In the last few years the research behind sentiment analysis has ranged from thumbs up\thumbs down and emoticon faces to more advanced methods.

A few companies mentioned in the article above are trying to sort out the signal from the noise like Tweetfeel, twendz, and twitrratr and others like Trendrr (can I buy a vowel please alex). Each has their own way of parsing data, mainly Twitter data, to mine the conversations for sentiment.

In the larger universe of analytical tools you have companies like BuzzLogic, TechRigy, Radian6, Visible Technologies, Viral Heat, and a bunch of new startups all trying to solve this marketers puzzle.

At the low end these services cost $10.00-$20.00 per month and on the high end thousands. Depending on what you are tracking, how far back you want to go, and how hands on of a solution you need, someone is building a sentiment analysis tracker for your.

The goal here is to track beyond mentions. For example, if your brand is mentioned 2,654 times – how do you know what the sentiment of most\some\all of those messages are? Where are conversations happening about your brand in the first place? How can you respond back to solve problems, answer questions, and apologize where necessary?

In thinking about the sentiment analysis market, I am trying to frame thinking 5 years out when brands will themselves have more conduits to their customers. Will systems still exist that brands do not know about and are not tracking? Or will the convergence of connectivity mean a more aware corporate culture that does not need to use yet another tool in their arsenal. Perhaps 5 years is too short of a timeline, but certainly they will have a grasp on this in 10-20 years.

I am curious to know what tools I should be looking at and how people are solving brand tracking probelms today. Let me know if you have ideas in the comments below.

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Sentiment Analysis

Since starting this blog I have been getting an increasing amount of PR firms pitching various products, promotions, companies, and more. My information is easy enough to obtain, or you can even fill out a form and I like being this reachable.

Lately it seems that the quality of these email “pitches” has gone down. It is not that I write about them in the first place, but it is as if they do not even read blogs to begin with (let alone actually reading this blog).

It is possible that I have been writing long enough simply to have my email on some PR blast lists (annoying) but even if this is the case, the quality “requests” have gone way down.

Below is my list of greatest offenders, offenses, and examples of what not to do.

1. Ridiculous news story happens and CEO of X Co. would be happy to discuss it
2. New product announced that has literally NOTHING to do with my blog or audience
3. Interview available with person X but no context given for a reason
4. Product or service announcement with no link and usually 8-10 paragraph description
5. Feature launch for a company I did not know existed – PR firm looking for a follow up article
6. Paid links in an article
7. Paid links on the homepage
8. So called “sponsored” posts – pay per post
9. Outreach by a unqualified individual
10. Mail merge failures
“Hi :namefield: I enjoy your :variable: blog, and wanted to discuss….”

I can’t tell you how many times I get an email with something from the list above. I sometimes write back to give advice or feedback on the so called “outreach” and offer tips (seriously) and I have never ONCE heard back. I know these folks get the emails as I have feigned interest in later emails and gotten a response.

Either way this is simply a rant on the state of outreach and the so called “social media experts” that are everywhere.

Like always the personal and eloquent connections and outreach work 10X better than spray and pray but I have to assume there is some success rate as the volume of these inquires is increasing.

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Outreach, PR firms, and Blogging

The main takeaway for me over the course of the half day event was that quality over volume wins every time. Many campaigns have an ability to gain a large share of voice simply by throwing media dollars at traditional channels to try to capture market share, but this strategy is quickly fading.

The day was structured beginning with opening remarks by Fred Wilson, and John Borthwick of Betaworks as a primer to how companies in this space are viewed by those that provide capital for them to grow. This was followed by a number of case studies showing the

Seth’s opening presentation:

Social Media Stories 2.0

View more presentations from Seth Goldstein.

No amount of noise will change perception of a product or service and the only way to influence reality is to devote your time towards quality. There were many great case studies from this days events that I am sure are available on the web.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Quality over Volume

In an effort to stick with the same question set here they are:
Are you using all your profiles? Everyday? Every Week? Every Month?
Are you gaining the original value from them?
Do you want to have 50+ profiles with your information in them? I feel like this one can’t apply to me anymore since having this many profiles is a large part of my job
and for some new ones this year:
Are the social profiles sustainable, or do they sit dormant?
Do they help you in some way?

This year marks a fundamental shift in how profiles and accounts work as the advent of third party verifications systems mean less accounts. Systems like Facebook Connect, Google Login, and even Twitter now have enough of an audience to reduce the need for creating yet another account on another service.

As I look at the services I use every day, every week, and every month I am trying to determine the ones that add the most value. In a lightweight web world it doesn’t make sense to delete these accounts, but certainly take stock of what you are using and what you are not.

To maintain and organize your accounts many people use browser password trackers, desktop remembering services, but I use a web based service (yes another login – but it connects with all servces) called passpack which allows secure storage. It is also a great way to stay organized and have your data available to you when you need it remotely, as the service is available via any browser.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Social Media Cleanup

Fred talked about the power of passed links in a recent post and it was the catalyst to this thinking.

