Disqus - Latest Comments for MartinEdic

Re: Where’s My SEO From Twitter?

webrochester1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:12:25 -0000

yeah and it will really hurt their page rank.

Re: The Dirty Little Secret of Social Media Monitoring

MartinEdic — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:52:54 -0000

At first glance I'd guess these variations are in how the media are classified- as the total number of results is not that far apart, 688 for R6 vs. 822 for SM2. The two system work very differently with SM2 having a longer historical database (about 2.5 years for some sources) that it pulls from. I would compare the new results for each daily as they come in or set a date range- SM2 allows this, not sure about R6 (I am former marketing director for Techrigy but otherwise not affiliated with them).
The other comparison that is far more important is the total amount of meta-data collected for each result. This meta data enables the wide range of analysis that the tools offer. Sheer results are meaningless without the ability to discover demographic, sentiment, emotive, popularity/influence, etc. of those results.

Re: Another study shows that Craigslist is killing newspapers

MartinEdic — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:20:16 -0000

I recently did an apartment search and had a bit of enlightenment regarding Craigslist and the 'old' world of print classified. Because Craigslist doesn't limit number of words (print charged by the word) and because you can post links and images, landlords have been forced to improve their properties and their photos. They can't get away with describing a tiny place as 'cozy'.
This is not a small change when you expand it out to classifieds as a whole. And it is a graphic example of why print newspapers are simply never going to be viable again.

Re: When You Are A Public Company Without Being Public

fredwilson — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:09:10 -0000

yup

Re: When You Are A Public Company Without Being Public

VictusFate — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:30:38 -0000

Great viewpoint Martin (breaking out of the tech market), you just have to sell the tops of the social trees in facebook to create massive need for your product(s). But any social media is going to have to keep users engaged. That's a tough job. Facebook has to make our social lives not just easier, but better for it to keep people coming back.
(I removed some of the excess out for now, may put together a blog post on it later)

Re: When You Are A Public Company Without Being Public

MartinEdic — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:55:52 -0000

I think this discussion is too granular. Revenue models aside (I know, that's a very blase statement!), we have to look at what Facebook has accomplished. I am middle-aged and have 160 active friends on Facebook, most of whom have joined in the last six months and are not techies. Virtually none of them Twitter for example (I have posted guides to Twitter at the request of some). What does this mean in the real world? Facebook, as a platform, has crossed the chasm. No other social media platform, including blogging, has done this.
This means the market they are creating is not demographically techies, young people, niche interest groups- it is everyone.
When you are reaching everyone your revenue models don't have to be earthshaking innovations. They not only reach a broad swath that is growing, they have a lot of data about everyone- much more, for example, than Google has. They not only know our demographics and interests, they know our range of people who share those interests. Our 'influence' in other words. From a marketing POV, we only need to focus our Facebook buys on the influencers and we exponentially increase our reach with relevance. This is huge.

Re: Quick ‘n Dirty Social Media Monitoring Guide: Intermediate Edition | Social Media Explorer

KatFrench — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:29:13 -0000

Martin,

I really appreciate your weighing in. For the purposes of this series, I separated out SM2 and Techrigy to highlight in this post because they offer ongoing free versions of their tools (not just a 30 day trial period). It was definitely no disrespect meant to either tool.

It was more based on the "if you're stepping up from Google Alerts and don't have a budget yet" factor than a comparison of the features and functionality between SM2 & Filtrbox and Radian6, Cymfony, et. al.

We probably will do a more detailed comparative post including all the professional monitoring tools out there (an update of a post Jason did around this time last year.) Most of the tools have had several rounds of upgrades in the last year, so that's a post that we probably need to cover soon. But this post wasn't meant to be that.

This post is more about ways that folks who are still just toe-dipping and testing the waters in social media monitoring can get more sophisticated in their approach even before they have a budget. In some cases, so they can justify that budget.

