Tools for measuring Social Media

A short listing of tools you can use to measure social media activities:

BlogScope Is an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as a research prototype at the University of Toronto. It is currently tracking over 12 million blogs with over 100 million posts.

Xtract – Xtract Social Links™ turns raw data into a marketing tool. By targeting the well connected influencial people in their communities this tool gives you the qualitative data you need to make decisions on who can help you with your branding.

Buzzcapture – Buzzcapture’s proprietary technology retrieves data that are relevant to you from Consumer Generated Media and filters the data through its linguistic analysis technology. Basically that means it crawls the Internet for conversations about your brand and gives you the data in digestible form.

Onalytica – By analysing what has been published online about a particular topic, as well as who is paying attention to it, they extract valuable qualitative knowledge that delivers insights.

TNS Cymphony – Our friends at TNS Gallup recently bought Cymphony. In their words; Cymfony, a division of TNS Media Intelligence, is a market influence analytics company that sifts and interprets the millions of voices at the intersection of traditional and social media such as blogs and social networks to gain consumer insight and develop stronger bonds with influencers.

NeilsenBuzzmetrics – I can’t mention TNS without mentioning Neilsen! In their words; Nielsen BuzzMetrics is the global measurement standard in Consumer-Generated Media. They are apparently the technology behind BlogPulse another free tool which shows the percentage of all blog posts they have measured when you give them a keyword.

The Most Measurable Medium Needs An XML Standard

Recently the WAA released 26 metric standards. Standard definitions are helpful for promoting understanding and creating a controlled vocabulary for discussing online metrics, but they don’t help with what I see as a huge challenge in today ’s metrics technologies.

The problem is this: currently available online metrics systems do not adequately separate data from presentation . That’s a huge limitation preventing Web data from being easily integrated with other systems. The industry must begin collaborating and creating a standard XML schema for describing Web data. Creating a widely used, consensus-based, published, and maintained XML standard for online metrics would make it possible to more easily share, transform, and use Web data in other systems.

Judah Phillips‘, webanalyticsdemystified.com blogger, tackled this topic on MediaPost. Click here for the article

Introducing Web Analytics 2.0

Being an analytics junkie myself I’m ofcourse subscribed to several blogs. Including Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik and this week I picked up a brilliant post on his blog that I instantly shared amongst my team in the agency.

We’ve all heard about Web 2.0 already for “ages” and now it’s time to talk about the serious stuff. The Web Analytics for it. Avinash is introducing the term “Web Analytics 2.0″. Here’s his definition of Web Analytics 2.0:

• the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition,
• to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have,
• which translates into your desired outcomes.

Some strong stuff you really need to think over (even for a junkie); and structure/process before translating it into practice for my clients. Click here to jump to his detailed exposé “Rethink Web Analytics“

E-commerce at Guess

Interesting interview with Steve Nicholas, assistant director of e-commerce at Guess. Steve talks about the challenges of multi-channel retailing, especially for a well-known brand in the fashion sector and one that has both wholesale and retail businesses to think about.

He’s covering topics like:

• Can you summarise where Guess is in terms of multi-channel retail?
• Have you set up your site primarily as a place for consumers to research products, before buying in-stores?
• You use Flash quite extensively on your site. Is it a must in the fashion sector, despite usability/accessibility issues?
• Why don’t you display shipping costs and payment options on the product listing page?

The full interview can be found here.

WPP bought Schematic

Picked up on the wire: WPP Group, the giant agency conglomerate based in London, acquired Schematic, a leading interactive design company. That transaction would be worth about $40m upfront, rising to about $100m if Schematic managers met targets.

In its first half results, WPP said 23% of its total yearly revenues were now coming from the digital and direct marketing sector. Schematic, founded eight years ago, says it specialises in creating ‘branded experiences’ on emerging digital platforms. According to WPP, the agency’s revenues for the year up to the end of March were just under US$30m. Trevor Kaufman, Schematic’s chief executive, told the New York Times:

“We’re more about creating branded experiences that consumers choose to have rather than shouting messages at them that they want to avoid.”

He added that the agency’s senior management had been given a ‘five-year earn-out’ as part of the deal. As a result, “None of us are going anywhere.”

Pioneer Kuro

Pioneer launched a global brand campaign promoting its KURO flat panel TVs. The tagline is “seeing and hearing like never before,” to describe consumers’ passion for home entertainment.

