Techpaulogy

IBM Data Visualization Tool Turns Out to be Amazing for Keyword Research

Wow. IBM's Many Eyes, a shared data and discovery tool, turns out to be a powerful tool for keyword research for MarCom and Search Engine Marketing purposes (hat tip to Sam Lawrence for piquing my interest in Many Eyes). I was trying to figure out what keywords and messaging to use for an upcoming product launch and the associated online marketing campaigns, and wanted to see how marketers are framing the conversation around some niche topic areas.

I started by reading a ton of posts from a selection of popular marketing blogs, but quickly became overwhelmed by the immensity of the conversation (marketers tend to, you know, be ridiculously verbose). So, if you know me, I quickly turned to data tools. In this case, IBM Many Eyes offered a great way to analyze text patterns and keyword density. It has two different tools to leverage.

First, you can create tag clouds out of any text. So I started with the Forrester Research Marketing Blog, and copied the 20 latest blog posts into Many Eyes (minus the author bylines to parse out repetitive names and dates). I set the tag cloud to 1-word display. My goal was to see what words were being used repeatedly. Here's what I found:

It was pretty noisy, but gave a good idea of recurring words. Then, I wanted to dig a little deeper, so I switched to 2-word analysis. This showed some more long-tail frequency, perfect for SEO and PPC:

Now we're starting to see some interesting results! Here's what's in the forefront of some leading industry analysts' minds. So, we know "brand monitoring" is a popular topic. With my SEO/PPC cap on, I also want to know what variations of brand-related terms are being used. Next, I turn to Many Eyes' Word Tree tool, and enter "brand" as the root word. After sorting by Frequency Order for easier viewing, we end up with this:

This gives us a pretty deep dive into long-tail terms, as well as what's the hot topic in the space. It makes sense that "brand monitoring firms" are pretty high profile, as there are a slew of acquisitions going on (JD Power bought Umbria, etc). And, it's pretty related to our space, as we recently evaluated a number of vendors, as well as explored a few partnership ideas.

Next time around, I am going to throw a bunch more data into Many Eyes from a variety of sources (it can take up to 1MB of data at a time) and get a wider slice of the conversation. You can also upload 2 separate blogs, and compare the 2 side-by-side on a keyword basis. Let me know if you have some even better ideas to use this (or other tools) to dig into social media conversations.

Bumpin' SEO Tactics - Get Your Rank on Lock

A good portion of my job revolves around search engines, both paid and organic (with the trusty help of Anvil Media). I've often explained what "search engine optimization" or "lead generation funnels" are to my friends and family, but maybe I should have enlisted the help of Chuck, who puts it best:

See all his SEO beats over on YouTube. Yeah, there's a few...

Jumping Desks - Frogger Anyone?

Due to Jive's rapid growth, there has been a ton of shifting around the office. Lots of cube hopping. So, what better coincidence, than to hop up a floor and over to the next building -- and to end up 10 feet from an old school arcade with Frogger and 8 other games:

It makes up for now being 10 minutes from the sweetest break room in town. (Almost - Guinness keg on tap.)

Jive's code to be in millions of Google Android phones!

Here's some great news: we just found out that Jive Software's Smack XMPP library is being built into Google's Android mobile platform. It was news to us, but it's great to be a part of this industry-changing initiative between Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Read the Jive Talks blog post for more info...

Evaluating Buzz Monitoring Tools - Suggestions?

My team is currently in the process of evaluating buzz monitoring software to get a better grasp on Jive, its competitors, and the enterprise software industry in general. When I say "buzz monitoring," I mean a tool that tracks blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news sites, and other online communities for specific keywords, and helps aggregate and analyze that data to determine trends, supporters, product feedback, etc. I'm hoping some other folks out there may have feedback for Justin and I?

