In the last few years the research behind sentiment analysis has ranged from thumbs upthumbs down and emoticon faces to more advanced methods.

A few companies mentioned in the article above are trying to sort out the signal from the noise like Tweetfeel, twendz, and twitrratr and others like Trendrr (can I buy a vowel please alex). Each has their own way of parsing data, mainly Twitter data, to mine the conversations for sentiment.

In the larger universe of analytical tools you have companies like BuzzLogic, TechRigy, Radian6, Visible Technologies, Viral Heat, and a bunch of new startups all trying to solve this marketers puzzle.

At the low end these services cost $10.00-$20.00 per month and on the high end thousands. Depending on what you are tracking, how far back you want to go, and how hands on of a solution you need, someone is building a sentiment analysis tracker for your.

The goal here is to track beyond mentions. For example, if your brand is mentioned 2,654 times – how do you know what the sentiment of mostsomeall of those messages are? Where are conversations happening about your brand in the first place? How can you respond back to solve problems, answer questions, and apologize where necessary?

In thinking about the sentiment analysis market, I am trying to frame thinking 5 years out when brands will themselves have more conduits to their customers. Will systems still exist that brands do not know about and are not tracking? Or will the convergence of connectivity mean a more aware corporate culture that does not need to use yet another tool in their arsenal. Perhaps 5 years is too short of a timeline, but certainly they will have a grasp on this in 10-20 years.

I am curious to know what tools I should be looking at and how people are solving brand tracking probelms today. Let me know if you have ideas in the comments below.

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The main takeaway for me over the course of the half day event was that quality over volume wins every time. Many campaigns have an ability to gain a large share of voice simply by throwing media dollars at traditional channels to try to capture market share, but this strategy is quickly fading.

The day was structured beginning with opening remarks by Fred Wilson, and John Borthwick of Betaworks as a primer to how companies in this space are viewed by those that provide capital for them to grow. This was followed by a number of case studies showing the

Seth’s opening presentation:

Social Media Stories 2.0

View more presentations from Seth Goldstein.

No amount of noise will change perception of a product or service and the only way to influence reality is to devote your time towards quality. There were many great case studies from this days events that I am sure are available on the web.

Guest post from Ben Johnson of LogoInn, custom logo design.

Personal branding is gaining popularity as it is opening doors to everyone who wants to benefit out of it in one way or the other. Recession is knocking everywhere and there are a lot of layoffs in many companies including the big ones as well. No one feels protected and there is no job security for anyone. Under such circumstances, I don’t need to wonder why people are putting their efforts in creating personal profiles online.

Personal branding has become very essential, you need to differentiate your brand in terms of your expertise/ knowledge, and social media provide that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Why it has become so important is because of the fact that you can portray your talents and goals to people who are pertinent to catering your purpose of personal branding.

There are countless ways you can create, communicate and maintain your personal brand. Doing so would help you out if you are in process of job switch, or if you are a recruiter of any company. Here are some golden ways to start off with:

Create a Blog

Blogging is a good way of creating your brand online. There are numerous blogging platforms where you can sign up. You can quick start by:

• Buying a domain name
• Creating a theme
• Compiling content
• Constructing your ‘About Us’ page

Make sure your blog domain is easy to remember and your theme should be according to what you are going to put up on your blog. For instance, if your interests and expertise are in the field of logo designing, your theme should be creative and has to have colors and designs incorporated in it. Moreover, assemble content relevant to your theme. Your content should be original, bold and should offer something unique in order to increase your readers. It is the most essential thing that has to be kept in mind while blogging, you can only stand out through your content. Be sure, whatever you write has to be authentic. And yes, don’t forget to include ‘Comment’ section and ‘RSS’ to your blog. Create an ‘About Us’ page in which you can give a brief description of yourself, your interests, your hobbies etc. Make sure your blog is well-defined for the search engines.

Once you’ve started blogging, you need increase the number of readers on your blog. You can successfully do so by updating your content regularly with quality and relevant content. Your knowledge and awareness in the area of your interest would be the gauging factor of how successful you are as a brand.
Enhance your online presence

Your job is not done here. Your efforts would be wasted even if you’re successful in creating a wonderful blog for yourself, unless you register your blog with the available blogs and web directories, claim with Technorati.com, and use Google Reader to store your searches. You need to increase your online presence. Hence, it is a good practice to get your blog easily indexed in different search engines. Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Also, building connections with the experts by commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly be of great help.

Do successful branding on social networking websites

Besides blogging you can sign up to various social networking websites. The most popular ones are:
• Twitter.com which connects you to other social media practitioners
• Facebook which connects you to other social media practitioners
• MySpace which could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with friends; find new ones
• LinkedIn for professional networking which helps in exploring business opportunities and getting advices from experts no matter where you are
• Flickr for photo sharing
• YouTube for video sharing
• Digg for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• StumbleUpon for voting on articles, pictures, audio, video etc.
• Upcoming.org for events updates
• Gmail for docs, readers and more.

