You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?
It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.
Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.
To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?
Welcome to the world of data visualisation.
Digesting data
Information technology has made the collation and manipulation of masses of data relatively mundane. When you’re looking to manipulate data in a specific way, the machine can chunk through it pretty quickly and answer your defined and closed questions:
What were the sales in week 39?
How much did we invest in PR last year?
In our last market research, how did our perceived value for money rate versus the competition?
But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? How do you decipher the mass of data? How do you see what’s going on so you can learn and respond appropriately? How can you answer undefined and open questions such as:
What’s the buzz amongst our customers?
Who or what is exerting most influence?
What trends should we know about?
Who’s most likely to have started this rumour?
Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?
Gathering the data is, of course, no mean feat. But the rise of the social Web presents the broadest and deepest pool marketers have ever had to swim in, and I cover this topic in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 (which, to my surprise, is being downloaded over 500 times a week!). Of course, there is also the little issue of who owns this information, which this article about the Social Graph on Read Write Web covers succinctly.
The next biggest challenge to spotting patterns and trends is simply that the data has more dimensions than we can cope with. Take your computer screen… two dimensional. Add some nifty mathematics and you can represent three dimensions. Change it over (compressed) time, and you can “see” four dimensions… but that’s about the best we can achieve.
So now we have two new battles on our hands.
The first is presenting data brilliantly in the three or four dimensions we can deal with. And the second is building in some intelligence so that we’re more than likely looking at the right combination of three or four dimensions amongst the dozens or hundreds represented in the data set.
Great visualisations
One of the fascinating outcomes of this new branch of public relations is the value non-geeks can literally “see” in it. There’s a reason someone coined the term “a picture paints a thousand words”. Perhaps “a data visualisation renders a million influences” will trip off the tongue in the future?! How cool is it to ’see’ a meme?
And it’s not coincidental that some visualisations are beautiful; not that I’m about to author a treatise on beauty, but heuristically it makes sense that we’re more likely to find the interpretation of something that looks good easier than something that looks a mess.
I’ll leave you with some visualisations, with hyperlinks to the source should you, like me, become entranced by visualisation.
Peter Shankman, the creator of the much talked about HARO (Help A Reporter Out) service has been a feel good media story. Guy starts a free service to help reporters find sources. Guy sends the list to PR folks for free so they can get their clients mentioned as sources. Guy grows the list on his own to over 23,000 to compete with paid service from Profnet. Guy signs on advertisers to keep it free for users and gets “way over $100 CPM’s,” as advertisers reach a very targeted group. Everybody wins. What’s not to love about this story? Capitalism at its very best.
Unfortunately, fairy tales don’t usually last forever.
This morning while scanning some Twitter updates my colleague stumbled across this:
and then this:
My first thought - Maybe Hamilton Nolan is right and this is some sort of cult. Folks what are we thinking? I realize Peter does use shock value, he did agree to get tasered after all. But his use of the word “lynching” and all the connotations that come with the word is totally uncalled for and wrong. Now I obviously don’t know the race of the PR person that he is referring to and despite our name, we don’t usually get into racial discussions on our blog. If the PR person happens to be white - then perhaps it’s nothing more then an egregious error in judgement. If the PR person happens to black his use of the word is unconscionable. Either way, the use of the word that brings back images of one of the most despicable acts in our Nation’s history is wrong.
There’s obviously some comparisons that can be made here to the recent incident involving Golf Channel host Kelly Tilghman and her use of the word “lynch” in referring to Tiger Woods. Her use of the word in context was “young players who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should lynch him in a back alley.” Tiger’s race, being an issue on the tour since he first set foot on it, made the remark a punishable offense and the network rightly suspended her for two weeks.
Since I started this post Shankman has updated his Twitter feed and let everyone know that the PR person has sent him a heartfelt apology:
At the very least Shankman owes everyone a heartfelt apology of his own for the consistent use of the word.
