We’re pleased to announce our November release with the following new features:

• Topical targeting: To help you research who has been talking about you, your competitors or your favorite topics within the scope of your projects communities.
  (i.e: I have aggregated a community of 500 beauty bloggers and I want to find out who has been talking the most about my brand or about “aging”).
• Community mapping: To visualize how the various bloggers in your community network with eachother, and, group them according to your preferences.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

Cats and Dogs aren’t  the best friends on earth. They’re exceptions but, as a dog owner myself, I can testify of the profound animosity between the two species.

Let’s put it that way, they’re not socially inclined to each other.

Does this translate to this new planet that we call social media?

Look at this picture:

Forgive me the fuzziness, after all we’re talking furry things here.

This picture* represents the mapping of a network of pet bloggers (a sample of 400 amongst 1500 pet bloggers). The purple ones are the dog’s bloggers while the red ones are the cat’s bloggers. We also have a handful of pug’s bloggers and they’re in blue.

A picture speaks 1000 words as usual. Even in social media, dogs and cats don’t socialize with each other. Can’t change mother nature.

* The picture above was created using our newly released ‘community network mapping’ feature.

Today, we’re pleased to announce our June release with the following new and improved features:

• Manage (save, export, import) blogs’ personal information such as name, email, phone, country and so on.
• Redesigned blog card with additional information for improved profiling.
• Support for multiple projects access in one browser window.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

Today, we’re pleased to announce our April release with the following new and improved features:

• Search on Symbol such as %, $, €, £
• Export Posts as RTF (then import into Word or OpenOffice for editing)
• Improved Usability in the Blogs tab.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

Today, we’re pleased to announce our new dashboard. It gives eCairn Conversation(tm) users access to a quick overview of the brand influence’s metrics in multiple views and graphs from one single web page.

Here’s a short video showing how it works (better viewed in full screen by clicking on the screen icon at the bottom right of the window below):

New features in the dashboard include:

• Presence monitoring: Tracks overtime the number of conversations about a brand, a product and sentiments about them.
• Influence monitoring: Tracks the influence ranking of one or more company blog(s), the level of connections and ongoing participation between the team and the community.
• Community composition: Provides data about the blogs that are monitored such as ad networks, social networks used etc…
• Latest team activities

Participating in social media as a team can help alleviate two issues that have been discussed by many:

- personal vs company branding
- scalability and productivity

Whether you are a freelancer, a small business owner, or an employee, you have a brand online (crumbs of it are on LinkedIn, Facebook and everywhere you dare to leave your social footprint).

In the first two cases, it’s simple to manage: You and your business brand overlap quite a bit. Your personal branding is roughly you business branding and the other way around.

In the third case, two interesting issues are: 1) what affect does employees personal branding have upon the brand of the company they work for 2) can one individual represent the brand in social media?
As Geoff pointed out, they’re risks for enterprises in having their employees develop strong personal brands in the vacuum.
A big part of my day is about reading blogs, and I see quite a bit of people working in big enterprises having professional work-related blogs where one can read in the about section: “The material that you see on this site is what I do in my spare time”…”The content and opinions on xyz are my own and not my employer’s”…Nothing wrong about it because social media is OPEN.
However, each time I read those, it makes me wonder: “where can I find his/her employer opinion?”, “Is there one?”

There’s no question that social media makes it vital for enterprises to open up and have “real people” participating in conversations and bringing value in their target communities.  Already, many corporate employees engage in social media (quite often the employer doesn’t even know about it). They connect with customers and social media influencers and learn from these exchanges. Perfect, that’s what we want.
But it’s as important for enterprises to have their brand established in their target communities. So, how can both goals be achieved?

