social media

robwatts — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:10:30 +0000

This is just a short post to announce that I’ll be shutting down the social media monitoring tool yacksocial that I created back in Feb 2010.

I’d like to thank all those who supported the effort and apologise if you’d grown to like it/use it.

My reasons are two fold.

One, I don’t have the time to recode it to work w/ oAuth which twitter will be implementing across the board for all twitter apps soon.

Two, I don’t have the desire or inclination to push it where it needs to go. I kind of lost interest in it when I left my previous employer.

Whilst projects like this need that initial pow, boom etc, they can’t be sustained on enthusiasm alone. They need like minded collaborators, a team, a marketing plan, push, desire, support and a budget.

If anyone is interested in the software, ( go and try it out, it’s freemium) do please send me an email – best offer gets the code.

Don’t ask me what I want for it, or insult me either. You’ll need to understand PHP and be able to upgrade the current basic auth to oAuth for twitter, else put simply, it won’t work. I should add too that it’s not a finished item, is a work in progress but it’s a good start for any company looking to have a tool in the space.

I’ll keep it up for a month from today, but then it goes.

Thanks

social media

robwatts — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:07:12 +0000

Not just another social media monitoring tool

I’m writing this post on an iPhone whilst watching Arsenal trail 2-1 to Stoke, a testament to the interconnected world we inhabit today. A world where we can interact w/ our networks from virtually anywhere, a world where the old constraints of modems and hard wired cables in a phone socket are but a bemusing memory of a place left alone in the roadmap of time.

Back then we usually had to wait before reading a response to a post or a comment. Facebook and Twitter, the proliferation of other nkotb like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite et al were just twinkles in the eye of their respective founders. Today all are becoming a mainstay of the online world, acting as sharepoints for the herds that flock to the power of their distributive connectivity; full of people chattering and networking, discussing themes and topics of their everyday lives. Lets face it, it’s nothing short of a technological social revolution; the web how it should be, as envisaged by the technerd visionaries striving to push it all that little bit further.

As a result of all this, quite a few of us have got excited by the opportunities that this activity presents. Never before has it been so easy to connect w/ people in their ‘moment’ never before has it been possible to identify so very quickly, people who are talking about you, your brand or topics and products important to your interests. The whole proliferation of listening tools that have sprung up is testament to the hunger and appetite for finding new ways of measuring, interacting and building relationships w/ those of import.

In terms of the tools available we have a wide and awesome array. Some do a good job and some simply overwhelm. Of the hardcore tools I’ve used I must confess that some ( even for a tech head like me ) provided too much. There weren’t any that I knew of that enabled me to simplistically look at a couple of important web nodes ( the blogosphere and Twitter ) and not only listen and monitor, but respond to, and share internally, to identify and classify as a CRM or Sales opp, a Marketing or Crisis management issue. All did lots of things really well, but none offered the kind of things I was interested in at a one stop shop.

See for me, at a keyword brand or product conversation level, there usually exists a need. A need to find, a need to share, grow, love, hate, acquire, enquire, inspire even – people tend to talk about such things in blogs, social status updates or forums w/ niche followings or interests. Brands especially can no longer rely on traditional offline media to build brand, neither can they depend on law to silence vociferous detractors, the option of sitting back and allowing conversations to develop w/ no awareness of or engagement w/ is a recipe for soon to be disaster.

Yet honing all that down and acquiring meaningful insight into such events, in the absence of some uber web understanding was and for many still is incredibly difficult. Could crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the masses hold the key?

You betcha! I didn’t know the stats to hand but I took a punt and said if anything of import is happening in the world today then it’s likely to appear in a blog a forum or in Twitter somewhere. With a little pipery and Tommy Cooper jush like thatery I was pretty sure that I could build something that not only allowed people to do the traditional response thing, but to also begin to understand some of the DNA beneath. The ability to identify friends and foes, the ability to extract positive or negative external references, the ability to measure the relative power and importance of what those referenced nodes were about. The ability to segment and take snapshots in time. Actionable insights into cause and effect. How f*#^%in cool to be able to say, right – we launched product x or initiative y and this is how the world/continent/country/region/town responded. These are the people who influenced things, these are the places where it happened and this is where we need to do better.

