Our blog is moving

In order to scale our blogging capabilities we are in progress moving the blog to a new location, Government in The Lab.  New content will be posted at the new destination and we will keep this location up and running for a long time to come.  We want to ensure that no content is lost as there has been a lot of hard work put into writing, discussing, and growing our common understanding.  Stop by our new digs and let us know what you think.

PeerIndex, helping you understand your social capital

Image via CrunchBase

“PeerIndex helps you understand and benefit from your social and reputation capital online”, that is the claim made on the web site.  In my opinion PeerIndex does takes the broadest look at an individual by analyzing a person’s profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and includes their blogs.

While no formula is perfect, and PeerIndex, which is still in Beta, has plenty of room for growth, I was excited to ask Azeem Azhar, Founder of PeerIndex, a few questions.

Q.  There are several grading/ranking systems in the market today, including PeerIndex of course.  Is it important, in your opinion, that we ultimately only have one or are there benefits to multiple systems?
A.  It is better to have a two or three ranking systems–because users can then assess their applicability or value. We’ll all use different models, perhaps emphasise different characteristics for different applicability. But as a buyer of or user of rankings, I want to know that I have choice.  You don’t want too many systems, but a fair smattering seems like a good outcome. And also you want them to be competitive and not government-mandated like the NRSROs (S&P, Fitch and Moodys).

Q. What key partnerships have you established to raise the visibility of PeerIndex?
A.  We’re new out of the gate, but you’ll start to see more integrations in coming months.

Q.  What key partnerships have you established that benefit PeerIndex users?
A. Ditto–but there are benefits to having a PeerIndex profile, and people will start to see them this year.

Q.  Giving a grade to an individual or organization is complex.  In my opinion it is important to look at Facebook (accounts, pages, groups), LinkedIn (accounts plus groups), Twitter, and blogs.  What is your thinking and how soon will PeerIndex be able to weigh in all of these if you agree that they are important?
A. I think you have to step back and understand the objectives of ranking/rating systems. The main objective is to help someone who doesn’t know the person or thing being rated understand that person or thing.  That thing could be a corporate bond where the Moody’s rating helps you assess its relative risk to other similar instruments. Or it could be a person, where PeerIndex ratings help you understand the authority (or trustworthiness) of someone on a given topic relative to the population at large.

The question then is what signals do you bring to bear on scoring your rating.  Clearly we take a laundry list of stuff – every tweet, every friend, follower, location, URLs, semantic analysis to boot — many thousands of factors are weighed up for any given full profile. Today we don’t expose all of that data (for example, we don’t show you how many times you were Retweeted), but we do capture it.  But even if you have all those signals you need to work out to what extent do you weight those given signals–for example, what is the value of list membership versus being retweeted? Is a ‘like’ on Facebook worth more than a connection on LinkedIn? And then how do you estimate all those features for an individual user versus the population at large? And finally, do you get any predictive value from adding those extra features or not? (If not, an Occam’s Razor principle needs to come to bear.)

So the question of whether something is important or not, isn’t really a matter of opinion. It is a matter of testing against the outcome you are trying to achieve. Perhaps one of these extra factors matters, perhaps it doesn’t. As we iterate our models, we’ll get better at including things that do matter and those that don’t.

 Q.  How many registered users does PeerIndex have today?
A.  Nice try! We went into a public beta at the end of July. We have enough for us to be happy.

Q.  If  Twitter and Facebook are able to reach their 1 billion member target would you be able to support grading 1 billion members?
A.  Well Twitter and Facebook are going after different 1 billions, so call the overlap 1.5 billion. And the answer is absolutely yes.

Q. While overall grades are interesting they become even more interesting, in my opinion, as you look at categories and locations.  Is there any thought around grading users and organizations in more granular ways?
A.  Yes-we’ll have some news about that relatively soon. Sure–we made some assumptions in our first cut of the product about what people would want to see, and what would deliver value. One of those assumptions was that an extremely simple dashboard would hit the spot–what we’ve learnt is that people want to look at each other in ‘more granular ways’ as you put it.

 Q.  What are the big challenges you see over the next six to twelve months?
A.  I thought really hard about this. We’re an entrepreneurial venture, and as such imbued with delirious optimism and faith in our ability to read ambiguity and solve problems–so perhaps it’s our self confidence!

The Manchester Police Tweetfest

Image via Wikipedia

Ingrid provides an excellent update about the 24 hour tweetfest by the Manchester (UK) police force.  This information needs to become standardized and therefore sharable in much the same way that weather data is today.  We are seeing 311 and transit data becoming more and more standardized at the local level, to the benefit of everyone as application developers are grabbing this information and building applications (paid and free). 

