DISQUS

There is a built-in social media convention that can help mitigate this: people can respond publicly and negatively when they see this taking place. Essentially this is one more attempt to apply 'broadcast marketing' standards to social media. And 'broadcasting' through an influential person (nothing more than spamming their followers really) will reduce their influence as people respond negatively.
If you sell your influence, you lose your influence.

Not sure the cooking analogy works for me because in essence in social media all the ingredients are the same: communication. Personalized communication that is public. So what we're looking for from a measurement point of view is meaning and source. Assuming that meaning is obvious, source, in this case, is the writer/speaker/contributor. Who are they, what are they saying, how influential are they, how do we reach them effectively, what do we say?
The answers to these questions are defining an entirely different type of marketing, one that traditional marketers are struggling with. We can't work off of consensus anymore- consensus gave us Neilsen-type metrics that we could target with mass communications. There are no mass communications in social media. The minute a source becomes mass media, it is no longer connected to an individual POV, a critical element of user-generated content.

So if you want to move forward there is an opportunity to help build a new marketing paradigm driven by this new social reality.

Great interview- when I saw he had an SEO background I was a little worried (;-) but this is very sharp assessment of social media. ( SEO and social are two different animals)
I hope this series continues on this level and would be happy to talk about the business models we're encountering among the brand managers we work with.

A very well-thought out post, especially the calculations for showing that, even on a small scale, you're increasing revenue per customer while growing your base. This is a double-whammy that shows the potential for explosive growth. If you have a subscription service like ours you're not just seeking to add customers, you're also working to upgrade existing customers. The combination of both should be very appealing to investors in a climate like the one we're living in today.

If you are going to brag about your technology, show us something we can look at including a web site, company etc., otherwise it can be taken as vaporware. This is a product discussion so it is perfectly appropriate to tell us who you are and what you do, in fact it is useful for those are seeking information to make a decision. Happy New Years!

In response to Sid, we own all the data we search through. We've been collecting conversations and associated meta-data since 2007. We're adding tens of millions of records daily. We've recently added tone (emotion) to our sentiment but it is still a blunt instrument. There is no such thing as an accurate sentiment analysis that does not use humans to judge the actual intent of the writer. I resent the implication that this is a gimmick (professional social media monitoring and analytics), as we have many users finding it exceptionally valuable to their businesses. I do agree that without ownership of the underlying data any tool is essentially a version of one of the free search tools, most of which do one thing or niche fairly well.

In the interests of transparency our pricing is here: http://www.techrigy.com/sm2_pricing.php . Larger accounts are priced according a projection of number of results collected. Please note that all Pro plans include unlimited search keyword phrases and Profiles and we do not charge User fees.

Peter,
All good points. On language: SM2 pulls results in whatever language the keywords are entered in and currently offers sentiment/tone in English, Spanish, German and Dutch with more languages coming. Regarding sentiment: Unless the provider does human analysis sentiment is nothing more than an indicator.
Engagement and tracking of work flow are important. We offer the ability to export results with user-configurable fields of associated meta-data (up to 35 fields per result) with notes. You can export permalinks and notes, for example, to track your responses and follow-ups. This will all be automated (tracking and reporting- activity requires real humans!) in our next release.
Finally, I totally agree on the customer support analogy. This is where you reap the real benefits. It helps to think of it as customer support both before and after the sale.

Though it's a lot more sophisticated (and admittedly more complex to use) than the basic monitoring tools you mention, there is a fully functional free version of SM2, our social media monitoring and analytics app. Try it at http://sm2.techrigy.com
And we don't demand that you have a demo or give up your first-born, though we do recommend a demo!

I really don't think it could have been prevented. People who really want to kill themselves usually succeed. Weird society we're creating though...

The answer is just like what they do on 'real' live TV- have a delay that is monitored. However to stop this you'd have to have a long delay. If I owned this site I'd shut it down until I figured out how to never have this happen again. It is said that people watching encouraged him which is absolutely repulsive unless they thought it was a gag. Actually that's just as repulsive.
Lot of bad karma out there over this- you know who you are.

We monitor social media and collect the data for use by our analysis tools. We have over 700 million historical results with up to 30 fields of meta data associated with each. We're adding 10 million results daily. This is just in the last ten months- which indicates how fast this conversational layer of the Internet is growing.
This ushers in an entirely new market research or competitive intelligence model, observational research on a global level.
So I'm not surprised by your results- this is not a novelty or a short term trend, it is an entirely new and permanent addition to our collective lives...

