Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Posted on September 24, 2009 by amit

The first step of any social influence marketing plan should be to listen – not just what people are saying about your company, but about you as a person, your competitors, and key trends in your industry. I’ve been spending some time recently looking at a lot of different social media listening tools. The factors I believe are important in this type of tool are:

The number of sources indexed – Twitter, Technorati, Youtube, etc…
The number of results
The quality of results – How many are actually about my search term vs. spam
Sentiment Analysis – Are the mentions positive? Do people hate me? I wanna know…
Trend Analysis – Can I see spikes and ebbs in mentions? What about by locations?
RSS – Can I get an RSS feed of this (this is critical for real use)
Email Alerts – Can I get a weekly report emailed? Can I get an email of mentions a day increase above a certain threshold (or dip)?
Widgets – Can I display all public mentions on my site?

Below is a brief comparison and analysis on my findings of the free services (a post on paid services will be coming soon)

Yahoo! Pipes

My initial plan was to use Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed of mentions across the major sites (Twitter, Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Youtube). I was pleasantly surprised to find many people had the same idea and extended it far beyond the major sites to include: Backtype, Techmeme, Boardtracker, WordPress and many others. Sweet! I ran the seemingly most popular version for the term “codechef” (one of the projects I work on) and was quite disappointed with the results. Only 33 results? Where are the tweets? Aright, time to investigate. I fired up the Yahoo! Pipes editor and was immediately regretting it:

Er… Ok. While in theory Yahoo! Pipes looked like the perfect tool for this, trying to extend or modify a pipe isn’t very easy. Also you are passing query parameters dynamically in the URL, if they underlying site makes a change, you won’t get results and might never know. Rather then trying to develop and maintain this myself, I realized there must be a lot of other people who want to do this.

SocialMention

SocialMeniton is the best tool I came across. It indexed all the sources I expected (plus some I didn’t), gave the best results (in terms of both quality and quantity), provided tools for aggregation and analysis and had a really cool widget:

You can filter based on source (blogs, photos, videos, forums, etc…), sentiment (view only negative mentions), keywords, users, etc… Super cool. Also the analytics, number of retweets, authors, last mention, average time between mentions is awesome. It’d be nice if the photos were shown as thumbnails in the full list of results (they are when you click on photos), but that’s a small thing.

Here’s a embed of their real-time widget for everyone’s favorite rapper (mesmerizing):

Collecta

Collecta was better then most but still lacking critical features to be considered seriously. It displays search results in a Twitter style stream (and also shows thumbnails of images). Also gives a nice preview of blog posts and articles:

Though without an RSS feed of results or tools for aggregation and analysis, this isn’t likely to be useful.

WhosTalkin

The last app I came across worth mentioning is WhosTalkin. Although this tool is also lacking RSS feeds and analysis, the site is fast and friendly. It’s easy to filter across results and is nice for a one-time search:

Conclusion

Currently it seems like SocialMention is far ahead of it’s competitors though this field is rapidly evolving and new players come in daily. Here is a summary of the tools described above:

	Yahoo! Pipes	SocialMention	Collecta	Whostalkin
Sources Indexed	As many as you want to configure (most popular “firehouse” has 40)	80+	Not mentioned, though I saw all the big guns	50+
Number of Results	33	124	45	130
Quality of Results	No spam	No spam	No spam	10% Spam
Sentiment Analysis	No	Yes	No	No
Trend Anlysis	No	Not really	No	No
RSS Feeds	Yes	Yes	No	Coming Soon
Email Alerts	Real-time and daily	Daily	Nope	Nope
Widgets	No	Yes	No	No

Next week I have demo’s of a few of the paid tools, to see what they can do, that we can’t do on our own. Know of any tools I missed? Have a different opinion? Let me know…

The Problem With Facebook

Posted on September 2, 2009 by amit

I came across an article today in the NYTimes describing how people are starting to leave Facebook. While the author’s claims are anecdotal (certainly the numbers indicate impressive growth), I found myself silently nodding in agreement at some of her points. The author outlines the feelings of being a stalker, concern of ownership of data, the “corporatization” of the site, the concern over FB’s tracking on 3^rd party sites and the uselessness of it all, as reasons people have recently left the site. While I’m not ready to jump ship yet, I have noticed my FB use has drastically decreased.

