Social Media Monitoring: Radian6 or Google? posted by David Robbins at Monday, February 23, 2009

In September, I wrote a post on Page One’s search for a social media monitoring service. After exploring several commercial solutions, we decided on Radian6 because the functions of the tool and pricing scheme best fit our needs. Since that time, Page One has continued to engage in innovative social media campaigns. Monitoring social media such as blogs, forums, Twitter, and rich media has been a key component in many of these campaigns.

When discussing social media monitoring, many people talk in broad terms about the need for companies to listen and engage in this space. New media channels are becoming more important than ever. In late January Advertising Age reported on a study by the CMO Council which found that many CMOs do not feel they’re effectively tracking social media.

But how does social media monitoring work in practice? Can a tool like Radian6 work magic for companies looking to make headway in this new frontier?

My answer, although it may not be satisfying to some, is that the value of the tool depends on the goals you set and the metrics you’re trying to track. No one tool is sufficient for a successful campaign.

In fact, while the best features of Radian6 are its analytical graphing components, during day-to-day operations I’ll often find myself going elsewhere to monitor social media in real time. For instance, in a lightweight blog campaign, a combination of Google Blog searches may be adequate (and in some cases, even more useful than Radian6 searches, since Google has Page Rank and relevance functionality). For Twitter, hybrid desktop applications like TweetDeck and simple, yet intuitive monitoring interfaces like TweetGrid can do the trick. For determining influencers, I’ve found it essential to complement Radian6 with Google or Technorati searches.

Tools like Radian6 certainly do have strengths that you can’t get for free elsewhere. Radian6 provides the ability to process and analyze information to determine key trends and drill down on contextual information. For example, using the Topic Trends widget, you can not only track trends in social media mentions of keywords through a period of time, but you can also zero in on a particular point of interest and perform additional analysis.


Sure, Radian6 can aggregate diverse information sources into one interface, but its display features are not necessarily optimal for all activities. More importantly, the metrics it tracks are not necessarily the ones that are most useful or relevant to every social media campaign.

This is the big point – Radian6 is a good monitoring tool, but it doesn’t have all the answers (nor do the creators of Radian6 pretend that it does). When engaging in a social media campaign, it’s essential that you drive the metrics and not depend on a tool to do it for you. Fundamentally, Radian6 tracks the number of key word mentions in social media, but you may be interested in different kinds of values or metrics – for instance, how your campaign efforts have affected website traffic, or in the PR world, how successful you’ve been in securing placements in top identified publications or blogs.

Buying a tool like Radian6 is a step in the right direction but success in social media requires smart planning and identifying metrics that are appropriate to the unique circumstances of the individual campaign. There’s no silver bullet in this world, which may explain why it’s so exciting and challenging at the same time.

Why Google Beats Everyone at Public Relations posted by Craig Oda at Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The future of PR is being created today, on sunny sidewalks and corporate cafes in Mountain View. The Google campus is germinating the future of information access and the future of public relations. There is no PR super-genius at Google inventing a new type of PR. The innovations in public information management comes from the Google campus itself, the world's ultimate PR water cooler.

Type the word "browser" into Google or MSN search. Chrome pops up in the top three results, ahead of Apple Safari, Internet Explorer, and Flock. Google News results for "browser," show Chrome in the top two rankings due to a Beta 3 announcement -- well ahead of Firefox. Since when is a Beta 3 considered news? Is this 1994 and I'm reading about Netscape? On a YouTube search for "web browser" Chrome is the top search result and the Android (Google phone) browser is the second result. How is this level of visibility possible for a beta, feature-incomplete version of a browser that doesn't work with Mac OS X or Linux?

Google PR hits on all media channels in parallel - blogs, video, forums and traditional media outreach. Having worked with Google on PR for their main developer conference, my impression is that they don't have a large PR army of staff or consultants. They are efficient. Google doesn't need to pay for an army of marketing professionals because their internal staff and the online community help them get the message out.

To understand the distributed nature of Google's PR efforts, look at the Google Chrome launch.

Messaging
Google locked down three message points and pushed them out through all channels. The browser brings web applications closer to desktop applications by improving speed, stability, and security.

Bloggers Create Three Media Hype Waves

On Labor Day at 10pm, Sundar Pichai, the VP of product management and Linus Upson, engineering director, launched Google Chrome on Blogger on the Official Google Blog. This was ahead of the official Google press conference and press release. By Tuesday, the next working day for press, the web was already buzzing with Google Chrome news. There were already thousands of blog posts, a Wikipedia entry with hundred edits, and active chatter on Twitter before most professional reporters could get the official information. This resulted in a triple wave of coverage, first by the online community based on the blog and rumors, second by the mainstream press, then third by the online community again once they gained access to the official information and product.  By the end of the day there were 50,000 blog posts and 6,000 news stories on Google Chrome.  Today, 2 months later, there are 450,000 blog posts.