Re: Quick ‘n Dirty Social Media Monitoring Guide: Intermediate Edition | Social Media Explorer

MartinEdic — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:10:44 -0000

Kat, there's no way you can put Radian6 at a different level than SM2. In my previous life as a Techrigy person I did a lot of A/B testing of both systems and radian6, while cute to look at with its widget interface, was not particularly useful in real world applications. The reporting tools and analytics are minimal and the amount of meta-data collected limits your ability to learn more about who is talking and why, where, what, etc.
Given that I now have an unbiased ability to choose between the two, I'd choose SM2.
And pricewise they're at the same level unlike Buzzmetrics and Cymfony.
That's my 2 cents!

Re: Maverick Angels launches AngelLink, a “virtual investment network”

anthonyha — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:22:15 -0000

That does sound odd. I've emailed Maverick to see if they can comment on this

Re: Maverick Angels launches AngelLink, a “virtual investment network”

Yuri Ammosov — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:52:15 -0000

Martin: this always smells extremely fishy. This means they cannot charge investors because they actually do not have any.

Re: Maverick Angels launches AngelLink, a “virtual investment network”

MartinEdic — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:47:31 -0000

I just looked through the Maverick Angels site and found that they charge companies seeking funding $995.00 if they reach a certain point in the process. I have never heard of an angels group charging a company to enter the vetting process.

Re: Maverick Angels launches AngelLink, a “virtual investment network”

MartinEdic — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:41:21 -0000

BTW, 'accredited' is a voluntary criteria wherein an investor is supposed to have $2 million in net worth or have earned over $250k/ year for the past three years (I think these numbers are still correct). The SEC dies not verify these claims, they are there to discourage people from investing their life savings if they don't these kind of assets or income.

Re: The Social Media Echo Chamber Makes Me Not Want To Listen | Social Media Explorer

MartinEdic — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:49:22 -0000

Kevin, I actually agreed with much of your post- their is a certain 'high
school cliqueyness' to the social pundits but I think it's harmless. Guy
Kawasaki actually wrote a good post about ignoring the influencers and
looking at the unknowns.As for Twitter, the key is to set up real time email
Alerts for keywords relevant to your business or interests and only follow
those whose interests are a match. This cuts through the huge amount of
silliness there and creates a highly targeted market. Our application, SM2,
supports this capability (among many many others) and has been very useful
in helping me understand the validity of Twitter as a business tool.

Re: The Social Media Echo Chamber Makes Me Not Want To Listen | Social Media Explorer

Kevin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:37:09 -0000

I admittedly have a love hate relationship with Twitter. That was more of a joke than anything in the piece but I do think Twitter is way overvalued. (In your specific case it obviously isn't and that is great that it is working for you.)

I saw a post today about small businesses and what they should use as a social media tool with their limited time and Twitter was number two on the list. First of all those blanket lists are horseshit because each business has different needs and their audiences are in different places.

While Twitter does work great as a tool especially when geared around tech people, the average everyday person has no idea what it is. Twitter is powerful for a certain crowd. But to key in and spend your time on it as a main plank, unless it is directly in your space, is a waste.

The thing is "social media people" and this is probably my second biggest peeve.... Think that everyone else in the world uses the internet the same way they do. That is one the biggest failures when it comes to strategy.

Re: The Social Media Echo Chamber Makes Me Not Want To Listen | Social Media Explorer

MartinEdic — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:21:23 -0000

Hmm...nothing like a good rant once in awhile!
IMHO, you're wrong about Twitter to put it mildly. I'm putting it right behind search in its eventual impact on how we market things, how we do customer support, how we manage brands and how we generate new business. We're booking 3-5 demos daily via Twitter for a professional service. Nothing else is moving into the B-B marketing mainstream as effectively.
Of course we are a social media company so its natural that our customers, being early adopters, would gravitate to something like Twitter. But I think its a harbinger...

