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Richard Stacy asks, “Is much of social media monitoring snake oil – or have I missed something?” In his blog post, Stacy first describes how he sets up social media monitoring for a client, using his expertise in available tools and knowledge of the client’s business environment. He then goes on to say, “However, out there is a huge industry selling incredibly impressive black boxes that reel off reams of charts and data and figures and tracking, with sentiment analysis and conversation mining (conversation mining?) and all sorts of other wizardry.”

Stacy concludes with, “But there again – it appears to be big business. People are buying these remote sensing and analysis products. Is it just snake oil and are the purveyors of such trading (albeit unwittingly) on ignorance? Or have I missed something?” In my opinion, Stacy’s custom approach is clearly the way to go for a small business, assuming they can afford to hire a consultant like Stacy and have the staff and management commitment to keep the monitoring going.

But for a large business, with millions of customers and prospects, thousands of employees, terabytes of customer data and complex web presences, there’s simply no way the Stacy approach can scale. First of all, the free tools are difficult to work with. They require human intervention and constant tweaking. And in some cases, you need a developer who understands an application programming interface (API).

Second, the whole point of social media monitoring is to acquire and exploit clean and valid data about customers and prospects and how they interact with your products or services. You simply cannot build a such a clean database by hand – without high-powered statistical methods that require expertise in quantitative marketing and significant storage and computational hardware capacity.

But the real reason why the advanced monitoring and analytical tools are vital to large businesses is integration. What Stacy does by hand for a small business is integration. With the advanced tools, it’s possible to tie in-house customer and CRM data with sentiment, presence in the media, geographic and demographic data. And an integrated tool answers one other vital question: “How does the marketplace perceive your competition?” And it’s possible to leverage a small investment in software, hardware and analytical staff into a significant competitive advantage. You just can’t do that by hand.

So my answer to the question, “Is much of social media monitoring snake oil?” is, “Hell, No!” It’s a growing business for a good reason – it creates value by enabling businesses to read the “digital body language” of customers and prospects, and provides a competitive advantage at a vastly lower cost than other approaches.

 

As you probably know, the Twitter main page, http://twitter.com/, has changed. If you’re an existing Twitter user, you’ll need to sign out to see it. I don’t claim to have seen all the blog posts, and I certainly haven’t been tracking all of the tweets about it, but I have some definite opinions about it.

The good: first of all, it is visually very appealing. It’s an attractive mix of blue colors with a green “Sign Up Now” button. Second, it displays the trending topics by “Right Now”, “Today”, and “This Week”. And I think the slogan, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” captures the essence of the Twitter experience for someone new to the platform. In short, I think it’s a good way to attract users.

The bad: a prominent search bar, as with Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha and many others, implies to me a research tool. Of course, I am a researcher, so that may be my personal bias. As the page stands now, it is almost useless as a research tool. Composing a Twitter search query is different from composing a Google query or a Wolfram|Alpha query. This would be very easy to fix — just add a link to the “Advanced Search” functionality for query composition, preferably a large “Help With Search” button for the newbies.

Ritu B. Pant posted an interesting opinion, titled “Why Twitter’s New Design Totally Misses the Mark” (http://bit.ly/zxMwL). Ritu’s opinion is that Twitter is about networking, not search. And I certainly agree with him on that. If it is about search, there would need to be a query help button as I noted above.

Still, Carri Bugbee (http://twitter.com/CarriBugbee, http://bigdealpr.com) notes that “I’d say Twitter’s new look reflects its future monetization. They can’t make $$ from networking unless they charge users.” This is true as well, although I’m wondering what the business model would be. Twitter search as it’s implemented now, regardless of how you execute the search, gives you a just a page of tweets. Would there be paid advertising on the page like a Google search?

I personally think the value of Twitter lies in the business intelligence one can extract from the public tweet stream. Twitter provides a low-frequency sample — about 20,000 tweets per hour at present — of the full timeline via the public “spritzer” streaming API. I’ve got a collector running on this stream to provide input data for SMART@znmeb testing.