In the past few months I’ve found that my newsfeed has less relevant information, mostly from people I don’t care about. I’m big on Twitter, the updates I get are personal, social and professional. I’m able to learn new stuff about the web world, keep up with my favorite artists and (to a lesser degree) connect with friends. The updates in my Facebook feed are largely spammy quiz results from girls I went to middle school with (Sorry Laura, I don’t care what Twilight character you most resemble). Maybe I should only accept real friend requests, maybe not.

Now it seems like FB is trying to compete with Twitter head on, by making status updates public and adding real-time search. Personally I think this is a terrible idea. I use Facebook and Twitter for different reasons. Facebook can differentiate itself by being the place I go to stay up with my “real” friends, plan events and share photos. Create more useful communication applications (like video and group chat), give me better ways to share my photos and videos (like embedding slideshows) and cut down spam by 90%. There are huge opportunities for Facebook in location based services as well.

I understand that Facebook needs to make money, and sees real-time as a huge opportunity, but they should focus on Facebook connect (already 10k+ sites using it). Want profit? Spread your tendrils across the web, become the universal ID then the defacto payment system for the web. Create an app store (I’d pay 99 cents for Mafia Wars) and allow microtransactions (25 cents for some more poker chips).

Don’t be Twitter, that’s not why we came to you in the first place…

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

Posted on July 28, 2009 by amit

Why should businesses engage in Social Media? In the end, the goal of all marketing is to increase sales/conversions. But only in rare examples can a company point to their social media marketing efforts and indicate a direct correlation with sales (one exception is Dell Outlet on Twitter). Companies should engage in social media to increase:

Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
Retweets – Twitter Search
Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
Duration – The length of time spent on the site
Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Posted on July 8, 2009 by amit

Last week I gave a few training sessions to new joinees in our company covering Social Media, Online Advertising and Analytics. From talks I’ve had with new joinees, I’ve found this information isn’t covered in college/graduate coursework. I’m planning on turning this into a longer course and teaching at one of the business schools here.

Part 1: Introduction to Social Media

View more presentations from amitklein.

Part 2: Twitter, Facebook and Social Data Portability

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Posted on June 21, 2009 by amit

Social Data Portability allows you to bring your friends, interests and relationships where ever you go across the web. For users, it means not having to create a new account on every site, and having immediate access to your network of friends. For businesses, it gives you more demographic insight into your users, as well as let you leverage the popularity of existing social networks to promote activity on your site. In this post I will discuss the strengths and differences between Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and Sign in with Twitter and show a few examples.

Facebook Connect

Simply put, Facebook Connect allows you to build a Facebook application outside of Facebook. You can integrate with Facebook’s authentication, retrieve profile information about your users, allow your users to find their friends who have “connected” with your site, as well as selectively publish actions to a user’s activity stream. Developing a Facebook Connect application requires software development chops but gives you access to Facebook’s 200m users. Digg and CNN both demonstrate different approaches to integration.

CNN
CNN offered a live video stream during Obama’s inaugration. It included a Facebook Connect application which allowed users to sign in with their Facebook credentials and participate in a live global chat.

Chattin' bout Barry

The participation numbers are staggering. According to Mashable:

1. 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

These numbers would’ve never been achievable if users had to register with CNN to participate. Recently, the Whitehouse has taken a cue and announced a similar application for it’s live video events.

Digg
Digg’s Facebook Connect implementation allows you to link your Digg and Facebook accounts. Each story you digg, shows up on your activity stream (for all your friends to see). For Digg, the beneifts are immediate, more people will see that I am digging stories and click back to the site.

Signing Into Facebook Connect

Digg story on my Facebook activity feed

Facebook Connect is now also available for the iPhone. This is huge and will create a whole new world of mobile social applications.

OpenSocial

OpenSocial is similar to Facebook Connect but allows you to build applications that run in orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo! and other 3rd party sites.

Virgin Global Row
The Virgin Global Row is a one crazy dude’s story about circling Antarctica in a boat by himself (and raising some money for charity). OpenSocial integration allows you to login, connect with other people who have joined the site, and push your actions on the site to your various social networks.

Open social options

Google Friend Connect
Google has also release a set of plug n play widgets based on OpenSocial called Google Friend Connect. Currently there are about 10 widgets available including sign-in, comments, polls, reviews, events and recommendations. This is cool because it allows anyone to quickly and easily incorporate social elements to their site (no coding required).