If social media is on your radar, you’re obviously familiar with Mashable and its founder Pete Cashmore. The blogging network, designed to cover Web 2.0 and launched by Cashmore in 2005, brings in an estimated $166,000 in monthly revenue through sponsorships and advertising. Racepoint Group was in attendance (with more then 400 others) at Mashable’s SummerMash Boston tour stop on Tuesday at the Roxy and had the chance to sit down with Cashmore.
Here is a piece of the interview that my colleague and RaceTalk correspondent Erik Milster had with him:
Although Cashmore wasn’t willing to fully disclose what’s in the pipeline for the rest of this year and moving into next year, it’s clear that the site will continue to be a must read for those involved in Web 2.0 and social media. According to Compete.com, in July the site nearly hit 1 million unique visitors - falling just short - with 977,328.
Jonathan Kash of the Fluent Simplicity blog has put together one of the best and most comprehensive Twitter contact lists to date – the Twitter Brand Index.
The Twitter Brand Index is constantly being updated and lists numerous organizations, media outlets, events, technology companies, politicians and government agencies, social networks, people, etc. that have created accounts and post updates to Twitter.com.
Here is a small sampling of some of the companies and people included on the list:
The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that’s almost Google’s raison d’etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Google’s highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website’s content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.
This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.
But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website?
The vast majority of people are not webmasters. Most people do not have content or linking responsibility for their organisation’s website. Most people don’t blog, and the vast majority that do blog have a PageRank of almost no consequence. So PageRank is most impacted by links from the BIG blogs (Huffington Post, Techcrunch) and the BIG media websites (BBC, CNN), which ends up not being quite so “democratic” then as Google makes out.
(Note, I don’t know for sure how Google et al ‘weight’ things, but I’m not alone in reaching these conclusions).
Enter social bookmarking
Every Web user can use a social bookmarking service. The immediate advantage is the portability of your bookmarks ie, they’re not stuck on one PC but available from any Internet connected device. And a bookmark, whilst convenient and directly useful to the person making it, is also a vote for the webpage in question.
It’s not surprising then that one of the big search themes resonating on websites such as SearchEngineWatch is social search. Some social search purists believe social bookmarking is all you need to deliver more relevant search results, and some see this approach augmenting the PageRank-type algorithms of the current dominant search services.
How can you use socially assisted search in your organisation today?
You might not be surprised if I assert that what’s relevant for your team mates is probably relevant to you. And what’s not, is not! If they bookmark a great online resource, a great restaurant to entertain customers, the website of a supplier or competitor, news articles about your market, then all these things are relevant to you too.
So why not get everyone using the same bookmarking service, so long as it’s one that allows you to search within your network. I use Yahoo’s Delicious (the first and best in my opinion), so let’s take a quick look at how it would work for you?
Once you’ve signed up and installed the Firefox add-on (or Internet Explorer buttons if you don’t use the world’s best browser!) you can get bookmarking. You can also import all your bookmarks (aka favourites) currently kept by your browser on your computer into the service.
Add your team mates to your Delicious network and you can tell your boss that you’ve social-search-enabled your business!
As per the screenshot below, to conduct a social search (1) select People _ My Network, then (2) type in your search query eg, “restaurant”, “news”, “customerX”.
Implications for marketers
At Racepoint, we recognise that every piece of content we produce for ourselves and for our client campaigns must be written for humans first and search engines a close second. That entails “search engine optimisation” designed ligitimately to take advantage of the most common approach to search today: PageRank style.
However, marketers must acknowledge the inevitable rise of socially-assisted search too, or “human-powered search” as some pundits refer to it. Are you making it easy for people to bookmark your content? Are you prompting them? Here, on RaceTalkBlog, for example, the main bookmarking services are just a click away at the end of the post.
If you’re not, then you’re not building up your position in the social search engine results today and, more importantly, for tomorrow.
