Synthesio, Global Social Media Monitoring

We recently mentioned that the ability to monitor the hundreds of thousands of sources of information on the web means nothing if you are unable to determine the influence of the different information sources, themselves.

Indeed, a brand has much more to worry about if a video criticizing its products is published on DailyMotion than if an unknown blogger publishes a single post complaining about the lacking customer service. These two types of complaints certainly deserve a company’s attention, but not with the same level of urgency nor with the same type of communication.

That’s why Synthesio has developed a global influence indicator: SynthesioRank, a real number from 0 to 10.

This indicators take into account numerous criteria to determine the influence of a site:

- Site audience (Nielsen, ComScore)

- Media type: blog, forum, mainstream media, video sharing, etc.

- Publication frequency and volume

- Number of inbound/outbound links

- Google PageRank

These criteria were chosen for their quality and representativeness as they can be applied to the entirety of information sources monitored by Synthesio, i.e. internationally.

Consequently, sites given a SynthesioRank of 10/10 include The New York Times and Le Monde (online press) as well as The Huffington Post and Techcrunch (blogs) and also sites like DailyMotion (video sharing) and who could forget: Twitter (microblogging).

Of course certain criteria have been discarded voluntarily due to their questionable reliability (such as in the case of Alexa data which is regularly disputed) or their divisive aspect (the case for a blog’s number of feed subscribers that is stable yet often unavailable).

All in all, the criteria that were preserved continue to evolve over time, allowing updates of SynthesioRank each trimester.

SynthesioRank is integrated into the site identity descriptions (available on all of our online dashboards) as well as our influencer and community mappings.

These same mappings also allow you to go even further in your analyses by integrating brand-specific data, such as the volume and sentiment analyses of the comments, as well as the purpose of the community (site theme and target readership).

Overall, the most important for our clients is to be able to opt for a personalized analysis grid with regards to their specific objectives. Influence is defined differently for each project depending on the definition of the query as an issue for PR purposes, identification of influencers for marketing actions, managing your communities, etc.

More details about these mappings to come in another post!

Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization – Every Webpage to be Social

Here is an interesting idea brought to us by Jeremiah Owyang in his latest blog post from the study The Future of the Social Web (that is probably right on): soon, all brand web pages will be social.

He presents a list of how each page could become interactive, even if the company isn’t necessarily keen on the idea…

Facebook, for example, already offers the possibility to open a link while remaining within the Facebook site. This allows Internet users, then, to click on hyperlinks without ever leaving Facebook and therefore experience an “entirely social navigation” of the web.

Another example: aggregators that combine e-mail and other private social network feeds with public information from various sites. They allow increasingly rapid information sharing and a global fusion of the social web with the Web 1.0, sometimes referred to as the “static” web.

In the end, the great implication is the sharing of all of our data, public and private. A company’s ethics are directly implied, then, since being ethical is no longer a simple luxury but truly an obligation given that it is possible to detect immediately if there is a spokesperson or company employee defaming the image of the company.

A second implication has to do with the consumer’s voice that will continue to become more important than that of the company and its directors. The opinions of other Internet users are no longer perceived to be those of strangers and have come to have a greater impact on consumers’ purchase decisions.

Opera 10, Chrome 4, Firefox 4 : Vers des plateformes sociales et applicatives

Staying within the theme of information sharing and aggregation, Fred Cavazza posted an article on his blog describing 3 new platforms that have just been launched in response to the social demands of Internet users.

It’s hard to say which of the 3 is the most promising (although we do have a soft spot for Firefox here at our offices ), but we can’t wait to see the buzz around these tools. One thing is certain though: all of these aggregators try to respond to a greater need to easily handle several accounts. Why? To better manage an online reputation, of course!

Open Door Day : Camille Alloing

http://www.demainlaveille.fr/2009/06/16/journee-porte-ouverte-camille-alloing/

Online reputation today has become one of the main « buzz words » of the blogosphere : it conjures up several ideas (including the management of your digital footprint, a concern for most individuals) but especially online monitoring for business intelligence purposes.

