The buzz on Google Buzz!

Mashable is on the job, finding the latest on Google Buzz -

BREAKING: Google Goes Social with Google Buzz

It’s official: Google has just announced Google Buzz, its newest push into the social media foray. This confirms earlier reports of Gmail integrating a social status feature.

Check out more links from our sidebar for others covering the news.

This is probably what Google was going to do with the Google Wave, but failed - I still have unused invites from my wave. Integrating the Buzz with Gmail is the killer feature here, who doesn't use Gmail anymore? Going to Wave, setting it up, figuring out what to do and even why was a major buzz kill(pardon the pun). My husband and I "waved" a few times for the novelty of it and then forgot about it.

I am off to check out the new features already - just wondering if this will go right to the Google Apps on iPhone and Android or not...

How to make the most emailed list...on NYT

Here is a very interesting article from the NYT - Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome - talking about something that is dear to the heart of anyone who is interested in social media for fun or academic reasons. The article is about the findings of a research study focusing on the most emailed articles from the NYT to figure out what made an article more or less likely to be circulated.

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)

Interesting on one hand, but not very surprising, eh? People are more likely to want to share good news, surprise and inspire their friends with information most of the time - unless it is me emailing my husband a bunch of links to beat him up in a debate...I am a barrel of laughs, why do you ask?.

There are a lot of lessons in this to not just bloggers, but to investors in social media - a sunny disposition that also disburses knowledge? Social media gold!

Voice Analysis to Figure out Lies

RealScoop (via Techcrunch) is an interesting software - claiming to be a wedding of voice analysis technology to Web 2.0 - by which means it figures out if someone is lying or telling the truth based on audio of the speech. The software attaches a believability meter to the videos on the site that rate the audio portion's "truthiness". Interesting and innovative though it seems, I can see too many variables going wrong with something like this - audio interference, difference between voices and modulation of men and women, other emotions coloring the voice, etc.

I don't think there can be objective analysis of the truth behind a speech without appropriate visual cues to aid the analysis process. I guess we can judge for ourselves....RealScoop plans to cover the VP debate and release believability meter readings for it. 

Creating word clouds

Here is a cool tool that lets you derive patterns out of any text you provide - Wordle! The idea is to run through the text and form a word cloud that visually represents the frequency of word appearance in the text. A really cool analysis tool with a lot of uses I can see already (some bloggers have used it to analyze the text of the Democrat and Republican convention speeches).

Throwing out some metrics for Social Marketing

Here is a nice discussion of social marketing and metrics that throws out a few ideas for marketing metrics -

Old School Metrics

-Visitors and Page Views: The raw data for daily visitors and daily page views across your domain.
-Optin rate: The number of people who optin to your list vs. total traffic for that day.
-Search engine bots: Which bots visit your site on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
-Referrers: From engines to individual sites. Who is sending you traffic.
-Entry and Exit: The pages visitors land on and exit from your site.
-Paths: The pages or “path” your visitors take through your site.
-Bounce Rate: How many visitors stay on your site less than 30 seconds.

Social Marketing Metrics

-Subscribers: RSS and newsletter subscriptions.
-Stick-Rate: How long social traffic stays and moves around the site.
-Linking: How many people on different social sites are posting, voting, and linking to your site.
-Comments: Average comments generated per post.
-Pickup: How many times across how many social news sites your linkbait, for instance, gets picked up, talked about, and voted to prominent placement, such as the front pages of social news sites.
-Bookmarks: How many people are coming through social bookmark engines like Delicious.
-Link Popularity: How many sites/publishers you are attracting with your content who write about you and link to you in their posts (the best kind of link you can get).
-Social News Tracking: How many visits you get from social news as well as how well individual pieces of content do on each site.

You can tell that most of the recommended metrics are very specific to the marketing and branding domain. A lot of these metrics are also quite difficult to measure - how do you measure stick-rate for a blog post read via an RSS aggregator?

Also, just because someone is talking about you does not necessarily mean they are saying good things about you. In the days of condensed feedback loops, negativity spreads much faster as a meme than positive news. How do you make sure you are being talked about positively, if at all?

The biggest drawback in the above scenario of course.....how do you apply these to a company's intranet? How do you convince a company to invest into something that outside customers might never get a peek at? How do you measure "honestly" how much value your employees are really getting out of the intranet?

These are some of the questions I am currently focusing on in order to come up with a comprehensive set of metrics that one can throw at different situations in varying combinations in order to come up with a good view of the "health" of social media (ROI - Return on Influence) invested into by any entity.

What not to do with Web 2.0

I know I must sound like a cheerleader going rah-rah for Web 2.0. In spite of all my enthusiasm for new technologies, I acknowledge certain technologies are not for everyone. Here is an interesting blog listing some really weird Web 2.0 startups....

I guess there is a market for every silly idea ;)

Measuring and Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications

"Measuring and Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications" by "Keynote" was another interesting white paper on social media metrics I could get my hands on. This is a more recent paper than the one I mentioned in the previous post, so it has a lot of information about technologies like "social networking" and "rich internet applications" that hadn't quite matured by 2006.

The paper starts of with the idea of the "network as a platform" - where the browser takes over for the desktop environment (or even a micro-browser as on a PDA or a cell phone).

As the paper's title makes it clear, the most important issue being tackled by it is measurement and to a degree, performance. How does one measure the performance of a web site that doesn't load all at once or a page that hits the server asynchronously defying the normal laws of page load metrics?

Social Media Metrics and Measurement

Speaking of memes, "social media" is one that has taken off quite a bit in the last couple of years. Web 2.0 and rich internet applications have been my domain of interest for a quite a while now as were my other blogs (some since 2002), so this seemed like a natural fit for my interests. While researching for a paper on making the business case for Web 2.0 applications, I stumbled upon a treasure trove of knowledge in the social media metrics and measurement - something I had never quite thought about, at least in a formalized manner.

One of the first things I read about this was a white paper on a roundtable discussion organized by Dow Jones about metrics and measurement of social media, called "Tracking the Influence of Conversations".

I could tell something was a little bit off in the paper as I went through it and then realized this happened in Q4 of 2006 - eons ago in blog years. The focus seems to be mostly on blogs and meme propagation while a lot of other social media phenomenon are missing in action. Still, there was quite a bit of interesting information in the paper. A couple of things that stood out to me were the metrics to measure such as the "velocity" of a meme (speed at which a meme is picked up from one blog to others) and "conversation index", the ratio between blog posts and comments/trackbacks.

So, we now have atleast two metrics to measure the impact (ROI - Return on Influence) of blogs as social media tools - how does this apply to social networking sites? What metrics would be relevant to say, microblogging? How can these metrics be captured and measured - leave alone used in a corporate setting?

I guess I have my next mission figured out ;)