Mar
30th

Oneupweb Reviews: Twist – A Twitter Trend Tool

Posted by Starr on March 30, 2009 at 10:02 am

For those of you who have put off adding Twitter to your social repertoire, the micro-blog’s growth and the rise of trend tools make it increasingly hard to ignore.

Nielsen Online recently reported Twitter’s surge in popularity skyrocketed from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February of this year. Many of these unique visitors accessed member communities via their mobile phones (either via text messaging or mobile Web). Those unique visitors fell mostly in the 35-49 age range, followed by the age group of 25-34.

Discovering what topics and keywords resonate with these demographic audiences can potentially impact multiple areas of an integrated marketing plan.

For example, watching Twitter trends for certain keywords can help with brand management, measuring the Twitter response to a viral campaign, boosting your creative juices and discovering Twitterati sentiment that can be used when creating banner ads, natural and PPC campaigns and much more.

Twist gives users general trends for “hot” keyword terms being discussed for the day or the entire week. The homepage automatically shows you a graph of a popular keyword that changes with every refresh, recent tweets and a list of “Hot Now” and “Hot Before.”

Clicking on the “Hot Today” link gives users a complete list of terms for the day of your search.

It also lets users search Twitter to compare keyword trends for up to a month. Searches comparing keyword terms return a graph showing the peaks and valleys of each word, plus real-time data with percentage totals for how many Twitterati used those keywords in tweets.

Here’s an example of a 30-day Mentions Chart for the keywords “GM, AIG, bailout.” Mousing over any date gives users those percentages as well as exact day and time of each mention.

Below the chart you can sift through tweets that are divided by each keyword.

Here’s where things get tricky, because these are the most recent tweets. What if I want to see tweets from over a week ago, when one of my keywords was at its peak?

What happens is you end up scrolling through pages of tweets. I stopped after realizing that going back 15 pages only got me to comments from the day before my initial search. Flaptor does take you to its Twitter search page, but you’re searching all tweets and not just those posted during your graph’s time frame.

Finding out overall sentiment is harder with Twist than discovering what keywords are showing up in Tweets. Searching for branded keywords, your company’s name or other important keywords may reveal absolutely nothing, but since the results update in real-time, that can all change tomorrow.

So, Twist, while not perfect, is useful for understanding what keywords are hot and not in Twitter conversations. The site does feel a little cumbersome, though, which keeps me from raving about it.

Official Oneupweb Review: Thumbs-Sideways, slightly heading towards up.

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Mar
27th

Oneupweb Reviews: Becoming a Retweetist

Posted by admin on March 27, 2009 at 11:18 am

Retweetist may help your next Twitter post gain some traction.

This Twitter trend tool tracks retweets. Tagging interesting Tweets with “retweet@username,” “RT@username” or “via@username” before or after sharing them not only means you’re a Retweetist, but helps this tool collect data about top retweets.

Here’s an example of retweets for a popular URL. Notice that most people use the “RT@username.”

Users can follow Retweetist to have updates on “Hot Retweets,” “Most Retweeted URLs” and “Most Retweeted Users.”

Is it really useful, though? Shaq’s marketing team must think so.

With Retweetist Shaq can gauge interest from Twitterati about which day’s Tweets were most popular. For a business this could mean also seeing which promotional or general Tweets received the most buzz. Seeing what posts were more often retweeted gives businesses a chance to improve what they post, thus the traction I was talking about earlier.

Posting interesting thoughts, comments and links is what makes for a “retweetable” message. For marketers, business owners, and anyone else managing a business Twitter account, this trend tool could help you tweak your Tweets.

It’s also a way to see who is spreading your company’s tweets, and which people are having messages about your company retweeted. For example, you might find a blogger who has posted a link about your product or service. If it’s favorable, you can retweet it. If it’s not, then you know what’s being said and you can decide what to do from there.

