Changes in Facebook

The two most important changes that have been done in recent updates are the way status updates in the Newsfeeds are shown and the Ticker.
Before the recent update, Facebook separated Top News (based on EdgeRank) and Recent (in chronologic order). This has changed into one “hybride” flow with messages. When you open your newsfeed, the first messages you’ll see are “top stories”, which are based on the EdgeRank. When you scroll down you’ll find your other messages in chronological order. Facebook stores your messages until you login and then decides which messages are relevant for you based on the EdgeRanker.

To make sure you don’t miss any posts while you are using Facebook, they have introduced the Ticker. This is a column on the right-side of your screen which shows the real-time updates of your friends. In this Ticker you are able to respond to these updates directly. In the app settings in Facebook, users are able to select which updates they want to see in the Ticker.

What our observations found

We found a couple of challenging occurrences:

1. Some status updates have a great impression & engagement performance vs. status updates which only have 10% of this top performance
2. Recent stories doesn’t necessarily contain all messages
3. The hybrid newsfeed doesn’t always show updates chronologically

Additionally Edgerankchecker.com found:

1. Average impressions per update have dropped by 22%
2. Average engagement has gone up by approx. 15%

Most researchers came up with multiple hypothesis about this effect:

1. 3^rd Party applications like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck but also enterprise level systems like Buddy, MI, Syncapse etc are being penalized by Facebook. A common hypothesis is that Facebook wants to discourage the use of these systems. It is being said that Facebook want’s to encourage users to visit their physical website instead.
2. Facebook “collapses” 3^rd party application posts. The common “See 8 more posts from Hootsuite”.
3. High chance that a status update is being scheduled. And because of this reason it wouldn’t act on the actual interests of the Page’s interest.
4. The content being published to Facebook is of low quality and therefore ending up with a lower Edgerank score. Stuff like subjects of interest, post length, update timing, receiving fan profile, message density among other things would influence this score.

Debunking the myths

Every big change leads to a lot of discussions. In the past this was about Google’s SEO algorithms and nowadays the discussion is about Facebook Content Optimalization (short FCO). But during these discussions there is something most of us tend to forget and that’s simply put common sense. So together with common sense, objective research and talks with Facebook engineers we came to the following conclusions:

1. DEBUNKED 3^rd party applications: Facebook is not penalizing external applications. What we see instead is bad configuration on the side of these application but also possible bugs on Facebook ‘s side. And here is why:
   1. Yes, Facebook is collapsing updates from the same application origin. But Facebook has been doing this for many months already. It activates as soon as an application sends more than a certain amount of messages within a fixed timeframe. This simply means that if you send an update through Hootsuite for your page and friends of my who use the same application as well, the posts from Hootsuite will be collapsed into one single post. Effectively killing your view rate. For this reason we use white label publishers for all our clients and advise them on their message density.
   2. Facebook confirmed that it is even favouring 3^rd party applications since it improves the experience of Facebook for a large group of both companies and personal users. It effectively decreases the load on their own systems and it helps companies get more insights and possibilities then they would otherwise be able to offer through the means of their own development roadmap.
2. CONFIRMED Quality of published content: It’s widely known that Facebook was already analysing the performance of your content and cross referencing it with your Page’s fans. This has indeed gotten tighter with the introduction of the hybrid stream. For some pages this meant that their posts weren’t shown at all anymore for a time, while others didn’t notice any difference. This all has to do with the fact that it’s no longer guaranteed that your post will even show up in the recent messages if Facebook thinks that the content is not relevant for it’s users. A simple test proved that if you would engage a couple of times with this new and “invisible” content of a bad performing page, future posts suddenly started showing up in the hybrid feed.
3. DEBUNKED Scheduled updates: this one is of course closely related to the previous point. If the update is not relevant enough, it won’t show up regardless where it was sent from. We’ve tested this on all clients and have seen little to no difference between the performances of a scheduled or normal update.

We hope that above information will help you in further improving your social enagement!

