We can’t believe 2011 is ending and 2012 is just around the corner! However, we couldn’t be more excited because this is going to be a huge year for Traackr and all of our subscribers.

First, a little time for reflection…

Reflecting on 2011, we have had some great accomplishments. We attended some great events in New York, Orlando and DC and, along the way, met some really awesome people. We began an initiative to celebrate influence driven by those that truly define the term with our alpha-lists, we closed our Series A round of funding and we released some really cool tool features like the Analytics Suite, daily Influencer Monitors and sentiment analysis. We also gathered insights from more than 100 Marcomm professionals on the frontline of online influence around influencer discovery, engagement and measurement and shared our findings at a session during the PRSA International Conference.

The last half of 2011 was also a big one for our engineering team. Months of tireless research to revamp our search engine and successful implementation from HBase to MongoDB has left us with tireless possibilites of where we can take our ever-growing data. It’s very exciting and we are really looking forward to seeing where the new technology can take us.

And now we begin looking forward…

Looking back is fun, but looking forward is even more fun. As we step into 2012, we have plenty in store, but wanted to share with you a few of the main features we’ll be releasing earlier in the year. Some have come to us through customer demand, and others are enhancements to the tool that we are sure will continue to bring unparalleled insights and assistance to our customers.

So, here’s what you can expect Traackr to bring to you in the new year:

Geolocation: We’ve had a lot of customer demand for this, and we assure you we have been listening. This feature is expected to make its debut in Q1 of 2012. With the geolocation feature, you’ll have the ability to search influencers within a specific geographic location. Interested only in influencers that are in the US? We’ll be able to find them. Interested in influencers only in New York, Boston and DC? We’ll be able to target in on them as well.

Data services: We pride ourselves on the robust database that we have built and continue to build. We’d like to make this data more available to customers and partners and allow for further integration of Traackr within their online platforms.

Influence map: There are plenty of ways we can take this, but we plan to start with the basics. To start with, we are going to expose the social graph of influencers on your A-lists. This will tell you who those influencers are connecting with and perhaps being influenced by. It will also show you who their closest connections are and give you better insights into how they interact with their community.

Alerts: We like to think of Traackr alerts as being Google alerts on steroids. You won’t be getting alerts on a daily basis that consist of absolutely everything on the web – half of which isn’t relevant to you. Instead, you’ll get alerts whenever someone on your A-list mentions one of the keywords from your Influencer Monitor. It’s only giving you the alerts you care about – very simple yet extremely effective.

Contextual help and support: The world of online influence is a beast, so it makes sense that any tool trying to conquer it (like us) would have plenty of room for improvement. We don’t pretend to be perfect, but we do have some truly great customer support that gets us most of the way there. However, we’d like to improve the help we offer within the tool and offer more tutorials on how to optimize your use of the tool.

We have another release that’s not ready for its unveiling yet, but we assure you that it will be our biggest announcement since Traackr began. I’ll give you a little hint – it will open up our doors to smaller businesses that haven’t had the resources to subscribe to Traackr. It’s going to be a big one, so make sure you stay tuned!

So there’s a bit of our 2012. If you have any suggestions, comments or concerns please do share!

Just in time for our big splash at the PRSA International conference in Orlando, we are happy to release yet another significant enhancement to our A-List Influencer Platform – ANALYTICS.

As of today, all Traackr users (this means you — and if it doesn’t, it should )  can now access the Analytics Suite for every active campaign running in their account.  The Suite offers:

• Deeper insights into the people and data generated from your A-List(s)
• Even more information to use when designing and executing your influencer campaigns
• Four different insight categories; location, keywords, scores, sentiment

This release represents yet another step for our A-List platform, further securing its position as the most robust influencer platform for PR & Marketing professionals. With the introduction of analytics, all Traackr Campaigns now consist of three major elements: The A-List, Influencer Monitors and Analytics.  Pretty cool.