As Geoff pointed out, one answer is team social media. Enterprises are organized around teams and it’s established that a well functioning team is worth more than the sum of its parts (try a group brainstorming and compare with your own ideas). This is true for social media too. The enterprise social media team will not always map to the enterprise org chart but it will exists. No one can do it all and the brand’s voice has to be in so many places at the same time. If you’re a company in computer security, there’re 1000+ blogs out there on this niche posting an aggregate of +500 posts per day, there’re hundreds of twit on ’spyware’ everyday and the list goes on….engaging is time consuming.
Examples exist of enterprises’ teams that have felt compelled to carry the brand in social media and have successfully done it, to better serve their market as individual but for the brand benefit too.

I’m happy to say that, from the very start, eCairn Conversation(tm) has been designed following the principle that teams of employees will engage in social media and our platform makes it productive for them:

Using our recently released influence algorithm (the post by the way describes our definition of social influence ), we’re able to share some empirical data on a year old question:  What’s the distribution of  influence within a niche community?

Picking the following two examples, social media marketing (900) and computer security (750) blogs, we observe a pattern that looks a lot like a long tail.

If,  rough approximation,  we decide that the top 25 blogs form the head, 26-100 the magic middle and 100-last the long tail, the % of the total inbound links within those communities looks like:

The ‘computer security’ community has a shorter head than the ’social media marketing’ community but,  roughly 1/3 of the inbound links are going to the ‘head’ (top 25), 1/3 to the magic middle (75 blogs from 26-100) and 1/3 to the long tail (101-last which is about 700 for computer security and 900 for social media marketing).

What’s the take out from a business standpoint?

Well,  if you’re a marketer(s) and you think you should target only about the top25 bloggers in a community  and forget about all the others (I hear that a lot, most of the time not even for niche communities, and I’m not the only one), you may:

1. miss out on a big chunk of the ‘influence dynamic’ going on within a niche community.
2. go the difficult way: The top influencers receive lots of requests and you’re less likely to be noticed..
3. forget about the trust factor:  Studies have shown that trust is higher with friends/people you know and B-Z bloggers may have a tighter trust relationship with their audience which is smaller.

We have released a new version of our Conversation ™ application that implements our influencer identification algorithm, (used to compute the popular Top 150 Social Media Marketing Blogs).

We also leverage it in our existing capability to find relevant blogs for you, blending “topic relevance” and “graph analysis”.

This major update is now available in Conversation ™ and, to summarize, you’re now able to:

• Quickly take an inventory of your social ecosystem and build a large list of relevant blogs for your community/ topic,
• Find out who the influential people are
• Build differentiated engagement strategies like “advertize on the A-List”,” buzz on the Middle Magic”…
• Measure your own influence in your target community (you’ll have to include your own blog in your project)

See it in action in this  short video ( 1mn).

Information overload: Everyone tries to get meaning, detect trends and spot key events.

We have ran a few experiments showing that focusing on influencers within a niche community and using eCairn’s conversation application, it is possible to :

• learn faster than using Google Trends or any bottom up monitoring application
• learn things that are invisible to Google Trends, although they are critical for a given community

Experiment 1: Android

First, on a hot topic that has hit main street not so long ago: Android, Google’s mobile platform aimed at competing with windows mobile, iphone’s platform, symbian and so on.

They’re 4 top device manufacturers in the open handset alliance: HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung.
HTC has released the G1 in September and got tons of buzz but everybody did at this time as a rising tide lifts all boats.

Since mid September, leaks have pumped up the buzz on Motorola’s Android plan though their device isn’t yet on the market, not much info exists (from a mobile blogger’s knowledge) on LG or Samsung plans yet.

The charts coming from Conversation(tm) are based on a community of +400 mobile bloggers.

Here’re the charts (and by the way, we put together, as a comparison, trends from our application and google trends for HTC and Motorola – it’s not super pretty as we had to make the Google trends charts narrower):

The Conversation(tm) and Google trends look the same for HTC which is normal because they announced the G1 in September (i.e “the niche community of mobile bloggers and the public had the same information available to them). Looking at the Motorola charts, we can see that there was quite a few conversations in September, visible in the spike on the Conversation(tm) trends but not on the google trend. We also noticed that the second spike is super sharp in google though it’s not in Conversation(tm); as soon as mid October, the second buzz starts in Conversation(tm) though it’s only when Motorola confirmed they have an Android plan in the making that Google trends start to spike. Within the mobile blogger community, when HTC generated tons of conversations, there was at the same time quite a bit of speculation on Motorola; Based on our reading, several bloggers found some information making them think a big team was being put together at Motorola. While the conversation slowed down a bit, it restarted as soon as the rumor came back this time because some bloggers spotted interesting information on the web.

