April 2008

I had a chance to interview Web marketing guru Andy Beal recently about Trackur, his new blog/press monitoring service. Since we had recently unveiled our own sentiment tracking system, I was intrigued by what appears to be a complimentary offering.

I tried to get Andy to reveal a little of what goes on behind the technological curtain, but understandably he was a bit reserved about detailing trade secrets.

Note the final paragraph. This is where Andy really aligned with our thinking regarding sentiment tracking. As Alan Wilensky says, sentiment is the weakest of CGM metrics.

I’d be eager to hear from any clients how the service is helping them in their brand monitoring efforts. The current buzz has been quite positive.

Here is the interview in it’s entirety:

Steve Broback: Many companies have “rolled their own” monitoring systems by aggregating custom search feeds from multiple sources. Other than the time it takes to create these searches, the challenge is that duplicate content, old content, and spam (splogs!) need to continually be weeded out. Is Trackur intended to be the alternative to this largely manual process?

Andy Beal: Absolutely! We built Trackur because creating custom search feeds was too time consuming and we couldn’t get the filtering and reporting options we needed. With Trackur, you enter your keyword one time and then let Trackur automatically monitor the different types of social media for you. You can filter out unwanted items, sort the results, email to co-workers and subscribe via RSS or email updates. You can’t do any of that when you manually monitor your reputation.

Steve Broback: Are we correct in assuming that Trackur taps into multiple existing search engines and then de-dupes and de-spams the results?

Andy Beal: Trackur does a great job of filtering out the noise and focusing on the signal–the content that matters most to your reputation. It doesn’t remove all duplication and actually, you probably don’t want to remove it all. A post might show up in Technorati one week, then again on Digg.com the next–if you removed the duplicates, you’d miss this reoccurrence.

Steve Broback: What search engines are you leveraging?

Andy Beal: Trackur pulls from a wide selection of content. It’s not really a search engine, more of a reputation aggregator. We don’t provide a complete list of sources, but we do include some unique content such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg.

Steve Broback: Have you created your own crawler of any kind, or is it exclusively tapping into existing indexing services?

Andy Beal: We didn’t set out to make Trackur a web crawler. It’s a reputation monitoring and aggregation tool. It’s power comes from bringing a wide range of web content together in a central database, then giving you powerful tools to manage the data.

Steve Broback: Google has been working this problem for years without much luck — how good is Trackur at removing splogs from results?

Andy Beal: Removing splogs from search engine results is extremely tough, so we’ll leave that to Google’s immense resources. Instead, Trackur focuses on providing clients with the tools they need to pinpoint conversations which include their reputation. If a Trackur client finds a splog showing up, they can add a filter to remove it from any future results.

Steve Broback: How do you avoid filtering out relevant content?

Andy Beal: We advise Trackur users to start off with the broadest of searches. For example, if you are Apple, start by monitoring “Apple” and see what’s tracked. If you find too many irrelevant results–or simply want to be more refined with your monitoring–you can add filters to focus on a particular word (such as “iPhone”) or remove the unnecessary results.

Steve Broback: How do you insure that old posts don’t re-emerge in search results?

Andy Beal: Actually, we don’t believe it’s a smart practice to say, “never show me this result again” when it comes to reputation monitoring. If a blog post attacks your reputation, you need to know if it keeps resurfacing–that would suggest that the post is being revisited or discussed by others.

Steve Broback: Have you applied for any patents specific to Trackur?

Andy Beal: Not at this time. There are processes we could patent, but we’re not finished enhancing Trackur’s technology, so we’ll probably wait until we’ve added new features, before applying for a patent.

Steve Broback: Shane Atchison says sentiment is the “next great analytics frontier”, and we’ve been focused on that metric of late. Are there any plans to integrate sentiment tagging into Trackur results?

Andy Beal: Sentiment analysis is definitely something we exploring with Trackur. The biggest problem is that it’s virtually impossible to accurately ascertain the sentiment of web content using an algorithm. Apart from the need for human interpretation as to what is positive or negative, technology gets confused by statements such as “Apple Mac’s are wicked bad!”

I wrote a post a year ago about how the fear of blogging had been replaced by the fear of not blogging. Boy, was I wrong about this being the case on a national level. A few months later I discovered that (at least for businesses in and around Chicago…) most of the dozens of directors of marketing I spoke to were still terrified or completely apathetic about the idea of blogging. Almost zero had any interest in our conference we built significantly for them. We had to cancel an event that in San Francisco drew 300 rabid attendees.

I’ve noticed that there’s barely a startup in Silicon Valley that doesn’t have a company blog. I dare you — find me a company that’s announced a round of funding that doesn’t have a blog. Okay, maybe a few don’t, but for every one that’s not blogging there are at least ten that are.

Now I read in the Wall Street Journal about how in the heartland of America, Miller Brewing Co. has created a very successful blog whose intent is primarily to needle their rival Anheuser-Busch:

The corporate marketing battlefield has long been strewn with pithy digs in ads and selective news leaks about others’ business woes. But it’s unusual for a company to go to the trouble of creating its own media arm to grind out news on the competition. While the site lets Miller tweak its famously tight-lipped rival, it also gives the company a platform to take a first crack at spinning industry news.