Sign in with Twitter

Yep, you guessed it, sign in with Twitter allows 3rd party sites to publish activity to your Twitter stream. One example of this is Spymaster (the Twitter game which equally amazed and pissed people off).

Spymaster
Spymaster is a game which allows you to go on missions, raise money, buy weapons and attack other spies (Twitter users). Success is based on how many of your followers play the game and how often you send out updates through your twitter stream. IMO the game is pretty boring although it is undeniably attracting a huge following and a really nice example of a successful viral campaign.

Bribing you to tweet about your activities

Real time spymaster activity

Conclusion

There’s a big battle over who will become the defacto social OS of the web. In the future sites/widgets/apps will be social (and location aware), the question is where your data will be sourced from. At this point Facebook is clearly in the lead, but Google has deep pockets and Twiter is making huge strides. As Facebook and Twitter launch payment platforms, the opportunity to monitize through social ads and microtransactions presents a huge opportunity. Got friends?

http://virginglobalrow.com/

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

Posted on May 31, 2009 by amit

The long-held myth that web companies can achieve profitability through free products, services and content solely based on advertising is fading. The diminishing rates of online ads, and the slowdown of venture capital and IPOs, has led to a realization that a sustainable business model for web companies must have multiple, diverse, revenue streams.

Over the last few months I’ve seen a growing number of companies offering alternative strategies to generating revenue.

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

The most straightforward revenue source is paid subscriptions. Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, absolutely crush it.

“if [their] 10 million subscribers were to pay the regular $14.99 month-to-month fee, then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost $150 million every single month… that means a revenue-target of more than $1.7 billion for FY 2008.”

While many media companies have experimented with paid subscription models, very few have been able to do it successfully. The exception is research focused companies like Forrester which banks on corporates with deep pockets shelling out $700 for a 12 page report. GigaOM and TechCrunch have also recently launched similar premium research and analysis services.

The New York Times recently released it’s TimesReader 2.0 Adobe Air client. While the client offers an improved user experience, I can’t ever imagine shelling out $3.45 a week for content I can get for free. Though I would pay for their $3 iPhone app.

It’s possible that with the success of the Kindle, these paid content services will flourish in the future.

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

A variation on premium content services is the freemium model. Give away 80% of your service for free, and charge for heavy users who want more functionality or a better experience. Pandora, a music discovery product, recently launched a premium services which, for $36 a year, removes ads, provides higher quality streaming music and offers a desktop app. A compelling offering for their top tier of users.

Wetpaint is another company that has found success through the freemium model:

“When Ben Elowitz formed Wetpaint in 2005, it was intended to let anyone create a Web site free… Wetpaint typically offers advertisers space on a few Web sites with a few hundred thousand visitors. But last fall, many of their advertisers raised their sights to publishers with more than five million readers, Mr. Elowitz said. Rates for leftover ad space fell to 25 cents per thousand views from $1… Now, Wetpaint charges its big company customers, like HBO and Fox, a fee in exchange for providing extra services like site promotion and moderating reader forums… Smaller customers can pay to keep their sites free of ads. Wetpaint plans to add more paid services, including additional storage for big files and personalized domain names. It is also considering selling virtual goods on its sites. “

Finally Google Apps is another nice example of successfully upselling premium services. The communication and collaboration platform is free for up to 50 users, but for $50 per user per year you get access to a whole range of services including: additional storage space, email security and archiving, video sharing, phone support and access to API’s.

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

It’s tough to argue against the game-changing success of the Apple App Store. Rival companies like Google, Nokia and Blackberry have launched their own stores (the Android Market, Ovi store and Blackberry App World respectively). A cursory glance on the Blackberry store only showed about 20 apps, and none of them were paid. While they won’t be competitive with Apple (at least for some time), it’s at least showing that this model is profitable and worth pursuing. I’m sure this is now central to how mobile handset makers and software developers plan on monetizing phones.

Interestingly this model is now being extended beyond just phones (and why not!). According to the Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz:

“Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX.

Our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it’s also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience. “

I believe that a paid app store is also a viable business model for social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Tencent, the largest Chinese social network, focuses on microtransactions as their primary revenue source. Users pay for subscriptions, virtual clothes for your avatar, new weapons, cute pets, etc… From their ’09 first quarter results:

Internet services (digital goods, game subscriptions, micro-transactions) – $279.9 mil (76% of total revenues)
Mobile Subscriptions – $64.5 (17.6% of total revenue)
Online Advertising – $21 mil (5.9% of total revenues)

Online advertising only 5.9% of their total $350mil revenues? Impressive.