If one can draw a conclusion from this example, listening to a niche community enables an observer to understand inter-related stories as they unfold and to anticipate upcoming buzz. The more relevant your community to what you’re dealing with, the more of these effects you get…tools that gather data from the broader web will somewhat have a tendency to be reactive and tell stories after the fact.

Experiment 2: The Age of Conversation II

We ran the same trends on a very niche topic very relevant to social media marketing ‘The Age of Conversation II’. Unfortunately, google trends says that there isn’t enough search volume activity to display a chart.

But Conversation(tm) trends, ran this time against our list of ~1000 social media marketing blog, shows that the buzz has been growing lately on this topic:

By the way, if you’re interested to read what they say about ‘The Age of Conversation II’, here’s an RSS feed from Conversation(tm)

Conclusion:

One of the major payback of closely following influencers is that you can

- See the story unfold,
- See a story that you wouldn’t see otherwise.

This is a critical know-how for companies that not only want to measure what just happened but make decisions relative to what’s about to happen and influence in return if they can.

Our baby has grown again! In the last few weeks, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers:

• Collaboration and sharing has never been better with the new annotations.
• Finding the information you really care about has never been easier with the new filtering mechanism.
• Our combo of ‘finding blogs’ features has been greatly enhanced.

A picture is worth a thousand words so here it goes:

Annotations:

Choose the action you want to take and view a record of all actions:

• Recommend a post (To share with your team members)
• Add notes (To keep a record of your own analysis)
• Track comment (For your record and to do some follow up later on)
• Forward (To notify someone in / outside of your team)
• Plan action (To record a ‘todo’ )
• Star a blog

Filters

Thanks to filters, you can narrow the posts’ list to what you really care about (it’s helpful when you have created a project to listen to x00 blogs and you have x00000 posts in your database). You can refine the results even more within a specific filter (for exemple, in a filter on social media marketing you could refine on twitter to get all the post talking about twitter). We also provide an RSS feed to those filters. With them, you can share with a broader audience on specific topics or create some very cool widgets or get an alert whenever something new has been publishing within them.

Add Blogs

mmm I think we should call it Add pages with an RSS . Though our primarily focus is tactically on blogs, it’s possible to add other type of content sources into Conversation(tm). We have users adding stock ticker headlines like Yahoo AAPL healines or twitter search like Obama or McCain twittering.

The key addition this time is what we call ‘preferred search’. You can now save your searches (save only those that have brought back enough relevant results). When you do, Conversation™ will run them in the background and create a ranked list of suggested blogs that you can analyze at any time. We recommend you find 4 or 5 good searches combinations, save them and come back to check your suggested blogs once or twice a week.

So here is the new Add Blogs page:

In the course of our (very long) days, we’ve built deep list of blogs on various topics ( > 100 blogs).
Now that we’re capable of detecting automatically if bloggers display their social network profile on their blogs, we got curious about the differences in the percentage of those who do and don’t across topics. By the way, the most frequent profiles are those of LinkedIn and Facebook.

The 7 lists we used for our empirical study are Personal finance (1501 blogs), Blogging (968 blogs), Social Media Marketing (698 blogs), Gaming (429 blogs), Cosmetology (400 blogs), Wireless (240 blogs) and Enterprise 2.0 (35 blogs). A quick note to state that we don’t pretend having found all the blogs in those categories , we found a lot of them but we don’t know where the end is.

