Web Business by Ken Burbary

3 New Media Tools You Should Consider

As new tools and services constantly spring up on the web, I’m often evaluating the ones that look promising and incorporating them into my Digital toolbox. I’ve developed some new habits around 3 tools that I want I share with you, and hope you’ll find them as useful as I do.

Posterous - Posterous officially labels itself as “the dead simple place to post everything”. It can be used a lifestreaming platform, like Steve Rubel does, a simple blog, or as I use it, an aggregation and distribution service for the media that I create and share. Like many of you, I participate in a disparate collection of social media outposts (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Blogs, etc..). I spend a great deal of time reading, commenting and sharing the interesting media I find with others in my network that I think could benefit from it. However, this can become burdensome and time consuming, as I’m forced to constantly copy/paste/edit links, text, and media to get it right way before sharing it on a particular network. Rinse & repeat for each social network. This gets old fast.

Posterous solves this problem, and quite efficiently I might add. My media sharing is now “1 stop shopping”. Posterous supports virtually all of the most popular social platforms, and integration with your accounts is simple and straightforward. Once setup is completed, you can use email or bookmarklets (for advanced users that want to customize the html) to autopost your shared item. Posterous supports a wide range of media types, which allows you to share photos, music, videos documents, and links with your other networks.Instead of manually sharing media & links on each of the networks Iparticipate in, now I send it to Posterous, and they take care of the rest of the distribution. It also has some useful features like custom domains, integration with Google Analytics for tracking, and some native reporting (views, comments, favorites).

Go ahead and see Posterous for yourself. I’ve been using it regularly at http://kenburbary.posterous.com

What the Hashtag – This service is specific to one social network, so if you’re not using Twitter then skip this section. If you are using it, you’ve probably come across hashtags (Read here for a explanation of what hashtags are). “What the Hashtag” aims to do one thing, and does it well. It provides you with the ability to easily group and follow all conversation with a unique tag. For example, I missed blogchat last week. Blogchat is a weekly discussion on Twitter, started by Mack Collier, to discuss blogs and blogging best practices. Using “What the Hashtag” makes it easy to catchup on the conversation. What was said, who was what, and when it occurred. This is useful because there are often very informative, and relevant conversations around events, conferences, webinars, etc.. that I want to follow but may not be able to due to other commitments. “What the Hashtag” solves that problem for me. It’s my own personal Twitter time machine. I get to quickly and easily cycle back to that conversation, follow what was discussed, and identify who I may want to follow up with after the fact or take further action.

View the #blogchat page on “What the Hashtag” and see for yourself:  http://wthashtag.com/Blogchat

Vitrue Social Media Index – This is a social media measurement service. It attempts to provide an easy to understand measurement of a brand’s share of online conversation. It uses a proprietary set of technologies & algorithms to generate an index score for each brand. The index score itself is ok, but the real reason I use the tool is because it provides a quick answer about which channel online conversation is occuring in the most. For example, let’s say I wanted to know how much of the online conversation about Ford Motor Company is on blogs, versus the other channels (social networks, video sites, etc…). Vitrue provides this for you. All you need to do is supply the search term (brand name) and you get immediate results. This information is useful because it can get you started in the right direction. Then you can use other monitoring & analysis tools like Techrigy SM2 to take a deeper dive into the area of interest.

Vitrue provides a free and directionally correct answer to validate a theory or idea you may have for your brand/client’s brand. This is much quicker, not to mention cheaper, than paying for a commercial monitoring tool to get the same answer. To be clear, use the right tool for the job. Vitrue provides quick and dirty snapshots that can be used for research and/or some decision making, but be sure to use other tools if more detailed information is required to make a decision.

The Dirty Little Secret of Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring (sometimes called social media listening or conversation monitoring) is widely recognized as one of the first social media best practices. It is the first step in getting to know and understand the behavior and needs of an online audience. Most companies that are engaged in this activity have an internal team or outsource the effort to their agency.

There is no shortage of tools/platforms available to monitor your key terms. Companies like Radian6, Techrigy, Nielsen and Cymphony are quite busy these days rolling out new partnerships and product features, all aimed at providing more meaningful data and better ways to use it. It’s the no-brainer call right? Fire up a tool and plug in some terms, and voila, instant answers.

However, I’ve begun to notice inconsistencies in the data that different social media monitoring tools produce. The dirty little secret or so it seems, is they aren’t all working with the same data sources. For this post, I want to discuss some differences between Radian6 and Techrigy SM2. This is not meant as a criticism of either tool, because I think they are both fantastic at what they do, but rather an attempt to highlight an issue, generate a public conversation around it so that everyone using Radian6 or SM2 can benefit.

Some background: While doing a recent set of searches for a brand using the EXACT same keywords and phrases, without using source filters, the results look different. Take a moment to view the charts below for R6 and SM2 results.

Now, ignoring the fact that both tools have some differences in categories, focus on the main sources of online conversation. Blogs, forums and micromedia (Twitter).

You’ll see a  dramatically higher number of blog results for Radian6 compared to SM2 (266 to 91). And for forums, vice versa (SM2 has 396 to Radian6 200).

While I expect to find subtle variations in the results between tools, I DO NOT expect to be put into a position to question which tool is “right” and which is “wrong”. Perhaps that isn’t the way to look at it though. Is the real answer an aggregate of both data sets? If so, how does one easily filter out the unique data versus duplicates?

This may raise additional questions that you need to ask yourself before selecting a monitoring solution.

Which subset, or channel, of social media does a particular tool specialize in?

Does this data mean if you know your audience is spending time on forums, SM2 may be better solution? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I suspect there is more to this than it appears on the surface. Hopefully someone else that is also monitoring can shed some light. With any luck, we can get some folks from both companies to chime in (David Alston, Amber Naslund, Jimmy Rey, Connie Bensen – any takers?)

UPDATED: I’ve been contacted by both Radian6 and Techrigy representatives, and am working with them to identify the source of the problems. After we have resolved the issue and feel confident about the source, I will update again.

My New Gig…

I’ve been quiet as of late, but for good reason. Behind closed doors, I have been very busy and I am happy to be able to publicly announce the exciting changes in my life (some of you have already noticed and been asking questions, so here is the scoop).  Several weeks ago I began the next phase of my career, and started a new position heading up the Digital Strategy & Social Media practice for Ernst & Young.

For those that aren’t familiar with the E&Y brand, it is an incredibly successful and diversified company. We provide a wide range of advisory, assurance, tax and specialty services to an impressive list of blue chip clients around the globe. With over 130,000 employees globally, we have an enormous organization, with the ability to bring deep expertise and resources to bear on our engagements.

I’m excited to play a critical role in helping E&Y advisory clients transform their business through the opportunities that digital marketing can provide. I will be spending the majority of my time thinking about the ramifications of social media on traditional marketing & communications. This means participating in the social web (uh oh, more time on Twitter!), analyzing & writing about digital strategy, trends, and best practices. And advising E&Y clients on the impact these issues have on their business.

Enough about me. I’d much rather prefer to talk about others. Looking back, my career has evolved in unexpected and challenging ways. I wouldn’t have been able to navigate those challenges and difficult decisions without the help and guidance from an amazing group of people that I have come to call friends and rely on. Besides my family, I sincerely appreciate and highly respect the tremendous character of people like Adam Cohen, Scott Monty, Amber Naslund, Blagica Bottigleiro, Ron Lippitt, Damon Henry, and so many others (you know who you are). THANK YOU friends! I hope you know I’m always there for you as well.

For those that need it, I can be reached at my new email: kenneth.burbary at ey dot com