A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at Professional Fundraising Magazine’s Digital Communications for Charities conference, called The Social Media Conversation [slides are here].  Kicked off by Roger Jones and Creative Director of The Good Agency, Reuben Turner, my bit was a case study of what I’m working on for Compassion in World Farming.  So I quickly go over how we’re optimising their use of Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and then go over how we’re monitoring it.  Monitoring social media activity is what everyone seems to be talking about right now, i.e. monitoring your brand’s ‘buzz’.  So the sites I talk about are Qdos, HowSociable, Twitter Grader, Google Trends, Google Insights, Omgili, Serph, and of course Google Analytics.

Qdos I have only seen used for individuals and not for brands or organisations, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for them, so I’ve been using it to assess changes in Compassion’s online reputation over time.  It’s quite fun to see who you’re more famous than, and it provides a nice ‘splodge’ diagram of how active, unique and popular you are and how much impact what you say has.  It doesn’t work for organisation’s Facebook Pages though.

HowSociable allows you to subscribe to monthly updates and compares you against famous brands like Coca Cola who are given a rank of 1000, so your number is in comparison to that.

Twitter Grader grades you against other Twitter users so you get a score depending on how much you tweet, how many followers you have and how many people you’re following.  They’ve also just launched Facebook Grader where you can get a score for how famous you are on Facebook.  Myself, I do better on Twitter.

Others I’m using but didn’t have time to talk about include Social Mention, Samepoint and Twitterholic.   Twitterholic is great because you get a graph over time of how many followers you had each day, so if it suddenly drops you can go and check what you said that offended everyone.  Mine dropped off quite significantly one day when I called Chris Rock a racist, but I reckon Twitter had just done a sweep of spam accounts and deleted a bunch of people.

I also showed how I’ve created an iGoogle ‘dashboard’ of RSS feeds made up from search results from a number of the above social media conversation search engines, in order to easily track the latest thing that has been said about the organisation, to see if there’s any opportunity to join that conversation.  On that there’s also a Dipity timeline of YouTube videos.

Mashable did an article about how to track influential voices using Buzzgain (apparently my face came up as influential about something or other!  I’m very proud – having my face on Mashable is the Social Media equivalent of being on the cover of Time Out) so I need to check that out too.  There’s also a bunch of Twitter directories which I use to find the right people for Compassion to follow, some of which are covered by Mashable this week too, for example Twellow.  Another Twitter tools I’ve used to find the right people to follow is MrTweet, and I’m using Twitterfeed to automatically feed our Flickr photostream RSS, Flickr group RSS, and YouTube RSS in to Twitter.  It’s important not to rely on auto feeds though or your Twitter stream will be boring and nobody will follow you back.

OK, so here’s the videos of me doing my thing.  Sorry for the crappy sound quality and it was filmed on a tiny digital camera but you get the idea! I start about six minutes in…

Lately I have noticed that with more and more people getting used to RSS, and more services allowing you to send content in and out of them, content is flowing in so many different directions and things haven’t settled into any kind of default situation. For example – I use Twitterfeed to send updates to my Twitter account whenever I update my Facebook status, write a blog post, or add images to Flickr. This saves me the bother of updating Twitter AND Facebook, and Facebook friends will get the same content as Twitter followers. I do it this way because I go on Facebook more often than Twitter, and sometimes I want to Twitter about geeky things that I don’t want to bore my normal friends with (yes Twitter friends, you know you are all geeks). Most people I know who are on Twitter seem to flow content in the opposite direction, sending their Twitter status to their Facebook, I’m assuming because they spend more time on Twitter. However, people who are Facebook friends AND Twitter friends, see the same content twice. Boring!

The duplication of content gets particularly annoying when you use feed aggregators to view stuff. There are two types of aggregators I’m familiar with:

1. The stalker feed aggregator: These make stalking your friends super-easy. You can stay on one page and see what’s going on with everybody on all of their sites. An example of this is Spokeo, which works really nicely because you can rename your friends who have various online names so you remember who they are, and you can merge profiles for the same friend on various services into one. You can also delete boring friends just on Spokeo, so you don’t hear about their rubbish life, and you still remain friends with them on whatever external site they use, so you don’t offend anybody. Although Spokeo’s UI is really easy to use, it looks terrible in my opinion (oh, I just logged back in for the first time in a while and they’ve had a redesign, and they’ve gotten rid of a whole farmyard of small furry animals from the site). Socialthing is another example, and looks nice and clean, but you can’t merge people’s identities at the moment, and you can’t view all the content from a single person like you can on Spokeo *see below. These would be fine if my friends didn’t port their content all over the place, resulting in something like:

‘John on Facebook: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Pownce: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Twitter: John is at home’
…etc

2. The ego feed aggregator: If you throw pieces of yourself all over the internets, and you want to make life easier for your fans, you could make a page that aggregates all the information about you and your life into one place, so people don’t have to check in on you on lots of different services, but can just read this one page. Lots of people do this semi-manually on their blogs, adding feeds and badges from their various profiles across the web. I’ve kind of done this here, but have missed a few out, like Twitter, and I’ve preferred to just list links to my various profiles. I’ve now tried out (but haven’t put on my blog yet) ShowYourself, a widget-creator thing that creates a list of links to your various profiles in a semi-automatic way. Using Twitterfeed or similar, results in this kind of aggregated ego.

Friendfeed does both of these things, with a ‘Me’ tab and a ‘Friends’ tab. The ‘Me’ tab can be seen by anyone (here’s mine). You can also view your own updates in the Friends tab if you want to. But there’s still the problem of duplicated content. I had a bad case of duplicated content for a while when I let the Facebook Friendfeed application post updates to my Facebook Mini-feed: Updating my Facebook status would automatically update my Twitter status and send an update to Friendfeed and my Facebook Mini-feed (Mini-feed update 1); then Friendfeed would tell my Facebook Mini-feed that I updated my Facebook status (Mini-feed update 2), Twitter would tell my Friendfeed that I updated my Twitter status, then Friendfeed would tell my Mini-feed that I updated my Twitter status (Mini-feed update 3). Phew! That must have been annoying for my friends – I was probably spamming their newsfeeds. Also, the Friends tab only shows people who are also on Friendfeed (as far as I can tell), unless you go through the process of creating an ‘imaginary friend’ for each of the friends you want to follow. I.e. it doesn’t automatically import all of your friends from each social network.

I think the next step for these aggregator sites is to scan for duplicated content and filter it out. *I just discovered that you can merge people’s various profiles into one on Socialthing, AND it removes duplicate content and still tells you the sites they updated:

Brilliant! Are any other sites doing this yet?

The last couple of weeks I’ve been using Flock (full review coming soon), which can function as a stalker feed aggregator if you set it up properly, and it’s been nice to have my friends’ updates in a side panel of my browser. Duplicated content is still a problem here though – I wonder if they are planning on doing the Socialthing thing and filtering duplicates and/or merging people’s identities when you view ‘All’ updates?

Related post: The Web Profile Aggregators (by Frank Gruber)