eCairn’s Blog

Blog Advertising: Some numbers!

July 16, 2008 — ecairn

In a previous post, we looked at how frequently bloggers have their social network profile (badge) on their blog. Given that we’re also capable of detecting automatically if a blogger is part of one or more advertising network, we did a similar analysis for ad networks. By the way, we don’t detect all networks yet, just the major ones (For the record, we’ve seen 100s of them).

As we saw with social network profiles, the numbers are quite different across topics. Here’s the skinny on the topics’ percentages using the same topics as during our previous analysis:

At the top is Personal Finance blogs - ~60% - We found quite interesting that this was the ‘worst’ topic in our social network profile analysis but it’s the top one for advertising network. Are personal finance bloggers more eager to monetize their property than others?
2nd is Blogging with aroun 50%.
3rd ex-aequo are Wireless and Gaming with about 40%.
5th is Cosmetology with 29%.
Then we got Enterprise Security (~20%), Social Media Marketing (~15%), Enterprise 2.0 (~13%).

Conclusion: It’s clear that advertising is widely present on blogs. What’s truly interesting is that the order above is almost the reverse order that we got when we did the social network profile analysis.

One interpretation is that bloggers that are targeted toward ‘consumers’ have a tendency to try and monetize more than those targeted to ‘business’ but on the other hand put a lower priority on being social network friendly: For example, Personal Finance and Blogging blogs are mostly targeting consumers!

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?

Well, one critical aspect of advertising is relevance. If you advertise on the right blogs, you automatically get relevance assuming you pick those who are related to what you want to advertise. And if you can find a lot of them for your campaign (fyi, we ran a campaign on 900 blogs once), you get the same traffic as you would for a top website. Sweet!

Posted in advertising. Tags: advertising, blog. No Comments »

Social objects, Opensourced enterprise

July 4, 2008 — ecairn

I had the opportunity to attend the SVASE event: Digital Media: Building a Business with Social Networks and to listen to the great panel from Google, hi5, Jaxstr and Jaiku.

One striking comment from Jyri Engestrom: “social business starts with defining a social object”. Photo for Flickr, Video for Youtube, Pet for Dogster, Date, Job aso… I find this really interesting and this clearly helps organising ideas.
Another one from Jyri on G Kawasaki: to be successful, you need to have an “unfair competitive advantage”. Funny that Jyri mentioned G Kawasaki as THE advantage of Alltop.

Using Jyri’s framework, I reflected that the enterprise world is full of objects ready to become social. Let’s take a few:

new product or service: this is all the concept of co-design, co-engineering. Designers love feedback and bloggers and consumers love participation.
event, campaign, ads, launch: testing concepts, bouncing ideas, another area with huge potential. Why not transforming an ad into a ” social object”, let’s call it a value ad !
new hire: again, wouldn’t this be funny to move to community based hiring process?

Opensource has paved the road for socially developed artefacts that make it to the commercial space. Maybe it’s time for companies to opensource their “product launch”, “advertising campaigns” (already done on the creative side with youtube contest ), “business process”, “innovation process” and maybe (I’d love an analyst prospective into this), Opensourcing will replace Outsourcing as the next enterprise model.

I asked the presenters about the opportunity for social solutions for businesses that organise the relationship between an enterprise and its target communities. The responses I got varied from very challenging to impossible! except for P Chanezon from Google - Opensocial who was more positive about such opportunites.

What still remains unclear is how to blend “enterprise socialisation” and “intellectual property”, how to socialise processes connexe to commercial transactions, what remains of an enterprise if most of its IP generation processes are opensourced ?

In other word, can enterprise rely less on what they know and own and more on their ability to learn and network?

Well, the net is that we (eCairn) are going after a very challenging objective: social influence solution for the enterprise ! Any (social) help is warmly welcome !

Posted in business, eCairn. No Comments »

Social Profile in Blogs: How many?

June 26, 2008 — laurentpf

In the course of our (very long) days, we’ve built deep list of blogs on various topics ( > 100 blogs).
Now that we’re capable of detecting automatically if bloggers display their social network profile on their blogs, we got curious about the differences in the percentage of those who do and don’t across topics. By the way, the most frequent profiles are those of LinkedIn and Facebook.

The 7 lists we used for our empirical study are Personal finance (1501 blogs), Blogging (968 blogs), Social Media Marketing (698 blogs), Gaming (429 blogs), Cosmetology (400 blogs), Wireless (240 blogs) and Enterprise 2.0 (35 blogs). A quick note to state that we don’t pretend having found all the blogs in those categories ;-), we found a lot of them but we don’t know where the end is.