This trend tool isn’t an end-all-be-all for understanding what’s being shared on Twitter about your company. It can, however, shine some light on what the Twitterati find interesting. And if you pay attention, you might just increase your company’s Twitter following.

Oneupweb Official Review: Oneup Thumbs-Up.

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Mar
23rd

Oneupweb Reviews: Newssift, a Semantic Search Engine for Business News

Posted by Starr on March 23, 2009 at 2:46 pm

Time-starved business folks are getting a little help summarizing important financial news through a newly-launched semantic search engine.

Newssift was released last week in beta by the Financial Times Group to provide business-minded individuals with a quick way to search and summarize news. According to TechCrunch the engine indexes approximately 4,000 business news sources which produce roughly 120,000 new articles daily.

Before we explore the site, let’s get our definition of “semantic search” straight.

I like the semantic search engine definition Phil Midwinter, a UK search engineer, gave in a guest blog post for Read Write Web. He states:

“Semantic search engine is a search engine that takes the sense of a word as a factor in its ranking algorithm or offers the user a choice as to the sense of a word or phrase.”

I searched the popular topic “barack obama stimulus plan” on Newssift, which allows users to enter a keyword search or choose from potential keywords sorted by business topic, organization, place, person, theme and more. As you can see from the home page below, users can begin choosing themes such as “Obama Administration” and “Stimulus Plan,” because each of these are hot business news items.

Users can choose topics, organizations, etc., from the hot topics offered, or they can enter their own keyword search to begin getting results. And as they do, Newssift provides an overall sentiment from various news sources.

I can pare down my search results from the specific sources I trust, or gain a quicker understanding of what’s being said that’s positive or negative about my search topic. And that’s what you see below after I conducted my search for positive blogs about President Barack Obama’s Stimulus Plan.

You also will have the option to save your searches, which could come in handy depending on how granular your search became.

Overall, Newssift may feel unfamiliar to searchers who are accustomed to the design and feel of aggregators such as Google News, but I like the obvious relationship connections. It makes it easier and quicker to hone your search, plus suggests new aspects you may not have initially thought of. Given the target audience is comprised of business-minded folks who are in a hurry, I think it’s an advantage for them to be able to click and go with as much solid information as possible.

Oneup Thumbs-Up.

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Mar
18th

Oneupweb Reviews: Veoh

Posted by Natalie on March 18, 2009 at 4:47 pm

—This is a guest post by Natalie

I’ll be honest—until quite recently, the only video watching I’ve really ever done online was through YouTube. In a quest to broaden my social media horizons, however, I decided to do a little investigation on another video site called Veoh.

Veoh is an online video service that gives users the power to easily find and watch video content and personalize their viewing experience. Veoh offers television shows from major broadcast and cable networks (CBS, ABC, WB, MTV, etc…), content from independent made-for-Internet studios or independently-produced videos from across the web. There are seemingly few limits to subject matter.

So, rather than review it from the viewer’s perspective, I decided to review Veoh from a potential advertiser’s perspective. Does Veoh allow advertisements on their site? Well, obviously yes, given the Classmates.com ad in the above screenshot. That question answered, who is their audience? Who would be best suited for advertising on Veoh? What types of advertising do they offer? After a little exploration of the site, I found some answers to these questions.

According to Veoh, their audience is young, influential, and highly engaged, which would indicate that there is quite a bit of potential within their site. Additionally, Veoh offers many advertising opportunities, including:

Targeted advertising—Veoh doesn’t specify all the targeting capabilities they offer, but they launched a behavioral targeting beta in July of 2008 that they claim can, among other things, “build custom audience categories around an advertiser’s specific marketing objectives.”
High Impact Takeover advertising—While there are a couple of different types of high impact takeover advertising, Veoh doesn’t specify what version they offer.
In-Stream Video Ads—In-stream video ads occur while the user is engaged and watching a video, so 30 seconds into a video, an ad might start running at the bottom of the screen.
Custom Sponsorship advertising—Again, Veoh doesn’t specify what they offer as far as custom sponsorship option, but if they offer traditional sponsorship opportunities, perhaps a sports drink manufacturer could sponsor a video on the Sports/Fitness TV Channel.

