Author Archive

There is no better way to get good press than to do interesting things.  With so many software applications out there already, it’s often best to pick a niche, do it well, and then integrate with other similar applications that will benefit your customers.

MySpace used to be one of the biggest social networks on the web.  It has recently come of age by focusing on the music niche.  They recently announced that posts on Twitter can feed into MySpace and MySpace updates can feed into Twitter.  MySpace made this announcement on September 21, earning them more mentions than any other this month.

Biz360’s Community Insights tool will allow you to monitor mentions of your competitors, industry, as well as your brand.  How can companies better use this knowledge to get a leg up on their competitors?

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

Consumers are participating more and at a faster rate on the web than ever before.  Instead of merely being big, the companies that seem to be winning out are those that are the most agile to listen, anticipate and then act on what is being said.

These real-time interactions bring up entirely new issues for companies eager to thrive during a recession.  This is the focus of the Read Write Real Time Web Summit in Mountain View, California on October 15.  Companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and the New York Times will be there.  The conference will be very participatory and will educate you on how you can best adjust to the rapid changes we’ve seen to the web in the past few years.

Biz360’s Chief Marketing Officer Tony Priore will be attending the summit.  Biz360 recently launched it’s new SaaS product Community Insights and will be reporting any news or tips gained.  If you plan to attend, please say hello.

According to CNN, there are 900 documented cases of the H1N1 virus.  Let’s compare that to how much chatter there is about it on the web:

Our coverage indicated that in its lowest covered day, H1N1 received two and half times as many mentions as there have been total cases since its discovery.  However, there is danger if the strain mutates the same way the flu virus did in 1918. Do you think the amount of press is warranted given the danger, or is this a story being overblown by media outlets?

Net neutrality.  It’s the idea that the net should be open and uncontrolled by major broadband providers.  While politicians have been mixed on the issue, most leaders in the web space agree that giving broadband providers access to control how much bandwidth is allocated to whom could slow progress for many sites on the web.

On the 30th birthday of ARPAnet, the predecessor to the internet, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski called for network neutrality and transparency rules.  Genachowski determined that the open nature of the internet allowed it to become what it is today.

This endorsement obviously propelled “net neutrality” to the top of the online space, boosting mentions 2800 percent.

Most Americans don’t even know what net neutrality is but would be heavily impacted if it were not protected.  Given America’s fascination with “Twilight”, Jay-Z and the latest in reality TV, mentions in so many blogs as well as MSN, Yahoo, CNet and the New York Times, it looks like the FCC scored a public relations victory with this announcement.

If you missed it, Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech at the Video Music Awards to announce that Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time. Let’s see how this affected mentions of Kanye West:

As you can see, Kanye went from mentions in the hundreds to mentions in the tens of thousands. Theoretically, if Kanye used Community Insights, he could log in and address all of his detractors directly instead of using the filter he did in Jay Leno. Community Insights actually lists blog mentions of keywords by influence, so he could and perhaps should start there.

Monitoring keywords around the web is powerful. The ability to track trends around the web will allow you to anticipate what’s going to happen next as well as what works in terms of generating buzz and what doesn’t.

Community Insights now offers an affordable means to track keywords all over the web. Since the tool will update mentions of key terms and phrases in 37 million blogs, more than 100 million message boards and forums, all of Twitter’s publicly available content, blog posts and forum content from social-networking sites like MySpace, and 50,000 news media sources every 20 minutes, you can be proactive versus merely reactive in monitoring and/or controlling trends.

We are inviting you to a webinar with our CEO Brad Brodigan and our CMO Tony Priore to take a look at everything Community Insights has to offer your business. Here are the details:
Date: Thursday, September 17
Time: 2 pm ET, 11 am PT
Length: 45 minutes + Q&A

Registration Required
https://biz360events.webex.com/biz360events/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=572387376

As a special thank you for participating, you will be given a free, no-obligation 15-day trial to test Community Insights Professional for yourself.

If you have any questions, please leave them on this blog. We look forward to hearing from you.

It’s hard to succeed without a great product, but it’s also hard to succeed without creating a strong perception of your product. A press release at the right time to the right places can help ensure your brand is always on top of the dialog on the web.

Community Insights allows you to monitor the dialog about your competitors. Updating in near real time, you can see when your competitors are getting press, what the sentiment is, and where they are getting coverage. If your PR team is agile, they can quickly issue messaging that can prevent your competitors’ campaign from gaining traction.

We used Community Insights to measure the dialog about three hosting cloud providers: RackSpace cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon EC2. Here is the coverage for the past 30 days:

If you track the red line, you can see that on August 25, RackSpace announced the tools for their cloud. This was a pretty big announcement as these tools only make using their cloud easier. On the 26th, Amazon announced their virtual private cloud, which you can see by the spike in the blue line.

Would Rackspace’s announcement about its cloud tools have received more attention if Amazon had not launched their virtual private cloud the very next day? How does this affect people’s perception of what is available to people competitively shopping for cloud hosting?

ReadWriteWeb is one of the most influential blogs in social media today. In a time when a lot of companies are struggling to figure out how individual relationships present in social media affect the bottom line, ReadWriteWeb always presents information to help them stay ahead of the curve.

The field of leveraging and fostering these individual relationships via the web is often called Community Management. Many people vow to be experts in the space, but very few of them have been involved in social media as heavily and early as ReadWriteWeb’s Content Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick. I asked for his advice on how companies who may be struggling with social media can get started or become more effective with it:

MICHELLE:
When did you first get involved in social media? How has the social media space evolved since you first engaged in it?