Another company successfully generating revenues from social gaming microtransactions is Zygna. According to TechCrunch:

“Zynga, the online gaming publisher, is making a ton of money… [close] to $100 million. And clearly, it’s accelerating… There looks to be a bright future in the online gaming sphere and specifically around micro-transactions. That’s how Zynga makes most of its money. With some of its leading games on MySpace and Facebook, it charges users for playing time or for things like chips in poker. These small purchases which usually amount to only a few dollars at a time, start to add up quick. And that’s only with a small percentage of overall players opting to buy them.”

Facebook finally launched it’s much anticipated payment platform for testing. Facebook hopes to be the OS for the social web. They are banking on companies like Zygna figuring out what it the masses want and developing social applications on top of their platform. App developers will be able to charge for subscriptions and create opportunities for in-app transactions. Facebook will get a cut of each transaction. Cha-ching!

Another interesting company in this space is Tipjoy, which facilitates small payments on Twitter. I haven’t seen this used effectively yet, but I imagine a micropayment based Craigslist Twitter app could be successful.

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

It’s undeniable that Twitter has achieved massive popularity, but that doesn’t always translate to profits (see YouTube). I believe Twitter’s most effective strategy for monetization will be mining and performing trend analysis on the millions of thought bubbles created by users daily. Both companies and individuals would pay big money to answer the following questions:

What are people saying about me/my product right now?
How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing audiences?
Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

On a smaller scale the new iPhone app Zensify:

“Shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow… “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this… And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds.”

I believe that providing a set of tools to monitor trends amongst your social graph (and public timelines), will be a huge revenue opportunity for companies looking to monetize on social and real-time.

Conclusion

When the internet was originally created the “page metaphor” mimicked the existing print industry. It followed that the way to monetize was through advertisements. As we move from pages to activity streams we’re starting to see entirely new, innovative ways to profit. We are still in the infancy of this new stream based revolution and while companies like Twitter and Facebook have achieved huge valuations no one (especially the Newspaper and Music industries) has yet figured out Monetization 2.0. Put on your thinking hats…

The Case For and Against Google's Rumoured Twitter Acquisition

Posted on April 5, 2009 by amit

There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about Google’s rumored “late-stage” acquisition talks with Twitter. While current consensus is that they are merely discussing mutually beneficial product strategies, it doesn’t mean that this deal isn’t being thoroughly considered and dissected by executive committees (not just of Twitter and Google, but MS & Yahoo as well) and tech pundits alike. In this post I will briefly give some background, describe the potential best and worst case scenarios for both Google and Twitter, and give a final opinion.

Background: Why is Twitter Important?

Microblogging (whether it be Twitter, Facebook Status’ or anything else), was always thought to be about about marketing. The business appeal of social media is that you can have a two way conversation with customers directly, at almost no cost, and let them do the dirty work of promoting your product “virally.” Personally, our iPhone-toting, attention-lacking, cause-of-the-day promoting, have-it-your-way generation thinks our opinions are important and should be heard…now. Equal parts narcissism and genuine interest in enhancing communication.

Now that Twitter has achieved mainstream popularity people are no longer think of it as a niche, social network. If it’s possible to organize, make sense of and data mine these millions of thought bubbles, Twitter becomes an incredibly powerful, real-time, social, search-engine. In this light, it is obvious that Google wants a piece.

Why Google Needs Twitter

Although Google dominates search and remains increasingly profitable, there are still a number of factors which could contribute to a Google’s fall.

Why Could Google Die…

View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon.

With the belts tightening and infinitely high expectations, Google is struggling to find their next big source of revenue. YouTube has the viewers, but no revenue. Other products like Lively (which always felt very pets.com bubbly to me), Jaiku (microblogging) and Dodgeball (location based services) were all killed off. Not only is Twitter (real-time search), a natural compliment to Google’s core product (static search), but Google also has the knowledge and experience to monetize this effectively. The sticking point is the cost. Twitter turned down a $500mil offer from Facebook a few months ago (though mainly in overvalued FB stock). Right now, a compelling offer from Google would have to be in the $750mil – $1bil range

What if Google Buys Twitter?

Best Case Scenario: Google develops an Ad-Sense for Twitter, and is able to elegantly incorporate Twitter into its search engine. Twitter-sense comprises a significant amount of search revenue, the real-time search offering creates a huge gap between Google and it’s closest rivals, and the perception of Google’s superior innovation and foresight lives on (profitably).

