I am about to deliver a big project to a client and I am playing with different ideas on what to do next.
Had (yet another) idea couple weeks ago and sent an email to my friend Duncan Moore to validate. Here’s the mail :
As more and more brands, agencies, producer and individuals disseminate content on 3rd party sites (Youtube,Vimeo, Scribd, Slideshare, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc.), it gets more complex to track all that content and measure the buzz (comments, links, bookmarks, RT, diggs, etc.) it generates.Per piece tracking gets rapidly overwhelming and Google Analytics is of little use, as the often-accompanying link back to the website is only a minor indicator of the effectiveness of the content. Traditional ORM solution might help for the buzz around it, but won’t tell you much about views and other data and will most likely received multiple hits for the whole conversation/campaign (the delicious link, the multiple retweets, the 5 diggs, the blog post, etc.) without really helping with analyzing that particular campaign.It might be as simple as entering all the youtube video your brand has and monitoring the number of views they generate, number of favs, comments, number of link back and so on.
From a development point of view, it could start as being fairly simple as it’s mostly about aggregating data and displaying it in a comprehensive dashboard view.
To me the biggest challenge would most probably to design a dashboard intuitive enough to be used and understood by agencies and not geeks with all that possible data.
I kid you not, less than 10 days later and one email to a possible developer, I received an email from Swix, an Ottawa startup I had been following for some time, thinking they would be releasing yet another Online Reputation Management software.
Well, they stole my idea. And they did it well. The execution of the dashboard and the “pods” concept is really nice. To make matter worse, they code a lot of it in Django, my new framework of choice.
Oh yeah, we could do the same, but honestly, at that point it would be close to copying and the fun is out. And when you know that one of the guy behind it launch the highly successful Shopify platform, you know you’re just as well going for another shot at it.
Good job guys and all the best to you !
PS : About the Disney Dashboard, are they a client already ?
NDLR: I hope it’s obvious I am joking when I say they stole something … at least from me 
