Monthly Archives: February 2010

featured, SEO

Data orgy, week end edition – everything about Google

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In the mind of many internet users, Internet = Google. It says a lot about the size of Google and its impact on the web (and also on the ignorance of some users :)Everything related to google should be interesting for any people interested in working at some point with the web (and of course, with social media).

This week end I had a couple of interesting reading I wanted to share :

  • A crazy infographic about stats of Google
  • A detailed article about how Google’s algorythms work (on wired)

Continue reading Data orgy, week end edition – everything about Google →

featured, Tools, Tutorials

Dashboard building – best practices

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Some of our clients currently asks us for Dashboard solutions for Monitoring purposes. Here is a bunch of good practices for building such tools.

What is it :
A web page build by the agency with a selection of RSS feeds to help the client to get a view on what is said about him, the challengers, inside the main media targets on the web.

Benefits for the client :
Bring an immediate view on relevant information directly impacting the business of the client

Recommended tools :
I recommend the use of welcome page such as Netvibes.
dash
Easier to understand for beginners, uses tabs, with a clean and slick ajax interface

Other tools available :


Which RSS feeds to include :

  • I first recommend to use rss feeds from search engine to track what is said about a specific client / challenger
  • Search from Google News – you can choose to display the news limited to a language / country. Be sure to display the news ranked by date (not relevancy). An RSS feed is dynamically created on such page.
  • Search from Google blog search – works exactly like Google News – as an alternative, Twingly is definitely a good solution to look at, especially if you have issues with spam on blogs (splogs).
  • Search from Twitter : you can track keywords on Twitter based on the language. But since many people uses english on Twitter, it is often more relevant to filter the Twitter search based on the geography. Define for example the center of a country (For example, the center of France would be around Clermont-Ferrand – you’ll just have to indicate the distance to the FR boundaries – around 600 km).

Keywords :
As always, it’s all about the keywords and their relevancy.

  • If you’ll choose a keyword too wide, the number of irrelevant results will lead to too much data. If it’s too narrow, not enough
  • Using operator (for instance “security” AND “Technology” OR “IT”) might help to narrow down the number of results and lead to better insights.
  • Again, the use of inverted commas ” ” is definitely the top trick to use for such searches.

Additionnal resources

Any other feedback or experience to share is more than welcome 🙂

[EDITED] Some Text 100 references

Following Jeremy’s request, some additionnal references :

Social networking, stats

Data orgy – visualizing the 6 year growth of Facebook

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Facebook just celebrated its 6th birthday, and Mashable just picked up an outstanding Infographic about the Facebook growth the last 6 years.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 and has come a long way from a Harvard-only networking site in the intervening years. In fact, Facebook has undoubtedly become the world’s largest social network, with over 400 million users worldwide and more than 900 employees. Let’s take a closer look at what kinds of numbers and user activity this growth translates to.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/facebook-growth-infographic/

Click on the picture for high res version.

featured, Social media news, video

Opt in press release against PR spam ? An Inconvenient PR Truth

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I’ve just seen a twitter message from a french journalist mentionning a press release he received with Opt in solution – it really impressed him.

http://twitter.com/couve/status/8583135307

Translation: “I received a press release with opt-in (I subscribe / unsubscribe). This is the first time. There is hope !”

I wonder if any of you already expericed such solutions, and what feedback did you get ?

I would tend to find such a solution quite brilliant …

This Twitter message appear just after a video I’ve seen last week

http://france.disruptionblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/inconvenienttruth.png

http://www.vimeo.com/9020095

This video is clearly very controversial (see some reactions here : http://www.prweek.com/news/bulletin/UKDaily/article/980491/?DCMP=EMC-UKDaily#comment)

As underlines some of my colleagues :

“I’m split 30:70 on whether such a campaign is beneficial for journo-PR relationships, or actually quite detrimental in that it’s trying to define a relationship with rules. Some things should be left unsaid, especially in relationships. If journalists have concerns about receiving spam PR e-mail, then they should ask to be removed from lists… PR’s should be diligent in doing so. Simple.”

Of course, I know all the effort at Text 100 to build targetted press list. But the video is also some electrochoc for the rest of the industry. I tend to think that solutions such as opt in + Social media newsroom could be a good way to cleverly push information to the perfect target.

Your opinion ?