As people and companies hype the latest “Social Media” tools and websites, they forget that the most important action or referral comes from someone you know – and online that comes in the form of a link that has been cut and pasted into an email, an IM, passed via Twitter, or included in a document.

There are certainly ways of looking at this fundamental behavior of passing links around and wrapping them up for better accountability.

One of the tools I use regularly for just about every link I cut and paste around it Bit.ly which allows ATLAS and DART like tracking – without all the fuss and its free. Simply cut and paste your url into Bit.ly and you can easily track information about how many people clicked on it, how it was passed, and most importantly figure out what systems your link now exists on. (I am staying out of the debate on url shortners for now.)

I digress to my main point, the method of cut and pasting your content is happening by your potential viewers, customers, and users – even by the person seeding your content into networks. This means that you need to make things easily shareable. I am not saying the latest widget company cannot help in this process, but I am saying that the ultimate real value comes from people sharing with each other. On the web that happens when people share links together – via cutting and pasting them around the web.

It took a few years, but Google Reader now has the ability to automatically email your friends from within the Reader “sharing” the post you are reading with them. This is a direct result of a behavior that was happening (outside the GReader experience) of people opening links in another tab, copying the url, opening up an email client, pasting in the link, and then sending it off. The solution to this problem came in the form of a built in system (note: not behavior change) by Google Reader. To me, that is a powerful observation and reaction.

Conclusion:
Think about how and why you are sharing links, and as you prepare to “seed” networks think about how people can further share this data with each other. As buzz words and tactics come and go, its important to pay attention to the behaviors that never change. Cut and Paste has been around for quite awhile, and when the dust settles on the latest “tool to get content viral” I think we will still be using the original 4 viral keystrokes of copy and paste.

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Copy and Paste is the best Social Media Tool

In it they describe 6 ways you can get new customers (as an ad agency) which really speak volumes about any organization whether you are an ad agency or a simply trying to sell a product.

1. Network Innovatively
2. Show your social media savvy
3. Adopt a recognizable platform
4. Be willing to contort
5. Write a book
6. Offer a direct line to the CEO

I do not agree with the definition of each by AdAge but the general gist it simple communicate. I provided my thoughts on each of these 6 below and how they may translate out to a larger group beyond simply ad agencies.

Networking is key, but doing it properly can mean the difference between being labeled a thought leader and a sales guy. I agree with what John Coleman does, and participate personally in these types of small innovative thinking sessions that are sparked by a single topic. This provides a non-invasive way of getting to know people without much pretense.

Showing your savvy and accepting one platform There are many ways to do this – but I think adopting multiple platforms is a great way to learn and understand a market. If your goal is to get clients, make sales, close business – than understanding what is out there and having an agnostic approach will serve you better than sticking to one platform. Showing your savvy will happen as your expertise develops across multiple platforms and you are able to make agile jumps to new things that come out. Nothing is worse than being pitched on a platform simply because there is no knowledge of other options.

Be able to contourt – this screams COMMUNICATION to me. As the world changes, so should your ability to adapt to customer needs. The cited example is building up an agency around a large brand (Dell). IMHO this should happen EVERY time there is a new brand brought in and account team formed. On a more realistic scaling front, this can be done in the form of listening to the needs of the potential customer and making sure you can meet them. (For those naysayers that state you cannot fit everyone into your business and stay strong against customizing all jobs – take this advice with a grain of salt as I know it will not work for everyone.)

Write a book Everyone jumps at the ambitiousness of this statement. It should read Write an E-Book its simple to do (.DOC to .PDF) low cost (Time) and free to publish (Ill let you publish it here if you want on Marketing.fm)

The work involved will be worth the effort even if nobody reads it (which will not be the case) as you will learn valuable lessons about your ideas and how they really look once they are structured in a publishable format.

Offer a direct line to the CEO Once again the genesis of this idea is communication. You should have open channels and folks that want to be concise, clear, and honest. Hopefully CEO contact will happen as a result of wanting to praise the work vs. move up the chain to be mad at a company. The overall point is that you should empower your employees to solve problems so that speaking to the CEO will be a nice bonus, but not a requirement for solving an issue.

If any agency, or individual wants to pursue one or more of these topics and needs a platform to do so (read: guest blog) feel free to reach out.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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How to get new customers: Communicate

As the social media scene unfolds there is now more opportunity than ever to join a variety of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, WordPress and so on. The problem now more than anything is having the ability to manage all of those accounts and still remain effective at networking. Having the ability to reach your customer, clients, friends and followers wherever they are is critical to building connections.

The folks over at Ping.fm designed a site where you have the ability to update your status on dozens of different social networking sites. I use Gmail for just about everything and Ping.fm allows you to add its updater to your Google Chat list. So anytime I want to update my status, I click on the chat and type is my update. A second later I get a response that my status have been updated. If I were to log in to all the different accounts I have and manually update my status it would probably take 10-15 minutes (given I don’t get sidetracked being on those sites).

This begs the question, “What good is it if you update your status but don’t get the replies or see others’ updates?”

