The lead up to election day in Massachusetts was noisy and exciting for people who like to follow such things.  The margin narrowed quickly.  Polls kept shiftng. As the the big day dawned, the White House knew that Coakley was in trouble.

For those of us following the race on Twitter, it was clear who was going to win. What?  How?  For a full week before election day,  anybody following the “Coakley” timeline on Twitter will have seen that tweets against her far outweighed tweets in her favor.

A search on YouTube was revealing as well.  A search for “”scottbrown” yields links to videos with positive headlines:

• Wow! Republican Scott Brown Has AWESOME Interview with Sean Hannity
• Scott Brown visits ZOLL Medical Corp.
• Scott Brown Has the Power: SuperNews!

While  a search for “coakley” resulted in these top three headlines:

• Coakley Thug Roughs Up Reporter
• Coakley staffer knocks Weekly Standard reporter to ground
• Martha Coakley Thug Instigates Assault on John McCormack: Full Clip

Roll back to 2004 – the presidential primary campaigns are in full swing, and the darling of the Democrats is Howard Dean – why? Because of everybody out there, he was the one that leveraged the Internet’s ability to directly connect with people.   Even though his over-the-top enthusiasm derailed his campaign, nobody can deny that, of all the candidates at the time, he was the only one that recognized the untapped potential of the internet.

Then comes 2008. Regardless of which side of the political fence you are on, recognition must be given to the effective campaign that the Obama team conducted.   And, prominent in that successful campaign was the use of social media channels to reach people.  He had help and lots of it.  Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, left Facebook to join Obama’s campaign. He helped develop the website,  and pages on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other niche services.  The Obama campaign also effectively used the internet for fundraising, taking a lesson from Howard Dean’s playbook.

That brings us to Sarah Palin.  Since leaving office as the Governor of Alaska, she has been making news left and right.  More than once, a single post to her Facebook page has resulted in copious amounts of discussion on TV, radio, online and in newspapers. She has 1.2MM fans and understands the unprecedented opportunity social media presents,and the power of direct two-way communication with people.

On January 14, 2010, the Wordstream blog correctly predicted that Scott Brown would “trounce” Martha Coakley, based on available data from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other internet sources.  Two days, later, the Boston Globe ran an article citing traditional poll results, predictably showing Brown ahead in the conservative polls, and Coakley ahead in the liberal polls.

On January 21,  Blogger Larry Kim posted an excellent article on Search Engine Journal, summarizing the space that social networking polling has carved out for itself going forward.    Social networking has permanently upended politics and the way campaigns are measured.

Conclusion

Even with a social media strategy, candidates have to have a compelling message. As the 2010 “silly season” heats up,  it will be interesting to see which candidates capitalize on this powerful channel.

What have you observed about politics and politicians in the social networking arena? Are your state or local politicans out there?

Now, two years later, my world and the one around me has changed dramatically.  Without a doubt, 2009 delivered a seismic shift – Twitter vaulted into the stratosphere. Any doubt can be about that is quickly disspelled by checking out Google’s timeline view for the search term “twitter”.

So, the obvious question that jumps out is ‘where those entries dating back to the 50s come from’, since Twitter didn’t launch until July 2006. A quick check reveals that they are the result of tags that allow people to post dated entries to Twitter, which is interesting in itself.  Twitter’s reach is not bounded by it’s actual existence – kind of like virtual time-travel…..

What’s Different About This Blog

There are many smart people writing about how to “do” social media, and giving us the daily firehose of information about new products, services, methods, processes, dangers, opportunities. So one more voice in that conversation is not going to make a lot of difference.  With the relaunch of my blog – Out There – I will explore how social networking is changing the fabric of society.

Social networking is upending the world around us on so many fronts – political advocacy, political dissent, branding, marketing, law, sales, media, sports, entertainment, healtchare, personal interactions, networking,and even crisis management.

