Splash, Then Ripples

Note: this article first appeared at MyCustomer.com on February 1st, 2010

Big Brother and Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring
Marshall Sponder with Cecilia Pineda Feret
MyCustomer.com

As a web and social media analyst I am predisposed toward any service that merges customer data with site analytics information and online conversations – which leads me to the following bold, as some say, prediction. At the Monitoring Social Media 09 conference last November, my presentation included the statement: “Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space within the next 2 years.” (For more information see Slide 15 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring).

Google, the largely Orwellian company that claims to “Do No Evil,” takes web site traffic data and correlate it to news, search trends, purchasing activity, search activity and browsing activity throughout the entire web. As I will be discussing Social Media Monitoring as part of my one-day conference in London on March 31st, 2010 at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, I have further developed my thoughts from last November.

Based on my own assessment by looking at the available platforms today, there are no Social Media Analytics vendors or Online Reputation Management Services capable of matching Google yet. I think Google’s entrance into this area would be mostly helpful to some of the current entrants, many of them could end up going out of business or being swallowed up by others. For a recently updated list of Social Media Monitoring Vendors see StephenDebruyn.com.

Data that could be used for Social Media Monitoring is collected from our search history, websites and web presence. Google collects 18 months of Web History (down from 24 months of a few years ago) and can view and search from the full text of the pages you, or anyone else who has ever logged into Google. Once it acquired DoubleClick, Google integrated DoubleClick’s browsing pattern tracking with Google’s web history tracking to have a full spectrum of access to our web experience at its fingertips, including what sites we ultimately visited after leaving Google’s site, and what products we purchased subsequently.

By logging into my own Google Dashboard, I can see all the information Google collects about me including the number of Google Analytics accounts I have access to, my Google Calendar data (so they know where I have been and where I’m going), my purchasing history via Google Checkout, if I use that for online purchases, all the people I know via my Google Contacts/Address Book plus the information in my Google Documents, the textual analytics around my Gmail correspondences, my Google Reader habits and what I liked and shared on it, whom I’m following on Google Reader and who follows me. In addition to information it collects about us via our Google Accounts and websites, Google Search now displays real time data from Twitter and Facebook highlighting relevant search results.

Google also knows my age, zipcode and activity (ClickStream) giving them a 360-degree visualization of me and anyone else like me who spends a lot time interacting with the world via the web. Magnify the data Google collects on me by the number of Google Accounts (unknown at this time) and you end up with an unparalleled collection of information – what John Battelle calls The Database of Intentions as he describes in his book, “The Search.”

In addition, Google’s real time information about us has been improving exponentially, especially for business activity. Google knows our location in physical space via Google Mobile (and our movements, where we were, are and where we went next), our advertising activity and our profit or costs on Google AdWords.

According to an analysis of 4 million websites done late last year by Factual, 28% of all websites are being monitored by Google Analytics. As of 2007, 108,810,358 websites existed — the way things are going, the number has probably more than doubled by 2010. Using 2007 numbers, Google Analytics was likely to track about 29 million websites then, and tracks probably closer to 60 million sites by now assuming the rate of growth has at least remained consistent. In all likelihood, it is much more than my conservative estimate.

Keeping in mind all the information Google collects on us, why shouldn’t it enter the Social Media Monitoring space with their own suite of solutions? After all, they already have entered many other areas where they are considered one of the top or THE top application for that area: Advertising, content, health, commerce, mobile phone, power monitoring, news, and web analytics tracking. It would be a natural fit for Google to enter Social Media Monitoring.

While Google has yet to formally compete with Comscore, Quantcast, and Nielsen in audience monitoring on web platforms, they can easily draw upon the categorization of services, create their own categorizations, and, to some extent, already have within Google Analytics Benchmarking and with Google AdWords. Any website owner can compare their own traffic with other websites in the same category – the data is anonymous, but highly indicative and useful.

What might a Google Social Media Monitoring platform look like and what features might it have?

• Free, easy to use, and accessible to anyone who has a Google Account.

