Your Social Data Archive

April 12, 2012 by Social Report Analytics Unit

We all spend a lot of time communicating with others using Social Media. In many ways this is slowly replacing many other forms of traditional communication. I had come across an interesting problem recently. One of my colleagues needed to find replies to a tweet he did in September. Just 6 month ago. It took him over an hour to scroll through the timeline on Twitter. On Facebook he couldn’t even go that far back. Many of us use Gmail. Imagine not being able to find a conversation that happened 6 months ago on Gmail.

Twitter does not offer any export facilities. The one on Facebook is quite useless. And that’s just Twitter and Facebook! How about all other platforms – YouTube, Foursquare, Digg? Imagine the pain of having to go network by network and somehow copy paste the data out to an independent storage. Yikes!

We’ve built Social Report as a social analytics platform, but have since realized a hidden feature that is so powerful that we often hear from our customers that this is the biggest reasons they are using our product.

Here is how we got there. To compute analytics we have to download all of your social data on regular basis. Not just your chats and friends, but also many other elements that provide more in-depth information about your network such as employment, education, and interests. We grab related elements such geography, videos, photos, etc, etc. All of this data is downloaded, neatly stored and subsequently processed to build reports. Reports are great but having this personal warehouse of your social data is amazingly useful. At any point in time you can export all of your data for further analysis, backup and customized reporting.

We are trying to highlight a very important issue – having a record of your social communication is a must! Just like having your emails backed up and available in case you need to go back and find a conversation, or find an attachment you sent, etc, etc. There are many reasons to seriously consider this: legal obligations, archival, creative and intellectual property rights just to name a few!

Confessions of a Social Marketing Strategist

August 16, 2011 by Social Report Analytics Unit

Metrics and analytics for our social accounts… It can be pretty daunting. Most of us who use social are people who get and understand other people. We tend to be dynamic communicators with a deep empathy towards other people. We’ve trained ourselves to pickup on nuances in text messages encoded with emotion. Over the years, we’ve mastered our ability to hear the feelings behind the words.

MIn social, we lack most of the key cues for good communication. We’ve learned to decode messages encoded with clicks of the keyboard in the absence of body postures, voice inflection and tone. Anyone who produces content for social services knows that this is a skill. It’s a skill we’ve honed with research and practice. Digital communications can be a challenge because we cannot rely on physical or visual social cues. We have to be masters of digital words and have an ability to fill in the gaps.

Decode Digital Communications for Real Connections

MSuch people are very good at zeroing in on emotion and feeling. We have to be. It’s our trade. We’ve learned to stir emotions and get people excited about products and services through the use of our words. We are able to craft messages that get people excited and interested in our messages. We have learned how to decode comments and mentions and respond appropriately. We are masters of digital communication.

MThen there’s the other side of social communications. We are held accountable to clients and employers. We love what we do but we have to justify either our time or our billable hours. While we have a deep understanding of the emotional side of people, we are also responsible for tracking our efforts and proving that we are producing results.

MThe other part of metrics and analytics is, we have no other way to know if we are coming closer to our goals and objectives or moving further away. We are results driven. We have to monitor factors such as, reach, response, action, and conversion. It’s not all about the conversation. It’s also about justifying what we are doing and quantifying our efforts. We are held accountable.

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Your Social Data Archive