FOUR CATEGORIES OF ANALYTICS

In this version of the analytics section, we have focused on four “categories”:

1. LOCATION

In the Location tab, you can see the location of all your influencers displayed on a US map. Clicking on any state (on the map or on the list to the right) will allow you to quickly filter your list by the influencer in that location.

2. KEYWORDS

This powerful chart offers insights into the relative usage of each of the keywords in your search query. There are some very interesting insights offered by this chart. For example, you can now see if there is one keyword that is dominating the search; or if any keywords you thought would be very popular actually aren’t being used that often by your influencers.  Most powerfully, by clicking on any of the keywords (or slices of the pie), you can filter the posts in your A-List by that keyword. Interested in all the posts mentioning “energy standards”? Simply click the keyword here and you can see all the posts, broken out by influencer.

3. SCORES

This tab offers insights into the make-up of the Traackr scores for the people on your list.  The 2×2 chart on the left allows you to visualize and select influencers plotted by a combination of Reach & Resonance vs Relevance scores.  Selecting any quadrant will allow you to view the influencers fitting in that quadrant. The bar charts on the right allow offer an overview of the scoring profiles of your list for each of our three scores (Reach, Resonance, Relevance). Clicking on any of the bars will display the influencers fitting into that percentile.

4. SENTIMENT

The Sentiment tab offers more views and insights into the data produced by your Sentiment tagging. The chart on the left offers a view of the past 8 weeks of Sentiment data week-by-week. Clicking on any line in the chart will display the posts for that week, sorted by Sentiment. The pie chart on the right display the last 8-weeks of Sentiment as an aggregate. Again, clicking on any slice of the pie will display the posts tagged with that Sentiment.

On the second page of the Sentiment tab, you can see your Most Positive and Most Negative influencers. You can also see those influencers who have “shifted” (either from Positive to Negative or from Negative to Positive) most over the past 8 weeks.

This is only the beginning…your feedback is important

This is our first iteration of the Analytics Suite and there is definitely more to come. The vision for this section is grand. We would like this suite to provide our users with the most insightful, actionable, influencer-centric information possible. To this end, your input is very important. If there are pieces of data, or different ways to visualize the data which would help make your lives easier or further enhance your influencer outreach work, please let us know. We’re counting on it…

Enjoy this first version of the Analytics Suite.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Earlier today we launched Sentiment Analysis in our A-List Platform — further enhancing the A-List as the most robust & actionable influencer platform out there.  We are very excited for this particular release.  We feel that Sentiment tracking will help our clients gain additional, important, strategic insights that will guide both the development and ongoing execution of their campaign work.

HOWEVER…I want to be very clear about the Sentiment Analysis feature we released.  We DID NOT release an automated sentiment engine. We apologize to those who were hoping otherwise, but the sentiment feature we released is based on MANUAL input provided by our users. We have built a system that gives our users the ability to tag the sentiment of specific posts produced by the influencers tracked on any list.

That’s right.  MANUAL tagging.

We didn’t do this because we want to make life harder on our users or because we wanted to make more work for those managing influencer work.  We did it because we, fundamentally, don’t believe in the effectiveness/accuracy of automated sentiment engines or the actionability of the data they provide.

First of all, automated sentiment analysis is a HUGE technical challenge which….has NOT been solved.  At least not yet.  Or for the foreseeable future.  From a technical perspective, it involves all the data processing sophistication involved with any big data problem along with the added complexity of NLP (natural language processing) which has to account for and adapt to the ways humans use language.  [For example, how does a computer account for posts like:  That is one bad ass motorcycle.  OR Blue screen of death again...Love you Microsoft!]  Ultimately, we don’t feel like this is possible in any sort of automated way.  We’ve looked at several tools and have spoken to several experts about the subject and are not convinced that anyone is even close.

