Filtrbox for Monitoring Your Brand on the Web
The internet is big, right? And there are a lot of people on there, huh? So how do you know when one of them says something about you? This has been a problem for businesses for quite awhile. They want to know when somebody is complaining about them, or praising them. Or maybe they are praising their competitors. (if you want to learn more about why you should monitor your brand, read this article from The Online Marketing Blog). So services like Radian6 came along and helped enterprises begin monitoring and filtering out the “noise”. These services are hugely expensive for everyday people, so many (including me), began “rolling their own” using tools like Dappr (for creating RSS feeds), Yahoo! Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds) and NetVibes (a dashboard for displaying all your data). In fact, I had always planned to write about it here, but I have found a better tool. It’s called Filtrbox. It is a Radian6 for regular people. In fact you can create 5 filters (meaning 5 terms/brand names/etc) for free. I have been using Filtrbox for a few month now and have been really happy with it.
Here are some of the main benefits of using it.
- It monitors blogs, social networks, social news, etc for any mention of your brand.
- It tells you the sites “FiltrRank” which boils down to how influential a particular site is.
- You can set the “FiltrRank” so that you don’t have to see unimportant mentions.
- It emails you daily with a listing of your brands mentions.
Filtrbox creates an easy way to see what is being said about your brand/competitors/industry on the internet. End of story. Check it out!
**UPDATE**
Want to see proof of how these services work? Both brand monitoring companies that I mentioned (Radian6 & FiltrBox) have left comments below thanking me for write up, both are now following me on Twitter, and FiltrBox has contacted me personally and offered to send some schwag. How’s that for response? In less than 24 hours, both companies have made contact and are trying to build a brand relationship! The real test will be if any other brand monitoring service that I didn’t mention follows suit.
Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency
“Crowdsourcing” is a huge buzzword in the Web 2.0 environment. It works on the assumption that the wisdom of many is greater than the wisdom of a few. Crowdsourcing has been applied a wide variety of businesses with varying success. T-shirts (Threadless), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), biomedical research and development (InnoCentive), nominal tasks (Amazon Mechanical Turk), etc, etc, etc. There is a new player to add to the list called Name This. Name This is crowdsourcing the name of your company/project/product.
Here’s how it works. Your company pays $99 and writes a brief summary about your business and any other relevant info about the name you are after. For 48 hours the community brainstorms, posts name ideas, and votes on their favorite name. Once the time is up a super secret algorithm determines which names had the most support and chooses the winners. The top 3 namers and their supporters get a pretty sizable chunk of the money and your company gets 3 market supported names along with about 200 other ideas.
The Name This model is not novel or original, but here is why it is interesting. The majority of crowdsourced services require participants to have some sort of skill or expertise. Name This requires none of this to participate. The ability to think creatively helps, but as you’ll see if you go to the site there are a number of participants who have not yet developed that skill. The beauty of Name This is in the simplicity. Name This is the most “mom friendly” crowdsourcing site I have seen and the companies seeking names don’t suffer because of it. Naming a company/project/product can be either the easiest or hardest thing in the world. Sometimes a name just comes to you and its an obvious fit. But sometimes its an arduous struggle. This struggle is greatly eased when a community of people put their heads together to create a great name.
There are some bugs with Name This (no editing/deleting of your own names, name proposal overload, mysterious algorithm), but there is a lot that can be learned from them. Keeping it simple, easily accessible, and valuable (to both namers and companies) goes a long way when creating a crowdsourced community or service.
Social Commenting Systems
There are a number of new social commenting systems becoming available. These services are in kind of a weird space. After all, every blog already has a built in commenting system. How do you benefit from using one of these services and “outsourcing” your comment system? Traditionally commenting has been a pretty one way experience. The comments are reactionary to the post. Built in commenting systems don’t allow much community interaction. It is difficult to reply directly to another commenter and continually monitor the ongoing conversation. Disqus, Intense Debate, coComment, and SezWho are all trying to change this. There are some benefits to using one of these systems: better comment threading to enhance and simplify discussion, ability to use avatars and video comments, a voting system for commenters to build their reputation, and the ability to easily follow commenters across multiple sites. The biggest benefits I see, are to the commenters themselves. A system like this helps commenters “own” the content they create. Often times, the comments on a blog are more interesting than the post itself. Built in commenting systems do little to reward commenters for the content. These commenting systems make it much easier for commenters to build their personal brands through reputation, gain followers, and aggregate their comments from all over the web onto a centralized service.
