When you market reacts badly to something you’ve done, it is because you should have known not to do it in the first place.

It is just that simple.

That is why Monitoring isn’t enough – it may be for your PR agency, but not when you are running a business.   

We helped the New York Times track the TeamConan meme on social media, but honestly, I’d rather have helped NBC engage the market before they started making decisions. Imagine the press we would have seen if NBC had found a creative way to have an open conversation with the market around one simple question “what should we do with late night”.

So, let’s assume NBC has been monitoring – what is the upside now? How do you put the genie back in the bottle?  

This is where monitoring fails. All the alerts, charts, graphs and data visualizations in the world can’t undo your bad decisions.

So, let me propose a radical solution – use justSignal, not at your PR agency, not just in your marketing department, but as a tool to make the voice of the market an important part of every decision you make. Take the data and build it into your product management, customer service, marketing, and billing decisions. Where you don’t have the data – engage the market. Ask them what you want to know – start a conversation and make a better decision.

You might say, “but I’m not NBC – my company will never be a trending topic on Twitter no matter how bad a decision we make” – and you are probably right. The thing is, companies rarely go out of business because of one bad decision – they usually go out of business because they make hundreds of them – every year – decisions that move their product or service farther and farther away from what the market wants.

Great companies own their markets because they make better decisions, consistently. Decisions better tuned to the needs of their target market. Starting today, you can have the information at the tips of your fingers. You can have real insight into the needs of your target market – and the ability to engage them in an open conversation about how you can help. Sounds good, right?

Late last week we announced that our newest analytic – SignalLinks – had left beta and was rolled out to all justSignal accounts. You can learn more about the SignalLinks analytic here.

Today we wanted to let you know that we’ve added the metadata for SignalLinks to our API.

We generate tons of metadata – or data about the Social Media content we collect – to facilitate our analytics and because we dig statistical analysis. Much of the metadata we generate never appears in our base analytics.

One of the key features of justSignal is our commitment to actually implementing an open data policy. Our open data policy isn’t a paragraph in our Terms of Service, or a vague statement on our site – it is something we consistently implement.

In accordance with that principal we publish every scrap of metadata we generate via our API services. SignalLinks is an excellent example. When we designed the metadata generation for SignalLinks we designed for two key views:

1. Links – Volume data about specific links (how many times was it mentioned).
2. Users – Who is mentioning which links, how often, etc.

The user view has not yet been released as an analytic. When we designed the SignalLinks analytic we realized that the Links view contained so much information that it didn’t make sense to try to cram in Users view – we thought it would be too much and, frankly, a little confusing.

But just because we aren’t using it right now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to you.

The API release today includes both the Links and Users views – every scrap of metadata we are generating.

SignalLinks – Links View

The Links View contains two sets of information:

1. The top (up to) 100 mentioned links
   • Number of Mentions
   • Date (month, day, year)
   • Original URL (probably shortened)
   • End URL (The actual destination URL)
   • Domain (The domain the URL points to i.e., google.com)
2. Links Summary – a summary of the data for all mentioned links.
   • Date (month, day, year)
   • Total number of mentions (content containing a link)
   • Number of distinct links found.
   • Mean number of mentions
   • Median number of mentions
   • Standard Deviation number of mentions

SignalLinks – User View
The User View contains the same two information sets, but organized around the user mentioning the link (not the link itself).

1. The top (up to) 100 users posting links (by number of links posted)
   • Number of times the user mentioned the link.
   • Date (month, day, year)
   • Original URL (probably shortened)
   • End URL (The actual destination URL)
   • Domain (The domain the URL points to i.e., google.com)
   • User
2. Links Summary – a summary of the data for all mentioned links.
   • Date (month, day, year)
   • Total number of mentions (content containing a link)
   • Number of users who mentioned a link.
   • Mean number of times a user mentioned a link.
   • Median number of times a user mentioned a link.
   • Standard Deviation number of times a user mentioned a link.

This is a powerful dataset for analyzing the links found in your Signal. Combining this with information you probably already have (metrics measuring the number of hits on specific landing pages, conversion rates on landing pages, etc) will give you a powerful tool to understand how much the appearance of those links on Social Media sites drives both traffic and conversion.

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:

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.

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.