We’re hosting a presentation for small business owners and operators here in Redmond at our office on sept 26, 2008. The focus is on business blogging. Our great new digs are at Thinkspace, hope to see you here.

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“Listen to any song in the world for free,” invites the home page at Grooveshark, and as far as I can tell, it lets you do exactly that.

I was fortunate enough to meet Steve Spalding and Nate Thompson at Gnomedex, and had a chance to talk to them a little bit about their service. They’re diving into the social music space along with the familiar players Last.fm and Pandora, although their model is a little bit different (and probably a little bit smarter).

Grooveshark plans to make its real money from selling analytics back to the record companies, indie labels, or individual bands who use their service.

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When I introduce myself as a social media strategist, the second most common question people ask me is “How do I know if social media would help my business?” (the most common is “what exactly does that mean you do?”).

The truth is that social media is not the best strategy for every company in the world. But it can be useful in a surprisingly large number of businesses.

Why? Because the web is a long tail of niche markets, and owning that niche effectively can be as powerful as being the most well-known store in town.

There are three important questions you can ask about your business to find out if using social media makes sense for you. Let’s look at an example.

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I decided that it’s been long overdue for us to do a comprehensive review of all the major blog search engines. Several planets aligned that made me decide this was the time.

1) The ongoing effort on the behalf of clients to feed our sentiment tagging engine with complete and accurate content as it appears. For our band monitoring projects it’s search results that get analyzed for sentiment, so we want to capture all the posts that matter.

2) To make sure we’re prepared for our big CES blogger bash, we need to identify all the bloggers who work the consumer electronics beat.

3) Splogs are threatening the social media ecosystem, and I am curious as to which engines are managing the problem well (or not so well.)

4) I just wanted to see how the MacBook Air stacks up against the new HP Voodoo Envy.

So far, 5 engines have been analyzed for the results the provide. More are being added.

We’ve categorized the results as mostly either “original content” (the good stuff) or “splogs” (the bad stuff) with a few other categories we’ll describe in a later post.

At this stage, let’s look at just the results deemed to be original content. See the graphic below. On the left you can see we have dozens of individual sites deemed “good” and what engines displayed them when I searched using HP Voodoo Envy along with Macbook Air terms.

Engadget content was captured only by Digg and Technorati, while Gear Live was captured only by Digg, FriendFeed, and Twitter.

Some quick conclusions can be reached here. One interesting one is that Technorati captured the greatest number of relevant posts. Note that since they offer the option to filter by authority, I took advantage of that and sought only sites with “a lot of authority.”

The big conclusion is for complete brand monitoring you can’t get away with using one engine alone. Even two won’t likely cut it. A bunch of sites were presented by Technorati that Google missed and vice versa. FriendFeed captured links that Technorati and Google both missed etc.

More to come…

Since we have such a uniquely flexible and accurate sentiment tracking system, we’ve been debating for some time whether or not to attach it to Twitter directly. Summize beat us to the punch with their algorithmic sentiment tracking system last year, and then Twitter acquired them — so we’ve feared competing with the “mother ship.”

Summize appeared to be great at analyzing large volumes of data, and is an impressive general twitter search engine. Unfortunately, like all other traditional text-mining systems chasing sentiment, it had sporadic but gaping accuracy holes that may have turned off those looking to do detailed brand monitoring. We’re speculating that this may be why after Twitter acquired them, the sentiment feature has been largely buried.

Joel Spolsky just posted at length today that he’s chosen to buy the Nokia E71 over the Apple iPhone 3G largely because of focused twitter searches:

When Apple’s iPhone 3G came out, I was pretty sure I’d get one. It had all the features I was waiting for. But the lines just weren’t going away.

I searched Twitter. For a week, then two, every day brought fresh reports of five-hour waits.

And then the reports of bugs started coming in. The Exchange synchronization features weren’t up to snuff, I heard. The phone crashed regularly, I heard. Basic operations were painfully slow. Battery life was abysmal.

Adam Curry suggested getting a Nokia E71. I had never heard of this thing. Nokia? Really? For years I had always thought that Nokia made chunky Europhones that were always just one button short of a usable user interface.

But, no, the more I investigated, the more it seemed that the E71 was a truly credible alternative to the iPhone 3G. The reviews coming in from Europe were stellar…

If stories like this don’t convince the luddite PR professionals that are still so prevalent, to get on the Twitter bandwagon I don’t know what will.

