Hey bloggers,

You did it!

Yesterday you and bloggers in 155 countries across six continents wrote about a single issue that impacts us all, and turned Blog Action Day 2009 into one of the largest social change events ever held on the web.

Your participation helped change the conversation and showed the power of the web to connect people across the world who despite their varied backgrounds have one shared desire: to make a difference. According to blogpulse, we increased the number of posts about climate change on a given day by 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today’s event across the web and around the world.

A full recap is up on our blog, and here are some highlights:

We hit 31,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17.9 million people yesterday. We just exceeded 13,000 registered bloggers on the site and are working to get all of you who posted but haven’t yet registered into the final count.

We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.

Of course, well-known bloggers were a big presence yesterday as well:

• The Official Google Blog gave a green tour of the company’s campus;
• Mashable asked what you’re doing to reverse climate change;
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog suggested “Five apps to help save the world”;
• Treehugger gave us two simple things that could, by themselves, stop climate change;
• Global Voices posted a roundup of bloggers from around the world writing in many languages;
• Gadling spent the whole day posting about green travel;
• BlogHer covered the road to the next international climate negotations in Copehagen.

There are many more, and we encourage you to check out the Featured Posts on the blogactionday.org homepage for a longer list of some of the world’s largest blogs.

Many of our nonprofit partners, leading organizations from around the world, were also actively involved in making the event a success:

• TckTckTck released a beautiful and touching new video;
• Greenpeace bloggers from around the world joined in;
• World Wildlife Fund featured Blog Action Day on their international climate blog;
• Oxfam helped emphasize the human side of the climate crisis;
• 1Sky wrote about the front lines of political activism in the US;
• The Nature Conservancy helped us understand the science of climate change;
• NRDC’s Switchboard bloggers wrote informative posts all day;
• Consequence wrote a whole series of posts on youth climate leadership.

You should all feel proud of this remarkable collective effort. And it doesn’t have to end today. For many, we hope this serves as an entry point into the broader movement to address the issue of climate change. There are a number of ways and some amazing organizations through which you can continue to remain involved, and we encourage you to check out our Take Action section to learn more.

We will continue providing updates and information about the success of today’s event and ongoing opportunities for involvement–including the the October 24th International Day of Climate Action organized by our friends at 350.org–here in the weeks ahead, and we hope you’ll stay with us.

Thank you so much,

Robin Beck
Lead Organizer
Blog Action Day 2009

Seems like the Pandoras at Dachis are particularly sore these days that entrepreneurs in the social media demimonde they helped unbox are making money and living large without proper pedigree, paying their dues or playing by the rules (as Peter Kim et al define them). Worse, in doing so those pusillanimous parvenus and pretenders — my homage to William Safire — are challenging Dachis’s Ptolemaic model of the social media consulting universe (where an insular club of self-congratulatory, self-referential early adopters occupy the center of the bullseye, natch).

David “Respect My Authoritah” Armano recently issued a cri de coeur against charlatans, opportunists and — gasp — plagiarists posing as social media “experts.” That refrain was echoed by a predictable chorus of acolytes using the comments thread to praise Armano’s wisdom and call for some sort of social media professional certification body — presumablycomprised of themselves — to separate the righteous sheep from the unworthy goats. Just as dutifully, Armano chimed in on the comment thread to praise their wisdom in recognizing his wisdom.

“The problem is this expert was sucking in the feed of my blog without permission, attribution and had more holes in his resume than a slice of Swiss cheese [emphasis added]. So how do you separate the social media snake oil from the vinegar?”

First, WTF is up with that metaphor? Which component represents Armamo’s content in this salad dressing dyad, the snake oil or the vinegar? Sounds unpalatable either way.

Second, his outrage over breaches in garden-variety content streaming etiquette is overreaction enough, but Armano goes on to imply that this “expert” was not worthy to traffic in social media content (which Armano might or might not have himself streamed, adapted or re-tweeted from others) because of an inferior resume. Oh REALLY….Apparently pedigree ought to trump ingenuity, enterprise and drive in the Social Media World According to Armano. I wonder if he would say that Michael Dell was unscrupulous and didn’t deserve his success because he was a college drop-out and disrespectful to IBM.

Brazen unattributed content streaming is definitely uncool, but it is also a foreseeable — arguably inevitable – extension of social media’s fetishization of content sharing. Further, isn’t it one of the central tenets of social media faith that community wisdom will sniff out and snuff out inauthentic poseurs and grifters?

In an April 10, 2008 post, Chris Brogan, commented honestly on his own experiences with the plagiarism, hypothesizing that copying is a constitutive part of the human condition and suggesting that owning up to those conscious and unconscious borrowings makes one’s own truth shine more brightly:

“We are all derivatives of someone else. It can’t be helped. Musicians have roots in other musical traditions, even if it’s not obvious at first. Nirvana is heavily Beatles-influenced, for instance. Authors are unique-twist copies of other authors. It’s just the way of the world, and how humans evolve.”

