What it is: Launched on April 15, 2008, Facebook Lexicon is a neat tool that allows users to follow language trends across Facebook’s public and semi-public forums or walls. Similar to Google Trends, it offers users the ability to track the popularity of different words or phrases.

What it does: In short, Facebook Lexicon counts the occurrences of words and phrases on profile, group and event walls over a period of time — as far back as 2 years — while creating a trend graph in the process. Simply enter your search terms (up to five) and witness the discussion trends users engage in on a daily basis. A new version of this mapping tool offers the following functions:

Dashboard: provide quick metrics, like number of posters, percentage of posters, number of posts, and user demographics all in one screen

Demographics: breaks down who is discussing a given topic by age, gender, and country. Percentage of Posters shows the percentage of posters in each demographic that mentioned the topic each day.

Associations: Similar to a tag cloud, the “associations” function shows terms that frequently show up in posts with the topics on X and Y axes. For example, the terms “Red Sox” and “Yankees” will frequently occur in posts about “baseball.”

Sentiment: shows the percentage of posts that are positive vs. negative about the topic

Pulse: shows keywords that frequently occur in the profiles of users who mentioned the topic, ranked by how many times the keyword occurs and how closely associated the keyword is with the topic

Maps: shows where people are talking about the topic, with darker colors indicating more mentions of a specific topic per day

What it is good for: In an industry that’s rapidly adopting web 2.0 applications in branding strategies, Facebook Lexicon offers communications professionals the ability to dissect user data from the world’s most popular social networking site.

By pulling data from the wealth of Facebook discussions, Lexicon offers users an insight of what Facebook addicts are talking about. This can be a powerful tool for industry professionals who want to gauge coverage of their product, or that of a competitor, among users.

For instance, the graph below illustrates the buzz generated by both Duke and UNC. As one can see, Duke’s presence on Facebook is slightly higher than that of their tobacco road rival. It is also evident that the majority of online discussions take place during March. I wonder why?

Moving Forward: Overall, Facebook Lexicon has the POTENTIAL to be a must-have for all agencies serious about social media metric tools, but not just yet.

Although Facebook Lexicon does do a great job implementing Google Trend properties into the social networking site, it still has some flaws—all dealing with lack of data. Depending on your search term, you could receive a gold mind of information or the dreaded “There is no data for your query. Please try another term.”

According to Facebook, “A term will only be displayed if there have been sufficient mentions of the term to display results. If a term doesn’t show up in the graph, or if there is a gap, it doesn’t mean that no one mentioned it; it means that not enough people mentioned that term for it to exceed the threshold.”

Another drawback to this nifty tool is that all the neat functions listed above (dashboard, demographic, sentiment, etc.) are still under development. Users can preview this new version by searching one of the 17 predetermined search terms listed by Facebook, but it ends there.

On a comforting note, Facebook Lexicon does go out of its way to protect user privacy by stating that “The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations or any other private user-to-user communications.”

Final thought: Wall discussions are read by tens, hundreds or even thousands of people (depending on your friends list) and in an industry rapidly merging with social media, keeping track of user sentiment across all web 2.0 properties is a must. Although the new Facebook Lexicon is still under development, go ahead and play around with the current version; you might be surprised at what discussion trends you find about your company!

As PR Pros, we’re often caught in a cycle of sorts when it comes to recommending and pitching outlets for our clients to appear in.  While we are constantly striving to identify new, relevant and exciting outlets for our clients to pursue, we know which pubs are really the “bread-and-butter” and which ones may represent a type of “risk”.

 

But that doesn’t stop us from trying.  And it shouldn’t stop a communications department within a company from trying to sell a new outlet appearance to the Suits, either.  Even if that appearance may come with being at the mercy of a flag-waving, self-centered, Bill-O’Reilly-inspired egomaniac.

 

We’re speaking, of course, of the Colbert Report. Did you know the half-hour, late night show is watched anywhere from about 1 to 1.5 million people nightly in a given week, with about 800,000 of those being 18-49 year olds?  This recent piece in the Los Angeles Times paints an interesting picture of what the show does for book sales – and how the show exposes authors to audiences they may never have otherwise reached.

 

But the show also regularly features “contributing experts” in its middle segment on the hot (or random) topics of the week, segments that may represent excellent opportunities to show off a member of your company that may be the next big industry guru.  Besides reaching that coveted 18-25 demographic, think of all the decision-makers in the older demographic you may be leaving an impression on.  Truly, a rare opportunity to show off your company’s relevance to current events and industry knowledge while simultaneously letting a bit of your corporate personality shine.

 

So take risks.  Be open.  And who knows – your company may just get Stephen’s next “tip of the hat”.

