CrapHammer

Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring.  I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it.  A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it.  I got the typical response.  Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home.  It won't work, or at least not well.  Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. (Note:  Using Radian 6.)

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?

Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.

My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest.  This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data.  And we are faced with an immediate dilemma.  How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source.  So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!"  What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website?  Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing".  So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration. 

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days.  And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools  to that slice of the Internet. 

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective.  So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs.  Simple and straight forward, no?  All great ideas are.  Or so I tell myself.  ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view.  And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign

What Spammers Know That We Don't

We are all working like mad to develop location based services and technologies. Phones that know where the nearest cool coffee shop is, discount coupons that apply to a store you just snubbed and walked past.  I believe it is considered to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity and the salvation of the mobile industry.

But frankly, we are sucking eggs and doing next to nothing while a few key individuals are proving you can mine for location based gold today with free or near-free resources.

Spammers Innovating Faster than Hi Tech:

The Real Estate, Online Pharmacies and Porn Spammers have once again proven they are leaders in adapting new technologies to their annoying purposes.

I tweeted the following:

And within minutes I received a follow from KatyFStewart.

She offers one link on her page.  To this site:

 

Should I be promoting her Twitter account?  Should I have clicked through on a link from a semi-naked nubile photo?  No.  Of course not.  But will I be alone?  Nope.  Guaranteed.  Not only that, I would bet that many a media person would cry to get even 1/10 of the clickthrough and conversion rates these people are achieving.

Not Just Porn:

Tweet the name of a city and you will undoubtedly get a sudden increase in followers.  Why?  Because the real estate industry is not about to be left behind by the porn industry.  Quite a few real estate agents appear to be using auto-subscribe services to add you as a friend in cities they do their work in.

These are services that listen for a set of keywords and once it finds a match with any twitter user in the world, it sends that person a follow request on your behalf.

Let me be clear. I hate auto-subscribe services.  It's like paying someone to get you more friends.

That said, it does make me wonder.  Do we really need fancy and expensive GPS and high tech solutions or could we just better monitor and respond to the contextual content people are providing in their tweets and status updates?

Brilliance:

What I love about [what] Ms. Stewart is doing (real name likely Amanda Hogsbottom) is that they are using simple, free and contextual tools to mine twitter and facebook.  Then they are doing simple (and free) IP sniffing from their website to provide an end to end contextually relevant and highly personalized (location based) solution.  Something the big brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve with likely far less success.

A System for Measuring Change through Stories

I stumbled across a reference to the Most Significant Change process a week or so ago.  For the life of me, I can't recall exactly where.  A search on Google brought up a PDF that presents both the concept and the process for implementing MSC. It is designed as a participatory monitoring tool for social change campaigns that have complex goals, involve organizations with many layers and where conventional monitoring systems are proving less than effective at furthering the mission.

LINK to PDF.

What most impressed me about MSC was it's focus on stories of significant change and a system for evolving and growing the values of an organization around such.  The stories that most resonate with the organization are the same stories that slowly transform all levels of the organization.  A wonderful use of social phenomenon to shape and grow an organization (as opposed to market norms).

1. It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.

2. It is a good way to clearly identify the values that prevail in an
organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of
those values are the most important. This happens when people
think through and discuss which of the SCs is the most significant.
This can happen at all levels of the organisation.

3. It is a participatory form of monitoring that requires no special
professional skills. Compared to other monitoring approaches, it is
easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain
what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they
think were important.

4. It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people
have to explain why they believe one change is more important
than another.

5. It can build staff capacity in analysing data and conceptualising
impact.

6. It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than
an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and
economic developments are reduced to a single number.

7. It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that
do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.

Again, here is the link to the PDF for those interested in learning more.