It’s become clear that “twitter followers” is the new “circulation number” for many companies out there. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the whole story, and rarely should a twitter account be evaluated according to this one metric. After all, you can easily bump up your numbers by the thousands with a $10 investment online, but these followers are usually spammers and rarely will show any interest in your content. And there’s the rub… how exactly do you measure whether people are interacting with your content and your twitter presence? Welcome to Klout.com…

What it is: Klout.com gives you a single, simple destination for measuring your campaign’s twitter engagement and reach.

What it does: Evaluate your twitter campaign’s reach; Compare different tweeple’s engagement ratings; Identify key conversation hubs (both lists and tweeple); Follow the rate and volume of other tweeple passing on your content; Drill down into what content works; and discover your influencers/influence by geographic area. And here’s what all that means…

Evaluate your twitter campaign’s reach: Klout gives every twitter account a numerical score based on their influence and reach – further breaking down your score into one of four main “types”. While the methodology behind calculating this number is up for discussion, it does take into account a wide array of factors that lead to a successful twitter account.

Compare different tweeple’s engagement ratings: Say, for example, that your campaign involves multiple twitter accounts. Which of these is actually working to get traction? Which of the accounts serves your goals best, and which should be rethought? Klout allows you to do side-by-side comparisons, giving you the ability to change tactics adeptly within a campaign.

Follow the rate and volume of other tweeple passing on your content: When evaluating your twitter account’s efficacy, a single score will rarely get you the answers you need. Klout digs a little deeper, and shows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of a given twitter account, breaking their overall “klout number” into more the more digestible categories of: Reach; Engagement; Demand; and Velocity.

Drill down into what content works: While it’s good to know that your twitter account is performing well, what is making that happen? What are your followers reading? What are they passing along? Klout gives you a list of your top performers to help you narrow down your priorities and messaging.

Discover your influencers/influence by geographic area: For some campaigns – as in real estate – it’s all about location, location, location. If your campaign’s success relies on a specific geographic area, this Klout stuff is absolutely for you.

What it is good for: Klout offers a deeper plunge into your twitter numbers – giving you the insight needed to grow your relevant followers in an organic way. While many companies choose to examine only the number of followers as a benchmark of success, this tool provides a much more accurate benchmark of your success.

As a quick example, 200 devoted followers who frequently retweet your content are a much more impressive accomplishment than 3,000 spam account followers who provide no value to your client’s online reputation. Klout’s staff gets this – and built safeguards into its measurement to reflect your actual influence in the twittersphere.

Moving Forward: Overall, Klout is a must-have reference for anyone working within the twittersphere… and given that it’s free, that makes it all the more attractive. Once again, the methodology ranking the importance of certain factors is still up for discussion, but as is often the case with social media properties, the proprietors of Klout.com crowdsource their formulaic improvements… and unlike Technorati, Klout’s algorithm is displayed for public view. There are still some “glitchy” areas of the tool, but – again – they are always looking for outside suggestions on improving the site. Our first one would be to ask that historical data be stored for future reference.

Final thought: If you are tweeting regularly for a client and want to start tracking numbers that are much more meaningful than simple follower numbers, check out Klout.com.

Good morning all you social media fanatics! Today we’ll be taking a closer look at Flaptor’s Trendistic, a neat little tool that’s quickly winning the hearts of our strategic planning and research team.

What it is: In a nut shell, Trendistic is a tracking tool that charts Twitter trends for users.   It literally lets you see the hottest discussion topics on Twitter.

What it does: Trendistic gathers tweets in real-time and compiles them into one-hour intervals. You can then view the hottest trending topics of every hour, or even input your own topic.

Trend Graph: Once you input your search term(s), the first thing that comes up is the trend graph. This interactive line graph displays the latest percentage of tweets for your search topic in the past hour and up until 180 days. You can even isolate your own specific time frame by a simple click-and-drag.

Recent Tweets: Below the line graph, you can see the most recent tweets compiled by Trendistic containing your search term. If multiple search terms were used, recent tweets from all terms will be displayed, including time and date.

Recent Trending Topics: This running list of the top trending topics can be found on the right side of Trendistic’s main page. Looks like the Cowboys vs. Eagles game generated a lot of buzz this past weekend.

What it is good for: Trendistic is one of the many tools that allow you to identify and track the coverage a person, event, product, or company has generated on Twitter.  You can even input a URL into Trendistic and count how many times it has been shared.