Higher-frequency samples are available, but Twitter has said, essentially, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” about access to them. In short, Twitter owns the raw data and is in position to partner with vendors of sophisticated business intelligence tools: Extract/Transform/Load (ETL), database management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), competitive analysis, text analytics, and many more.

I believe the revenue from such partnerships would easily fund the platform infrastructure, and possibly even sophisticated Twitter clients for community managers and others who want to use Twitter for networking.

So: jump in — comments are now open!

 

[followbutton username="znmeb"]


Download “Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit” (pdf, 1.25 megabytes)


Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit


Update 2010-09-08:

Clicky has a new gizmo that I have totally adopted – ClickyChrome. I haven’t made a big secret of how much I like Chromium, the open source branch of Google Chrome. But ClickyChrome just makes it all so much more worthwhile. You install the extension, fill in a control option panel, and then you get:

  • A badge in the upper left corner of your browser that shows either visitors currently on line, total visitors or goals completed, and
  • An optional popup that notifies you when someone completes a goal.

So, if you’re a Clicky user, install Chrome or Chromium if you haven’t already, and head over to http://meb.tw/9yWWRL. I’ll be watching for you.


If you visit my web sites, you’ll know that I use Clicky to do my web analytics, and that I have placed Clicky affiliate links on all of them. In the past few weeks, a number of people have asked me why I use Clicky instead of the “free” tools, and how I use it.

Why Clicky, as opposed to the free tools? Well, when people talk about free tools, they’re usually talking about either raw server visitor logs, which need to be post-processed, or Google Analytics. Google Analytics is certainly popular and comprehensive, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to set up and manage. I’ve only managed to get Google Analytics set up on one of my sites, and I found the reports and dashboards incomprehensible.

Clicky, on the other hand, took me about five minutes per site to set up. The most time-consuming part of the operation is installing and configuring the plugins for Drupal and WordPress, the two content management systems I use. That took me about two minutes per site. And then, it just works, and the reports and dashboards are intuitive, easy to read, and easy to configure!

The second key feature of Clicky is real-time analytics. All of the statistics, visualizations, dashboards, goals, campaigns and so on are updated in real time. And there is a Spy capability. With Spy, you can watch visitors as they move around on your web site! I’m watching them as I type this blog post, and as you’ll find out below, I watch them when I am actively engaging on Twitter.

Which brings up the third key feature of Clicky — integrated Twitter search monitoring. You can define Twitter search criteria, and Clicky will monitor the search continuously. The Twitter search monitoring dashboard has the following panels:

  • Tweet rate graph
  • Tweet types
  • @Senders
  • @Recipients
  • Links
  • Hashtags
  • Tweets

I’m not going to spend much time talking about most of the panels, but the “Tweets” panel is fully interactive — it can function as a Twitter client. If you click on the “@Sender” of a tweet, a browser window opens up on that time line. You can click on any active elements in the tweet, and a browser window will open up on the link. And to the right of each tweet, there is a “Reply” and a “Retweet” button.

So how do I use Clicky? First of all, like any other web analytics tool, I define my goals, campaigns and funnels. But I also define a Twitter search monitoring criterion. For example, to monitor reaction to this blog post, I defined a Twitter search for “Clicky”.

Once all of the setup is done, I open up two tabs in Clicky. The first tab is the Spy tab, which lets me watch visitors to the site. And the second is the Twitter search monitoring tab for the search monitoring criterion. Then I post a tweet, for example, a link to this blog post. Once the dialog begins, I can interact with people on Twitter, watch visitors on my web site, and even change things while I’m watching. Essentially I have real-time A/B testing and engagement on Twitter!

So there you have it — Clicky in a nutshell. I think it’s a perfect example of how Twitter can facilitate engagement on the Internet, and why one would want real-time tools, even for a small-scale web presence like mine. Please feel free to comment here, or on Twitter.

