Analytics 2.0

Much more than just tagging

Category Archives: Social Media

The real value of Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis for Analytics proposes

We talked a lot in this blog about the different type of information and the value of each of them.
One type of information is “Behavioral information“, useful to answer the “What are people doing”. Even when some people mix up Analytics with Website Analytics, the true is that Analytics it is much more than that. You can answer “What are people doing” with behavioral information, but not “Why they are doing what they are doing”. That it’s a huge problem…I mean, at least if you want to do something with the information like make a decision that drives your company closer to it’s objective. The coolest information to know “Why the people are doing what they are doing” is attitudinal and not behavioral. For instance if the people is not buying your products, that doesn’t mean that your products are not good, or your campaigns are not well targeted, or any other thing, that is something that you know with attitudinal information but not with behavioral. If you wanna know why they are not buying your products just go and ask them…why assuming the risk of making decisions with inferred information? Exactly…there is no reason…

Behavioral is cool but it laks of own value by it self, it requires to be used with any other type of information. We have the very same situation with the other type of information like Attitudinal. Before knowing why people is doing something you should what are they doing. So, when you mix both types the magic appears and you feel like having an epiphany is something possible :-) and is not so far away.
However, even when you feel that the above is something clear to you, the possibility to measure all the attitudinal information required to give relevance or to answer the “WHY” to the Behavioral information is pretty new. I mean we have polls and surveys insite since…well, we always had them, but surveys and polls cannot capture the total reality of the behavior unless the survey allow open answers, but if so you have another problem…make that information useful or turn it into qualitative information, otherwise you have like a short list of things that you are measuring with the survey, so the possibilities of explaining the “WHY’s” are almost null.

Having said that is easy to understand the importance and power of the Text mining and Sentiment analysis for Analytics. However I’m not sure that we are using that technology in a properly way. Every day I receive four or five emails about a new “solution” for measuring qualitative information about what people are saying online and it seems to me like we are all accepting some kind of freaky schema where if you have more tweets and likes then it means that your company is being successful, so companies that develops technology for “listening” what is being said delivers reports that are focused exactly on that, but unless someone pays you for size of you ego your company won’t get any benefit from this.

As a person that begin as an analyst and a researcher I must said that I found lot more value on this technology than measuring likes and tweets. I mean, I found extremely fabulous using Text Mining and Sentiment analysis for Research Proposes more than anything else. I’m not yet talking about “Social Media Analytics”, “Social Media Monitoring” or “Social Media Engagement” platforms, I’m just talking about the potencial of this technology for business.

Have you ever heard about a person called Michael Porter? He talks about a model called value chain, almost every person in the world that studied management knows exactly what I’m talking about, if you don’t just take a look at Michael Porter by Wikipedia.

Mr. Porter (not Potter…don’t be such a nerd person) says that the margin that a company gets from its operations is the result of:

1. Primary Activities: Inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, Marketing and Sales and Post Sales support.

2. Secondary Activities: Firm Infrastructure, Human Resource Management, Technology and Procurement.

The better you work on those areas, the better your company goes. The better your company goes, the better margin you gets. So, if you want that your company gets more margin you can just provide each area with the possibility to listen what people are saying about them and let them work on give people, what people want it. Isn’t it soooo sexy? I mean, who cares on how many tweets or likes or even mentions you have when you can listen, in real time, what people are saying about yours, or your competitors’ products?

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Social Media Metrics Standards – Where is the link between Strategy and Operations?

Fortunately we are moving towards the generation of Standard Metrics for the Social Media Campaigns performance, which is great! but not enough.
I’m affraid that we felt once and once again in the same trick. We focus on what it is possible to measure and based on that we select our metrics.
It looks like the same process we lived during the development of Behavioral Metrics. Even today some people don’t understand why should they use some behavioral metrics and it is understandable because some of them are not useful at all. I mean, they are not useful if you use them lonely.
SocialMedia is bringing the same problem with it. I was trying to evaluate every single metric that people, companies and organizations are proposing to measure Social Media Performance and instead of identifying metrics to real understand how are the campaigns going (related with the companies objectives) I’ve fount metrics that are just useful to compare companies to other companies without any sense. It is just about having “more” (or less depending the metric) than your competitor.
Continue reading →

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Social Media Metrics with Jim Sterne

I’d like to share with you a very interesting video about an interview carried on by Byron Gordon to my friend Jim Sterne. Do you know that the price tag was just invented 150 years ago and was the milestone that revolution the marketing industry? (Come on, do you really thing that marketing is new stuff?). Take a look at it!

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Measuring “Social Campaigns” with Google Analytics

If you are already generating Social Campaigns or are just beginning I recommend you to track them so you can folllow the “plan-action-measure” improving Cycle.

Some of you have probably very interesting projects but are not experts in programing or coding and normally avoid this kind of post. Don’t do that! This process is really simple and extremely usefull…give me just five minutes and I’ll show you.

1- Once you have planned your Social Campaign (links with interesting content in Facebook, twitter, Orkut, Sonico, MySpace, Hi5, or any other) you will need to define the Source, Medium and Campaign name (if you are generating multiple links in the same “post” then you can use the variable Content as well).

Source: It is the source of traffic you will be activating, in this case Facebook, Twitter, etc…

Medium: Is the type of advertising like cpc, banner, email or in this case “Social”

Campaign Name: Is the name you use for any particular campaign, lets say “facebook_test_analytics2.0″.

Campaign Content: If you are using multiple links give a particular name to each them so you can recognize which is generating you better performance.

2- Go to Google URL Builder Tool: Once there fill each of the above mentioned fields as in the following example.

google_url_builder_tool

 

The field in green must contains the landing page URL, in red the tracking variables (Source, Medium, Content, Name). Then generate URL (in blue). The result is a URL that contains your landing page URL followed by “?” and each of the variables concatenated with “&” as follows.

http://www.analytics20.org/about-analytics-20-model/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_anchor&utm_campaign=analytics_20_model

Then use that link in the properly source to populate your content wait some hours and voila! you are already measuring your social campaign…pretty simple huh? 

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SocialMetrix.com – One of the Red Innova Startup Competition’s Finalists

                                

 

Its been almost two years since we (the SocialMetrix founders) talked for first time about developing a reporting platform based on what people are saying on the Internet.

It was a long road until today. Things where normally different of what we were thinking and contingency plans became part of our normal planning but what never chanced in all this time was the final objective and our passion.

Today, I’m very glad to announce that SocialMetrix is finalist at the Red Innova Startups contest. This gave us the necessary breath to keep pushing SocialMetrix to the place we’ve imagined from the first time.

I would like to thanks Red Innova for the opportunity that gave us.

I would also like to thanks the other people that make this Company come true with functional products and clients. Martin (Enriquez) the guy that always said “It is possible”, Sebastian (Rosenfeld) one of the most pragmatic and passionate guys I’ve ever meet and Gustavo (Arjones), a f…ing brilliant mind.

My best wishes to the rest of the participants, I know some of them (like Santiago Siri) and they are amazing. Good luck!

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