The differences are huge as you can see and point, most of the time, to a poor level of integration between people’s blogs and social profiles:

At the top is Social Media Marketing - No surprise, we were expecting it. Bloggers in this category stay on top of the social media wave. Our figures show at least a third of Social Media Marketing bloggers display their social network profile on their blog. Right now Conversation(tm) detects only badges on the home page; but in the future, we will detect them on the about page too.
2nd is Enterprise 2.0 with a bit more than 20%
3rd is Wireless with a litte more than 10%
4th is Enterprise Security with a little less than 9%
Then we got blogging (~4%), Cosmetology (~3%), Gaming (~2%).
Last is personal finance (~1%)

Now let’s look a little deeper at what’s happening in our list of Social Media Marketing blogs.

Some blogs are group blogs where we typically don’t expect to find social network badges. If we take a swag at narrowing to only blogs from individuals, it would probably bump the percentage to the vicinity of 50%. Not bad!

But the story really gets interesting with this last experiment: On a small sample (10) of blogs from individual bloggers who didn’t have a social network badge in their blog, we found their profile in LinkedIn and, 8 times out of 10, the blog is listed on it. Honestly we don’t think its that way on purpose (i.e: bloggers don’t want readers to find their social network profiles). It’s more a data integration issue.

Conclusion: There’s a long way to go before we see a tight integration between blogs and profiles so you can go seamlessly from one to the other in order to have a complete picture of the bloggers you like. With the exception of blogs hosted on a social network (niche social network), the infrastructures are separate (blogs powered by wordpress, typepad and so on, profiles powered by social network platforms) thus the issue.

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?
The answer is quite straightforward. Nowadays, when we see a piece of content from someone, we go and google them or check if we find them in social networks because it gives us more information about the author as well as additional ways to build a relationship with them if we desire. We do that all the time and I’m sure you do too! The issue discussed in this post makes it harder than if one little click was all it takes to go from a blog to a profile.

Here, one of our job is to deal with fragmented infrastructure and bring them together in a seamless and meaningful user experience so we see a nice issue to solve. Let us know what you think!

Posted in Conversation App, figures. Tags: blog, profile, social network. 3 Comments »

Food blogs: facts and figures

June 19, 2008 — domlah

Here is a short study to give an idea about the type of reach, volume and impact one can get focusing in a specific area of the blogosphere.

We’ve accumulated 4200+ blogs that specialized in Food & Restaurant. These are blogs dedicated to the topic, not blogs with sparse posts about recipies. We’ve done that looking at directories, carnivals and expanding and filtering using a mix of linguistic and link analysis.

On these 3800+ blogs, here follow facts & figures that you may find interesting. Let’s see how it translate for Buzz, Blogger outreach and Blog Advertising.

Buzz:

2600 of these blogs have posted at least once during the last 3 months, for a total of 40 000 posts
1300 have posted at least once last week, for a total of 7000 posts
400 blogs have posted last day with a daily total of 800 posts

Based on our experience, scanning through the list adds up to 3-4 hours a day in “quick but efficient reading”. One should definitely spread workload between team mates or use extensive filtering !

Advertising:

800 blogs accept Adwords, 200 accept Premium advertising from mainstream networks like OpenX (140 blogs), BlogAds (64), Adbrite(14), Chitika (9), Quigo (8), Federated Media (7)…

We didn’t look for specialized networks in this vertical, which (I think) would have raised the numbers considerably. Still 800 blogs that you can target with placement targeting make a decent audience. Moreover, these are mainly “middle magic” blogs where you can expect a higher return on your ad $.

Blogger Outreach thru social networks:

Only 15 of theses bloggers expose a Facebook profile, which is way lower than what we saw in some other verticals. A little surprise, but we know we’re missing a good chunk of MySpace blogs.

We then look at the quality of content.

We are syndicating 3-month-worth of these blogs RSS and we query this consolidated feed with four highly differentiated sub-topics: One ingredient Roquefort” , One city “Palo Alto” , One brand “Olive Garden” and a very special one “Birthday cake”+pink+girl.

Here are the results (it’s dynamic so the numbers are different from when I wrote this post)

Roquefort, 42 posts since March 08 in English , with 10 of them in French.
Palo Alto 24 posts
Olive Garden 18 posts
“Birthday cake”+pink+girl 3 posts

Result excerpts are worth reading, just click on the links above - it might be slow since the database is on our test server and the format as user friendly as an RSS can be; However, Content is highly relevant; Posts like The Fro-yo battle in Palo Alto is a wonderful review!

I encourage you performing similar queries in your favorite blog search or on your favorite food portal.

Bottom line:

Cutting your slice of the Blogosphere and dedicating some valuable time to listen, learn, engage, build relationship and influence is clearly something that deliver different results from an “alert” or “keyword monitoring” strategy.