Last week I got a preview at Pioneer EMEA HQ and to be honest, the adds are scary and cool at the same time.

TV ads consist of a hand with eyes, a heart with an eye that comes out of a person’s chest, and my personal favorite — and by favorite, I mean the ad that scares me the most: an eyeball with a mouth where the pupil normally resides.

I found some public material at Mediapost, both TV and print adds. The latter follow the same theme but come of less scary:

• Click here, here and here to see the TV ads.
• Click here, here, here and here to view print creatives.

TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles created the campaign and OMD handled the US media buy. The European localization and campaign is done by These Days

Ready for the future of Media?

Deloitte’s Technology & Media industry group released (April 2007) insights from a survey of U.S. media consumption that contradicts conventional wisdom about the Millennial generation (current ages 13-24, also known as “Gen Y”).

It’s a first comprehensive media consumption survey, providing a generational “reality check” on how American consumers between 13 and 75 years of age are using media and technology today — and what they want in the future.Notably, even when using high-tech communications, such as instant messaging (IM) or text messaging, their most frequent topic of conversation is quite traditional: their favorite TV shows.”

The whole report is interesting (downloadable here), some of the particularities are:

• 76% of all consumers find Internet ads more intrusive than print ads, and 64% pay more attention to print ads than those online.
• 28% of all consumers would pay for online content to avoid seeing ads.
• While offline advertising is effective in driving web traffic,
  • 84% of all consumers visit a website after finding it through a search engine
  • 82% do so because of a personal recommendation.
• 87% of all consumers continually frequent the same websites, but 56% are constantly in search of something new.

Source: http://www.deloitte.com

Google Analytics AIR (beta)

If you like Google Analytics and you want it to be on the desktop, then try the Google Analytics AIR (beta) that has been released today. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all features of Analytics.

Some features include:

• Easy profile selection and account management.
• Use multiple profiles from different Analytics accounts.
• All visitors, traffic and content reports available.
• Tabbed interface to easily switch between reports.
• Data drilldown, goal values, data segmentation.
• Animated, interactive graphs.
• Advanced data grids with filtering and paging.
• Switch between interactive reports or PDF reports.
• Site overlay view.
• Exports to PDF, Excel and XML
• to name some.

More info and Beta sign-up on: www.aboutnico.be

Microsoft “Gatineau”

Ian Thomas (Director at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions) took the stage at the Belgian Web Analytics Day (WAD) and gave the public an extensive world première to Microsoft’s upcoming free web analytics tool (codenamed Gatineau). (including some some screenshots – YEAH-was waiting on this!) This was the first public presentation of Gatineau, which aims to take on Google Analytics and basic web analytics software vendors. Beta applications are limited, sign-up is available.

Eric T.Peterson, leading presenter at the conference, was so kind to share the slides on Gatineau on his site

Google..Let’s Rock & Roll, party and eat some Gateau, euhm Gatineau

Forrester Wave: Web Analytics, Q3 2007

Subtitled “Buyers Must Chose The Level Of Power And Complexity That’s Right For Them” by Megan Burns

Forrester evaluated Web analytics products during June and July 2007, conducted online surveys of Customer Experience Professionals and Web Analytics specialists, and interviewed more than 10 vendors, user companies, and independent consultants including: ClickTracks, Coremetrics, Google, Omniture, Stratigent, SEMphonic, Unica, Visual Sciences, WebTrends, and our friends @ ZAAZ.

They are impressed by Omniture’s education program, the unified interface of Unica Affinium NetInsight, the sophistication of Visual Sciences Visual Site, the level of customization of WebTrends, the user-friendly interface of Visual Sciences HBX and ClickTracks’ data visualization; found Coremetrics to be the best, based on the fact that Forrester believe they’ve managed to balance power and simplicity. Other leaders are Omniture, Unica, Visual Sciences Visual Site and WebTrends.

What Forrester found less satisfying in general was the differences in data collection, data processing, vocabulary, strange pricing models and a few other things. They also found that all tools have usability issues. In fact, not even one vendor passed all of the tests!

Buy the report (incl the Excel tool)

Register and download the report for free from Unica’s website (excl the Excel tool)

vendor comments:
Visual Sciences
WebTrends
Coremetrics
Unica