From there he gave a bravura exhibition of how a genuinely centered, confident, non-self-aggrandizing social media expert respsonds to the scourge of plagiarism:

“I’m inspired by others, and derive some of my skills and abilities from what I’ve learned from others, so instead of bitch about someone copying my stuff, I’m going to praise some people that I have learned from in developing my own presence. (None of this is to blow smoke up these people’s butts. I know most of them. I like most of them. This is about me, and about what goes into the media I make).”

He went on to describe the debts he owes to Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, Annie Proulx, Jeremiah Owyang and Jon Swanson, then concluded simply and elegantly:

“My big point: none of us are originals. It’s okay. And I’ve DEFINITELY done it myself, where I’ve thought something WAS my thought, only to find out that I was synthesizing something I read a few days back, or a conversation I had (Did that famously badly once, to a friend I love, and had to rescind).

“But if you KNOW you’re going to riff off someone, give a little link love and be done with it. Fair?”

HERE COMES THE PAUL HARVEY MOMENT

The irony here is that Peter Kim, in his Sept. 23, 2009 ”amen” (my term)  to Armano’s rant, appears to be adopting the convention of Brogan’s earlier post — without crediting Brogan.

“We invest time and energy in contributing to a collective understanding. I applaud Todd Defren and ShiftPR for sharing their work on the social media press release. Nielsen Online offers free use of their industrial-strength brand monitoring system through Blogpulse.

“We celebrate the success of others. The community at large helped Chris Brogan and Julien Smith become New York Times best selling authors. We’ve cheered on my friends and former colleagues Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, and Ray Wang (and Deb Schultz) in creating Altimeter Group.

“We give credit where and when credit is due. As Dachis Group builds momentum and understanding around Social Business Design, most people have acknowledged our work in adding their own thoughts to the conversation.

Hmm, makes ya think. Whether the similarities are coincidental or purposeful, maybe Kim should give credit to the New York Times best-selling author who had the wisdom and class to demonstrate how to place social media “plagiarism” in perspective and then process through it with grace and genuine generosity of spirit, not vitriol and proprietary-speak topped off with a self-serving plug for a wannabe new business paradigm.

In a Nov. 16, 2008 post entitled “Social Media is Not Socialism,” Kim puts it even more bluntly:

“When someone plagiarizes content, the social system breaks down.  Individuals who plagiarize seek to claim credit for themselves.   Social media is already social and a Robin Hood-style redistribution of value isn’t required.  But credit and attribution remain key to socializing and increasing the value of content for everyone involved.”

Red alert! System failure!

I guess that would seem to be the case if the ultimate goal of social media is to productize/monetize Social Business Design (which, it coud be argued, is itself derivative of primary social science and marketing research conducted by others).

In closing, my formula for battling social media socialism is this: If you’re that concerned about getting credit for your content, then name it, claim it and smack a big circled “C” on it. Otherwise, trust the wisdom of the community to recognize your work no matter where it appears or who takes credit for it, and the truth will out.

Feel free to use that one.

1967

• The Internet is born. It has been commercially available since 1988.

1979

• A decentralized system of discussion boards called the USENET (User Network) is created.

1994

• The online travelogue travel-library.com is launched as a community on USENET.

1996

• cyber24.com is launched by photographer Rick Smolan to promote collaborative photo blogging under a project named ‘24 hours in Cyberspace’.

1997

• John Barger, an American blogger, publishes short posts in reverse chronology calling them the ‘Robot Wisdom Weblog’ . Soon similar web pages came to be commonly known as weblogs.

1998

• Blog hosting-cum-online journal service called ‘LiveJournal’ is launched.

• ‘OpenDiary’, another online journaling tool is launched.

1999

• As a web joke, blogger Peter Merholz broke the term weblog as ‘we blog‘ in the sidebar of his blog ‘peterme.com’. The term later gave way for the new generic term Blog.

• The blog host ‘Blogger’ is launched by the Pyra Labs. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2003.
• A journal hosting tool for beginners called ‘DiaryLand’ is launched.

2001

• The advent of political blogging begins with ‘Instapundit’.
• One of the first audio blogs ‘Buzzgrinder’ is launched to enable members to upload mp3 files in to their blogs.
• The bloggies awards are initiated. The winners will be chosen by the public and blogs will be nominated in around 30 categories.

2002

• The photo blogging service ‘Picasa’ is launched by Idealab. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.
• One of the first blog search engines ‘Technorati’ is launched.

2003

• A travel blog called ‘BootsnAll’ is launched.
• One of the first vblogs ‘Metacafe’ is launched.

