Ok, so I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I just realized that Cision is white labeling Radian6’s social media monitoring product for their own platform (the announcement came in late October and you can see the Dashboard looks EXACTLY like Radian6’s).  In fact, they barely even bothered with the “label” part of white labeling.  All I have to say  is… REALLYYYYY????  Radian6 has a fine platform.  I’ve paid for it, I’ve used it, and I’ve endorsed it at times.  However, it’s not great.  None of them are. Props to Radian6, though, for landing Cision.  I’m sure that sales rep bought a round of drinks when the sig came through.

Let me back up a step by saying that I manage social media monitoring for a lot of companies.  Big companies.  Companies who would pay real money for real information.  Companies who want social media monitoring.  And yes, I’ve tried all of them - Umbria (you want HOW much?  HA!), Radian6, SentimeMetrics (DISASTER!), CyberAlert, Metrica, BuzzLogic (LOL - “we can’t do a temporary trial because we don’t have any controls on our system and we’re afraid you’ll just download everything”.  Oh really?  That Fortune 200 client I represent?  Gone.  No soup for you…), the list goes on.

That’s why we look to a company like Cision - the 800lb gorilla in the media monitoring industry that, despite a pretty pitiful rebranding (does anybody want to buy more database access from the new Cision rather than the old Bacon’s?), still has the coffers to really invest in something as critical as social media monitoring and bring a major, innovative product to the marketplace.  How could they fail us so badly?

Are you ready for a confession?  I have software on my personal desktop that does better than this.  You want to hear another secret?  I paid the international developers less than a single month’s subscription to Radian6 to develop the real guts of the software.  And they were thrilled!  It’s just not that difficult to create social media monitoring software.  Why can’t Cision figure it out?

Dear Cision rep who (hopefully) stumbles across this blog post: it’s called Yahoo! Pipes.  Start there.  With a little ingenuity you can figure out what we want from our social media monitoring software.  Hell, with Yahoo! Pipes you can build a FREE platform that does all the gruntwork of a Radian6.  The only thing that’s left is to build a quick command line bot to scrape the data you are pulling and pump out mildly attractive graphs.  Ta-daaaaa!!! The world is good and so is your social media monitoring product.  You can even call it Cision.

I realize this has been a really negative post.  In case you can’t tell, this is a real hot button of mine.  I’ve looked HARD.  Why can’t I find decent social media monitoring software?  I always like to end on a high note, so let’s finish up with a look at a few guys who DO actually get social media monitoring:

Mike Manuel

Lee White

SOCIALMEDIATRADER

The long postulated relationship between Beer and Church has been now been laid to rest by a complex analysis of user behavior in Facebook.  The beer industry is still reeling from this morning’s announcement (as discovered via Facebook Lexicon) that large spikes in Church-related discussion lead to significant declines in Beer-related discussion.  Conversely, large spikes in discussion of beer drinking are invariably followed by an increase in Church-related discussion.  The graph found at Facebook Lexicon continues along a similar path over the year with Beer and Church dovetailing closely.  The implication that users attend more Church after drinking large amounts of beer has long been speculated.  The converse implication, however, that Church attendance leads to brief declines in beer drinking is counterintuitive for most people who have been to Church before.

“Nothing makes me want a cold beer more than a long day at church,” says one Church-going beer drinker who asked to remain anonymous.

The discovery that Church is negatively impacting the beer drinking habits of Facebook users is seen as a major indicator of things to come in the industry.  Spokespersons for the beer industry are expected to be meeting with representatives from the Pope and other religious leaders around the world in the coming days to discuss the implications of these findings.  Highlights from the Facebook Lexicon graph can be found below.  The full Facebook Lexicon findings can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/a7nku6

Facebook Lexicon, which launched earlier this year, allows users to view volume of specific keywords being posted as Wall Posts to Facebook pages over time.  The Wall Post function, which is being tracked by Facebook Lexicon, is one of the best ways to track trends or keyword buzz because its simple and straight forward usability, coupled with its visibility on friends’ profiles and in News Feeds, makes it highly viral.