Social networking is giving each of us an unprecedented ability to impact the people, companies and organizations that have historically impacted us through one-way communications – TV, radio and print media.  With social networking, we can be the master of our own universe.  We can impact and even cause events.  Consider a few examples:

Brand disruption

• North Face Lawsuit Against South Butt Going Viral With Facebook App
• An action that may have backfired since South Butt released a Facebook app and the whole spat has gone viral
• What Domino’s Did Right — and Wrong — in Squelching Hubbub over YouTube Video
• Motrin Learns What Happens When You Upset the Moms

Marketing disruption

• UK – Shops offer discounts and vouchers on Twitter
• Numerous US retailers are using Twitter to engage customers

Crisis disruption

• British Columbia residents turned to Twitter to get the most up-to-the-minute information during its “worst forest fire season in living memory”.
• How Twitter and Facebook Users Are Responding to the Haiti Crisis -  “In less than 48 hours, the American Red Cross had received more than $35m in donations – including $8m directly from texts.”

Conclusion

The balance of power has been upended.  Organizations that have historically pushed one-way communications and worked diligently to control the message now find themselves in the position of having to listen in real time and participate in conversations – “sitting it out” is not an option.  Along with this shift are all sorts of unintended consequences.

I look forward to exploring the the things that are happening out there….where social networking is disrupting everything.

Your thoughts, ideas, agreements, and arguments are welcome – what examples do you have of social networking disruption?  Tweet me @debbiepascoe with #outthere sitings.

Draw in a deep breath…..exhale…..ready to start again….writing about all the amazing things going on out there, where social networking is disrupting everything. 

I’ve moved over all the posts from the Web Optimization Blog just in case you need a blast from the past.

69 Tools to Monitor, Measure, and Track Your Website

Published October 15th, 2007 in Tools

PAGE ANALYSIS:

1. SEOmoz Page Strength Tool – A useful tool that gives an overall look at the strength of a page.
2. Sitening’s SEO Analyzer – See if your pages are structured to achieve high search engine rankings.
3. Self SEO’s Page Speed Checker – Test the load time of your pages and your competitor’s pages.
4. GoogleRankings.com – Check the use of keywords and phrases on your site.
5. Popuri – See several items such as PageRank and inbound links all at once.
6. Keyword Density Analysis – See how frequently you are using certain words and phrases.
7. Meta Tag Analyzer – How are search engine spiders seeing your meta tags?
8. Code to Text Ratio – Check for code bloat.
9. Strongest Subpages Tool – Finds the 30 strongest subpages on your domain.
10. Similar Page Checker – Avoid duplicate content.
11. SEO Analysis Tool – Measures the ranking potential of a page.
12. WebSitePulse – A few different tools to test your sites performance.
13. Website Grader – Get a score for your site and even compare it to competitors if you want.
14. Watchfire WebXACT – Test for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

STATS:

1. Google Analytics – The leading free stats program.
2. AWStats
3. StatCounter
4. AddFreeStats
5. OneStat
6. Smart Tracking
7. Alexa – See where your site ranks.

BLOG STATS:

1. FeedBurner – Stats on your feed and your subscribers.
2. pMetrics – from Performancing.
3. pMetrics Plugin- Extending pMetrics.
4. IceRocket – Free stats program for blogs.
   
5. Technorati – See who’s linking to you.

STATS PLUS:

1. Crazy Egg – Provides visual data about your visitors.
2. Mint – An extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program.

WEBMASTER TOOLS:

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Lots of information that shows you how Google sees your site.
2. Web CEO – A collection of a number of useful tools. Free and paid editions.

CHECK AND TRACK SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS:

1. Sitening’s SERP Tracker – Test your page’s optimization.
2. Search Engine Rankings Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Google Banned Checker – Has the largest search engine in the world banned your website? Find out here.
4. Number of Pages Indexed – How many pages do you have indexed by search engines?
5. Website SEO Checkup – Make sure you’re ready to get high search engine rankings.
6. GeoTargeting Detection Tool from SEOmoz – Determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines.