We’re in the middle of engineering several Sentimine tests for clients and prospects for new dashboards, services, and reports, but it seems like it’s time to put a Twitter sentiment system plan on the whiteboard. If anyone reading this has a concrete monitoring project (preferably brand, product or stock-oriented) they’d like to alpha test let me know. Steve AT parnassusgroup DOT com.

Here at Gnomedex everyone is wearing a big, colorful badge designed to match people up with like-minded others wandering through the hallway.

These badges are courtesy of Pathable, the group running the event registration and behind-the-scenes social networking that comes attached to a Web 2.0 conference nowadays. So the question is: does it work?

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For years, we’ve been saying that search should largely drive the content (particularly headlines) that business bloggers choose to create.

Robert Scoble comments today on the useful Google AdWords Keyword tool that can assist in this effort. We leverage this and other free (and paid) services (WordTracker etc.) to help determine what subject lines will drive the most relevant readers to the blogs we create for clients.

One service we provide is a virtual “peek” into competitor’s server logs to see what searches are driving traffic to their site. This can tell us how successful they are, and give clients ideas for terms and phrases that may be profitable for them to post about.

As an example let’s take a peek at Robert’s blog. First, let’s use the service at tagcrowd.com to see what terms are frequently used by Robert in his content:

Now, let’s see what popular keywords are actually driving search traffic to his site:

Notice how many people come to his blog because they are searching for product/service information (Vista, iPhone, Facebook.) Also notice that Robert writes quite a bit about Techmeme and Twitter, but the resulting traffic is not proportional.

Here is an analysis that marketers might find informative. It shows what terms related to products, services, and companies are driving the most traffic to Robert:

One of the biggest issues facing the blogosphere today is how the “bad apples” in the PR industry chase after bloggers who are not relevant to their market or the products they’re pushing. We get tons of “story idea” emails that don’t remotely fit our editorial beat. If more companies leveraged services like these to better target the bloggers they pitch, there might be less vitriol sent in their direction.

Hey PR people — ping us if you want some help targeting your outreach. Leveraging this kind of analysis can help you get more traction in the blogosphere.

For marketing a political candidate this may be the case. This from the Economist (emphasis mine:)

Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton’s internet director, says that YouTube, even more than Facebook or MySpace, has had a huge impact on the campaign. Will.i.am’s ode to Mr Obama, “Yes we can”, has had nearly 9m views since it was uploaded six months ago; some 1.9m have watched the McCain Girls’“Raining McCain” over the past four months. Thousands of clips created by ordinary people have been uploaded, to be shared in blogs and often covered by traditional media too.

Both nominees have their own YouTube channels. Mr Obama’s videos have had 52m views, Mr McCain’s 9.5m. Mr Obama’s entire 37-minute speech on race in America has been viewed 4.7m times on YouTube. But the inflamatory sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have also been seen by millions.

There are a myriad of social media tools and services available on the web right now.

It can be tricky finding out which ones you should be paying attention to and, more importantly, how you can use them to generate measurable improvement in your bottom line.

There’s good news and there’s bad news when it comes to business in social media.

The bad news is that creating and maintaining customer relationships effectively takes time and effort, there is no magic formula that takes all the work out of it.

The good news is that it’s not rocket science. In fact, it’s a straightforward process that practically anyone can manage.

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Monitor110 (now shut down) was a web monitoring service akin to our own Sentimine product, but with a Wall Street focus. They had developed an impressive prototype service that received some amazing press coverage. Several people — including one of the founders — are blogging like crazy about what went wrong, and I find it riveting.

One of my first impressions is that even with an investment of 20 million dollars, and a staff of dozens, they ran into several of the same key challenges we have, notably the difficulty of eliminating spam from results, and accurately tagging for sentiment (both issues we have been fortunate to solve quickly.)

It appears that since our engineers don’t believe that NLP is the default answer to most problems, we have avoided chasing the algorithmic chimera that others have pursued.

One thing we were sure of early on: if Google can’t solve the splog issue, it ain’t worth even trying…

Enter this search request into Google Blog Search:

voodoo envy “macbook air”

Do you find anything listed that is a direct link to:

notebooks.com
gearlive.com
macrumors.com
engadget.com
nytimes.com
?

I sure don’t. I can find lots of splogs that lift their (and other’s) content though.

Now do the same search in Digg. There they are! It appears to me that many of the most relevant blogs appear in Digg (as they should…) and are nowhere to be found in Google blog (or news) search.