With these four advertising options, and their proclaimed demographic, it seems that nearly anyone could find Veoh a useful outlet for placing ads. However, Veoh does not list prices on their site, so you would have to contact a sales representative to find out whether Veoh is affordable for you or not. Additionally, since Veoh doesn’t specify what type of targeting they offer, they may not be the best choice for, say, a brick-and-mortar in Cleveland (unless they can geotarget).

According to Veoh, the site has more than 28 million users worldwide, 350 million videos, and 100 minutes is the average time spent per visitor on their site. Armed with these statistics, unwary advertisers may assume that just strafe-bombing their ad through this site without any targeting may seem like the best option; however, think carefully before you do this. You wouldn’t want your ads running in videos that rarely attract users or have questionable content —Veoh’s TOU forbids “pornographic” content, but it doesn’t take much searching to turn up some fairly risquè videos. They also offer a “Family Filter,” which indicates some content may be objectionable to some people.

Before advertising on Veoh, just remember to ask yourself, “Who is my audience and what would they be watching?” Then try to place your ads right in front of these customers. If you don’t have a specific audience, be sure that your ads are running on more popular videos that don’t contain any distasteful content (unless, of course, that’s the audience you’re looking for). Additionally, be sure to ask Veoh how you can be certain your ads won’t show up on these videos and what they would do to compensate you if they did. Be certain that you could terminate your contract at any time if your ads aren’t performing.

So, while on the surface Veoh sounds like it could be a good addition to your integrated advertising mix, there are a few too many unanswered questions for me to fully recommend it. Oneupweb Thumb Sideways.

Feel free to comment below if you’ve had any personal experience advertising on Veoh!

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Mar
16th

Oneupweb Reviews: Mahalo’s LiveBlog (Part three of the Mahalo.com Review)

Posted by Starr on March 16, 2009 at 4:58 pm

Mahalo.com is like a drunken Britney Spears—you can’t help but stare and wonder how it survives.

Like Britney, Mahalo.com does way too many strange things and doesn’t behave like a normal member of society. Reinvention was tough for Britney, but she’s at least managing. I can’t say the same for Mahalo.com because it suffers from a major identity crisis.

Mahalo’s reinvention began in October 2008, when CEO Jason Calacanis made sweeping changes for a more dynamic homepage. Those changes included enhancing the existing Mahalo News feature and the addition of LiveBlog, a human newsfeed or ticker.

Calacanis told TechCrunch these changes were inspired by the 10,000 to 15,000 visitors who refreshed the home page multiple times a day looking for new information links. Mahalo News got a minor change with a “top news” category, but Liveblog was meat to sate the Mahalo Community’s hunger for information.

LiveBlog delivers real-time one-liners about news and events happening around the world. Each short sentence is categorized by general descriptors like “News” or by one word commentary on the story, such as “Yikes!” and “Strange.” Users can link to the actual story and Mahalo guide pages that provide additional information.

Categories in the LiveBlog have neither rhyme nor reason. They don’t help organize the stories and good luck trying to find an older post because you’ll be scrolling for a while.

The addition of the Liveblog and other Mahalo Social elements are further evidence of Mahalo’s identity crisis. It’s like Calacanis decided to squeeze everything everyone loves about going online into one page, but didn’t take the time to make any of those elements user-friendly.

To add insult to injury, now Calacanis says Mahalo is a social aggregate.

So let’s recap. The site is a social aggregator, search engine, wiki, news aggregator and social network.