• The blog hosting-cum-social networking website ‘MySpace’ is launched.
• The photo blogging websites ‘Photobucket’ is launched. It will be taken over by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.
• One of the first open source blog hosting websites/ blog tools ‘WordPress’ is launched.

• The Weblog awards are initiated.  The winners are chosen by public votes.

2004

• The blog search engine BlogPulse is launched by ‘IntelliSeek’. It will be taken over by the Nielsen Company.
• A health based blog hosting service called ‘HealthDiaries’ is launched.

• The photo blog hosting service ‘Flickr’ is launched. It will be taken over by Yahoo! in 2005.
• The BOBs – Best of the Blogs awards are initiated. The winners are selected by an international jury of independent journalists, media experts and blog experts.

2005

• ‘Blogher’ – A women oriented blog hosting service is launched.
• One of the largest and video blogging site ‘DailyMotion’ is launched.
• Google introduces a blog search engine called ‘Google Blog Search’.
• Yahoo launches a blog hosting service – Yahoo! 360°

• One of the most popular video blogs ‘YouTube’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.

2006

• One of the first micro-blogging website ‘Twitter’ is launched.
• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Jaiku’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2009.

2008

• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Plurk’ is launched.

Last night I was invited to the stunning Soho Square offices of Hill & Knowlton, to talk social media with a bunch of non-profit types. This was quite different from the ‘usual’ gatherings in a number of interesting ways.

1. The attendees were far more senior than usual- heads of digital, working with CEOs, in one case charity founder. This was really positive, as internal buy-in is a relentless struggle for many a community manager. These are the people that need to sit around a table with the likes of me, who actually do the day-to-day job and be convinced that it has value and that the risks can be addressed.

2. It was, therefore, not the usual suspects. All of us knew H&K a different way; we started developing a relationship with them through @CandaceKuss who’s a dog lover and former breeder of guide dog pups and who admires what we do online given our limited size and resources. We’re used to seeing some familiar names and faces on the discussion circuit now, and these weren’t them.

It was the first time, for example, I’ve come across a member of the Stonewall team, and there was also someone from the Royal Albert Hall. Fascinating, because of course we have different issues – it’s easy to say ‘let go of the product/message’ when it’s yours, but in the case of the RAH, of course, it’s not THEIR product.

3. It seems to have spawned something even more useful. While there was a certain unavoidable lack of focus in such a broad discussion, steps were taken by the lovely Sara Price and Gaylene Ravenscroft to plan where to go next – they were prepared to throw the format out if it didn’t work. Instead, preliminary decisions were made to have more structured workshops in the future, beginning with a focus on metric – hallelujah!

Metric really is the key to everything social media – and so it should be. It should be an integrated part of communications and we wouldn’t dream of trying any other comms strategy without it. It is the key to knowing if you’ve achieved your objectives, it is the tool with which you persuade the reluctant, it is the essence of communication. And despite the plethora of free goodies out there, most conversation-tracking tools are swingeingly expensive for a charity our size. A workshop that helps us get the very best out of what we can get our hands on – and turn that into fundraising, volunteering, rehoming and other engagement stats – would be very helpful indeed.

In fact, my only disappointment with the session was with the ‘listening guide’, which was designed for pure novices (“go to Twitter.com and click Get Started”); apart from Blogpulse I heavily used all of the tools mentioned – in fact, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been involved in the discussion in the first place. It would be good to see this taken further – perhaps an Advanced Guide? – moving forward.

Learning something new is what I live for – I look forward to doing that in the next session.

Los nuevos medios y la presencia en ellos pueden ser analizados aunque no lo crean. La mayoría piensa que estas páginas estan libres de estadística porque no aparece integrado en ellos un sistema donde analice las entradas, las intervenciones y los followers ( en el caso de twitter)

Pero te voy a enseñar unas herramientas para que la puedas usar de forma comercial como personal (aquellos que quieren ver su progreso en las redes sociales)

• Para el Facebook existe Page Statistics, una herramienta que simplemente con ingresar tu nombre puedes ver el progreso en una tabla estadística y tu ranking.

• Otra herramienta para el facebook es socialistics que es como un google analytics para cualquier página, esta se integra a los widgets de tu página de usuario.

• Para el Twitter tenemos el twitter grader, nuevamente si insertas tu username podrás ver tu estado y tu ranking.

• Y para blogs existe un herramienta algo disfuncional por lo mismo que está en beta (versión prueba) se llama Blogpulse y registra cuantas veces ha sido citado tu blog y las preferencias que tienen al visitarte algo que está más alla de lo que hace simple pero efectivamente wordpress.

Photo Credit: wburris

Yesterday was July 1st, Canada Day. For 142 years, Canadians have enjoyed the true north, strong and free! Throughout Canada, people took part in celebrations in different provinces, different cities and different events, but through social media and the Internet, we can find out what the day was like for all Canadians, near and far, celebrating as one.