• Any website monitored by Google Analytics would also be monitored for mentions against specific pages of the site, much as WebTrends reports referral logs to Radian6, but, in this case, it will be Google Search feeding Google Analytics seamlessly much as Yahoo! Search feeds Yahoo! Pipes.

• Google Alerts, which have already been built into Google Analytics, via its Intelligence features, could list any mention or event that surpasses a preset threshold. Google Analytics already does this for site events such as more page views, visits or time spent on a page than normal based on trending algorithms that Google has employed and maintains for each Google Analytics account.

• Google’s entry in Reputation Management could also take the form of a coordinated response to online mentions using a version of Gmail, with preset templates already set up for the site owner to respond to negative or positive buzz.

• Specific solutions might be offered using an advertising campaign with AdWords, including on YouTube where links would be provided in response to a specific action or mention, so that the site owner or business could take immediate follow-up action and have the information appear in Google’s properties counterbalancing or supporting mentions as the case may warrant. Google could or would charge the User for running advertising against the responses, but the User, for the most part, could or would use Google’s Reputation Monitoring service for free. Google could create and maintain a PR/Management Dashboard for individuals and entities.

• Reputation Management could also be added to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Now a site owner can monitor how often their websites are crawled by Google, any problem encountered, and is able to use a response form to communicate directly with Google when there is a problem with their site. Google can find information on the web relating to each page of the site and place it in Webmaster tools for response by the owner while still passing the data to Google Analytics for analysis, trending and alerts.

• Paid Advertising via Google AdWords (or AdSense, if you’re a publisher) could be integrated with brand mentions in Social Media that appear in Google Search and tied to landing pages monitored by Google Analytics. ROI could be calculated, perhaps for the first time, for Social Media efforts across most or all of your marketing channels.

As Google has almost all the pieces in place to do a better job of social media monitoring than anyone else, why hasn’t it formally entered this space yet?

Simply put, until now, the Social Media Monitoring space wasn’t big or important enough for Google to get involved, it was still a niche market in its infancy, according to Forrester.

So far, much of the online marketing budget for Businesses has been focused on Search (Paid and Organic) and not Social Media. In addition, Google may be hesitating until the market grew big enough. Meanwhile it has been increasingly viewed as Big Brother; where Google’s entrance into monitoring is likely to amplify fears that Google knows everything about us and will use that information for its own best interests at own expense.

But, in 2009 the tide began to turn in favor of Google dipping its foot into Social Media Monitoring as conversations began to be viewed as markets with a whole class of technologies emerging to help companies keep track of the online conversations. Last October two key events happened which helps Google justify enter the Social Media Monitoring space.

o First, In-Q-Tell, the investment arm of the U.S. government that also serves the C.I.A bought a stake in Visible Technologies, one of the largest Social Media Monitoring vendors. This action sent a signal to Google and the business investment community that Social Media Monitoring was on the verge of becoming a big business (one that Google may want to be part of).

o Second, the FTC released its Blogger rules defining the scope and penalties around monitoring blogger payola and Social Media endorsements. As more and more businesses and individuals seek to monitor online reputation the market for Social Media Monitoring is becoming much more crowded with bigger profits for the main players such as Visible Technologies, Radian6, Buzzmetrics, et al.

I suspect Google has considered entering Social Media Monitoring for some time now and has been quietly working on its own offerings, poised to enter the market at any moment and dominate it, as Google has proven over and over. Often Google acquires companies to enter a space such as the recent purchase of AdMob to enter the Mobile Advertising space. The Google acquisition I am most familiar with is Google acquiring Urchin in 2005 and making it a free product to anyone who opened a Google Account. However, I do not believe Google needs to acquire a Social Media Monitoring Platform as their own products are at least as good as anything they could acquire and they have everything they need to launch their own solution and tie it to their existing products.

How would Google’s entry in the Social Media Monitoring be good for the existing players in this space?

• Google’s entry into any business area raises the visibility of that sector and further legitimizes the business model of that sector.

• Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring will force monitoring vendors to cooperate with each other and improve their offerings, just as Google’s entrance into Web Analytics encouraged vendors to differentiate themselves from Google Analytics, focusing on features such as event correlation, segmentation and rich media tracking, features Google Analytics did not initially offer, but does now.

• Development of standards for Social Media Measurement. As I mentioned in slide 11 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring Social Media does not have a standard set of definitions for measurement of conversations, sentiment, or share of voice to guide vendors in implementation, which hampers interoperability of social monitoring platforms with each other, even though they are monitoring the same conversations online. Furthermore, implementing standards leads to more profit for vendors. One example is the IAB’s VAST Video Advertising Standard which further monetized third party Video Ad Platforms such as BrightRoll.

• Most vendors prefer not to share information with each other, however, with Google’s presence in this space, they will have more reason to do so.

These are just some of the reasons for Google to formally enter the Social Media Monitoring space. Of course, the usual suspicions regarding Google’s intentions as they enter any business are likely to surface again. Accusations of being BIG BROTHER hasn’t stopped Google before, and it probably won’t stop them now.

I just read an article in AdAge written by Freddie Laker, Director of Digital Strategy at Sapient. He describes a situation that taunts the most impulsive among us. Those who cannot bear to let an uninformed writer and simply wrong piece of information float around out there in the nethersphere of cyberspace need to: STOP. REFLECT. PONDER.

As Freddie, (I can call you Freddie, can’t I? We’re both in this together here.) points out, sometimes drawing attention to a naysayer plays right into their original intention: drawing even more attention to their comments. His conclusion, in this case, ignore the tweet where a clueless reporter unaware of the role Sapient has played in the development of interactive marketing calls them “complete clowns.”

I can’t think of, immediately anyway, an industry where this kind of situation arises more frequently than in hospitality.

You sleep, you know how a hotel should be run. You eat, so you have every right to dictate how a restaurant should be run, how a dish should be cooked, served. Most people agree on that premise, or else we wouldn’t be witnesses to the success that is and has been Zagat’s and CitySearch and Yelp.

That said, yes, as a guest you have a right to your opinion and are free to post it wherever you can find nowadays, whether it’s Yelp or an up-and-coming I need to add to the list, BooRah.

The problem develops when someone who is talking out of their hat has a clever or funny or distinctly credible way of phrasing things. Then that business’ reputation is at risk from a negative review that may have gone viral, if only in the sense that it influenced subsequent reviewers pushing them to be undeservedly panned to such a degree.

It’s happened to me, in fact, and I am an owner of a restaurant and a consultant to other ones, so I should know better. Sigh.

So, oh wizened readers and writers of AdAge and of Splash, Then Ripples, when then? When do we step in? What are our options to stem the flood of negative comments to our profiles and reputations when in an industry where people naturally turn to community reviews by their fellow guests?

Augie Ray wrote this very NEED TO READ post, on reasons why someone would unfollow me which I read on Social Media Today on etiquette/manners/rules on Twitter. I was very happy to read the following . . .

I hate to call anyone out, but I follow Chris Brogan and find his Tweets incredibly noisy because of all his personal @replies. This morning he’s sent tweets like “@pilarstella – thanks. So far, no rappelling. ; )” and “@qzcolszh1949 – complete coincidence, but hey, I’ll take it. : ).” What are these supposed to mean to me (or others) other than @qzcolszh1949 and @pilarstella? I find Chris an interesting thought leader, but I may unfollow him because he’s getting in the way of me tracking interesting tweets from other less noisy thought leaders!

My goodness, I thought I was one of the few to disagree with how a Social Media Expert is Tweeting, and maybe I am, but for someone like Chris Brogan to keep @replying to people without even hinting at context? PUH-lease, stop it already. Someone else in the comments section of Social Media Today defended him saying that maybe he didn’t follow those he was @replying and COULDN’T DM them.

