Continuing to feature my delicious links on blog posts [I don’t like those automated services that just post a blog of your daily or weekly links – I wanted to group it better. I also don’t tend to save the obvious stuff to delicious, but tend to save things I’m not so likely to remember how to find via Google. So, in no particular order, here’s]… some slightly random/obscure analytics and analysis resources:

• Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter
• TweetReach: How Far Did Your Tweet Travel?
• Twit IQ: Twitter client apparently with analytics (but I can’t figure out how to see any decent ones…, but the rest is worth a look)
• Three Mashable articles about measurement and analytics and ROI: July 2008; October 2009; February 2010
• Analyze Words: Twitter Psychology. Also try TweetPsych
• Facebook Analytics: Part II – Vendor Solutions | John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified
• Follow Finder by Google Looks at who you follow and suggests you other people to follow (Twitter appear to have copied this functionality now)
• Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on Sentiment Analysis about Social Media Week NYC 10

I just made an audible noise of exclamation upon noticing Google Calendar has an updated Favicon

Anyone want to suggest their favourite random/obscure analytics or analysis articles/resources? Aside from the biggies (Google Analytics/Brandwatch/Radian6 etc.)?

If anyone wonders what people in their 60s do online, here’s my folk’s online activity:

Last week my Dad joined Facebook. My Mum has been on Facebook for around a year. Now when you’re new to Facebook, you get a progress bar to encourage you to come back and do more:

• Dad does social bookmarking, once Furl now Diigo, as well as being an active member of MyLibraryThing. I tried to get him to use del.icio.us but I think he’s sticking to Diigo.
• My mum uses MSN but my Dad doesn’t. If I don’t respond immediately she thinks I’m ignoring her.
• My Dad is a Flickr Pro but my Mum isn’t. I bought him his first Flickr pro account because he was getting into photography and I was sick of getting huge images filling up my inbox all the time! Dad uploads photos that Mum takes too.
• My Mum started a blog recently, about living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an Aspergic husband, and politics.
• My Dad prefers to microblog on Twitter, is on Last.FM and uses Spotify.

There must be something to the fact that each of them has favoured such different social channels through which to connect. Not sure how much is to do with gender and how much to do with their individual personalities, but Mum’s seem much more to do with communication (Facebook, blogging and MSN) whereas Dad’s seem more hobby specific and functional (Flickr, Diigo, MyLibraryThing, Last.FM).

I was going to describe the new text based MMORPG, ‘Spymaster‘ which has just hit Twitter, but then I realised this article said pretty much all I was going to say. Except… people have already started hating it (e.g. The Guardian’s Technology correspondent Charles Arthur – that got a few RT (re-tweets). Because the default settings make it so that everything you do on the game sends out a tweet to your stream, your stream is gonna get clogged with #spymaster tweets and nothing else, annoy all your followers etc., pretty quickly unless you change them to be minimal/non-existent.  However, right now, lots of people are pretty excited about what appears to be a standard, traditional text based game – mainly because of its clever integration with the Twitter API.  I predict there will be a big hoo-ha over the next few days, some people will be loving spymaster, some will be hating it, it is going to be big, it is incredibly viral, and I think it will end up being quickly shunned by the Twitter community.

But in the meantime… I’m gonna be playing it. On Team Russia of course!

Whose side are you on?

p.s. if you want a spymaster invite, you don’t actually need one, you can just sign in with your Twitter username and password. I did and it worked. Also, it’s weird, when you send an invite to someone, they get a DM with the spymaster website address, but no invite code or anything, so it’s not even doing anything that clever in that instance.

Just received an email from my contact at Facebook with the following information:

As of tomorrow, it will be possible to create engagement adverts using the self serve tool. This means that you can promote business profiles and events on Facebook using the run-of-site (ASU) adverts and encourage users to become a fan of that page or RSVP to an event invitation directly from the ad space, as the (very basic!) examples below show:

New Facebook Ads - examples from Facebook - meat not my choice!

This is replacing the ‘social actions’ feature which allowed ads to link to a page but didn’t let users fan the page from the ad itself. This is potentially huge for brands/businesses with profiles (create a profile here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) as it means you can pay on a CPC basis to generate fans. This used to be only available on the homepage on a CPM model.

With business profiles becoming much more like a personal profile, they are a great way for brands to communicate with their customers on a more personal level, with status updates, videos, competitions and so forth, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals The ability to run targeted ads driving traffic to those business profiles means that users can interact with their favourite brands with just one click whilst browsing Facebook. the average CPC on the self-serve tool (http://www.facebook.com/advertising) is currently around $0.25, so effectively, a brand/advertiser can gain an engaged user/consumer for about $0.25.

I’ve just emailed back with the following questions so I’ll let you know what the answers are when I get them:

1. if someone clicks ‘become a fan’ on the ad, do they still get taken to the Fan Page or do they just become fans and not move pages?
2. can someone click the ad and go to the fan page but not click ‘become a fan’?
3. can you now only pay when they become a fan and not when they click through to the Fan Page but don’t become fans?
4. can you still get ‘endorsed’ by existing fans when the ad is shown to friends of fans by having their friend’s name and picture accompany the ad? AKA ‘Social Actions’?