Do a quick search on Twitter , FriendFeed and OneRiot and you’ll see a real-time stream of what people got up to on Canada Day. (Note: these links lead to the search results).

Do a quick search on Flickr and see the many photos of concerts, fireworks, parties and of course, people decked out in Canadian flags.

Do a quick search on YouTube and Vimeo and you can watch the celebrations in cities that you have yet to visit.

Do a quick search on Technorati and BlogPulse and you can read the bloggers’ take on Canada Day.

Social media tools are connecting communities and their power lies in how these tools allow users to make their own connections. Imagine if we took the search beyond Canada Day and looked for conversations around your company event or your company brand? What would you see? What would you learn?

Listening and monitoring is a fundamental step in any online strategy. Are you making it a priority?

Victor
eMarketing Strategist

London, Munich and Madrid, are three of the oldest but dynamic cities in Western Europe.

Some quick facts about each city:

London
Population: 7,556,900
Area: 659 sq mi
Density: 12,331/sq mi

Madrid
Population: 3,213,271
Area: 234.4 sq mi
Density:2,044/sq mi

Munich
Population: 1,356,594
Area:119.9 sq mi
Density:11,318 /sq mi

But how does each city compare in the amount that they are written about in blogs?

It is unsurprising to see that London comes top, Madrid second and Munich third, and as the population to coverage ratios are roughly the same, so the same proportion of people in each city must be blogging,

What is interesting is that there is very little deviance over the 6 months measured – the amount of content blogged is pretty consistent.

Now, take a look at a Google trends graph over the last 5 years:

London is blue, Madrid is yellow and Munich is red.

The pattern matches with the blogpulse chart, and there is a tiny trend of fewer and fewer general searches over time, but interestingly there is an increase in the amount of news about Madrid and London, but not Munich.

Why do you think the results have come out like this?

Online Reputation Monitoring is part and parcel for any major brand to small businesses.

The world has radically become transparent with web 2.0, it is important to keep up with the conversation and see what is being said about you, your brand and your company.

One negative comment, or viral youtube video can create the  domino’s effect. Domino’s pizza brand took over 49 years to cultivate and was damaged in 30 minutes or less, by an awful prank posted on youtube by an employee.

Customers can have a huge impact on a brand.  The fact that Domino’s wasn’t even aware of conversations that were affecting its reputation, shows that they were not embracing or adapting to new media platforms thier customers were using.  Dominos didn’t even have a Twitter account, they do now @dpzinfo, though late in the game.

What is your brand online reputation defined by? unfortunately for Domino’s its by negative comments and postings. This could have been nipped in the bud if they were actively monitoring and managing their brand online.

Companies must be active in  adapting to the platforms guarding thier brand, engage with their customer and participate in the conversation whether offline and online.

Here are five free monitoring tools that I useful and comprehensive.

Social Mention -  A real- time social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks,videos and microblogging services.

Backtype – A conversational search engine that searches comments on blog posts about your brand.

Blogpulse – A blog search engine, that searches the blogosphere for blog postings that relate to your search query as well as buzz- tracking and trend searching.

Google Alerts – set up a google  news alert, to receive daily emails of postings and links that relate to your brand or industry

Tweetgrid allows you to create a twitter search grid where you can track up to nine search terms in real time.

These are great useful tools that are all free that can help you keep track on what is being said about your brand in real-time.

People are talking about you, your company, your brand. Do you know what they are saying?

Here’s a practical resource guide on how to find out what people are saying about your brand. Listening to what   people are saying seems to be a hot topic right now but most people don’t know where to start. There are some very good software companies that will help you achieve your goals but they can get expensive or simply are not in your budget especially when there are so many free tools already. I will share with you great tools that will do the job and are free. It will take you some time to set them up and see what works for you but you can’t ignore the conversations on the web. Listening to what’s happening is important because it will help you understand better what your customers want.

1. Google Alerts – free tool that allows you to subscribe for specific keywords and topics of interests. You get an email delivered to your inbox automatically when your search terms get ranked on Google. You need to sign up for this tool. You can monitor your  company, your competitors, any trends that you may be interested in, news or your own name. This one is a must!

2. BackType – another powerful free tool that tracks comments on the Social Web and emails you results. Every time someone mentions your company in a blog or a social news site you get an email. Another must if you want to save yourself time and want the essential information delivered to your inbox. You can view all conversations based on a trend, topic or an article and receive notifications whenever a conversation that you are interested in becomes active. Check it out and sign up today!

3. Tweetbeep – A free tool that works pretty much like Google Alerts but it searches the conversations on Twitter. Every time someone mentions your name, your product, your company and anything else you want to track you get an email. If you are in Twitter, you need to sign up for Tweetbeep. If you are not on Twitter but you want to know what everybody else is talking about on Twitter, again, you need to sign up. Another way to search the conversations on Twitter is with Twitter search.