“They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers” in newsrooms and the trade press, says Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University. “It’s something you couldn’t do five years ago,” before the proliferation of blogs.

The article doesn’t say if Anheuser-Busch is responding with their own blog, but the implication is that they’re largely in denial:

Anheuser declined to answer specific questions about Brew Blog or make an executive available for an interview. It wouldn’t say whether it considers the site a concern. “Our focus is on our consumers and delivering great brands,” Dave Peacock, Anheuser’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

Hey big companies: If this whole “transparency” thing is still terrifying to you, wait until competitor blogs are launching assaults on you and you have no defense. Hey wait, maybe your competitors will let you comment on theirs!

Buzz Bruggeman sent me this info a few days ago. Collective Intellect has closed another round of financing this time worth $6.6M. Their total take so far is $11.2M. The bulk of the services they provide are social media tracking and sentiment analysis.

An interesting note from this article is that it appears their initial foray into sentiment analysis was to provide investor-related analysis services to Wall Street. That idea seems to have been eclipsed by the idea of doing brand monitoring.

Despite the fact that this arena is viewed as a highly attractive one to investors, we have purposely eschewed the notion of pursuing VC funding for Sentimine. It seems to us that the pressure to monetize quickly/prematurely and the risk of commoditization of sentiment puts those with a high level of capitalization in a less competitive position.

I often joke that we need to do a press release touting how we’ve secured $147.50 in our third round of financing for our service.

Monitoring blogger sentiment is critical to journalists according to a report cited by JakeMcKee today. Seems like Sentimine, our new platform for aggregating and tracking blogger sentiment may have a role beyond brand monitoring. It might also serve as a useful tool to serve journalistic endeavors.

I’ve been reading Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions by Shane Atchison and Jason Burby. Shane (co-founder of ZAAZ) wrote a post for ClickZ back in March of 2007 claiming that sentiment is the “next great analytics frontier.” Seems to me that if companies and now journalists are tracking blogger sentiment, we may be onto something…

I know a lot of people who are reluctant to start blogging because they feel like they’ll have a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about. And they’re right that coming up with the right stuff to blog about is one of the more daunting tasks you face if you’re aiming to blog regularly.

The first great solution, which I recommend, you can find at Copyblogger here.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole for this problem. You can write about the same stuff more than once.

It turns out that repetition is a great tool for teaching and persuasion. If you’re trying to get an idea through people’s heads, it’s actually a good strategy to approach the issue for four hundred different angles. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve blogged about how a blog should be your business homepage.

The point is this: repetition is a teaching strategy. As long as you’re not simply re-posting something you wrote before, re-hashing the same subject is fair game.

I know that blogging can often take more time than you expect. I sat down to write this post half an hour ago, and I’m just now starting to type. Who knows what time it will be when I’m actually done writing it.

Unfortunately, successful blogging often requires a commitment to consistency that can seem daunting. Fear not - there are strategies for rolling activities that you do on a daily basis into good, useful blog posts with a minimum of effort.

Del.icio.us

If you use del.cio.us to tag interesting posts or pages on the ‘net, you can also use it to automatically generate a digest post at the end of each day.

You can find instructions on how to set up your blog by plugging your username into the following URL:

https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/blogging/posting

As long as you bookmark at least one item with del.icio.us each day, you’re guaranteed to have a post on your blog. Even better, if you’re bookmarking interesting things (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’ll be giving your readers a great set of recommendations.

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. It’s the new Facebook.

Twitter’s API is awesome, flexible, and completely malleable. It also gave birth to Twitter Tools, which is an awesome plugin for anyone using WordPress (and why wouldn’t you be?) that lets you import a digest of the day’s tweets.

So unless you go a day without tweeting OR tagging anything in del.icio.us, that makes two posts a day without even opening your posting window.

A side effect of having a plethora of cool web services built by VC-backed entrepreneurs is that they all need to find an exit.

In recent times, that’s meant that companies get acquired as opposed to IPOs.

Check out Fred Wilson’s blog post today on finding new exit strategies.

I think it’s a good point that these services tend to languish under the ownership of large companies. It would be cool to find a new way to maintain high levels of innovation and still give investors and entrepreneurs the incentives to keep building them.

Everyone knows that Web 2.0 technologies have permanently shaken up the practice of Search Engine Optimization. But when people discuss the confluence of Web 2.0 and SEO, they’re usually talking about blogging. After all, we all know that search engines love blogs because they’re dynamic, link to each other frequently and have well-structured code. Blogs usually beat metatagging and link exchanges on a static website.

But what about Facebook applications? Until recently, search engines weren’t indexing them. But according to Justin Smith of Inside Facebook:

Facebook recently enabled developers to serve XML sitemaps off the apps.facebook.com. Sitemaps are used by webmasters to notify search engines of updates to pages and page structure, and generally are a worthwhile exercise in any SEO strategy. Since apps are served from apps.facebook.com, developers get to ride on the back of Facebook’s PageRank - potentially a big leg up on regular web apps.