In fact, I recently spoke to a representative from one of the biggest general monitoring companies who proudly claimed that their sentiment engine boasted a 74% accuracy rate – compared to the 50-55% accuracy of the other big monitoring tools.  So, that means the “best” tool on the market still has a 26% margin of error.  I’m not sure of any other statistical model where this would be considered a ‘success’ (maybe someone can point me to a good example, but I won’t hold my breath).  Not only is this margin of error far too large for any serious analyst to trust, but I can’t see how anything with that kind of margin is actionable in the least.

With manual sentiment, you have 100% accuracy.  We like that number.

SENTIMENT, LIKE INFLUENCE, IS CONTEXTUAL

The second, and most important, reason why we wouldn’t consider an automated sentiment engine for our product is that sentiment, like influence, is highly contextual.  The sentiment of a statement (or post) is highly dependent on the perspective of the reader.  Yes, there are certainly cases where sentiment is very clear and not debatable (BMW sucks! is clearly negative), but these instances are far-and-few between.  In most cases, sentiment is not clear-cut.

Automated sentiment engines assume that any given post has a set sentiment that never changes.  A negative post is a negative post in any situation, at any time.  We don’t think this is the case.  At all.  We think the sentiment of a single post can change drastically depending on the perspecitve of the reader.  Take a post like:

Those new Microsoft commercials are ok, but I liked them better when Apple did them  btw – what is Jerry Seinfeld thinking?!   So stupid.  

What would an automated sentiment engine do with this?  Probably neutral.  Maybe positive because of the smiley face.  Or maybe negative because of the mention of “stupid.”  Who knows.  In any case, the automated engine can’t account for the most important part – context.

What if you were Microsoft’s brand manager, hoping to create a campaign that would help people to forget about Apple?  You’d probably consider this post pretty negative (doh!  Damn you Apple!!).  But what if you were Apple’s ad agency?  Pretty positive for you (awesome, people think of our commercials even when they watch a Microsoft ad!).  And what if you were Jerry Seinfeld?  Not great.  Negative sentiment (what’s the deal with this twitter thing anyway??).

This is just a quick, silly example, but I think you can see the issue.  Same exact post, 3 different sentiments — all accurate.  All based on the context of the beholder.  This is why, fundamentally, we don’t believe in automated sentiment analysis.  Even if the technology worked, it just doesn’t make any sense.

WITH TRAACKR, MANUAL SENTIMENT IS TOTALLY MANAGEABLE   

Don’t get me wrong – we totally understand the “value proposition” for automated sentiment as well as the need for it.  Automated sentiment was designed to help researchers make sense of an enormous amount of data.  Automated sentiment is necessary when you are trying to analyze the general web – thousands, even millions, of posts.  We get that.  It’s a task that can’t be done manually.  Here’s the problem.  The web is an ENORMOUS OCEAN OF DIRTY WATER.  Honestly, the web makes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch look like a well manicured lawn.  So, yes, there may be a million posts mentioning your brand that you want analyzed for sentiment, but 70-80% of them (unscientific estimation) are junk and not worth any attention.  So, if 70% of the posts in a given sample are junk and the sentiment engine has a 30-50% margin of error….honestly, what’s the point?

But with TRAACKR, you are able to filter the web by the people who matter most to you at any given time.  By focusing on the content from the RIGHT PEOPLE, you eliminate the problem of junk, random, non-important posts and you make the process of manually sentiment tagging completely manageable and realistic.

And this gets you real, accurate, ACTIONABLE data.  You don’t deserve anything less…do you?

DS

Much propz go out to the hard-working TRAACKR tech crew for what might be the most important feature released in our A-List Platform this year – SENTIMENT ANALYSIS.

As of today, TRAACKR subscribers can apply and track sentiment at the post- and influencer-level for all the activity captured by each Influencer Monitor. With the sentiment analysis feature, you can:

• Gauge sentiment on a post-level based on the entire campaign or on the influencer-level based on one person
• Monitor how feelings of your (client’s) brand and its competitors change over time from the people that matter most
• Track sentiment over time for a select group of influencers — like the ones you targeted with a specific outreach campaign
• Give your clients a monthly report on the sentiment shown for their product line(s) from the people they care about most

All of this is now possible with our new Sentiment Analysis feature. Interested in finding out more? E-mail info@traackr.com. TRAACKR subscribers can read the rest of this post to find out how to use this new feature.