Um, I bet you a Haagen-Daaz Cookie Dough Ice Cream Bar that he DOES follow them back, but this is his way of trying to show that he “engages with his followers” and that he is able to make his platform interactive. Me? I find it annoying and I DON’T want to have to click AGAIN to find out why he’s saying what he’s saying that is so cryptically intriguing.

It’s not just Augie and me, is it? Not to call poor CB out on this, but maybe it’s time people stopped ragging on Robert Scoble and his unfollowing adventures and give honest and constructive feedback to someone who needs to hear it.

Actually, to address that Scobleizer item for a moment, I think less people would have been annoyed if Robert hadn’t made such a big deal about unfollowing the too many people on his list. Then again, maybe he mentioned it once and it got the ball rolling and rolling . . .and rolling. Leading to namecalling and so on. Personally, I think Robert had the right idea, and enjoyed all the attention just a smidge, just perhaps on a communications level, his was NOT the right integrated approach.

These days, because of a recalcitrant BlackBerry, the way I follow certain thought leaders and friends out of almost 2000 is sending them to my phone as texts. It’s a lot of messages, but those I find most interesting and worth saving I send to my email to read later and deal with on a bigger screen than my phone. So far that is working for me. And I edit the ones that go to my phone periodically and swap them out for different ones.

I do have groups on TweetDeck, but find that I look at that less because I am often in waiting mode where I can just swoop through Text Messages. I find with favoriting on Twitter I don’t tend to go back, so I prefer to save interesting URLs through Google Bookmarks now which I can categorize. Note to self, ask Twitter to permit categorizing of favorites.

As for my way of tweeting, re#2 I DO thank publicly for RTs & Follow Friday mentions, etc., but not consistently. Sometimes I DM it. Still on the fence about that one.

I totally agree with Augie on the rest of the 8 items on his list. . . lest you anger the Twitter Gods, or, at the very least, your followers.

How about you, are you annoying anyone on Twitter?

Rather than write a post here in response to an article I read in Mobile Crunch about an unscrupulous PR firm caught posting positive reviews, I responded on Mobile Crunch. Then I realized that this topic I grapple with often in this business and in life in general AND it only says Facebook User. Huh? So if I use Facebook Connect to respond on peoples blogs, it only shows my name if the person reading is signed into Facebook.Yeesh.

Here’s the article’s URL : http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/22/cheating-the-app-store-pr-firm-has-interns-post-positive-reviews-for-clients/#comments

And here are my comments. . .

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Funny, I was JUST talking to my client about TRANSPARENCY yesterday.

This is PR, people, the bad side of it. This aspect of PR is what helped convince me to leave it as my first career years ago. (I was in healthcare PR before the FDA came down HARD on the pharma companies).

Yet today, I embrace the possibilities of connecting with customers, clients, et al. through Social Media to have actual conversations. As a Community Strategist I listen, share, and connect versus just broadcasting messages like in the OLDEN days.

But, there will ALWAYS be those looking for loopholes (what did YOUR tax returns look like? ) and we just need to consider the source and learn to be a bit more, ok, a LOT more, cynical about the motivation behind providing certain info than we ever used to be.

Why MORE cynical? It’s a lot easier to look authentic these days. We all should consider the importance of the HOT word of the year: TRANSPARENCY now that it is SO easy to research the validity of info by tracking back on the internet.

REVERB got caught, but there are so many marketers (and companies themselves!) still out there that will keep doing this in every industry including music, food, beverage, cars, hotels, gadgets and on and on.

Yes, it’s disconcerting to know that people feel that they need to deceive to sell . . . especially if they know that others are also doing it. So . . .they do it, too, it works for them, until they get caught. And then they’ll figure out another way.

That’s why we should ALL look at reviews and such, whether online or offline: TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, etc., with a grain of salt and then take the plunge and BELIEVE or not based on how authentic we consider the source.

I don’t always expound on issues like this, but this one hit a nerve and I will probably blog about it SOMEDAY soon.

Until then, feel free to follow me at pinedaferet on Twitter where I discuss social media, culture, biz dev with digressions into other interesting stuff.

Here are further followup comments I made to specific fellow posters: