Out of the top global Google searches for 2008, four search terms are social networking sites. Three of these social networking sites are exclusively European. Two of these three are “invitation only” social networking sites.

• Topping the list at no. 3 is Facebook login
• No. 4 is Tuenti, a Madrid-based “invitation only” social networking site,
• no. 7 is Nasza Klasa, a Polish “find old classmates” site initially frequented by older Polish persons, but attracting more and more youthful members
• no. 8 is Wer Kennt Wen, a German “invitation only” social networking site that looks for “who knows who?”

Seems social networking has blossomed just as we have.

Our international team is pleased to see that we cover all the necessary languages-with native speakers. Time to set up a nice project to track what the forum and blog buzz is about these networks. We should probably do some back-in-time tracking. Do you think that three months back in time is enough?

A while back we won an award when we presented at a venture capital event in Brussels. It seems there was also a big final, in Barcelona on the 19th December, so we’ll be there for the networking possibilities and a big cash prize of 90K, that would pay for a good team event :)

There is a nice mix of technology and biotech players. With our social media technology story, which plays well in recession, measured marketing and word-of-mouth we have to be in with a chance…Hopefully we can meet up with some people from the Forrester event, when I was there with Caroline.

Following the main version 3.0 announcement yesterday we’d now like to spend the rest of the week giving a bit more info on the other new dashboard features.

The blog ‘influence’ ranking is the second most exciting feature and almost as important in adding value for marketers as the Brand Maps. This has been added to the dashboard in response to huge industry demand to provide some sort of measurement to blogs in the way ABCs are used for traditional media.

What do we mean by ‘influence’?

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This week we’re announcing version 3.0 of the dashboard and every day we’ll post here a little more detail about what the new features do.

The feature we’re most excited about is the new Attentio ‘Brand Maps’ which we believe has the potential to disrupt the Market Research industry. How so? Well first let’s start with:

What is it?

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After months of hard work from the R&D team and fantastic feedback from our clients we’re very excited to finally start talking about version 3.0 of our dashboard.

Techcrunch FRbroke the news this morning and we’re now talking to a host of enthusiastic press, bloggers and potential customers who want to learn more about the new product.

We’ve mainly focussed the news on our revolutionary new ‘Brand Maps’ feature but the next gen Attentio Brand Dashboard™ will have a host of goodies we think answer some of the major demands of marketers, particularly those working in the digital sector.

We’ll do a post every day this week breaking down some of the new features in detail but for now here’s a quick summary:

• Breakthrough ‘Brand Mapping’ technology
• An automated blog ‘influence’ ranking
• Easy project set-up wizard
• Significant increase in sources including new sources like Twitter
• Live Search capability to create charts on-the-fly
• More country classification of sources enabling greater regional breakdown of results

Thanks for all the support we’ve had over the years and if anyone wants to get further information or arrange a demonstration drop us a line at attentiocontact@attentio.com

I am sitting here jet lagged in my hotel in New York. Darika tells me that she has communicated our new Attentio Brand Map feature to a great group of bloggers and press.

We are excited about this. It enables marketers immediately to get a pulse of what people are saying about their brands AND how this changes over time. What would you prefer to see? A 50 page analyst report or a tool where with a click of a button you see your brand and themes as they are discussed in blogs, forums in a lovely dashboard with drill down to articles…

Big kudos to Frizo and Per and team for putting this out there. I look forward to getting feedback over the next weeks/months on where this is being used. We will be releasing new features around this platform starting next week. For now there is some nice pictures here. If you would like a demo drop me a comment or email attentiocontact@attentio.com

The Revenge of the I, an upcoming marketers’ conference this 17th October, will explore the online tools that consumers are using to make an impact on the markets that concern them.
That event is a sign of our times — the online tools that were once the creation and purview of brilliant computer nerds have been taken over by the users. Users in many cases ‘own’ the tools, in the sense that they create the content. Without users social media platforms do not exist - they lose purpose.

Consumers are using blogs, forums, microblogging (such as Twitter, Jaiku, Spoink, etc.), YouTube, social networks and search tools. The next generation of consumers will use these tools more and more. Which companies can afford to ignore that fact?
A couple of years ago, nobody considered viral marketing, Twitter campaigns, seeding programs or even having a corporate blog on the website. The situation is analogous with the early ‘90s when very few companies had company websites. Now it’s hard to imagine the world without them. The variety of social media tools to be discovered and incorporated into marketing campaigns is impressive.

However, it’s one thing to be familiar with tools and strategies; it’s an entirely different concept to use them to measure the results. If the impact of a campaign, isn’t measured, it is impossible to truly manage it.
The Revenge of the I puts a strong emphasis on the practical use of social media tools. Lots of business cases will be presented, especially case studies from early adopters – all those who went viral, measured it and are ready to share the results.

Attentio is speaking at this conference. Together with our client, advertising agency Boondoggle, we will talk about online conversations: how to listen and how to act. Our case study will be a conversational marketing campaign for Lexus.

Marketers should be aware of how social media tools are being used, by whom, and for what purposes. Whether used for killing time or for the beginning of an information insurrection, online tools have moved beyond the control of their developers and into the hands of the probing masses, the investigative individuals; into the hands of you and I.

More about the congress on the site of organizer BDMA:
http://www.bdma.be/index.php

You can still REGISTER for the Congress

As an analyst, I am interested in how people access information.

My focus is social media. And my geographical location is Europe. But I can’t limit my study of how information is accessed to either of these facts. I’d miss too much.

I’d lose insights into what makes buzz valuable. As discussed in earlier blogs, offline events impact online buzz.  For example, word-of-mouth in English is limited to neither a national nor a linguistic audience.