Following the announced strategic partnership with DQ&A, I was asked to share some thoughts about ROI and “Social Media Engagement” for their newsletter. Below the outcome as it was published, by no means it is all-inclusive, so you are invited to add, comment or let me know what you think… - RvH –

The ROI of Social Media Engagement

Social Media was called “a hype” in the beginning of 2010, by the end of the year it was here to stay. Many organizations started to use social media for (mainly) reputation management. When asked about the results, the answers usually consisted of many words but few facts & figures.

Organizations are now taking the next step by truly engaging with their audiences via social media. Why? Because consumers are demanding it. Furthermore, tools have been developed helping organizations to efficiently manage their fanbase, while measuring and analyzing the impact of their engagement.

The year 2011 will be about the ROI of social media engagement, showing social media is a game-changer in almost every industry.

What is the ROI of Social Media Engagement?

Maximized exposure

Every entity has its own mission and or ideas for using social media. For many institutions spreading a message to as many people as possible is the main objective. The return is maximized exposure without  any significant additional costs.

A good example of this would be government institutions who mainly have an informative mission for health & safety purposes. By spreading a message real time (for instance during a natural disaster such as the Tsunami in Japan), making use of social media can contribute significantly.

Improved Customer Service

Now that producers and consumers have found each other on social platforms, consumers are demanding to be served through this newly available channel. Why would consumers pick up the phone, make additional costs while being “on hold” in lengthy queues, if they can also get real time social customer service for free? The Dutch Railway (NS), KLM and Bol.com are just a few examples of companies who have already discovered the value of being connected.

Then what is exactly the return of a happy customer being served by these social “call” centers or web care teams? This is of course difficult to say. At the same time think about what the Return of Not Investing (RONI) would be, if your competitor does?  Are you willing to take this risk? Social media will not replace traditional channels completely, but it will become an increasingly important additional channel.

Increased Revenues

For most organizations return on investment means: “showing the money”. Mostly this is achieved by creating traffic via a campaign or message, leading the fans towards a webshop where they can purchase a product. Tools are now going beyond the ‘click through rate’ by measuring how much additional revenues are generated via social campaigns and through which social networks. Social commerce triggers audiences to a new type of impulse purchase, while actually being within their own social network.

For example, Greetz.nl an online platform for sending postcards, have experienced up to 80% increase in social media revenues (within 4 months), which are directly contributable to social media campaigns. It shows that engaging via social media pays off.

Knowing your fans

The biggest return lies with really getting to know your fans by engaging with them, preferably on an individual level. Therefore social media needs to be integrated into the various processes and disciplines of your organization such as marketing, pr, customer service and sales. Once an integrated approach is taken an organization learns more about their fans and for instance their personal preferences. These learning’s via social media will take lead generation or re-marketing to the next level.

Sophisticated tools are needed to execute a social media strategy efficiently, especially with a larger fanbase. With these tools indicators are showing which social network performs best in activating your audience and who your super promoters are, ie. those interacting with your brand frequently and forwarding your messages within their own networks. This increases your exposure and also improves your ranking in Google.

For your organization to be future proof it should get ready to satisfy the demand of future generations. Generations who will undoubtedly be community oriented, always connected and almost have no other reality than online reality.

Ralph van Hooijdonk

Managing Partner

Media Injection

www.mediainjection.nl

@mediainjection

Mobile: 06-21115997

Amsterdam, 24 september 2010 – Media Injection, een social media management en analytics leverancier, kondigt aan dat het is benoemd tot één van de vijf genomineerden voor de Accenture Innovation Jury Award in de categorie ‘Best Web Concept’. Met deze benoeming komt het concept tegelijkertijd in aanmerking voor de publieksprijs. De uiteindelijke winnaars worden bekendgemaakt tijdens het Accenture Innovation Seminar op dinsdag 2 november 2010, in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

De winnaar van de publieksprijs ontvangt een cheque van EUR 40.000 aan mediawaarde bij dagblad Metro. Vanaf vandaag kan iedereen zijn stem uitbrengen voor de publieksprijs op de website van de Innovation Awards: Breng hier je stem uit!