GOOGLE PAGERANK:

1. PageRank Prediction – You need a minimum of 100 backlinks.
2. Smart PageRank – Check your PR.

REPUTATION AND BUZZ MONITORING:

1. Google Alerts – Have preset alerts sent to you by email.
2. co.mments – Monitor comments on blogs.
3. Conversation Tracker from BlogPulse
4. Trend Search from BlogPulse
5. Keotag – See if blogs are using your company name in the tags of their blog posts.
6. BoardTracker – Watch for mentions of your company in forums.

LINKS:

1. Dead Links tool from W3C – Find broken links.
   
2. Link Popularity Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Find broken links.
   
4. Backlinks and Anchor Text – See who’s linking to you and what anchor tex
   t they are using.
5. Reciprocal Links Checker – Do you have agreements with others for reciprocal links? Check them here.

SPIDER SIMULATOR:

1. Summit Media’s Spider Simulator
2. Spider View
3. Webconfs.com Spider Simulator

CSS ANALYSIS TOOLS:

1. Clean CSS – Formatting and Optimizing
2. CSS Tidy – Optimizer and parser.
3. CSS Redunancy Checker – Redundancy is easy to do with CSS. Fix it with this.
4. CSS Analyzer – A validator plus.

VALIDATORS:

1. HTML – Validator from W3C.
2. CSS – Validator from W3C.
3. RSS – Validator from W3C.

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE:

1. AlertSite Website Performance Monitor
2. KeyNote
3. WebWatch Bot
4. IPCheckPoint

GOOGLE ADSENSE:

1. Free Charts and Graphs
2. AdSense Notifier – Shows your AdSense stats in the status bar.

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY:

1. BrowserShots – See screenshots of your page in a number of different browsers.
2. Ready.mobi – Test your site for use with mobile browsers.

OTHER:

1. Geotargeting – find the location of your host’s servers
2. Find Your Site’s IP Address

Subscribe to the Vandelay Design Blog

Our blog is updated regularly with content related to web design and development. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

Great list with all sorts of handy tools…

Posted via web from SocialDeb

69 Tools to Monitor, Measure, and Track Your Website

Published October 15th, 2007 in Tools

PAGE ANALYSIS:

1. SEOmoz Page Strength Tool – A useful tool that gives an overall look at the strength of a page.
2. Sitening’s SEO Analyzer – See if your pages are structured to achieve high search engine rankings.
3. Self SEO’s Page Speed Checker – Test the load time of your pages and your competitor’s pages.
4. GoogleRankings.com – Check the use of keywords and phrases on your site.
5. Popuri – See several items such as PageRank and inbound links all at once.
6. Keyword Density Analysis – See how frequently you are using certain words and phrases.
7. Meta Tag Analyzer – How are search engine spiders seeing your meta tags?
8. Code to Text Ratio – Check for code bloat.
9. Strongest Subpages Tool – Finds the 30 strongest subpages on your domain.
10. Similar Page Checker – Avoid duplicate content.
11. SEO Analysis Tool – Measures the ranking potential of a page.
12. WebSitePulse – A few different tools to test your sites performance.
13. Website Grader – Get a score for your site and even compare it to competitors if you want.
14. Watchfire WebXACT – Test for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

STATS:

1. Google Analytics – The leading free stats program.
2. AWStats
3. StatCounter
4. AddFreeStats
5. OneStat
6. Smart Tracking
7. Alexa – See where your site ranks.

BLOG STATS:

1. FeedBurner – Stats on your feed and your subscribers.
2. pMetrics – from Performancing.
3. pMetrics Plugin- Extending pMetrics.
4. IceRocket – Free stats program for blogs.
   
5. Technorati – See who’s linking to you.

STATS PLUS:

1. Crazy Egg – Provides visual data about your visitors.
2. Mint – An extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program.

WEBMASTER TOOLS:

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Lots of information that shows you how Google sees your site.
2. Web CEO – A collection of a number of useful tools. Free and paid editions.

