February 19th, 2013 by Sten Franke
Recently, I was guest speaker at the APG Mindcracker workshop, which took place for the first time in this form. Besides the beautiful location at Google in Berlin and the good organization (thanks to the entire local team, especially Sebastian Krowarz from Ogilvy) especially the lectures (Prof. Ulrich Weinberg from Hasso Plattner Institute – Design Thinking, Anne Beuttenmüller from Google – Google Tools, Stefan Erschwendner – Customer Development and (me) Sten Franke – Automated Sentiment Analysis by gridmaster – Reach, Relevance, Resonance) were very exciting and rewarded by all participants with a great collaborative workshop atmosphere (THX ALL!).
After an extensive introduction into the market, tools and fields for Social Media Monitoring & Listening, we intensively discussed the challenges of Sentiment Analysis, in particular the depth of knowledge in the so-called Social Media Listening Tools. The result of all participants was fairly clear and can be summarized as follows:
Learning: Most of the listening tools do not exceed Buzz-Tracking and therefore do not offer the opportunity to generate important consumer insights. Marketing managers want to know, what really moves their fans and costumers.
Ergo: One cannot avoid a (monetary / temporal) investment in a significant study design (wide concept and theme worlds) and technological solutions which it can process.
Trend: The era of Social Media Listening solutions, which accumulate masses of irrelevant and often redundant hits in the form of unstructured buzz, is slowly coming to an end. Qualitive insights are wanted – less is more!
Since the official launch of our new gridmaster (V3.0) Social Media Intelligence Tools is still pending, I would like to publish a screenshot at this point – as I presented at the workshop.
Our goal is to enable all agencys, companys, and organisations a cost-efficient, coherent and established analysis of their target group, their platforms, their talks and topics, as well as the latest trends. // Generation quantitative and qualitative consumer insights.//
July 26th, 2012 by Alexander Becker
Burson-Marsteller took a look at the Fortune 100 companies and identified five social media findings for 2012. Among them are that the users speak a lot about them, that video content constitutes a huge growth factor, and that engagement has become a “second nature” of companies.
Of particular interest is the fact that ever more businesses maintain channels on ever more social media platforms. They settle more quickly on new platforms like Pinterest, or Google+ and use them actively. This shows: the challenges to social media and community managers are rather becoming more complex than easy.
But have a look by yourself:
March 27th, 2012 by Sten Franke
Google has identified the signs of the time. The question to Return on Investment (ROI) in social media campaigns probably is one of the most important topics this year, as many enterprises crave for simple and working solutions.
For instance a recent research by Iron Mountain concludes that most European businesses yet don’t know how to handle data of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. “Indeed 94% of the questioned German companies (Europe: 86%) are aware to file communication in the social media channels as a formal business process” the paper states, but “at the same time 72% of the German businesses (Europe: 63%) don’t consider themselves as capable to capture the shared data and information of social networks accordingly”.
In fact tools and solutions that measure the ROI of almost all social media campaigns exist for long. Our gridmaster is an example to mention here.
Offers like ours and those of other monitoring tools satisfy an ever growing need. Google wants to have their share of the market and consequently drill with Google Analytics. Soon it is supposed to measure ROI, only on least significant sources like Blogger.com, however. It cannot perform a deeper analysis of top players like Facebook or Twitter yet.
“Google Analytics claims to close the gap between social media and hard business KPI’s”, t3n writes. “It shall be accomplished by not only measuring the traffic that arrives via different social media channels, but also tracking it further.” That’s how direct inferences onto conversion rates become possible.
Google inferences to social value
Number of visitors in the Social Web
Though, the ROI is only one side of the coin, the other are Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). They cannot be neglected in relevant and traceable measurements of success of social media campaigns. If you want to quantify the latter, Google Analytics doesn’t help you yet. Then you better turn to established monitoring tools, like our gridmaster for instance. They can assess buzz, demography, sentiments and semantic data on top of it. Only they enable you to place activities sustainable and targeted. Considered globally it’s all about the increase of brand awareness, sales, profit, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Still countless businesses evaluate the success of their social media campaigns with the mere mass of the three f’s: Friends, Followers, and Fans. Whether on Facebook or Twitter – the bare amount of them doesn’t indicate their interaction rate.