HOW TO APPLY SENTIMENT TO A POST

Applying and reporting on sentiment in TRAACKR is very easy.  To apply sentiment to posts (you can only apply sentiment to posts generated in your Monitors), simply (a) roll over a post; and (b) click on the little heart next to the post.  Click the heart until it registers the sentiment you wish to apply.

• Red = Positive
• Black = Negative
• Grey = Neutral
• Open heart = no sentiment (not counted toward sentiment totals)

WHERE TO APPLY SENTIMENT

You can apply sentiment in TRAACKR in two places:

1. On the Monitor page:  You can apply sentiment to any post in the monitor.  While in the Monitor, you can navigate from week-to-week and apply sentiment to each week’s posts.
2. On each Influencer Profile:  You can also apply sentiment to the Monitor posts found on each Influencer Profile.  By checking the Monitor button on an Influencer Profile (see below), you will find all the posts from that influencer using the keywords in your Monitor.  You can apply sentiment to any of these posts.  This is a very convenient way to apply sentiment to all your important posts based on a single influencer’s contribution.

SENTIMENT REPORTING

Once you have applied sentiment to the posts from your influencers, you can view a new Sentiment report in each of your Monitors.  While in the Monitor, simply select SENTIMENT from the View pull-down menu and you will be able to view a comparative report of your positive-negative-neutral posts…over time.  This is the perfect report for tracking Sentiment over a longer period of time.

Also, on each Influencer Profile, you can see a Sentiment breakdown of that specific influencer’s posts (see below).  This is a great way to determine the sentiment of each influencer. If you want to filter the content on each influencer profile by a sentiment rating, simply click on the sentiment (Positive, Negative, Neutral) and you can hone in on all the posts tagged with that sentiment.

MANUAL SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

As you have probably realized, our sentiment analysis feature gives our users the ability to MANUALLY apply sentiment to posts. I’m sorry if you were looking for an automated sentiment analysis engine from TRAACKR– but this is something you will never see from us (never is a tough word, but I’m comfortable using it here).  Yes, it does take a little work to manually apply sentiment to posts in any monitoring tool, but with TRAACKR your monitoring efforts are focused and filtered by the people you care about, making this work totally manageable and efficient. And after putting in a small amount of effort, your sentiment results will be 100% accurate (as opposed to 50-60% that leading, automated sentiment analysis engines boast).

You can read more about our take on automated vs manual sentiment analysis here.

Overall, we are incredibly excited to add Sentiment Analysis to the A-List Platform.  Our goal has always been to design the most robust and ACTIONABLE influencer platform out there…and we think this new feature is helping us to do just that. Being able to track sentiment for the people that matter most is a powerful thing. It offers further insight which can be instrumental in designing marketing strategies as well as a way to track the success/failure of your outreach efforts.  Wouldn’t it be great to say to a client that because of your brilliant work, you were able to drive positive sentiment about their products, among the top influencers, from a dismal 22% to a staggering 77% over 6 months? Would being able to show it be even better? Well now you can…

Enjoy this new feature.  And as always, let us know if you have any questions/suggestions after playing with the Sentiment feature.

DS

Over the weekend, we unveiled a brand new section of the TRAACKR A-List Platform — one we’re very excited about.

We call it the A-LIST STORE.

So what exactly is it? Well, it’s a new area of our platform which houses a selection of specific and targeted pre-defined A-Lists in a wide variety of topics. Basically, all the work’s done for you – you just have to shop for your topic, bookmark it and voila, you have a completed A-list to follow.

So what’s in it for you? It’s pretty simple:

• Access to an entire store at no additional cost  – all Traackr subscribers can access the A-List Store from their Dashboard
• A-lists from the A-List Store do not count against your subscription quota*
• A stocked selection of A-Lists covering a variety of interesting topics that’s always growing
• A much more robust Influencer Platform and loads of helpful content at your fingertips

Interested in finding out more? Read on for more details!

THE A-LIST STORE

The A-List Store is a new area of our platform which houses a selection of specific, targeted, pre-defined A-Lists in a wide variety of topics.  These A-Lists are just like any A-List you would create in TRAACKR…except the keywords have been generated for you by members of the TRAACKR team and searches already run.

TRAACKR subscribers can browse the A-List store at anytime – for any reason.  You may be looking for a specific list to help one of your clients/campaigns or you may be interested in finding a list of influencers on a topic of your personal interest.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE LISTS IN THE STORE?

There are three things users can do to lists from the A-List Store — View, Bookmark and Customize.

Viewing an A-List from the A-List Store

By clicking on the title of any list within the store, you can view a full copy of the list.  You can browse the full list of influencers, explore the detailed profiles, as well as the content, scores, etc.

Bookmarking an A-List from the A-List Store

By bookmarking a list within the store, you’ll be able to follow anything of interest and access each A-list more conveniently.  When you bookmark a list from the A-List Store, it will be added to your Dashboard, giving you convenient access to it whenever you log-in. You will also be able to view that list at any time and follow it’s progress as it refreshes and updates.

The best news is that viewing or bookmarking a list from the A-List Store DOES NOT count against your subscription quota.  Bookmarked lists can be used at no cost to our subscribers.  So go for it. Bookmark away!

Customizing an A-List from the A-List Store

Sometimes bookmarking a list from the A-List Store will not be enough.  There will be times when you find a list that is very close to what you’re looking to build yourself. In this case, you may want to have edit access to this list and the freedom to customize it to your liking. By customizing a list from the A-List Store, you have full access to edit the list. You can edit the keywords, add/exclude influencers, create an Influencer Monitor, etc. By clicking ‘Customize’, you will essentially create a fully editable copy of this list for your account.

*NOTE:  Customizing a list from the A-List Store will count toward your account’s Active list quota.

NAVIGATING THE A-LIST STORE

The A-Lists in the A-List Store are organized by categories.  The easiest way to navigate through the lists in the store is to select a category of interest from the drop-down menu on main store page.

ENJOY THE A-LIST STORE!

This first version of our A-List Store is stocked with a good selection of A-Lists covering a variety of interesting topics. This selection will continue to grow over time as we will be releasing new lists into the A-List Store on a regular basis, so check back often.

With this release, it not only gives our users a much more robust Influencer Platform, but it will also enable us to continue to design more creative offerings for our users, as well as allow people outside of TRAACKR to contribute to the Platform.

It’s an exciting release for us. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback.  Enjoy!

DS

TRAACKR’s ever-improving Influencer Monitors just keep getting better. With this latest release, we have introduced comparison views which enable deeper and more meaningful analysis of your influencer campaign activity. Here’s why this is really hot stuff:

• Easily stack your company up against its competitors in one simple graph
• Intuitively track your brand’s Share of Voice among your market’s top influencers
• Compare multiple keywords; the only report on the web that gives you an Influencer Share of Voice report
• Compare content of specific influencers; the only app that gives you comparison insight into the voices that matter

Now that we have your attention, take a look below for a more in depth explanation on the new features of our Influencer Monitors. Questions? You can always get a hold of us at info@traackr.com!

COMPARING MULTIPLE KEYWORDS:  The only Influencer Share-of-Voice report on the web

By selecting “Keyword Comparison” from the View dropdown menu, you can compare the mentions of up to 5 keywords on the same graph — essentially creating a Share of Voice report among your influencers (or any group of influencers that you select).  You want to compare the number of times your influencers mention your brand vs your competitors?  Just select “Keyword Comparison” from the drop down menu above the chart as well as the respective keywords from the keyword list on the left and you will see each keyword displayed as a separate line on the chart.

Look for how your brand compares over time.  Look for interesting spikes or dips & dig into interesting activities.  How about using this chart to track mentions of specific product features — wouldn’t that be interesting?  See which of your products/features get the most “ink” from your influencers.  Cool stuff.

You can also filter the influencers that you want to analyze in this view.  This means, if you want to track keyword mentions over time from a select group of the influencers on your list (the one’s you’ve tagged “outreach” perhaps), simply filter the influencers and refresh the report.  Voila — a Share of Voice report on a select group of influencers.  Wow…

COMPARING INFLUENCERS:  The only way to compare the content of specific influencers

Because of TRAACKR’s unique ability to track individual influencers, users can use our Influencer Monitors to compare the activities of select influencers on the same chart.  This works just like the Keyword Comparison view, however, in this view the graph will display the activities of specific influencers.  This means that if you want to compare the activity of your top 5 influencers when they mention your brand, you can do that here.  Simply select “Influencer Comparison” from the drop down menu as well as the influencers you want to see on the chart and click Refresh.  You will see those influencers compared on the same graph.  The results of this view might be very surprising…

As we mentioned with our last update, our Influencer Monitors have proven to be the most efficient and effective way to focus your monitoring efforts.  By honing in on the influencers that matter most to you (and the ones with whom you are probably in contact) and tracking when they mention keywords that are important to you, you can really streamline your process and gain actionable insights.

With these latest “comparing” features, our Monitors are moving to yet another level.  They open the door to new & interesting insights — enabling even more robust analysis.

As always, let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.  Cheers!  

Over this past weekend, we released the newest version of the TRAACKR A-List Platform and made some very exciting improvements to our Influencer Monitors. Check it out!

Daily Monitors

As of this week, our Influencer Monitors will now report daily activity from your influencers.  You no longer have to wait an entire week to get the data on your Monitor keywords because every morning when you log in to TRAACKR, you’ll be able to see all the activity created by the influencers on your list from the previous day. More data faster means you can be much more effective at managing your campaigns.

When you look at your Monitors, you will still see the data presented in the same weekly format, but the data from the current week will show as partial week and displays any posts/mentions generated up to that point. So, if you are viewing the current week in the Monitor and you see 33 posts listed, this means that there are 33 posts for this week-to-date.

Filter your Monitors

With this latest release we have enhanced your ability to filter your Monitors as well. We understand that being able to filter your Monitors by a variety of criteria is very important and allows you to be very strategic around your influencer monitoring activities. So now you can:

• filter your Monitors by specific keywords or sets of keywords
• filter your Monitors by different groups of influencers
• filter your Monitors by both keywords and influencers!

Filtering by keywords

You can now dig into any single, or group of keywords in your Monitor.  If you want to see the performance of a single keyword, you can simply click on the keyword (just like you could before this release).

However, if you’d like to see the results of a select group of keywords, you can do that as well.  Simply check the keywords you want to see as a group and click the Refresh button.  Your Monitor will be filtered to show you only the influencers and posts containing those keywords.

Filtering by Influencers

Even more powerful is your ability to see the performance/mentions by any specific, or group of specific influencers.  To see a Monitor chart based on the performance of a single influencer, simply click on that influencer’s name and the Monitor will show only performance from that single influencer.

If you’d like to narrow the results of your Monitor by a select group of influencers, you can simply check the influencers you want to see and click Refresh OR you can…

…select a group of influencers that you have tagged on your A-List (if you don’t know how to tag your influencers, you should read here).  This function is very powerful.  If you want to see the posts generated by the people you tagged as ‘fans’ or ‘outreach targets’, etc, simply select the tag you want to track from the drop-down menu and your Monitor will be filtered by that tag.  This allows you to compare the activity from various groups of influencers very quickly and easily. Powerful stuff!

You can also filter your Monitor by the influencers you have Starred as well.  Same way — just select Starred from the drop down menu and you are all set.

Filtering by keywords AND influencers

Finally, you can now combine multiple filters to your Monitors.  For example, if you only want to see when the people you invited to the party mentioned specific keywords, you can now do that by selecting the specific keywords as well as a specific group of influencers.

