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Archive for January, 2009

Apparently the new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz could make well over $19 million dollars this year, according to Reuters. This despite the fact that some of her comments the other day caused a further dip in their stock price, the New York Times reported.

Bartz receives a $1 million dollar base salary, and has bonuses of up to 200% of that. But she will also receive $10 million in cash and restricted stock to cover benefits and stock options she gave up at Autodesk.

The New York Times stated: “After reports that Ms. Bartz wasn’t sold on the idea of selling Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft, investors sent Yahoo shares plunging 6.5 percent on Thursday.”

Seems the Microsoft deal just will not die. Regardless, Bartz joins Yahoo when their stock has fallen from a 52 week high of $30.05 to a under $10 – the stock is now trading at around $11.50.

Disclosure and commentary on her financial package could further impact Yahoo’s short term value.

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WHEN I first heard of Twitter, I thought about it much like many of you probably still do. It’s just noise. Who needs to know when someone is having a pizza?

But I’ve had a few epiphanies along the way that have changed my thinking. The general background is on my professional blog with link above, so I won’t repeat it here. I also posted a piece on my Fastcompany.com blog. The bottom line for me is that Twitter is a great news source, a great place for learning about social networking and a great place for tracking general noise in the blogosphere, whether it is about you, your company, your competitors or any topic of general interest. If it is worthwhile, someone will be tweeting about it. And the noise level behind something is a good indicator of general interest.

There are two major things that you can do right now via Twitter from a metrics standpoint. The first is, measure what is happening with your tweets. The second is, what is the noise about your clients?

Using Twinfluence.com, one can get the equivalent of a research run, showing reach, velocity and social capital of leading Tweeters. Barak Obama shows up with the most “reach” (followers and their connections at one degree) at over 15MM. However, he has not sent a message since the famous post-election victory declaration and now the question is whether in fact it was him or his PR machine. Blogger Jason Calacanis is #2 with over 13.5MM “reach”. Due to a factor called retweeting, Twinfluence rationalizes that the followers of followers could quickly be reached through an important message being forwarded or retweeted. In fact, many of the rankings of importance of Tweeters take retweeting into account. (When they retweet you, your ranking goes up).

Some other metric companies include TweetRush, which can give you an idea about the total volume (running about 300k people per day with about 5 Tweets per person); Tweetlists, which shows the most popular “conversations”; TweetVolume, where you can find the volume of a word or brand; TwitterGrader, which measures your rank (happy to say I am in the top 5% based on reach and authority); and Twitterrank, which for some reason does not rank me as high as TwitterGrader. (By the way, my Twitter address is mediadls.)

As mentioned above, another major use of Twitter is following noise about clients and client campaigns, as well as your own company. The easiest way to follow the noise about your client is Twitter search, which is search.twitter.com. Type in your company, a client’s company or a competitor and see what the chatter is. If you click on the advanced text link, you can add keywords to do with a campaign or many other factors. In fact, when the rockets started shooting from Gaza, I searched for “within 150 miles of Gaza.” Very interesting to see the tweets from both Gaza and Tel Aviv on one page. This parsing of Twitter is key to the future here.

In the future, we should be able to measure the metrics of individuals on Twitter and understand how much traffic they are getting, setting up the potential of an Adwords-type situation where the writer and Twitter share in revenue. We should also be able to do the same for individual topics written about, thus facilitating keyword advertising. Technologies for both of these situations exist today; it’s just a matter of Twitter deciding to open up APIs and to determine what this small company of 25 people who have achieved major influence wants to be when they grow up.

David L. Smith is CEO and founder of Mediasmith, an internationally recognized digital media agency with expertise in targeted media planning, execution and measurement.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Twitter Metrics

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A nine-year-old girl, allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, has been found using a mobile phone signal and Google Street View.

A police officer and a firefighter in Athol, Massachusetts, joined forces after authorities were alerted that Natalie Maltais had been taken.

Officers used GPS in the girl’s mobile phone to find her approximate location.

They fed the co-ordinates into Google Street View, pinpointing a hotel where where the child was subsequently found.

The alarm was raised after grandmother Rose Maltais picked up Natalie from the child’s legal guardians for what was supposed to be a weekend away.

She “said that she wasn’t going to return Natalie and then left the state”, Athol police chief Timothy Anderson told the BBC.

The police contacted Ms Maltais, but after she didn’t return Natalie as promised, they decided to track them down using Natalie’s mobile phone.

Since 2005, US law says that mobile phone providers must be able to locate 67% of callers within 100 metres and 95% of callers within 300 meters.

This requirement has led to GPS capability in most new mobile phones in the US.

“This is very useful, although we can only use it in emergency situations such as when a person is missing or lost, or a life is in danger,” said chief Anderson.

Knowing this, police officer Todd Neale contacted the mobile phone provider, AT&T, which gave him GPS coordinates every time the phone was activated. Police must submit a compliance form to the phone provider to request location information.

Joined-up thinking

Officer Neale then got in touch with Athol’s deputy fire chief Thomas Lozier who had previously used GPS to direct firefighters tackling forest and brush fires, and to find lost hikers.

“Last spring, there was an incident where the cell phone transmitted the co-ordinates of some people lost in a local conservation area,” deputy chief Lozier explained.

“We tracked them down using hand-held GPS units and within an hour we’d gotten them back.”

He used mapping software to determine the location of the co-ordinates given to him by Officer Neale over the radio. Then he turned to Google.

“As soon as the officer said to me, ‘I wonder how we can research the area’, I thought of it,” he said.

He found the location on Google maps and looked at the Street View, which shows eye-level photographs of the area. That’s when he spotted a nearby hotel.

“I noticed the hotel in the area, and as I was panning the map, I was able to see the road sign at the intersection,” he said.

He used Google to search for hotels near that intersection and found the Budget Inn in Natural Bridge, Virginia.

Officer Neale alerted the Virginia state police, who found the missing child and her grandmother in the hotel as predicted.

The deputy fire chief said how happy he was with the outcome of his team effort with Officer Neale.

“It was brilliant,” he said. “Half an hour later, he called me [on my walkie-talkie] at home. I had my home computer ready to go and he informed me that it had been successful.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

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