Socialgraph Helps Search Engine Listings

When showing the value of an online community you are building, do not forget about checking the search box. Typical questions about expected outcomes from a community may still center around reach metrics. How many people am I reaching? How many eyeballs am I catching with my messages? The comprehensive answer includes reach (unique visitors, community members, etc.), engagement (i.e., conversations among fans and your brand) and search rankings. And your search listings are related to reach and engagement.

The basic principle of affecting organic search results is strong and relevant content that gets repeated, cited and linked in online conversations. When you build a community page or a fan page, steer your editorial calendar to include bits of newsworthy information that can easily grab and pass along to their networks. When sharing news about a discount, expert tips or a new product launch, your audience expands your digital footprint, brings you more visitors/fans and generate links. The sum of these activities have a positive impact on Google search rankings and your content rises higher and higher as your community expands and chatter grows through tweets, discussions and blog posts.

In fact, Web analyst Brandt Dainow’s list of rules for beating Google at SEO includes the following audience behaviors, which help search rankings:

Fans who like/follow you
Impressions from social graph fans (i.e., they talk about your brand in social media, including your message points, brand name)
Impressions from social graph fans with links (i.e., fans are citing your community page and referring traffic)
Secondary fan connections (i.e., friends who tell friends who then become your fans and/or referrers)
Other citations (i.e., links, references from people who are not your fans/followers)
Number of visits, click-throughs

Online conversations increase the value of your community. A bustling online hub means higher visibility and accessibility.

Posted via email from dotwom’s posterous

Online News and Buzz Predict Stock Value

SENSEnews, a service brought to you by the people behind the semantic search engine hakia, is able to make sense of it all for investors. The system aggregates vast amounts of information such as facts, news events, financial interpretations, speculations, market factors, sentiments and reviews. Then, it plugs this knowledge into an intricate algorithm. The result is a computation of unrealized stock value. You know when your investments are overpriced or undervalued. You decide to sell, hold or buy more.

As the co-inventor of SENSEnews Dr. Riza Berkan, indicates, the average person cannot track and analyze such vast amounts of data. Whether we get our news from the media or through word of mouth, we are always a few steps behind in the information game. Therefore, SENSEnews offers an incredible advantage to traders and those who manage their own portfolio.

While the relationship between news and stock value have been studied in depth, the addition of social media to the mix elevates the conversation about the value of online word of mouth to a new level. Services like SENSEnews also underscore the importance of financial information companies release online. Through the funnel of SENSEnews, what companies publish about themselves, what the media say about companies and what citizens publish online can affect perceived stock value (and performance.)

Posted via email from dotwom’s posterous

Twitter’s Real Value

Recently I was speaking with a Columbia MBA student who wanted to know what I thought of the “zillion dollar Twitter deal.” I think we are all excited about the idea of seeing glorious Internet deals coming back. Remember, when you asked for VC money for hypothetical business plans and inflated numbers and you got a few more millions to just go and try things? While I am not sure if Twitter is worth a “zillion” dollars, I do think it deserves significant investment.

Twitter is more than a 140-character message update service where people rant about their latest activities. It is a very adept tool at collecting consumer data and mapping networks. As social media tools such as Twitter become mainstream, we’ll see more talk about personal CPM. Today we go through many calculations and estimations to figure out how influential an Internet user is, how far they can drive a conversation, how many people follow their word and take their advice. Twitter is revealing plans to track retweets. That’s very much like seeing the list of people who quote from articles and reference other people’s work when advocating new ideas. It’s a simple way of gauging authority. Retweets show how an idea is embraced and spread by Internet users. As simple as it may sound, I think that’s a significant development in cataloging Twitter-based information.

I see Twitter as a powerful tool that will be able to show us how authoritative and powerful a given blogger/Twitter user is. Its advanced features will add a new dimension to online research about brand-related dialogues.

Love-Hate Check with Brand Tags

I always wondered about the representativeness of online buzz. So many brands jump into it (or told to do so) thinking it’s what the consumer thinks, period. It’s representative of what a certain type of consumer thinks. These consumers had the will and the time to find the social media area and they had the courage and the drive to write about their thoughts about the brand.

Despite the potential skew in representing public opinion, I do see a lot of value in checking out online buzz about brands. At least you know if there is a problem. The nay-sayers and those with harsh words can reach far more people than those who are pleased with their brand experience. Consumers expect to be pleased when they shop. Anything that succeeds or fails beyond expectations make the news. And negative news travel further than positive ones.

That’s why I like Noah Brier’s Brand Tags Project – a site that displays cloud tags about hundreds of brands. Site members are shown a number of brand logos and are asked to type in the first words that come into their mind. The site does some magic and aggregates the responses and voila, you get the picture of what people associate with each brand. The words emphasized in cloud tags may or may not match scientific brand awareness studies’ results. But they do show any negative sentiments that a sub-section of consumers feel towards the brand. This tool could be a great conversation starter with a client and it could provide many ideas to test through surveys.