This tool is extremely helpful for comparing the coverage of competing brands and identifying trends in the ever-changing online conversation.

A search for At&t and Verizon saw a spike in Twitter discussions for Verizon on January 5, 2010. Much of the buzz was due to Google’s Nexus One and its anticipated availability to Verizon wireless customers.

Final Thought: Trendistic is quite possibly the best free Twitter archive and trend tracker currently available. The simple user interface makes it easy to see exactly what people are talking about and when they are saying it.

Hello all you social media fanatics! So far, ‘Social Media Monday’ has covered the world of blogs, social networks and Twitter. Today, we’re going to take a look at forums with BoardTracker.com.

What it is: BoardTracker.com is a search engine designed exclusively for online discussion forums or message boards, hence boardtracker.

What it does: Boardtracker has a very simple interface and yields very simple results. All you need to do is input a keyword and press enter. Boardtracker returns all the forum threads that contain that keyword. You can get more specific by inputting a date range or a particular website or choosing from one of 20 categories.

In addition to being a search engine, once you complete your free registration, you can start to personalize the service. The ‘My Threads” tab is place where you can bookmark your favorite threads or forums so you can have easy access to them once you log in. Boardtracker also has a “My Alerts” feature where you have the option to send specific search results directly to your email.

What it is good for: Boardtracker is one of the many tools that allow you to navigate the ever-changing online conversation. People don’t hold back their opinions when posting their thoughts onto forums so they’re a great place to determine the overall sentiment about a certain company, product, person or industry. So when new business comes in, you can use Boardtracker to see what people are saying about that company online.

Moving Forward: Yes, Boardtracker does offer a general idea of what is being said online about a certain topic, but in order to grasp this general idea, you would need to manually go through every result and determine the overall sentiment. There are no “Top 10 keywords” or “Top 10 forums” associated with each search topic. However, there is an option to sort the search results by relevancy, indicating which posts are most important.

The site claims that they are currently tracking 69,511,291 threads in 37,284 forums, and are constantly adding more. You can even add your own board if it is not already in their database, so all in all it is pretty comprehensive. Additionally, all the information in Boardtracker’s database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows for more relevant results.

Final Thought: All in all, Boardtracker is a great tool to determine a general sentiment of an online conversation but should definitely be used in concurrence with other social media measurement tools to really grasp the big picture.

UPDATE - 12/15/09 – BoardTracker.com has a 2.0 Beta version in the works that addresses most of the issues above. Be forewarned, it is currently full of “Slowness, bugs and cats”. So keep an eye out for a review of BoardTracker 2.0 in a future ‘Social Media Monday’ post!

In this week’s installment of Social Media Monday, we take a look at one of our favorite Twitter search tools, Twellow.

What it is: Twellow is a people search tool for Twitter, allowing you to connect with people of experience and expertise in your areas of interest.

What it does: Twellow collects publicly available tweets, analyzes them, and categorizes each of the users responsible for those tweets into various categories—art, food, travel, politics, etc. Think of Twellow as an online phone book directory for Twitter, which connects users “with people who matter.”

Get listed: Registering for Twellow is easy; all you need is a Twitter account. Just visit their new user page, enter your Twitter username and voila! Once registered you can modify your categorization on Twellow and create an extended bio.

Categories: With over 1 billion followers and 11 million Twitter profiles, Twellow has literally hundreds of categories, and search features, which make it easy for Twitter users to “cut through the clutter.”

Search Toolbar: By default, search results are sorted by number of followers, but can be filtered by utilizing Twellow’s advance search tips—allowing you to connect with Twitter’s true influencers.

Twellow Suggestions: Makes is easy for users to see other tweeple that are tweeting about similar areas of interest.

TwellowHood: This nifty feature allows you to locate tweeple in your neighborhood who you can connect with. Simply click on any state to zoom in for a list of people that are tweeting in your city.

What it is good for: Twellow serves as a one stop-shop for industry folks interested in identifying Twitter’s most influential tweeple–in any category.

An instant search lets you see the number of people tweeting about a certain topic (in our example, biotechnology), their last tweet, and how many followers they have.

At Brodeur, we regularly use Twellow to identify ‘who’s who’ among tweeple, particularly in recruiting ‘followers’ that share our clients’ views and would benefit from our messaging.

Moving Forward: What makes Twellow unique is the number of indexes and search categories it provides—it really is the ‘Twitter Yellow Pages.’ By providing a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, Twellow makes it easy for anyone to study a certain aspect of any market.