The differences are huge as you can see and point, most of the time, to a poor level of integration between people’s blogs and social profiles:

• At the top is Social Media Marketing – No surprise, we were expecting it. Bloggers in this category stay on top of the social media wave. Our figures show at least a third of Social Media Marketing bloggers display their social network profile on their blog. Right now Conversation(tm) detects only badges on the home page; but in the future, we will detect them on the about page too.
• 2nd is Enterprise 2.0 with a bit more than 20%
• 3rd is Wireless with a litte more than 10%
• 4th is Enterprise Security with a little less than 9%
• Then we got blogging (~4%), Cosmetology (~3%), Gaming (~2%).
• Last is personal finance (~1%)

Now let’s look a little deeper at what’s happening in our list of Social Media Marketing blogs.

Some blogs are group blogs where we typically don’t expect to find social network badges. If we take a swag at narrowing to only blogs from individuals, it would probably bump the percentage to the vicinity of 50%. Not bad!

But the story really gets interesting with this last experiment: On a small sample (10) of blogs from individual bloggers who didn’t have a social network badge in their blog, we found their profile in LinkedIn and, 8 times out of 10, the blog is listed on it. Honestly we don’t think its that way on purpose (i.e: bloggers don’t want readers to find their social network profiles). It’s more a data integration issue.

Conclusion: There’s a long way to go before we see a tight integration between blogs and profiles so you can go seamlessly from one to the other in order to have a complete picture of the bloggers you like. With the exception of blogs hosted on a social network (niche social network), the infrastructures are separate (blogs powered by wordpress, typepad and so on, profiles powered by social network platforms) thus the issue.

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?
The answer is quite straightforward. Nowadays, when we see a piece of content from someone, we go and google them or check if we find them in social networks because it gives us more information about the author as well as additional ways to build a relationship with them if we desire. We do that all the time and I’m sure you do too! The issue discussed in this post makes it harder than if one little click was all it takes to go from a blog to a profile.

Here, one of our job is to deal with fragmented infrastructure and bring them together in a seamless and meaningful user experience so we see a nice issue to solve. Let us know what you think!

Our baby is growing! No kidding, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers.
So here it goes:

Social Network Integration

People’s profiles on social networks typically tell you a lot about who they are, what they like and who they know. Profiles are also a great tool to connect with them. We’ve run into people who prefer not to receive email but are ok if someone contacts them through their social networks. With our recent release, Conversation™ detects Facebook and LinkedIn badges when they’re present on blogs.
Users of the application get a summary view of:

• the presence of social network profiles
• the social networks available

In addition, they can access individual profiles in one click from the application.

Blog Card

The blog card contains a wealth of information to help you analyze a blog and determine if it fits your criteria for your buzz, outreach, viral or advertising activities. With this feature we’re introducing our new paradigm dubbed Place/People/Conversation -> If you’re a marketer, you want to know where your target market (prospects, customers, influencers…) socialize online; you want to understand who they are and what they’re talking about. Indeed, you may elect to advertise on relevant sites, do an outreach to relevant people, and buzz in relevant conversations. It’s now easier, thanks to the blog card. We think this new paradigm fits better with marketers’ usage of social media. Over time, expect the whole application to move toward this new user experience.

Here’s an example of the kind of information you will find in a blog card:

We’ve some interesting data on how the presence of advertising or social profiles vary amongst verticals and we’ll share them with you very soon. So stay tuned.

By the way, remember those features come on top of those we added in May, like ad network detection and more….

If you’re interested in trying Conversation(tm), we offer a one month free trial for an unlimited number of users.

At eCairn, we listen to 660+ blogs on social media marketing; I scan, filter and click hundred of posts every day. One of the interesting benefit is that in the flow, we get a glimpse on what the current hot topics are. Usually they are discussed heavily during a few days and thus, get our attention more than anything else, then gone.  A little while ago, ’social media measurement’ generated quite a lot of activity, ‘PR spamming’; right now, it seems like a very good video called ’social media in plain english’ from commoncraft is raising to the top with 19 posts with the following pattern over the past 4 days:

• 1 post on 5/29
• 3 posts on 5/30
• 3 posts on 5/31
• 6 posts on 6/1
• 6 posts on 6/2

More posts may be coming…as I’ve observed in the case of ’social media measurement’ that the 100+ posts I was able to find on the subject during a recent burst started on May 6 and ended on May 26, with peak posting between May 18th and 22nd.

