I never know quite where I'm going to end up when I write a post - I started with Seth Godin's Traffic Truth Tricks and ended up .........
Well .... it's nice Seth Godin is giving some value (while getting liberally re-tweeted ... nothing against that) in his post about Discover the truth about a site's online traffic - where he mentions .......
... You can see the referrals and traffic to an individual bitly twitter URL by copying the URL and adding + sign to it. For example, if you see something like this in a tweet: http://bit.ly/870Ry9 just copy it and paste it with the plus and you'll see http://bit.ly/870Ry9+. I think that's pretty neat. You can also track top retweets on an hourly or daily basis.
I didn't know that ... I bet a lot of people did not know about it, either. If you provide value to the community - you ought to be re-tweeted(and Seth asks for your subscription right at the end of the post).....
..... .PS You can get updates on this blog in Twitter by following @thisissethsblog. And you can get a free subscription by RSS (the best way) or email.
My observation is what "the community" wants and finds valuable is not often the same thing the individual who is posting, finds valuable - more about that in a minute. Many of my best posts, by my own estimation, hardly got re-tweeted, at all, yet a post I just made a comment about (with a list I didn't come up with - but found value with - and noted it) got re-tweeted 253 (and counting) and viewed more than anything else I've ever written - at Social Media Today - this weekend, it was a syndicated copy of my post on 26 Tools for Social Media Monitoring that I spent about 10 minutes writing at 1AM in the morning - more as a quick note and what I read earlier in the day (or the day before). Notice that Social Media Today "tweaked" my title, I notice editors often do that - don't know if it helped, or not. Other posts of mine, that I worked on and put my soul into, often spending a few hours on them, that I thought were more original and better - never got picked up, at all.
Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring
by webmetricsguru on 12/10/2009 23:41 10 comments , 8534 views
Categories: Surveys & Research, Social Software
As far as the Traffic Truth, via Compete or Quantcast vs. Alexa - they're all wrong compared to site analytics, as much as 40% under or over counting - but we've been down that road before - it's not a new topic - most people know Compete is better for overall trending and competitive intelligence when you have site analytic data (we almost never do have it).
But, Seth Godin's Traffic Trick doesn't really go far enough - because it's only about Bit.ly, and that's not enough to cover the whole universe of where content is being created and shared.
1. BackType to the Social Media Today post shows several bitly URLs that were tweeted -
http://bit.ly/info/6DG3Mi which, when expanded ... turn out to be 1001 clicks as of now (I checked the other bitly urls listed.
1,001 Total Clicks
All clicks on the aggregate bit.ly link bit.ly/6kLto6
Long Link: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/155299 Conversations: Tweets 72; Shares 10, Likes 2, Comments 2; Shares 0; Comments on Page 10; View All Locations: United States 488; Canada 125; Other 103 View All
And not all the urls listed were from Bitly - like http://tinyurl.com/ybmkjh8 , http://short.to/10bvd , http://ff.im/-cO8l9 , http://j.mp/6wBhvK -
Have no idea what the traffic from TinyUrl, Short.to, Ff.im or j.mp was - and I don't know, off hand, of anyone integrating that traffic - Seth's traffic trick doesn't really work, unless you want a quick Bit.ly fix.
Plus, let's not forget my original post - at Webmetricsguru.com - shouldn't my content be "summed up" ... it is, more or less, the same thing ... right? What's the combined views of my content, including all syndication? Who's able to answer that question? I should think Seth Godin would care about that much more than I do, since he's syndicated all over the place - way more than I am. How come he doesn't provide a quick trick on that one? He can't - he can't solve this problem - he would not even try - it's not a quick fix.
My post on Webmetricsguru.com
WebMetricsGuru » 26 Tools for Social Media Monitoring
http://bit.ly/7l8b3h30 ClicksThe bit.ly link bit.ly/7l8b3h was added by tweetdeckapi
72 Total ClicksAll clicks on the aggregate bit.ly link bit.ly/61AKVc
Long Link: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/12/26-tools-for-social-media-monitoring/ Conversations: Tweets 22; Shares 2, Likes 1, Comments 0; Shares 0; Comments on Page 0; Searching... View All Locations: United States 11; Russian Federation 6; United Kingdom 3 View All
We'd have to add the 72 clicks from my post to the 1001 from Social Media Today and get something like 1073 clicks, plus whatever else was at the other shorted urls - which aren't easy to collect (but maybe someone ought to try).
Now, Compete, Alexa or Quantcast don't give stats on individual urls - and Compete is at-least a month behind - so they're not helpful here.
On the other hand, Social Media Monitoring Tools, like Radian6, Techrigy, Sysomos - don't pick up the slack and they ought to try - they're all keyword based, but ... not url based or topic based, but they ought to try to be.
For example, let's take Radian6 - if I put a url in the source filter - will it take care of all the other url shortening and syndication? I'm trying it right now - Seth Godin might be into Traffic tricks - I'm not. What will Radian6 comes up with?
I put all the urls I could possible get into the source filter - suppose I could add Google Sidewiki urls on my site and Social Media Today (but SideWiki doesn't work on the url level, yet), since Radian6 now tracks those, but I left those out, for now.
I created a topic profile that would be sure to pick up anyone talking about my post, in either place.
And I added "Sentiment Keywords", a new feature Radian6 added that allows them to do Sentiment Analysis by letting a user tell Radian6 the phrases or entities they think are important - VERY NICE - Kudos to Radian6 for adding this ... real stuff - that we can use - not Seth Godin's Traffic Tricks ... intended for a quick marketing pickup and some additional subscribers to his blog (who could end up being his clients or buying his books, stuff, down the line).
I also set my Influencer Settings to be thus (see below).
Last, but not least - I ensured that only keyword relevant content from the sites I am using in my source filter would be considered.
The results - didn't work too well - didn't aggregate the traffic but it did make the "Influencer List" and the "Word Clouds" more accurate - in a general way. I know Radian6 and the rest of the tools, wasn't really designed to answer the questions I'm asking - to be fair - and neither is Seth Godin, to be fair - again - he's a Marketer - don't expect good analytic from him - he sells ideas - makes you feel good - and then he's collects his money, and walks away - to the next gig or speaking engagement, or book.
Honestly, that's OK, I don't expect any more from Seth Godin, than that.
Getting to the Word Cloud - much better - not that I added Source Filters and Sentiment Keywords - "Social Tools", "Social Media Tools" and "online reputation listening" are the basic focuses - it doesn't do "meme analysis" yet (covered that in my slideshare presentation at Monitoring Social Media 09, below) - but it's not bad, for what it is now.
See my presentation to find out how this word map could have been a lot better
Meanwhile, the Influencer List got a lot better - even though it's not about my post - but just people who would be receptive to the topics in my post.
If I wanted to create an Influencer List with this basic data - I could - it take a few hours, but much of the noise, I think, is eliminated by limiting the sources of data and putting sentiment in around keywords I define ahead of time.
And I'll argue the people on the bottom of the list are probably more likely to be receptive to me (if I wanted to contact them, than the people on the top of it).
However, to end this long post - no tool really can do more than get part of the answers - simple Traffic Tricks from Seth Godin don't work well in this , nor to the Social Media Monitoring platforms, though I think, this is an area they ought to tackle next year, for 2010.
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