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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I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego earlier this week and was once again impressed by the quality of the sessions and panels. Started by Aaron Kahlow, the OMS is dedicated to online marketing education spanning email, search, social media, and much more. I went for just one day (the first day on Tues.), but was able to pick up several nuggets that I wanted to pass along from different speakers and people I met.

1. The single most read email your customers will EVER receive from your company is their welcome email. It’s not even close. You need to optimize this email as much as possible to drive results. Source: Ann Holland, MarketingSherpa.
2. Content marketing — content to attract and retain customers — is hugely important, but how do you cut through the massive clutter of content on the web (my question to the panel)? The answer: by 1) having the best and most original content of any of your competitors, and 2) by being creative, including multimedia content, animation, etc. Source: Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner.
3. Instead of wondering about the next Facebook or Twitter, look for connecting technologies (like VoxOx) that allow people to streamline and aggregate their communications and social updates.
   
4. Stop talking about features and solutions, and start addressing your customer’s unique pain points as it relates to your solution.
5. Every organization should be a metrics-driven organization where decisions are made based on quantifiable data. Source: Holland, MarketingSherpa.
6. The big bigger brand wins the click, wins the conversion — every time! Branding should not be under-estimated. Source: Holland, MarketingSherpa.
7. Increasingly, marketers are publishers — every company needs to set up a publishing arm to create and promote unique content that engages and converts potential customers. Source: John Battelle, Federated Media
8. A blog is a great hub for your content strategy. Source: CEO, Compendium Software
9. Consider putting a retweet link in your PDFs. For instructions on how to do it, go to Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-add-retweet-buttons-in-your-pdf-documents/#more-639. Source: Stelzner, Social Media Examiner.
10. In marketing, the worst thing people can say about you is nothing. Source: Tom Hoehn, Kodak.
11. Fail fast — it’s OK to fail, but do it fast, learn from it, and move on. Source: Hoehn, Kodak.
12. Thanks mostly to search engines, 80 percent of all blog traffic is first time traffic. They don’t know you. Write your blog content with this first time visitor in mind.

Did you attend the show? What did you learn?

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Last month, the venerable Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today posted an interview we did together back in May at eMetrics San Jose (when I was consulting). I was just coming off writing a 30-page special report for MarketingProfs.com and my head was filled with all the great case studies I had researched. Here’s the video:

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I love this contributed article in MobileMarketer.com from one of the executives at Digitaria, an Engage client, because it’s sole purpose is to be useful, without a hint of promotion the company’s considerable capabilities in this area. It succeeds on every level. The article, entitled “Which iPhone App is Best — Web or Native,” walks readers through different scenarios in determining which type of iPhone “app” — a software application or an iPhone-optimized web site — might be better for their business. The differences are significant. The article was inspired by real-world questions author Michael Brown receives from clients. Read on.

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The San Diego News Network (SDNN.com) launched to much fanfare last week — at least among local Twitterati, who Tweeted up a storm about the debut of the built-from-scratch, web-only news operation. The Twitter-buzz is completely justified, given the number of juicy story lines:

• In the face of a dying newspaper industry, an entrepreneurial husband-and-wife team decide to bankroll the launch of an upstart online news operation. Neil Senturia and wife Barbara Bry, SDNN.com CEO and associate publisher respectively, reportedly sank $1 million into the venture.
• They partner with Ron James, SDNN.com publisher, who returns to compete directly against his former employer, SignOnSanDiego.com, the online arm of the financially crippled and recently sold San Diego Union-Tribune, which unceremoniously let James and other talented SOSD.com execs go last summer.
• Lurking in the background is another local online news operation, not to be overlooked: the critically acclaimed VoiceofSanDiego.org. (I’ll also throw in the NCTimes.com, which operates in North County San Diego, and SDDT.com, the online outlet for the San Diego Daily Transcript, a downtown legal publication).

Given this juicy set up, I decided to look at several audience measurement services to see just how far SDNN.com has to go to eclipse its online competitors. The answer: quite far.

Here’s a graph from Alexa.com showing SignOnSanDiego.com enjoying a sizable lead over NCTimes.com, VoiceofSanDiego.org, and, of course, SDNN.com, which just shows up as small blip having just launched. The numbers reflect daily reach, or percent of global internet users. I looked at Compete.com, Quantcast and Alexa.com, and found the latter to be most accurate.

Is the intense competition and Everest-like climb to the top news to SDNN.com? Not likely. They know the landscape and must feel confident in James ability to replicate his success at SignOnSanDiego.com — and before that Time Warner Road Runner and San Diego Magazine. James, a new media wizard, has partnered with several local news organizations, as well as brought in an all-star cast of former local print reporters, including former U-Ters David Elliott, Arthur Salm, Maria Hunt, and Ruth McKinnie Braun to name a few.

