Live Podcast: Monitoring Social Media Conference Preview #MSM10

Following the success of their events In London, Influence People is hosting a one-day Social Media Monitoring Conference in San Francisco on 21st October, followed by a half-day training bootcamp on 22nd October.

Monitoring Social Media (#MSM10) will bring together leading brands, PR and marketing experts to discuss the latest ideas, trends and techniques in social media monitoring and measurement. Though a series of presentations, panels and expert-led discussions, we will explore the critical issues that marketers and PR professionals are facing in their efforts to monitor their social media interactions.

Get a free preview of what to expect at the conference as well as insights you can use now! Catch the archive here:

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[iTunes]

Remember that this show is by you, not just for you! Your questions are an essential part of the program and included in this show! Remember you are always welcome to tweet, Facebook or email in your questions before or during my shows.

UPDATED: Teaching Understanding Google Analytics

I am thrilled to be teaching Understanding Google Analytics, an online course, for mediabistro.

The first classes begin July 29th. That course is ending soon, but you can now sign up for the next session that will begin on Thursday evenings beginning October 7th. Sign up here.

Here’s the course description:

Business owners used to only be concerned with the number of hits to their website. Now businesses, bloggers, and online marketers need to know more than just how many people are coming to their site. They need data about their site’s performance, Internet marketing investments, lead or sales conversions, visitor behavior, and user interaction. Fortunately, the advancement of web technologies has made this comprehensive collection of data and analysis possible.

Why Sentiment Analysis Can’t Work And Why It’s A Damned Good Thing!

Dominique Lahaix, CEO of eCairn

This is a guest blog post from Dominique Lahaix, CEO of eCairn. eCairn Inc. (@eCairn) is a privately held software technology company, founded in October 2006 that specializes in community and influencers marketing. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Dominique (@Dominiq) and other company founders have a cumulative experience of 50+ years in e-marketing, knowledge engineering, collaborative filtering, linguistics, software development and software engineering at well-known companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Xerox, eBay and Motorola.

Let’s start with an example.

Imagine you work for Dell and you have to rate the following conversations to be examples of positive, neutral or negative sentiment:

• HP is good.
• Dell is good, but I still prefer HP.
• The new Dell PC is good but the previous one worked better.
• The new Dell PC is good but I miss the look of the previous one.
• HP works great but I hate them.
• Dell works great but I hate them.
• Dell is as good as HP.
• HP and Dell are the same crap, maybe Dell a little bit less.
• HP and Dell are nice entry-level products.
• Dell is good if you can afford it.
• Dell is good but exclusive.
• I would only recommend Dell’s PC to small businesses.
• Dell is the Dom Perignon of netbooks.
• Apple is to Dell what Saint Amour is to Beaujolais Nouveau.
• I worked too much on my Dell last night and I got sick looking at the screen.
• Dell is only good for gaming.
• HP is like it was in the Packard’s time.
• HP is like what it was in Carly’s time.
• No wonder why the Dell stock is going south.
• I love HP (from HP’s PR agency or Director).
• I hate HP (from an employee recently fired).
• A tweet repurposing the one above without any additional comment.

Hard to rate isn’t it? These are fairly standard sentences, not corner cases. There is no irony and no borderline use of language, but it just shows that:

Live Podcast: Featured Guest Jai Decker Co–Founder and CEO of DrivenTide

Jai Decker

What can analytics really tell you?

To hear Jai Decker speak, a lot more than you might think.

In fact, thinking back on his contributions to many deep discussions on the topic, solid analytics analysis and reporting might just be the ideal way to optimize search and find community that matters to your business.

It’s data-driven decision-making at it’s best. We’ll talk with Jai about that and much more. Don’t miss it, listen here:

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Live Podcast: Featured Guest Charlene Li, Founding Partner, Altimeter Group and Co-Author Groundswell

Charlene Li

Charlene Li is a legend, a young one, but a legend nonetheless.