Media Injection werd genomineerd voor een award in de categorie ‘Best Web Concept’ door acht experts en kenners uit de sector. Uit de genomineerden kiezen zij de winnaar van de Innovation Award in deze categorie, welke in november bekendgemaakt wordt. De jury voor de categorie ‘Best Web Concept’ bestaat uit:

• Bernard Aleva – SVP Innovation & Product Development Elsevier Science & Technology Journals
• Willem Sijthoff – Media Entrepreneur, o.a. Peak (e.a.)
• Lara Ankersmit – Publisher Digitaal Telegraaf Media Groep
• Simone Brummelhuis – Founder The Next Women
• Rene van Erk – Director of Product & Business Development Europe Wolters Kluwer
• Heleen Dura-van Oord – Founder DQ&A / Partner Peak Capital
• Eline Deijs – Publisher Online Weekbladpers Tijdschriften
• Marc Bervoets – Senior Executive Accenture

Media Injection stelt organisaties in staat om social media structureel strategisch in te zetten. Het product MI Connect maakt communicatie via deze kanalen meetbaar en analyseerbaar en maakt de ROI inzichtelijk. Door intelligente systemen worden organisaties in staat gesteld om fanbases van duizenden al dan niet miljoenen te managen.

Achmed Awad, founding partner bij Media Injection: “Voor een bedrijf zoals Media Injection die zich met name focused op B2B, is een nominatie in de Accenture Innovation Awards een geweldig compliment en erkenning voor het innovatieve karakter van onze concepten. Social media is nu een hot item bij veel bedrijven, en onze oplossingen lopen vaak voor op de muziek. Deze nominatie geeft aan dat onze producten aansluiten op de huidige en toekomstige vraag vanuit de markt”.

Over de Accenture Innovation Awards

Accenture heeft de Innovation Awards in het leven geroepen om bedrijven te huldigen die uitzonderlijke prestaties leveren op het gebied van innovatie, hen bij elkaar te brengen ter verdere stimulatie en om innovatie in Nederland in kaart te brengen. Een vakjury die de concepten beoordeelt op innovativiteit, succes en potentie, maakt in november 2010 de winnaars bekend van de Innovation Award voor Media, Communicatie en High-Tech en van de Innovation Award voor Financial Services. De winnaar van de juryprijs of Blauwe Tulp wint 50.000 euro mediawaarde van mediapartner Emerce. De winnaar van de publieksprijs wint 40.000 euro mediawaarde van mediapartner Metro. Het Accenture Innovation Seminar vindt plaats op dinsdag 2 november 2010, in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

Meer informatie over de Accenture Innovation Awards is te vinden op www.innovation-awards.nl. Voortgang van het evenement kan bovendien gevolgd worden via www.twitter.com/IA_2010.

Over Media Injection

Media Injection is een bedrijf dat zich sinds 2009 bezig houdt met geautomatiseerde social media oplossingen. Social campaign, CRM, analytics en content management worden geïntegreerd binnen bestaande bedrijfsprocessen naast bestaande kanalen zoals email en sms. Hierdoor kunnen bedrijven social media op een meetbare en beheersbare manier inzetten. Al kort na de start van het bedrijf werd er zowel nationaal als internationaal interesse getoond in de producten en diensten van Media Injection en anno 2010 worden er klanten en social networks in Europa, Zuid Amerika en China gemanaged. www.mediainjection.nl

Over Accenture

Accenture is een bedrijf dat zich wereldwijd bezig houdt met management consulting, technology services en outsourcing. We hebben meer dan 190,000 mensen in dienst die klanten bedienen in meer dan 120 landen. Wij werken met onze klanten samen om hen te helpen high-performance organisaties en overheden te worden. Dit doen we door een combinatie van bewezen ervaring en uitgebreide vaardigheden in alle industrieën en bedrijfsfuncties. Daarnaast doen we diepgaand onderzoek onder de meest succesvolle bedrijven in de wereld. De mondiale omzet over het fiscale jaar dat eindigde op 31 augustus 2009, bedroeg 21.58 miljard Amerikaanse dollar. Kijk voor meer informatie op www.accenture.nl

*** Noot voor de redactie ***

Voor meer informatie over dit bericht kunt u contact opnemen met:

Achmed Awad

Contact

E-mail: achmed@mediainjection.nl

Tel.: 015 268 2606

Accenture

Anja van Beijnum-Breunis

Press Manager

E-mail: anja.van.beijnum@accenture.com

Tel.: 020 493 83 83

Efficiency in social: het kan

Veel organisaties zijn al actief in social media of willen actief worden. Tot dusver was het nodig vooral mensenhanden en –hoofden daarvoor in te zetten; social media management kost veel tijd, resources en dus geld. Maar sociale media zijn ideaal om direct in contact te treden en te blijven met je doelgroepen. Media Injection bracht daarom engagementtool MI Connect op de markt.