 

Advertising, marketing and public relations have been around since the beginning of time.  Long before the age of radio and television, people relied on the word of others for their information, especially regarding businesses and products.  The more people that liked a business or product, the more people would talk and the more people would use them.   

 

Merchants traveled from locale to locale to sell their wares and services.  Then, handbills and flyers were the announcements of the day with word of mouth being the advertising mechanism.  Eventually, “modern” communications came into being; the printing press, telephone, telegraph, radio and television.  Now businesses had more ways to get the word out to far more people about their organization, their products, and their services.  Advertising agencies popped up with creative ways to promote the business and/or products on the television.  Their sole purpose was to create ads that would capture the viewers/readers attention and direct their purchase of a product or service.  Hundreds of thousands of people could be reached easily through print ads, radio spots and television commercials.  This ‘new’ fangled technology also made it easier for organizations to get the word out about who they were and what they did. 

 

Years later with the advent of personal computers and the worldwide web, the ability to connect with others worldwide instantaneously, word of mouth suddenly took on a whole new meaning.  Social networking, discussion forums, personal journaling sites cropped up and people could instantly connect with others around the globe.

 

Wikipedia defines “Blog” as: “A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”  

 

People now use blogging for everything.  The average person can put his passions, opinions, thoughts into his blog and post it for the world to see, and comment on. 

 

New York magazine printed an article in February of 2006, just a list actually (called The Early Years) that is a timeline on the History of Blogging.   People started using their blogs to discuss anything and everything.  That includes their personal experiences with products and companies, books and movies, politics, religion, child raising issues, medical issues, etc.  You name it someone is probably blogging about it.   Terms like Citizen Marketers and Citizen Journalists have been attached to bloggers now. 

 

What does all that have to do with business, advertising, public relations, and marketing you ask?  It has everything to do with it.  It’s called communications.  Consumers of all products and services are not afraid to post their experiences with a business online for the world to see.  Businesses have more reason now to worry about “word of mouth” recommendations than ever before.  Within minutes client/customer opinions of your services or product can be seen worldwide, before an organization can even react to it.

 

In their book Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message the authors show the role that blogging is now playing in the business world.  People aren’t afraid to take their satisfaction or dissatisfaction of/with any organization, product, location or service to the entire world.  A good example is this blog I found, The Viral Garden, giving a critique of this very book.   

 

In this book there is mention of someone who had a bad experience with the tech support for Dell computers.  Googling Dell Hell produces 311,000 results, many of which are personal blogs.  Entering any product name with the word “sucks” (the average person’s definition of dissatisfaction) into a search engine, produces some interesting results.  For example “Hershey’s sucks” produced a list of 56,600 results; Nabisco sucks comes up with 21,700 results; Ads suck produces a whopping 257,000 results.  Googling “product endorsement blogs” brought up 235,000 results.

 

It is all the more important today for businesses of all kinds, to pay attention to their clients and customers.  One disgruntled client/customer can create a blog and reach millions in short order.  BusinessWeek magazine ran an insightful article recently on the importance of paying attention to all these unhappy clients/customers “Love the customers who hate you.”  More importantly they show why turning that dissatisfied customer into a satisfied one is some of the best free PR a business can get: “You should require everyone in your C-suite to read the missives of unhappy customers who rise up in Google — and to fix every problem they can. It’s O.K. to ignore the people who hate you for sport or seem to be operating out of a need for attention. But don’t make the mistake of dismissing the rest. Learn from them and you’ll earn many dividends. You’ll satisfy dissatisfied customers. These customers may turn around and tell their online friends that you don’t suck after all. That’s free PR that can save you lost sales or even earn you new ones. You will learn about your products and their problems and how to make them better — without the expense of focus groups.”

 

Dell created a “Dell Community” on their website that offers blogs, forums, ideas, and videos.  They even have a ‘community suggestion box’ for customers to send their ideas, as well as a ‘member spotlight’ where they recognize some of their most active contributing community members.  By interacting with their customer base, by listening to them and actually considering some of their suggestions, Dell is able to satisfy more of its customers who probably then turn around and talk about how great Dell products and support are. 

 

Even YouTube is being used for advertising, branding, and by those more comfortable in front of a camera than at a keyboard.  Googling “public relations on YouTube” produces 2,410,000 results.  Someone else was apparently curious about PR on YouTube and found 102 YouTube videos tagged “public relations” back in September of 2006.  In May of 2008 I found 70,600 videos tagged “public relations”. 

 

It is safe to say that the computer age is definitely changing the way people shop, buy, judge products and services, as well as interacting with each other and businesses.  With information so readily available to the average person, people in marketing, advertising, public relations have to work harder to get their word out, because the general public is playing an even bigger role in shaping how businesses operate.  Word of mouth has taken on a new meaning now and can spread faster than you can say “may I help you?”