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Right now, here is an initial list of products being reviewed:

• BuzzLogic - we were also evaluating this when I was at Anvil Media
• BuzzMetrics - BrandPulse/BlogPulse (by Nielsen)
• BuzzPerception (by CustomScoop)
• Orchestra (by Cymphony)
• Radian6 - thanks to @davidalston, @RichardMcinnis, and @lebrun on Twitter
• SEER (by VML)
• TruCast (by VisibleTechnologies)
• Umbria

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The basic requirements are as follows:

Track/Monitor

• Track social media by site and by source (some bloggers post on multiple sites)
• Allow for both branded search ("Jive"), competitors, and general industry terms ("collaboration software")
  • Including advanced search operators (and, or, not) to filter noise
• Weighting/ranking of posts -- some are high impact (ZDNet) some are low impact (personal blogs)

Analyze

• Allow for trend analysis
  • Data import/export to integrate with Google Analytics, Eloqua, and SalesForce traffic & lead data
• Record tone of post (positive, neutral, negative)
• Record meme of post
• Record product discussed in post (Clearspace, Clearspace X, Openfire, etc.)
• Allow for human intervention in automated processes
  
  • Weighting
  • Tone
  • Meme

React/Participate

• Tools for getting involved in external conversations
  • Track replies to comments
• Track offline/back-channel communication (a.k.a. CRM when conversation ends up on email)
  • Depending on the CRM capabilities of the tool, we might also consider integration with SalesForce.com to manage blogger relationships

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Does anyone have experience with these products and services? Any recommendations? For example, Jason Falls has a great video over on his blog about his visit with Radian6.

Jive Won "Technology of the Year" Award from Infoworld

Jive just won Infoworld's annual Technology of the Year award, for its Clearspace X online community software. Specifically, Clearspace X was recognized as the  "Best Community Platform" in the Applications and Middleware category, alongside other winners like Oracle SOA Suite ("Best Enterprise Service Bus"). Winners were chosen by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers:

"these Technology of the Year award winners represent the best business process management system, best enterprise service bus, best database middleware, and the best SaaS collaboration and community platforms we tested in 2007."

The award is based on a review of version 1.1.1 earlier in the year, and since then there have been a number of great additions, including:

• Customizable dashboard (users can filter updates & new content they're interested in)
• Customizable interface (admins can drag-and-drop rearrange and add content modules)
• Popular and related content widgets connect blog posts, wiki documents, and discussion threads
• 1-Click sending discussion/forum/blog/wiki content via email

More commentary on the award can be found at:

• Silicon Florist
• Fast Wonder
• Jive Talks

Track Your Company and Competitors in Real-time: Persistent Search for Business Intelligence

A number of people have recently asked me how to setup real-time alerts for different things -- Jive, competitors, their own name (vanity?), etc. I've tested a number of ways to facilitate this "persistent search" functionality, whereby I am notified any time one of the many search engines out there (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Technorati, etc) finds a specific keyword. Let's use "Jive Software" as an example. Here is what I want to do:

• know any time a blog mentions the words "Jive Software"
• know any time a static website adds a page that contains "Jive Software"
• be notified ASAP so I can react

Now, to facilitate this, there are some process points:

• I want to avoid clogging my inbox, so this has to be done via RSS, not email (so Google Alerts won't fit the bill).
• I also want to over-subscribe, and build logic to filter the noise -- as opposed to only subscribe to one or two sources -- so I don't miss anything (which crosses-off the persistent search functions built into RSS readers like Attensa , where you could setup searches for both "Jive Software" and "Clearspace" and get two of every article that mentions both).

So, I turn to Yahoo Pipes. This tool is absolutely fantastic. A life-saver. And for you Perl ninjas out there, you can make it do even more than me. So here's what it does: takes in data (RSS/XML, JSON, whatever), allows you to mash it up (splice, sort, filter, rename, etc), and then spits it out in whatever fashion you want (RSS, JSON, email, text message).

Back to our "Jive Software" example. So, I want to setup a "pipe" to monitor this term (a free-standing tool that sucks in data, processes it, and spits it back out):

1. Log-in to your Yahoo account
2. Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
3. Go to my profile http://pipes.yahoo.com/techpaulogy
4. Hover over my pipe that says "Persistent Search – Jive"
5. Click on the "Clone" link in the upper-right of the gray highlighted area that pops up
6. Click on the "My Pipes" link in the top navbar
7. You should see a new pipe in your list of Pipes that is a copy of mine.
8. Click on the title of the copied pipe to go to it's management page. You'll see the current live results for "Jive Software" searches on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Technorati , etc.
9. Click on the "Edit Source" link. Now for the magic (click the image -- it's 1600 px wide, might need to resize or download to see it best):

Here, you can see the guts of the pipe. It uses modules to fetch the source feeds, in one case re-maps some data fields to sync up with each other, combines all the sources, sorts them by date, filters out duplicates, and outputs the new feed. Voila! Play around. Now that it's been copied to your account, you can break it to your heart's content. Envision expanding this to also track searches for competitors, Jive product names, industry analysts, etc. (you'll see another pipe in my account called "Splice - Jive Feed" that combines this persistent search pipe with a shared OPML file of enterprise software blogs -- it's a work in progress).

