According to a recent eMarketer article people are using social media in all sorts of situations but what's the weirdest place you've used Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social site before (and we want to see some crazy 'other' responses)?

Take our poll now (and be honest):
http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2197682/

Read the original eMarketer article here:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007352

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Interesting research study from Silverpop on measuring viral sharing of email content in select social networks.

Key insights from the study include

• Most companies include four to five different sharing links
• The life of a shared message is about one week
• Just including sharing links isn't enough, content is key
• This is supported by inconsistent click-through rates
• Facebook dominates among the social networks
• View rates are still low but expected to grow with social media
• Over 20% increase in reach due to social sharing

Interesting is also, that the main social networks (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) that are most often included in emails are not necessarily the ones attracting the most clicks on sharing links (see graph below).

Download the original research study here
http://www.silverpop.com/landing-engage/eMarketer_html/ShareStudy_oct.html

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Interesting but obvious GroupM Search, comScore and M80 research exploring the interplay of search marketing and social media (the next hype after the wave of research on display impact on search). People who hear about a brand or discuss it via social media are more likely to search for the brand (I guess we finally have to accept that no matter where people interact with brands they sooner or later want to check them out, i.e. search for their website).

Key findings include:

• Consumers exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid search are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products
• There was a 50% CTR increase in paid search when consumers were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search
• There was a 42-point lift in searcher penetration around brand product terms when consumers were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search compared to paid alone

Click here to download:

Whitepaper-GroupMSearch-Social-Search-Interplay 10-09 FINAL.pdf (1758 KB)

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According to eMarketer's latest article social media measurement lags adoption among marketers which is quite sad considering the importance of social media in today's purchase or campaign funnel (see graph below). How a brand, service or product is portrayed in the social media space increasingly determines its overall success (e.g. Bruno launch) and can also be used as an early warning mechanism.

And it's really not that hard, the amount of free tools and advice that is available online to help with social media measurement is staggering. Have a look at the list of tools below plus the top 4 questions to ask yourself and don't hesitate to email Chris at cbartens@datalicious.com if you would like some further advice on how to measure social media success.

eMarketer: Social Media Measurement Lags Adoption
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007286

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, rates stength, sentiment, passion and reach, lists top authors

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search - Technorati's new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced - Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search - Google's index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse - Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph - Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Search Tools

• BoardTracker - tracks words in forums
• BoardReader - Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili - Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
• Google Groups - Searches usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups - Searches all Yahoo! Groups.
• Samepoint - Search Real-Time, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Q&A, Networks, and more

Twitter Search Tools

• Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes". See what's happening — 'right now'.
• Twitstat - Twitter Tweitgeist - Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• TweetScan - search for words on Twitter
• Twit(url)y - see what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
• TweetBeep - Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
• Twitrratr - Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme - View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
• TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
• Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.
• Tweetcloud - Cloud of associated words around a submitted key word

For more tools and tips on social media measurement have a look at the below page.
http://measurementcamp.wikidot.com/tools-for-measurement

Where is the content coming from and how is it harvested?
Is the online content simply aggregated blog and board data from a handful of sources or does your provider harvest the data themselves? Is technology gathering the data or is there a human element to ensure important or relevant content sources are included? What tools are being used and how large is the content reservoir of CGM data? Does this reservoir contain current or historical data, or both?

How is the data cleaned and prepared?
How does your data provider clean and prepare the data for analysis? What rules are applied to systematically reduce irrelevant conversations (noise) and ensure relevance? For example, if you are interested in CGM insights on the telecommunications provider 'Orange', how do they ensure references to orange as a fruit or colour are excluded?

How is the data organized or segmented?
Is the remaining content relevant to the business questions being asked? What are the base, volume and discussion sources being included for classification? How is the data being segmented so it contains the most pertinent consumer discussions around your specific area of interest?

How is the data being analysed and are actionable insights delivered?
How is the information actually being analysed? Is it purely done by automated technology or by human analysis, or both? If technologies and software provide the information, how does this technology manage to measure things like sentiment of a conversation accurately? Can technologies help you determine what the important topics are that lead volume or drive a particular sentiment? Is there a consulting service so that information and data can be transformed into insight?

Check out the below page for the full article.
http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/pdcimages/NielsenOnline_May_Newsletter08.html

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