Disqus - Latest Comments for Martin Edic

Re: Disqus and Seesmic Pair Up For Video Comments

Martin Edic — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:49:15 -0000

We've been contemplating using Disqus and frankly, I hate this idea. As it is, the rapid proliferation of widgetty things on blogs has been adversely affecting load times and increasing bounce rates as users lose patience- I almost stopped reading this blog before you dropped a lot of the widgets you'd been playing with because of long load times. I think Union Square might be well advised to track this as a potential issue as some of your companies seek to compete by adding features that could adversely affect the sites they are targeting as partners.

Re: Got information overload? Get filtrbox, but don’t pay quite yet

Martin Edic — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:43:31 -0000

Our service, SM2, does social media monitoring, has a free version with no expire date and includes extensive analysis tools (think Google Analytics) including sentiment indicators, gender, age and location, an authority ranking, etc. We index blogs, wikis, social networks, microblogs, user-generated rich media content and more. It's targeted at agencies doing brand and reputation monitoring but anyone can sign up for the freemium version.

Re: The Commenting Challenge

Martin Edic — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:19:46 -0000

BTW, we're trying DisQus on this blog. Let us know what you think!

Re: Social media is not a focus group

Martin Edic — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:12:28 -0000

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a directed research model, I just think that something entirely new is emerging, something that doesn't think of itself as a community. For lack of a better term I've been referring to it as the social media eco-system. The metaphor is fairly accurate as the entire swath of online communication media (as opposed to information media) are highly interrelated. The bewildering array of connections between social networks, micro-blogging, bloggers, blog commenters, comment streams like this one on Disqus, etc. isn't so much a community as an environment. a growing yet ephemeral environment.
A meme can start, grow, evolve and die off quickly, often too quickly for traditional research to even identify its existence- yet it is capable of creating buzz that lingers or even expands.
The obvious application here is risk and reputation management (PR) but marketers are also starting to understand the new model (even if our attempts to engage are all over the map!).

Re: Should Politicians Use Social Media?

Martin Edic — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:53:33 -0000

I sit on the monitoring side of social media (we're a social media monitoring service) and reputation is a major issue with politics in social media. If you're going to campaign in SM (actually even if you're not!) you should also monitor what people are saying so you can assess the sentiment and then participate rather than pitch or sway. Social media picks up and spreads opinion a lot faster than conventional online media so monitoring provides an early notification of good or bad trends around a reputation. This 'real time' aspect means that simply setting up Google Alerts is not enough because they're not providing real time results from things like Twitter or the social networks- they have index which has a time lag.

Re: Next 6 Months Will be Transformative for Social Web

Martin Edic — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:16:58 -0000

The IPhone as a driver of social media use is a fascinating situation because the participation moves out into mainstream everyday life. Unlike other mobile platforms, it has a desktop- level OS and a full-fledged browser that doesn't require mobile-specific web design. This combined with always-connected status means people are going to use their iPhones as their primary connection to everyone else.
For marketers this creates an upheaval. The savvy ones will immediately start trying to figure out an engagement strategy that improves user experience rather intruding upon it. This is the big marketing challenge and those who understand it are going to do very well. Those who keep trying to push messages down people throats with a social media advertising model are going to get hurt, IMHO.

Re: The New Media Lifecycle and Social Discovery

Martin Edic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:34:55 -0000

As a provider of social discovery services we can confirm that there is a revenue model and a huge potential market that goes pretty far beyond the PR and marketing people that are the most obvious target audience for social media monitoring and analysis. We're seeing a lot of interest in reputation management for example. The phrase 'reputation management' as a search keyword had 8100 Google searches in the year ending June 1. However for the month of June following there were 4000 searches on that phrase! This is how rapidly the landscape is changing.

Re: The New Media Lifecycle and Social Discovery

Martin Edic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:38:36 -0000

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.

Re: The Clash of Old and New Media Continues

Martin Edic — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:57:07 -0000

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.

Re: Social Times Receives $15 Million Valuation

Martin Edic — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:36:12 -0000

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!

Re: The Social Web Economy: Who Are These People?

Martin Edic — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:40:18 -0000

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...

Re: 2008/06/19/gene-simmons-radiohead/

Martin Edic — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:42:38 -0000

I may be wrong about this but it seems to me that, despite appearances, Simmons has been a right wing conservative all along. Complaining about a situation that has already irretrievably changed is a waste of energy. Like it or not we're not going back to the old model.

Re: 2008/07/14/how-to-monitor-your-brand/

Martin Edic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:46:00 -0000

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

Re: 2008/08/05/government-2-an-insiders-perspective/

Martin Edic — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:29:04 -0000

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.

Re: 2008/08/20/socialmedian-twitter-fundraising/

Martin Edic — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:48:25 -0000

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.

