Steve Broback, CEO, Parnassus Ventures

Just tried QuarkBase, works great. Put in the URL, click the “technical” tab and voila, there it is. For years I’ve been viewing the source of a post and then trying to parse what the code is describing. Painful, but it worked.

I was hopeful that the service with the promising name: BuiltWith would do this for me, but IMHO it mostly overwhelms the user with SEO minutiae. It doesn’t actually tell you what the site is “Built With.” It can tell you a site is using WordPress plugins, but never gets around to telling you anywhere (I can find) that it’s built with WordPress.

Although they do refer to it as a “blog” in the article, the Wall Street Journal headline In Big Sur, Web Site Run by Resident Is Key Data Source exemplifies the trend we predicted back in 2005 when we said that blogs will be the Web “sites” of the future.

“The Web site and blog are run by Lisa Goettel, a temporarily homeless Web designer whose move to a new Big Sur house about 150 miles south of San Francisco was derailed by the wildfire, which was 18% contained Tuesday. Ms. Goettel runs the site out of a coffee shop with free wireless Internet in Carmel-By-The-Sea, about 25 miles north of Big Sur. She depends on five residents and businesspeople who remain in Big Sur — defying mandatory evacuation orders — for on-scene reports.

The site has become a must-read for Big Sur residents, the media and even fire officials. It routinely scoops fire officials and newspapers. The site also provides displaced residents a space to find temporary employment or shelter. The blog has already received 73,000 hits since it went up on July 3.”

And it’s no surprise that the blog is driven by WordPress, our favorite blogging engine for this type of site. We’re converting more and more traditional client “sites” to WordPress these days…

I’ve been asked to talk about blogging and how it relates to business at the Rainier Club in Seattle on May 12, if you’re a member and plan on attending. Let me know what questions you have ahead of time and I’ll tailor my presentation. Steve [at] blogbusinesssumit [dot] com

Hey PR people! Want to get bloggers to write about you or your products? Please, please, for all concerned — tear up your Technorati Top 100 list and start over. For most companies, 99 percent of overtures made to the “A” list bloggers will at best be ignored, and at worst could result in negative coverage.

We believe the best bet is to find approachable bloggers with the right topical alignment. The nice thing is that if you are topically aligned to a significant degree, even a relatively popular blogger can find your message of interest.

The key thing is to create a win-win scenario where the blogger being approached is actually glad to hear from you, and you know that if they write about you, someone will actually read it. We think a good way to do this is to find bloggers who are writing about things your customers are interested in, and have aligned posts that are prominent in search.

The main thing to recognize is that significant and growing numbers of shoppers begin their buying process in a search engine. Anyone with a retail site can attest to the fact that their server logs show the bulk of their traffic is coming from search. Blog posts are featured prominently in results your customers are finding, and these are the bloggers to engage. Robert Scoble wrote recently that despite Twitter and Facebook it’s still “a Google world” and we couldn’t agree more.

Here’s an example of how search term analysis can provide a numerical index of alignment with a company.

Let’s look at two bloggers that are not on the Technorati 100 and how they align with two very different companies.

Let’s start with Jeremiah Owyang. He wrote a bit about influence today. Buzzlogic, a company perhaps using the old-world(?) “inbound-links-as-power” metaphor was profiled.

Jeremiah places highly (in the top 20) in Google for 7,900 unique search terms. The top 10 individual words used are: media, marketing, web, social, myspace, strategy, community, facebook, companies, and corporate.

Thomas Hawk places highly with 8,200 terms, the top ten being: camera, media, digital, windows, player, mce, store, center, connection, photo, and slr.

Do these blogs overlap at all? A little. They share 8 popular search terms between them:

That’s an alignment of about .1 percent.

Let’s look at a couple vendors who are buying Adwords search terms.

Awareness Networks provides social networks to the enterprise. They’ve purchased 1,270 search terms. How many align with Thomas Hawk’s organic keywords? Zero. How many align with Jeremiah? 64. That’s an alignment of 5.04% Here those terms are:

Digital SLR Guide teaches consumers how to buy and use digital SLR cameras. They’ve bought 708 search terms. How many align with Jeremiah? Zero. How many align with Thomas Hawk? 50. That’s an alignment of 7.06%. Here are the overlapping terms:

Our sense is that the terms we see here are compelling, and that alignment numbers (purchased terms/blogger organic terms) indicates both strength of “influence” (highly ranked organic terms) and topicality (shared terms).

We’re now starting to use search term analysis in an organized way to both measure influence and to do the needed “matchmaking” between clients and bloggers. Eager to hear what readers think.

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’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.

I have more data points relevant to yesterday’s post. Bottom line: Yes, you need non-trivial human involvement to go beyond 80 percent accuracy with unstructured content like blogs. Text-mining vendors claim that for many projects 80 percent is perfectly adequate though. Based on what I’m reading, I think there is likely a market for a process like ours that can automate the tagging and extraction/compilation of relevant content at high (90 percent plus) accuracy levels.