I would, however, like to see these four services rally around an open standard. The ultimate goal is to have the comments for all blogs to be centralized to one service. Having four services would be better than thousands of built in ones, but not quite ideal. Some merging or standard would definitely be better for the web community.
I really think that if you respect your blog’s community, you owe it to them to use one of these services. We are now using Disqus for our commenting (incredibly easy to install). See below for my sample comment. Let us know what you think.
Overview of Location Based Social Networking and Brightkite Review
Sharing your location with your friends in real time might be the next big trend on the internet. Kirk touched on this a bit in our niche marketing article. There are scores of new websites cropping up to make it easier to let your friends know where you are, meet up with people in your area, or find out information about your location (not too mention show you location relevant ads). I came across a great video of Tom Coates from Yahoo! talking about Fire Eagle and the location based landscape. Fire Eagle is a web app that is designed to serve you content based on your location. The “consumer facing” features of Fire Eagle are actually pretty sparse. The really interesting things about Fire Eagle, however, are the APIs that they provide. Essentially they are working as a “location broker”, meaning they provide a backend location service for other web apps to tap into and use however they can imagine. In the video below Tom Coates talks about the plethora of location based sites out there and the potential in location based computing. The video is almost 18 minutes long, so I will post links to the websites below if you don’t want to watch the entire thing, though I do highly recommend it.
Services to update your location and current location based uses:
Navizon - Peer to peer phone app that updates your location every 10 minutes
Loki - Free location based search and navigation tool bar that also updates your location every 10 minutes
Zonetag - Geotag your photos from your mobile phone
Firebot - A Twitter based app. You Direct Message @Firebot your location and it updates Fire Eagle
Brightkite - Uses “check in” locations to update your location and connect you with your friends
Rummble - Helps you discover people or places that you would like based on your location
Plazes - Helps you create events and activities in the “Real World” at specific times and places
Spot - GPS Satellite Messenger Unit for Journalists, Backpackers, Travelers to show progress, check in with friends & family, and get assistance
Wikinear - Shows you Wikipedia articles near your location (this feature is also now available through Google Maps)
Lightpole - Helps you find restaurants and bars near you as well as reviews
Outside.in - Determines the location that blog posts and news articles refer to, and serves you them when you are near
Metosphere - A service that attempts to overlay meta data on the physical world. And introduces something called “GeoBlogs”
Fireball - Plots your friends’ locations on a Yahoo! Map
Fire Widgets - Widgets from Fire Eagle that give you weather and geotagged photos for wherever you are
Moveable Type - Introduced a plugin that displays your location on a map on your blog
So which of these apps will be the next big thing? Which are here to stay and which will just fade away? One thing is for sure, a great idea doesn’t necessarily make a great app. Implementation is just as (or more) important.
Brightkite has been getting a lot of hype lately. I have had a chance to sit down with this service a bit. Their proposition is that you can track your friends’ locations in real time and meet up with people around you. Long story short, it uses “check in” points. Meaning you periodically tell Brightkite the address of where you are. If you don’t know the address, you can do a search by company name (Starbucks, for example). This is pretty easily done via laptop from their site. However, the real opportunity for a service like this is in using your mobile phone. Unfortunately, Brightkite is less than convenient from your phone. The process is way to manual. You send a Text Message with your address. If you don’t know your address, send the name of a company. They then send a message back with a list of company locations for you to choose from (not an easy task to choose from a list of Starbucks in a downtown metropolitan city). At this point it is hard to see the full benefits of all your effort, because of the relatively small user base (it is still in beta, afterall). The process is too much effort and not enough reward. The implementation of Brightkite is just not simple enough yet. I don’t want to track down my address so I can tell it to Brightkite. It feels like I am doing the work for them! Updating your location needs to be more automated, using GPS or Wifi Triangulation. It needs to be as simple as 1 or 2 clicks to update and post your location. Minimize the amount of work I need to do in order to use Brightkite, then I will whole heartedly jump on board!
If you want to try out Brightkite for yourself, we have some invites. Post a comment below or find us on Twitter.