Who else has played with this? Any Perl ninjas out there want to help me write logic (based on Regular Expressions) that can help standardize dates in all the various feeds to enable better sorting? Right now it's pretty hit or miss. Also, I'd love to explore publishing some shared "best-practice" OPML files (one for Competitor's blogs, one for Enterprise Software blogs, etc) that can be plugged in -- I was having trouble parsing the OPML file in the example "Splice" pipe.

Starting my New Job with Jive Software

Last week was my final run with Anvil Media -- I had a great time there. They have an amazing PPC/SEO/Web Analytics team, who I will miss tremendously (but luckily will be working with, and playing with, still).  Anvil has a track record to prove its success, with a client base that includes enterprise software companies, global technology publishers, universities, brand name e-commerce sites, financial services providers, travel & tourism sites, etc. Plus, this year we won a Marketing Award of Excellence (MAX) for Best Return on Investment (ROI) from the American Marketing Association (AMA) of Oregon (for our work with SmartWool's PPC campaigns.

While all this was very exciting, I've been feeling a little antsy recently, working for client service firms. A good chunck of my professional career has been spent in the worlds of management consulting and advertising agencies. More and more, I've been wanting to trade breadth for depth. Working in client services provides an amazing opportunity to experience a wide variety of businesses, challenges, and opportunities, as well as develop an arsenal of skill sets -- I used to call my days with Deloitte Consulting a "business boot camp for liberal arts students." These days though, I want to focus, go deeper, have more ownership in the process, and ultimately leave no stone unturned as can sometimes happen within the constraints of multiple clients, budgets, billable hours, and the intricacies of client-vendor relationships.

So, timing of the opportunities at Jive Software couldn't have been better. I'd already met the team through various events (Portland Web Innovators, BarCamp Portland, etc.), and had done a good amount of my client work in the enterprise software space (e.g. Deloitte, Attensa, ColumbiaSoft, and PolyServe). Plus, I am a rabid consumer of online collaboration tools, so its enterprise collaboration software called Clearspace was right down my alley. Jive also develops a real-time, business-class instant messaging server called Openfire,  and an online community portal called Clearspace X that brings all the bells and whistles of Clearspace to an externally-facing platform that offers customer support and user collaboration (the next generation of the wildly popular forum software). I'm coming on board as the Online Marketing Manager, to help coordinate Web efforts to market Jive's suite of products, as well as generally promote the benefits of collaboration software to bust information silos that have been built in a world of emails and redundant conversations. It's going to be lots of fun!

pdxMindShare + Anvil Media Coverage on Seth Godin's Blog

Kent Lewis, president here at Anvil Media, just got off the phone with Seth Godin (the best-selling author of more than seven books on marketing, the spread of ideas, -- e.g. Purple Cow!). Seth gave a brief write-up of the conversation on his blog:

"The most important part of the story is this: he doesn't do the community work for that reason [a profit motive]. He does it for the right reason--because it feels good to help his community. The magic of the zero-marginal-cost scalable nature of the web is that your volunteer effort goes a long way and generosity almost always pays off."

Seth is referring to pdxMindShare, an invaluable resource for numerous people here in Portland's business community.

SearchFest 2007 - Search Engine Marketing Conference

SearchFest '07 is fast approaching on Wednesday, March 7th! It's a full-day search engine marketing conference featuring multiple learning tracks, workshops, and expert panels to help you leverage search engine marketing (SEM) in your organization. Whether you are an SEM professional, work in an advertising agency, or are on an in-house marketing team, SearchFest '07 will connect you with the leading thinkers and practitioners in SEM today.

The conference is a collaboration of SEMpdx members, including Anvil Media (where I plug away at SEO, PPC, and web analytics). Panels will be headed up by representatives from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Looksmart, eFrontier, iCrossing, Portland Trailblazers, Snap Names, Feedia, ID Branding, Tektronix, and WebTrends, to name a few. Other luminaries of the industry will also be in attendance too -- for example the SEOmoz team (Rand and Rebecca).

Hope to see you there! Here is the agenda and the registration page.