Calacanis bills Mahalo as a “human-powered search engine” but its results pages are lost without the support of Google. The site spends so much time trying to do everything that it doesn’t really do much of anything that another site doesn’t do better. Do you remember the Simpsons episode where Homer’s brother allows him to design a car (”The Homer”) with absolutely every feature he wants (including shag carpet, separate bubble domes, and the result is a $250,000 nightmare that ruins his brother’s automobile company? Mahalo is The Homer.

So, while I like the idea behind the LiveBlog, there are other sites that do similar things far better (Fark.com comes to mind) and Mahalo isn’t giving me anything new.
And while we may not know Britney’s destiny, Calacanis says he has enough funding to keep Mahalo fully bloated and shambling along until 2012 (which, incidentally, is when the Mayan calendar, and thus the world, ends).

Official Oneupweb Review: Oneup Thumbs-Down.

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Mar
13th

Oneupweb Reviews: Facebook’s New Content Streaming Face-Lift

Posted by Starr on March 13, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Facebook Pages got a bit of a face-lift this week that allows for more social interaction with regular profiles. In short, your business page will look more like a user profile.

The most obvious change is the enhanced wall, which gives businesses the opportunity to approve what’s posted. Like a regular profile, businesses can now update statuses and fans. Soon Facebook plans on allowing those posts and status updates to be seen in a Fans’ News Feed.

Another notable change is the tab organization. With Facebook Pages, businesses can add applications for additional tabs that update customers on events, reviews and discussions. If you don’t like the applications that are out there, you can always make your own.

Facebook Pages also do something a regular profile can’t—measure and track posts. Businesses can get an insight tool that allows them to measure user engagement by seeing how many users start and stop viewing posts and how many users make comments.

These changes are a part of Facebook’s continual movement toward helping people share information for a more open social network. And it sounds like more changes are inevitable for both Facebook Pages and regular profiles. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg explains his reasoning for why these changes are necessary in a March 4 blog post, which also chronicled the evolution of this social networking juggernaut.

At the end of the day, more changes are necessary as more people look for ways to manage and add information to the social network. After all real-time updates are great, but not if they aren’t organized, which is partly what these changes are trying to do. And every change could provide more opportunity for businesses willing to use a little creativity.

Stanford University’s Facebook Page is a great example of how these new changes can increase social interaction.

Already users have access to a number of videos, photo albums and events that help alums keep in touch and prospective students learn more. And Stanford let its fans guide some of the process.

Through a discussion tab, fans were able to post ideas on how to make the page more engaging.

Comments ranged from allowing fans to upload pictures and projects currently being worked on to creating a group for newly accepted applicants to meet on Facebook.

Engaging Facebook users through these new changes builds brand loyalty. Receive the help you need to get started and take a page from Stanford’s book by involving your current fans.

Personally, I’m excited about these changes and can’t wait to see what Facebook comes up with next!

Official Oneupweb Review: Oneup Thumbs-Up

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Mar
12th

Oneupweb Reviews: Mahalo Answers (Part Two of Mahalo.com Review)

Posted by Starr on March 12, 2009 at 2:32 pm

Can Mahalo talk its members into powering the human search engine through its Mahalo Answers feature?

Hmmm… I wonder what that infomercial from Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis would sound like?

“Are you SICK of BEING UNAPPRECIATED for your Trivia knowledge? Have you ALWAYS THOUGHT you DESERVE A BLACK BELT for your SEARCH ENGINE KNOW-HOW? Now YOU CAN get that black belt and MAKE MONEY by SHARING YOUR KNOWLEDGE in your spare time.”

Since launching Mahalo Answers in December 2008, Calacanis hasn’t promoted this crowd-sourced Q&A as a home-based business venture. You have to wonder, though, if the human-powered search engine needs the help of its “brown belts with black tips” —answer ninjas with over 10,000 queries solved and about $400 or $500 Mahalo Dollars in their pockets (or, rather, PayPal accounts)—to help make its search engine a viable resource.