Een échte engagement tool

De veelgehoorde wens uit de markt is vooral om het social media management efficiënter te laten verlopen; bijvoorbeeld door het vele ‘handwerk’ te vervangen door een vorm van centraal aangestuurd en eventueel geautomatiseerd social media management. Dat betekent dat je de boodschap slechts één keer hoeft op te stellen voor al je sociale kanalen.

Media Injection heeft naar deze wensen geluisterd en voegde daar nog andere functionaliteiten aan toe. Zo biedt MI Connect ook de mogelijkheid links in die boodschap op te nemen die de conversie meten. Door middel van een 1 dashboard kan de organisatie monitoren en ‘terugpraten’, en op die manier in gesprek treden met de (individuele) communityleden. Hierdoor kun je het bereik maximaliseren en je verschillende doelgroepen optimaal bedienen en aan je merk of organisatie binden. Het systeem is realtime en maakt analyses van alle sociale, CRM- en conversiedata mogelijk. MI Connect is de enige tool die deze combinatie van functionaliteiten voor social media management biedt.

Bol.com: launching customer

Bol.com zocht een tool om berichtgeving over de online winkel te monitoren maar ook om actief de dialoog aan te gaan met klanten. Door de continue inzet van verschillende social media waren de medewerkers van het team erg veel tijd kwijt met handmatige acties. MI Connect helpt hen nu deze processen te automatiseren wat meer tijd laat voor evaluatie van campagnes en het monitoren van verkeer en conversie via social media-kanalen.

Over MI Connect

MI Connect is de eerste en vooralsnog enige engagement tool die zowel social content management, social campaign management, social analytics als social crm in zich heeft. Het overzichtelijke dashboard van MI Connect brengt al deze onderdelen samen en maakt het makkelijk om een proactieve social media strategie toe te passen. Met MI Connect kan het social mediabeleid van een organisatie tot in de puntjes uitgezet en beheerd worden.

MI Connect is een product van Media Injection. Media Injection ontwikkelt software die social media meetbaar en analyseerbaar maakt om bedrijven grip te geven op social media.

Gert-Jan Lagas, responsible for online campaigns at Greetz, decided to act immediately and sent out a call to their fans in Facebook, Twitter & Hyves. The message was simple: let’s support Nicky’s final request and help Greetz with sending as much cards as possible. Within hours, fans ordered hundreds of free greeting cards, donated by Greetz. At the ultimate peak 1 card was sent every 27 seconds. Counting 2009 cards, Greetz had to stop the charity campaign, since the request had been extensively fulfilled and media attention towards little Nicky kept growing.

I would like to demonstrate with this post how social media can work for commercial companies in a different way. Fans inside the communities of Greetz happily engaged with this charity campaign and even admitted to experience an increased loyalty towards Greetz. Thanks to the word of mouth, the message spread rapidly among friends, resulting in a positive brand awareness and growing community.

In the end it’s clear again, that social media is all about your fellow humans and your responsibility in society. Showing your social side as a company results in a direct reward from your fans and most probably a positive gain on the long run. Well done Greetz!

I intend to ocassionally write about whatever catches my attention in “the world of Social Media”. No, I am not a social media guru, there are too many already!

I do however, have a strong interest in the changes that social media are bringing about in the various aspects of personal life, business life and the shift of power (or attitude) between consumers & producers. My main business interest lies in the social media tooling that change or facilitate the way we engage with each other. For the better.

I invite you to leave comments in our company blog, if you agree with us, or even better when you disagree! It’s all good.

Crisis Management via Social Media; Marketing trick or true effort?

