• 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…

Related posts:

1. Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. B2B Social Media Marketing

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?

Related posts:

1. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
2. Intro to Social Media Videos
3. The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

There are 13 articles including, Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation, How Micro-Interactions are Changing the Way We Communicate Online, How Tiny Applications are Remaking the Future of the Web, A Look at Games as Tools Not Toys, and Data Visualization for the Online Era. Below are some key takeaways – this is not meant to be a complete summary, just an excerpt to give you an idea of the contents.

Meet the Connected Consumer

• All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations… We’ve found that [consumers] don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.
• We were most surprised to see widespread acceptance and frequent consumer usage of Web site widgets… This development reinforces our belief that distribution of content and services will trump destinations, as both consumers and Internet technologies continue to evolve. Additionally, it will provide significant challenges for publishers (primarily media and entertainment companies) who currently have no clear path towards monetizing content distribution across the Web.
• Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments. No longer are we seeing Internet technology adoption rates limited to only certain segments. Our study found widespread acceptance of these new service offering and finds older consumers much more likely to spend money online.

Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation

• What is happening is that the concept of social networking is evolving and morphing. It’s now about making the entire Web social instead of just creating a ghetto of destination sites where people have to go to socialize (a la Facebook Connect).
• People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it’s no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives.
• The most recent rapid expansion on the Facebook and MySpace sites came when they opened up their systems and allowed developers to make applications for their sites
• Design for multiple levels of participation
  • Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
  • Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
  • High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
  • Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s “economy”

Putting Jakob Back on the Shelf

• Stop launching your design activity around pages as the medium… We need to build frameworks that power both storytelling and answer-seeking to occur.
• Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions. The new experience might be a conversation; it might be a series of decisions made by the user; it might be an interactive storytelling session. Understand what the customer needs, and just design that.
• Let’s not limit our vision to effective Web editorial styles, properly ordered Cancel and Save buttons, and left aligned lists of mixed capitalization blue links. Let’s design customer experiences that start and end with, well, the customers’ goals and needs—and let’s start with a blank slate. Use storytelling and interaction building blocks—not the building blocks of desktop publishing.

How Micro-Interactions Are Changing the Way We Communicate Online

• At the heart of micro-interactions is the belief that immediacy, simplicity, voyeurism and constant communications matter. The success of the tools lend credence to the notion that quick, possibly frivolous, short bursts of communication are just as useful as more measured, reflective communications.
• Web experiences will need to support communication dynamics that allow users to engage in something and report back to their communities in a Twitter-like fashion. Because they have the portability of a social graph, these micro-interactions will take place anywhere on the Web as people interact with their friends in more locations.

How Tiny Applications Are Remaking the Future of the Web

• One could argue that we are seeing a third wave of software properties—propagated by RockYou—that is differentiated from previous waves based on customization, interactivity and viral distribution.
• We believe that widgets provide the purest glimpse into the new, improved networked future. It’s an interconnected world where people will select, personalize, share and consume Web services wherever and whenever they choose. Effortlessly.

A Look at Games as Tools, Not Toys

• Get to know the product by imagining it as a game… Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
• People love instant feedback. It creates a sense of reward through a series of small, doable steps. In games, the steps to “winning” are visually represented and easily accessible. This may look like a coin-counting meter, a halo around your avatar or many other things. Mint.com’s dashboard provides instant feedback on your financial goals. It monitors how every swipe of your card affects your budget and net worth, and even how your spending compares to others in the same city.

Data Visualization for the Online Era

• The next time you are tasked with providing users with consumption or performance information, or a way of comparing the past, present and future, think of the questions the users are trying to resolve. Then get creative and provide the answers visually. Consider how quickly they can use the information to decide to buy, change, stop or reconsider. Ensure the style of the visuals reinforces a brand personality. The result? Users who will feel empowered, engaged and appreciative that you have saved them precious time and allowed them to make a decision with confidence.

In case this report isn’t enough reading for you can download last year’ report: Desigining for Constant Change.

Related posts:

1. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
2. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability