Join Us at Social Media AZ

201001200956.jpgThis year we are sponsoring SMAZ – Arizona’s premier Social Media event for businesses. The event is being held in Downtown Tempe at the MadCap Theatre. Fred VonGraf – the events organizer – has put together a phenomenal list of speakers and panels which will make this event a must attend if you are interested in using Social Media in your business.

I know, times are tough and you’ve got to be smart about how you spend your limited capital. So if you register using the code “justsignal” you will receive 45% off the standard rate.

We are sponsoring SMAZ this year and will be providing some justSignal services to the event, you can check them out here:

Participate in the SMAZ conversation on your Mobile Device: http://justsignal.com/smaz/mobile

Check ou the SMAZ buzz: http://justsignal.com/smaz2010  

I look forward to seeing you there.

SignalLinks – Tracking the Link Buzz in your Signal

Today we’ve released – in beta, to a limited number of justSignal customers – our newest Signal Analytic, SignalLinks.

SignalLinks gives you detailed information about which links we find in your Signal, how often they are mentioned and which domains are mentioned the most. This information is provided for yesterday and the total for the previous 30 days.

Maybe most importantly we provide a graph of the number of link mentions versus the total number of unique links found.

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 10.47.17 AM.png

This simple graph tells you the level of link “BUZZ” generated on any given day. The further apart the two lines get, the more likely it is that a small number of links are being mentioned repeatedly. In this example see 21-Nov:

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 10.51.06 AM.png

The divergence of the lines tells you there was buzz around a small number of links being mentioned very often. The greater the separation the more “link buzz” there was.

Looking at the data we find that the link http://my.barackobama.com/tweetyoursenator-bitly/?source=101 was mentioned 1,808 times. The next closest link was mentioned less than 1/4 as much.

Link Reporting:

The report includes the most mentioned links for the previous day:

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 10.56.54 AM.png

And the last 30 days:

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 10.58.14 AM.png

Domain Reporting:

The report includes the most mentioned domains for the previous day:

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 11.00.16 AM.png

And the last 30 days:

Screen shot 2009-11-25 at 11.01.03 AM.png

This information paired with our SignalMeter, SignalDensity and User Activity analytics provide you a comprehensive view of the activity for your Signal.

If you are not on the beta customer list for the SignalLink you should expect to start seeing SignalLinks delivered to your Inbox in the next 2 weeks. If you haven’t signed up for justSignal yet – get yours today.

As always if you have any questions just let us know.

Let’s Talk About Open

door.thumb.jpeg It is a simple philosophy really, you pay us to collect user generated content (or Social Media if you prefer) provide you analytics and engagement tools – you own the data.

Every company talks about open and data portability, we actually deliver.

How? We offer you two API levels of service that allow you to get all of the the data we collect – and the metadata we generate – out of justSignal. Maybe you want to feed it into your own Analytics solution… maybe you want to combine it with your marketing and sales data… maybe you just want to store it as a historical record. It doesn’t mater to us why, because it is your data.

So, what is actually in this data – because the devil is always in the details right?

There are two basic types of data you get from our Digest and Real Time API’s:

  1. Content
  2. Metadata

Content

The content section of the data is every element we collect from the underlying services. For example, for Twitter we pass along to you every single field we get from the Twitter Search API. It is all the content, every field. The same holds true for every service we collect from (Twitter, Blog Search, Backtype, Flickr, and YouTube).

When we add new services (more on that later) they will appear in the content section of the API.

Metadata

As we collect data from the services we examine the data for certain useful pieces of information. For example, we determine which of the terms in your filter were matched for that piece of content – which we use to generate your weekly SignalDensity report:

200911211036.jpg

The following metadata types are currently included:

Content Term

The terms (or keywords) from your filter that were in the content.

Daily Volume Summary

The number of pieces of content we collected by service. Includes the total volume, number of unique users posting, average per user, median per user and standard deviation per user. For Example:

  • Date: 2009-10-22
  • Total Tweets: 685
  • Number of Users: 565
  • Average Tweets Per User: 1.21239
  • Median Tweets Per User: 1
  • Standard Deviation Tweets Per User: 0.89176

This information is generated for every service we collect from.

Daily Top 100 Users by Service

Every day we generate the top 100 users (by volume) for each service we collect from. Included in this data is the User information (user name and link to the user page if available) and number of pieces of content (tweets/blog posts/etc).