It doesn’t come for free and takes time (even so we’ve added great productivity in the process). It can be managed, optimized and measured (more to come on this topic). It all boils down to how valuable is social influence in your particular business.

Posted in figures. No Comments »

Conversation™ Updated - Ad Network, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.

June 11, 2008 — laurentpf

Our baby is growing! No kidding, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers.
So here it goes:

Social Network Integration

People’s profiles on social networks typically tell you a lot about who they are, what they like and who they know. Profiles are also a great tool to connect with them. We’ve run into people who prefer not to receive email but are ok if someone contacts them through their social networks. With our recent release, Conversation™ detects Facebook and LinkedIn badges when they’re present on blogs.
Users of the application get a summary view of:

the presence of social network profiles
the social networks available

In addition, they can access individual profiles in one click from the application.

Blog Card

The blog card contains a wealth of information to help you analyze a blog and determine if it fits your criteria for your buzz, outreach, viral or advertising activities. With this feature we’re introducing our new paradigm dubbed Place/People/Conversation -> If you’re a marketer, you want to know where your target market (prospects, customers, influencers…) socialize online; you want to understand who they are and what they’re talking about. Indeed, you may elect to advertise on relevant sites, do an outreach to relevant people, and buzz in relevant conversations. It’s now easier, thanks to the blog card. We think this new paradigm fits better with marketers’ usage of social media. Over time, expect the whole application to move toward this new user experience.

Here’s an example of the kind of information you will find in a blog card:

We’ve some interesting data on how the presence of advertising or social profiles vary amongst verticals and we’ll share them with you very soon. So stay tuned.

By the way, remember those features come on top of those we added in May, like ad network detection and more….

If you’re interested in trying Conversation(tm), we offer a one month free trial for an unlimited number of users.

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

Actionable influence ™

June 11, 2008 — domlah

There is an evergrowing attempt to identify the most influencial people on a given topic and, although I find this an interesting study, I don’t really see how actionable this is, for a social marketer.

OK, you just figured out that the most influencial people on Microsoft strategies are: Steve Balmer and Bill Gates. So what… the chances that you’re able to send these people a Facebook invitation are still very small.

That’s why I ‘d like to suggest a more hands on approach:

Listen, Listen … I love the sentence ” anybody with a match can start a forest fire” (from this CMA Blog). I’ll add, unless you’ve got heavy rain or a snow storm or just happen to be in the desert. So listen and spot when it’s dry enough and ready to burn.
Not all matches are equal, Not all fire are the same: use the customers words, immerse in his conversation of the day, provide information and knowledge that he/she can benefit now. Don’t risk getting doused with a bucket of water by the first blogger you anger.
Take influence as a verb (influence somebody) not as a noon ( influencers) . Figure out who YOU, or YOUR TEAM can influence, spot 40 trustable people with decent influence on your favorite topic. People that you can reach and that will read your prose, people in your LinkedIn or Facebook first circle. Here is a reference article from Steve Rubel on Trust
Seed as you test - test is still a core function of marketing insn’t it - then seed big. Use buzz, outreach to “test, adjust, ignite” and advertising to refuel…. until you get critical mass and find your road to tipping point. (See Dan Zarella on social influence)
Set reasonable expectations, most of the time, it’s not gonna be viral but you’ll have learned a great deal down the road.

You’ve probably noticed you’re on a “solution provider blog” and as you guess, our solution makes it possible to execute these steps with high productivity and quality.

Posted in viral. No Comments »

Glimpse on what’s hot by listening to many relevant voices

June 2, 2008 — laurentpf

At eCairn, we listen to 660+ blogs on social media marketing; I scan, filter and click hundred of posts every day. One of the interesting benefit is that in the flow, we get a glimpse on what the current hot topics are. Usually they are discussed heavily during a few days and thus, get our attention more than anything else, then gone. A little while ago, ’social media measurement’ generated quite a lot of activity, ‘PR spamming’; right now, it seems like a very good video called ’social media in plain english’ from commoncraft is raising to the top with 19 posts with the following pattern over the past 4 days:

1 post on 5/29
3 posts on 5/30
3 posts on 5/31
6 posts on 6/1
6 posts on 6/2

More posts may be coming…as I’ve observed in the case of ’social media measurement’ that the 100+ posts I was able to find on the subject during a recent burst started on May 6 and ended on May 26, with peak posting between May 18th and 22nd.

Listening to a wide variety of relevant voices really gives you a glimpse on what’s hot for them.

Posted in Conversation App, buzz. 1 Comment »

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:

How to find a large number of relevant communities where to engage
How to organize active listening; and this spans from product marketing teams to PR
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: blog, Conversation App, social media. 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:

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.

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

A 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: ad networks, Conversation App, release. 1 Comment »

« Older posts

Newer posts »