Clicky Web Analytics


[tweetbox label="You're here - tweet to me!" default="@znmeb "]

 

Jeremiah Owyang with pizza and beer on the deck!

Does it get any better than that?


Buy your ticket here!


Join Social Media Club Portland and the Internet Strategy Forum (ISF) on Wednesday, July 22, for a summer social! ISF keynote speaker, Jeremiah Owyang, will join us for a Q&A at this casual event, which will include plenty of time to hang out on WebTrends’ rooftop deck, enjoying hometown favorite Widmer beer and pizza.


Our summer social kicks off ISF, which takes place July 23-24. Of course, we have a discount for you! Use code “SMC” when registering for ISF to save 15% off the price of the full day conference on July 23. That’s just $195 to hear people at the top of their game talk about what’s working right now.


As an analyst at Forrester Research, Jeremiah is on the cutting edge of all things social media. He authored the recent report “The Future of the Social Web” and is #2 on the “Twitter Power 150 List.” We’re compiling a list of questions in advance to ask Jeremiah – post your questions to our Web site or tweet them to @SocialMediaPDX.


Buy your ticket EARLY!


This event may sell out. Tickets are $15 in advance until midnight July 21, $20 (check or cash only) the day of the event at the door.


What:

Social Media Club Portland


When:

6:00pm – Networking

6:30pm – Q&A with Jeremiah Owyang

7:15pm – Pizza and Schmoozing


Where:

WebTrends Rooftop Patio

851 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1600

Portland, OR 97204


Cost:

$15 in advance (credit card or paypal online)

$20 day of event (cash or check only)


Tell your friends and show our sponsors some love on Twitter!


Internet Strategy Forum: @Summit

Jeremiah Owyang: @jowyang

Widmer Brewing: @Widmer_Brothers

WebTrends: @WebTrends

 

Nobel prize laureate Herbert Simon once popularized the term “satisfice”. Simply put, “satisfice” means “make something good enough.” It’s what we do when optimizing — making something the best it can be — costs too much in terms of time, money or other resources.

I was reminded of this concept the other day while experimenting with Twitter search. In particular, I was attempting to figure out how the Twitter search “sentiment analysis” works. And the reason I was doing that is that I was struggling to understand why my screen name, “znmeb”, was returning a 6 percent “negative” sentiment rating.

So, why does a nice guy like me have a negative sentiment rating of 6 percent? As far as I can tell, It looks like Twitter search determines whether a tweet is positive, negative or neutral solely by the presence or absence of smileys! That is, if a tweet has a :( or :-( or :P , it will be counted as a negative. If it has a ;-) it will be counted as
positive, etc. Incidentally, if it has a “?” it will be counted as a question. That, apparently, is the scope of its “sentiment analysis” capabilities.

OK … that’s part of the story … people who put frowny-faces in tweets about me will give me a negative rating. So … who are the folks frowning on yours truly? Well, in the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us!” It turns out that most of the tweets counted were tweets I made! So, if I frown on Apple, Twitter search frowns on both Apple and me. If someone else frowns on AT&T and addresses it to “@znmeb”, Twitter search frowns on AT&T, me and the sender.

To test this, I posted a tweet that said, “I hate Hoover vacuum cleaners — they really suck :-) ”. Now that’s an example of a sentence more or less deliberately designed to embarass any natural language processing sentiment analysis algorithm. As you probably have guessed, Twitter search counted it as a positive reference to both me and Hoover.

Why does this matter? Because it looks to me like many — perhaps most — of the social media monitoring tools available use Twitter search as their primary way of gathering input data. If these tools are passing on the sentiment analysis provided by Twitter search without any further processing, they may misrepresent the true sentiment about the search target. And that in turn may foster errors in decisions made using the dashboards these tools provide.

So … I put the question to my readers: “Is Twitter search good enough?”

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