If you want an overview of some of the things that Google offers, Hubspot have an excellent ebook. If you don’t know about Hubspot – they are offer a ton of free Hubspot resources and clear explanations on business use of social media as well as software. Below is one such example.
People I have shown Research.ly to are often shocked. “What?! It has the data on every tweet?” Yes. Everything you have put out there. Over three years worth. And it can take that and slice and dice it anyway you want: positive or negative sentiment, gender, location, top retweeters, who made the first tweet on a trending topic. It is one of the new platforms developed by the team at PeopleBrowsr.
When I showed it to one clinical researcher in the office the response was ‘I am never going on twitter, ever.’ ‘People presume they are having a private conversation, albeit in a social space – they don’t expect to be tracked, comments analyzed and remembered’. Well, what goes online stays online and these are powerful platforms.
What does Research.ly do? It is a search engine and analytic tool for social media and it’s very good for those topics that get a lot of conversations happening. For example a new clothing store – Zara, has just opened in Sydney – and instantly you can find out who is talking about it, where, and top proponents of the store.
Let’s take that a step further. Research.ly translates that data as a Viral Analytics Platform. You can just as easily search for a peak in conversation over the last three years and find out what was being said using the datamine. Take for example the case of the dating site eharmony. They had a spike of online conversation over a year ago in January 2010.
Click on the spike and it takes Research.ly seconds to find the conversations about a discrimination lawsuit against eharmony (for excluding gays and lesbians). Using the datamine, eharmony can see exactly what was said, who said it and the sentiment. Top right of the screen you can search other topics like this years South by South West.
The platform also slices and dices the conversations by community and builds a score card – so that you can see who the top 15 communities are that are positively mentioning a brand. The communities are defined by looking at people’s twitter bios – in other words how people define themselves.
And then it takes the top three communities and finds those people within them who are the very top positive influencers for the brand. What does that mean? That a company can find it’s top advocates – champions. These people will create a good online conversation for them – and that worth a lot of bucks to some companies.
Let’s take that a step further. The Viral Analytics platform can be customised – in this case CocaCola get realtime data of the conversations across twitter, facebook (pages), blogs… for any number of accounts and keywords and they can also export the data. They can do the same for the competition, in this case Pepsi, RedBull, Dr Pepper. The team have also just added (this is very new) – a workspace tab - you can look at who is tweeting within your company. This is a very powerful tool indeed.
So, PeopleBrowsr platforms – real-time data, a social search engine. That remembers, tracks and analyses.
Do you remember the doubt, uncertainty, ‘it will never take off’, ‘how do we know the content is good’, ‘Wikipedia is dodgy and students should avoid using it at all costs’ that was around when Wikipedia was first launched Jan 15th 2001? The whole concept that anyone could contribute anything and it still be quality information was revolutionary.
It now describes itself as the “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project”, and as a resource (a good one in my opinion) it’s well an truly here. Take a look at this:
The percentage of all American adults who use Wikipedia to look for information has increased from 25% in February 2007 to 42% in May 2010. This translates to 53% of adult internet users who use Wikipedia
Education level continues to be the strongest predictor of Wikipedia use. The collaborative encyclopedia is most popular among internet users with at least a college degree, 69% of whom use the site.
Those are some nice stats on Wikipedia from PEW
Happy Birthday Wikipedia!
Too Many Events Going On. And if you’re not online at the right time you miss the mention of them on twitter. Fantastic Solution is Lanyrd. It looks at your friends, which events they are going to, and let’s you know.
It tracks all conferences, including health. Once you link your twitter account, it gets very clever and not only gives you a calender of events, it tells you who is speaking (with a link to each of their profiles). Usefully I can register to track events in advance. So now I don’t need to worry I’ll miss it. I’m already looking to track BarCamp Sydney and SXSW, and it’s told me that a friend is speaking at an upcoming conference I didn’t even know about. Blimey.
Here is a list of speakers for SXSW:
Awesome. Simple. Highly recommended. To link up go here: http://lanyrd.com
Thanks @amcunningham for the heads up on this one. Check out Anne Marie’s blog to see how to include new health and medical conferences
AND
@laikas has also blogged about Lanyrd in a simple step by step how to way.
Worth checking out both of these posts – especially if your focus is health.
Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome* extension that allows you to graph your gmail activity over time. What’s neat about it is that it’s searching your gmail and instead of providing a list of messages, it shows them as graphs of email trends. This means it can visualize your communication with friends on different platforms by searching your inbox so you can see how much you were on Facebook or twitter and compare how that’s changed. It’s a graph of your trends over time.
Here’s my graph – even shows the dip where I went on holiday in April 2010. I’m predicting that my red line (facebook) will go up. We will see. 
*Google Chrome is a browser, like Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox.