Nowadays, more and more organizations are discovering the power of social media. Some see the potential for this ‘new ways of working’ and are front runners to improve their reputation, customer service and/or sales.

Some companies are – all of a sudden – starting to use social media due to some form of crisis. A crisis caused by unethical behavior, mismanagement, or even an “act of god” like the Volcano Eruption in Iceland.

In general, a crisis is a good moment to change boundaries, but I battle with my thoughts if these companies are just using social media as a marketing trick or is it true effort to keep an audience informed? In the below blog post are some examples through which I want to show you how companies are using social media in times of crisis (the good, the bad & the ugly).

THE GOOD: KLM ROYAL DUTCH AIRLINES vs. ASH CLOUDS

KLM was already using social media. They really experienced the potential of it whilst in the middle of a crisis.

KLM showed that actively using twitter & facebook can be a very effective way of keeping their travelers informed during extraordinary circumstances. Even though often there was no new information to give, travelers apparently liked/appreciated being ‘connected’ with KLM.

Many travelers didn’t call the call center, didn’t look at the information screens @ schiphol or even didn’t go to the information desk. They went social, because KLM did as well. The result was that their social presence, actually relieved their call center capacity and so KLM was able to keep more travelers informed.

The number of followers went from 12.000 (just shortly after they started using twitter) to 24.723 after ash cloud nr. 1 on 04/05/10. Cloud nr. 2 their followers went to 27.356 (17/05/2010). Today they have 39.063 followers.

By the level of their social activity and involvement (still today) to my opinion this is TRUE EFFORT and here to stay.

THE BAD: NESTLE vs. GREENPEACE

Nestle was confronted with a social media campaign from Greenpeace. They posted a video on Youtube (1.5 million views) pointing out that due to Nestle’s purchasing practices for palm oil, they were contributing to rainforest deforestation. Nestle responded by having the video removed from Youtube. This helped Greenpeace in their exposure and so came lots of reactions from angry fans.

What did Nestle do? Nothing. But, they did refer to a press release, basically signaling their lack of interest or intention to change. I truly think it was their lack of understanding the power of social media. The negative attention got worse and worse and then Nestle responded by asking fans in facebook to leave “their community”. Check: http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=6786

Soon Nestle realized they didn’t own their community. The power lies with the fans or consumers. Within 8 weeks they announced a change of policy AND a partnership with the The Forest Trust. It was a lesson learned the hard way and I am sure we will get more examples in the future of companies being forced to change their practices. For the better.

Nestle started using social media as a MARKETING TRICK but in fact were forced in making it TRUE EFFORT.

THE UGLY: BP DEEP OIL SPILL vs. BP

At first the efforts of BP seemed impressive and had a good start of “damage control” following their oil spill in the gulf of mexico. They created a twitter account to keep people informed and register for volunteers. They also used flickr to show the world pictures of all their efforts being taken, to minimize pollution. Check a video on cnn via: http://tinyurl.com/39npmbj

Soon they wanted to further ‘improve’ their corporate image by buying top google search results. Not so great idea. People noticed and started thrashing BP. Are trying to hide something? http://mashable.com/2010/06/08/bp-oil-spill-google/

Recently, it also became known that certain pictures on their flick page had been photo-shopped. I really don’t understand why they did this… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1296764/Did-BP-Photo-shop-ANOTHER-oil-spill-image.html

Obviously BP has a lot to learn about social media and themselves. If you start to use social media, you better get real and honest. If you are not, someone out there will find out. And this will sooner or later hurt your company reputation again and again, causing significant (and unnecessary) damage.

My verdict on BP: A MARKETING TRICK as I expect that their social activities with time, when the mess is gone, their social activity will be gone as well.

Why wait for a crisis to reshape business?

How many companies will wait for a crisis, before they will really start using social media? And when the crisis is over, that will be the moment when we find out if it is trick or true effort!

RvH

Of course these successes are  somehow related to an increase in revenue due to their social presence. But if you’ve got thousands or even millions of fans, it really gets challenging to determine which channel is performing the best, which campaigns delivered the highest engagement, which fans are your most valuable ambassadors and don’t get me started about the massive amounts of conversations. Is it just me or are we missing a piece of trusted Taylor’s scientific management?! In which of course I mean the theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes strategy, with the objective to improve organizational marketing effectiveness. Don’t get me wrong, but we’ve arrived in a similar era where we are moving from pioneering new technologies to an undeniably strong desire to measurable and controllable applied technologies. (And in particular social technologies!)