After drafting yesterday’s post about mining blog sentiment I discovered a Feb 27 post on the SentimentMetrics blog which reinforced what I’d heard from other gurus in the space. The SentimentMetrics blogger, (Leon? — posts don’t list the name of the author) says:

In addition, Mark Anderson responded to my post yesterday with a comment on his own blog. Anderson clarified:

“If you are working with longitudinal data, comparing month to month for instance, or comparing different products and brands then extremely accurate sentiment reading isn’t necessary as you are really looking for differences between groups. Additionally by considering the relationship between positive and negative sentiment in trended data (they tend to be positively correlated) when the correlation changes, in other words in one month for one brand you might see that negative sentiment increases while positive decreases, this signals a possible ‘event’ is occurring which needs to be drilled down into for further investigation.

However, for some of our clients in the past (such as Unilever), an extremely accurate level of sentiment was desired. Our methodology (AA-TextSM) relies on triangulation for validation, and we have sentiment accuracy in high nineties in most cases when applying this technique. Because most of our projects are ad-hoc in nature, the human factor is very important, so Anderson Analytics, more so than those companies focusing solely on a large volume of blog posts usually invest the time in perfecting custom dictionaries and understanding the special relationships between words in each project.

As you mention, many survey open ends are rather structured. On the other hand many are not. For instance if you ask a hotel guest to rate their overall satisfaction on a 10 point scale, then ask, why did you give this rating in an open ended question, you will get anything but structured answers. Our methodology has been used on other types of data as well though (call center logs, emails etc.).”

It sounds like the AA-TextSM system requires human involvement to customize the algorithmic process. In that last paragraph, Anderson attests that surveys can contain unstructured data. It seems to me that without getting humans involved (like to create custom dictionaries) you fade back to 80 percent accuracy when analyzing those unstructured portions.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months researching companies in the “sentiment analysis” space. When we began developing our own process for categorizing/tagging blog posts with product and/or company affinity, we discovered that most monitoring systems take one of two approaches. They either take an algorithmic approach to text mining, or use a human tagging methodology.

Bottom line — have a computer “read” the text, or have humans do it.

I’m hearing conflicting reports about the pure algorithmic approach and its accuracy. Academic research largely attests that you can’t get much better than 80% accuracy when analyzing “unstructured” content. Others claim that the right algorithms can practically tell you a bloggers shoe size.

Our foray into this space started when a founder of one of the more prominent (and well funded) brand monitoring companies confided to me that their year-long initiative pursuing algorithmic sentiment detection was considered a failure due to achieving at best 80 percent accuracy.

Technical gurus at another well-funded and well known firm in this space confirmed in discussion the 80 percent figure for their algorithmic process.

Given their experiences, I wonder if most of these claims of highly accurate sentiment tagging using only algorithms is just PR spin.

Seth Grimes recently wrote an article on the subject that implies 80 percent is high on the scale:

We have developed a hybrid platform that provides human-level accuracy with the benefits of an automated environment. We’re doing exhaustive testing now, but we’re seeing accuracy way beyond 80 percent. Check it out here.

One company touting the algorithmic approach is SPSS. They work closely with Anderson Analytics who provides services in this space. It appears surveys are one of the main content sources they process — which seems like rather “structured” content to me. No doubt that boosts accuracy. Tom Anderson’s blog is here, and he discusses an upcoming webinar on the subject.

Relevant contributions on this subject can be found from bloggers Matthew Hurst, Stephen E. Arnold, Nathan Gilliatt, and Seth Grimes.

in the article How Can a Company Protect Its Reputation on Web Sites? Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal writes about the realities of expunging negative information posted about your company on the Web. In many ways he gets it right, but in a few aspects, he’s a bit deficient in his coverage.

He implies that there’s not much you can do to demote negative content in Google search results, which is SO not true. We have a client who was involved in a lawsuit several years ago (which they won btw) and their attorney had posted about his efforts on their behalf. The content was not really all that negative, but it was the fifth item from the top when you searched for their name in Google. Our client wanted it sent to as far below the fold as possible, so largely thanks to our efforts, it moved from position 5 to position 65. It went from the first page of search results to the sixth.

How’d we do it? We launched a blog that mentioned them frequently and invoked a blogger engagement campaign that got others mentioning their name as well. It worked like a charm. Worthen references Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School who is also a blogger, so I am guessing he concurs with us on the power of blogging.

Here are a few key quotes from the article and my thoughts.

“Once information finds its way online, it’s almost impossible to get it off.”
If he means that Google won’t forget about it, that’s generally true. Otherwise, pages come and go all the time.

“One thing not to bother with is so-called search-engine optimization, in which you hire consultants or buy software that’s supposed to make good information rise to the top of Google rankings.”
True. We’ve posted many times that most SEO efforts are largely ineffectual voodoo in comparison to spending the same money on content creation.

“A better bet is to confront the accusations head on. If a blogger writes that your company has poor customer service, leave a comment on the site saying you’re trying to fix the problem. Similarly, never ignore false rumors, as these can spread like wildfire on the Internet. Mr. Solove says to address the rumor on your Web site as early as possible.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Want some help pushing the bad stuff down? We’re happy to help.

I watched Meet the Press yesterday and as expected, much of the conversation surrounded the Obama/Clinton race.

