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Fan Page Analytics Part II

0 comments By Deb Filed in Analytics, facebook Tagged with , , January 6th, 2010 @ 10:02 am

This is Part II in a two part series.

As discussed in Part I, Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics (FPA) demonstrates the potential for better understanding of Facebook Fan Page Fans and aggregate demographics.

Testing it out: Cyclefilm

Facebook Fan Page Fans most likely to be Cyclefilm Fans

From a practical standpoint, Markus Neuert at Cyclefilm put FPA to work right away. Note the list above of the top Fan Pages that crossover with Cyclefilm’s site. Including: Lance Armstrong, Women’s Cycling Magazine, New Belgium Brewing and USA Cycling, to name a few.

As a result Markus reports:

After seeing the analysis, I posted a CycleFilm new item on the FB sites I share the most fans with. In addition, the location analysis made me log on to twitter and follow more people from Colorado.

I had an amazing re-follow response! All in all, I think the analysis made my social postings more relevant. I can target people and groups who are most likely to find Cyclefilm products entertaining and useful, cutting down on perceived ’spam’ and getting a better response rate. We all win! Relevance and targeting are key to a successful marketing strategy in my opinion!

Curious about the FPA data, I asked Pete Warden: Does FPA cover all Fan Pages?

The site relies on a sample of around 100 million public Facebook profiles for its statistics, which means that some smaller pages may be missing or have too few profiles to be significant. Generally any sites with more than 500 fans should show up.

One last question for Pete. How do you see FPA evolving?

The evolution will be driven by the feedback I hear from users of this initial version. There’s a lot of directions I can take this, I’m pretty excited about extending the analytics to Twitter to for example, but I’d like to understand what features people really care about before I go too deep.

What suggestions do you have for Pete? What would data sets will be useful for you? How would you apply this to twitter?

Let them know in the comments below, or you can find Pete on twitter @petewarden and Markus Neuert @cyclefilm.

Fan Page Analytics uncover value in Facebook Fan Pages

0 comments By Deb Filed in facebook, marketing, measurement, online community, research tools January 2nd, 2010 @ 11:36 am

This is Part I in a two part series.

Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics is an online application that generates comparison data & geographic demographics of Facebook Fan Pages. A lot of discussion around fan pages has been that they are low-visibility, elicit little engagement from fans and are akin to a status symbol- check this box so your friends will know, you too are a fan of sock monkeys.

Gist, a social CRM, hosted the dinner at Defrag ‘09 where I met Pete Warden and a host of other technies interested in creating a clearer picture of social network users from publicly available data. Based on those conversations, Pete decided to tackle the Fan Page challenge.

A couple of days ago, just after a few tweeps were discussing that number of Fans doesn’t necessarily correlate with activity or community, Pete released Fan Page Analytics.  A common perception: Fan Pages basically offer the ability to demonstrate an affiliation. And, with the exception of a few celebrities and organizations that work to build community on the page, not a whole lot happens on a Fan Page.

As it turns out, even with little activity, Fan Pages can provide useful information when viewed through Fan Page Analytics (FPA). For example, Fans of Snuggie™ are also likely to be fans of freeze pops, Michael Jackson and Twilight (Sorry, but I couldn’t resist picking a “soft” target for my first example.)

Yesterday I asked Pete a few questions to learn more about FPA.

What inspired you to create FPA?

I’ve spent a lot of time designing ads to run on Facebook for my Mailana service, and it was very tough to figure out what locations or shared interests to target since Facebook doesn’t give you access to that sort of demographic information.

Where did you find the data?

I realized that the data I’d already collected from web crawls of public profiles on facebook.com could help me build a better picture of the audience I should be aiming for.

One happy user is Markus Neuert at CycleFilm

I asked Markus what he’d learned from using Fan Page Analytics:

At first, I was very surprised by the amount of fans I share with Women’s and Ladies Cycling Mags. On second thought, I wasn’t. Through my own Fan Page analytics provided by Facebook, I knew my audience is 80% male – and males like to look at females – so what better way to do that than on the mentioned women’s cycling Fan Pages. :)   My recent DVD release of US Pro Cyclist Liz Hatch may also have contributed to that.  Either way, the analysis clearly confirmed Facebook’s own analysis data, and even expanded upon it by giving me concrete options to act upon.

Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics is currently in beta. If you’d like to participate here is a link to the form.

And the saga continues…Part II: Pete shares where he is going with FPA and Markus explains how he immediately leveraged his FPA data for CycleFilm.