Of course in terms of the whole GEO thing it’s still early days but, wow, what an exciting time for both marketers and consumers. Anyone who even half gets this stuff who fails to feel the power needs to pack it in tomorrow.

Ok, so yes – it isn’t oauth yet ( I got this thing called a day job) it isn’t beautiful on the eye, it needs a bit more ajaxification, it needs a little negative matching and a few more reporting options (pretty PDFs anyone) but it’s getting there. I hope you give it a try and if you find it useful, support the effort

Cheers

Rob

Sent from an iPhone

social media

robwatts — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:35:06 +0000

Social Media Monitoring Tools – Yack Social

I’m pleased to announce the fruit of a little recent xmas obsession. A social monitoring tool for those who are scared by huge datasets ;0)

I think it’s pretty cool, it lets you listen, monitor, respond and report.

It doesn’t go out and spider the web. It just lets you choose words that are important to your brand or your competition and take samples from twitter and the blogosphere.

My view is that if its on the radar then it’ll end up in blogs or twitter. Lots of people use twitter, but few track what they are doing, simply because there are few very easy ways of doing so. This for me, goes some way to adding to that conversation.

I’ve a list of to do’s and am adding extra value as and when I get the time.

I could have sat here and refined and refined for ever and a day but…you’ve just gotta put things out there and see what they do sometimes.

If you encounter the odd bug, then do let me know. I’m working on it daily, so apologies if you find one. I might buy you a pint if I meet you.

It’s a chargeable, but it should make your life a little easier, especially if you are a PR, SEO, Marketing or Sales person.

It isn’t a state of the art ‘grab the web’ tool. They already exist. I’m not re-inventing the wheel.

It’s designed to let you take stock of real time and deal with it in the here and now.

Through using it you can:

Identify sales opps
Identify marketing opps
Deal with Crisis Comms
Send messages to internal depts
Check activity overtime and get learnings
Identify Retweeted Links
Identify Social Influencers
Identify the most active people for a keyword in a timeline
Export Reports to Excel
Create Charts and Graphs
Detect sentiment automatically
Mark Sentiment
Interactwith Twitter
Create up to 5 campaigns
Use Multiple Twitter Accounts
Use a Single Login with multiple aliases

Additional add ons in development are:

The ability to add negative keywords
The ability to geo target keywords
Linkedin Integration
Foursquare Integration
Email reports
Customise reports

The GEO targetting aspect mightn’t be as effective for keyword purposes, simply because of people not geo tagging their tweets. Know a tweeter? et them to geo tag their tweets!!

Initial price during Beta is just £45 per month for early bird users

I’m going to go freemium but need to recode aspects of the sign up process watch this space.

All those who sign up before the end of January will get a free month too. You can get it here

If you don’t find it useful, then after 5 days, just cancel your subscription. Stay longer and it’s a one month rolling commitment.

Use it and it gets interesting, choose your keywords judiciously and see what it puts together for you.

For those who want professional insight over and above what you can glean by yourself, there are additional custom social media reports available at extra cost. These are written by people like me and are not cheap.

If you want a great list of other tools on the market then you can find a great list here .:)

social media

robwatts — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:39:41 +0000

Seems like mybloglog has had a bad week. I read today over at Andy’s that mybloglog banned a guy named shoemoney for reasons relative to general not very niceiness, at least that must have been their perception. Mr shoe posted a few mblID’s. These can be obtained from user avatars uploaded by mbl users. I use them myself in my mbl tracking script. A reason for banning? No of course not. I think you have to look a little more closely to perhaps begin to understand why.

The reasons behind Mr shoes ban seem to have their roots in him posting various exploits that can be applied and used to basically, fuck with how mbl works. I don’t think this is a bad thing generally, in fact its good to have people point out flaws; especially when they can be patched with relative ease. Constructive criticism is always good.Its a delicate balance though, if someone took it upon themselves to attack and criticise with regularity, posting things that made me look dumb or stupid then my gut might be inclined to say hey do me a favour blokey, just piss off out of it if you don’t like what I am doing. That would of course ( as appears to be panning out to be the case) , be a mistake as I’d open myself to all kinds of attacks from followers, detractors and cronies.