MARSHALL:
I’ve only been doing this for about five years. I came from the nonprofit world and thought social media tools would be good to learn about so I could help bring them into that sector. I blogged as I learned and eventually started getting work blogging, more than the consulting I originally envisioned. When I got involved in all this it was a lot more marginal, we were all very scrappy. There were a surplus of freaks all trying to get or create a relatively small number of jobs in the field. Now social media is far, far more mainstream. Everyone’s more professional and there are far more marketing and PR people involved. On the up side, I did get to meet Neil Young once because of all this. I didn’t see that coming. So I guess you could say it was always weird, but now it’s getting really weird.

MICHELLE:
Blogs and Twitter are integrating marketing, product development, customer service roles for companies into one Community Manager role. In a large company, what is the most efficient way for a Community Manager or Managers to delegate these tasks so as to make the customer happy?

MARSHALL:
I think it’s best for all the traditional roles to stay intact and for a new position to be created that bridges all the different departments with social media as the glue. The Community Manager contributes to almost every department in a company but needs unique social-media specific skills and experience.

MICHELLE:
What steps should companies take to best empower their Online Community Managers to make the best decisions?

MARSHALL:
Let them speak freely in public. Let them spend their time however they see fit, as long as they are getting results. Expect a lot from them but understand the way they are being pulled in many directions on both sides of a wall – inside and outside the company. Understanding their job is helpful. Reading our Guide to Online Community Management is a good way to accomplish that.

MICHELLE:
I find a lot of larger companies’ social media efforts to be somewhat “gilded”, where the negative comments get ignored and the positive comments get rewarded. What are your thoughts on this?

MARSHALL:
That’s probably not a sustainable strategy for too long. Even if you can maintain it for a while – it’s no way to make the most of your engagement with social media. That requires as much authenticity as you can muster, in order to build relationships, in order to harvest the gains. This isn’t just another broadcast medium to push your marketing message through – this is people baring their hearts and minds to each other. (Really!) There’s good business development opportunities there, but only if you connect meaningfully with other people.

MICHELLE:
Can you name a great example of how a company capitalized on an opportunity presented in the social media sphere?

MARSHALL:
Smart people strengthen relationships between themselves and sales leads, vendors, possible hires, analysts, press and other people of business interest through social media all day every day. One of my favorite stories is about Lucia Willow, Community Manager at Pandora. Twitter is larger than Pandora now, but for most of the time she was on the site that wasn’t the case. Lucia says that she’s used every social network out there but Twitter offers her “the best bang for the buck.” When Pandora was facing a possible end to their business because of rising licensing fees, Lucia was able to mobilize scores of people on Twitter to engage with Congress over the matter and pass it on to their friends. It ended up saving not just that business, but potentially many other innovative small companies at risk as well. Twitter users are unusually fast-acting and engaged, Lucia told us. That’s just one of a number of case studies included in our Guide to Online Community Management.

Deficit spending. It’s a perfectly valid concern. So is the fact that millions of Americans don’t have health care and that those who do pay a lot for it.

How do current events affect whose voices are being heard and whose are being ignored? We decided to use our web monitoring tool Community Insights to look at how the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy affected the dialog about the cost/benefit analysis of a public health care option.

If you look at this chart, you’ll see that concerns about the budget peaked August 25th. It was fairly consistent before this date.

Senator Kennedy died on the 26th. The dialog about the deficit was cut in half. On the 27th, the dialog about the deficit was 1/10 of what it was on the 25th.

Did Kennedy’s strong stances on universal health care make the idea of discussing its costs seem insensitive? Is the general public apathetic about the costs associated with universal health care? Will the budget deficit conversation snap back to life as the amount of time from Kennedy’s death elapses?

If fiscal conservatives would like to bring up the costs associated with implementing a public option for health care, they will need to figure out how to bring back the dialog in their favor.

In these challenging economic times, companies are looking for more inexpensive efficient ways to make customers as happy as possible.  Biz360’s social media monitoring technology gives you the tools to spend more quality time with your customers to improve your product or service. Tools that work on both a service and marketing level.

When someone asks for help in an online forum or a blog, it becomes a public matter.  As a company, you can choose to ignore it or you can step up and offer assistance.  It will then be publicized and archived that you stepped up and assisted in the matter because you took the time to comment.  This is customer service and marketing rolled up into one.

As an experiment, we used Biz360’s Community Insights platform to monitor any time someone used the terms “Canon G11″, Canon’s new product offering along with the term “help.”  What did we find?

We found hundreds of mentions on the web.  In one thread on the photo sharing site Flickr, a power user asked about the new features the camera offers.  The camera was also written up in the influential blog Gizmodo and in the MacRumors forum.

Community Insights allows companies to surface a census-like amount of comments about a product like the Canon G11 within minutes of their posting.  Using the tool, to identify product mentions in proximity to other terms such as “service” or “help” can enable Community Managers at companies to quickly react to the relevant and contextual mentions of their products to correct misconceptions, offer feedback, or connect customers with the appropriate resources within a company.  Another good example of this type of usage is to search for the term “cancelation” to identify people thinking about canceling your service so you can reach out to save potential departing customers.

Since these incidents of customer service are all documented on the web, they demonstrate that a company is more dedicated to performing customer service acts better than an ad will tell them they are.