In 6 months she’s created a new breed of business with her consulting company, Altimeter Group.

In that time, she’s also written a new book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, out May 10th and remained a popular and powerful figure in Web 2.0 business strategy.

And she’s a lovely person, too!

We touch on many of these topics and more on her appearance on The A-List podcast. Listen to the archive:

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Live Podcast: Featured Guest Dave Morgan, CEO Simulmedia

Dave Morgan

The A-List is back and better than ever!

After a rather long winter’s nap – following our coverage of LeWeb conference – we return with Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia (dontcha just love the name?).

The company, which launched in March last year, aimed to improve the impact of TV program promotions by lifting the effectiveness of their tune-in programming spots. But how, especially  in an increasingly on-demand world?

We’ll ask Dave, whose imense success includes developing and selling TACODA and Real Media. Listen to the archive here:

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Listening Beyond Your Brand

Amber Naslund

This is a guest blog post from Amber Naslund, a social media and marketing professional, and the Director of Community for Radian6, where she’s responsible for client engagement, community building, and helping companies tap the potential of online reputation management and social media monitoring. She’s spent the last decade or so raising funds, building brands for companies of all sizes, and messing with all things online. The post was inspired, in-part, by Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun’s appearance on The A-List podcast.

When most companies hear “you have to be listening” in social media, they immediately jump to the notion that listening should be brand-focused. They’re quick to type in their company name or the names of their products to see what the web is saying.

Smart strategy, sure. But that’s not all there is to listening, and companies would do themselves well to consider listening at a different level, above and beyond their brand, to learn some important things about how their business fits into the big picture.

The Competition

The value of competitive intelligence is undeniable, and there is rich information out there on the web about what your competitors are doing.

The Evolution of Formulas to determine Social Media Influence

Marshall Sponder, Source: Entrepreneur.com

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Marshall Sponder. Marshall is the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, one of the most influential and viewed blogs on Web Metrics, Web Analytics, Social Media and Search Marketing. He  writes a monthly column for Entrepreneur.com on leveraging online marketing technologies that help businesses succeed in a challenging economy. Marshall maintains his own Analytics Consultancy, NOW-SEO, and is an Emeritus Director of Social Media  the Web Analytics Association. Marshall also writes ArtNewYorkCity.com, which covers the New York Art world along with his own art; Smartmobs.com and BigGreenBlog.com as well.

I recently finished the first leg of a long journey in a quest to help create an “Influence Scorecard,” but stayed away from formulas that could be used to determine influence. Yet, almost two years ago, Edelman published a Distributed Influence paper that started by treating Blogs as Magazines and ended by suggesting we define influence of a blog / blogger by the amount of search rankings it has and a formula for Influence (without specifying how the quality of attention and audience would be determined).

Listening Literacy for Nonprofits Part 3: Listening Tools: A Starter Kit

Beth Kanter

This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.

There are free and paid monitoring tools available to support listening through social media channels. To make your scanning efficient, you’ll a RSS Reader, software that grabs fresh content from blog posts, web posts, Twitter, and other sources. Most RSS readers, like Google Reader, are free.

Many nonprofits like Google  Reader, especially those who are working as a team because it makes it easy to share items without cluttering up email.

For additional tutorials and tips on using RSS Readers, see the NTEN’s WeAreMedia ToolBox.

Listening tools consist of monitoring, tracking, and analytics software. Here is a good starter kit using free tools.

Live Podcast: Featured Guest Dominique Lahaix, Co-Founder and CEO of eCarin

Dominique Lahaix

Who are your key influencers?

It’s a question everyone from marketers to the mainstream media have been wrestling with for years – perhaps decades – and now new technology is here to help put some science to the search.

If you haven’t heard of eCairn before now, this program is a must-listen. If you know of it, but want to see the results they’ve gotten from putting their product to the test, you’ll want to hear this, too.

Today I welcomed Dominique Lahaix, Co-Founder and CEO of eCairn, the social media marketing software, to the program. Listen to the archive here:

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