The best way to filter the web

For a long time, we have been saying that our Influencer Monitors were the most efficient (and effective) way to monitor the web. By creating a Monitor in TRAACKR, you are able to filter the web by the people that matter most to you — when they mention the keywords you care about.  This allows you to focus your monitoring efforts, saving an enormous amount of time, energy & frustration.

And now, as of this past weekend, we have taken these Monitors to the next level.  Enjoy and, as always, let us know if you have any comments, suggestions or ideas for further enhancement.

Thanks!

Not only do we love that spring has finally arrived, but we are really excited about what has come/is coming with it – new Traackr team members, a move to the West coast and a new website!

We are pretty excited about the website so I have to start with that. It’s been a very long time coming and it does a great job of telling visitors what Traackr is really all about, complete with a great video that you have to check out. We’ve already gotten some #propz on it too! Our friend Jeremy Pepper from Pop!PR Jots tweeted, ”Loving the new @traackr redesign for the Website: http://bit.ly/2lWzqk. Great overview of what it does and why it rocks.” Thanks Jeremy, we hope everyone else likes it too!

The team got a talent boost as well after welcoming Senior Engineer Bryan Warner, aka “soon-to-be new dad.” A true New Englander at heart, he loves some good fresh caught Atlantic ‘lobsta’ and is a huge hockey fan. Oh, and don’t worry, he’s definitely not one of those fairweather fans that come along when the Bruins are in the Stanley Cup playoffs – it’s been a tight relationship since childhood.

We also welcomed West Coast native Doug Sikes as VP of sales. In typical West Coast fashion, he loves to catch a few good waves early in the morning, but loves his two Russian ballet-trained daughters even more. When he’s not playing the role of “ballet dad”, he can be found brewing his own beer, checking out some art, or shaping surfboards. He’s got a lot going on and is a pretty interesting guy, so feel free to get a hold of him at @douglasasikes or dsikes@traackr.com if you want to chat about art, ballet, surfing, Traackr or all of the above!

We’re also really excited about announcing our move to the West Coast. The team will gradually be making its way across the state throughout the rest of the year to our new home in the heart of tech start-ups and veterans, Silicon Valley. We believe this is going to be a great move for Traackr and a huge source of inspiration for innovation and growth in order to continue to provide you the best PeopleSearch technology possible!

With all these changes and additions we are continuing to move forward, and it’s pretty exciting. Continued technology advancements and great new features including not only snazzy, but useful analytics are only a few things that we have in the horizon. As always, we truly appreciate your ongoing support. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without you, so thank you, thank you, thank you!

Check out the site and let us know what you think!

In typical Steve Jobs fashion, Apple is once again trying to one-up our latest software release with a little announcement of their own later today.  Ugh.  So frustrating.

But the show must go on and we are happy to beat the Apple team to the punch with this announcement of our latest software release — successfully deployed over the weekend.

As always, much props to our elite, yet always humble, tech team for this latest release.  Along with many “behind-the-scenes” improvements as well as several noticeable UI updates, we are also very excited to announce the first version of Traackr’s Starter A-Lists.

STARTER A-LISTS

Up until this weekend, Traackr users only had one option when creating a new A-List Campaign — start from a blank slate and develop a custom set of keywords on which your A-List will be based.  Obviously, the development of custom keyword sets is one of the most powerful elements of the A-List tool.  We will never eliminate that option.

But as of today, A-List users have another option when creating new Campaigns.  You will notice on both your account Dashboard as well as on the New Search page a new drop-down menu of pre-made keyword lists (see image below).  These lists represent your other option when creating a new Campaign.  You can either start from a blank slate (like you always have) OR you can select a pre-made list of keywords developed by the TRAACKR team.  One of these pre-defined list of keywords may be exactly the list you are looking for OR it may serve as a good “primer” for the list you are looking to create. The titles in the drop down list describe the types of influencers that each list will identify.

