And it’s been an interesting week. Another blizzard.

No school. (It seems like a month already!)

I love the boys. Really, I do. But it’s time for them to go back to school before they forget how to read.

But I digress.

BlissDom.

I was seriously honored to be a part of the Final Keynote, Women, Technology and Social Community: Connecting with Heart. I got to talk about the history of women in communities online. I had a blast.

I met some amazing women (and a couple men). It was definitely worth the trip. (And the accommodations weren’t bad either!)

Anyway, in true form, I am compelled to put some graphs and charts up to demonstrate the BlissDom social chatter. With more than 27 THOUSAND mentions of BlissDom since November 2, 2009 (OMG), I sure have a lot to chart!

Read on. This is the fun part.

Check out the geography of the social mentions. (I know who that Alaska thumbtack is!)

I love me a good theme cloud! This represents the top mentioned terms in the 27,000 mentions. Hey, where’s my name!? Well, at least Alli is in there.

Sure, there’s a lot happening all over. But the chatter’s on Twitter. Big time.

It should come as no surprise that the bulk of the tweets were….(drumroll please)…during the conference.

Say it ain’t so!

Truthfully, this surprised me. More male than I expected. And I’m wondering if it’s actually correct. When I get past this work deadline, I’m going to drill down and see for myself. Meantime, it’s interesting, n’est pas?

And who can resist seeing who is out there shouting the loudest (or the most at least). I included the top 100 below the chart. I couldn’t help myself. So enjoy. I’m off to finish a super exciting project (seriously, I love my job!).

See y’all online! (I got that y’all thing from Alli. Like it?)

~Wendy

The speakers were announced for BlissDom today. I’m really proud to be speaking with some amazing women about something near and dear to me. Alright – I know! But I promised to keep it to myself for now.

Not easy for me, for sure.

But I’m really excited so had to share!

~Wendy

Worth a read…. Some highlights:

Moreover, 80% of chief marketing officers are now using consumer insights generated on the web to help “shape decision-making at the executive level”.

Similarly, 90% employ “customer stories and product suggestions” in helping identify which goods they should attempt to develop.

By the end of next year, 59% more respondents will utilise reviews from members of the public in the innovation process, with information found on Twitter recording a 407% uptick on this measure.

Sam Decker, chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, argued “while 2009 may have been a trial run for many brands and social media, in 2010, CMOs expect social initiatives to directly impact their bottom lines, without exception.”

Of course, we love this because this is what we do in our Social Focal Reports: analyze conversations to identify important trends and information for product and marketing opportunities, and more.

Cool. I was going to score a signed copy of Twitterville. Woot!

At the last minute, I decided to go to the pre-Blog Potomac happy hour. What the heck. And I met Shel. I could start now about how I feel about social media being a gateway drug… one that leads to in-person meetings but that’s a post for another time.

But what a nice guy. Okay, I know I sound surprised. Don’t mean to. It’s just that many business authors I’ve met have left me feeling a little… dismissed. You know what I mean?

Anyway, back to the point. Sorry.

I have a signed book to give away. To one of you. I am not kidding.

But first, you have to read my statistical analysis of social mentions of the book for September and October 2009 to humor me. I have included charts, graphs and maps. I love this stuff.

Sure I won’t know if you skipped all the way to the bottom to find out how you can score the book, but please look at my graphs. I worked hard on this! Thanks. See you in a minute…

Groovy Charts and Graphs Section of the Post

I ran several searches through Techrigy’s SM2 – and infused some custom searches of my own – for the time period of September and October 2009. The searches were aggregated.

The theme graph below shows the entire body of social mentions for book, as defined by my searches. (Hey look, Don is there again. Funny.) No big surprises, really.

What is surprising is the tone of the mentions. I am all the time telling people that none of these monitoring systems does tone well. And it’s true. Believe what you want. I did meet someone at Blog Potomac who tells me his system is better. I hope he’s right & can’t wait to see it. But…

Of the thousands of mentions that make up the theme cloud above, I went through each one by hand (really, I did) and judged the tone. After all was said and done, less than 1% of the mentions were negative, about half were neutral and about half were positive. The neutral mentions were truly neutral; for instance, “Have you read Twitterville? I’m looking for a recommendation,” or “Twitterville has been released.” You get the picture.

Honestly (and why wouldn’t I be honest?), I have never done an analysis of this sort where the chatter was so overwhelmingly positive.

This next Theme Cloud was made by Kate, one of our analysts, who thought that it would be interesting to isolate the Twitter mentions. Kate would have written this post, too, had it not been for her coming down with H1N1 in a bad, bad way. Get well soon, Kate!