CHECK AND TRACK SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS:

1. Sitening’s SERP Tracker – Test your page’s optimization.
2. Search Engine Rankings Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Google Banned Checker – Has the largest search engine in the world banned your website? Find out here.
4. Number of Pages Indexed – How many pages do you have indexed by search engines?
5. Website SEO Checkup – Make sure you’re ready to get high search engine rankings.
6. GeoTargeting Detection Tool from SEOmoz – Determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines.

GOOGLE PAGERANK:

1. PageRank Prediction – You need a minimum of 100 backlinks.
2. Smart PageRank – Check your PR.

REPUTATION AND BUZZ MONITORING:

1. Google Alerts – Have preset alerts sent to you by email.
2. co.mments – Monitor comments on blogs.
3. Conversation Tracker from BlogPulse
4. Trend Search from BlogPulse
5. Keotag – See if blogs are using your company name in the tags of their blog posts.
6. BoardTracker – Watch for mentions of your company in forums.

LINKS:

1. Dead Links tool from W3C – Find broken links.
   
2. Link Popularity Checker – From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
3. Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Find broken links.
   
4. Backlinks and Anchor Text – See who’s linking to you and what anchor tex
   t they are using.
5. Reciprocal Links Checker – Do you have agreements with others for reciprocal links? Check them here.

SPIDER SIMULATOR:

1. Summit Media’s Spider Simulator
2. Spider View
3. Webconfs.com Spider Simulator

CSS ANALYSIS TOOLS:

1. Clean CSS – Formatting and Optimizing
2. CSS Tidy – Optimizer and parser.
3. CSS Redunancy Checker – Redundancy is easy to do with CSS. Fix it with this.
4. CSS Analyzer – A validator plus.

VALIDATORS:

1. HTML – Validator from W3C.
2. CSS – Validator from W3C.
3. RSS – Validator from W3C.

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE:

1. AlertSite Website Performance Monitor
2. KeyNote
3. WebWatch Bot
4. IPCheckPoint

GOOGLE ADSENSE:

1. Free Charts and Graphs
2. AdSense Notifier – Shows your AdSense stats in the status bar.

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY:

1. BrowserShots – See screenshots of your page in a number of different browsers.
2. Ready.mobi – Test your site for use with mobile browsers.

OTHER:

1. Geotargeting – find the location of your host’s servers
2. Find Your Site’s IP Address

Subscribe to the Vandelay Design Blog

Our blog is updated regularly with content related to web design and development. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

Great list with all sorts of handy tools…

Posted via web from SocialDeb

You have to have a Google account to use it.

According to the site you have to have above a particular version of FF or IE – what – no Chrome?

When you open the browser after installing the toolbar, the default page looks just like the Chrome default page – little thumbnails of “Most Visited” pages.

It directly competes with Digg, Delicious, etc and is will be much easier to use and more accessible.

It reminds me of panels like Quantcast, etc, that collect visitor data – over time, the Google sidewiki will enable Google Analytics users to marry up sidewiki data to their web analytics data.

If marketers thought they were losing the ability to control their brand because of user-generated content on Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, etc – just wait……..

Posted via web from SocialDeb

What is Scout Labs?

Scout Labs is a powerful web-based application that tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships. Take the tour to see all the features in action.

Persistent Searches

You know what you and your team need to be monitoring closely. Set up a search and it is immediately available for your whole team to review and optimize.

Rants and Raves

See what people are loving or hating about your product or your brand. Let them help you make more customer-centric decisions about your business and products. It’s like a real-time focus group of millions.

Buzz Tracking

See at glance which searches are up or down. The Scout Labs dashboard offers real-time metrics for buzz volume, customer sentiment, and competitive share of voice across the web.

Email Alerts

Get insight summaries pushed to you via email. Like Google Alerts on steroids, you can see top conversations, new words, positive and negative posts, recent Tweets and more — on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule.

