The innards of a Social Media Analytics report

I work with a lot of different social media listening and tracking tools and while some posses a freak ability to be able to briskly skim through blog posts and Twitter searches, most clients would cringe at the idea of sifting through tons and tons of both relevant and junk information. This is why clients are clients and I’m sitting in front of a computer lurking Technorati.

Since most people are dumb-dumb’s its good to make your report as straight-forward as possible. Here’s a list of great ways and essential things to communicate and display information you get from your social media monitoring tools.

1. Collective Volume - all related activity (mentions) in social media across all platforms.

2. Mentions in Blogosphere (Twitter, etc.) - Volume in a specific social media area of interest (perhaps you were targeting bloggers for outreach).

3. Share of Voice – My favorite graph, and probably one of the most important. The data shows where the buzz is happening (and where you need to focus efforts).

4. Audience Sentiment – Your clients will heart this one so hard.

5. Word Cloud – This is the prettiest one of all, and quite possibly the most interesting.

There are a lot more ways to interestingly serve data but keep in mind that a lot of times, its better to just get to the point. Take this and do what you will. I made everything in Numbers, the word cloud in Wordle.

Seth Godin FAIL

The other day, “Marketing Guru” Seth Godin launched a service with the help of Squidoo. Brands in Public is basically an aggregator that brands can use to organize conversations about themselves in social media. Sounds cool, right? So why are people so pissed?

The tool pulls all the information into a dedicated profile. Squidoo has already taken the liberty of creating a bunch of “unofficial” company ones already in hopes that the companies themselves would take notice and front the cash to be able to have control over the thing. I look at this like someone creating a Facebook profile for me and then demanding cash to be able to take over. NOT COOL.

How much money? $400 a month. For something you could do yourself on your own dashboard with listening tools like Social Radar, Scoutlabs, or Radian 6.  This whole controversey sparked mainly because the genius didn’t ask permission or let anyone know what he was conjuring, and is ultimately is trying to scam brands into giving him money for absolutely nothing, aka “brandjacking”. In recent events, Squidoo has backed down and stopped creating these unofficial pages, they’ll now only create them if they’re asked.

I checked out Squidoo’s Brands in Public profile and (despite having heard rumors that they were blocking negative comments) can only hope they’re realizing they’re ridick. Here are some screen shots I pulled:

How do you feel about this? Here’s what Techcrunch has to say.

this week: favorite internet things

This weeks top things:

1. MP Change: some crazy japanese morph thing, you upload a picture and put silly things on your head. This thing is almost as fun as Photobooth for Macs is.

2. Twits: Washington Post thought up this gem of a viral vid. Celebrity Twitter dramatic readings.

3. 19lb Baby: Yeah.