Re: 2008/10/01/government-where-is-the-urgency/

Martin Edic — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:18:43 -0000

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? ;-)

Re: 2008/10/13/social-media-influence-on-what-to-buy/

Martin Edic — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:21:52 -0000

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 dataÂ 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...

Re: 2008/11/24/police-justintv-suicide/

Martin Edic — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:58:13 -0000

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.

Re: 2008/11/24/police-justintv-suicide/

Martin Edic — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:43:58 -0000

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...

Re: 2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/

Martin Edic — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:55:15 -0000

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-Â 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.

Re: 2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/

Martin Edic — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:14:41 -0000

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.

Re: 2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/

Martin Edic — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:41:47 -0000

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.

Re: 2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/

Martin Edic — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:48:03 -0000

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!

Re: 2009/01/02/how-to-raise-money/

Martin Edic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:10:55 -0000

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.

Re: Measurement is for engineers. We just need consensus.

Martin Edic — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:41:35 -0000

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.

Re: Discussing Social Media with Jacob Morgan | danny brown

Martin Edic — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:19:55 -0000

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.

Re: Knowing “creepy” when you see it

Martin Edic — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:21:51 -0000

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.

Re: Jumping Over a Mountain

Martin Edic — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:19:42 -0000

If 60% don't understand social media that means 40% do, to some degree, which is huge. We (Techrigy) think that this is the tipping point right now for social media to go mainstream and change the entire nature of communication online.
My personal take is that we're in another tipping point that is far more pragmatic- Americans are finally starting to understand how deep the global energy problem is and businesses are going to see employees with long commutes revolting as the cost factor plus the time factor makes it crazy not to decentralize.
Social media and SaaS tools are the levers that move us over the mountain.

Re: What Do You Think

Martin Edic — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:51:46 -0000

Yianni, try our SM2 tool- there's a free trial.

I think there is an inevitable evolution going on from static content, which has its place, to a global conversation which will always be changing. I suspect that what we need is a personal tool, driven by keywords and preferences, that retrieves results from a lot of SM sources and delivers them to us. Obviously monitoring tools like ours, Radian6, Buzzlogic, etc., can do this (to some degree-it's a constant upgrade cycle to keep up) but it's not currently scalable to individual users for a variety of reasons.
This will change eventually and we might get the equivalent of an iGoogle for SM that does not rely on widgets. Who knows, maybe we'll build it...

Re: The Salad Bar Business

Martin Edic — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:39:47 -0000

Pretty common business situation I think. You throw in loss leaders if they increase traffic and size of sale. You measure one vs. your control (salad bar before sushi) and check revenues. You keep testing and you listen to the buzz, ask your checkout people what they see people buying and reacting to, ask people what they like and don't like, etc.
In other words there's social communication taking place that you need to listen to, observe and then respond to- just like social media...;-)

Re: Five LinkedIn Tools I Need Right Now

Martin Edic — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:20:10 -0000

They announced the Company Profiles too early IMHO since the only way to add a company is to send someone and email and hope something happens. I'd like to see this change.
And yes, it feels static. For example the Groups feature is really poorly designed- you join a Group and nothing happens, you don't get taken to a social network-style page or anything. I like LinkedIn but agree that they are leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

Re: Capital One Takes Aim With Slingshot

Martin Edic — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:29:35 -0000

I think corporate social networks are going to replace 'traditional' web sites. We just put one together (on Ning) and it's already getting a lot more traffic than our site- of course we're in the social media business so that's not surprising. However if you centralize access to About info, products and services, customer support, company blogs, etc. in a social network then it becomes the primary destination for everything related to the company- a community.
The big challenge that corporate marketers need to face in social media is the need to participate- you cannot orphan your efforts by not adding value on a constant basis. I think Capital One is wise to roll out gradually because of this factor.

Re: PitchEngine Launches- I Might Have a Plan

Martin Edic — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:28:13 -0000

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.

Re: What I Want PR and Marketing Professionals To Know

Martin Edic — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:44:37 -0000

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.

Re: How Content Marketing Will Shake the Tree

Martin Edic — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:25:41 -0000

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!

Re: My Best Advice About Personal Branding

Martin Edic — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:14:52 -0000

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.

Re: How Does The Web Define Authority

Martin Edic — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:26:55 -0000

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.

Re: 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Martin Edic — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:24:45 -0000

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!

Re: Tracking Your Brand Online

Martin Edic — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:02:07 -0000

There's a free version of SM2, our premium social media monitoring and analysis solution at <a href="http://sm2.techrigy.com " target="_blank">http://sm2.techrigy.com . We monitor all social media sources and have over 1 billion results in our social media warehouse with up to 30 fields of meta data for each. Full historical results going back to 2007, sentiment, demographics, geo-location, authority, trends comparison and much more. Extensive reporting options and dashboard. We'd be happy to take you through a demo if you're interested- that goes for anyone reading this!