Looking ahead from the past

5 comments By Deb Filed in learning Tagged with , January 1st, 2010 @ 10:46 am

Welcome 2010! What has made the last year for me, were words of wisdom about life, work, technology, culture, you name it. I’ll share a few of them with you here.

On getting Started

Inspiration is for amateurs.

Ken Bernstein is a friend and Boulder artist who kindly reminded me, while I was complaining of writer’s block, that if you’re a professional, waiting around for the muse is not an option.

On organizational culture

Your culture is your brand.

Tony Hsieh, zappos.com CEO, has this as his mantra and you can find it on their company website. Maybe it is even in the corporate restroom stalls, I don’t know.  It’s so tempting for a company to go for ROI right off the bat, but Tony’s philosophy has been to hire optimistic, problem solvers who love to give good customer service. They know customers will come back. And a culture like that is going to be around for a long time.

On what makes great technology stand out

It’s actually counter intuitive. To me it’s the thing that’s the least complicated. When I was writing at Wired, any time I got some new, fancy technology that people would tell me, ‘this is gonna change the world,’ I’d send it home to my mom and dad. And if they said, ‘uh we don’t understand how this works,’ then I kind of knew this wasn’t going to gain wide adoption, at least in its early phases.

Ball State University Prof, Brad King, emceed last year’s Business Accelerator at SXSW. In his Level3 Red Couch interview, we got to pick his brain for a few minutes. This response to the question “What makes great technology stand out?” reminded me how easy it is to get caught up in the slickest, coolest looking app that performs awesome tricks for tech junkies, but may not sell to the average person. Isn’t that our goal? Creating new technology because you think it’s cool is fun, but producing something useful, that is accessible, now that’s progress!

On change

The first step towards change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change.

My friend Myrna shared this Will Garcia quote. Myrna Weinreich shares inspiring thoughts like some people breathe. Whenever I need a new perspective, one of the quotes she shares is right there for me. We are in a state of rapid, constant change and it helps to take a breather and remind yourself to adapt.

These words are still relevant for me and will be moving forward. Not a lot of luggage, but something that will get through security anyway.

Happy New Year!

Blog Action Day for Climate Change: just do one thing.

4 comments By Deb Filed in Environment, blogs, community, community service, participation, poverty October 15th, 2009 @ 12:48 am

Last year I was lucky enough to participate in Blog Action Day. It’s pretty impressive to see the numbers- 7,883 blogs, from 140 countries with over 11 million readers are reaching out to educate people about Climate Change. Posts are from bloggers like Vincent Abry from France whose un monde du geek I enjoy. Ritsuko’s ゴハンBlog in Japan. (ゴハン = food.) Whose tweets about camping I’ve enjoyed. And, The Gamelian World out of Ghana who recently reported the first iPhone game likely to come out of Africa.

You get the idea- all these folks on the same day reaching out for the same goal. Pretty amazing.

My contribution is a small one. I used to work in the environmental movement and what I noticed is that most people felt guilty about not doing enough. I think they felt that if they couldn’t do something on a grand scale, like have a completely solar home, that their was nothing they could do to contribute to protecting the environment. When, in fact, if you asked them, they did something- turned off the lights after they left a room, conserved water, drove a smaller car, etc. Once they thought about it, they decided they could add one more thing into their lives, such as:

  • Writing to an elected official once a year to let them know their opinion.
  • Figured out how to recycle in their neighborhood.
  • Watered their garden before 8 a.m. (less evaporation)
  • Wore a sweater and turned the heat down. (Thank you President Carter!)
  • Bought grass-fed beef when they could afford it.
  • Supported a local CSA buy purchasing their vegetables through one.
  • Volunteered at community organizations committed to protecting the environment while serving the community. Denver’s Same Cafe is a great example!
  • Giving props to a climate-friendly business on review site tuggl.com.

Again, I am not suggesting you do all of these, just saying maybe you can try out one of these occasionally. Then you can work on getting your home off the grid. jk.

Thanks again to the folks at Blog Action Day for making this happen!

Point/Counterpoint: Plurk v. Twitter

10 comments By Deb Filed in micro-blog, plurk, trends, twitter Tagged with , , , , , , September 17th, 2009 @ 12:41 pm

This is a cross-posting with Aaron Strout of Citizen Marketer 2.0.

