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We wanted to take a second to note that Ed (@znmeb) and Dan (@sunsblogger) won our first Twitalyzer Community contest to tag social media experts, celebrities, and politicians. Congratulations to both guys who will shortly see their faces in rotation on the “Featured Users” widgets throughout the web site.
While Ed, Dan, Carri, and a host of other folks tagged like crazy we didn’t get the critical mass we’d hoped, especially among politicians and celebrities. Perhaps a better strategy is to ask you … what could we offer you to get you to tag folks in Twitalyzer? Make tagging easier? More intuitive? Better prizes? Cash money? What do you think?
If you have ideas and suggestions please Tweet us directly and let us know. Thanks!
As we kick off the Twitalyzer Community idea we wanted to see if we could get your collective help with something!
We’d really like to start getting more people tagged in Twitalyzer. Tagging makes the application amazingly more powerful and useful, but we have not done a good job clarifying the how’s and why’s of tagging. While we work that out, we want to have a contest!
The contest is to see who can add the tags “Social_Media_Expert”, “Politician”, and “Celebrity” to the greatest number of Twitter users in our system. All you need to do to add the tags is Twitalyze someone you know to be in one of those three categories, click any of the “Tag” buttons on their profile, and add the text. For example:
The only real requirement is that, you know, the person you’re tagging is a social media expert, politician, or celebrity. We’ll let you be the judge, but we will also spot check your work and disallow/remove inappropriate entries so don’t be that guy, okay? To keep track of who is doing the most tagging we’ve created this uber-cool Top 25 Twitalyzer Tracker list that you can segment by geographic location or tag applied. Check out the early results for all three categories:
- Twitalyzer Tag “Social_Media_Expert”
- Twitalyzer Tag “Politician”
- Twitalyzer Tag “Celebrity“
The prize for the “top tagger” in each category on February 1, 2010 will be a free month in the “Featured User” slot all throughout Twitalyzer (a $100 USD value!!!) That and the warm feeling you’ll get when you go to bed knowing you did something really awesome for the Twitalyzer Community. Go forth and tag, Twitalyzers!
One thing that Jeff and I have discovered since releasing Twitalyzer 2.0 is that some of our users are really, really passionate about, well, Twitalyzing people. We think this is totally, totally awesome, and we have been brainstorming on ways to both recognize the fantastic work many of you are doing on our behalf and, if people are willing, apply crowd-sourcing techniques to help improve Twitalyzer.
The best idea we’ve had so far is to launch this section of the site, The Twitalyzer Community pages!
Through the Twitalyzer Community pages we will do our very best to communicate our needs to you and, more importantly, give all of you a voice to ask for the features you’d like to see us develop in subsequent iterations of the application. While you all know we watch Twitter Search religiously for mentions of Twitalyzer and are always happy to get feedback via email (feedback@twitalyzer.com or write to eric@twitalyzer.com or jeff@twitalyzer.com), we wanted to set up another way for folks to offer feedback publicly. Something really, really easy.
How about just tagging your feedback with the hashtag #twitalyzer?
Doing this will let us keep an eye on your feedback using Twitalyzer Search which we think is a pretty freaking useful thing to do. Not that we’ll respond differently if you have low impact or influence … not us, we love you guys! If you have an idea, suggestion, criticism, complaint, or just want to let us know you love us too, tag your Tweet with “#twitalyzer” and we’ll be sure to get back to you ASAP!
You can even keep in touch with each other that way if you like. Who knows how it will evolve?
By very, very popular demand we just rolled out a private tagging option in Twitalyzer Tags (which you need to Sign in with Twitter to use, of course!) Now, when you go to tag a person, you’ll see a checkbox that says “Private.” When you check that box, the tag will be added to the person, and nobody but you will know!
Sneaky, huh? We don’t even send an auto-Tweet about the tagging when you’re using private tags (since that would kind of defeat the purpose, right?)
