The top movers are: Citizen Marketer 2.1, CK’s Blog, and Jeff Bulla’s Blog; each moving 50+ positions!

• Citizen Marketer 2.1 experienced a spike of traffic in mid November for his Brand Haiku blog post.  A band of bloggers and companies (including Apple) participated in describing a brand experience in a form of a haiku.

*New means they were not in the Sept post, or recently added to our database.

To learn more about our tool and how it can help your company, join 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!

The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?

Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.

Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.

The video game blog community is large and extremely active.

This major release comes with a brand new User Interface and some amazing new features. We worked closely with customers for months to integrate their requests. We are very proud of our product.

This new release will change how you access the application features, making them easier to discover and use. The new navigation will allow you to:

• Add and manage sources in your project – In particular, you will see the ‘Blog’ tab renamed as ‘Community’. This is to illustrate the fact that many different kind of sources can now be added to your project besides blogs.
• Access and manage conversations – In particular, you will see the ‘Posts’ tab renamed as ‘Conversations’. Again this change is to illustrate that you can aggregate posts, tweets, facebook updates, linkedin Q&A, mainstream media content and so on in one single place.
• Filter conversations to zoom on what you’re interested in – This functionality ‘Filter’ is now called ‘Topic’. Both the list in the Community tab and the Conversations tab can be filtered by topic.
• Find ‘network’ information – The functionality within the current ‘Networks’ tab will then be available under the ‘Community’ tab.

Other improvements are:

- Navigation:

1. Action buttons at the top of each tab to access critical functionalities.
2. Filter pane on the right side to narrow the list against a wide range of critical criteria.
3. Navigation between projects in one single click.

- Overall look n feel: New fonts, color, styling, improved dashboard.

- New Self-Help Center with plenty of FAQs, User Guide, tutorials and videos.

- Other enhancements specifically requested by our customers:

1. View trends on Search and Topics (previously available topic only)
2. RSS on Search and Topic
3. Date range for search (in addition to all time, day, week, last login)
4. Export up to 5000 conversations at once.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new release and our team look forward in working with you! Please, join us to a 45 minutes product demonstration on Wednesday March 10th at 9:30am PST: Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/278917336

Below are screenshots of the 3 main tabs:

1 – Dashboard

2 – Community

3 - Conversations

The morale boils down to “you have to improve all the steps in a given process to improve the process”. Here it’s applied to the Social Media Engagement process.

Amongst the many things my gentleman was able to do that he could only dream about before, he was now able to keep more than 2000 digital books at his fingertips. He also told me he adds more all the time.

Surely, I can see how convenient it would be to carry a whole library in your pockets.
But after I left him, I did some maths: Assuming he is an avid reader, but works a normal 8hr job, he reads 2 books per week, 200 book per year, thus it will take him 10 years to read everything he has on his iphone.
What’s the point?

The point starts here; technology has made :

1. finding stuff easy while before the ‘cost to access’ was one big limiting factor on the consumer side.
2. producing stuff easy while before the ‘cost to distribute’ was one limiting factor on the producer side

Easy access to music, easy access to books…and: Easy access to people in your market thanks to social media.

That’s not coming without a big challenge
What was the goal of this gentleman? Response: Read. Challenge: I don’t have enough time to read 2000 books.
What’s the goal of marketers in social media? Response: Communication and relationships. Challenge: I don’t have enough time to talk to all those relevant folks I have access to. And C=L+T (smart Communication is Listen then Talk). So I also need to listen!

The truth is you can talk to many people at once but you can listen only to one (You can do mass marketing but you can’t do mass listening and technology can’t help much here at least until we find a way to dump/structure massive amount of info into our brain by bypassing our senses which may not be a good idea anyway.)  On top of that, consumers are smart, they turnoff if they’re talked to unless they know you, but love to be listened to.

The key for marketers today is thus to nurture the relationship over the transaction. As the Buddhist saying goes, “it is what we pay attention to that grows.”

Where do you find the time for it? How do you tune your process so that you reach your goal?

For one you can scale quite a bit by doing ‘team social marketing‘.  Your brand may have an SM guru and the impact of this key individual is real. But it’s the power of the many that really holds the key. It is the many that make real things happened. Find 5, 10, 20, 100 and optimize the workflow between them and your market through social media.

For two, you have to focus on the right segments. In a given niche, there are hundreds influencers. That’s already plenty of folks to listen to as a team and communicate. Handpick them and listen/engage with them. If they know you exists and start liking you, they will likely relay your message to others they know; may be with a bit of a twist but, that’s ok and desired, because we don’t remember what we’re told, we remember how one made us feel.

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.