While Twellow does a good job at eliminating the clutter and spam found on Twitter, there is still room for improvement. For instance, new users are initially categorized by their Twitter bio, and not by the message conveyed in their tweets. You can always go back and change your bio on Twitter, or update your Twellow profile, but a categorization by tweet relevance would be helpful.

Also, similar search terms produce dissimilar results. For example, there are currently over 1,200 user profiles under the Biotechnology category, but only 228 matches for the search term “biotechnology” and 598 matches for “biotech.” A ranking algorithm in Twellow’s directory could help solve this issue and make it easier to identify relevant tweeple.

Interested in finding out the latest and greatest on Twellow? Or how this search tool can help drive your clients’ social media campaign? Then visit Twellow’s blog to remain up to date on new site developments.

Final thought: In an industry rapidly becoming synonymous with social media, Twellow is a must have for keeping track of industry influencers on Twitter. If you don’t have it, get it, and if you do have it, love it.

In today’s edition of Social Media Monday, we will be taking a look at the blogosphere through the eyes of Technorati.

What it is: Technorati is a blog search engine tool that’s packed with extras to help you navigate the ever-changing online conversation.

What it does: Plain and simple, Technorati is a search engine for blogs. Type in any keyword and Technorati will show you in real-time which blogs are addressing the topic. Displayed in the search results are the blog title, post title, URL, a brief excerpt of the post, a small screenshot and a rank based on Technorati’s ‘Authority’ algorithm.

Beyond the search engine tool, Technorati’s home page offers several other features that help qualify the blogosphere, including:

Today on Technorati: Here you can check out the day’s important news stories, as well as recent product reviews and other relevant blog posts.

Top Blogs: Technorati ranks their blogs by ‘Authority’. This section reveals the top 5 “risers” and “fallers” in terms of this Authority statistic. There is also a link to the top 100 blogs by Authority.

Latest Articles: Technorati prides itself on aggregating blog posts almost as soon as they are posted on the blogs themselves. These are the latest blogs that come into Technorati’s feed.

Hottest Blogosphere Items: It is not clearly defined what makes an item “Hot” but one can assume that this is an extension of Today on Technorati, displaying the latest news stories and product reports.

Most Popular Videos: Frequently watched videos from across the web.

What it is good for: Technorati can provide you with a general idea of the who, what, why and where of almost any topic in the blogosphere. Even if you don’t have a specific keyword in mind, Technorati provides the latest posts within several categories including technology, business, entertainment, lifestyle, sports and politics.

When new business comes in, it is important to know where that potential client stands in the social media landscape. A key element of determining their position in this landscape is seeing what type of blogs the client is mentioned in and what is being said about that client. A quick keyword search and Technorati makes it all available.

Moving Forward: What makes Technorati unique is its ‘Authority’ ranking system, which measures a site’s “standing & influence” in the blogosphere. According to the site, Authority is calculated based on a site’s “linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time”.

This number could be very helpful when determining which blogs hold more weight when discussing an individual client or a particular industry as a whole. It can also help establish which blogs are most influential and therefore more appropriate to pitch for your client.

The only pitfall is that you have to trust that the data gathered by Technorati is accurate. The site does suggest that it involves certain “linking behavior” and “categorization” but it’s the “other associated data” that raises my skepticism. I would be much more confident in the data if they explained the actual algorithm instead of using vague internet-speak.

Final Thought: Skepticism about Authority aside, Technorati is still an excellent tool to establish a basic overview of what is being said in the blogosphere about a given topic and what type of people are talking about it.

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!

Today is the first in a series of “social media Monday” posts.  In these posts we are taking stock of the social media tools — some fee-based but many of them free — that we use in developing social media strategies and analyzing social media developments.

We start with Compete.com, a measurement tool that’s growing in popularity not only because of its versatility but also because — it is free!  Our own Matt Lancos provides this review.  Thoughts and comments can be given here but feel free to contact Matt directly at mlancos@brodeur.com if you’re looking for more info or would like to discuss.

What it is: Compete.com calls itself a one-stop-shop for website analytics. Their Site Profile provides multiple measurement tools to help qualify nearly any website, but the go-to feature has to be the site traffic history.