Glad you asked. The second part to this social networking management is having the ability to subscribe to most sites like Twitter and Facebook via your RSS reader. With one chat box you can update the status on all your social networking sites, and in one RSS reader you can see all your followers’ or friends’ status changes as well.

All of this automation might seem like it defeats the purpose of joining those sites to begin with, but in the end you are saving a lot of time while increasing your social networking capabilities. In my book I would rather be able to participate in 5 conversations well versus those same 5 conversations well but at a huge loss of time. Play around and see what other ideas you can come up with to increase your online footprint while managing to stay on top of all of them.

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Post from: Eric Friedman
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Managing Social Networking – Ping.fm and RSS

You are participating in a keynote roundtable this year at the SES 2008 show in San Jose about attributing sales to Search – How much credit does an SEM program deserve?

It obviously deserves its fair share but this is the problem we are trying to solve… That search should not be an island and should be collaborative with other marketing activities. Historically, Search Marketers have tried to compete with other budgets rather than trying to be complimentary. We are trying to get marketers to understand they should work together and how to play nice with other marketers.

How do you determine the success of a Search campaign? What are some benchmarks for success?

It really varies. There are two key things we look for in metrics:

Most people with their search campaigns are only interested in Response Oriented — this is where the goal was to provoke people to do something. They want to know how many clicks and people buy. We are doing these but starting to do more around Awareness Oriented metrics – how many people became aware of us or our products during this phrase and what was their depth of their engagement with us.

Too many people exclude generic words from their campaign because the ROI is not positive but if they measures the awareness lift similar to GRP’s it opens up a different perspective. The current brand recall studies show this has tremendous value to the business. Additionally, we look at the “why only x” in terms of clicks and conversions. I have never been happy with a 5% click rate which means that 95% did not connect. If our client is the market leader they should be getting more but too many marketers do not take the time to understand why they are not getting their fair share of that opportunity.

What are some examples (generic or specific) of companies doing search right or wrong?
There are many large and small companies doing search wrong. Just about any search you do you will see mistakes with both paid and natural search. I see a lot of big companies that still have not effectively integrated search into their marketing organization. Those doing it well are many of the brands on the panels at this next SES. I am impressed with what Intuit has done as well as Intel – both are examples of well integrated search programs.

What is the latest “flash in the pan” meme in search marketing?

Social Media optimization – I think there are a lot of hacks out there that are jumping on this bandwagon since it is hot now. We are seeing a lot of chatter about optimizing social media content. While a lot of this is good information it is done after the fact rather than anything strategic that creates continuity. There are some companies who have embraced it and have tied it into a larger traffic and messaging strategy.

What are next generation search marketers thinking about?
They are thinking about content optimization across multiple formats and how to maximize all intersections with searchers. They will also be looking for was to integrate search into the entire content creation workflow.

What is one area you would like to see people spend more time on when looking at SEM analytics?

Monitoring paid and organic search integration.

Please share some of your professional background and why enjoy being CEO/President of Global Strategies?

I am one of the pioneers of Search Marketing. I got started by sending requests for inclusion into Yahoo! Directly to Jerry Yang when they were just starting out. I helped Outrider grow into the largest search agency that was acquired by WPP in 2000. After taking a break from search and working on a few internal consulting projects I formed GSI to work with companies to integrate search into the workflow for scale. We have grown to be a leader in enterprise and global search marketing. Why I enjoy being the CEO? I get to oversee a great team of dedicated Search consultants and work with some of the biggest brands in the world. I get to travel the world to meet with clients and teams. Last year I logged over 300,000 miles and visted 20+ countries. The travel around the world gives me the opportunity to experience many different forms of search marketing techniques and opportunities.

For more information about Bill Hunt or his company checkout Global Strategies.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Interview: Bill Hunt – SES 2008: San Jose

Its time to clean out your social media profiles.

A lot of people have been buzzing about what they are doing with their profiles such as Hugh MacLeod deleting his twitter account, and Andrew Baron putting his Twitter account up for sale (as written about by Chris Brogan). Which you can see the ebay auction here.

I recently wrote about this very subject just days before in an article analyzing the monetary value of a social networking profile.

So take your pic from the list below showing all the Social Networking services and start doing some Spring Social Media Cleaning:
List of Social Media Sites
Another list from SEOmoz
Mashable – list of 350 social networking sites

Ask yourself a few key questions:
are you using all your profiles? Everyday? Every Week? Every Month?
Are you gaining the original value from them?
Do you want to have 50+ profiles with your information in them?

If you are anything like me, making an account or a profile on every new service that comes out, it definitely ads up. I tend to use some of the same usernames, profile pictures, login names on many services so that I can guarantee my identity on the service and ensure that I will at least attempt to use it for awhile. The true test of a service is whether I am there 30 days later.

I will say that there are some accounts that I do not use that I plan on keeping – but others I may purge. One thing that I have started to do is tag my new profiles and accounts so that I can keep track of how many I actually have. At this point I know it is in the hundreds (thousands?) so I think it is time for a little social media spring cleaning.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Spring Social Media Spring Cleaning