John Andrews nails it with his comment at Andy Beals.

wow… it’s amazing to see so many users adopting our service so fast. We are really excited to see the validation that the MBL platform is capable of so much more, and also how amazingly innovative the blogging community is. We’ll have to fix some of the loop holes of course, and we’ve got great people working on keeping things moving forward, but keep the feedback coming and let us know what we’re doing right and what you need from us…

People like Matt Cutts have been using similar approaches for years, we all know where it got those guys too.

MBL’s crime it appears is that they didn’t code things perfectly and that enabled people to do things like, surf as other people using a cookie exploit, or add co-authors without consent or add other sites to peoples accounts, again without their consent.

Ok, so yes, not the best things in the world to have had happen, it undermines faith and trust in whatever else could be ‘leaking out’ but come on lets face it, its not exactly the end of the world, or a reason to be filed under heinous crimesville but it’ll gain one a little attention if you come out and support a position one way or the other.

My personal take is one of so what who really really cares, who died even? I’ll still use mybloglog I think its a bit of harmless fun and a good way of getting new eyeballs on to what you do and say. Its a cracking little site that created a lot of interest and buzz in a segement that is continually evolving and growing. So it has a few holes that tech head nerds will point at and say OMG, how bad is that..yeah – so – and.

Some might wonder why MBL is such a focus, why are these evil seo types so interested? Well, SEO’s types tend to be the ones who push and poke and prod, its the nature of getting up where you need to be that drives it. SE algos are that little harder to get at these days,the requirement to gain traction and influence within their algo parameters dictates that people will look at the most cost and time efficient ways of increasing their scores. Like it or not, MBL offers a means of gaining attention. Attention = links, links = better scores, better scores = more money blah blah blah. Digg, reddit, delicious, wikipedia, dmoz all had or still have even, similar issues. Its the downsided price of success on the net.

Thankfully for MBL at least, most users are just happy to stick the thing on the their blog and leave it at that. They love the stat functionality, love the little people icons, love the little community and ‘blog love’ thing in general. I think its cool too, which is why I’ll continue to use it until something better comes along.
Overall, a storm in a teacup methinks. Could have been handled better, on all sides.

Update:Mybloglog reinstated Shoemoney

social media

robwatts — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:35:30 +0000

Brad wrote an interesting piece today which got me thinking about the topic of linking out, authority scores, pagerank leakage and all those old chestnuts.

Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) .

Following on, I was looking at a few blogrolls on various blogs just the other day, most had a few links here and there numbering between 6 and 15. Some like Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea had a big long blogroll in excess of 30 links.I don’t have Bills ranking figures to hand, but I’m sure he hasn’t been too adversely affected by linking out so extensively.He provides quality viewpoints that others link to. If a Search Engine happened to penalise on the back of such extensive outlinking then it would, IMO be a little harsh, not to mention poor for its users. Its how the web works after all, links links links!

That said, I think generally it might be a sensible idea to maybe look at ensuring perhaps, that ones blogroll, especially if its pretty long, doesn’t appear on every single page for example, as this could help cut down on any sameiness factor, which could be a determinant in any subsequent ranking considerations. I’m thinking duplicate block/content issues here.

It may also be useful to bear in mind, that not all sites have an equal footing in terms of any authorative weighting system, so what one site may be able to get away with, may not necessarily apply to another with a lower hub/authority score.

One thing we can all be assured of is that this ranking in the Search Engines game isn’t a static target, it moves and shifts with subtleties that we mightn’t see for months or weeks after its happened. Toolbar PR for example is widely recognised as not being a true representation of ones actual pagerank, which again isn’t the magic bullet that people once assumed it to be.

Sure, links do indeed power the net, but its now a question of the types of links you are getting too. The days of mutliple footer links from low quality sites being able to boost you up a serp are long gone.

The advent of Digg, Reddit, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Myspace and all manner of other different types of Social Media platform that enable mass participation and citation dictate that the ground is a whole lot more fuid than it once was. These too are excellent pointers towards what is and what isn’t current. Who is ‘buzzing’ and who is not. Matt Cutts wrote a blog post about writing articles that users will love the core message being that if you do then people will pick them up in their readers and link back to you and talk about what you have to say – rocket science huh?