The first media wave was heighten

ed by Google's clever use of Scott McCloud, a well-known professional comic artist, to produce a Comic Book on Google Chrome. The comic book was physically mailed to reporters and bloggers, arriving in Europe one day ahead of the launch. Although Google claims that this was in error, the result was that starting in Europe, bloggers scanned the comic book and distributed it online ahead of the official launch.

YouTube Triple Play

Google released three types of YouTube videos at the launch of Chrome: 1) Technical HowTo videos that were an average of 20 seconds long; 2) technical vision human story , a 4:50 minute video featuring their development team (currently at 650,000 views); 3) the Google Chrome press conference.

Multitude of Media Channels

• Google Chrome Media Center - an online press site with links to the official press release, B-roll (broadcast) and YouTube videos, logos, and screenshots.
• Google Chrome Help Documentation - official help documentation from Google with links to video embedded in the documentation.
• Chrome Help Forum - online community-based help.
• Chromium - open source site for the project behind Google Chrome.
• Online community development with Blog and Google Groups discussion areas for open source developers.

Google organizes key message points and uses free online services to amplify their messages. Everyone can freely use Google Groups, Blogger, YouTube, and search analysis tools like Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools. The secrets of visibility hide in the open. Now, it's up to the rest of us to open our eyes.

Public Relations Optimized for SEO posted by Nadja Blagojevic at Wednesday, October 15, 2008

As a PR firm, we are always looking for ways to promote our clients, either through traditional PR activities like press releases or new social media campaigns. A few months ago I began investigating ways to give our clients more bang for their buck by checking out search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to see if our PR activities could help us boost SEO results.


SEO is basically a way to increase your rank on a search engine results page for a certain key word term. If you want your website to be at the top of Google's list, there are a number of techniques to help you get there, like coding the term into your website, including the term on the content of your page, and having other websites link to your site (ideally using that term).


If a PR firm is supposed to be getting a client's news out all over the Internet, getting links to a client's website all over the Internet doesn't seem like a big step. However, it's surprising how few people in PR know how to improve their clients' search engine status (folks in marketing generally seem to be ahead of the curve). Public relations firms are just now starting to "get it." The upcoming Public Relations Society of America conference includes a few sessions on SEO tactics, but they are mostly aimed at beginners.

Over the past six months, we have seen a real desire from our clients to partner more on increasing their web traffic, search standings, and lead generation. With access to Google Analytics information to gain a deeper understanding of how press coverage drives traffic to their sites, we can talk with clients about the keywords and search terms that they want associated with their website.

For me, the most exciting part of integrating SEO and PR practices is the impact that clients can see as their inbound links and web traffic rise. It is cool to know that a link-rich story that ran a month ago is still sending readers to the client's site, or that a certain publication was one of the top sites sending the client traffic.

For example, the links in a June interview in Dr. Dobb's Journal with Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and creator of Maven, sent readers to the Sonatype website as recently as last week. Folks who came to the site from that story tended to stay longer, and the percentage of those who were visiting the site for the first time was higher than average. In contrast, links on the popular developer website DZone tended to send people over to the Sonatype site more regularly, but most were people who had already been there. Sure this is interesting, but why is it useful?

From a PR perspective, you get a whole new understanding of the publications. Even though they have a very technical audience, Dr. Dobb's Journal is a better place for high-level stories that preach the gospel of Sonatype's Java development infrastructure. Even though they have a large readership, DZone is a better placement for stories that appeal to those familiar with Sonatype and Maven. Looking at search engine and web traffic flow can help PR firms better target story placements to advance the business interests of the client.

The big question is: why don't we see more integration of SEO and PR?

What do you think?

Social Media PR: the Big Idea posted by lonn johnston at Monday, July 14, 2008

Page One PR has used social media tools in our client campaigns since we started the agency in late 2002.

We developed our expertise at companies in the early days of open source and Linux. In open source, the winners are projects and companies that can foster communities of developers the fastest. The more developers you attract to your code, the more valuable your code becomes and that in turn attracts more users to projects. If you're a company, the more of those users who convert into customers, the more successful your business.

That experience informs how we look at "social media" PR at Page One.

It's very challenging to attract a lot of different people around an idea. The idea by definition has to be big. And authentic. For us, it was originally open source and the promise to participate in something that would change forever how software was made.

Google came to us in mid-2008 for help on a project. Their big idea was that software would be created in the cloud and run on clients in the browser. No one owns the cloud but Google has great tools for making software in the cloud. They wanted developers to know more about those great tools. Their business interest was to attract more Web developers to their Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I think by all measures it was a huge success. Registrations were so high that Google had to shut down the lines at Moscone to start the keynote address on time. We had onsite blogging from TechCruch, podcasts by Mashable, and twitter feeds from all of the main events. Pre-event coverage was up almost 600 percent from the year before and first day coverage jumped more than 300 percent. CNET alone ran 10 stories.

Many of our agency peers in the PR industry run around all bug-eyed like old Roman statues obsessed with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Seesmic, Plurk, LinkedIn or whatever might be the latest tool. But successful social media is not about the tools. It's about the big idea, and then it's about how you use all of the tools you can to foster participation in the big idea and, if you're a company, to advance a business interest that you can measure.