Google and the news

This week, The Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows wrote a cover story titled How to Save the News, about Google. He might more accurately have titled it How Google is the News.

Google has been an unavoidable focus of news for most of the last decade, but things have really heated up over the last year or so. Google has enjoyed cover stories in pretty much every news magazine in the US, and lead stories in the business and financial pages of the dailies on a regular basis. Type “Google” into Google, and the news hits are 28,000 for the past month alone. By comparison, “Obama” gets 44,000.

Frankly, I'm all Googled out – we went well beyond saturation coverage a long time ago.

Of course, Google is the news is another sense: they have become the way that most people find stories, or aggregate the information they consume. In the process, they've also become the totem for all the online ills that plague the old-school news media. The thrust of Fallow's story is that Google recognizes the value of a healthy Fourth Estate, etc. etc., and that the company has plans to make good on keeping journalism healthy and vibrant. Right. Forgive my skepticism.

The US media's love affair with Google is perverse, or ironic or maybe just weird. Fallow's has fallen victim to it. Google is adored not so much because they're fighting for information freedom in China, or because they build very cool and totally free stuff we can all use, or because their search engine is a simple work of genius: The US media loves Google because it is a phenomenal financial success. This trumps everything, and makes them infallible in the way Microsoft was in decades past. Google prints money. They may be a one-trick pony, but the trick is very lucrative.

A year ago, The Atlantic ran another cover story on Google, although much less flattering. Is Google Making us Stupid? was written by Nick Carr, and the title pretty much says it all. I think Carr has a very level-headed view of the social issues with new media and online economics, but you could argue that he too has fallen prey to the Google hype. We should remind ourselves that this is a company that makes bundles of money selling advertising atop a search engine; everything else is window-dressing. They aren't going to democratize China, make us stupid, or save the media biz. They're just going to continue to make a lot of cash.

A definitive list of social media measurement & metrics tools?

(Updated December 2, 2011)

Last week Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group, along with his colleague John Lovett, published a nice report on social media analytics. It's a very useful framework for thinking through how to measure the rights things, which in turn will focus attention on the right kinds of activities.

But how to measure? Way back in 2006, Owyang took a snapshot of the companies that offer tools for social media metrics, and came up with a list of forty-two firms. In the last week I've trawled the web to update his list (and thanks to Ken Burbary for a nice wiki list of different tools), and come up with an astonishing 82 firms that offer some kind of social media measurement solution. And I'm pretty sure I've missed a bunch.


Help me update and correct the list. Please send me your additions, along with any other comments on these tools, and I'll post an update. If there's enough interest, I'll also try and categorize these solutions better -- there's certainly a lot of diversity in this list.


SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Updated: February 11 2011

Company	Comments
Alterian	SMM
Appinions	SMM
Andiamo Systems	SMM
Attensity	SMM
Attentio	Multilingual
Beyond Analysis	Gone
Beevolve	SMM
Biz360	Acquired by Attensity.
BrandIntel	Gone
Brandwatch	Brand monitoring
BurrellesLuce	SMM
Buzzcapture	SMM
BuzzGain	Meltwater Group Product
BuzzLogic	Now TwelveFold Media
BuzzNumbers	SMM
CIC Business Consulting	BI tool Chinese market
Cision	SMM + other tools
Collective Intellect	SMM
ComMetric	Mapping to financial data and stock tickers
Converseon	Agency with some tools
Cover-All Technologies	No longer supporting SMM
Crimson Hexagon	SMM
CustomScoop	SMM
CyberAlert	SMM
Cyveillance	Brand monitoring, QinetiQ company
Cymfony	SMM + other tools
Dow Jones & Company Insight	SMM + other tools
EchoMetrix	Gone
eCairn	SaaS metrics solution
EmPower Research	Custom technology solutions
Ethority	SMM
Evolve24	SMM
Jive	FilterBox product.
HowSociable	Free gadget
Imooty	SMM
Infegy	Brand monitoring
Integrasco	SMM
Intelligence Technologies	Gone out of business
JamIQ	Asian languages
J.D. Power and Associates	acquired Umbria
Jodange	See Appinions
Kaleidico	No longer supporting SMM
Kaava Corporation	Marketing services, some SMM
KDPaine and Partners	No tools but strong analysis
ListenLogic	social CRM?
Lexalytics	Sentiment detection
Linkfluence	French language
Lithium	Social CRM
Market Sentinel	Brand monitoring
mBlast	SMM
MediaBadger	Consulting firm with tools
MediaHound	SMM competitive intelligence
MediaMiser	Media monitoring
Meltwater News	Media monitoring
MetaTale	Gone.
Metrica	Multilingual, part of Gorkana Group
Millward Brown	Precis
Moreover technologies	SMM
Netemic	SMM
NetEquity	Gone.
New Media Strategies	No longer supporting SMM
Nielsen Online	NetRatings
Onalytica	SMM
OneRiot	Gone.
PRMetrics	Free customizable social media portal
Radian6	SMM, acquired by SalesForce.com
Relevant Noise	See Zeta Interactive
Report International	Brand monitoring
RepuMetrix	Brand monitoring
ReputationHQ	Gone
SAS	Business intelligence tool with SM
SamePoint	Gone
Scanblog	Gone.
ScoutLabs	See Lithium
Sentiment Metrics	Not just sentiment
Socialarc	SMM
SocialMention	Social search engine
Statsit	No longer Relevant
Synthesio	Multilingual
Sysomos	Business intelligence tool
Tealium	No longer relevant
ThoughtBuzz	SMM
TraceBuzz	SMM
Trackur	SMM
Thomson Reuters	BuzzAnalytics and OpinionAnalystics
UberVU	Now Crimson Hexagon
ViralHeat	SMM, Free API
Visible Technologies	SMM
VMS	Gone
Vocus	SMM
WaveMetrix	SMM
Zeta Interactive	Relevant Noise product for SMM

What's wrong with this picture?

If you've read a magazine or newspaper over the last few weeks its been hard to avoid the iPad advertising. My favorite appeared on the back cover of The New Yorker:

Wait a second.... Here you have a print advertisement for the iPad, inexplicably promoting the New York Times, a newspaper which has yet to figure out a way of making any money from distribution via said iPad.

Clearly, the Apple gang have no sense of irony.

The Optimistic Economist

When an internationally known economist bets his career on social media, you pay attention.

I first heard the Michael Mandel speak in February 2009 when, as he put it, “the economy was stone dead.” At the time he was chief economist for BusinessWeek and had authored more than 50 of the magazine's cover stories. What I liked about him then – and what I enjoyed again last week when I heard him speak for a second time – was his rational, resilient optimism.

Back in 2009, Mandel showed reams of data giving a historical perspective on how bad the current recession was (answer: very bad), how we got here (answer: greed and deregulation), and how we can recover (answer: innovation). Mandel is a big fan of innovation as the engine that drives the US economy. He's consistently argued that the only way to dig-out from the current recession is to find ways to generate growth through innovation. As he put it, saving your way out of a recession “takes forever”. Over the past decade, he contends, too much innovation has failed to mature and become commercially disruptive.

Last week, Mandel pointed out that the current recession is so deep any recovery will likely be slow. However, describing his job as “divining the shape of economic booms from weak signals”, he sees early optimistic signs in a few market sectors, chief among them being media and communications. He's especially bullish about the online sector and its disruptive effect on everything from journalism to advertising, although he sees massive changes ahead for the entertainment industry, too. He pointed out that in 2010, about $62 billion will be spent in online advertising (about 15% of overall advertising spend), and this will climb to $146 billion by 2020.

None of these insights are especially original but Mandel has, as he put it, bet on his own predictions: Last year he left BusinessWeek and founded his own online venture, Visible Economy. He's pretty blunt in his opinion of old media – while many argue that the business model for journalism is in question, he contends the problem is more fundamental. For Mandel, conventional journalism is broken, and no longer delivers what people want, when and how they want it.

