There is an impressive new site called Social Mention that you should check out. It offers a good analytic report of the real time buzz associated with a keyword(s) submission. It is a very simple 1-step keyword submit to get the result of a set of buzz metrics such as Strength, Sentiment, Reach, and Passion. It has some other key metrics as well as an aggregation of blog posts and articles that match the keyword.
I think the interface for the input as well as for the analysis/report is top notch and it is a site worth your time if you need some basic reporting tool for WOM or Social Media.
Bottom line — it is not an analytics tool that is going to blow you away with concrete ROI data about WOM or Social Media, but let’s be honest that level of concrete ROI analysis does not really exist for WOM and Social yet because nobody has really figured it out (…and it is FREE so please no whining from the data nerd herd).
Recently AddToAny, makers of one of the most popular sharing widgets, published a report on the status of sharing on the Internet today. Some of the results are pretty interesting — not a shocker that Facebook leads the pack with 24%, but I was a little surprised to see that Twitter was only at 10.8% & that Digg and Reddit were under 5%. See the full graph below.
These are definitely interesting stats, but another stat that I would have liked to have seen is how much sharing has grown over the past 1 – 2 years. In addition, I would like to see a stat that isolates the AddToAny widget and compares the amount of sharing from pages/sites that have the widget vs. those that only have the “share via email” feature. I think you would see a massive drop in sharing activity (probably a massive drop in the growth rate of Facebook and Twitter too).
Let’s face it, if it takes more than 1-click to complete an action online the conversion rate for that action drops significantly. In other words, we are very very very lazy.
So, let’s give some credit where it is due. Little widgets like AddToAny are a HUGE part of the reason we are sharing so much these days. I think Mark Zuckerberg should send the AddToAny creators a few million bucks (wunderkind chump change) in thank you money.
Hello, my name is Eric and I am a Facebook addict. Apparently roughly half of my 160+ “friends” share my addiction. Add in twitter, flickr, youtube, blogs and the rest and it all seems like a huge mess of people wasting a ton of time wandering around the interWEB. However, there is a bit of method to the madness….someone who is overly talkative, enjoys being the center of attention, and those who are natural connectors are essentially hubs distributing information out across many multiples of 6 degrees of separation links.
It would be very cool if there was a way to visually map this out. Not just a map of your own social network…but an aggregate map that combines all of the connections and hubs across the total internet. It would probably look like a total mess….but within that mess you would find some amazing opportunities for quickly distributing information if you could access the connectors/hubs in the model without wasting time on the other 90% of the followers/receivers of info.
Google probably already has this underway and is watching me type this right now btw. Hello Google…show me the map.