As of this writing, the domain www.facebook.com has a Google PageRank of 8. It’s entirely possible that a well-optimized application page could be indexed by Google as being more relevant than a company’s own website. An inbound link from an application page could also make your site more relevant.

If you’re attempting to make the case for developing a Facebook applicatio to reach your audience, don’t forget to mention the SEO benefit to your boss.

I’ve put in many hours this past week surfing for posts, articles, and papers covering the sentiment analysis space. We’re preparing to give several presentations focusing on Sentimine, our sentiment analysis service, so I’m assimilating the latest info.

One of the more interesting pages just landed in my browser.

A paper by Veljko Fotak, a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business, shows a correlation between blog stock recommendations and equity prices. This implies that closely following financial bloggers who are bullish (or bearish) on specific equities may give investors an edge.

We are currently steering Sentimine toward brand monitoring uses at this point, but the financial applications may be a logical move down the road.

Seth Godin, as he so frequently does, has put his finger on a really important concept: the details make the difference.

The facts:
Too many choices.
Too little time.

The response:
Quick decisions based on the smallest scraps of data.

It’s amazing how the little things make such a big impact on our decisions. When a reader first lands on your site, they are going to see a lot of things that help them fit it into some kind of category.

For me, sites fall into one of these groupings:

1. Personal Blogs
2. Media Blogs
3. Company Blogs
4. News Sites
5. Forums
6. Services/Social Utilities
7. Not interested

And you’d be surprised at how quickly I decide which category a new site falls into its place.

Google ads at the top of the page? Media blog.

Forums are easy.

Custom banner image? Personal blog.

Content not obvious/above the fold? Not interested.

When you’re building your blog, pay attention to the grammar that you’re using. Make sure your site advertises itself as what it is. That will help you gather the right audience.

This big long post on Searchblog requires some chewing. I’m going to take my first bite in public.

If I were to take what Battelle is saying and massively simplify it, it would looks something like this:

Consumer brands love to advertise around media brands that generate a lot of enthusiasm and dedication from their readers. Combine this with the fact that the print advertising industry is extremely mature (there is a formula in place that more or less works), and you realize why magazines can charge a crapload for a full page spread.

And the online equivalent of those magazines are…drumroll please…blogs! Or, in many cases, media sites built on blogging technology and an ethos that more readily matches the blogger than the mainstream media outlet.

The trick to print advertising, it seems, is that it exists in a format that has a lot better chance of connecting with the reader than advertising online. And Battelle rightly reminds us that online media is still extremely young, and we’re likely to see plenty of permutations of business models in the next few years that we haven’t even thought of yet.

If Battelle is correct in predicting the rise of online media brands, and I think he probably is, then there are going to be a lot of opportunities in this space going forward. What I want to know is how much “old media” brands will catch on and run with it, and how much of the space is going to go to newer, different media outlets like BoingBoing.

Infamous celebublogger Perez Hilton posted yesterday on his blog that there’s a reason why he hasn’t written about Leona Lewis — one of his favorite artists — in a while.

It’s because he’s being sued by her label, Sony BMG and its subsidiaries Jive and Zomba for posting widely distributed songs that were being attributed to Britney Spears. It turns out that the offending .mp3s were tracks that didn’t make it onto Spears’ newest album.

In Hilton’s words:

Sony BMG, and their labels Zomba and Jive, are suing us for streaming several songs that turned out to be by Britney Spears.

When these songs first leaked, there was a lot of doubt as to whether they were Britney or a fake. Plus, we never made any music downloadable.

Every time we saw a take-down notice from the R.I.A.A., we complied immediately. By the way, no one at Sony BMG ever contacted us about Britney.

Also, every song we posted - not knowing if it was or wasn’t an authentic Spears song - had already been all over the internet and fansites, yet PerezHilton.com is the only entity being sued by Sony BMG.

He lists a number of other talented people that he no longer covers, including my all-time favorite singer Christina Aguilera. He asked himself:

Because Zomba, which is owned by Sony BMG, is suing us and we had a lightbulb go off recently: we can’t support any artist signed to Sony BMG.

Why should we help the company suing us make money???? Especially when their lawsuit is personal!

The record industry has been notoriously backward when it comes to the Web. Their behavior towards Hilton has been no exception. It doesn’t matter much whether the gang at Sony BMG has a legitimate case against Hilton, it’s not in their long-term best interests to sue him.

Hilton may be reviled by many, but his coverage has helped to rocket some musicians from obscurity into the national spotlight. Musicians crave coverage on his site. A rave from him drives countless iTunes downloads.

If Hilton refuses to cover any artist signed to Sony BMG, you can expect that other artists will get the spotlight. That means lost revenues and lost opportunities. It would have been better to just send him a takedown notice and let the whole thing go away quietly.