On last week’s Quick-n-Dirty podcast
show, my co-host, Jennifer Leggio and
I spent some time talking about Twitter wannabe, Plurk, and why
it never really took off (see Compete’s comparative numbers). In fact,
in my wrap up post, I went so far as to say that Plurk “sucked.” Well,
our friend and listener, Deb Robison, hopped on the show’s live chat and told us not so fast.
In fact, Deb argued that not only was Plurk not dead but rather that
there were a number of reasons why she actually liked Plurk more than
Twitter.

This conversation of course piqued my curiosity so I threw the idea
out to Deb that we do a “point / counterpoint” on Plurk vs. Twitter.
We agreed to divide and conquer with me writing the intro, both of us
creating a list of “pro’s and con’s” and then Deb doing the wrap up.
Since Deb gets the last word in this discussion, I have to say, she’s
done a great job getting me to think more about my harsh criticism of
Plurk. That’s not to say that I will jump back in and start using
Plurk again but rather that I might take a “kinder and gentler”
approach when I bring it up.
To make this a little more interactive, I did add my comments on Deb’s
lists in brackets — I encouraged her to do the same (hers are in gray
type):

Deb’s Plurk Pro’s

  1. threaded conversations easy to follow, seems to develop
    conversation better, more in-depth [AWS - fair point. Although
    there are a few third party apps that do this for Twitter like Mike Langford's TweetWorks]  Deb: yes, but is TweetWorks widely known?
    Oddly, one of the best apps for following threaded Twitter
    conversations is the app-formerly-known-as TwiterFon, now called echofon, but
    is only available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, so it too languishes
    in obscurity.

  2. consistency of group builds
    relationships greeting, familiarity, connections- asking about
    personal/work issues
  3. timeline and response mechanism
    prevent missing a conversation you were participating
    in     [Aaron: Twitter could benefit from this although
    hashtags make an attempt to replicate] Deb: but you still have to do a
    search for a hashtag potentially taking you away from your Twitter
    stream- obviously not the case if you use Tweetdeck, or Tweetgrid, but
    both have limitations- there is often a lag time.
  4. easier to decide who to
    friend-can see them participate in other conversations and how they
    are connected to the people you already know
  5. groups formed around communities
    within plurk- plurkshops, plurk weightloss, recipe
    exchange
  6. constantly adding new features
    (where does the money come from?)
  7. can post from other services
    such as ping.fm and posterous
  8. private conversations take place
    among a group of people     [Aaron: in my mind, this is Plurk's biggest advantage over
    Twitter. I've heard that this functionality is underway on Twitter but
    right now, it's frustratingly absent]
  9. **Has anyone noticed my high
    level of restraint here? I never mention that- Plurk rarely goes down.
    A lot of folks migrated to Plurk during the season of the FAIL Whale
    last year, but moved back once things stabilized.     [Aaron: great
    point]

**Deb:
I have added #9 as an afterthought here, can’t believe I forgot it for
the original list **

Deb’s Plurk Con’s

  1. no community
    evangelism     [Aaron
    - where's Robert Scoble when you need him?]
  2. karma- it’s only a novelty, not
    sure why people focus on it so much     [Aaron - as I mentioned in the
    podcast, this is the thing I hate most about Plurk]
  3. hard to use on a PC- mouse
    trackball makes it easier to scroll side to side
  4. no SMS (IM though)
  5. only a couple of mobile apps
—————


