Bre.ad: Key Ingredient or Tasteless Promo?

When it comes to shortening URLs, bit.ly has been my weapon of choice for conserving characters, tracking analytics, and general organization. However, there is an appetizing startup looking to help you chef-up some additional flavor. Currently in private beta, Bre.ad gives shortened URLs five seconds of personalized promo before taking you to the final destination (ex: http://bre.ad/0ccfyw). Although yet to be released publicly, there has already been plenty of debate over its value proposition. An undoubtedly clever execution, but is this the reincarnation of the pop-up ad masquerading as self-expression? Let’s explore this in greater detail…

7 Deadly Sins of Sentiment Analysis

When it comes to monitoring and measuring social media there are plenty of tools to choose from ranging from the entirely free to the incredibly pricey. Generally, you will get what you pay for on the lower end of the spectrum, but the value really tends to vary once you cross over the $500 per month threshold.

As firehose data access becomes increasingly commoditized, it is the depth of analysis that truly differentiates these solutions. Terms like natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) have become all the rage. However, it is sentiment analysis that has received the most hype and it is frightening how often it is abused.

The following will examine some critical mistakes to avoid when analyzing sentiment…

+0.02 on Google +1

When it comes to social, Google has failed to successfully execute. As captivating as Wave initially sounded, it turned out to be nothing more than a learning experience. Many feel the premature timing may have prevented it from living up to its hype. Getting there too early can be equally as devastating as being late to the party like the recent Buzz-kill that will never catch up to Twitter’s traction. Despite previous attempts at social, Google +1 certainly has the search expertise to back any efforts they decide to launch. What can we expect as Google strategically ventures deeper into “social search”? Is this the unofficial beginning of “Google Circles”?

REPUTATIONology

The emergence of the internet may have given anyone in the world a unique voice, but it is the recent proliferation of social graphs that have given these voices both credibility and real-time reach. The once fragmented shouting match of the Web has now been refined to personalized networks, organized communities, and unique identities. People are now able to instantly reach out to anyone with a shared interest, passion, friend, location, etc. Uncensored peer reviews offer more trustworthy opinions than the neatly packaged 30-second Madison Ave propaganda of the past.

Social Commerce is the NEXT BIG THING.

via Paul Marsden at SocialCommerceToday

Social Commerce along with Social Search and Social Mobile are 3 of
my big investment buckets (I invested in Aardvark, Milo.com in 2 of those categories). There’s an epic Wired UK cover story on Social Commerce. You must get the hard copy. I got a couple cool quotes in:

“I call it people rank, as opposed to [Google’s] PageRank. Just as PageRank gives more weight to a page with more authority, we can now identify the most influential people in a space. Traditional marketing? It’s dead. It’s real-time social marketing and commerce that really matter now. There will be multibillion companies in the social commerce space. We’re where we were with social gaming two or three years ago…It’s about ego, sharing your status and accomplishments, a quest for positive validation”

Making the Most of Your Data

Dear Corporate Baby Boomers: crank-up your hearing aids and accept social technologies or get out of the way. Actionable insights are just waiting to be mined in these increasingly vocal conversations. There’s no more hiding and running away will only make things worse. People will find you and people will talk about you. How could you not want to hear what they have to say and make the most out of all the available data?

Social Media Monitoring: 6 Critical Questions to Address

As social media continues to evolve exponentially, keeping track of it even at a personal level becomes a difficult task. You can imagine how much more involved this can be for an entire company or brand to make sense of all this data. The following post examines 6 critical questions that arise when attempting to monitor social media.