It’s been in the news (see this Guardian article). Manchester police have been tweeting all calls over a 24 hour period. It’s been an interesting and effective way to show the range of police calls – it’s not all break-ins and bust-ups. A lot of it is what’s been described as ‘social work’ – ‘confused man reporting his television isn’t working’, etc. My favourite was the tweet that described a call to deal with a man who was holding … Read More

via Policy and Performance

Citizen Engagement through IBM Jams

While the video dates back to July the concepts discussed in this video certainly still apply to all cities and towns across the world. I apologize for the IBM advertising aspects of this (I am not affiliated and make no money from it):

7 Tips to Mastering Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising can be a powerful tool for increasing sales as well as for growing membership in your Facebook fan pages (again, ultimately to grow revenue).  The author goes into good detail on these seven facts, read on through to explore in more detail:

1. There are two primary destinations that can be advertised through Facebook
2. Ad costs and impressions are heavily influenced by click-through rate
3. Targeting friends of connections increases the relevance of your ad
4. Facebook advertising takes time
5. An “Action” is an in-ad Like
6. Daily budget and daily spend limit are not the same
7. You’re not the only person who can access and edit your Facebook ad dashboard

Are there other key points people should keep in mind?

 Terry Lozoff, Pres/CEO of Antler Advertising on Facebook can be a cost-effective means of bringing new people to your fan page. To truly harness the value of Facebook advertising, you’ll need to dedicate time and resources to test, analyze, monitor and tweak your ads. Do this and you may just find a sea of opportunity waiting for your brand, company or event. The biggest challenge with Facebook advertising is maximizing the efficiency of your ads … Read More

via Mike Magolnick

Gubernatorial Candidate Chafee promises open government reform

My friend Sid Burgess wrote this excellent guest post about gubernatorial Candidate Lincoln Chafee’s recent comments about open government.  Sid does work with the team at SeeClickFix, so please keep this in mind as you read his post.  Since I have a great deal of respect for the SeeClickFix team, and Sid, I do not mind highlighting them as part of this post (I receive nothing in the process, just FYI).   

Beyond what Sid shares below I also wanted to note that this is a very good sign for American politics.  It is one of the few times I have seen a political candidate speak about open government as part of their political platform.   Will other candidates pick this up and merge this message into their campaign?  Will this spark more meaningful citizen conversations and involvement?  Will this translate into measurable change leading to cost savings and other efficiency wins?  Only time will tell, of course, but at least the conversation is underway.

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Image from campaign website

Lincoln Chafee, independent candidate for Governor of Rhode Island, is all about the power of the community. In a recent press release outlining his plan for “open, accessible, accountable government,” Chafee made it clear that real change starts when citizens and their governments have connectivity and communication. He plans to bring Rhode Island in step with other forward-thinking administrations by improving the accessibility and usability of the state’s website, as well as initiating an open procurement process. Chafee also intends to utilize tools which enhance open government, such as GovLoop and . . . SeeClickFix!

“I want to include Rhode Islanders in the process of stewarding their neighborhoods by encouraging the use of SeeClickFix, a free mobile phone and web application that allows citizens to identify, report, and fix non-emergency issues in their neighborhoods,” stated Chafee on his campaign website. Wasting no time, the campaign has already organized a “SeeClickFix Storm” to take place this weekend across Rhode Island, during which supporters are asked to find and report issues in their neighborhoods with the goal of publicizing Chafee’s open-government initiative.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen groups of people get together, with friends or in support of a cause, to utilize SeeClickFix en masse. In some ways, it is the most fun and effective way of making a big difference with relatively little effort. Chafee’s campaign initiative will be off to an effective start with the help of SeeClickFix to bridge the communication gap between citizens and their local governments. “With this ‘SeeClickFix Storm,’ we can start using SeeClickFix statewide and getting community issues fixed,” Chafee says on the Facebook invite to the event. “And more broadly, Rhode Island citizens can participate in the work of government in a meaningful way.”

SocialMadeSimple, making social media easier for real estate professionals

While at a Tweetup last night in Cambridge I ran into the people behind SocialMadeSimple and had the opportunity to hear a bit about their solution.  This video, from their website, hits upon many of the key points.