What it does: View the monthly traffic numbers of up to five different websites on a color-coded line graph. The graph can display the data from the past 3, 6 or 12 months. Below the graph, in addition to all the raw data, Compete provides five more helpful pieces of information:

Monthly and Yearly Change: Displays website growth or decline in terms of a percentage

Top Search Terms: Displays what people are searching for to get to that site

Referral Sites: The top 5 websites that people visit before that site

Destination Sites: The top 5 websites that people visit after that site

Top Tags:  The tags most associated with that site. You even have the ability to add tags you deem appropriate.

When not comparing sites, a single profile includes a site description, total number of visits and a rank based on unique visitors.

What it is good for:  Compete offers a straight-forward way to qualify a website. If your client receives coverage online, you can immediately see the potential reach of the story.

The historical data is also worth noting. Check out the graph above to the see the point in December 2008 when Facebook took over MySpace as the top dog of social networking.

In a real-life example, as part of a past campaign we reached out to the increasingly influential Mommy Bloggers. As part of our analysis we used  Compete’s traffic data as one of the factors in prioritizing Mommy Blogger outreach.

Moving Forward: Overall, Compete is a great weapon to have in your measurement arsenal. After signup, the service is completely free*! But just how accurate is this information? According to Compete, the data is based on a diverse sample of 2 million people that is “statistically normalized and projected to represent the size and demographic composition of the total active U.S. Internet population.”

As I said earlier, the site traffic history is their one go-to feature. The other tools are really just complementary features to the traffic data. The referral and destination site tool can sometimes help with audience analysis and competing websites, but most of the time they end up being Google, Yahoo and Digg.com.

The Compete Blog is also worth a read. It specializes in people’s internet behavior based on all of Compete’s research tools. Many of these stories are actually pretty fun, including one about competing fast food pizza chains.

And if you’re the on-the-go type, make sure to download the Compete toolbar. Normally I am VERY exclusive when it comes to toolbars, but this one is definitely worthy of my browser. Whenever you’re at a site, click on ‘Profile’ to get unique monthly visitors, site rank and an adorable mini-version of the historic traffic data graph. And even if clicking one button is too much work for you, the unique monthly visitor data and site rank appears automatically in the bottom right corner of your browser.

Final thought: Come for the traffic data, stay for the blog and leave with the toolbar.

*Compete does offer a “PRO” version for a monthly fee, with provides additional features such as industry category profiles, expanded data and comprehensive search analytics. The Brodeur Blog did not address these features.

I was preparing for a series of presentations and panel discussions on the topic of social media measurement and decided to put together a list.  Specifically, I was wondering what a list would look like of different people, places and things that measures stuff on the Internet — some for money and others for free — some serious and others, well, let’s just say “playful.”

Below is what we came up with … a nudge over three score.

I owe a lot of the initial research to Linda Daichendt of Strategic Growth Concepts and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group.  Thanks to them and hats off to Matt Lancos and Marco Carranza-Walter for stitching their lists together and peppering them with some others.

So here’s my agreement with you.

From our (Brodeur’s) side, we’re going to start a series on the Brodeur Open Blog profiling, reviewing, and otherwise giving our take on as many of these measurement tools as possible.

What do we ask of you?  Simple.  I know we’re missing something.  Probably a lot of something.  If you know of some measurement thing or service that is neat, cool, interesting, or just fun, sent it along to us.  We’ll update the list to include it and put it in the calendar for our profile series.

Until then, enjoy the list …

• Addictomatic
• Alexa
• Attentio
• Bit.ly
• Biz360
• Blogpulse
• BlogScope, by University of Toronto
• Boardreader
• Boardtracker
• BrandIntel
• Buzzlogic
• Buzzmonitor
• Cli.gs
• Collective Intellect
• Compete.com
• Converseon
• CustomScoop
• Cymfony
• Del.ici.ous
• Facebook lexicon
• Factiva
• Google Alerts
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Howsociable
• Ice Rocket
• Integrasco
• Kaava
• KDPaine & Partners
• Lotame
• MediaMiser
• Millward Brown Precis
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics
• Newsflashr
• Onalytica
• Pythia Analytics
• Quantcast.com
• Quarkbase
• Radian6
• Relevant Noise
• RepuTrace by CoreX Technologies
• SentimentMetrics
• Socialmention
• Sphere
• Sports Media Challenge
• Summize
• Technorati
• TrackUr
• Trendpedia
• Twellow
• Twingly
• Twist Graph
• Twitter Grader
• Twitturly
• Gen Y Tribe
• Unica
• Visible Technologies (TruCast)
• Wavemetrix
• Website Grader
• Xinu
• Yahoo Pipes
• yExplore