It’ll be interesting to watch things play out. I’m guessing SDNN.com, operating a much lower overhead, probably doesn’t need to come close to matching SignOnSanDiego.com’s audience to turn a profit, but you know they’ll be trying. Here’s wishing good luck to the SDNN.com crew, as well as to Mark Davis and his staff over at SignOnSanDiego.com. As Davis recently Tweeted me: “The good news for the audience is that competition can only make everyone better.”

Amen.

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Earlier this year, Digitaria successfully launched its new sports division, called Digitaria Sports, devoted exclusively to helping sports teams and organizations worldwide create and implment their digital strategy. The launch was key for Digitaria, which has built a roster of more than 20 different organizations, from AVP Pro Beach Volleyball to the NFL to International Speedway Corp. One of Digitaria’s most coveted publications from a coverage standpoint was the Sports Business Journal, which caters to a highly targeted sports and technology audience. Read about the sports launch in the journal, as well as other stories about ISC and the Seattle Sounders.

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Late last month, we featured Part I of an interview with Twitter comedian and social media/search expert Brian Carter. He’s the second part of that interview where he focuses on more serious-minded subjects such as how to best recruit like-minded followers on Twitter, how he uses Twitter for market research and how on he manages nearly 70 updates a day while still being productive. Check it out:

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While many people view Twitter as a place for engaging in conversation with like-minded folks, or perhaps distributing their content, Brian Carter sees something else: a stage.

Brian Carter is Twitter’s resident comedian, delivering a stream of jokes and observations in 140 characters or less. While others are pontificating about social media best practices, including yours truly, Brian is quietly sending in his next pun, such as these proto-typical Tweets:

It’s a tough gig — there’s no immediate feedback, except maybe the occasional LOL, and of course, the space issue. But Brian pushes forward, determined to bring laughter to social media’s brightest stage. So far, Brian’s been a hit, having amassed more than 16K followers in less than a year’s time (compared to 13K followees). Part of the reason is that he’s also a highly respected search engine marketing and social media ninja for Fuel Interactive — he Tweets about that too.

Having enjoyed Brian’s off-the-cuff Tweets (view his favorites here), I decided to send him a few questions. He produced and sent back two videos of answers. Here’s Part I, check back later for Part II:

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The buzz words and phrases being tossed around by many social media and PR professionals these days typically revolve around “listening,” “engaging,” “monitoring,” and “starting a conversation.”

Fine words all of them, but seemingly lost in this barrage of Web 2.0 lingo are words like “ROI,” “measurement” and “leads” just to name a few.

Why is that?

Case in point: I attended the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego this week – a really nice, intimate conference with lots of great content. During a session about digital PR, the speaker (someone who was very knowledgeable) told the crowd that public relations isn’t about measurement and leads, it’s about influencing people. The speaker told the crowd that if your CEO asks about your bottom line impact, then you should tell him (or her) that’s not what PR is about (paraphrasing here).

When I followed up afterward with a question about how one tracks and reports success in the new direct-to-consumer PR model, the speaker talked about conducting pre- and post attitudinal surveys.

Sorry, but I just don’t believe that’s going to sell in the executive suite, especially during these extremely tough economic times. It’s also the wrong approach for marketing-focused PR professionals (not corporate communications) who need to embrace measurement, not continue to deflect or ignore it.

One of the problems to date is that PR traditionally has been a black box of measurement – quite impossible to track effectively. But with the rise of digital media and innovative new measurement and monitoring technologies, that is beginning to change. The effectiveness of PR and social media initiatives can now be tracked like any other online marketing campaign: in terms of traffic, conversions, leads and sales. That’s a new world, and one that most PR professionals aren’t familiar with yet.

One of my ROI-minded clients recently asked me whether all the press activity we’ve been generating recently has driven any traffic. It’s a fair question and one I can’t answer with, “well, PR isn’t really about generating traffic or leads.” In this day and age, that just doesn’t fly anymore. My client knows some of the intangibles of PR, but in these times, he also wants to see some bottom-line results for his money.

So, I’m currently piecing together a comprehensive report showing traffic and conversions from different online sources our agency has leveraged, including PRWeb, online articles, blog posts, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook and more. Through new technology, I’m able to show traffic from both click-throughs (direct from a referring link in the story) and view-throughs (visitors who read an online article that contains no direct referring link, but still came to the site later on).

Because digital PR has such a profound impact on search engine results, I’m also showing rather dramatic monthly increases in organic traffic from Google and other search engines.

Is online PR as effective as search engine marketing – from a pure cost standpoint, probably not (I say probably because this is new territory), but it does generate significant results. Best of all, this data can now be placed in context of other online marketing initiatives, helping PR and social media gain credibility at the executive table, and also leading to actionable decisions that improve overall PR results.

I love the power of social media for its ability to engage people in entirely different ways.  Engage is, after all, the name of the business. However, just don’t let terms like “measurement,” “value” and “ROI” get lost in the ever-growing blitz of new buzzwords. These are words I’ve grown up with my entire professional life, and believe me, they never go out of style.

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