Aaron’s Twitter Pro’s
  1. Sheer numbers: Whether it’s 20
    million or 40 million (yes, there is a question as to how many of
    these folks are actually active), many of my friends are here en
    masse.     Deb: yes, but the numbers are
    overwhelming, some days I see people in my stream and think “who the
    hell is that and why am I following them? Or a friend doesn’t show up
    in my stream for days. They were active, but for some reason only some
    Tweeps show up in the stream. I am sure volume is the
    issue.
  2. Simplicity: yes, it took a
    little while to figure out Twitter but it was a whole lot easier to
    navigate than the land of weird looking animals with bones sticking
    out of their necks.     Deb: again, see my argument about karma-
    who cares? Are you subject to nightmares after seeing Plurk critters?
    It’s about the conversation.
  3. Third party apps: due to
    Twitter’s open architecture, I’ve loved the apps that have been
    developed around Twitter.     Deb: yep, the Plurk people
    missed the boat on this one. Although, I don’t understand why the
    Twitter folks couldn’t seem to innovate, Plurk constantly adds new
    features which seem to play the role of a third party
    app.
  4. Low barrier to
    following/un-following: unlike Facebook, I like the fact that
    following or un-following someone on Twitter has very little stigma. I
    can “try” someone’s stream if I like and then just as easily un-follow
    them if I don’t find value.     Deb: never had any problem
    unfollowing people on Plurk or Twitter, but I notice some people
    really get upset when unfollowed. What’s the big deal? You have a
    thousand followers and you are going to miss me??
  5. Straightforward stream: while
    one might argue that this is the biggest strength and weakness of
    Twitter, I like the fact that I can dip in and out of the stream as I
    choose. If I want to update and walk away for a day, there’s nobody
    waiting on the other side for me to finish my threaded
    conversation.     Deb: yeah, but I have had to come in
    mid-stream when a conversation is going on and sort through the tweets
    to get to the origination of the convo. That is when I reach for
    TwitterFon (echofon).
Aaron’s Twitter Con’s
  1. Spam: with mass adoption comes
    opportunity. With opportunity comes scam artists. Unfortunately, this
    has become a huge pain in the ass when it comes to determining who to
    follow back.     Deb: I did not
    have to deal with a spammer until a couple of weeks ago. It was
    sending me through the roof. I experienced
    “SpamRage.”
  2. Threaded conversations: while
    there are third party apps that do this, it would be nice to have this
    “in-line” on Twitter.
  3. No group DMs: as I commented
    above, there are many a time when I would love to be able to send a
    group DM. For instance, I group blog with a number of friends over at
    Big Papelbon and
    it would be nice to be able to send a comment to all the contributors
    via DM all at one time.
  4. Hard to follow lots of users:
    yes, I do use Tweetdeck which makes following discrete groups easier
    but it would be nice if Twitter had Friendfeed like capabilities to
    pre-segment people into groups. Based on Deb’s “Plurk pro’s” above, it
    sounds like you can do this on Plurk.     Deb: you can create groups and/or private
    conversations sent to individuals of your choice on Plurk, but I
    rarely do it. Tweetdeck crashes constantly, so I don’t use it
    anymore.



Gee, I feel like David Brooks and
Gail Collins of the New York Times’ The Conversation blog where the opposing parties exchange
niceties about summer vacation, then give their POVs. The Conversation
ends nicely and we politely agree to disagree. That having been said,
while I wouldn’t use the word “sucks” about Twitter, I don’t like it
as much as Plurk, but feel I have to use it for my work- held hostage
by a little bird and a whale. Thanks for the lovely discourse Aaron
and I hope your summer on the Cape didn’t leave you with too bad of a
sunburn. [Aaron: Deb, this has been a blast. And as you
know, I love doing the point / counterpoint thing. Normally I spar
weekly with Jennifer on the Quick-n-Dirty but I always welcome
engaging with other smart folks like yourself.]

Gist Open Beta Launches: Multi-talented CRM collects, prioritizes & manages contact information

1 comment By Deb Filed in CRM, PRM, Startup Tagged with , , , September 15th, 2009 @ 7:12 am

Gist_logoA great app for saving time, learning more about your contacts and keeping up with the news! Gist’s easy-to-use customize dashboard keeps you up-to-date, not only on a contact’s resume, but on their social news as well.  It also makes sharing information across email, twitter and faccebook a snap!

Gist finds and organizes social data and puts it at your finger tips.

Gist offers a number of ways to organize your contacts- tags, by importance/frequency of information flow and good old alphabetization. For each person, there are the standard fields for phone, address, etc., but Gist goes social by adding fields for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, etc. Their search engine is so powerful that in some cases, when adding in a new contact’s name it immediately finds their twitter and LinkedIn info and adds it automatically!

Suddenly you have an easy way to prep for meetings and a huge time saver. And did I mention that Gist is compatible with Outlook and integrates into Salesforce.com? It also works for my gmail and google apps accounts which makes me very happy.

What’s new with Gist?

  1. For Gist Rookies the Gist Tour- an entirely new introduction to Gist with videos to highlight features and functionality
  2. Much deeper integration with Salesforce.com
  3. A dashboard optimizer that lets you determine the number of people & companies’ news you can view at any given time.
  4. Speed improvements- especially for twitter, which was kind of pokey during private beta (we were a demanding bunch of beta users)

If you want to learn more about Gist, check out the “See How It Works” video on the Gist home page, or, once you create an account go to the Help button and click on “Show Tour.”