Tweet Links

We extract links from the Tweets we collect and generate information about that link. The information includes both the original link (likely shortened), the resolved link (what the shortened link actually points to), the domain of the resolved link, and a wealth of information about the HTTP transaction. For Example:

  • Original URL: http://bit.ly/Fle3y
  • Resolved URL: http://www.tweetmyjobs.com/jobpostings/2189294?src=1
  • Domain: www.tweetmyjobs.com
  • HTTP Transaction information including, HTTP Code, Transfer Time, Redirect Count, Content Type, etc

If you’d like a sample of the XML output of the API you can download one here.

As we continue to add services and create new and interesting sets of metadata they will appear in these APIs.

data-jail.jpg At justSignal we believe you can talk about open, or you can just do it. Our commitment to you is that your data is yours, you will always have the ability to extract it from our service and do with it what you will.

How’s that for open?

If you have any questions please let me know.

TweetsForBoobs – How justSignal Helped Make it Happen

200910090957.jpg Sometimes the best way to illustrate how justSignal can accelerate your strategy is by providing concrete examples of how others have accelerated theirs.

TweetsForBoobs is raising money for the Susan G. Komen foundation by encouraging folks to tweet the #tweetsforboobs hash tag on Twitter. It is the brain child of Chase Granberry and Josh Strebel – justSignal (and I for that matter) claim no credit for the idea or it’s successful execution.

In the interest of full disclosure, we did donate justSignal to TweetsForBoobs.

TweetsForBoobs needed four things in order to complete their vision.

  1. A way to capture Tweets about the site and with the hashtag
  2. The ability to put those Tweets on the site in real time.
  3. A way to count how many times a Twitter User used the hashtag.
  4. A way to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

justSignal, because we focus on the complete Social Media Lifecycle, was uniquely suited to get them there – fast.

TweetsForBoobs was able to create a Signal that pulled in the content they were interested in. They were also able to – using our Exclusion Engine – remove spam and re-tweet bots from their Signal.

In order to create an engaging user experience on the site TweetsForBoobs dropped in and customized our real-time Twitter widget.   

Using our API service, TweetsForBoobs was able to pull in all mentions of the hashtag and the site in near real-time. This enabled them to count how many times each user tweeted the hash tag and update the site with current pledge totals.

Finally, TweetsForBoobs wanted to have some information (analysis) that gave them some indication of how the campaign was going. Since every Signal comes with our SignalReports (SignalMeter, SignalDensity and User Activity) they had basic who, when, and how much information.

sm-lifecycle.png

That is execution of the complete Social Media Lifecycle enabled by justSignal.

  1. Signal – Getting the #tweetsforboobs content.
  2. Engagement – Using our Widgets to put the content on the site, and using the API to create site specific information.
  3. Analytics – Using our SignalReports to gauge the effectiveness of the effort.

What makes TweetsForBoobs even more interesting is that they clearly show the benefit of our approach to data and analytics. When Chase wanted to understand the “Reach” of the hashtag he wasn’t confined by the data we provide “out of the box”.

The data is yours, when you have a question we don’t answer – because it is the really, really important kind, those specific to your business, company, product or service – you have access to the entire data set and the unfettered ability to mine out what is important to you.

You can read Chase’s excellent summary of the data and his thoughts on justSignal at the Authority Labs Blog.

What about action?

That is where you come in… head over to TweetsForBoobs or just grab your favorite Twitter client and send a tweet with #tweetsforboobs in it. Every time you do you pledge $1.00 to the Susan G. Komen foundation.

justSignal, TweetsForBoobs, and a Special Offer

justSignal is doing what we can to support the search for a cure. We all know someone, a mother, sister, cousin, aunt or co-worker who’s life has been touched by Breast Cancer. It is high time we found a cure.



At justSignal we’ve commited by donating our services to TweetsForBoobs in an effort to use Social Media to raise donations for the Susan G. Komen foundation. But we want to do more.



Until the end of October, you can sign up for justSignal and make a donation to the Susan G. Komen foundation at the same time. Just use Promotional Code tweetsforboobs and you’ll get your first month of service for just $5.00 – and we will donate that $5.00 directly to the Susan G. Komen foundation.



If you don’t want to sign up… that is cool too, but please head over to TweetsForBoobs and donate to the cause.



The All New justSignal

drop-logoI’m really proud of justSignal the product… we’ve been hard at work over the last 4 months creating – what I believe to be – the the most compelling Toolkit for extracting real ROI from Social Media.

That being said, I’d be the first to admit, we ignored justSignal.com. Yep, it is true, we simply paid no attention to it. I was completely focused on creating a bullet proof platform to deliver Signal, Engagement, and Analytics that was both useful day one and open – so it can deliver value continuously. I will admit, however, that I consistently had to tell people:

Yeah, we are doing killer stuff… just don’t look at our website.

Well, that ends today.

Welcome to the new justSignal.com. Welcome to The Social Media Toolkit for Business.