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post I made regarding brand monitoring and Google. In that post I mentioned that Google was providing me with a 30/70 signal to noise ratio. My tests so far with Digg indicate a 70/30 ratio. Far fewer splogs, much more original content.

“Scrabulous shut down, which is the right call to make. i mean, we have IP protection 4 a reason” - Jason Calacanis

This morning I read on the New York Times’ Bits Blog that Scrabulous has been shut down on Facebook for anyone inside North America.

I’m in agreement with Jason Calacanis on this one - just because Scrabulous is an online version of an existing game doesn’t mean that it’s outside the protection of the law.

It’s too bad for Hasbro that they didn’t catch on and make their own version of Scrabulous sooner (the iPhone app, on the other hand, seems to be doing very well) because they’ve lost a lot of revenue to Scrabulous and Hasbro will probably never get to enjoy the benefits of being the HUGE fad that Scrabulous was for a while on Facebook. Now we’ve been there, done that.

I think the days of passively protecting your IP are over. In other words, no company is going to be able to successfully prevent someone else from doing something. Just because you own the IP for Scrabble does not mean that you can prevent Scrabble from being on Facebook.

Instead companies need to proactively protect their IP: Get there first so you can own the space.

Since we’ve developed the world’s best automated sentiment tagging engine, we’ve spent a lot of time working with various search tools trying to determine the best way to feed it accurate, timely, and complete content to score.

For those clients of ours who want to stay on top of what’s being said about them, many times we have utilized Google Blog Search as a key component to our monitoring efforts. The problem is that it seems to be declining significantly in terms of trustworthiness.

For fun I did a search today in order to compare two competing products that I lust after: the MacBook Air, and the HP/Voodoo Envy.

The Google Blog Search was:
voodoo envy “macbook air”

It provided 86 net results, and I examined each result carefully. Here’s what I concluded:

• 4 were dead links.
• 35 were spam blogs.
• 18 were mildly sploggy — brief abstracts of original content with links back to original source (usually automated extracts.)
• 1 was a complete duplicate of original content, but in a non-splog environment.
• 1 was a brief comment below a post.
• 27 were original content.

Bottom line, almost 70 percent of the results were noise, not signal.

In at least two cases, Google provided a splog entry but NOT the original piece the spammers stole from! (Yes the originals were syndicated via RSS…)

Splog one here. (appeared in search result.)
Real site here. (did not appear in search result.)

Splog two here. (appeared in search result.)
Real site here. (did not appear in search result.)

Sorry gang, but when spam is the number one result of a search, and original sources are MIA, something is wrong.

The New York times has a piece today talking about Microsoft’s new(er) partnership with Facebook to expand the use of their Live search:

To Microsoft, Facebook is a quick way to expand the audience for its search engine. More than 29 million people actively use Facebook in the United States. They will soon see prominent displays of Microsoft’s Live Search box on their friends’ and their own Facebook pages.

Everyone’s been griping for ages about how horrible the search functions are within Facebook. We did a few successful posts that essentially made it easier to find groups or pages on Facebook.

Why did they get traffic? People would rather search Google for the link to the page than try to navigate through Facebook’s own search UI.

I’ll be excited if, in addition to just letting me search the internet at large, Microsoft actually indexes Facebook (remember - Google for the most part is not allowed to do this) and we can finally do away with Facebook’s own, abysmal, internal search.

So all in all, I think this could be a good move.

According to Mark Walsh in the Online Media Daily, two of the existing mobile ad networks, AdMob and JumpTap, have announced new customized ad units for the iPhone:

The platform’s key element is an “Action” icon within ad units that allows users to launch video (via YouTube), audio, maps and Web sites as well as initiate calls and download content from Apple’s iTunes and App stores. A separate “Canvas” unit lets marketers create expandable ads with custom features.

As people start using their handsets more for social networking, commanding the ad platforms on the iPhone and similar devices is going to be very important. It may turn out that monetizing a social network is a lot easier on a mobile platform than it is on the computer.

If you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve for engaging with your customers using social media (which is usually a good place to be) I’d start thinking about how your service or product can fit in with how people are using their phones.

Urbanspoon has a genius iPhone application. If I were Yelp, I’d be a little worried. What if Urbanspoon opens up some real social functionality in their iPhone app? Making reviews and recommendations on restaurants is a whole lot easier from a phone while you’re still there.