The new Google tool apparently can’t handle the Standard KPI’s. I.e the new tool only touches the surface of social media data. As easy to navigate Google Analytics may be, it can’t replace a complex professional tool. Indeed, the new service of the web company can possibly give the lots of rudimentary monitoring offerings lacking depth a hard time.
January 16th, 2009 by Sten Franke
Original article by David Nelles
Earthquake, war and flight disasters: Twitter has become a convenient catastrophe medium.
Caution: Consumers are listening. A Tweet with its unpleasant effects.
Google party plane – Google’s flight personal goes nippy.
Beautifully viral – naughty Durex Bunnies + Outtakes.
Nine Inch Nails – make money by giving.
Journalists should be able to handle these Technologies at the latest in 2009.
The wild 70’s in Apple.
Uschi Blum – Love’s slave.
December 11th, 2008 by Sten Franke
Google presents the most popular searches, globally known as Google Zeitgeist 2008.
For Germany, the most popular searches are eBay, YouTube, Weather and GMX. The List is also shown in Google-Watchblog.
Furthermore, it’s quite interesting to see that five social networks are among the german top ten of Fastest Rising – Wer kennt wen (#1), Facebook (#3), followed by SchülerVZ (#4), StudiVZ (#5) and Jappy (#6).
Actually, I didn’t hear much about the last community Jappy, so I did a quick research and here what I got: Jappy is a portal for singles, which replaced the Singlestreffen.net in 2002.
Back to “Wer kennt wen”:
It’s such an impressive fact to see that globally “Wer kennt wen” is among the top ten of Fastest Rising and it even ranked on the 8th place.
If one looks at the current numbers of IVW in November, one can see that Wer kennt wen network has shown more page impressions than StudiVZ (4 billion vs. 3.9 billion). Although StudiVZ lies considerably ahead of Wer kennt Wen and other Social Networks in Germany – with 166 millions numbers of visits – and yet, SchülerVZ stays on the top with 4.9 billion PIs.
But we need to take into account that page impressions alone, are not the only significant indicator, given the fact that every single photo click can actually generate few more page impressions.
June 13th, 2008 by Sten Franke
After reading an interesting blog on valleywag.com, I started thinking about, how Google manages to offer such a great amount of information about almost anything, with just one click. Obviously, the company has to have ways to somehow work itself around privacy privileges, confidentiality agreements and the like. Google’s lawyers usually busy themselves trying to defend their right to keep content online — so Google’s search engine can index it, of course. Currently, however, it seems they are busy trying to get – and preferably keep – their own name out of the ‘search results’ when it comes to the YouTube revenue-sharing program – the video site’s new program for ads sold by video creators.
Stacey Wexler, litigation counsel for Google, instantly reacted to a blog on Silicon Alley Insider that posted the entire advertising contract. Via email, she asked Silicon Alley Insider to take down the references to this particular contract. Wexler claims the contract is confidential. First, the email was posted to its site, but now displays an error where Wexler’s email once appeared. The original post about YouTube, however, remains online, and a reader has even reposted Wexler’s email in a comment. This comment has recently been deleted from the site. Fortunately, valleywag.com has posted the email and the contract on its site. As a result, a discussion about why Google’s made such a big fuss, legal matters and an ‘evil rank’ has started:
A contract cannot be considered binding on people who didn’t sign it in the first place, so the actual CONTENTS of the contract are irrelevant.
How apt coming from a company that espouses to organize and spread “information”. Google made such a big fuss that they be free to flout copyright laws and be able to scan and publish electronic copies of all the books in the world. And then here they are, whining when one contract gets published on the net. Its not surprising though – this has always been Google’s modus operandi. It’s only evil when someone else does it.
On this note: Google might be the world’s biggest and most used search engine, but this rather embarrassing incident clearly shows that there is still a lot to learn.