By now most people have heard of the Iraqi journalist who threw his two shoes at President Bush’s head during what the White House was billing as a celebratory press conference (see video below).  This Iraqi shoe incident, which happened on December 14, spawned a wave of viral activity from YouTube to Huff to Digg (actually THREE of the top five stories on Digg as of this posting were covering the President Bush Iraqi shoe story).  Search volume for “President Bush” spiked also due to the Iraqi shoe incident - to the highest it’s been since he was reelected in 2004 (see below for recent trends in search volume for “President Bush”).

Amid all this chaos and hubbub, a few entrepreneuring Brits are cashing in on the President Bush Iraqi shoe incident.  Enter Sock and Awe! - a very simple (like seriously simple), Flash video game in which the player tries to hit a ducking President Bush with his or her shoe.  Sounds like it was probably created by a couple of college kids skipping class during finals week, right?  Perhaps.  But more importantly, the destination is being used to promote a soon-to-be-launched website call PopJam.  Meanwhile, not only have the PopJam founders jumped on the Bush-Shoe bandwagon to promote their site to millions of people (over 21 million shoes have been thrown by nearly a million people in just two days), they are now selling their overnight sensation on eBay:

The auction is currently commanding nearly $2,000 with the bulk of the bidding undoubtedly being left to the final moments.  What’s the lesson here for those of us trying to market “legitimate” brands to “legitimate” audiences while juggling “pain in the ass” regulatory departments?

The entire online world is keyword-driven.  Period.  Everything is found by keywords, whether it’s in Google, YouTube, Technorati, or whatever other portal is used to access information.  In this case the terms “President Bush” “Iraq” and “Shoe” created an entirey new marketplace in a comically short period of time.  Keywords make up consumers’ search behavior, define the content they access, and allow us as marketers to direct what content they are landing on, so long as we understand our consumer well enough to know the secret combination that makes up their keyword-driven behavior.

Take this video for instance… I uploaded it at the time of posting this blog.  How many views do you think I can get - well after the newsworthiness of its content has died away, simply by optimizing it for the right keywords?  Let’s find out…

See the full release here: Chevys Mexican Restaurant

Chevys has launched their first ever holiday widget, embedded below, and are offering a $500 party to the three people who generate the most engagement.  The tactic is a way of incentivizing online users to not only play the Mexican Jumping Bean game, download recipes, or buy gift cards through the widget themselves, but to share the Compadre widget with as many of their friends as possible.  The more of their friends who interact with the widget, the greater chance they have of winning a $500 holiday party.

Check it out, but if you end up winning, I’d better be on the guest list.

CarryOn is supporting the Digital Family Reunion (DFR), an event that will bring together the California technology and business communities for the holidays. In association with some of the region’s top trade associations and social networking groups, the DFR will reignite old relationships, spark new ones, and set the stage to kick off 2009 with a bright new start.

Inviting early adopters and legacy participants of the Internet 1.0 and today’s digitally apt Internet 2.0 tube dwellers, the DFR creates the optimum conditions for these generations to synergize with one another and inspire opportunities that will serve our industries, our region, and our society at large.  The DFR is helping to advance the conversation between these like-minded, yet diverse communities by asking the question: “If we knew how connected we all are, how would that change everything?”

Join the conversation along with CarryOn!  The event takes place Thursday, December 11 from 5-10 p.m. at the Skirball.  Friends of CarryOn can enjoy a discounted ticket price by using the promotion code “DFR30.”

This week marked the 75th anniversary of the 1933 ratification of the 21st Amendment, which ended the country’s ban on booze. The amazing thing is that this has become a major media event garnering attention from all the big guns… from The Today Show and Good Morning America to USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. And, have you checked Facebook statuses lately? Or, how about Twitter? There are hundreds of updates and Tweets from consumers who plan to celebrate the end of Prohibition with a drink or few. Blogs are ablaze with party suggestions, drink recipes and historical tidbits too. Everyone is getting in on the action! San Francisco is celebrating with a parade down Market Street that ends at a brewery, and similar events are being held in New York, Chicago, New Orleans and other US cities. Dewar’s Scotch bought full-page ads in New York to promote the day. Even global think-tank The Cato Institute is taking advantage of the day and hosting a discussion “Free to Booze” in DC. Behind the Prohibition Repeal Celebration are the marketers who seized the opportunity to create a national drinking holiday when before we had none. I’d like to toast to them and their savvy promotional genius. And thanks to President Roosevelt, who signed us out of national Prohibition, it won’t be with bathtub gin.

Cheers guys.