Listening to a wide variety of relevant voices really gives you a glimpse on what’s hot for them.

How can marketers operate in the highly diversified, community based, conversation driven social media world?
(and, by the way, how do we help them do that too)

There has been tons of writing about it on social media marketing blogs and, to summarize, the bottom line looks like: They need first to become part of it (not just monitor on the sideline but join them as someone else said) and, second, they need to adopt a new engagement model (listen to people first). And it’s hard work.
Can they ignore it? Nope….it’s not going away.
Social Media is becoming mainstream everywhere, so companies are struggling with:

1. How to find a large number of relevant communities where to engage
2. How to organize active listening; and this spans from product marketing teams to PR
3. How to develop social marketing campaign that mix blogger outreach, buzz, viral marketing and more traditional online advertising on web2.0 properties.

Conversation, our online application to find/listen/engage with communities, enables a marketing team to get better at 1, 2 and 3. Conversation is designed for collaboration and sharing thus its work group ready and you can have multiple users working together and sharing at the same time.
To get started, you create a custom database of relevant social media based on your target. This is done through a combo of blogsearch/bookmark/upload features. Social media is a very dynamic world thus having an integrated way to populate and maintain your list of target communities is critical. For our own usage, we’ve built a database of 600+ blogs talking about social media marketing and it’s growing over time as we discover new blogs we hadn’t seen before.
Once you’ve populating your database, you’re automatically subscribed to all the communities and you can listen to them using a composite view of the content that has been published by them (using the same example as before, we store 20 000 posts in our database and get more than 200 everyday). Of course this is a massive amount of information but the trick is that if you do it as a team with the right tools, it’s doable. Our list is easy to scan and, when you find something relevant, you can read the details and reply to it or just share it with a note. By the way, the list is searchable. You can even set filters to make your favorite topics stand out.
Though the debate is still on, we suspect the right social media engagement model will mix direct interaction with influencers, participation in conversation, and use of buzz/viral and mass traditionnal online advertising mecanism. Conversation provides useful data on social network profiles, advertising network profiles and more so you can plan and manage your ‘campaign’ saccording to your need.

Voila, a picture is worth a 1000 words so here’s a demo of the beast.

And a few screenshot based on a wireless project a client is running on our app:

Blog list —

Post list —

Yesterday, we released a new version of Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers. It contains an exciting new feature, the Media tab, and a few improvements we’re eager to discuss with you.

The Media tab

First of all, each project gets a new Media tab where marketers will find useful information about advertising. Click on the tab and you get a summary view of:

• the presence of advertising
• the ad networks available

On the left, the Presence section shows you the percentage of blogs that accept/don’t accept advertising from the most common ad networks (Google AdWords/AdSense, Yahoo Content Network or Federated Media just to name a few among the twelve ad networks we detect).

On the right, the Networks section lists all the networks that appear on at least one blog in the project. They are listed from the network that appears the most to the least.

Click on any link in this view and you jump in the Find Placements view.

Here you can filter down the list of blogs by the ad network you want to use. You can select blogs with a few or no ads at all. And you can combine those criteria with other filtering capabilities using labels and star.

The Media tab will soon get better with additional useful information like the social profiles of bloggers.

Better search in the Postolist

A couple of weeks ago, Conversation™ got a brand-new search engine. We use a customized sphinx full text search engine; it is well integrated with our environement , a lot more faster that the mysql full text search and has nice features such as english and french stemming.

Yesterday, we pushed out some improvements over this capability:

• better highlighting in results, particularly for phrases
• better filtering by keywords

Better UI design

Last but not least, the UI design has been improved. If you’re already used to Conversation™ , you might have already spotted the differences on the previous screenshots: A few targeted adjustments on header/tab styles or the layout for a more pleasant user experience.