He could be right.

Yet another redundant and ill-informed opinion on Apple's iPad

It seems like everybody has something to say about Apple's iPad, so in the interests of complete redundancy I thought I'd chime in.

I should say up-front that I've never seen a real, live iPad, have only a vague idea of what it can do, and have no intentions of buying one. In other words, I'm much like all the other ill-informed pundits out there.

So let me begin with a confession: I love books of the dead tree variety. I actually collect books (I've just finished reading a first edition of Steinbeck's The Moon is Down), and I'm currently wading through all of Dickens' novels after buying a used set from the 1900s. So the iPad phenom got me thinking: what if things got reversed, and in a parallel universe the iPad came before the invention of books?

I get that the iPad can stream video, host a bewildering range of applications, and can make pretty good buttered toast. It's a multi-functional device, but its primary use-case is to provide a new platform for books and book-like content. The ability to meld multimedia content is pretty cool, as is the ability to bring the conventions of Web content to the format of the book. But as a portable tool for conveying a linear narrative, it has a bunch of issues. There's the bed-and-beach problem (you want to read a skinny computer in either location?). There's the drop-and-dry problem (I might handle my Steinbeck carefully, but a paperback is pretty indestructible). There's the share-and-sell problem (I'm not enthralled by some of the lock-in issues around the content I might buy). And have I mentioned battery life? In my parallel universe, if you had an iPad and no books, I think some latter-day Gutenberg might invent them anyway.

I know I'm a Luddite on this. My guess is, the current iPad will be a complete flop but some later incarnation will be a wild success. And books will become history. I have no idea how this will change what we read - would Steinbeck and Dickens exist in an iPad age?

Say Nothing

The mathematical definition of zero is X + 0 = X. The marketing definition of zero is “no comment.”

For the last few weeks I've had the great pleasure of delivering “no comment” to a great many people. Its been tough going. Marketing types like me hate to say nothing. We're genetically unequipped to keep quiet. We love the sound of our own voice. We like to expound, we revel in expressing a view. If Marketing were a author, we'd be more Henry James than Ernest Hemingway. If we were a band, we'd be Yes rather than The Ramones.

When the goal is not to score, playing the game can seem plain wrong. Over the last weeks I've learned a lot about the fine art of keeping schtum, and while I wouldn't say I'm expert I do have a few pieces of advice:

• When you're saying nothing, less really is more
  It's very tempting to elaborate, be erudite and try and be clever. When The Famous Reporter comes calling (the same guy who usually never returns your calls), we shouldn't disappoint him, right? Wrong. Better to to be straightforward.
  
• Saying nothing can take a long time
  Doing a regular interview with the press can sometimes take a very few minutes. Perversely, when the aim is to say nothing of import, the delivery time can be very long. The same question which you can't possibly answer is often asked in many different variants. Or the unanswerable question is secreted in a long, rambling monologue in the hopes that it won't be recognized. Saying nothing requires patience.
  
• Nothing can sometimes mean something
  There really is no substitute for “no comment.” Anything else – even “I can't answer that question” - can be examined in minute detail and found to hint at something.
  
• When you're saying nothing, be nice
  Always remember – the journalists are just doing their jobs. They have to ask. Be courteous.

It's also worth remembering that while saying nothing is generally a novel experience for most in marketing, asking clever questions to us dopes is what journalists do every day. They're really, really good at it.

Who's using social media most?

There are now more Facebook profiles than the entire population of the United States, Canada and the UK combined: it seems like pretty much everyone is busy blogging, tirelessly tweeting, or fiercely friending.

But who is most active with social media? Forrester Research has done a nice job of explaining the demographics of online participation, based on a taxonomy they created for the popular book Groundswell. Using their handy online tool you can see how online partication differs between men, women, age groups and geographies. What Forrester doesn't do is explain the types of people that get involved – their mental, emotional and social characteristics, as well as their motivations. What compels people to blather online? What traits do they have in common? Are the most active participants – what Forrester refers to as “Creators” - different from the lazy bums who do nothing with social media (what Forrester acidly calls the “Inactives”)? More to the point, what assumptions can marketing and communications professionals make about the people that actively engage with them through social media?

