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. Read the rest of this entry »

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I went searching for an old French colleague on Facebook the other day in hopes of holding a seamless chat conversation in French. Later on, I went looking online for my long lost Swedish relatives in hopes of speaking with them in their native tongue.

Impressed? Don’t be. I don’t speak a word of Swedish or French. I was simply emboldened by the VoxOx Universal Translator, a new capability of the VoxOx unified communications service that enables instant, seamless foreign language translations across SMS, email, chat and social networks (specifically Facebook Chat, MySpace Chat and Twitter @replies).

It really is a wonder: I select my language, my contact’s language, and then begin chatting, texting or emailing away. The VoxOx Universal Translator provides instant translation for both parties … to them, it looks like I speak perfect French or Swedish (or Cantonese or Portugese or dozens of other languages I can choose from). The best part is that only one person has to be using VoxOx to make it work. The service is also interoperable with every major IM client.

To Trekkies, the “universal translator” is a (plot) device that Spock and Kirk used to communicate with alien species. While instant voice translations may still be a way off, instant translations through electronic communications (chat, sms, email) is now here.

Watch the VoxOx Universal Translator in action below or download the service here. You can also read a write up in the popular blog, Gizmodo.

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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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