TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

monitoring

Don’t wait for your ship to come in…

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It was while I was working as a journalist at Motorcycle News that the news came through that legendary motorcycle racer Barry Sheene had died. After his death, a tribute poster was created for charity, with a suitable photo and the quote;

‘Don’t wait for your ship to come in… Swim out and meet the bloody thing’

That’s true of most situations, and especially in digital. The access to self-publishing, information and knowledge, collaboration, computer power, cloud storage and more means that there’s never been a time when it’s been more likely you’ll find someone else could be already implementing your idea, or your rivals are innovating in a new way.

But the flip-side is that all of that stuff is just as available to you if you go and make use of it. If you’ve been thinking about creating a website, for example, you could have a working example up and running on a free CMS in under 30 minutes. Most importantly from a business perspective, you start listening to your customers and monitoring your rivals quickly and relatively easily, all for free.

It’s already the time:

2011 is definitely the time to do it – in fact 2010 already was. You can still run an entirely offline business, but if you’re ignoring digital, you’re ignoring a huge source of revenue and opportunity. The repairman who fixed out cooker today was completely unaware that we found him via recommendations on an online forum, and he would have been equally unaware had anyone written anything negative about him (they didn’t, and he did a great job at a very reasonable price). The fact is that simple tools exist to allow him to be made aware when something business-critical is being discussed.

So why hire someone?

You might be wondering why I’d emphasise how quick and simple it can be, considering most of my living comes from helping people create and market digital content.

It’s really quite simple, and it’s the same reason I’ve paid for design and development help for my own projects. The opportunity is there for me to learn those skills (as far as any natural ability might let me), but I’d rather concentrate on content and marketing, as that’s where my natural skills and experience can best serve both my clients and my own projects.

Plus, there’s nothing to say you can’t get started, and come to someone if and when you discover areas in which you need help and advice.

Creating Twitter lists with Mixtweet

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Humanity has always loved creating lists to provide context for things, and the Twitter universe is no exception.

Whether it’s the suggested user list for new users of the service, the Twitter List function which has recently been announced and will arrive soon, or the huge variety of third-party lists created for almost every topic (e.g. People in UK Radio – I’ve slipped down the list slightly!)

But if you want to create a list quickly and easily to monitor, and don’t fancy waiting around for Twitter itself, then Mixtweet provides a good solution.

It allows you to create mixes from your friends, your timelines or other peoples mixes, and you don’t need to be following people to add them. And once the list is created, you can embed it as a widget wherever you fancy.

You can also view multiple ‘mixes’ via the site, with real-time updates and the ability to clip any update for later reading, and founder Michael Wu has said that Mixtweet lists will be made compatible with Twitter Lists when their API becomes available.

It also users OAuth to access your account, so minimising any safety risk, or you can create a log-in via the site itself. All in all, a really nice service – although you may wonder what their plan will be once Twitter Lists become available, that doesn’t seem to be a reason to avoid using them in the meantime.

Bit of a round-up for a busy day…

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It’s been a busy day at work, so rather than adding to my list of ‘things I should really blog about when I find time’ file, I thought I’d clear a few things out:

  • First up is the news that that two Australian girls stuck in an Australian storm drain decided to update Facebook for help rather than phoning for help. My first response channelled the spirit of Bill Hicks, but it certainly raises an issue about how younger generations wish to communicate, even in emergencies. Should emergency services monitor the main social networks as a necessity, just in case? What happens if you’re a user of a niche social site, rather than Facebook or Twitter? And no monitoring system to my knowledge is 100% accurate at picking up every message on a service…
  • ‘Just’ 25% of women are influenced by social networks when making purchases. Firstly, the fact that 25% are conscious of the influence is pretty impressive considering how new social networking still is for many people. Secondly, they aren’t influenced by social networks – they’re influenced by other people – the social network just makes this less geographically limited. I’d agree with Matt Wise from Q Interactive, who conducted the survey, that “brands are failing to use social networks to effectively target women” (Except I’d use the words engage or serve women), but in a lot of cases, they’re also failing for men too. And I’m not going to mention the Brand Republic headline for the story…
  • Technorati appears to have given up on monitoring. I can understand that Technorati has lost direction, particularly given the plethora of real-time search services, plus Google blog search etc. But I’m surprised that rather than concentrating on making their core business better, they appear to be trying to emulate the big content sites – given the efforts of brands like AOL etc, I can’t see Technorati being a big draw for content consumers (although I could be wrong). And the fact that they’ve dropped blog roll links from their monitoring, whilst also producing a lacklustre monitoring nod to Twitter, really suggests that they’re in search of a plan. Because obviously as I write this, blogging is dead…

That’s probably enough for today – I’ll end on a more constructive note for Technorati – rather than throwing away the monitoring side of the business to jump on the blog content and real-time bandwagons, why not improve the core product, as people have asked for years, and perhaps also implement a decent alternative to Feedburner? Give me decent monitoring, monetisation and innovation in RSS delivery and I’ll be a lot happier, as my RSS readership continues to grow proportionally. There are a lot of issues with the real-time web at the moment, and the non-real-time web isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

When numbers become meaningless and dangerous

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I’ve just been looking at the latest stats from comScore (Via Techcrunch), and the statistics for Facebook‘s arrival as the fourth biggest site in the world illustrated for me why site stats can become both meaningless and rather dangerous.

For starters, the numbers of the top sites are so big that we don’t really have any way of gauging them – as Eddie Izzard explains using the examples of mass murder (some NSFW swearing).

But the big problem with numbers like these is that they can become very dangerous, due to the tendency for people to quote them as law, and rely on them:

Reasons to worry:

  • Monitoring services like comScore and Compete can only track online traffic to domains – no clients and no apps. A particular problem at the moment for Twitter, but growing for all sites.
  • A certain percentage of users are always unquantifiable thanks to cookie deletion etc, or end up showing up different times on different computers
  • In the comScore example, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites are bundled up into their respective companies, so you can’t tell what comes from Google Search and what comes from Orkut or Google Maps.
  • No accounting for OpenID, Facebook Connect etc.

But essentially, the big risk is:

  • Unless you’re one of the top 20 or so sites, the total number of users of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc won’t matter much – you’ll still be able to get 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 fans/friends. What really matters is what you want to achieve, the relevancy of the network, and how you work at building valuable relationships rather than numbers.
  • And rather than numbers, look at the interactions, or for the business minded, how many people actually buy something…

But on the bright side:

Besides the fact we can accept social networking reaches almost as far as the internet with Facebook getting 340 million uniques per year, the fact that Wikimedia Foundations sites clock in right behidn it at 303 million uniques also shows the undeniable value of crowdsourcing user generated input if it’s done relatively well.

And maybe the combination of my three blogs will crack the top 10 next year!

Monitor the UK weather via Twitter mash-up

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There’s a fantastic Twitter mash-up to capitalise on the UK fascination with weather – even if most of us will only see about an inch of snow at the moment.

Recommended via @joannejacobs, it works by Twitter users posting a Tweet with the hashtag #uksnow and the appropriate postcode. For example “#uksnow NG9 3/10”

You can see it working by clicking on the image above or visiting the site of the creator, Ben Marsh, but I don’t know how long it will be running for – you could ask him on Twitter at @benmarsh!

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