How to use these STARTER A-LISTS

Using these lists is EASY.  Simply select one of the lists from the drop down menu and click LOAD.  This will load the keywords from the list into the New Search page.  At this point, you use these keywords as if it were a list you created yourself.  You can run a search to see results, you can add/remove/edit the keywords, etc.  Just like with any other New Search, this list will not count against your quota until you ACTIVATE it.  Once it’s Activated, it will be your list and count towards your subscription.  You can also add/remove influencers, create a Monitor and do anything else you would with a normal A-List.

Why STARTER A-LISTS?

We created these Starter A-Lists as a way to help simplify the keyword generation process for our users.  We understand the challenges of generating good keyword lists and we wanted to help.  We still strongly believe in the power of custom influencer lists derived from custom keyword lists (this is how one is able to uncover the people who are influencing very specific parts of a topic/conversation) and these Starter A-Lists are just a way to help speed up the process of generating a keyword set.  We understand (and hope) that none of the lists in this drop down menu may not serve your needs exactly…but our hope is that they will serve to give you a good base of keywords to work from and decide where and how you’ll branch off on the topic to suit your needs.

For instance, are you interested in finding influencers for PR technology tools?  Why not select the General PR influencers list and customize the keywords to hone in on the technology tools conversation?  Looking for people influencing new energy policy?  You may want to look at the Smart Grid list and add some specific “policy related” keywords.

And if not, don’t worry.  You can always start from scratch and create your own list…

What’s Next for STARTER A-LISTS?

We have many plans for these Starter A-Lists.  First thing on the agenda is to create more of them.  We will be rolling out many more Starter A-Lists over the coming weeks, covering many different topics and conversations.  We will also be organizing these lists by categories, making it much easier to search and find a useful list.  After that, in the coming months, we will be expanding on this concept to make the A-List platform much more robust and powerful.  We have some big thoughts and would definitely appreciate your feedback.  So please, as you test drive the first versions of these Starter A-Lists, let us know your thoughts.  We want to know not only ways we could improve on them, but also any thoughts on how you think they can evolve in the future.  Thanks in advance!

That’s our news for this lovely Monday morning.  Thanks for reading and, as always, for your continued support!

Your move, Steve  :)

Over the weekend, we released a few new features in the A-List Platform based on user feedback.  The most obvious features enable enhanced filtering in the Influencers Monitors.  We have also added another user level (Manager) which will offer more flexibility to multi-layer agencies with many users.  Read on for more details:

Filter by Influencer Tags

As of this weekend, you can filter your Influencer Monitors by specific groups of influencers which you’ve tagged in the A-List.  This means, if you want to see the posts generated by those influencers that you’ve tagged as “analyst” or “tier 1″ or “conference speaker”, you can do that by selecting the appropriate tag in the drop down menu underneath the keywords on your Monitor page (see screenshot below).  This feature was borne from some of our power users who wanted to be able to better segment the tracking of their influencers.

Filter Monitor by Individual

We’ve also added the ability to filter the Monitor a specific individual.  By clicking on any individual influencer’s name in the Monitor, you will generate a “personalized” Monitor for that person.

These two filtering options give you much more flexibility when analyzing the content generated by your influencers.  We have more Monitoring enhancements coming soon as well!

New User Level – Manager

We have also created a new user level in this release which we call MANAGER.  Managers are users that sit between Team Members and Account Admins.  The Manager role is ideal for Account Managers in many of our agency clients.  These are people that need the ability to create new TRAACKR campaigns for their clients, but don’t need to view the campaigns that other people in the organization are creating and managing.  Managers can create new campaigns and manage any campaigns that he/she creates.

The Account Admin user level has not changed.  Account Admins can still view all the campaigns created in the account, create new users and manage all other Account-level functionality.

We have also made several other improvements/optimizations of the system in this release.  One thing you will surely notice is the overall speed of the application.  You should notice a significant improvement in the load times for any page in the platform.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback.  Thanks!

DS