Re: 10 Tools for Monitoring Your Brand in 2009

MartinEdic — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:35:40 -0000

We offer a comprehensive social media monitoring application that collects all of the sources you mention in one place and includes extensive analysis tools including demographics, sentiment with tone and emotion, geo-location, trends tracking, share of voice, popularity ranking and much more. There is a fully functional free version at http://sm2.techrigy.com

Re: Where’s My SEO From Twitter?

dewaji — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:39:37 -0000

I would agree with you, and this will make Twitter not valuable service

Re: Not All Earnings News Is Bad

MartinEdic — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:05:35 -0000

And now we have aapl beating the street estimates by 22% eps on GAAP numbers and by 50% on non-GAAP numbers. $28 billion in cash. What do they do with that?

Re: Where’s My SEO From Twitter?

MartinEdic — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:33:23 -0000

I would argue no because it would flood Twitter with SEO spam. The purpose of no-follows, is in part, as an anti-spam tactic enforced by Google to keep their results clean. If every Retweet became a link their API would get slammed with scripts.

Re: Scale Economics

MartinEdic — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:47:18 -0000

I think the ad serving industry is in total denial regarding banner blindness- it is real and it is the primary reason for falling CPMs. The idea that you can 'broadcast' ads into social media is so wrong that I don't know where to start. First, if you place an ad in social it will not only get ignored, it may create a strongly negative backlash. This has not been the case in traditional media.
Second, people seeking buying information in social media want information- not brand messaging. Throwing something 'creative' at them is putting the horse behind the cart. They're already past that stage of the buying cycle.
I know I sound like a lunatic to people in the media/ad industry but listen please: You have to wake up. Advertising in social media will not work. Community engagement works. Adding value to the discourse works. Serving up contextual ads will not work.
The gist is: Stop trying to glom an old model onto a new media.
BTW, why am I so vehement about this? Because we have a database of over 1 billion social media conversations and if you run a search on 'ads in social media' the sentiment analysis is off the charts negative.

Re: You don’t want that free iPhone — another Twitter scam breaks out

MartinEdic — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:28:02 -0000

Major phishing attacks going on in Twitter also. Detailed analysis here: http://blog.techrigy.com/?p=181

Re: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/thoughts-on-re.html

MartinEdic — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:10:41 -0000

Fred, I'd add Viet Nam to your Asia list. Lots of very exciting stuff going on there including a massive investment in manufacturing infrastructure that is entirely new and state of the art. Plus there is that layer of French culture that still remains from colonial days. I'm definitely planning to get there this year.
And I too start at 7 and get to the office around 10. It means I spend the busy commute time at my desk dealing with emails and then have a relaxing drive in to work.
If today is any indicator, 2009 is going to be big for us. I started my day with over 20 requests for information! Amazing how the holiday ending recharges people!

Re: Default To Public

fredwilson — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:24:23 -0000

Great decision, self service for the win!

Re: Default To Public

MartinEdic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:05:15 -0000

In social media the real value comes from two aspects that unique to most social media sources: They are public and the effect of a conversation is exponential. We deal with marketing agencies and those who don't understand these values always question the value of engagement in social media. They still have the 'blast your message out to the world' mentality that says that engagement is too granular, too one on one, to be cost effective. This leaves out the fact that an engagement that adds value is read by many and spread by many. It's an entirely new eco-system for communication of all kinds including mar-comm.
As for openness, we made a decision expose our pricing on our site and offer a fully functioning free version of our app without requiring a conversation with a sales rep. We are the only company in our space to do so and it has proven very effective, generating business and building a user-community that provides a lot of valuable input.

Re: Luca shovels in $76M for coal-to-gas technology

MartinEdic — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:19:49 -0000

"Coal is no longer the dirty word it once was."
Yeah, right. We now know that virtually every coal plant in the world is generating, as a by-product, millions of tons of coal ash, an unregulated toxic substance and burying it in ponds. The technology this company offers might alleviate that but the industry is going to fight for their sunk costs in filthy coal generation before someone wakes up and realizes that coal is the single worst energy source we have. Even with this approach you still have to mine and move the coal, an extremely destructive process that is also very costly from an emissions and fuel POV.
Please don't write this foolishness. I expect better.