It’s clear that an important part of your business success the next 3-5 years are most probably tied to your social presence, depending on if you’re targeting consumers. Like with any emerging technology everything starts with trial and error and at a certain point you’ll hear enticing stories from pioneers who accomplished great successes, with nothing more then gut feeling and a serious amount of luck. This will turn out to be quite useless, from the learn and repeat perspective.

For those of you who already know our company, it’s clear where I’m heading. However, since we are a startup ourselves, everyday is a unique day. And to actually see customers work with your products is really enlightening. Our goal was to enable our customers to get valuable insights from their social media communication with the help of our products (ROI being one of those). But since we’ve evolved since then, it’s great to say that now we can actually measure the exact ROI of social media. There are various ways, differing per customer, but the key in this success is integration of existing systems, with our systems and social networks. Making it a seamless part of your company’s business processes. Does it sound like a million dollar ERP implementation? Well it’s not, it’s quite easy actually. Although I’m sure we still have a long way to go, the explanation for this relatively low cost – high return is all because we and our customers are still in the first stage of optimization regarding social technologies. The first 80% of this new strategy is relatively easy to reach, while the last 20% will be amazingly expensive and time consuming.

So:

• Integrate existing systems with tools like ours and connect your business to the social world of your customers
• Start now and gain the advantage versus your competitors (earlier and better learn cycles)
• Achieve great results within a short time period
• Costs will stay low, while returns are amazing
• And also, quick and great results are a great motivator for organizational change

But what does this say about the effectiveness, the active user group and especially why should your business invest in a Twitter presence or eventually even a Twitter ad campaign?

Nothing, because I’m surrounded  with marketing savvy professionals and these tend to go with the latest trends which I humorously call the “marketeer tunnel effect”. So with Twitter you’ll reach a certain group, but if this is your target group I can’t say. This is something my company researches for our customers. But something I can say for sure: most active Twitter users have something in common, and this usually translates into a certain personal profile. And although Twitter has mesmerizing amounts of registered users, recent research indicates that only 21% is an active user. Which supports my theory that these so called power users dominate the image of Twitter as a heavy used communication channel.

These heavy users consist of experts, exhibitionists,  advertisers and webmasters utilizing this channel as a classic marketing shout box and a small part manages to have conversations. (And between you and me: some have so many tweets that it seems they send out a message every hour since the start of the service. Which makes me wonder if their employer knows about their extra curricular activity )

However, Twitter is great if not the best way to make news and status updates available in real time. If you want to know what’s going on around a certain subject you can find a never ending list of individual tweets all stating something about this subject. Twitter users who are really offering a certain added value to this subject will get noticed and others will follow them to see what they have to say now and in the future. Furthermore, Twitter as a listening channel can be great, just like Google, but in real time to hear what others have to say about a certain subject and ideally engage into this “conversation”. But I’d also like to use this opportunity to state that Twitter was never intended to be a conversation service but a status update one. If you’re interested why, how and any technical details, feel free to ask…

In a way this is the same way blogging has evolved. We can all remember the blogs of someone narrating to an empty audience how much he or she is frustrated at work/life like an open diary. People are fond of telling and listening to stories but these blogs usually don’t have more then 10 readers a month and die silently. I predict the same is happening with these kind of Twitter users. They start off enthusiastic and end after an average of 10 tweets. Twitter is easier to access, so more people will use it to micro blog their thoughts hence it’s success. And for your business the usuage of Twitter can create great success if you keep it’s two success features in mind:

• Add real value to your message (or become really good in story telling )
• Listen and engage with subjects related to your business or campaigns.

It’s as simple as that. But believe me when I say that 80% didn’t get it.

“So what are you guys at MI doing then?!”

