Desenvolvimento e design para a Web

Sysomos Audience: Measuring Social Media ROI Beyond Traditional Web Analytics

Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn't say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service's scoring engine.

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Going Beyond Traditional Web Analytics

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

Send Us Your Questions for Gary Vaynerchuk!

On Thursday morning of this week I will be interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk, social media maven and host of the wildly popular Wine Library TV video podcast. You may remember we mentioned Gary a while back when reviewing his book Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, a bestselling book on how to use social media to boost your personal brand.

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The interview will focus on geo-location services and their impact on crossover marketing between the Web and the physical world. Vaynermedia, a consulting company founded by Gary and his brother AJ, recently worked with the NBA's New Jersey Nets to experiment with ticket give-aways using the location-based mobile application, Gowalla.

Could a mobile location-based campaign actually increase attendance at Nets games? We will detail the results of the experiment after our interview with Gary, but let's just say the results may surprise you.

For right now, we want your questions for Gary! It can be about geo-location and the campaign with the Nets, or it can be on a different topic like personal branding or social media. We will be selecting some of the most thought provoking questions from the comments and will get answers straight from the horses mouth.

So if you have a question for Gary, leave a comment below and check back later this week for our interview!

Photo by Flickr user Adam Tinworth.

All-Star Team Backs StackOverflow to Go Beyond Programming Questions

They say raising venture capital is a young man's game. Joel Spolsky is a very logical exception to that rule and will announce today that his question and answer site for computer programmers, StackOverflow, has raised $6 million from some of the hottest investors in web technology. Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake, Joshua Schachter and others have put in money. Industry luminaries Clay Shirky and Anil Dash have joined the team as advisors. That's a real dream team for a web startup.

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Spolsky is the author of the cult-classic blog Joel on Software, he's been the CEO of bug tracking software maker Fog Creek Software and at 45 years old, he'd never raised venture capital before. Now in a mere 18 months, he and a small team have built a red-hot website that sees over 7 million unique visitors monthly and is ready to take its formula outside of the computer industry.

StackOverflow is a simple concept: people post technical questions about computer programming, other people post answers and then users of the site vote the best answers to the top of each page. Reputation is accrued over time as your answers get voted on and programmers on both sides of the questions love the service. Some advertising and a job posting service based on the reputation programmers have built up by answering questions on the site have made StackOverflow profitable for months.

Fast, free, high-quality answers to technical programming questions is something there was substantial demand for. The market leader for years has been a site called Experts-Exchange, a fee or performance based service founded in 1996 and the favorite target for StackOverflow's rhetorical slams. In 2008 Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, a widely respected developer in his own right, founded StackOverflow, named after the technical phenomenon wherein too much memory is used by the data stack storing data about active subroutines.

The site came out of closed beta in September, 2008 (we covered it first among general interest tech blogs). Then it hit 3 million unique visitors just 4 months after launching. In October '09 the company announced Stack Exchange, a service that offered white labeled installations of the StackOverflow software for use by anyone else. In December, Stack Exchange was selected by Google to power the Android Developer support forums. The site is thoroughly cool. For example, it periodically offers data dumps of all its user data in aggregate, under a Creative Commons license, for outside analysis of the social dynamics between users and more.

Plans for the Future

It's generally acknowledged that the Stack Exchange vision of white labeling for anyone didn't work. Spolsky says that very few communities really picked up enough steam and the licensing fee meant that a community had to be lead by someone who was both capable of the community part and of monetizing it, two criteria that whittled down the number of candidates quickly. (See MathOverflow for an example of a really good, super-nerdy niche site that did work, though.)

Now Spolsky says the plan is for the company itself to launch a handful of very targeted sites running the same software but focused on offering objective answers to technical questions in other verticals. The StackOverflow community has a running vote on what the first sites will be about and leading ideas include statistics and data visualization, GIS, mathematics, search engine optimization, home repair and the care of firearms.

Spolsky says that future sites will be rolled out through an automated process wherein a number of people will propose a site, then debate the ground-rules for content on the site and then gather a core group of experts to commit to the site. Once an algorithm has determined that a critical mass has been built on a topic, then a new site will open up on StackOverflow's own servers.

How will those sites be monetized? Spolsky says now that the company has money in the bank, he doesn't have to worry about that for a good long time. His backers support the "get big first, then figure it out" strategy for monetization. StackOverflow, for example, couldn't have built its job finding service if it didn't have data about the qualifications of 7 million programmers. The same or different business models will emerge as the new sites grow in size, he says.

Spolsky says that programmers have joined StackOverflow because it's a lot like blogging, but with a lower barrier to entry. Busy professionals join the site and share their knowledge for the joy of sharing it, and because they benefit from the collective wisdom offered there. He believes that there are a good number of other fields where there are objective answers to technical questions and where people care more about the right answer than they do about what their friends have to say about something. Spolsky says the much-hyped Quora is a nice competitor but has a different, more social vision and a long way to catch up to StackOverflow's 7 million monthly uniques.

Spolsky says the decision to raise money and assemble the top shelf team that he has was motived by the realization that StackOverflow is an unusual opportunity. "It's very rare, but we saw an opportunity to get big fast," he told us by phone. "We're not going to have to worry about the cost of servers, hiring a few people, getting office space. Before I would have walked around New York for weeks looking at all the office space to save $2k/month. We don't have to be careful anymore. We have the confidence to blow this out on a worldwide basis. We're a top 700 site on the web today; we want to be a top 70 site."

He says he didn't expect to be out raising money, but the type of business his became and the opportunities that backers offered made it a clear choice. "I've always been against the concept [of raising money]," he told us. "For the vast majority of businesses, it just doesn't make sense. There are a very the limited number of opportunities in which VC makes sense, and I didn't expect to be in one of them but suddenly StackOverflow revealed itself to be one of them."

Spolsky says that the easiest way he's heard people explain the difference between Stack Overflow and old fashioned forums is that when you go to Stack Overflow, the right answer is at the top of the page. That's a charming way to put it and it's sure to be interesting to see the team that's assembled take a shot at building that kind of experience around other kinds of topics.