BusinessWeek Online reports on a move by Google to make social network advertising more relevant by developing an InfluenceRank. This technology would help assess an individual socnet member’s level of influence over a group of peers — sort of a FICO score of your personal profile’s influence.

Joe Marchese at MediaPost’s Online Spin offers an interesting perspective: it’s clear you can’t directly correlate activity with influence, without risking overvaluing the influence of a follow-happy Florida car dealer who’s finagled more reciprocal Twitter relationships than Peter Kim. More importantly, what will marketers do with influence levels; will paying a higher CPM on a higher InfluenceRank personal profile actually achieve influence? This capability might end up a red herring; offering a quick-fix to marketers reluctant to dive deep into developing the social media capabilities that might drive longer term community value.

Tags: advertising, marketing, measurement by admin
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All this week, Technorati is releasing its 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Thus far they’ve profiled the bloggers, explored blog topics and styles, and examined the business of blogging.

Catharine P. Taylor over at SocialMediaInsider reflected today that we don’t often give blogs their due. Blogs went so quickly from novelty to mainstream, and were in some respects overshadowed by other more addictive technologies like social networks and microblogs. With 900,000 blog posts every 24 hours, posting has become part of the daily rhythm of life for roughly 23 million US bloggers. Perhaps blogging has become the dial tone of social media: we’ve grown so used to it we just expect it to be there.

Tags: research by admin
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We get a good deal of unsolicited feedback on our name here at Crimson Hexagon. Comments range from: “Five syllables — is that a joke?” to “Wow, you guys are SEO geniuses.”

The Library of Babel, visualized by http://wordle.net

Here’s the story behind the name — we thought it fit our business, and what our technology is positioned to do: make sense of large volumes of content. So far, some like it and some hate it, but everyone seems to remember it.

Tags: company by admin
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When consumer research giants like P&G and Unilever announce an impending industry shift, it’s time to take notice. It’s no surprise that consumers are tiring of solicited feedback: lately it seems that every online purchase I make from movie tickets on up merits an exhaustive survey. Even a call to a mutual fund company yields an intrusive follow up call to see how the first call went. Phew.

Wouldn’t it be better to minimize the endless questioning, and limit the solicited research to the highest value settings and interactions? That’s the thinking behind this Advertising Research Foundation initiative. ARF is bringing together industry giants to  engage with this consumer research crisis.

We’re hearing about the challenges of finding qualified participants on the solicited research side, and on the monitoring side, a concern around sampling vs. statistically significant results. As the barriers to online content fall one Tweet at a time, we’re thinking we’re closing in on the ability for consumer brand discussions to consistently generate statistically significant insights.

Tags: research by admin
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Seth Godin ponders listening to and engaging with high-volume customers — not the bulk buyers, but the loud kind.

It’s a question we bat around when developing monitors to gauge online opinion. Weighting results for authority and relevance is vital for brand marketers. But how important is it to track the insights in ALL the opinion, and not just the opinion that you subjectively (”everyone reads x”) or objectively (rank, link analysis, etc.) assign?

We see companies starting to do what Seth Godin talks about: amplifying some voices over others by giving them a platform. Whether that’s monitoring and integrating inbound customer messages, opening up blog comments, or hosting a community depends on the level of engagement companies are prepared to offer.

Tags: brand monitoring, customer voice by admin
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United Airline’s stock took a beating on Monday when a news item about their 2002 bankruptcy was republished without a date stamp — and next to a current weather map. The echo effect of a single document led to a >$1B loss in less than a quarter of an hour.

Today’s NYT deconstructs the chain of events, and concludes: “eliminating the human touch from the process seems to be what wiped out all that value in United’s stock.”

Inferring sentiment from text without human participation is extremely difficult.  Our own approach relies on a one-time human analysis that amplifies and scales with an algorithm — and focuses more on characterizing the haystack than identifying each needle.

Tags: news, uh oh by admin
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Our CEO Candace Fleming will be speaking at the New Marketing Summit on October 14 in Foxboro.  Chris Brogan has put together a terrific agenda, including Don Peppers who should have some interesting insights on 1to1 media meeting social media — feels more like a continuum than a sea change to me.

Candace’s panel is Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring, and the Future. We’re hoping she’ll get the chance to dive in with some concrete examples of where tuning in to opinion made an actionable difference.

Tags: events, product by admin
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