Finally, I have to say thanks to Gist for all the TLC they gave their beta-users: monthly calls, speedy responses to feedback and reaching out to users in the various cities they visited showed their strong commitment to building a community, not just creating a product.

Gist CEO, T.A. McCann, will be presenting at defrag this November. We look forward to hosting him here in Denver and learning more about Gist. In the meantime, you can contact Robert Pease, V.P. of Marketing at robert(at)gist(dot)com.

#chat on twitter: what do you get out of it?

0 comments By Deb Filed in community, twitter Tagged with , , , September 14th, 2009 @ 2:49 pm

This week Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) and Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout) hosts of the Quick-N-Dirty Podcast have asked me to be guest. We’ll discuss twitter hashtag chats- #foodchat , #blogchat, editorchat, and #journchat are a few you may have heard of. And we’d like your feedback- take this poll and let us know what you think.

How and why do you participate? What do they bring to the community as a whole? And what do you do if a chat is junking up your stream?

Take the poll. Catch us on the the Quick-n-Dirty Podcast this Thursday, 9/17, at 4PM MT.

Following @KellyeCrane’s lead: Friday Funnies

0 comments By Deb Filed in Uncategorized August 7th, 2009 @ 11:08 am

Kellye Crane at Solo PR Pro inspired me to post a funny. This TED talk of Alain de Boton’s made me smile and laugh at myself (and the human condition).

You wouldn’t bring an allen wrench to bed, would you?

0 comments By Deb Filed in fun Tagged with August 3rd, 2009 @ 2:45 pm

question-mark-button-thumb304974

*disclaimer* I know I am going to get a lot of bad, innuendo-laden jokes (and creepy spam), so keep it smart and funny and I’ll post your comment.*

While I was sick the last couple of weeks, I realized that even though I was pretty out of it, I really wanted to tweet, check up on facebook, email, etc. on my iPod Touch. I just about went nuts because I needed to lay off.  Total technology withdrawal compounded my injuries. Clearly I am a little too close to my technological devices.

Friends have reported they take their laptops and work from bed. Sometimes, you can even tell that folks are tweeting news links while still in their silk jammies.

People electronic mobile devices are TOOLS. Productivity tools.

I know some of you will say you are playing a game, watching Jill & Kevin’s Wedding Dance, or playing Sudoku but a lot of you are working.

In the past I have brought writing to edit, papers to grade, etc. But I never brought in something that clocks my billable hours, allows me to have a conference call or review spreadsheets. It’s one thing if someone can’t stop checking their Blackberry at the dinner table, but the bed thing takes it to a whole new level.

My point: If you worked in any other profession, would you bring tools to bed? Let’s try and visualize that…

  1. Vice- you need to get those two-by-fours glued together by tomorrow morning’s house framing. Nope. Glue stinks.
  2. A band saw? Nah. Wood shavings make a mess.
  3. Sewing machine? The sheets would get caught in the button-holer and it would be all over.
  4. Soldering iron for model airplane assembly? Too dangerous.
  5. Paper shredder? (see #2 regarding “mess.”)
  6. Wire cutters and that lamp cord you need to fix. Sounds like something out of a B horror flick.
  7. Tape measure & balance. Do I have to explain?
  8. Small set of screwdrivers. Put the Ikea nightstand together before you go to bed. Some “parts” might go missing.
  9. Garden clippers to deadhead your potted miniature roses? Ouch!
  10. KitchenAid standing mixer. I don’t think I’d get a good enough crust if I mixed on an unstable surface..

In all seriousness, this week we’ll be talking about real productivity apps.

Some of you probably would like to add to the list of tools not invited to bed. Post your additions to the list and remember, this is a family-friendly show.

I have to wash my iPhone’s hair…

10 comments By Deb Filed in humor July 17th, 2009 @ 5:38 pm

Tired of using the “I can’t go out tonight, I have to wash my hair” excuse?

As with everything else, let technology give you a hand. Here are several subtle ways to tell a prospective date that you aren’t available tonight.

10. My computer just got the blue screen of death.

9. I only go out with iPhone 3GS owners.

8. I only accept date requests via IM and email, your request came via voice.

7. Need to figure out how to sync my contacts and calendar.

6. Taking a “build your own iPhone app” webinar.

5. Need to review my Genius shopping list.

4. Domain name blue-light special on godaddy.

3. Already going out with a “missed connection.”

2. There is a special on hulu I just can’t miss.

1. I have to go through all my new Twitter followers and block the spammers.

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