Having worked at a web analytics company, I love analytics and the trends they reveal. To me, Google Analytics is like cat nip.

I’ve found another analytics toy that I’m nearly as fond of. It’s called ViralHeat, a cost-effective social media monitoring and analytics tool that does a nice job of tracking our social media activity and engagement across Twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook, as well video views and web site mentions. It’s a clean, easy-to-use tool that has become a key part of our internal reporting for VoxOx, a free desktop software that combines voice, video, text, chat, social networking, faxing, file sharing and more into a single interface. I wanted to share five reports we use to help us measure and analyze our social media efforts, specifically on Twitter.

1. Mentions Over Time — Late last year, we made a concerted effort to be more on Twitter where our target audience lives. But how to measure our impact, beyond a simple increase in followers? We began using ViralHeat and now routinely track mentions by day, week and month. This comes in particularly handy following product launches, where we can essentially track our “reach” into the “Twitter-sphere” based on total mentions. This simple report has helped us quantify our social media efforts to executive management.
2. Share of Voice — It’s great that you receive hundreds or thousands of mentions per month on Twitter, but how does that compare to the competition? Using ViralHeat profiles, I can easily calculate the number of mentions we get over time against that of our fiercest competitors to come up with social media share of voice (for Twitter). This is an extremely valuable statistic that let’s us know how we are doing against the competition.
3. Total Reach — This is another key statistic that I routinely track and report on. Total reach, or “total impact” as ViralHeat calls it, represents the number of people who potentially saw a tweet about your company. It adds up all the followers of those who tweeted about your company over a certain time period. For example, 500 mentions over the week may have a total reach of more than 300K+ Twitter users — it all depends.
4. Top Influencers — ViralHeat shows a nifty chart of top Twitter influencers by both volume, and by impact or reach. This can be very handy in understanding who are the best people to build relationships with, including those we should at least be following and engaging with on Twitter.
5. Sentiment Analysis — This is a tricky one, as I know automated sentiment analysis is tough to tackle and something even high-priced monitoring tools haven’t figured out yet. Still, ViralHeat’s Twitter sentiment analysis seems to work relatively well and helps keep track of positive, neutral and negative posts.

A Raw Analyzed Stream of Tweets Mentioning VoxOx

Also: this isn’t a metric per se, but look at the raw analyzed tweet stream for a quick glimpse of indivual mentions. It’s an easy way to pinpoint tweets that you may want to respond to, including potential customer support issues.

That’s it for now. Do you use ViralHeat? What are your top reports?

A Sample ViralHeat Report

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When it comes to showing how something works online, it’s hard to beat a good video screencast. This is my new favorite content type.

I first realized the power of a good video screencast when I watched real estate investor/social media practitioner Chris Record‘s video on how to best utilize Facebook events. It was a perfect video on how to use a particular capability. I sent Chris an email asking him what technology he used. He graciously responded: Screenflow for the Mac (which I have).

I quickly shelled out $99 to download a copy and went to work creating my first screencast for a blog post at work. I had been planning on doing a post on how to utilize certain features of our universal communications software, VoxOx. Instead of writing the instructions out using well-placed screenshots, I could now easily record a short video. After a few practice tries (I did it in one take), here’s the final product.

Do you have a cool screencast to share?

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I had the opportunity to use HelpAReportOut.com (HARO) for the first time the other day – not as a PR professional, but as a contributing writer working on a special report for a popular online marketing publication.

The experience from the ‘other side’ was eye opening. I received literally dozens of requests – so many it was difficult to read through every one.

I submitted my HARO request for a piece I’m doing on Twitter success stories. In my submission, I asked for examples of businesses using Twitter to further one or more business objectives. I asked for examples across different business models and different industries. I let it fly.

I received a total of more than 60 responses, and they still keep coming in. Having been on both sides of HARO now, I thought I’d share some tips for using the service more effectively.

1. Be as crisp as possible – I was much more apt to read those responses that cut to the chase of what I was looking for, rather than rambling responses. PR pros understand this pretty well, but small business owners may need a reminder.
2. Be compelling – Reporters want big names and/or innovative pitches and case studies. If you even think your pitch may not be a good fit, it’s not. If you have a big name client, put that in the subject line or high up in your e-mail. Microsoft was one that certainly caught my eye.
3. Offer any ROI or results data you have up front – This makes it much easier on the reporter or blogger to target your entry as something they can use.
4. Get in early, or get in late – To get noticed, it helps to be either among the first entries, or among the last – the ones in the middle tend to get muddled and lost. Also, it’s important to realize you are not the only one submitting a great idea.
5. Don’t be afraid to follow up – You’ve put in a lot of work. If you don’t get a response and you think you have a good case study or story, don’t be afraid to follow up.

As for the people who are posting requests on HARO – I offer this: Be as incredibly specific as possible. I thought I was, but could have been a more specific about innovation and ROI. That said, I did receive many great responses and I am thankful for everyone – long or short, rambling or not — who made the effort to respond.

Are you a HARO user? How are you getting the most of the service?

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