So what looks different? Well, of course Twitternames come up. Interview, more feeling-words (love, like, awesome, excited, nice) and (doh) fewer blog, blogger words.

So that’s interesting, no? More social mentions on Twitter use emotionally positive words than in the whole universe of social mentions. Hmmm. I need to think about this some more and do some testing of that theory.

And not super surprising is that more of the mentions are on Twitter. Of course we know that @shelisrael is very active and the subject of the book is, well…pertinent to the platform. (note that not all mentions from 9/1-10/31/09 are included in the graph below. Some were categorized as mainstream news and other…and are not included here for simplicity’s sake.)

I just love plotting mentions against a calendar.

But even more fun looking geographically. While the U.S. and Canada seem fairly predictable, Australia has quite a lot of noise.

And looking at the U.S. by itself….

And then I had to do one more thing. I isolated all the mentions that also mentioned Blog Potomac. Why? Because that’s where I got my book, met the author, and because it was a really great day. And because I could.

What you’ll see, to me, represents the conference in its entirety more than the book itslef. You see Shel and the book, of course, but also Ning and Andy Carvin and Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston and people. Yes, folks, PEOPLE.

You made it. That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Leave a comment here (be sure to include your twitter name or email address in case you win). One commenter will be randomly selected to win on November 6th. That’s this coming Friday.

I sure hope we get more than one comment. But if that’s the case, it’ll be easy to select the winner.

Cheers!

~Wendy

Since we do a lot of research in the food world, I read a lot of blogs that talk about taking it local. I see challenges and advice on a daily basis. While many of the posts and mentions are small scale, I was curious what it looked like in aggregate. So, naturally, I ran with it.

The search was for ‘locavore’ and ‘localvore’ in the past 4 months across all social platforms. And what I found did not surprise me.

(Note that ‘bit’ refers mostly to bit.ly links. Yes, I had to look.)

Sure, food and local and organic and farmers (yay, farmers!) show up well. But are you surprised that only one location, York (ostensibly New York, right?), shows in the cloud?

If you’re like me, you’re saying to yourself, “Sure, but who writes out a state name or city name in a post? Particularly in Twitter.” And you’d be right. But wouldn’t it be cool to see where the mentions were coming from?

So 72.7% of the mentions captured are from the U.S. Is that a monitoring issue or reality? Not sure. Canada, UK, Australia sure had quite a few posts.

So I started wondering. Are the percentages of posts representative of the population distribution of the U.S. I mean, seriously. Weren’t you wondering that, too?

Population stats from 2008 Census estimates, by the way. The highlighted states have significantly more posts than the population distribution would suggest, leading me to believe there are more locavore-enthusiasts (or more vocal locavore enthusiasts) in those states than in other states – percentage-wise.

I could do this all day. (Hey wait, I do!)

~Wendy

As you’ve surely read, the FTC has announced that bloggers who review products must disclose whether they have any “material connection” to advertisers. That includes any payments or free products they get from companies. The rules (also for users of Twitter and Facebook) take effect Dec. 1 and carry a hefty ($11K) fine.

Some people applaud the ruling, such as Abraham Harrison who are “are thrilled with the new FTC endorsements guidelines and the strengthened transparency, honesty, and accountability these rules are bringing to the world of marketing.” So is Andy Sernovitz over at SmartBlog On Social Media.

Some people? Not so much. Take, for example, Jay Yarow of BusinessInsider who wrote, The FTC’s Blogger-Disclosure Plan Is Ludicrous, Unnecessary, And Unenforceable or Jeff Jarvis who worries about unintended consequences over at Buzz Machine. Or John Furrier who wrote Why Matt Cutts is Wrong on the FTC Rules suggesting that the guidelines are vague and will stifle innovation.

Wherever you fall on the issue, you can bet there were a lot of opinions – hence, a lot of data to mine.

Yay! And that’s where I come in.

So this is a theme cloud of the 4,066 results since October 1 with 75% of those results coming in the past 3 days.

Is it me or is it just fascinating?

It’s clear that the ruling is being talked about with respect to its effect on blogs way more than its effect on Facebook and Twitter. But those are talked about, too. And what you can’t see from this cloud (but I have geeky graphs to prove it) is that more than half the discussion is on Twitter at 2,399.

But what the heck is don on the cloud for?

~Wendy

We find they are great ways to get a quick read on a topic or universe. Granted, the data that goes in is key and that’s where we really live and breathe. This little cloud I put together represents recent blog posts mentioning eco-friendly sippy cups.