Creating accounts on all these would certainly give you instant recognition on social media. On top of it, creating groups on social networking platforms would give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lots of people in one go.

Networking should be aggressive

Once you are on all the networking platforms, start interacting with relevant people. People who have similar interests and expertise. Gain knowledge from them and share yours. Allow them to reach you easily and make your availability most of the time. Interacting with them would make your network feel that you are active online and this would help you increase your brand’s credibility. Plus, your healthy participation would expand your networks.

I have shared my knowledge regarding how to create your personal brand through social media. Share in the comments section, if you have more to add to it.

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In it they describe 6 ways you can get new customers (as an ad agency) which really speak volumes about any organization whether you are an ad agency or a simply trying to sell a product.

1. Network Innovatively
2. Show your social media savvy
3. Adopt a recognizable platform
4. Be willing to contort
5. Write a book
6. Offer a direct line to the CEO

I do not agree with the definition of each by AdAge but the general gist it simple communicate. I provided my thoughts on each of these 6 below and how they may translate out to a larger group beyond simply ad agencies.

Networking is key, but doing it properly can mean the difference between being labeled a thought leader and a sales guy. I agree with what John Coleman does, and participate personally in these types of small innovative thinking sessions that are sparked by a single topic. This provides a non-invasive way of getting to know people without much pretense.

Showing your savvy and accepting one platform There are many ways to do this – but I think adopting multiple platforms is a great way to learn and understand a market. If your goal is to get clients, make sales, close business – than understanding what is out there and having an agnostic approach will serve you better than sticking to one platform. Showing your savvy will happen as your expertise develops across multiple platforms and you are able to make agile jumps to new things that come out. Nothing is worse than being pitched on a platform simply because there is no knowledge of other options.

Be able to contourt – this screams COMMUNICATION to me. As the world changes, so should your ability to adapt to customer needs. The cited example is building up an agency around a large brand (Dell). IMHO this should happen EVERY time there is a new brand brought in and account team formed. On a more realistic scaling front, this can be done in the form of listening to the needs of the potential customer and making sure you can meet them. (For those naysayers that state you cannot fit everyone into your business and stay strong against customizing all jobs – take this advice with a grain of salt as I know it will not work for everyone.)

Write a book Everyone jumps at the ambitiousness of this statement. It should read Write an E-Book its simple to do (.DOC to .PDF) low cost (Time) and free to publish (Ill let you publish it here if you want on Marketing.fm)

The work involved will be worth the effort even if nobody reads it (which will not be the case) as you will learn valuable lessons about your ideas and how they really look once they are structured in a publishable format.

Offer a direct line to the CEO Once again the genesis of this idea is communication. You should have open channels and folks that want to be concise, clear, and honest. Hopefully CEO contact will happen as a result of wanting to praise the work vs. move up the chain to be mad at a company. The overall point is that you should empower your employees to solve problems so that speaking to the CEO will be a nice bonus, but not a requirement for solving an issue.

If any agency, or individual wants to pursue one or more of these topics and needs a platform to do so (read: guest blog) feel free to reach out.

I recently added another widget to this blogs sidebar that will display items that I “share” from my Google reader. These items automatically get pulled into my FriendFeed stream but not very well read. Now when I share an item from my reader it will automatically be displayed in the right hand side of this blog – with the original author info as well – for you to click through and read about.

You can see the full listing of items that I share on my shared items page which you can subscribe to as well. As I have mentioned before I believe Google is becoming a social network that surfaces parts you need only when you need them.

I have tried other blog bling in the past and some is still a part of the site while others are not. That is the fun of having a blog to experiment on – if you do not like this feature let me know!

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There has been a lot of talk and speculation about how and when Google will jump into the social networking space. I think Google already launched a social network – its called Gmail. (Leaving Orkutout of this thought process and other iterations)

As I said in the final line of my last post the best social network might be one you are already on, but never proactively joined.

By having a gmail account you can;
chat with your friends across multiple networks
video chat with your friends
search all your correspondence
access everything via mobile and more apps
…and much much more.

This is not to mention all the other Google features that somehow are finding their way woven together.

What is the underlying central point for all this? I believe it will soon be your Google profile page, but not yet. For now its Gmail.

The reason is because people are having the continued problem of signing up for yet another account on yet another network. I believe the most beneficial network is one you do not even realize you are a part of. If you are anything like me you have way too many profiles already.

By delivering value at the point you need it without cluttering up the experience with features you don’t Google is delivering the ultimate disintermediated experience.

Who wants game apps when you want to video chat?
Why deal with comments and replies when you want to send a direct email?
Looking for a place to eat with friends via mobile? Then why clutter the area with favorites and status?

Each is solved with the ever ubiquitous Google account via any number of devices, all connected via the social network that is there when you need it with the functions you want – while hiding everything else.

Now that Google is encroaching on real estate on my blog, I expect features to roll out that pertain to “me the publisher” and will surface when I need them. For those that do not have a blog or a need for Google Friend Connect – they will never know it exists, which is exactly how social networking features should be.