Well it’s quite simple, we’ve connected all popular social networks to our system which enables companies to manage their social content, social campaigns, social CRM data and social analytics from one dashboard. So instead of managing all individual networks by hand we made it easy to do everything simultaneously from managing your conversations to intelligently analyzing how well your last campaign is doing in real time to ultimately determine your ROI on social media. And since our system behaves like a plug-and-play box we don’t really care which network is popular today or in your country.

“So, you’re a kind of social content mangement system?”

Well, actually yes. However we should avoid comparison with website CMS platforms since social networks are a whole new dimension and specifically very dynamic in nature. Therefore it requires you to actually act real-time which ideally results in an engagement between you and your audience. And this is what we automatically manage, analyze and support.

“Okay, can you explain the difference between monitoring tools & your engagement system”

Monitoring tools are essentially a large box of content. They have these so called crawlers searching the internet for information which is subsequently stored in this box. When this information is gathered you can search for certain keywords in this box eventually offering you insight into what has been said about these keywords on the world wide web (blogs, forums, websites etc). A lot of these tools also analyze the information found to indicate the sentiment around the selected keywords. And if you found something of interest you can reactively go to the source and perhaps manually post some form of communication/reaction. Finally, like the word already said, crawling is a slow process.

Our system MI Connect on the other side is not crawling the internet nor trying to find keywords. We enable you to proactively publish your communication/campaigns in whatever channel you want as long as it’s yours (social network profiles like FB, Youtube and even locals like Hyves, SchullerVZ, Netlog and blogs, websites) and since the conversation is going on right now we’ll make sure that you’ll be notified in real-time to join the conversation right away. All from one dashboard. And this is actually the only comparable part, since the rest of the system (social campaigns, social CRM data and social analytics) are far more advanced in nature.

Check out this neat chart to make it even more clear:

“So, do you also monitor the Buzzzz on the internet?”

Yes and no. We believe that there are a lot of great tools already out there currently doing exactly that. So we teamed up with one of the best to offer monitoring services in addition to our own systems. Great thing about this is that our customers now can manage their social communications and data within their social communities with our system MI Connect, and consecutively monitor how this word of mouth spreads itself throughout the internet with our monitoring module. On the other hand, with the data crawled from monitoring the internet, our customers can now launch specific tailored campaigns directly to their social communities with our systems. So it’s actually a great synergy!

Hopefully this post makes things a bit more clear what we do and saves me and my colleagues some time explaining. AND this will be the start for a better website and marketing material

Most recently I saw this video with David Heinemeier Hansson very well known for his work on Ruby on Rails and 37 Signals. I guess I could recommend it to anyone even remotely thinking to start his or her own business. You can find the video at the end of this post.

The essence of David’s talk is pretty simple. Actually, you can’t get it more simple anywhere. He starts off with mentioning that VC’s and ambitious entrepreneurs are always talking about 100 million dollar companies. For VC’s less then that is not interesting enough to invest in and entrepreneurs all believe that their new product is going to give birth to a multi million dollar company and won’t settle for less.

Ofcourse, there is absolutely nothing wrong with ambition and certainly not 100 million dollar ambitions, but why not just get started making a great product and try selling it for a decent price and eventually making profit? If you sell a great product 500 times for $50 a month you already have a fine business with a revenue stream of $300k a year. In comparison with the millions we were just talking about it doesn’t seem a lot, but if you think about it for a moment it’s certainly more then the average salary you’ll ever get as an employee and as a bonus you’re doing something you really enjoy.

To make things even worse or maybe in my personal opinion funnier a lot of these startups from the US getting literally millions of venture capital frantically hoping that this startup might be the next big thing. VC’s inject a decent CEO with accompanying salary and start building up the company as if it was actually making money (read: forming expensive development teams, office space, marketing budgets, company cars). And now my most amazing discovery: most of these company don’t have any way of earning hard cash in the short term. Their services/products are offered for free, maybe popular and widely used, but still free. So in fact, they are hoping that maybe in the near future this company will start making money and not just money but millions of dollars kind of money. And I’m not kidding if I tell you that these odds are the same as winning the jackpot in the lottery.

Back to David. Quit dreaming, quit gambling with alien money and just start making money for God’s sake. And it’s plain simple: great product + price = profit.

David’s video: http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08