There are many competing and largely incompatible theories on this question, but lets look at two of the front runners:

1. The Wisdom Of The Crowd thesis
   
   
   Advocates believe that the great mass of people that haunt social media and the Web are wise, well-intentioned, motivated and overall a pretty good facsimile of the population at large. They give us unfiltered access and insight into our customers, employees, voters, or other publics. True acolytes of this theory believe in an almost mystical ability of crowds to accurately guide opinion and decision making, an argument borrowed from the work of James Surowiecki who wrote the popular Crowdsourcing book back in 2004. Ask a crowd of kids to guess the number of jelly beans in a large jar, and the while individual answers will vary wildly, the average of all answers will be extremely close to the true number (I know, I tried this at a school fair).
   
   
2. The Madness Of The Masses thesis
   
   
   There's a whole stack of theories penned by lofty thinkers like Freud, Tarde and Bernays that see crowds as irrational herds, spawning Orwellian DoubleThink or manipulated GroupThink or all sorts of other Thinks. But you don't need to wade through all these turgid academics tomes, just read the comments on an average blog. A great deal of the blogoshere and social media seems to attract rabid extremists and flat-out nutters. It just sounds mad.

Both theories can't be right. The Wisdom thesis seems to argue that the most active social media participants are reasoned and can fairly represent underlying populations, which is why crowdsourcing advocates argue they can be co-opted by marketing types to help develop and test products, ideas, messaging and so on. On the other hand, the Madness thesis argues that social media activists are just that – at best unrepresentative, at worst a herd led by extremists, zealots, and the marginal. If the Madness thesis is right, marketing types would interact with the social media Creators in a very different way. So, which thesis is correct?

Lets start by explaining crowdsourcing, which will require we look at some statistics and probability theory. Imagine you are faced with a question for which there are only two possible answers – say, who will win in an election, Democrats or Republicans. There are numerous factors that might determine the result, and any given individual will only have a partial understanding of those factors. Lets suppose that given all the factors people comprehend, that each individual has a 51% chance of being right in selecting the election winner. On this basis, if you were to ask one person for their pick, there's an about even chance they'd get it right – you might just as well flip a coin. However, ask 10,000 people for the answer, and the majority selection will be extremely accurate. The same statistical logic applies when you have complex problems with many possible answers, like the jelly beans in a jar problem, and you apply it to a group of smart 5^th graders who can make a well-reasoned guess. Ask enough 5^th graders, and the average answer you get will be weirdly close to the real jelly bean count. This is called the Condorcet Theorem, but here's the rub: if the individual group members are less than 50% likely to be correct in their selection, then as you increase the group size the probability that the answer will be correct starts to approach zero.

Condorcet has important implications for crowdsourcing. First, it explains the otherwise mystical ability of some crowds to make very good average guesses. Second, it suggests that we should never rely on the wisdom of a crowd if we know or suspect they are poorly informed or biased. In fact, these people will lead us away from the correct answer. At the very beginning of his book, Surowiecki gives a classic example of a crowd that is well informed and unbiased – attendees of a county fair guessing the weight of a cow. Can we say the same about Forrester's social media Creators?

I think there is some evidence to suggest that social media Creators are likely a self-selecting group of activists, passionate evangelists or committed detractors. The comments I get on my corporate blog or in response to an informal online survey are not going to be representative of the underlying population of all customers. Borrowing from Condorcet (and breaking with strict statistical logic), the opinions I see online are not going to approach some kind of truth – they are just as likely to head in the opposite direction. And the more people I interact with through social media, the more they may lead me astray.

Or at least that's the risk. Truth is, we don't know enough about social media mavens and we could do with some good research as a complement Forrester's Technographics.

We in marketing should be careful to understand who is active in social media – what is driving them, what motivates them, and to what extent they are outliers and unrepresentative of our target audiences.