMA Talkable Brands Exchange
• October 17-18^th, 2011: Pivot 2011
• Nov 16-18^th, 2011: WOMMA Summit 2011
• Nov 3-5t^th, 2011: BlogWorld LA 2011
• Dec 7-9^th, 2011: LeWeb 2011

Below are the word clouds featuring the top 50 expressions used when one of the conference is mentioned. Click to zoom in:

The text version of those expression clouds is available below, where I highlighted a few expressions to see how the keywords are ranked. The ones on the top of the list have high occurrence.

A couple of interesting notes by looking at how expressions rank for each conference (one color per expression):

• ‘Social Media’ (obviously), ‘Marketing’ (obviously) and ‘Business’ appear at the top of everyone’s concerns.
• ‘Brands’ issues are a top priority for Pivot attendees.
• Platforms (i.e. Twitter, Facebook,…) are not a primary concern for Blogworld people but rank fairly high among LeWeb attendees.
• ‘Influence’ is only discussed by people mentioning Pivot.
• ‘ROI’ & ‘Measurement’ are only talked about at WOMMA.

Well, if you are interest in social media ROI or ROI Measurement discussions, WOMMA is probably your conference.

Contact us with your interest and we’ll look up which conference you should spend your time in: conversation+conference@ecairn.com

How will you pick a conference in 2012?

For those who just joined us, we’re looking at more than just the tech communities since the kindle fire is targeted to a much larger demographic. I’m looking at the volume of buzz that the kindle fire gets in the following blog communities: Wireless/Mobile, Music, Moms, Fashion, & Books. First up, the share of voice. Again this is how it’s calculated:Wireless/Mobile:
Music:Moms:Fashion:Books:No real surprise here. A continuation of the trends we saw just after the big press release held by Jeff Bezos shows how little effort Amazon put into generating buzz for the Kindle Fire. Even after the release of the tablet, the wireless/mobile computing and book lover communities (communities in which I was sure news about the tablet would trend) showed little deviation from the standard number of mentions before the release. Let’s look again at the word cloud of the wireless community:

I noticed that post-release, there seems to be an increase in the mentions of competitive products, no doubt from the many user reviews that have sprung up comparing the $200 tablet to the competitors like the Nook Color, Galaxy Tablet and iPad.

While the level of buzz has dwindled since the first announcement, it’s been rather consistent ever since then. No additional news (even after release) has prompted any additional mentions, and the share of mind (brand penetration) has stayed even. With this level of buzz, one would assume that sales would take a hit. But recent news has shown that the kindle fire’s performance on the sales charts hasn’t been so bad. In fact, I’d say sales have been downright great. But what’s brought this on?

As Roberto says in his post from Gizmodo, “Not surprisingly one of the main factors is trust. Amazon has a great history with consumers. We want stuff, Amazon drops it off. You want to read books without lugging around actual books, Amazon has us covered. This trust was hard-earned.” Amazon’s trust is the bond that they share with their consumers and their partners. It’s the aspect which brings them their influence, and as we mentioned in a recent post, trust is one of two “x-factors” that carry the ability to drive action. So maybe they didn’t need to generate buzz after all. Maybe it’s not about broadcasting your message and needing to constantly advertise and push your brand into the minds of others, but the inherent value that you bring to your audience that drives them to come back, time and again.

This was the final post on the kindle fire trend. If you want to see our previous posts on this subject, here’s part 1 and part 2.