What about searching all the blogs that are becoming extremely popular these days? Do you know that there are 2 new blogs being created every second! Here are some free tools to help you understand and track what’s important to you on the blogosphere.

1. Technorati – you can search the entire blogosphere with this tool and see what blogs are writing about you. For example, I just searched for “Lake Tahoe” and the site came back with 2,377 results for this keyword. You can also compare the noise about your brand with a competing brand and see who’s getting more exposure. Neat!

2. Google Blogsearch – another free tool for seeing what people are saying on blogs. On my search for “lake tahoe” it returned 297,428 “lake tahoe” related searches.A lot of blogs to go through!

3. BlogPulse – this is a free blog search service provided by Nielsen BuzzMetrics. You can search by keywords or URLs. You can create trends, check out popular trends, follow onversations or go deep into your favorite sites and authors. My search for “lake tahoe” brought back 14,181 results. I have the opportunity to see who’s talking about lake tahoe and I can track the conversation or see the blog’s profile. I really like the trend tool and I can see a lot of useful applications for it in the future.

And finally,there are aggregators that allows you to follow the conversation across various platforms.

1. Friendfeed – It searches across blogs, Twitter, Flickr and 50 other social sites.

2. Spy – Spy is a great tool that allows you to listen to tconversations on the web. It actually aggregates the comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType, and more social websites and RSS readers. Lois Gray wrote a nice article on Spy.

3. Trendrr – if you are interested in tracking trends, I would recommend Trendrr. You can create up to 20 trends for free. Lois Gray wrote another great article about Trendrr on his blog.

4. Socialmention – An excellent tool for monitoring your social exposure. They even give you a social rank and you can subscribe to daily email alerts.

Do you have any favorite tools that you use? Please, share.

Interested in more resources. Check these out:

Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation – a great list from Mashable

Twitter aggregators

How to get the most out of Friendfeed

How to measure online influence

I have been remiss in not paying enough attention to social media monitoring software.  I suppose it’s understandable given that social media is at the margin of CRM—moving to the center, but still in the outer shell—and monitoring software is somewhere beyond that orbit in the software equivalent of the Kuiper belt.  Maybe it’s time to pay a little attention there because monitoring software can be a big addition to your marketing strategy, and much of it is free.

First, what is it?  Social media monitoring software is a class of applications, delivered on-line that track aspects of how you and your company are being talked about on the Web. 

There are applications that track text—twitter feeds, blog posts, comments and the like.  These have been around for a while and a classic example is what might still be called a vanity search on Google and other search engines.  The basic idea is that the search engine looks for fragments like Beagle Research or Pombriant, and brings links back to your email.  If you recall the Steve Martin classic movie, “The Jerk” getting a Google Alert is equivalent to receiving a new phone book.

There are lots of sub-specialties in this area.  For example, products like del.icio.us can tell you when someone bookmarks a web page.  Blogpulse can tell you who is picking up on a blog posting that you might not think is going anywhere.  It can also tell you about the use of keywords, like your product name for example.  And Co.mments can track the comments left on blogs—do people like your posting or are they panning it?  What else are they saying?

The proliferation of different types of social media, especially video, seems to have spawned a cottage industry of companies that will gladly scour the video sites to bring back tidbits that may be informative or salacious.  Suppose someone snaps a photo of one of your executives in a compromising position, a search of flickr, YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe and other sites can alert you to trouble. 

Then there are consolidators like Keotag that tracks which keywords are being used as tags.  Is your company name being used as a tag?  It might bear looking into.  I was impressed to learn there is even a search engine product—oodle—that scours online job listings and aggregates the information.  Is your competitor advertising a new position for what looks like a new product line?

Then there’s Edgar Online.  Edgar is the SEC site that captures and makes available public filings on public companies.  It gives you a window into the health of public companies.  There is also SeekingAlpha which lets you subscribe to the RSS feed of conference call transcripts (think earnings calls).  Also, Google Patent Search (beta) is self-explanatory.

There’s more too.  Marketing Pilgrim (www.marketingpilgrim.com) lists 26 of these and similar sites that are available free to track what the world is saying about you and yours.  I don’t have the heart or the stamina to go into all of them though.

What’s the net of all this?  A couple of ideas.  First, social media is not just for individuals, companies can make very good use of free filters to understand customers and competitors better. 

Remember clipping services?  They were dedicated to scouring magazines and literally clipping articles for you.  Every month you would get a file of clips that helped you understand what the market thought about you last month, or more realistically, three months ago when the reporter filed the story, in the case of magazines. 

