The UK Election Social Media Dashboard

Click HERE to see the UK Election Social Media Dashboard!

Posted via email from UK Election

What are people saying about Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable? ((tag: ukelections, elections, socialmedia, monitoring, gordonbrown, alistairdarling, davidcameron, georgeosborne, nickclegg, vinc

So, the election is upon us. Hustings, hustings everywhere. The boy
stood on the burning deck when all about was hustings. Etc.

Because I'm dashboard-kerrayzee, I thought it might be a nice idea to
put together a few dashboards to cover all this. It's also a good
exercise in developing new methods that don't depend on Yahoo Pipes
any more, because nowadays Yahoo Pipes is, not to put too fine a point
on it, shit.

Let us not fool ourselves. Politics is about personalities. So if you
want to see what people are saying about the key figures, take a look
at http://www.netvibes.com/brendancooper#UK_Election%3A_Key_figures.

And if you want to read the 'official' news, go to
http://www.netvibes.com/brendancooper#UK_Election%3A_News_coverage

Everything should stand up although we're depending on a lot of things
working here, such as: Google Blog Search, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter
and, of course, Netvibes itself. But aggregated together they could
not be less reliable than Yahoo Pipes which is, not to put too fine a
point on it, shit. Didn't I just say that?

If you're in any way interested, and are actually reading this blog
(you mean to say, you still read blogs? You weirdo) then look out for
more coming down the pipe (not the Yahoo variety because - I'll leave
it at that).

In a whimsical folly, harking back to the days when politics was about
policies, I thought it might be interesting to get an idea of message
penetration (ooer missus) so I'll be looking at ways to show that in
another tab.

I've also noticed that there are some good, solid political bloggers
out there who occupy an interesting space between the dross of YouTube
and quality of the dailies.

And I just might aggregate the combined output of the parties
themselves, so you can see the difference between what they're saying,
and what other people are saying they're saying.

So that'll be three lovely new tabs coming up. Five in total. Count the tabs.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.

I want to listen, so let me find you!

I've been doing a lot of social media strategy lately. This involves digging around the web looking to see where a client is influential and what the sentiment is around that client, compared to its competitors (among many other things). And, so that I'm comparing like with like, I compare YouTube channels to each other, blogs to each other, Twitter accounts to each other and so on. It's no use comparing, say, the number of group members in Facebook with the number of subscribers in YouTube because they're not the same thing.

One thing I look at is the split between advocate and advertising influence - that is, the influence of what other people are saying about a client, versus what the client is saying about itself. And, again, I do that for the competition. The results can be very interesting when you find that one organisation is doing all the hard work itself, spouting pages and pages of blog posts and tweets, when it could be using its audiences to do that instead. Or, that another organisation has virtually no control over what is being said about it online because it has none of its own sponsored channels and therefore no 'voice' to add.

To do this, you have to hunt. You have to find the advocates and that takes a long time. But - and here's the nub of the rub - I'm also finding that I often have to hunt for what an organisation is saying about itself.

It should be - and sometimes is - as simple as going to its website and looking for the links to Twitter, Facebook etc. But I would say at least 40% of the time I find that an organisation hasn't listed any of its presences or joined them up in any way. So if you're looking at its LinkedIn group you're not told that it has a Twitter account, or if you're looking at Twitter, there's no mention in the background graphic that it's on YouTube too. Etc etc etc.

Read that again: I have to hunt for what an organisation is saying about itself. Sometimes I've missed things. I've searched through Flickr several times and overlooked the Flickr group because the organisation has used some weird title for the group and hasn't tagged anything meaningfully. If it had just told me, loudly and clearly, that it had a Flickr group, somewhere on its website, ideally on the home page, then I'd have found it easily enough anyway.

So what is the point of engaging with people when you make it hard for them to find you? You need to have everything working together, all interlinked, everything doing its own separate yet complementary task of slotting into your overall communications programme. Not separated out little islands that you have to join up yourself.

So, if any community managers are reading this - or anyone at all judging by my sadly declining blog figures - then take this piece of advice: if you want to be heard, then make yourselves easy to find first. List every one of your presences up front, with nice big icons, not piddly little ones at the bottom of the page, and not on a sub-page off the home page under the title 'Beware of the Leopard'. Basically, don't make people have to find you, because they won't bother.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.

It's all swings and roundabouts

... as my grandad used to say.

I'll be honest with you: business stank in December, January and February. I don't know what happened. It just disappeared. I spent the time productively, developing my own tools for measuring and monitoring, chasing leads and - heaven forfend - indulging in online advertising, but it was quite disheartening. I could understand December because people are generally too knackered or too busy (or both) to start new projects off. Other freelancers I spoke to said they experienced the same thing so, note to self: go for a nice wintersun holiday in December from now on.

Still, January didn't improve and neither did February. I was starting to get worried. Was I losing my mojo? Because I did have some, once. Or perhaps I was just stunningly lucky when I started off freelance.

