TRAACKR

We have been featured in a Forbes.com article:

How To Get Paid For Being Cool

Technocrati is releasing its 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Some interesting tidbits of information are worth calling out.

Yesterday’s piece on the How of Blogging gives some interesting insights on what the top bloggers (as defined by Technocrati) do different from others.

In a nutshell, and it should come as no surprise, top bloggers: 1-Publish more often, 2-Use tagging of their posts more intensively, and 3-Leverage any and all tools and tricks to promote their blog.

As a side note, we found entertaining the fact that Technocrati highlights the most widely used promotional tool for bloggers to be “List your blog on Technocrati”. Hum… wasn’t the sample they interviewed all bloggers listed on Technocrati? Isn’t that called a self-fulfilling prophecy? Anyways, the article still remains interesting and abstractly valid when it comes to studying and emulating the top 500 blogs on Technocrati.

We take issue though with the fact that except for a handful of bloggers who can realistically aspire to make it to this very select list of most referenced blogs, the methodology applied by Technocrati, thus any advice stemming from it, is utterly useless. What matters for most of us is not what we need to do to become a Techcrunch or RWW but rather how to stand out in our own community.

For exemple, “Tag your posts” is a good piece of advice but it’s not nearly sufficient for me to do anything with it… What I really want to know is what tags have the highest success rate for the topics I blog about.

Contrary to Technocrati’s top-down approach to measuring performance, Traackr has taken a bottom-up one and providing Traackr users with first and foremost a sense of self (what am I doing right, what can I improve) and then a sense of the community around them (who else is in my community and what do they do different).

Hopefully, these 2 opposite approaches to measuring success will meet somewhere. Stay tuned!

The Traackr team has decided to run for this year’s Forrester Groundswell Awards. You can find our submission here.  The Groundswell’s philosophy and principles are very much in line with the conceptual framework behind Traackr and we feel it is a great forum to initiate discussions, get feedback on what we have done so far.

We encourage you to go to the Traackr submission on the Groundswell’s site and share your opinion on Traackr!

We have experienced a little snafu with our weekly email that showed a score of 0 for all Traackr users… For those interested, we migrated servers last week and it messed up the queries we run for these weekly emails that compares the scores of week n to week n-1.

Apologies to all for this. No need to hyperventilate though: your score is kept safe and sound in our database (and its backup) ; you can go see for yourself by logging in Traackr.

Last night, I had the chance to briefly meet Tim O’Reilly at Ignite 4 Boston (thanks Sara!). Better yet: I had the opportunity to talk to him about Traackr!

So I went on to explain that Traackr is about finding and qualifying social influencers in online communities, helping them become aware of their role and influence, and, when relevant, connecting them with marketers (I guess it you’re reading this post I probably didn’t need to tell you all this, right?). Tim’s reaction was to say “you had me until you mentioned marketers”. I tried to qualify what I meant but my window of attention was closing, darn!

I have grown increasingly frustrated since last night about this interaction. Not at all at Tim O’Reilly but at the fact that “marketing” or “marketer” has become a quasi curse word in social media lingo, and in many ways, rightly so due to decades of mass media.

So now is the time to reclaim the term ‘marketing’ for what it is intended to be (and in some ways is): an open channel between a brand and its customers.

For too long brands have had the “luxury” of mass communication, primarily consisting in pouring TV dollars in marketing campaigns. Exxon Mobile has an image issue? Let’s do a large TV campaign on how they works hard at solving all the world’s greatest problems.

The theory behind this approach is that perception trumps reality and you can muscle your way to controlling perception (much cheaper than actually changing reality). There is nothing new here and Exxon has perfected this craft over and over again.

So if *this* is marketing, no wonder that the perception by most is that marketers are there to get you, crafting messages to shape perceptions, deliberately manipulate cognitions and direct behaviors.

Here is the glitch: the definition I just gave is the one for propaganda, not marketing; propaganda never made the list of the famous 4 Ps defining marketing.

No question that some (many) marketers still behave like propagandists. So let’s just call them for what they are instead of polluting marketing.

The good news is that they are an endangered species as the propaganda machine only functions when the leaks are limited, meaning when the audience targeted has limited access to other sources of information and opinions. With mass media is taking a plunge, the one-sided perception of brands is weakening; meanwhile new social media are offering the general public amazing opportunities to voice their opinion, seek the one of peers, unmistakably leading to the end of the era of propaganda. I don’t mean that there won’t be (or isn’t for that matter) propaganda in new media but rather that the openness of the system makes it impossible to succeed.

I understand Tim’s concern when we talk at Traackr about connecting social influencers (i.e. the most influential voices in communities) to marketers, envisioning these community leaders becoming themselves propaganda agents. This is not this type of relationship we’re anticipating.

Traackr’s perspective is that there is a fundamental and symbiotic relationship between social influencers and marketers that is in the making and will accelerate the downfall of propagandists.

What form could this collaboration take? We don’t believe that it is or will be one-size-fits-all. Depending on the role played by a social influencer, their community, and the brand a marketer represents, the collaboration could take very different forms (from simple information sharing to product endorsement).

A good example of how this is already happening may be the way the Obama campaign collaborated with social media moguls to call out the misrepresentation of the facts by the McCain campaign of Obama’s comment on “putting lipstick on a pig”, falsly presented as describing Sarah Palin. All the Obama team had to do to stop the propaganda machine was to make available the full clip of his speech and let social influencers communicate on their own terms.

A more symbiotic collaboration as described above between influencers and marketers has the potential to lead brands into the social media revolution by forcing them to pay more attention to their audiences and not only on how to sell to them but more importantly how to be relevant. Social influencers in turn can provide better insights for the community they represent and further their role by impacting decisions on products and services by brands.

Now I need to find a way to summarize all this in a couple of sentences for the next time I meet Tim

Earlier this week, Tubemogul released a new piece of functionality called Marketplace, in their own words, a dating site for video producers and advertisers.  We love the simplicity of their interface showing a list of ranked producers and a simple search box to filter them.

The accuracy of the information provided is quite limited at this stage but it’s a good starting point they can expand from.

Our one concern about this effort is the fact that it gives the false sense that “View Count” is the sole measure of the performance of these producers. The reality is much more complex and the data required to truly measure video producers’ (or any other web content producers’ for that matter) performance much more diverse, View Count being one of the many pieces of data needed.

The reason why we want to drive this point home is because it is important for marketers to start thinking differently about performance metrics and the focus of View Count reinforces the (mis)perception that new media can be treated the same as old media, by looking at viewership for shows.

New media, and social media especially, are quite different in that respect and limiting performance measurment to this concept of viewership really missing the boat of what social media is about: participatory audiences.

At Traackr, we have embraced the richness of the data and its complexity from the start of our venture (and have grown a few white hair because of it since then). For that reason, we are measuring content producers’ performance along 3 separate axes: popularity (how many people view my stuff), buzz (how many people talk about my stuff), and reach (how far does something I say can travel). Each of these axes is composed of a wide spectrum of data sets that get normalized and aggregated across sites we track.

We’re working on making all of our geeky stuff more sexy to our audience. So stay tuned!