Posts Tagged ‘chinwag’
Social media tools list - from analytics to Digg
February 20th, 2008
After recently attending the Chinwag: measuring social media event, I wanted to share with you some of the hundreds of mostly free measurement, tracking, conversation, monitoring tools and so on that are out there and widely available. All of which can be found on our archived research page , which is there for all to use to better understand social media and related subjects.
The first link is a Mashables page where you will find tools for web traffic visualisation, blog and RSS feed analysis, market research data and site rankings, analytics software packages and log file analysis.
The next link is 26 must-have buzz monitoring tools, all of which are free of charge.
For the PR readers of the blog here are some tools for you that have been tried and tested by PR consultant David Jones.
If you are a big fan of DEL.ICIO.US as we are here at Liberate, here’s another one for you. The ultimate DEL.ICIO.US TOOLBOX - over 180 DEL.ICIO.US tools to use. Check out our own bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/liberatemedia
By now you should all be digging and submitting story you like to Digg. To keep on top of it all here is a Digg tools and resource page.
If that wasn’t enough for you here’s 70 more Digg tools.
Want to track your website? Well you should! On this page there are 69 tools to do just that.
If you just want to concentrate on blogs here are some tracking tools and six key ways to measure it.
If you have a found a discussion in the bloggosphere and you want to follow it try one of the following tools.
Twitter is very popular at the moment and numbers 4 and 5 in this blog post will help you monitor conversations and visualisation.
More reputation and social media tactics tools can be be found in our rescource.
If you would like to add to our resource or think we might have missed some important tools please get in touch.
Chinwag: the length isn’t in measurement yet
February 19th, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag Live event was all about measuring the effectiveness of social media - a brave subject matter, bearing in mind that many are still getting to grips with what social media is, let alone grasping the new metrics associated with it.
Sitting on the panel were Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at research firm Nielsen Online, Robin Grant from word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, Will McInnes, MD of social media agency Nixon McInnes, and Ankur Shah of data-driven measurement company Techlightenment. The panel was chaired by a big name within web analytics - Jim Sterne.
As a first observation, I found it disappointing that there was not a better balance of communications experts on the panel. Granted, measurement often goes hand in hand with technology and data collection, but monitoring is equally as important in social media and far more the realm of communicators. Although Ankur and Alex put forward their very best case for technolgy being the answer to everything, I remain unconvinced that in this early stage in social media, technology is able to accurately interpret emotion, tone, and to a certain extent the unsaid.
A pertinent observation by Jim Sterne was “getting humans to agree on language is almost impossible”. If that’s the case, how on earth can we expect computers to. In Will McInnes’ words: “humans are slow, and computers are dumb”.
If I’m honest, I came away thinking that I hadn’t learnt as much as I’d hoped to, and this sentiment seemed to be shared by other people in the audience. A Tweetscan last night for ‘chinwag’ was very telling - a lot of passive observations, but nothing ground-breaking or inspiring being shared.
One hypothesis for the night had been the notion of establishing industry-wide agreement on measurement standards. This wasn’t discussed in great depth, but there seemed to be a reluctance to address the concept and debate how it could work. This underlined my major disappointment with the evening - that being that everyone was talking from their own individual agendas. While social media is inherently about honesty and openness, the data experts were keeping their cards very close to their chests, and not so willing to reach conscensus on anything. While I appreciate this was a discussion, it would have been nice to see more willingness for collaboration, from an industry operating at the heart of social media.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Chinwag: Fishing in the digital media recruitment pond
January 30th, 2008
Or should i say puddle…
Some of the Liberate Media team went down to Chinwag last night to get to grips with the digital media skills emergency and it seems the problem maybe worse than we had first suspected.
Sam Michel, Chinwag’s Founder and MD, kicked off the evening by sharing the results of the Chinwag skills survey, with some rather alarming stats such as ‘97% of digital media organisations find it difficult or impossible to attract digital people’…Ouch, and i’m afraid the outlook didn’t get much brighter.
There were many good points raised on the evening both from the panel and the floor as to why this is occuring, so i’ve summarised my top three below:
- The digital industry cannibalises itself, especially in our recruitment. We don’t look to other industries to recruit and we don’t think of transferable skills. This means an ever shrinking pool of talent is being sucked dry by an ever increasing roster of potential employers. Simple demand and supply.
- There is a lack of training and education for those wanting to get into the industry. Academic media courses are, in the main, run by those without specialist digital knowledge, so the graduates that are coming out simply aren’t up to the job. And even if the courses are up to scratch the industry changes so fast that within the three years taken to complete a course, the teachings are out of date.
- There is no body, force or will to face these issues head-on and promote the industry to other sectors, or - God forbid, make it seem an interesting and worthwhile place to aspire to be. Last night there were calls for a digital media recruitment body, calls for the IAB to step in and calls for help from just about everyone - even the recruitment agencies.
Add this to the issues of no time to recruit and according to Matt Alder, head of digital at Barkers, only 10% of digital jobs actually being advertised, and you can soon see why we’re in this mess.
For me, the problem is routed in the issue that the digital media industry doesn’t look, recruit or even engage outside of the industry, which is shocking - yet obvious when you think about it. We are insular beyond belief; other industries promote themselves and flutter their eye lashes at potential employees without a second thought, so why should we expect our industry to continue growing without some investment in people.
Why shouldn’t we look at transferable skills? Some already do and at Liberate we’ve already looked outside of the industry to recruit, and the results have been both eye-opening and rewarding. Having a new perspective on the industry is very powerful.
The time for procrastination and blame has passed. In times of crisis only action will turn the problem around, and we’re going to have to make some serious changes to open ourselves up to the type of candidates we want. In Liberate’s cases that’s - senior and experienced digital communicators, just in case you were wondering!
We’ve already got a plan in place and you’ll be seeing the fruits of our labour both on our site and reported via our blog. We are going to be embracing digital marketing to assist our recruitment targets and doing what we do best, which is communicating and driving results.
Watch this space.