With this new release, you get:

• Community Tab
  • Now, Influencers can be viewed in 3 modes:
    • Community List View (already there and default one)
    • Network View (see connections, color influencers with topics)
    • *New* Geo-location View (see influencers on a world wide map)
• Improved Twitter and Facebook profile detection
• Added list of communities on Heathcare
  you can now import lists from a wide range of Healthcare topics – see our big list of lists here.
  
• Fixed a bug affecting the importing of large lists
  

Learn more and register for a demo:

Watch those features in action in the video below:

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.

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 —

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.