Twitter.com has once again raised the bar for news reporting, as breaking news is delivered with unsurpassed speed and efficiency. The most recent example was a quick one-word update from Twitter member Caroline (Vixy), who wrote “earthquake” to notify the Twitter community and local followers of the recent earthquake in Los Angeles.
Will Twitter become the next-generation emergency reporting system? Or, as purported by Chris O’Brian, will it be the best newsroom tool of the future?
Do you trust and respond to breaking news on micro-blogging platforms as you would traditional media outlets?
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are plagued by users abusing the fact that all someone needs to sign up is a valid email address.
In the most recent incident, reported last night by MSNBC, Matthew Firsht from the U.K. won nearly $44,000 in a lawsuit against a former friend that created a libelous profile in Matthew’s name. Because apparently, when some “adults” join a social network originally used by only college and high school students, they feel compelled to behave like 14 year olds.
The former friend / culprit / juvenile delinquent, Grant Raphael, added intentionally incorrect information about Matthew in regards to his sexuality, political views and finances. When Grant claimed that someone else must have created the page on his computer when his party was crashed last year, the judge called the statement “far-fetched” and awarded Matthew nearly $30,000 for libel, $4,000 for breach of privacy and $10,000 for libel against his company.
The silver lining of this story is that Facebook did an excellent job managing the problem, promptly removing the phony profile and cooperating with the proceedings which helped Matthew win his case. This however, is clearly not the first fake account to be created and surely will not be the last.
Do you think Facebook and other social networks will begin requiring more verification when people create profiles? How can we protect our identities and prevent this from happening in the future?
Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.
The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry
I do hope the ebook stimulates discussion and debate about this vital and nascent field, and look forward to the ongoing “distributed conversation”. Love to know what you think.
I’m relatively new to Twitter (follow me), and have had my fair share of frustrations with it so far. I think it’s generally pretty slow and doesn’t have a good way for new members to integrate into the network, but it does provide a great way for people to connect, who otherwise never would.
But when Twitter is working, users can now connect with politicians to share their thoughts and concerns with their representatives. While Barack Obama is on Twitter, I’ve only seen him (or someone else on his staff) update where he is or what he’s doing. However, Texas Congressman John Culberson has become an active on Twitter, engaging in back-and-forth conversation with his followers, and is actually following 732 people. This type of interaction is great, and is an example of how Twitter can help connect people.
Will more politicians turn to social networks like Twitter to help engage the public? The YouTube debates that were held last year seemed to be a big step forward in acknowledging what the elections really are about, and hats off Congressman Culberson for going a step further when he really didn’t have to.
Please Note: This post has nothing to do with supporting or not supporting Congressman Culberson. It’s simply a pat on the back for engaging citizens and listening to what they have to say.
Are you overwhelmed by your social networks? Do you feel there is just not enough time in the day to SuperPoke on Facebook, update your MySpace mood, add your Flickr pics, Plurk and follow fellow Twitterers? Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles “social Web browser” applications that can make your social networks work for you.
Toolbar that runs on left-hand side of Firefox browser (will be on IE in July)
Aggregates friends’ updates on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Last.fm
Chat on AIM, GTalk, MSN and Yahoo!
Drag, Drop and Share videos you find on YouTube and MetaCafe and add pics to Flickr
Universally update your profile status
Interactive screen saver and desktop viewer called chirpscreen (Mac only runs viewer)
Aggregates friends’ photo updates on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter
Users can comment and share photos without stopping the screen saver
Gives you live updates on eBay auction items you like
Toolbar that runs on Firefox browser
Aggregates friends’ updates on Facebook, Digg, Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us, Magnolia, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress and Xanga
Check email on AOL, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail
Media MiniBar has a scrollable filmstrip view of photo and video streams from YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo
Toolbar that runs on top of Firefox and IE browsers
Aggregates friends’ updates to MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and Twitter (coming soon: YouTube, Bebo, Orkut, LiveJournal, Flickr, Yelp and Flixster)
Any other sites or tools that help simplify your social networking world? Post a comment and give us your suggestions!