Seamless transitions between the things you need and the things you don’t are what make a service great. Not knowing you are on the network is what will make the service succeed.

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This certainly represents a new direction for interacting with Google as more of a social network. You can now become an active “member” of this site, which will probably have more implications later on.

Blogs are active discussing the implications of Google Friend Connect, but the real battle is on as Facebook has also rolled out their own program, aptly called Facebook Connect, but is it enough?

I also noticed recently that some sites, like TechCrunch, are using the Facebook Connect system for authenticating blog comments. The interesting thing to note here is that this is not simply adding content to TechCrunch but also sending things back to Facebook.

…Facebook Connect doesn’t let information flow just one way. You can now post notifications of your comments to your Facebook wall whenever contributing here on TechCrunch. After hitting the “Add Comment” button, just select a type of feed item (which Facebook calls a “story”) and your friends on Facebook will have the chance to appreciate your snark and wit.

(source)

So what does this mean for this blog? What does this mean for other blogs?

Well, its a race for early adopters in my opinion because with the presence of MyBlogLog and now Google Friend Connect in my sidebar – would you even want a third? I currently use Disqus which solved the problem I had managing comments via email and comment spam.

As more people add Google Friend Connect to their blogs Google is gaining more real estate on pages, much like they did with the adsense program. What they do with this space remains to be seen.

I think that Google is slowly creating a social network with all the recent features it has been quietly releasing such as your own Google profile page, as explained by Chris Brogan. When signed into Google you can checkout your profile here. We might not think of this as a traditional social network with chat rooms, comments, photo sharing and a news feed, but with recent additions to Gmail and now Google Friend connect I think Google is going to pull all these things together.

The best social network might be one you are already on, but never proactively joined.

My friend Adam recently wrote about finding the right ratio of persistence, passion, and quality to try to come up with the formula for success.

In it he references the 90-90-1 principle from Jakob Nielsen known as the participation inequality.

Luckily for Adam and others Jake McKee has created a site specifically designed to explain and explore the 90-90-1 Principle:

It explains the principle and narrows down the explanation in a way that is easily digestible and of course shareable with others.

worth noting:

The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.

This is not a bad thing!

Having a continued concentration on quality over quantity we allow for an evolution of contributors to occur. Those that try to crank out mass quantities suffer from a quality problem, which in turn will lead to an audience problem, thus most likely lower the amount they contribute back. Those that contribute high quality postings and gain the trust and attention of an audience are more likely to continue the trend, and push them to come up with better materials.

With the advent of spam blogs and republished content coming up everywhere one could argue that the signal to noise ratio is getting worse. On the other hand, with the barriers to entry so low for new participants to enter this space we may be getting much more signal than we realize. I have seen that shift on my blog with simplifying my comment system with Disqus, going through a redesign, and keeping up with where and how my readers interact with my site.

Keeping up with comments is only part of participating with your community. Monitoring where your content gets consumed, whether by RSS, email, or on your page, is also very important.

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As the social media scene unfolds there is now more opportunity than ever to join a variety of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, WordPress and so on. The problem now more than anything is having the ability to manage all of those accounts and still remain effective at networking. Having the ability to reach your customer, clients, friends and followers wherever they are is critical to building connections.

The folks over at Ping.fm designed a site where you have the ability to update your status on dozens of different social networking sites. I use Gmail for just about everything and Ping.fm allows you to add its updater to your Google Chat list. So anytime I want to update my status, I click on the chat and type is my update. A second later I get a response that my status have been updated. If I were to log in to all the different accounts I have and manually update my status it would probably take 10-15 minutes (given I don’t get sidetracked being on those sites).

This begs the question, “What good is it if you update your status but don’t get the replies or see others’ updates?”

Glad you asked. The second part to this social networking management is having the ability to subscribe to most sites like Twitter and Facebook via your RSS reader. With one chat box you can update the status on all your social networking sites, and in one RSS reader you can see all your followers’ or friends’ status changes as well.

All of this automation might seem like it defeats the purpose of joining those sites to begin with, but in the end you are saving a lot of time while increasing your social networking capabilities. In my book I would rather be able to participate in 5 conversations well versus those same 5 conversations well but at a huge loss of time. Play around and see what other ideas you can come up with to increase your online footprint while managing to stay on top of all of them.

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When you request friendship with someone on Facebook you are assume you will be accepted or ignored after a certain point. The state in which you exist while not yet accepted and also not yet ignored is known as Facebook Purgatory. (update: yes, this is already a coined phrase see urban dictionary)

Facebook Purgatory is a place that was recently described by one of my friends as a strange area you are in when someone does not accept your “Friend Request” nor do they “Ignore” it.

There are some great definitions around the web of this “state” and the reasons why someone would keep you in it. My favorite recent example (which shall remain anonymous) is that one of my friends was “let out” of facebook purgatory by another friend who kept them in there for years – literally years. This means that every time they went into their friend request area this person sat – in Facebook purgatory – waiting to be accepted or rejected. I am not sure why…but I find this highly amusing.

Any other terms or phrases that have come out of social networking sites recently?