Spokeo: Track Friends (or Strangers) Across All Major Social Networks
There is a new social networking web service out called Spokeo. They say: “Learn something about your friends …Guaranteed!”. Basically, they are a social network aggregator (free to try, monthly subscription). Type in an email address and they search 22 social networks for any content/info posted by that person. The concept is simple enough. Initially, I thought that this would be a good way to find out which social networks your friends are using, so that you view their content or join and add them as a friend. I decided to give it a try. Upon logging in, I was amazed when I saw an aggregated timeline of all the updates that my friends had made across nearly every social network. Similar to FriendFeed, but force fed (everybody’s feeds are shown, no opt in required). The site has a lot more implications, both good and bad. This can be a good tool to stay current with your friends or just interesting people. If they post on many social networks you can receive all their updates in one place and not have to visit each site individually. And if they start using a new site, you will know automatically.
I do get a bit worried however. We are hearing more and more about people not getting hired for jobs because of content on their Facebook or kids getting suspended from school because of pictures on their MySpace. Not to mention this is perfect “stalker-ware”! This tool can make this process 22 times easier. No guessing what sites they use and searching manually. Incriminating evidence just shows up! Automagically!
This also brings up privacy issues. More specifically “privacy through obscurity” (similar to “security through obscurity”). You are not more private by using Picturetrail instead of Flickr or DailyMotion over YouTube or Bebo and not MySpace. And you never really were since the creation of Google, but it is getting a whole lot easier! Spokeo performs its searches based on email address. So by using different email addresses for different aspects of your life you can limit the amount of info Spokio can find. Beyond that people are left with a few options: (1) Either don’t use these social network services, (2) only use them if you can make a private profile, or (3) embrace it: put your thoughts out there for everyone to see, add to the global conversation, and stand behind your opinions/actions. I was in a talk with Justin Kistner recently and he said something that stuck with me: “Privacy is for the emotionally insecure”. I am starting to come around to his opinion (at least from a social point of view; political environments can make this tricky).
Services like Spokeo will continue to crop up and make accessing information easier and easier, you either need to be very conscious of your privacy or assume that everything you post will be available to the world.
firef.ly
If you look to the sidebar on the right of this page you will see a new widget called firefly. It is a new service that allows anyone who is on the same page to chat with you. The counter will tell you if there are others on the page and if any of them are currently chatting. Once you click on the “Join Them” button, you start to see mouse cursors of other users on the page and if they say something a chat box appears just above where they typed on the page. It is a really fancy, cool little web application. But how useful will it ultimately be? Justin and I were using it just a bit ago for a short chat session and we decided that maybe so, maybe no.
First of all, it can only be used to chat with other people on the page. I believe the intent is that other people reading the same article can discuss it. This makes me think of sort of an active comments section. A
pretty cool concept yes, but aren’t passive comments more effective for this purpose. You want to see the conversation about the article come from all the readers as a whole instead of the readers who happen to be there now. So for that purpose, maybe no.
I could also potentially see this service used on a site where you need to talk to an administrator or site operator. For example, if I had a business where I offer computer repair and consultation services, I could allow people who visit my website contact me directly. The problem is that the way firefly currently works is that I would have to be on my website at all times to receive messages. If the host could receive these chats via an IM client for example, this could become much more useful in this situation. Perhaps a premium service would be in order here.
I so far cannot see any opportunities for monetization with a service like this either. Possibly with premium services as mentioned, but at this point it seems more like site bling. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very cool bling, and I encourage you to try it on this site. If you can think of some great uses for this project please discuss in the comments below.
Do you use LinkedIn Answers?
Admittedly, I don’t use LinkedIn to its full potential. A feature was just brought to my attention by Kent Lewis of Anvil Media, LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn Answers is a feature not so prominently featured on the page (the page is busy enough as it is). It is very similar to Yahoo! Answers. You ask questions and any users can submit answers. You can then select the “Best Answer” which will display on their profile. Since LinkedIn focuses on business and professional services, questions generally revolve around business advice. Their are a lot of experts on this site, so you can get some great free and insightful advice. The benefits of answering questions are just as great. Every answer you post is a reflection on you and your brand. You are building your credibility and expert status. And each time you are tagged as the “Best Answer” your credibility sky rockets. It can also be a great way to find new leads and get new business without doing traditional sales.
Now start building your LinkedIn expertise!