However, there are certain shall we say 'practices' which don't help freelancers. They generally fall into these categories, in ascending order of irritation:

• A prospective client asks for a quote. I send the client a quote. The client doesn't reply. I chase three more times. The client doesn't reply. I give up. This is fair enough - this is all prospective and there are no obligations on either side. But it's a bit, well, rude.
• A prospective client asks for a quote. I send the client a quote. The client says they're going to consider it. That's fine. They responded, but deep down I kind of know it's not going to happen. They get a '5' score on my little spreadsheet. If you want to know whether it's good or bad, I'll tell you that it automatically gets shaded in black.
• A client says "Yes, let's do it." We all wave our arms in the air. They move up to a '2' on my spreadsheet which is a nice shade of orange. Then they realise they might actually have to do something such as review content or supply material. And they disappear. Again.
• An existing client disappears. That is, you thought you were working together, and the client keeps coming up with excuses, usually "I'm ill" or "I'm busy". Fine, I wait until they're better or less busy. The client doesn't reply. I chase three more times. The client doesn't reply. I give up. This is, in my opinion, not fair enough. At all. It's about as rude as it gets, short of giving you the finger.

What I really don't like about these scenarios is that people think it makes life easier just to disappear. What's wrong with being honest? I mean, why not just say "We don't need what you offer" or "You're too expensive" or "We think you smell"? I'd rather have this than radio silence. Besides, if they tell me I might be able to do something about it. Particularly the smell.

But I've noticed things suddenly pick up. I haven't been doing anything different. I've just had people who understand the value of relationships, who kept in contact, and who now have work for me. They're all at 'number one', which is red hot. Hurray.

I don't want this to be a gripe because I seem to have been doing that a lot recently, but here's the lesson: it might be easy to ignore a freelancer, and you obviously think it's just you doing it and no one else, and I'll play by the rules and leave you alone, but don't forget that freelancers work with all sorts of clients on a daily basis. Inevitably we chew the fat with people who hire us. And whereas we're discreet - or at least I am - and never bad-mouth a client, we will also talk glowingly about people we like and just not mention 'the disappeared' at all.

So if you want a mention, even if you don't want my work, then be honest with me. If you just disappear, you'll disappear.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.

Want to know the truth? I don't read blogs any more.

It's true.

I used to love reading blogs. I found them endlessly fascinating. After a while I got to 'know' some of the bloggers and understand the community that surrounding PR and social media.

But it recently struck me that I hardly read them any more. It was quite a surprise to get onto Google Reader recently and realise this. I don't even have Google Reader bookmarked any more. I just don't bother with it. Occasionally I might see something of interest in my 'Must Read' feed, but that's about it.

So what's changed? It's probably a combination of things. I do a lot of online work now and perhaps I just don't want to stare at a screen any more than I have to each day.

It could be that the novelty's gone too. It was amazing - actually, for me, life-changing is not an exaggeration - when I wrote my first post, subscribed to my blog on Google Reader, and saw my post come through. I could have been on the other side of the world and still have read it. And I loved that I could read other people who were 'getting it' too.

Or maybe everyone has run out of things to say? That's probably unfair. But I do think the issues around blogging have all been discussed many, many times now and the engagement just isn't there any more. I hardly get any comments any more. My blog stats have remained pretty much level over the past year. Unless I do something radical, that's not going to change. So perhaps other people don't read blogs either any more?

Or is it that the 'new kids' on the block really have taken over? Maybe it really is more immersive/rewarding/accessible to tweet several times a day rather than blog once? Or to share thoughts, videos and pictures with friends rather than analysis with peers?

There is still a place for blogging. Organisations can do very well by putting their people out there and presenting a human face, and increasing their search engine attractiveness, day by day, post by post. I'd still argue there's very little to lose if a company wants to blog, providing they can spare the time to do it.

But... meh. I'm trying to think of a nice way to round this post off. I usually do the thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing and end on a crescendo. But right now, it's more diminuendo from me I'm afraid.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.

Forget bad hair days, I've had a bad tech week

Sometimes, nothing seems to work properly.

This week I had a sudden flash of inspiration: how about importing an RSS feed into a Google Spreadsheet, creating a chart from it, then publishing that chart as an image? You could then produce your own charts for RSS feeds. Wonderful.

A quick test showed that yes, you can publish an image. Fab. Further research showed that the importfeed function was what I needed to bring in an RSS feed. I kind of knew that because I'd used importxml and importhtml in the past. Only one snag: it didn't work. Whatever I tried, it just returned 'N/A''.

Since then I've looked around and found blog posts that illustrate how importfeed works, and they show the same error. Even the Google Help shows this error. I haven't had a response from Google Forums and I've emailed the people running those blogs, but no response so far. Which leads me to conclude that a fantastically useful function, which I'd really really really like to use, doesn't work any more.