Worst Case: Twitter is unable to live up to the hype, a true monetization plan never pans out and people finally realize that no meaningful information is actually contained in a tweet. Investors are angry that Google paid a $1.65bil for YouTube and $1bil for Twitter and haven’t made a dime back. The next new thing is all the rage, Twitter is left to journalists, b-grade movie stars, politicians and retro-nerds.

What if Twitter remains independent?

Best Case Standalone Twitter: Twitter remains open and partners with Google, Facebook and every other major site on the planet to publish conversations streams on every page of the web. IM, SMS and newspapers die. Consumers and brands are able to interact directly, in a powerful way to improve products, services, politics and communication. Twitter is able to effectively generate revenue through a mixture of paid services for corporates and search monetization.

Worst Case Standalore Twitter: With VC money drying up, web valuations plummeting, and no clear revenue model Twitter collapses under it’s own inability to scale it’s services to meet demand. Eventually sells to AOL for $50 and a cheeseburger.

Final Thoughts

Biz Stone and Evan Williams are already rich (having previously sold Blogger to Google), have funding from VC’s who don’t care about revenue (yet), have a product that’s generated popular, mass appeal and has the potential to change the world. The product is still in its infancy though the concept has been validated by the interest generated by the big players (FB and Google). Just like Google can be called an operating system of the static web, by remaining open and allowing 3rd parties to develop useful, innovative businesses on top of Twitter, they can become the foundation for the real-time web. I say go for it, roll the dice, take the mystery behind door number two and build Twitter into a real value-adding, sustainable business. Then again, there’s a lot you can do with $1 billion dollars…

CodeChef launched!

Posted on January 30, 2009 by amit

For the last 2 months or so I’ve been working on setting up an India specific, online coding coding contest: www.codechef.com. The goal of the site is to identify top technical talent, promote our brand and foster technical competition. It’s a cool project for me ’cause I get to use my existing web project management skills, as well as manage the marketing side (which I’ve never done before). I’ve taken a real interest in social media marketing and am pretty pumped to test out some ideas I’ve had. We will be building a Facebook app, integrating with Facebook Connect, running Twitter contests and doing some other new media-ey stuff.

Last week we soft-launched at a big student festival at the top engineering school in Mumbai IIT’s TechFest. We setup a booth and asked students the output to three code snippits, if they could answer and explain, we gave out some t-shirts. It turns out people will do anythig for free stuff. The booth was packed the entire time. It was a really great experience, interacting with students, talkin’ up CodeChef and walking around wearing a giant chefs hat. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I’m looking forward to seeing how big we can make this.

Some random pics from techfest below (look for the cool chef’s hat)…

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

Posted on December 18, 2008 by amit

John Batelle recently wrote a great post about the shift from static to real-time search. To paraphrase he says that Google is/was awesome because for the first time, you could quickly and accurately get static information about any search term. Though this strength is also a flaw. By nature, newer content will have a lower page rank and thus appear farther down in search results. The emerging “liveweb” will be able to answer the question “What are people saying about X right now?” The current best example of this is Twitter Search. But this isn’t enough. The question I really want to ask (and the real moneymaker) is “What are people I trust saying about X right now?”

A few examples where static search is insufficient:

Breaking news/current events (we’ve seen many examples where Twitter breaks news stories first – i.e. San Diego Fires, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, etc..,) Many times Twitter is able to provide (arguably) more accurate real-time reports that the news that traditional news outlets later pick up on. While Google is incorporating News Results at the top of it’s list:

It’s still not enough if I want to get a grasp on the current situation/perspective/events occurring now (though interestingly enough the NYTimes ad on the right is incorporating real-time content).

Finding the amount of times people are searching/mentioning a term – Google Trends allows you to verify the pretty obvious fact that searches for Santa tend to spike at the end of the year, but did you know Canadians were the most actively searching for Santa and that progressively each year less people are asking Google about him?

The equivalent of this is Facebook Lexicon (interestingly no label on the y-axis, not useful for an actual research tool) and Twitter Twist (been down for quite a while). This is huge for PR and Product companies who want to be able to monitor how much buzz a person/event/product are receiving.