Mark,
I've been reading your series with interest since we provide a very comprehensive listening tool for social media and have been collecting hundreds of millions of social media results over the past year. I keep expecting some kind of contact from government agencies who might be interested in this data yet have had zero interest. Given that everything we collect remains in its original state including meta-data even if it has been deleted from its original source, I'd think they'd be all kinds of intelligence applications across many branches of government. Yet you write about a complete lack of urgency in understanding and accessing social media which strikes me as almost criminally negligent given the ease with which these tools can be deployed.
Why am I not surprised? ;-)

Our social media measurement app SM2 calculates a popularity ranking for social media results. It is an amalgam of the sources you mention plus things like number of followers, comments, etc.
The problem in social media is that low popularity sources can become high influence sources very rapidly so you cannot ignore the long tail of popularity. That's why things like reach and authority are not the same in social media as the rest of the web.

Isn't he risking coming up against SEC regs for public solicitation of investors? I'd want to get a good legal opinion, especially since Tweets are public records and preserved in multiple places including our social media warehouse. You can get in a lot of trouble if you're not careful about this.

I don't like the noise metaphor because it implies that any noise you generate is beneficial. Unfortunately when you generate a lot of noise you're likely to create a white noise effect that cancels itself out.
A personal brand like Chris's has specific attributes that one wants to control and define- your song (to beat a metaphor!) rather than your racket...
We remember compelling songs but tune out noise.

I guess I'd add Reputation Management Agencies since I'm seeing what I think is a new model emerging. Good piece- looking forward to the series as a whole. Jeremiah Owyang has a good piece on the challenges of social media: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/07/t...

Ours was $38 million at the end of this year. Not bad but it's worth the pixels it's painted with...
They don't ask for any financials except if you're pre-revenue or not. Very web 2.0 of them!

Provide value.
We market to agencies who are trying to figure out how to explain social media to their clients. One of the most effective things I've done is to create 'generic' unbranded PowerPoint decks on the subject that the agencies can use to achieve their goals with client education. I don't want attribution or even a brand mention and they can do whatever they want with them. I put them on Slideshare and have had a thousand or so views.
I really think this is the future of marketing. We already have a blindness to traditional advertising that renders it almost useless. And we've become very sophisticated consumers of information because access is so easy. Give me something valuable or useful and I will remember you. Intrude on my attention with something I don't want and I will also remember you!

Great post and I'd add the following:
The reason for Chris's points is very simple- but also a very different paradigm. Conversation in social media both one-to-one and one-to-many. I don't believe there has been any other medium where this is the case. Marketers are used to the 'soapbox in the park' approach where you shout out your message and hope it resonates with some passerby. If I am that passerby and you continue to shout at me regardless of whether I appear interested my reaction is going to be negative. in social media I will go further. I may share my negative reaction. There is a big risk in treating people in social media like a market. We're individuals, albeit individuals with a new form of power. That's why Chris' message of simple respect is so critical.

This is a little strange- I just heard the phrase 'government 2.0' in a meeting with a public policy firm this morning. They were looking at our social media monitoring application. And we had two Pentagon sign-ups for our free test version today. A meme emerging perhaps?
I've always thought there were obvious intelligence uses for what we do given that social media is a global communications medium. The obvious big brother aspects aside (i hope you all know that your public activity in social media is public and can be discovered- you don't have protections if you're public), there are undoubtedly nefarious things going on. So I hope, in your Gov 2.0 research you take a look at what we're doing.

I'd also check out newsvetter which forces those who are pitching to couch their pitch in a format friendly to the needs of publishers. Basically you run your story through an online interview process that ensures that it actually is a story, contains the information required and is useful to publishers including those in social media.
I think these kinds of solutions are, in part, an attempt to make up for the huge amount of press release spam that many lazy marketers dump into the media. The real message, especially in social media? Show some discipline and learn by listening.

I agree that participation is a critical differentiator in online media. When sites like NYTimes.com embrace commenting, add true blogs and generally open up to reader participation, those sites become online destinations. Social elements integrated with journalistic standards is the new model. The challenge, I think, is keeping everything at a certain level, editorially. That's where the collective experience of traditional media can be leveraged.

You might want to try the free version of SM2, our social media monitoring and analysis tool. It monitors blogs, wikis, social networks, microblogs like Twitter, user-generated content and a lot more. You get extensive analysis tools including sentiment, authority ranking and demographics and you can get daily reports via email or RSS. http://sm2.techrigy.com

In reference to Kevin's comment, limiting your discovery to one social source media is a huge mistake. As huge as it is Facebook is only a fragment of the entire social media eco-system and Friendfeed is still an early adopter base. The amount of political commentary on Twitter alone is mind-boggling. You really need to monitor it all to get a real picture and then you need the tools (sentiment, demographics, authority, etc.) to parse the results. We offer a free service that does this.