Team Collaboration

Insight needs to be actionable. That’s why everything you find in the Scout Labs application can be acted upon. Forward items to make sure they get responded to, bookmark them for later, initiate discussions around new product ideas, download graph data or copy graphs.

Conversation Digest

You don’t need to read all 4,000 new posts of the week to get a sense of what’s going on. We summarize the most buzz-worthy stories for you and call out what’s hot and what’s new so that you can tune in early.

Wide Coverage of CGM

Wherever people are sharing thoughts and perspectives through CGM (consumer generated media), Scout Labs is there. Blogs (in english-only), forums, social networks, image-sharing sites, video-sharing sites, Twitter — with more volume and data types coming online every day.

Automated Sentiment

We use natural language processing techniques to assess the sentiment and tone of your searches in each post, on the fly, as it hits our system. If we get it wrong, you can override it for your team (this becomes labeled data that our systems learn from over time). We can also provide historical sentiment data to you in less than a day (sometimes in minutes). For all the sentiment geeks out there: no user training sets necessary.

Kill Posts, Add Sources

From day one of our development, savvy agencies and customer community managers have wanted to be able to see and interact with the data in our system. Missing a source? Add it. Don’t like a result and don’t want to see it any more? Kill it. Additional controls will be added on an ongoing basis.

Real-Time Content

With Scout Labs, you can create a search, hit go, and seconds later get a dashboard fully populated with insight and intelligence on same-day english content. Our proprietary search-based architecture means no stale data or long delays while the system is locked up “getting” or “processing” data.

Unlimited Users

Invite everyone on your extended team to tune into the rants, raves and wishes of customers and great things will happen. No limit on the number of users per workspace.

Designed for Agencies

Agencies of all sizes can use Scout Labs to power their social media monitoring offerings. Add your logo, curate the data for your clients, and add your insights. The Scout Labs application is your collaborative client dashboard to share the voice of the customer in real-time along with your own insights and recommendations.

Building a list of social networking monitoring/metrics products and services – Scout Labs looks interesting….

Posted via web from SocialDeb

He likens the current concept of putting the “real internet” on the phone (Like the iPhone) to

• putting the real horse into our car
• the real symphony orchestra inside our radio
• like using your TV to listen to radio

It using a mobile phone to access the 6th mass media.

He’s not saying that there isn’t a market for the iPhone, rather that using the iPhone – or any smartphone – to access html-created websites is NOT the form factor or the utility of the mobile services business.

His article is jam-packed with information and anecdotes – here I’ve summarized a lot of the metrics he cites. It is not a substitute, though, for reading the complete article.

First some basic numbers, according to a recent presentation by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker at the San Francisco Web 2.0 conference (see image below), there are currently 349MM Broadband users globally, and 3.3BN mobile users – 9 ½ times more mobile subscribers globally than broadband subscribers

Now, the summary of Tomi’s article (and a note of thanks for his permission to quote):

Mobile is The 7th Mass Media

• with Print the first – 500 years old,
• Recordings the second – around 100 years old,
• Cinema the third, – around 100 years old,
• Radio the fourth, – around 100 years old, took 38 years to get to 50MM people*
• TV the fifth and – around 50 years old, took 13 years to get to 50MM people*
• The Internet the sixth in this sequence -15 years old, took 4 years to get to 50MM* people

This year, 2008, will be the cross-over point when more users will access internet content (including WAP) via a mobile phone, than via any kind of PC/laptop.

• has already happened in advanced mobile-savvy countries Japan and South Korea,
• happening the mainstream countries like the UK
• and in developing countries like India and South Africa

On Nov. 4 Nokia announced a series of new devices and services designed extend the benefits of the Web to rural India, including crop information for farmers and mobile e-mail for people who don’t have access to a personal computer.