I’m reminded of something I read some time back. It was a thing called Block Level Analysis a process whereby a page is broken down into various sections and elements. The condensed version is that some links are worth more than others dependant upon where they are within a page. So navigational links may not be as semantically valid as a link found within a block of text in the upper part or main body of a block of text; if this, or a variation of were factored into an algorithm, then the placement or length of any blogroll ,could well be academic in any case.

From time to time, maybe we are all guilty of worrying about how a search engine may or may not interpret what we do or say. I’ve worked in affiliate spaces. I know that you can get cabin fever riding the ups and downs of the Search engine algo change waves. In many ways too there was a time when you just had to, there was no other way, if you wanted to keep ahead you had little other choice. They were continually evolving and we had to second guess their movements in terms of how they were weighting this aspect or that. Today, whilst its a whole lot harder, it is also a whole lot more straightforward too. The vagueries and theories relative to KW densities and tag structure and word placement are largely on the wane. The search engines seem to be applying a hell of a lot more weight towards what is current and who is creating buzz and new link juice. Authorities and white lists have been established, probably via some DMoz or Y! directory snapshot. New sites wanting to perform well in the competitive spaces, better be pretty hot. If they are, then they will create that buzz and will be talked about within social media spaces. Everything that follows will have been earnt by dint of being linkworthy.

IMHO of course

social media

robwatts — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:02:05 +0000

I read a very good blog post this morning from the old linkmeister himself NickW.

He talks about linkbaiting generally, what makes for good vs what makes for bad and touches on its newly born cousin ‘widgetbait’, a term I heard for the 1st time yesterday in a private discussion with Lyndon . More on widgets further on.

Anyways, getting back to Nick. For those of you who don’t know him or have never had the pleasure/displeasure to encounter his often acerbic wit, he’s the guy responsible for setting up Threadwatch , Performancing and the recently launched click influence and is generally credited with coining the phrase Linkbait. He’s a good egg, who tells it like it is.
Besides damn hard work a big aspect behind Nick’s success with these ventures has been his ability to stimulate debate amongst the community by writing interesting content that actually has something to say.

He gets people talking about stuff. Simple huh? Very rarely will you read a longish blog from Nick that doesn’t have something to add to the mix. He wins, we win. He gains links and kudos, we learn a little and maybe grab an idea or get incentivised to modify or adapt or use whatever it is he might be talking about. Does he hit it everytime? No, of course not, he’s human like the rest of us, but he’s certainly worth some closer scrutiny…

Linkbait

The term linkbait for example, is a classic distillation of a topic which when used correctly really can rocket you through the stratosphere and get you ranking for those all important keyphrases.

Before it was coined, no one really had any kind of label for it. You were either that educational person over there in the corner, that rude controversial person, that wisen sage, that idiot or whatever other singular label you had the displeasure to be slapped with. The very term linkbait is now recognised as the umbrella for the tactics used, or hooks that grab peoples attention. By seeing it for the broad strategy it is, it really does help in any strategic thinking process.

Just go and look at the link data for his 1st ever post on the topic. Then go and look at all the varying conversations it stimulated ha, google even has a little fun by asking, did you mean linkabit?

Getting those all important links

Which of course goes to the heart of what its all about and why baiting in general is such an important aspect of any online marketing strategy.It might be obvious to say that a good title will attract links, good links too, people won’t just linkabit they will linkalot. Blog posts are seen in places like Digg, in feedreaders, bloglines, MyYahoo, Googlereader, pageflakes and a whole lot of other platforms that share or distribute user content. A carefully crafted headline will therefore, grab the attention of its readers and provided that the content is there to back it up, will get you more readers and help grow your brand.

People like sensationalism, the success of tabloid journalism is a testament to this. In an online world where eyeballs often means increased revenues then one has to pull out as many of the stops one can. Online marketers need as many tools in their box as they can muster.
Widgets get you links, links get you traffic and grow your user base

Widgets pull new users and help grow brands and communities. They really are a phenomenal success and very popular indeed, especially amongst blog users and the myspacer users of this world.

Just look at the success of MyBloglog. Mybloglog is a recent Y! acquisition purchased for 10 million dollars, not bad eh? Look at its stratospheric growth over the course of the last year.

What really pushed it to the top? Some might say it was this neat little widget that enabled people to put their visitors faces right there on their blogs

Others might argue that it was a whole lot more than that, the point is though that people love neat and funky. Be it a wordpress plugin, a flickr photo include, a google map even, people will flock to them like birds to birdseed.

The lesson to be learnt would be to get widgetising folks,people like soloseo have the right idea, take a popular idea tweak it and add value. Aff marketing 101 perhaps, but as applicable as ever for building that all important userbase and content.

With organisations like the BBC prepared to invest heavily in the whole concept of social media, it really is one of those areas that are ripe for opportunities. For both bloggers and community content distributors alike.

If appropriate social networking opportunities arise, then we would look at them very seriously, because it’s a growing area of business that we’re not particularly in at the moment.

Interesting words huh?

social media

robwatts — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:05:49 +0000

I love the recent Y! acquisition, mybloglog. Its like a myspace with bells on. Ive encountered some really nice and interesting people too. In case you haven’t seen or used it before its a social media platform. You can join communities, add contacts, upload photos and if you install a piece of code you can get stats and display photos of visitors from their network on your site as they arrive.

On the user front I think its kinda cool. IMO I think It adds an extra dimension to ones website by way of showing an extra human dimension. You can see the latest faces of people who have visited and if you so feel inclined, go and check them out to see what they are all about; at least thats what Ive found myself doing!

Their stats page is cool too. Gives you a non fussy overview of where your readers came from, what they viewed and what they clicked. It even tells you what ads they clicked on too.

Great, for some at least, a quick and easy way to see whats what, without the need for other 3rd party metrics. Your top 10 referrers, top 10 articles showing the number of times they were read, and the top 10 external off site link clicks within your blog posts. The ad clicking feature is good too, showing you what ad was clicked on, or at least the target destination. Ok, so its lacking in a lot of things and could be a whole lot better granted. But hey, its free and besides if you want something a little more involved there’s always Google analytics or Web trends or for the ultra paranoid amongst us, there’s the traditional on server log file analysis approach. Webaliser, Analog, AW Stats all do a pretty good job at showing you the why’s and the wherewithals (ad clicks aside perhaps).

The other day here lyndoman and I had a little light hearted discussion of some of the pluses and minuses of this whole tracking thing.

I can’t see porn sites using the widget, else you would just see a lot of hairy crusty blokes, viewing the hot lesbo action websites, lol. Good way to blackmail.

But what would be cool for geeks would be mobile phone text alerts that tell you when such and such has visited your site.

It’s a brilliant service with fantastic ways for it to go wrong.

It got me thinking about some of the privacy issues on all this; my cynical antenna went on to dark orange status and got me thinking in terms of if they wanted to, they could actually track your entire history throughout their network. Who you visited, what you read, how long you read it for, what you bookmarked, did you comment, what did you say etc blah. Lyndoman’s comical reference to Scott Rafer sitting in some room with multiple screens and white cat on his lap couldn’t be so far from reality.

Anyhow, it was for reasons like this that some time back I didn’t buy into the who Google personalisation/ search history thing. I don’t want Google or any other search engine for that matter knowing my searching patterns; especially when its aligned to me personally.Why? Just coz, EOS.What is really in it for me I asked myself. After a short while I realised, not very much at all. Great for them, hell yeah. Great user demographic info, priceless in terms of pushing the right products to the right people in the right places, provided I’d want them of course. As I’m not a big fan of cold calling anyways, I decided to pass.

So we have these privacy policies whereby we see that companies promise not to share data about us and all that – the whole thing of course, is built on trust. We entrust our actions to people and companies we don’t know. We assume that we are protected by law from infringements of our personal liberties and whatnot, we assume that just because they say they won’t do this or that, that they won’t. Just made me wonder really, what is there to safeguard us? Who if anybody monitors these things, where are the policies outlining who has access to the data and who doesn’t? We all remember the AOL user search revelations , we should also remember that everything we push out there into the big wide world goes through the servers of our ISP. Thats all of our Instant messaging, emails, web browsing, video conferencing – everything. I wonder who ensures the restrictions on all that too.

Important questions no? What do you think?