Those of us that work extensively with social media often forget that most people know little about how to blog, tweet, etc…, and/or are fearful of getting started.  SocialMadeSimple is working to eliminate the pain by for a very large niche, real estate and mortgage professionals.  They are taking a big picture approach and helping these people by:

• Providing strategic plans to guide users at all levels of comfort.  Starting with a plan is critical to success.
• Creating the accounts, if not already in place, to support social media activity.
• Providing education on the tools.
• Providing a library of content.  Many people sit down in front of their computer and have no idea what to write. Fresh content is added to their library providing professionals with articles they can simply share or comment upon depending on their comfort level.
• Grading users.  Goals are only useful if you are measuring how you are doing against them.  This grading system keeps people, and entire organizations, on track.

SocialMadeSimple is a  new company but they are already gaining traction.  They recently signed a deal with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Southern California and Arizona, giving more than 6,500 agents in that area access to their solution.   I’ll keep an eye on how they progress, stay tuned.

John

Related Articles

• SocialMadeSimple Inks Deal with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Arizona and Southern California (prweb.com)

Android to Add Next 500M Mobile Web Users in India? (via GigaOM)

Image via Wikipedia

I continue to push the point that the Android phone will easily defeat the iPhone, in terms of overall market share, within the next 9 – 12 months.  Adding a half billion people in India would definitely go a long way, wouldn’t it, towards making this a reality.  Even if the iPhone comes to Verizon I think it’s a matter of too little too late.  What do you think?

 New, private 3G networks in India combined with mobile adoption and Google’s (s goog) march towards powering inexpensive smartphones in the Asia-Pacific region could bring half a billion more people to the mobile web in India by 2014. Handset makers new to the smartphone market are gearing up to soon offer Android devices for $150 to Indian consumers, with hopes of future phones priced below $100, says the Wall Street Journal. If these efforts ar … Read More

via GigaOM

Related Articles

• Android to Add Next 500M Mobile Web Users in India? (gigaom.com)
• Nielsen: Android Surges to No. 1 in Recent Sales (Ryan Kim/GigaOM) (techmeme.com)

Are you a social media entrepreneur?

Great video, you can’t miss this one.

PostRank Connect

Image via Wikipedia

I learned about PostRank Connect at the recent Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston and decided to give it a try as it meets my key criteria:

• It promises to provide me with insights about my content through the PostRank Analytics application (free, for now, when you sign-up for PostRank Connect).
• It promises to connect me with brands that could lead to mutually beneficial relationships.
• It is FREE.

How do you sign up?

Navigate to the sign-up page and enter standard information like your username, password, and location.  Now identify your content sources, your blogs and your social media accounts.  Important points:

• It is critical that you identify the attributes of your blogs as you set them up, making it easier to do the matching of brands and influencers.
• When you identify your blog you must also prove ownership, like you do with Google Analytics and other similar tools, by either adding a page, an image, or making a networking change through DNS.
• When you add a new contact source you can link it to a Twitter account.  Ideally you should also be able to tie in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and any number of other accounts as well.
• To achieve the best results you should use Google Analytics to your site.  This will enable you to see how engagement and traffic tie together.

Alright, what else?

Well, return to business as usual for a couple of days, running any planned campaigns or just letting the sites run as you normally do.  After a few days log back in, select the My Sites tab and then click upon the View Analytics button.  I set this up for a brand new community that I am very slowly tweaking and very slowly rolling out.    When I view analytics for this site I see the following:

You can view, side by side, the page view information and the social engagement information associated with this site.  If you scroll beneath this first chart you will also see all Facebook status updates and Twitter messages that are related to content or pages you are tracking for this site.  By default all blog posts (tracked via RSS feed) are tracked.  Other content must be added manually as part of the setup process.

Deeper analysis?

You can click upon the Analyze menu to download a CSV file which I am, at this point, unimpressed with.   You are not given the option to choose a date range or fields to include in the CSV file and the data, at least for my test site,was not useful.  I am looking for, and hoping to see, PostRank put a lot more into the reporting for this solution.  This offering is not significantly more powerful than Google Analytics alone.

My verdict?

The product is easy to set up and requires a minimal effort to interact with.  If you are already making use of Google Analytics and investing in Twitter and Facebook than you should give this product a try.  If you are not using Analytics, however, I would not both using this product.

John

Related Articles

• Analytics For Social Media (outspokenmedia.com)
• Social Graph, Influence and the Social Web | PostRank Blog (postrank.com)
• Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? (adamsherk.com)
• PostRank adds Google Chrome extension and soft launches new service, PostRank Connect (techvibes.com)