Today, the internet is worth 45 Billion dollars in revenues – three largest revenue types are

• advertising,
• adult entertainment and
• gambling

By contrast, mobile is worth $72Bn with adult entertainment, gambling and advertising on mobile – each worth about 2 Billion dollars, more or less. But of the $72Bn value of mobile content, there are several far bigger content types:

• Music on mobile is worth over 9 Billion dollars.
• Gaming is worth 5 Billion (Source Netsize Guide 2008).
• There are half a dozen content types already for mobile that have grown to be bigger than adult entertainment and gambling. (screen savers, Sudoku puzzles, personal services.
• In Japan, in 2006 text-based books sold directly to mobile phones totaled 82MM.

Mobile social networking was launched commercially in South Korea only in 2003;

• was worth 6 Billion dollars in 2007 (source Informa 2008) and
• had over 100 million paying users on mobile

Zero in 2003 – 6BN in 2007

At the end of 2007,

• 2.4 billion people – 74% of all mobile phone users – were active users of SMS text messaging
• 800 million active unique users of email
• <500 million active users of all kinds of IM Instant Messaging services
• In Finland interactive SMS text messaging already delivers more revenues to the TV broadcast industry than advertising or subscription income
• UK – 20% of the total viewing audience participates monthly in voting on reality TV shows via SMS
• Japan, 30% of TV viewers interact with TV content in all manner of ways via the mobile

With all this, I’m now convinced that the Mobile Web will not replace the PC-based web.  It will cause a lot of disruption as organizations experiment and struggle and come to grips with whether and how they need a Mobile Web presence. The Mobile Web is all about connecting on a personal level with people.  It’s about giving people what they want, not what you want them to have.  It’s about engaging them on their terms, not yours.

Wow. Power to the people!

*The Emerging Digital Economy – http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Digital-Economy-Dept-Commerce/dp/1892209160

First, Boone Pickens has turned to social media to get the word out about the Pickens Plan. If you want to get on board to help change our dependency on foreign oil, this site gives you a plethora of ways to get involved – from an RSS feed, to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube.   So here’s a guy that is about as opposite from the plugged-in-iphone-toting-twitter-mob-participating 20-something as there is.  No matter. Boone Pickens is a self-made man and he got where he is by figuring out what he wanted to accomplish and then marshalling the forces to get it done.  Nothing has changed; he’s just implemented some new tools.

Second, Webguild published an article about a recently released study by Sapient that can accurately be described as a call to arms to digital agencies.  Ninety percent of respondents agree that it is increasingly important for their agencies use “pull interactions”  – social networks and online communities, rather than “push campaigns”.  This same study found that “nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns”.  Whoa, think about it – what is the churn rate of agencies if 45% plan to switch.  If I was an agency CEO, first I’d be reaching for the Maalox. Second, I’d be learning everything there is to know about social media, and developing “best use” profiles for each one.

Third, social media has outstripped pornography as the most frequently searched topic on the web. According to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, surfing for porn has dropped from 20 percent a decade ago to about 10 percent of searches.  The hottest internet searches now are for social networking sites.  This is doubly interesting since pornographers use some really aggressive and shady techniques to gain visibility on search engines.  And despite it all, their numbers are falling. Of course, 10 percent of today’s searches is significantly larger in sheer numbers than 20 percent of  searched 10 years ago would have been.  Still, going from 20 percent to 10 percent is a significant loss.

But Wait, There’s More

Whether companies are aware of it or not,  their employees are out there networking all over the place, on blogs, LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. New outlets are popping up like mushrooms after a big rain.  Some of them, like Yammer, are providing enterprise-specific social networking spaces.

Some companies – I’m fortunate enough to be employed by one of them – are embracing the notion of social media and looking for ways to enable employees to network, form communities, and work more seamlessly with their teams.  Very cool stuff.

What To Do Next

Companies can’t stop social media from intruding into their world, so it’s really time for executives to start getting their heads around how it will change their business and how it fits into their strategy.  Don’t wait for your agency to figure it out for you.  There are people in your own organization that are all over this- find them, engage them. listen to them.

What networks are you engaged in?  Is your company adopting social networking? Your experiences and observations welcome.

Related post: We’re Looking for the Mouse

Watch Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 Expo 2008 San Francisco