Chuck Todd, News Political Director for NBC made a statement that hit me as particularly relevant to those who follow the blogging space:

“If you really look at why Obama’s beating Clinton, It’s not on issues, it’s on authenticity.”

Seems to me that it’s true. Hillary’s pontifications have more of a contrived “press release” tone to them while Obama is more “bloggy” and authentic.

This reinforces the “This is our conversation” image of Hillary that was so brilliantly put forth by Obama supporters in the “1984″ spoof.

Hey marketers! Authentic sells….

In the Wall Street Journal article New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue, reporter Kelly K. Spors says “If you’re not making money off your blog, 2008 might be the year.”

Spors profiles several bloggers and the services available to generate revenue. Here are some revenue specifics to inspire you:

Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com, a site with articles on rainforest conservation and other environmental issues, makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month from AdSense, using various types of ads. Mr. Butler says his blog currently gets about 1.3 million unique visitors per month.

He’s planning to eventually experiment with Google’s video player ads and create his own video content for the site. “The rainforest has always been my passion, but I never expected to make a living off of it,” says Mr. Butler, who quit his job as a product manager in 2003 when he realized he could make a living off his site.

Darren Rowse, the Melbourne, Australia-based writer of ProBlogger.net, a popular blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money, earned roughly $250,000 in 2007 off ads on three blogs he writes. Mr. Rowse says he makes the most off traditional display advertising, where advertisers pay a fee to appear, but he also has used affiliate ads and Google AdSense.

The great thing about Problogger.net is that the site is all about how to achieve the kind of success Darren has. Lots of great tips and techniques straight from the horse’s mouth.

Since early October, we’ve aimed our sentiment tracking system at the many bloggers who have been comparing the Apple iPhone to the LG Verizon Voyager. While our Sentimine system can accurately sense the tone applied to almost any product or service, we focused our first public portal on consumer electronics as it provides a nice linkage to our upcoming CES blogger party.

As of this writing, the sentiment meter shows the two products in a dead heat. That was not the case at first. Below is a chart depicting how the sentiment tracked over time.

The blogosphere was largely pro Voyager until mid November, when the trend moved in the direction of the iPhone. It appears that the anticipation of the product led to positive speculation while the actual shipping of the phone (on Nov 21) led to side-by-side, hands-on comparisons. This led to some negativity.

This chart depicts the cataloging of 260 original relevant blog posts. Duplicate and splog-generated posts are filtered out from the final sentiment rating.

Many of the bloggers whose posts are cataloged will be attending our second “It Won’t Stay in Vegas” blogger party next week at CES. If you’re a blogger who covers the gadget space, we’d love to see you there. Just email Jason AT parnassusgroup DOT com for an invite. Vendors, exhibitors, and PR people should contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com for sponsorship information.

Launching a new product or service? We can build a private, real-time blog/press sentiment portal for you too. Contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com.

Chris is a capitalist at heart, so I’m not sure what to think of some of the posts appearing on his site today. See screen grab.

Clearly, this is not copy written by Chris. It does remind me that I need to make a run to Nordstrom’s though…

We’ve faced some content weirdness ourselves lately thanks to “outside” activities, so Chris gets my sympathy if he’s being mucked with by hackers.

Have you had a similar experience? How did you solve it?

Jason showed Disqus to me a few weeks back, and I seriously considered using it — until I figured out that you don’t own your comments anymore. One of the main points of cultivating comments is to have valuable content added to your site, and with Disqus, it’s added to their site.

Scoble has a demo of the system (and fawns a bit over it) at Scobelizer.

Here’s my question, where does Google see the comment appear first? If it’s on the Disqus site, that means your blog is now being populated with “duplicate” content (or no content at all.) Scary.

Jason just tested this, see the screen shot below. This is a search for a comment made on “his” blog. Google sure doesn’t see it as a being linked to his content. This makes Disqus a total non-starter IMHO.

I can understand why the Typepad crowd might like this, as they aren’t used to totally owning their content, and are generally feature-constrained. I’m surprised Fred Wilson doesn’t care about the platform and SEO ramifications though.

So the breaking news is that Trent Lott may have retired in order to preempt a scandal involving a gay escort. If true, it will be another case of bloggers leading the traditional press around by the nose. The story broke at Big Head DC (a blog) while Hustler Magazine and Fox News could only hint that “a bombshell” was coming in “a week or two.”

We have a saying around the office — if you want to know what will be on the TV news day after tomorrow, check your rss newsreader today.

If the story proves to be false, it will tar bloggers yet once again as not doing their “fact checking.” My hope is on the former scenario. The latter is a tired old excuse that is largely without merit IMHO.

The Wall Street Journal writes today about how big portals are not only losing traffic and ad revenues to small sites like blogs, but are also becoming dependent on them for content.

“Big Internet companies such as MSN and Yahoo have small teams whose job it is to “discover” these smaller sites before their competition does. They scan the Web, attend industry conferences and hobnob with start-ups to get names of talented but obscure content providers. Marty Moe, vice president and general manager for AOL Money & Finance, says he has started making informal deals with smaller blogs and other sites in order to fast-track the process. ‘The contract process can be slow,’ Mr. Moe says.”