With this in mind, the site CaddE-Reputation was created. The result of a collaboration among three students specializing in online monitoring, CaddE-Reputation is an open space where you can find all of the current events regarding online monitoring tools or simply online monitoring, itself, in France.

Camille Alloing, one of the collaborators for CaddE-Reputation, has provided us with a clear and concise resumé of the process of online monitoring on Aref Jdey’s blog, Demain la veille, also well-known in the online monitoring sector.

The only missing part we saw was the Analysis of Search Returns that should follow any monitoring and precede any action. In fact, online monitoring (put simply) means:

1)      Identifying and Listening to what needs to be monitored

2)      Analyzing and Measuring

3)      Reacting judiciously

Sentiment analysis, as well as a ranking of the articles, are therefore key elements necessary for preparing the monitoring follow-up in function of the business’s short- and long-term strategies.

We will be blogging soon about how Synthesio ranks its sources, but in the meantime we’ll simply say that search returns make no sense without being able to determine their influence.

All in all, a good resumé that is worth taking a look at.

US Women use blogs and social media for information

We often receive questions about social media and the point of measuring them, and we would like to present you with some opinions from other experts on the subject. In this article you can see the results of a study carried out by BlogHer and iVillage, the two largest feminine Internet communities.

Although this study is only based on American participants, the analysis can surely be applied to a large number of countries, France for example, within a couple of years if not right away (the average delay with regards to the U.S.’s Internet use is 2 years).

Among the study’s conclusions is a poll of 3.000 women, 80% of whom read a blog 1 to 3 times a week, often searching for new products online.

Nevertheless, the fundamental point remains: these women buy brands that they are “familiar with”.

The Drapeau Blanc agency, created by the union of two public relation agencies specialized in consumer communication ( Passerelles and WebReport), have published their white paper that brings together various pieces of advice with regards to corporate-consumer relationships.The “Five Main Checks” are well written and clearly show the experience they have. The blogosphere doesn’t pardon negligent bloggers… once a blog post has been published, you can count on it being there for quite a while!

Once again it is interesting to see the remark that the Internet user is “in control”, an expression that seems to group all consumers into one category as having the same amount of influence. It’s crucial to see, however, that certain ones have definitively more influence than others in regards to a company’s online reputation.

To give an example, Sprint just recently sent a complimentary Blackberry to Loïc LeMeur following a post on his Twitter account that they were not offering the new version. His friend didn’t get quite the same response (if he got any) to similar posts on his own Twitter account: seems like a bit of a double standard…

Happy reading to those who haven’t yet downloaded the white paper

Online Reputation Management (ORM) – A Proactive, not Reactive Process (but SEO and SEM only go so far)

Taking care of your company’s online reputation is certainly not a task to be dealt with “post crisis”. Monitoring should be a constant activity, either with any number of the free tools that we are all familiar with or with professional tools like Synthesio.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) can respond to monitoring needs in their own way but they don’t go far enough. You also need to be able to identify which sites are the most important, who are your brand’s influencers, what are your community’s main activities, etc.

In order to avoid certain crises (by detecting Internet users that can damage a brand’s reputation – rightly or wrongly), being proactive is key, but also and perhaps above all, so is finding and promoting so-called “brand ambassadors”.

After that it’s up to the company to decide what to do with this information. Unfortunately there is no handbook that can tell you exactly how to interact with your community. We’re well aware that the agencies that we work with have their work cut out for them!

Poor Economy Heightens Brand Equity

According to a study published by Harris Interactive, brand equity does not decrease during an economic crisis. On the contrary, consumers see purchasing familiar products or services as a sound investment.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that you should be monitoring your brand more closely during any type of crisis? After all, brand equity is created largely via buzz (online) and word of mouth (everywhere else), and WOM doesn’t go away just because of economic troubles!

It’s clear, of course, that a “golden” reputation is constructed over the long-term, but the analysis of Internet users’ online conversations makes up an essential starting point for a brand’s strategy with regards to their presence in consumers’ lives, whatever the situation… our clients seem to have gotten it quite well .