Sippy cups, you ask? Well, we’re deep into a very exciting research project surrounding eco-friendly products for babies and children. We’ll be telling you more soon. Bet you can’t wait!?

This one shows the most used words.

This one, the most used phrases.

I’m sure you can imagine how useful this can be when drilling deeply into social research to see what is being said, by whom, and how.

Good times!

~Wendy

This tag cloud represents the total social conversation between September 1, 2009 up until the conference.

This one shows the conversation during the conference – from Wednesday until Sunday.

What jumps out at me is the more social nature of the initial cloud as opposed to more work-related, business issues on the second. Shocking? No. Cool to look at? Yes.

(full size tag clouds here. I sheepishly admit I don’t know how to make them clickable to expand. Anyone?)

The above ring chart shows the voices talking about Type A Mom from September 1, 2009 until the conference. All have at least 25 mentions. (download here)

And this chart shows the voices (25 or more mentions) during the conference. Sure was a lot of tweeting going on! (download here)

No big surprise that the number of mentions increased and peaked during the conference. (download here)

Using text analytics, the above chart shows the emotions reflected in the content of posts that mention the conference. (download here)

None of the charts shows how much I enjoyed the conference.

I did.

None shows the amazing people I met or the interesting and creative businesses that they have created. Nor do they show the great marketers out there who really understand and want to work with these businesswomen.

Back to work I go. But like I said, I felt compelled to share!

~Wendy

Part of our intent was to begin the necessary digging to discover more about the relationships formed among women online, and more specifically, to understand the nature of influence across and within the hundreds of micro-communities that are emerging.

As social media researchers, this is what we believe: those with the loudest voices, in any community (whether we’re talking dieters, environmental activists or moms focusing on issues pertaining to babies) discussing your brand, are obviously worth tuning into because of their influence. I.e., if one of these prominent voices announces to the world that there’s lead in the paint used on your widget (regardless of if the statement is true or not) –  you’ve got more of an immediate problem than if a single blogger with three followers does the same. Clearly. However, there’s also enormous value in listening to the voices that may not seem as loud.

There are two particularly notable points we’ll make about this latter group. First, looking only at the number of followers a single blog has can be enormously deceiving in determining its value for businesses and brands. For instance, if the individual is expressing the same opinion given above pertaining to lead paint – and it’s the same worry being expressed by others within a defined time period, you could have a legitimate concern worth addressing. Viewed in context to how  a single voice reflects what others of a similar profile are saying; collectively, the single voices can be early indicators of trends and potential concerns among one’s core consumers. This information potentially  can help companies develop new products and services, or hone existing ones; squelch rumors before they balloon and lead to real problems; or better profile the various consumers they are, or should be, engaging with.

Second, as social media continues to evolve, we are witnessing the emergence of micro or niche communities, what some are referring to as tribes. For marketing purposes, understanding how these niche groups organize and inter-lock will become increasingly important. Thus, the individual blogger with a small, but active band of friends becomes more valuable to marketers.

This issue of micro or niche communities was a recurring one at the conference. And we expect this to continue to be the case beyond Type-A , for many, many months to come.

-Angela

** The trip to Asheville was insightful, thought-provoking, exhausting –  and fun! On the way back home, Wendy and I discovered the Pink Cadillac Diner. Just when our hunger was reaching dangerous levels (Could that really be King Kong a few feet from the hood of our car? Actually, it could… and was.), a round of hamburgers and coffee saved the day. Don’t judge. Who orders salad at a diner?

Wendy plus coffee.

Ditto Angela.

At this point, just about everyone has covered the basics of social media and the fuss about Twitter, Facebook, and more. But the magic question many still ask is “what do we do now?” Join us as two social media thought leaders (I did not write that, by the way) share where to start and how to keep things going. Whether it’s capturing the online discussion and what is being said about your organization or identifying your most vocal members and creating a community, we’ll provide you with action items and tools you can use to monitor and engage in the discussions.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009
2:00pm – 3:00 pm ET (11:00am – 12:00am PT)

Presented by Wendy Goldman Scherer of The Social Studies Group (that’s me!) and Paul Schneider of Socious (really smart guy), this information packed webinar will offer:

• Free or low-cost tools you can use to monitor discussions
• What you should be monitoring and measuring
• Creating a promotional plan and launching your online communities
• Creating a content plan for your social media efforts
• How to keep your members engaged

Sign up here. It’s free, of course!

~Wendy