Actually, relying on the Mahalo Answers community may not be a bad idea for Calacanis himself. Any of his Mahalo brown belts could have performed a quick Google search and told him his security consultant had been convicted for stealing online banking identities. That could have saved a little embarrassment.

For those who don’t know the concept behind Mahalo Answers, you earn points that can potentially turn into cold hard cash for every question you answer. There are different karate belt levels depending on how many points you’ve earned and your belt color determines how frequently you can post or ask questions. Which, in an overly-complicated fashion, leads to the money.

The cash comes from tips offered by people asking questions. The best answer, as rated by the person asking the question, gets the tip. Refunds are given for crappy answers, which can affect a person’s ability to make 75 cents on a Mahalo dollar (the site takes 25 percent).

Twitter users seem to love posting questions on Mahalo Answers, but they aren’t really tipping. To “generate excitement,” however, Mahalo has begun coughing up a buck tip for a variety of questions, including mine. As you can see below, Mahalo is funding questions that are specific, not general questions like “How are you?” or, more to the point, “Why?”

Tipping and rating users is supposed to make this Q&A more accurate, competitive and all around better than, say, Yahoo! Answers. In the end, however, Mahalo Answers just offers a lot of opinion from a lot of people who could well be qualified, but just as likely aren’t.

So, the rating: while it’s somewhat entertaining, the fun factor is mitigated by the weird D&D-esque “ninja” point system, the obvious fact that very few people are liable to spend money for answers they could get elsewhere for free, and the natural preponderance of know-it-all blowhards.

Oneupweb thumb sideways, leaning toward down.

My next Mahalo.com post will focus on the site’s LiveBlog, so stay tuned.

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Mar
6th

Oneupweb Reviews: Mahalo: Reinventing the Search Wheel With Social Features

Posted by Starr on March 6, 2009 at 2:32 pm

Wow.

That’s my reaction to changes Mahalo has made to become more social-friendly and, well, just more. And maybe the most. Of everything. There is so much happening that Oneupweb Reviews is, by necessity, going to separate this site review into a three-part series. First we will look at how Mahalo fares as an alternative search engine, and then we will investigate the newer offerings, such as LiveBlog and Mahalo Answers in subsequent posts.

Short history: Mahalo launched in 2007 as an alternative search engine that doesn’t use an algorithm to deliver its results. Thus, their tagline: “human powered search engine.”

Because it is human powered, the site claims it provides spam-free, rich content. In other words, Mahalo is organizing all the search results you want into categories while eliminating all the stuff you don’t want.

From the home page you can:

Search multiple social media sites and other search engines
Use Mahalo Answers to post questions to Twitter, Facebook or the Mahalo community
Read the Twitter-esque LiveBlog
Read stories on Mahalo News & Mahalo Features
Find a slew of information already pre-categorized by interest

When you conduct a search, Mahalo returns its own search engine results along with results from Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, YouTube and Flickr. These Results appear in frames organized by tabs.

The more general search engine queries return average results. When you get into more geo-targeted terms what you’ll get is anyone’s guess.

After searching “traverse city restaurants” there were no results returned from Mahalo. When I searched for “san francisco restaurants” Mahalo returned a page with fast facts about the city, other Mahalo-related pages about the city, as well as links to tourism and restaurant review sites.

How is the name of the mayor of San Francisco and the average climate relevant to my search for a restaurant?

While it’s nice you get a Google map with a few pinpointed restaurant locations, users really have to search through results for relevant information.

I suppose I could pose the question “What are the best restaurants to eat at in San Francisco, California” by using the Mahalo Answers features. Unfortunately this is slow because answers are emailed to members. You do have the option to bribe, um…I mean “tip” Mahalo members for the best answer. No thanks.

I’m a proponent for a one-stop shop search and social aggregation site, but I think Mahalo needs to leave search to Google. Why reinvent the search wheel and decorate it with social features?

Oneupweb Reviews: Thumbs-Down!

Read more about my experience with Mahalo Answers during my next post.

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