Product Reviews / Social Shopping – When most people want to buy a product online, they head to Google. This is why advertising on search is a big moneymaker (as opposed to advertising on social networks which is seriously struggling – people go to Facebook to waste time, flirt, look at pictures of their friends drunk and write each other stupid messages, not buy products). There have been a bunch of entrants into this market but none so far has provided a compelling product and achieved critical mass. Hopefully now with Facebook Connect/Google Friend Connect, someone will make this possible. If I’m looking for a camera, I want to know which camera my friends use and love, then find the cheapest place to buy it. The first person who makes this easy to do (using my Facebook social data) is going to make a killing.

Google dominates static search, Twitter knows what you are doing, Facebook controls your social graph and Apple knows where you are. The company able to blend all of these services (static, real-time, social, and location), while maintaining the strictest privacy controls, which will dominate the next era of the web

The Events of the Last Few Days

Posted on November 29, 2008 by amit

I stay in the Northern Suburbs of Mumbai, about an hour from downtown where the terrorist attacks of the last few days occurred and left over 150 people dead and many more injured. The last few days I’ve stayed holed up in my apartment and the office (3 blocks away), and aside from ruining my thanksgiving dinner plans, I’ve been largely unaffected. It will take some time to put together all the pieces and figure out how and why this happened. I’m not one of political commentary but here are some observations:

I haven’t been downtown since, but everyone’s saying the streets are empty. This is inconceivable in a city of over 15 million people. Even up here the roads are not car to car with traffic, for the first time since I’ve been here.
People are complaining about the slow response time of the Indian government. I’m not sure why this ordeal took over 3 days, maybe it had to do with fear for the hostages or the inexperience of the local police rushing in. What I’m wondering though is how is it that the anti-terrorism squad chief and commissioner of police were killed within the first few hours of the operation? While I don’t know anything about them, and I’m sure they are hero’s and extremely brave, if you are in a position of command, isn’t it your job to lead your forces and not rush into battle? Could the poor response have something to do with confusion over who was giving orders? This is total speculation.
This is a really great article describing the importance of the Taj to Mumbai and it’s people.
It’s awesome to hear about the bravery of the hotel staff.
With India’s general elections coming up in May, the recent attacks throughout India have set off speculation that national security will be the campaign focus and shift the political landscape. I don’t know anything about local politics, but I just hope that people here do not elect hawkish leaders, who are jumping at the opportunity to go to war with Pakistan.
My brothers in Israel tried to convince me to come to there for a few days till things blow over. I never thought that I would consider going to Israel to escape terrorism.
Lastly, it’s amazing the power the new media outlets (Twitter, Wikipedia, Blogs) have at disseminating information. I was following the Mumbai Twitter channel before any of the major news outlets caught wind of the situation. There is something hypnotic about reading first hand accounts mixed in with people’s reactions of the traditional media news accounts. While this is definitely great and a step in the right direction towards empowering the masses, it is also extremely dangerous. People were tweeting information that blatantly wasn’t true and had potential to cause panic (not that this is any different from the incorrect accounts reported by the sensationalist, traditional news outlets). I was also shocked at how quickly the wikipedia page for the event was put it up and how well researched and referenced it was (sourced from over 130 accounts).

My friend Mary is currently living abroad in Thailand (and experiencing a coup first-hand). In a recent post, she asks, “What is going on in the world? Or am I just seeing it with wider-open eyes by virtue of my location outside of my home country? Tragedies are occurring around the world with alarming frequency, but perhaps we don’t pay attention unless our loved ones are affected? Is this part of what we seek when we travel and live abroad – an expanded perspective that can only be obtained as an eyewitness to such occurrences?” While I’ve only been in Mumbai a month, consider my perspective expanded. Over the last few days family, friends, colleagues in India around the world have all shown extreme concern and support. Often overcoming difficult situations leads to a renewed appreciation of what you have. Thank you all for your kind words over the last few days, please continue to stay in touch.

Amit Klein

Figurin' it out…

Tag Archives: twitter

Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Yahoo! Pipes

SocialMention

Collecta

WhosTalkin

Conclusion

The Problem With Facebook

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Facebook Connect

OpenSocial

Sign in with Twitter

Conclusion

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

Conclusion

The Case For and Against Google's Rumoured Twitter Acquisition

Background: Why is Twitter Important?

Why Google Needs Twitter

What if Google Buys Twitter?

What if Twitter remains independent?

Final Thoughts

CodeChef launched!

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

The Events of the Last Few Days