Like we said, we applied this “marketer” tag to our pal @kaykas and when you go to his profile that tag will simply not appear, at least not as associated with us! But, when you go to your Twitalyzer Dashboard > Tagged report you will see this “marketer” tag followed by an asterisk (”*”) telling you the tag is “private” and you’ll be able to track all the folks you’ve labeled as such!
Brilliant, huh? Even better is that you can use the Twitalyzer Dashboard > Segments tool to apply “private” tags en masse now simply by clicking that same “Private” checkbox:
And there you have it! We welcome your feedback on this feature and please let us know if you find any bugs or glitches.
It’s now been two weeks since we publicly launched Twitalyzer 2.0. We are humbled by the amazing number of people, brands and organizations using Twitalyzer to help them understand their impact on Twitter and to improve their short-messaging strategies.
We have been featured on a couple of our favorite blogs:
- Silicon Florist: Twitalyzer 2.0 takes analyzing Twitter - and over analyzing yourself - to a whole new level
- The Next Web: Twitalyzer Releases Version 2 Of Their Popular Twitter Statistics Application - You Will Use This
- We even got featured on our local NBC affiliate’s Web Watch segment (thank you @StephStricklen and @TheSquare)
While we are certainly happy with this recognition, we are more proud of what you had to say about Twitalyzer 2.0. Here are a few tweets that we really liked!
- “We DO love Twitalyzer! You have done a great job! It’s a really useful tool for us!” @WebEx
- “The new Twitalyzer sets a new standard. I love it!!” @Twitter_Tips
- “Using Twitalyzer in many ways. Benchmarking, finding influencers, GA integration, setting goals, & ongoing analysis. Love it!” @Hallie_Janssen
Twitalyzer continues to be adopted by businesses and organizations of all sizes, as well as applied to various studies. Mark Senak (@eyeonFDA) of PR and Communication firm Fleishman-Hillard published a case study power and use of Twitter by the US Congress using data from Twitalyzer. The white paper is entitled “Twongress - The Power of Twitter in Congress” and can be found here: http://bit.ly/54goBP
We are looking forward to pushing exciting new features and as always, keep the feedback coming
It has been a few months of hard work but we’re very, very happy to announce that everyone now has access to Twitalyzer 2.0! I’m sure Jeff will have a lot more people to thank but I wanted to start spreading the word that the application is now open to all and the 2.0 BETA is officially closed.
If you’re just seeing the new version for the first time we strongly recommend that you take the time to download and read the Twitalyzer Handbook which should get you up to speed on nearly everything you need to know. Beyond the handbook you can get more information about the new release a few different ways:
- Check out our “Help” file online. Yeah, we went ahead and did it and actually provided, you know, helpful links. The help file has contact information, definitions, information about changes to the application, and a bunch of other helpful links.
- Check out our “Definitions” file online. Okay, we’re cheating here, since the definitions are really just part of the help file. Still, one thing that people get all concerned about is how we’re defining metrics and measures so in an effort to be really, really transparent we have included all of our definitions and calculations for your reading pleasure!
- Ask some of the awesome folks already using Twitalyzer! Perhaps you noticed that on the home page you can now see the people who are using this application. If you click the “More” button at the bottom you can see the last 100 people who have been using the application. If you know any of them, go ahead and ask them for help!
- Ask us for help, we’re helpful! Of course if you get really stuck you can reach out to us at @Twitalyzer and we will do our very, very best to help you along. We want you to succeed, truly we do!
- Did we mention we wrote a 50 page user’s guide to the application? Yeah, we did, so please take the time to check out the Twitalyzer Handbook which does seem to be answering a lot of people’s questions.
Okay, we’re gonna celebrate the release now … not quite like Jeff’s wife Amy wants us to with fancy clothes and expensive parties, but we’ll work on that.
Enjoy Twitalyzing!
In addition to the recent updates that Jeff posted I wanted to share two really cool changes we made this week:
1) Twitalyzer updates are now available in REAL-TIME for those of you who just can’t Twitalyze enough. Instead of having to wait 24 hours to update your scores, you can now get updated scores every hour. And while we recognize that a one-hour delay is not “real-timey” enough for some folks, our intention is to reduce that delay as much as possible based on server performance.