Second this week: Netvibes. I had an opportunity to put a dashboard together for a premium client, on the back of a major press release. Initially everything was fine, but slowly it started to misbehave. Eventually I'd put the thing together but needed to delete an extraneous widget. So I deleted it, everything fine. An hour later I looked, and the widget had returned. "Weird", I thought, and deleted it again, and tweaked another. An hour later, it was back again, and the tweak had disappeared. So I moved it, and archived it. This time, an hour later, there were two widgets instead: that is, two widgets I didn't want there, which a client could see.

Now I know Netvibes isn't a professional solution and I couldn't really honour any kind of SLA with it, but it was pretty frustrating that I couldn't get this to work. It works now, fine. But it didn't then, when I needed it to.

Finally, over the week I've noticed that Backtype has stopped producing RSS feeds for searches. I found Backtype incredibly useful as a monitoring tool to see comments - that is, key indicators of engagement. This time I did get support: Backtype responded to my tweets asking what was going on. Unfortunately they've confirmed what I thought. You can't just specify a search and get an RSS off it, that I can see. You can only monitor comments to specific posts. My problem is that I need to know what those specific posts are first, in order to monitor them! I'd much rather have something that guides me to the posts I need to monitor. That is, I'd rather it worked the way it used to.

Unfortunately at the time of posting the entire service seems to have keeled over. It just gives a 502: Gateway error right now, which I don't think I've ever seen before so it must be bad. I'm guessing they've decided to stop the RSS-from-search because their servers were in danger of melting, but it looks to me like the changes they've implemented are experiencing teething troubles. What a pity.

And that's it. That's been my week. Three very useful things that haven't worked properly for me. Sometimes, I do wonder whether it's better to go back to paper and pencil. Or maybe just banging the rocks together.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.

What are people saying about... PR?

This is another in a series of posts in which I set up dashboards to get an overview of what people are saying, and where they're saying it.

This time: PR. Public Relations. The art and science of spin, persuasion, influence. Whatever you want to call it, the chances are that today, you read, watched, saw or listened to something that had a PR agency behind it, and you didn't even know it. More importantly, the likelihood is that somewhere down the line - not today, not tomorrow, but sometime, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart - you will make a choice that was influenced by that 'thing' you read/watched/saw/heard. You may not like this idea, but it's true. That's why the entire industry - plus advertising, plus marketing - exists.

Anyway, click here to see the dashboard, or click the image below (if Posterous will let me include the image this time, that is):

I initially set out with this dashboard to throw in EVERYTHING - that is, social video, photo, comments, networks, news, the whole kit and caboodle. After a day or so of watching the results come in I started to tweak the keywords. At first it seemed fairly obvious: it's just 'PR' or 'Public Relations', innit? Sadly, no. Here are some of the keywords you need to exclude:

• Phrases for which 'PR' is short-hand. To wit: "Project Reality", "proportional representation", "page rank", "power ranger" and not forgetting the world-famous "Pakatan Rakyat".
• Words that PR agencies tended to use to promote themselves, such as 'sizzle' (as in 'sizzle reel'). I wasn't interested in what PR agencies said about themselves. I wanted to know what people were saying about them.
• Weird stuff. 'Hockey'. 'Football'. And 'Run of the Cat'. No, really. Check it out on YouTube (don't worry, it's not rude).
  

After a while I started to get closer to what I was really after. I wanted specifically to know what people thought or felt about PR, not just what they were saying about it. So I started feeding phrases such as "I think PR", "I feel PR", "I don't know if PR", and so on. This was quite successful in giving an overview not of what people were saying about PR, but how they were affected by it.

Then, again, I realised it would be much more interesting to distil even further. So let's look at a 'Blair binary'. Let's look at people who love PR, and people who hate PR. This is #PRLove and #PRWin, directly compared.

So, that's what I've done. I've pared this right down so you can see the phrases 'I love PR' and 'I love Public Relations' compared directly with their counterparts 'I hate PR' and 'I hate Public Relations'.

And you know what? Many more people seem to love it than hate it. This surprised me - a lot.

Way back in time Jonathan Hopkins created the #PRFail Tumblr blog so that people could generally whinge and moan about the state of the PR nation. In reaction, I created #PRWin to balance the books. #PRFail won, by quite some distance, and this told me that there was a vast, fetid, pus-filled ocean of ire and resentment reserved especially for the PR specialists.

But this dashboard tells me something different. Go and take a look. There are more tweets that love PR than hate it. There are so few 'hate PR' tweets that at the time of writing, no one has actually issued a tweet containing the phrase 'I hate PR' or 'I hate Public Relations'. Ah, there we go - ok, some people have, but not many.

So, there you have it. Love and hate, the two basic drivers of human instinct, all neatly packaged into one dashboard. It might be interesting to extend this to advertising and marketing, just to see how we're all faring relative to each other. And I'm working on a way to display stacked charts showing numbers of mentions for each platform in near real-time. All that needs to happen to make that possible is for Google to fix its importfeed function. Then we'll be laughing. Ha ha.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.