My most recent research into buzz and its origins has been in the realm of TV medical dramas.

Why? A European Union proposed directive may open up the European market for medical goods and services. According to the Directive, an EU citizen will soon be able to mail order or even travel to another EU state to purchase a medical good or service. European health care consumers are encouraged to do this when in need of a medical good or service that they feel is not available or not adequately provided in their own state. The EU citizen’s home health policy must then reimburse the citizen for the cost of the procedure and the price of related medications. This at the same time that marketing regulations are changing

Citizens in the EU will have more choices when it comes to individual health care. But how will they know about all the different options available to them in medical care? In reading more and more forums and blogs, I noticed that the ideas and information accessed by potential cross-border European health care consumers came from (largely United States produced) medical dramas.

House is a particular cross-border favorite. The drama features the British actor Hugh Laurie as a sarcastic curmudgeon who also happens to be a brilliant doctor. Laurie plays the infamous Dr. House of the drama’s title. Each episode follows House and his team of diagnosticians as they pursue the cause and then the cure of an obscure disease. Viewers are attracted to the show by the drama’s colorful characters, but viewers leave each episode, buzz suggests, with more than just a sense of having been entertained.

Viewers leave with information. Viewers leave with information about possible medical conditions, medical procedures, and medical knowledge. Viewers leave, ultimately, with modified expectations about what kind of health care they can and should expect for their family, friends, and themselves.

I enjoy the idea of an American medical drama starring a British theater actor influencing Spanish and Dutch ideas of modern medicine. As an analyst, I also enjoy following the medications and procedures introduced, and watching the online buzz coalesce around specific ideas and procedures. I am interested to see how this is going to interact with the new options available to the European health care consumers and producers.

You have just been invited to a dinner party and you know someone you like will be there. He/she has just taken a job with Adidas in their social media outreach division and to impress you want to get up to speed with all that is going on in blogs and social networks in the fastest time possible. Let the checklist below get you up to speed in a matter of hours.

Great sites for free blog and social media search -

1. http://www.trendpedia.com (Attentio)
2. http://www.Quintura.com
3. http://www.Grokker.com
4. http://www.Silobreaker.com
5. http://www.Trendrr.com
6. http://www.BoardReader.com 

Great site for social media presentations:

http://www.Slideshare.com, just search for WOM, social media, buzz or viral marketing

Amazingly buzzed sites:

1. http://www.Digg.com – vote for stories
2. http://www.Delicious.com – social bookmarking
3. http://www.Twitter.com – micro blogging
4. http://www.Jaiku.com – micro blogging
5. http://www.FriendFeed.com – aggregator of most social media sites – blogging, twitter etc

Essential reading:

1. http://www.micropersuasion.com (Steve Rubel) (PR/Social media)
2. http://www.jaffejuice.com/ (Joseph Jaffe) (PR/Social media)
3. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ (Danah Boyd) (Sociology/Social Networks/Social media)
4. http://redcouch.typepad.com/ (Shel Israel) (PR/Social Media)
5. http://www.charleneli.com/blog/blog_index.html (Charlene Li) (WOMM/Analyst/Social media)
6. http://loiclemeur.com/ (Loic LeMeur) (Entrepreneur/Event Organiser/Social media)
7. http://uk.techcrunch.com/ (Mike Butcher) (Journalist/Start Up spotter/Social media)
8. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/ (Jeremiah Omyiwang) (Analyst/Social media)
9. http://datamining.typepad.com/ (Matthew Hurst) (Social media analysis/Natural language/social media monitoring)

My colleagues and I are social media analysts.

I think that the purpose of this position should be explained so that our clients can take better advantage of our skills.

Social media monitoring is not Google. It is not search.

Social media is conversation.

The way in which people, online or offline, discuss ideas is not the similar to the way in which people search for information. Search is personal. Social is, well, social.

Searchers look for official reports regarding the “efficacy” of a drug. Patients and people talk about how our pain medication “works”. The concept, efficacy, is implied in the conversation.  The word, “efficacy”, itself is never mentioned in a social exchange.  A searcher, a Googler, would use “efficacy” and “aspirin”, in a search. A social media analyst would investigate online conversation using a series of terms like “aspirin”, “pain medication”, “headache”, “works”, “useful”, “relief”, “relieves”, etc. Social media analysts specialise in the investigation of discussion and conversation, not in search.

This can get complicated, especially in the European sphere of social media. Consider, as our Italian analyst notes, the gender of an Italian adjective. If something is good, then good can be buono or buona, dependent upon if the good thing is a feminine or masculine noun. Then, if the noun is plural, an “s” can be added to either adjective form.

German, our Austrian analyst observes, complicates conversation through demanding that words change their format dependent upon their position in the sentence.  Our French-speaking analyst adds that there’s also the issue of blogger/forum slang. She points to a USA MTV show now broadcast in France and Belgium that uses what might be “verlan” or Arabic French slang in its title. Slang in France has caused even the purist French authorities to reconsider the encroachment English and Arabic are having on the French language.

All this conversational nuance must be considered in creating a successful social media project to monitor and measure topics of interest to you or your client. The position of the analyst is also helpful in determining things like

• the location of certain types of buzz (the British “Bobbies” are located in London, the “Garda” in Dublin, and the NYPD in New York…or the movies),
• the level of education embedded in the buzz demographic (kids discuss a “runny nose” and doctors blog about “excessive mucus”), and
• the popularity of the blogger (how many people are quoting Perez Hilton in the social media gossip sphere?).

So before buying into the social media software with the complete confidence a semi-pro Googler, think about the information that you are looking to capture out of the online conversation.

Then consider a conversation with a social media analyst.