Now it’s instant.  Everyone is a reporter too, wittingly or unwittingly.  That photo of you or your boss three sheets to the wind and scantily clad playing tiddlywinks at midnight at the user conference in paradise last month was a lark but it ended up on-line.  Can you say damage control?  In the arms race that is marketing, you need to know because your competition wants to know and you know what that means.

As you might expect, there are consolidators of these filters and companies that span the differences in media and I think they bring a certain cloak-and-dagger quality to all this.  Imagine being able to get a clippings service worth of this kind of information streaming into your face every day.  The sheer volume of information out there is impressive and there is almost a CIA-like (I am sure they will track this keyword, Hi, guys!) quality to getting this kind of market intelligence. 

It’s a great use of technology but I wonder about some of the ramifications and potential for abuse.  In the time it took to write this, it feels like social media just grew up.

Now that I have introduced the idea of Corporate Blogs and Bloggers, and have shared both the advantages and risks behind blogging in the business setting, I feel that it is time to put all of that information into context. 

The Official Google Blog, a blog run and authored by various Google employees, is a blog that has consistently been ranked highly as one of the top blogs in the blogosphere by various rankings lists, including Technorati’s “Top 100 Blogs” and the BlogPulse Analysis “Top Blogs for April 4, 2009″ list. 

On Technorati’s list, The Official Google Blog ranks 13th out of the top 100 as of Sunday, April 5, 2009. This is based on the blog’s Authority Number, which is 8,122 as of today’s post. 

On the BlogPulse list, The Official Google Blog ranks 36th out of the 40 listed as of Saturday, April 4, 2009, a ranking based on the blog’s rank trend, which is shown in the chart below that appeared on the BlogPulse Profiles site for The Official Google Blog.

But why is The Official Google Blog consistently ranked highly as one of the best blogs on the blogophere?

To begin, Google’s blog is committed to providing its readers with any information that they want to know about the company including topics ranging from Google’s corporate culture and structure, to its products and innovate ways of thinking. This helps Google appeal to all of its stakeholder groups in one place, allowing each stakeholder to not only have his or her question answered, but learn about other aspects of Google as well by reading what others had to say. I also feel that, by having employees and specialists from each area of the Google company author and publish posts on their specific focus area, the blog is opening up the perspectives from which it is appealing to its readers and giving the company a human quality, allowing the readers to see and learn about the company in a more personal way. 

The blog is also updated frequently, keeping the content of each post current, which is important because otherwise readers will get bored and stop visiting the blog and hearing what Google has to say. From a stakeholder’s perspective, I also enjoy how Google keeps its blog very interactive by promoting conversations and providing such a large array of information that a reader with any interest in the company can find something on the blog that they can relate to. 

Overall, I feel that Google has done an amazing job in keeping their corporate blog personal and audience-appealing, while still remaining professional and keeping in tune with the Google culture.

In my last post I discussed a few websites that provided some really interesting tools for social media measurement. Since Katie Chatfield’s blog has so many other useful resources on it, I thought it would be useful to review a couple more in my next few posts.  

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Nielsen’s Buzzmetrics services and today I am going to talk about their service called blogpulse. They advertise this service as a “window to the blogosphere” and rightly so, as it does do just that. It allows for people to search what is being posted on and commented about on blogs. This tool is quite useful because not only does it allow you to search for specific topics and trends within blogs but they also provide daily blog stats that share how many blogs are out there and which ones have recently updated. They also provide very useful blogger profiles that analyze top blogs and their activity and relative influence on the web.

Upon doing a quick search for “social media measurement” (the topic of this blog of course), blogpulse found 3253 blog posts that were related to the topic the most current of which was discovered within six minutes of my search. It’s obvious how useful this tool could be to someone who is trying to track what is being said about his or her company or brand online. They can quickly search for some of the most up to date postings about their company. I think that this tool is quite valuable to those interested in measurement because it is simple and easy to use and provides some really useful results. What do you think about blogpulse? Would it be useful to your company or interests in measurement?

RXA Photos

Online research and analysis is often one of the first steps taken when working with a new client or your own company to start integrating social media into a communications plan. Depending on your focus, you likely have a determined set of keywords and phrases relevant to your company, competition and the  industry that you’ll be researching to mine for insight and data.

There are of course excellent companies such as Radian6 that you can use to help develop an intial analysis and assist with continuous monitoring. But what if you’re a nonprofit or small company on a tight budget or just looking to get a snapshot digital survey to demonstrate to your CEO or director that there is a need to get engaged online?

Here are 5 free tools to assist with your surveying efforts:

Google Insights
Start big. This tool will help you look at the bigger trends and access data back to 2004 on a statewide level. Still confused on utility? Take a look at this great guide Google put together for examples of how to best use the tool.

Compete.com
Some measurable component of your social media efforts will likely entail driving traffic back to your website. Compete is a great way to benchmark efforts by comparing your company’s existing site to your competitors’ sites. Basic analytics are provided with the free version with the option for more details with a Pro Account.

Whostalkin.com
From blogs to news, forums to videos, images to networks, this site is a great way to get a comprehensive look at existing online presence and conversations around keywords or topics. You will have to sort through some clutter but overall the return is very thorough.

BackType.com
Comments on news stories and blogs can obviously have a huge impact on the direction of conversation that results from readers interacting with a post or article. BackType can quickly help you track down where those conversations are taking place and who’s doing the chatting.

Search.Twitter.com
Certainly not to be ignored as Twitter continues to grow as a key site for conversation propulsion. However, take it a step further and be sure to capitalize on these 8 excellent tools to extract insights from Twitter streams (thanks @limyh !).

BONUS
BlogPulse.com
Whereas WhosTalkin’ is a comprehensive tracking site, BlogPulse can help dive deeper into trends and topical posts while even allowing you to track conversations around search results. Pair this with Google Blog Search and you’ll have the blogosphere covered.

Hope you find these useful for establishing a baseline snapshot of your digital landscape and feel free to comment with your own suggestions!

-Scott

In today’s technologically savvy environment, the word ‘blog’ is fairly common. In fact, blogs are authored and read by so many different audiences, and discuss such a wide range of various topics that there is something on the blogosphere for everyone, no matter what your interests.

But how many blogs are available on the Web for you to search through to find just what you are looking for? Though various measurements of the number of blogs available on the Web do exist, www.blogpulse.com states that, as of March 2, 2009 at 4:20 p.m., there are 103,609,379 identified blogs. Blogpulse.com is a service provided by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which is discussed further on Kendall Wadworth’s blog in a February 26, 2009 post titled, Nielson Buzzmetrics.

So how does this large number of blogs currently running and available on the blogosphere relate to the business world and corporate blogs? According to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a wiki started by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, 60 businesses out of the 500 on the Fortune 500 list were blogging in a professional setting as of February 11, 2009. This number accounts for 12% of the corporations on the Fortune 500 list.

But does this 12% of Fortune 500 companies that are now blogging represent a growth in the market? According to a December 29, 2005 post on Chris Anderson’s blog  The Long Tail, set up through the Wired network of blogs, titled “Announcing the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Index,”  corporate blogging activity within Fortune 500 companies has risen from 4% in 2005, to the current rate of 12%, and we will hopefully see a continued rise in the future.

I got curious about this question when reading the comments Mathew Ingram’s recent post on social networks and uptime. Mathew noted the curious case of Twitter, which is the social network “that everyone wants to use” despite it’s near-legendary struggles with downtime last year. Another commenter asserted that Imeem was actually more popular than Twitter (really? hmmm, maybe that comment was planted by Imeem).

Anyhow, this got me thinking about ways of measuring popularity. I could have easily just looked up traffic stats for social networks on compete.com, but that’s too straightforward.

Instead, I turned to my favorite quick-and-dirty buzz tracker – Neilsen’s BlogPulse. After all, a reasonable way to measure something’s popularity is to look at how much it’s being talked about. Tracking blogosphere mentions of social networks also removes the bias inherent in tracking mentions on the social networks themselves.

So I punched a few keywords into BlogPulse. Here’s their track of blogosphere mentions of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace over the last 2 months:

Facebook still gets more mentions than Twitter, MySpace getting less attention

Facebook’s recent spike no doubt due to the terms of service kerfuffle. Funny, the Facebook and Twitter lines seem to rise and fall in lockstep with each other — I guess there’s a lot of posts out there comparing these two. (Like this one.) And it looks like people have pretty much stopped talking about MySpace in the last few weeks, despite healthy chatter before Xmas.

Here’s another one, to test that assertion about Imeem in comparison with attention hogs Facebook and Twitter.

Imeem? Did somebody mention Imeem?

Ha ha, looks like almost nobody at all is talking about Imeem. I guess bloggers don’t like music or something.

I read a lot of Holocaust literature, and thought this would make an interesting search. If the searches turned out to be successful, I could see the potential for using blog searches to find subject booklists, a common reference query.  I tried my search on Technorati, BlogPulse,  and Bloglines.

Perhaps it was my search term (“Holocaust literature”), but I was unable to quickly find any useful information, and I was unwilling to sift through hit after hit of what seemed to be largely irrelevant results. Using quotation marks around my search term helped a bit (and certainly narrowed results), especially on BlogPulse, but the other search engines seemed not to respect quotations as much.

My final results:

Technorati – 15 largely irrelevant results

Bloglines – 103 largely irrelevant results

BlogPulse – 41 hits, with much more relevance than the other two.

I’m not sure I’ll be dedicating a lot more time to blog searches.

Why do the efforts of biodiversity groups such as Conservation International receive less attention than climate-change studies, though they are equally crucial? This question from Tom Friedman has been on my mind. After all, I am just as guilty as the rest of my fellow bloggers. I can only remember once writing a post recently about the bees. 

That biodiversity suffers from a PR image, was confirmed by a November 2007 Gallup Survey, on “Attitudes of Europeans towards the issue of biodiversity”. Published by the European Commission, the survey reveals that, only 35% of Europeans know what biodiversity mean, and most see no immediate personal impact of biodiversity. It also shows a lack of understanding of the causes and consequences of biodiversity. 

How would you fix this problem?

source: Blogpulse

Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” is proving to be this year’s summer blockbuster movie, breaking box-office records as fans flocked to opening weekend premieres. The buzz around the movie leading up to the opening included anticipation of the late Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker, which bloggers agree is worthy of an Oscar nomination. After seeing the movie last weekend, he has my vote.

> Read More

According to Nielsen’s trend monitor, BlogPulse, weblog mentions of ‘Peak Oil’ themselves peaked on June 27 2008.

In spite of such compelling evidence, sceptics argue that supplies of Peak Oil opinion are actually unlimited and will never run out. Others are more cautious and warn that not talking about it won’t make the issue go away. They also warn that if demand for Peak Oil talk did ever outstrip supply, the blog would be a very different place from the blog we have always known.

Though the trend seems clear, it’s too early to tell yet whether this really is a peak, or whether we’re seeing instead early indications of a less radical ‘undulating plateau’.

Experts note that this pattern is fully compatible with the well-known ‘Hubbert curve’ hypothesis of resource extraction, and that M. King Hubbert himself would have predicted the present shortfall in Peak Oil blogging- if only he had remembered to predict the invention of the blog itself.

To avert an impending Peak Oil blog crisis, many American bloggers are considering asking their OPEC counterparts to increase production of views about Peak Oil, although there is widespread concern that this may still be too little, to late. It has even been suggested that opinion-producers could dilute their blogs using so-called ‘advanced recovery technology’. In this way, Peak Oil talk could be sustained well beyond current expectations.

The opinion of this author is that even though we may indeed have exhausted half of all the words about Peak Oil that will ever be written, we won’t run out completely for at least another, oh, let’s say thirty years.

Furthermore, absolute shortages of Peak Oil talk are highly unlikely and in any case can be avoided by means of substitutes such as unconventional Peak Oil talk. We may not know what this is yet, but that certainly won’t stop us from talking about it.

And if all else fails we can always talk about peaks in many other commodities – a trend already clearly identifiable among key opinion-formers.

One thing is certain: the current lull in Peak Oil talk has nothing whatever to teach us about our amazingly short-term view of energy resources, which stops us thinking any further than this week’s prices at the pump, and which encourages us to believe that as soon as oil prices drop slightly we can all go back to talking about Paris Hilton.

So relax Peak Oil pundits, as ever there’s nothing to worry about. Just remember you read it here first.

Back by even more popular demand, even more, more FREE ways to track your online buzz. If you missed any of the previous posts, you can find them here:

• Even More FREE Ways to Track Online Buzz
• Easy and FREE Ways to Track Your Online Presence…Plus, See What California is Up To
• More FREE Ways to Track Your Web Presence
• Quick Case Study: Google Trends

Okay, now for the good stuff:

Blogpulse:
Blogpulse from Nielsen BuzzMetrics is one of my new favorite tools. The highlight of the tool set is the Blogpulse search itself, which allows you to measure keyword usage in consumer-generated media (or CGM for you cool kids). So, we could look at some keywords for the 4th of July holiday…such as ‘Fireworks’, ‘Hot Dogs’ and for contrast, ‘Christmas.’

Ah, it looks like Fireworks wins, by a pretty big margin. I wonder what ‘fireworks injuries’ looks like.
http://www.blogpulse.com/trend

Co.mments.com:
co.mments.com allows you to monitor comments (obviously) and replies to specific blog posts. So, for example, if a blogger posted a negative comment about your state, hotel or restaurant, you could simply copy and paste the post URL into the field and follow the comments via RSS or email. The service becomes especially useful if you are tracking several posts from multiple sites. Now if they could only find the negative comments for you.
http://co.mments.com/

BoardTracker.com:
Finally, boardtracker.com provides a quick search of message boards from hundreds of sites. While the data returned by boardtracker.com is not as segmented as I would like, the service will give you an idea of the conversations being discussed about your destination. I probably would not use the service to find and respond to consumers (too many threads!), but it can be a valuable service to stay in front of negative or positive PR situations. Oh, and my other minus on boardtracker.com is they categorize travel under ‘Sports and Recreation.’ But, still worth a look.
http://www.boardtracker.com/