2) Everyone, and this means you, is now getting access to Twitalyzer PRO features! This includes all the tagging and visualization features as well as the “Top 100 Influencers” list. You folks have been so awesome we wanted to do something nice so welcome to the “PRO” club!
You may need to update your profile to see the new “PRO” features appear. If you can’t find them go ahead and Twitter Jeff or Eric and we’ll make it happen ASAP.
And, if you’re psyched about all the changes we’ve been making lately, won’t you please help us out and Twitter about your love for Twitalyzer?
Our code-monkey gnomes have been very busy over the past couple of weeks rolling out some new functionality to help make Twitalyzer an even better analytics solution for you. What have they been doing?
1) New logo! Yes we finally have a new brand identity that distinguishes us and what we do - which is helping our many, many users to understand their influence and impact of micro-blogging conversations. Many thanks to @kriscolvin for her creative design (we were not easy to please)
2) Enhanced User Interface. We cracked the whip on our gnomes to finally realize that some reports and information were not easy to find. So we uncluttered some of the clutter, consolidated some of the reports and hopefully made the user experience much more enjoyable.
3) What does my score mean? In our giddy to get meaningful data to you, we were told by some of our loyal users that the data did not always make sense and inconsistent in some of the reports (Bad gnomes!) In this current release we looked at everything, looked at again, went out for coffee and looked at everything once more.
- Main dashboard: We are now using a rolling 30 day average for the primary metrics. Here is an example http://twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/profile.asp?u=katzpdx
- If you click on one of the trend graphs below one of the metrics, the time period is also a rolling 30 day average for that metric.
4) All (ok, most) data in one place. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could quickly change from one metric the other or display any combination of metric and timeframe? Well, now you can. From the main dashboard, click on “More detail” under one of the metrics (http://twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/detail-metric.asp?q=Influence&u=katzpdx) We now display the details of the metric that you clicked on with the timeframe of last thirty days. From here, you can change any combination of metric and timeframe. Please note that we are still cleaning up on how dates are displayed for last sixty days, last ninety days and all time.
5) Tag me, Tag you. Our gnomes, when not stuck at their desks coding away, love to play tag and so do we. You can apply tags to yourself and others. Start with tagging yourself here: http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/tag.asp . We use oAuth to authenticate your twitter login credentials. You can add up to three interest tags about yourself or your organization and then click “Apply These Tags!”. Want to add tags about another Twitter account? Enter the account and click the “Tag! button. You can now associate other Twitterers with up to 3 tags. IMPORTANT NOTE: These tags are public tags so play nice.
Our gnomes are now busy on working on the next release, but if you have any comments, suggestions or bugs let us know.
We are happy to announce a joint study with Access Communications (a Ketchum company) at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago. Twitalyzer teamed up with the technology Public Relations agency to provide insight of the top female bloggers and their influence on Twitter.
“As citizen journalists and emerging media outlets challenge and overtake traditional media, it has become increasingly important for communicators and marketers to understand where these individuals and media properties rank in the overall landscape,” said Michael Young, senior vice president and social media practice leader, Access Communications. “By combining ABIE with Twitalyzer we’ve developed a powerful and holistic way to depict an individual blogger’s social media influence and rank them within the broader context of the blogosphere and twitterverse.”
“Creating and maintaining influence in a short-messaging medium like Twitter is no easy feat,” said Eric T. Peterson, founder and CEO of Twitalyzer. “Twitter is unlike any communication platform out there and so building influence and creating a measurable impact requires more than just having a lot of followers. Building influence is about being a frequent and strong voice, sharing relevant content, as well as supporting and listening to the community.”
The full press release can be found here: http://www.accesspr.com/client_news.html
Dr. Ralph Wilson from Web Marketing Today interviewed me about Twitalyzer at the Emetrics conference in San Jose. The video was just published and despite not liking to see myself on the small screen the interview turned out pretty well. Check it out!
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