Healthy Blog Reviews

There’s one question that seems to be asked of Twitter all the time: what’s the ROI? I tend to reply with some smart alec comment such as “That’s like asking: what’s the ROI from my telephone!” Yeah, that doesn’t go down too well, but it’s true. Twitter is a channel, a tool. Just like your telephone, it has no ROI unless you put in place a strategy that can be measured. Well, that may be all well and good, but Twitter’s not taking any chances. It’s not prepared to sit back and hope its business users are smart enough to figure out the “ROI of Twitter,” so it’s made an important acquisition. It’s just acquired an analytics company. When Smallthought launched  Trendly , a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it…Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we announce the acquisition of Smallthought Systems. They have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners. Trendly is now closed to new customers, but according to its site, the service offered some pretty cool analysis . Stuff you can actual use!

Tags: acquisition, among-the-first, Analytics, current, current tools, m&a, new-customers, smallthought, smart-enough, Social, telephone, time, Twitter
Posted June 11, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Here at Marketing Pilgrim we have to keep an eye on everything happening in the Internet marketing space. It takes some doing to accomplish that and using tools to help make sense of all of the buzz out there is critical. We are, of course, very partial to Trackur for our online monitoring needs (maybe you should be too?). Now, we have received confirmation that the social media monitoring and analytics is heading rapidly toward maturity because IBM is getting into the game as well. We say this because IBM isn’t exactly on the leading edge of this type of service. As a result, if there is an official IBM product entry into the space then we are well beyond the “Do you think we should have this at our company?” phase. Mashable reports IBM is introducing a new social media monitoring tool, one that it says will measure consumer sentiment from data gathered on Twitter, blogs and other web services and networks. The software, called the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons, and it’s already being used by some pretty big businesses. Uh oh, geek alert! Anytime the term NLP (natural language processing) is used we know we have stepped into the land of engineers, scientists, academics and good ol’ fashioned ‘smarty pants’ types. We also know that there is a great likelihood that the tool itself may be a little, well, technical in its delivery. Take a look at the screen shot below and get an idea. If you can’t read it, there are terms like distribution, churn and predictor importance. Sounds important. Mashable’s description captures this as well. SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench is a high-grade product and might be both too sophisticated and too expensive for the average small business. The interface itself is hardly what we’d call intuitive or user-friendly. But for larger enterprises that need robust technologies and can’t risk entrusting data collection to a startup web app, IBM’s software might very well provide the features they need. So the online monitoring industry moves on into maturity. IBM’s entry into this space evokes the same feeling one gets when they discover that their grandparents started Facebook pages. It’s at that point that you figure everyone knows about it now. All kidding aside though, most attempts at any type of automated sentiment analysis in monitoring tools is more marketing hype than product reality. If IBM could prove that their tool does something to move the needle in this area then maybe there is something to this. In the area of automated sentiment analysis I still think that all claims to that effect should be viewed as guilty of over-hyped ‘til proven otherwise.

Tags: Analytics, area, called-the-spss, evokes-the-same, facebook, game, grandparents, internet, Internet Marketing, marketing, nlp, online, Social Media, space, tool
Posted May 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

All the cool kids have apps these days, and Google Analytics doesn’t want to be the last to the party. Yesterday at the eMetrics Summit (and on the Google Analytics blog ), Google announced several additions to its Analytics offerings, including better integration with AdWords and a Google Analytics App Gallery . The App Gallery premieres with almost 40 apps, targeting everything from phone call tracking, to widgets, to enhanced reporting tools. Google’s examples include “tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site.” Expanding Google Analytics and its features, of course, can be a great way to enhance the offerings, and maybe make it more competitive with paid packages. Meanwhile, Google AdWords is also integrating more into Google Analytics. Now, for example, developers can pull AdWords data through the Analytics API. Also, says Google: Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. And since the people at Google are apparently visual learners, they made a video to explain this. On a related note, AdWords Search Funnels are now available in all AdWords accounts. What do you think? Which apps are you most excited about? Will this be enough to bring Google Analytics on par with bigger paid packages?

Tags: AdWords, analyticator, Analytics, api, cloud-computing, cloud-hosting, cool, metrics-summit, offerings, over-the-coming, party, people, Search, words-search
Posted May 5, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media