Visualisation on Philip Sheldrake

How the Influence Scorecard radically transforms marketing and PR

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so the title of this post grabbed your attention. Regular readers will know that we ran the first Influence Scorecard workshop in New York last week, and I took the action to diagrammatically represent the journey we’ve embarked on. And here it is. And you can track its progress, indeed join our team, at http://influencescorecard.wikispaces.com .

This is a first stab, and at a guess represents a three-year journey, at least for the early adopters most aggressively seeking competitive advantage via their approach to all six influence flows.

That’s contingent of course upon the leading social Web analytics vendors quickly picking up this approach and developing their products and services accordingly.

Meltwater, visualising influence and a big sphere that might not fit conveniently in your office

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ’traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.

For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy ’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman ), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.

I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.

We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field :-) and the prospects for data visualisation.

Data visualisation

Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.

Visualise your SEO

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Tableau Software knows just a thing or two about data visualisation. A spin out from Stanford, the company won the CODiE award for best business intelligence solution 2008… it’s amazing what the faculty of visualisation can do for your intelligence, or your PR as anyone who has followed my obsession with data visualisation in public relations will know I believe. (Previous posts on the topic appended.)

Tableau Software’s Niels Hoven has posted about using visualisation techniques (and a nifty Excel plug-in from Microsoft) to delve into the content of rival websites to determine keyword effectiveness and make your final keyword selection. He even rounds off by employing visualisation to measure the effectiveness of your SEO work. Nifty.

Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Marketing communications operates within an increasingly complex multi-stakeholder web of influences, and the way many of us can or will be able to devine how influence goes around and comes around, how reputations get built up and eroded, is to look at it pictorially.

My best attempt to date at explaining this in non-mathematical language is in my post “Can you see it? Making influence visible. ” Check it out. More widely, my post “Influence… it’s a numbers game ”, lists all my posts related to this topic.

The Buzz of Social Web Analytics - vendors reach out for the 2009 eBook

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I’m being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn’t know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They’re keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I’m sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!

I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence. Here’s a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).

Techrigy

Techrigy describes itself as enabling “organizations to know what’s being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy’s SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time.”