PhilGo20

As the web enters a more user-centric era where conversations can be gold mines,  you will soon need the ability to filter content and news based on the influence level of the messenger to cut through the noise. If you are looking for good blogs or discussions about Django (my current framework of development), you should be able  to see any post/tweets written or commented by  Jacob Kaplan-Moss (one of the lead developer) at the top of your search results.

To do that, you first need to determine who has some influence online around that topic. There is currently multiple web services to evaluate user ranking, and I’ve reviewed some here. Klout is another of those services and a pretty popular one. Main problem with most of them is that they usually have no concept of relevancy : they evaluate your reach, influence, activity and other parameters as a generic score, without any relation to a topic or domain of influence.

I’ve just performed a search for ‘Django’ in Klout’s topics search box. Number one influencer on this somewhat niche topic is … Tara Hunt aka MissRogue. For those who might not know here, MissRogue is a successful author/marketing consultant/entrepreneur with a somewhat decent audience of … 29757 (Dec 1st 2009)followers on Twitter. She probably knows more about Django than the average person, but I would have expected Jacob Kaplan-Moss or some of the bloggers in my Django links collections to be slightly above her in such ranking…

klout django influencers

What happened is probably that she tweeted that keyword several days ago and the Klout engine pick it up, putting here in their Django topic basket and by looking at the outstanding number of followers she has, promoted her to the top of the list. A more complete analyze of her tweets would have been enough to avoid this error. Further analysis of shared link would be even better, but slightly more complex.

User Ranking methods and technology will most certainly become ubiquitous in a near future and evolve into something solid and relevant enough to be used as a content and conversation filter, as well as for targeted advertising purposes. A great example of the relevancy concept can be found in Traackr from which I just got a demo. They still do some manual intervention for quality assurance, but they have included a relevancy score related to the queried domain, as I would expect. We talked a little bit about their roadmap and they seems to have some pretty interesting stuff coming up.

Are you planning to use some kind of User Ranking in your applications or web strategies ? How ? What are you expecting from such tools ?

When trying to identify early influencers and pool of knowledge around a certain topic or industry, finding early poster/commenter is one simple trick often used. Not very complex, but it often leads to other links and users and help shape how the information started to spread. Backtweets is great to see who shared a link on Twitter (despite the limited timeframe available), but Delicious gives a very different type of results and the ability to research much older content to see who picked up on it first.

Delicious

I am (still…) an heavy user of delicious. By clicking on the number of persons who shared a link in delicious, you access the bookmark history page. On top of this page,the ID of the first user to share this link is displayed and the date when he shared it. It also gives you a basic timeline to look at to see when the url popularity took off. Despite a clear drop in popularity, there’s quite a bit to be said about the usefulness of the data in delicious. Something to try…

Note : Because Delicious development has been pretty stale (cough) lately, I find myself using Diigo more and more. My favourite feature is the ability to create private groups to share links with clients and partners on specific topics and projects. Main problem is that I still search for links in delicious and the auto-tagging feature is not as relevant as there is less links shared on Diigo…

I’ve also recently found out about a new startup in Montreal called Wajam offering the same kind of bookmarking tool, but haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Twitter and I use it all the time. But since it became the fastest growing channel, the number of real blog comments have dropped enormously. You often find yourself looking through rows of re-tweets that were collected by a Backtype or Disqus plugin at the bottom of a great post to realize that it was retweeted 30 times and commented once… Worse, how many times have you seen an heavily retweeted post with 0 comments ?

Retweeting shows appreciation but it’s gotten so easy, that it seems less and less users takes the time to join the conversation and comment. Not talking about adding  15 char to a retweet here. It’s probably true that Twitter increased the number of participants in those conversations, but they rarely add real value to it but simply passing it to their own network. Which is good but …

Looks like a great opportunity to show your favorite bloggers or new one you just found out about that you value their content and ideas. I am 100% sure they remember more easily comments that retweets… which could be a great opportunity to contact them if you have anything to ask or offer.

I had been postponing to write this for a couple weeks, but a link shared on PostRank Twitter account left me no choice but to hurry up.

Social Media Monitoring is now an essential part of any brand, corp or product marketing plan. Between tools like Radian6, BuzzMetrics, TechRigy, one can also use free tools like Google Alerts to monitor mentions of keywords or brand name in the news. It’s way too late to get any decent readership with a “How to Monitor Your Brand With Google Alerts” but add a SocialMention.com feed to the mix and you just spiced up an old recipe, allowing monitoring of social media platforms. And everybody likes good free online reputation monitoring tools.

Btw, SocialMention is a great social media search engine developed by Jon Cianciullo in Ottawa.

Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

SocialMention also uses Backtype API to monitor blog comments.

So that’s what this guy did and he created a video tutorial to show how to do it. Super simple.

So what I am adding to this ?

Well, one problem with this method (and with most monitoring services) is that you can rapidly get an avalanche of alerts and you will most likely spend a good amount of time flying through the list to see what could be relevant. On top of that, that does not tell you the reach or range of influence of these results. You’ll have to look it up yourself to see if these links where bookmared on delicious, shared on twitter, if they have comments and so on. Lengthy process.

The magic trick ? PostRank by AideRSS.

PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.

Available as a GreaseMonkey Script or a FireFox extension, it will basically gives a 0 to 10 ranking score to any item in your Google Reader List and allows you to filter out result based on their PostRank score. Look at your Google Alerts + SocialMention feed in list mode and instantly know which one are worth looking at, based on the social engagement they generated.

That’s it, a cheap and manageable Online Reputation Management tool. Not perfect, but worth trying.

If you need more info about integrating PostRank with Google Reader, look at this.

EDIT:

Both (mine and Intelligendo) explanation kinda skimp over what you should be monitoring.

Marty Weintraub create a great tutorial on how to do this and how to choose search terms for monitoring