Jeff Katz / Twitalyzer

ROI of Social Media Transcript

Stev Hello everyone, this is Steve Groves with the

en SocialMarketingConversations.com and stevengroves.com with Guy Powell of
Grov Marketing-Calculators.com and today we're getting together for another
es podcast and the ROI of social media series appearing at
SocialMarketingConversations.com and StevenGroves.com.
Hey, Guy, how are you today?
Guy Fantastic, Stephen and it's great to bring the series and we've got a great
Powe call coming up here with Jeff Katz with Twitalyzer. Some very interesting
ll tools that if you are not familiar with, it's a great thing to understand and
learn about.
SG Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.
The Twitalyzer tool is something that Guy showed me the other day, and it's
really exciting to have him on the phone. Well, let's introduce him in here.
Today we have with us Jeff Katz with Twitalyzer. Jeff has over seventeen
years combining business and technology insight and the various product
development, strategic consulting and data analysis roles. Jeff's been an
independent consultant since 2006 when he worked very closely with his
clients to ensure their online business initiatives became a reality via
comprehensive digital strategies. Prior to joining Twitalyzer, Jeff was a
product manager at Web Trends in Portland, Oregon.
Welcome to the call, Jeff.
Jeff Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.
Katz

SWG Well, we're real excited about it and before we get started can you talk just a
little bit about what Twitalyzer is and what's your role there?
JK Sure! Well, Twitalyzer is an analytical and reporting platform built for short
messaging media, which, you know Twitter today is a de facto player in the
space. We've been pretty much around for a year or so now and this
weekend we had an upgrade in our primary platform about a month or so
ago and my role is really kind of product strategy and business development
with myself and Eric Peterson, who founded Twitalyzer.
SWG Okay, and where do you see Twitalyzer going? What's the market for
Twitalyzer? How do you see people using it most effectively?
JK Well, with the new release of 2.0, we see more and more organizations
shifting away from people who, like a lot of other analytic tools over the past
year were more focused on their individual scores and how they're doing on
Twitter, is now what we're seeing is we're seeing companies outside of
Fortune 500 companies who really small non-profits and small Mom and Pop
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Steven Groves / SocialMarketingConversations.com Recorded January 19, 2010
Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

shops on Twitter, to understand their impact on Twitter and to better

improves it. So if they want to see how they brand or how their organization
is structured and whose communicating with them and how to effectively
respond and whether it be a customer service or actually a sales opportunity
or everything in between.
We really see it going from an individual usage to companies really trying to
understand the metric and benchmark around thos to improve their Twitter
as a channel.
GP What do you see as the key successes that you've had with some of the
companies that are using it?
JK Well I think what we're seeing now is the market is maturing, I'm sure you
two are aware of is companies nowadays they spent the last year or two on
Twitter even on Facebook and other platforms getting their word out and
trying to build up mine share and certain numbers as far as followers and
sometimes they Tweet.
Now what they're trying to do, and we see this with some of our customers
that we're talking to, is how do we measure that? Our board wants to know,
someone into web analytics, how many pay-per or clickers they're getting,
they now want to see how I'm engaging my client. Am I increasing certain
minor scores? Am I able to look at certain segments of Twitter population
and react to those and engage with them?
I think that's what we're seeing almost across the board with our install base
right now. It's very exciting for us because we do come from a digital
management space with web analytics and we're seeing what we saw five,
six years ago when analytics started to take place in social media
measurement.
GP Yeah and it's certainly looks that way and you know, if I look at your
dashboard and got four or five things across the top in terms of impact and
engagement and generosity, velocity and clout. And do you see there are
specific types of companies? Or vertical companies that will benefit from
this more than others? You think it's more of a general platform across the
board?
JK It's definitely more of the latter. We have spent a lot of time and talking to
various companies when we were in BETA over the winter before the New
Year's. We had some very significant companies test and we tweeted about
them. We had Starbucks and Microsoft and IBM and Intel and some small
businesses that were friends that we knew personally that we could engage
with.
We went across the board, what we're trying to be is and this latest release

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Steven Groves / SocialMarketingConversations.com Recorded January 19, 2010
Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
Jeff Katz / Twitalyzer
ROI of Social Media Transcript

of our product is we essentially want to be the de facto analytical tool out

there, almost kin to Google Analytical Web Trend. There is certainly some
prodder social monitoring tools out there that speak to a larger enterprise
trying to monitor the whole social media platforms. But we're focused
specifically on Twitter. You know when other social media platforms come up
or along or become more of a significant player, but certainly what we're
seeing is very much across the board.
SG Yeah, so I'm sitting here looking at the dashboard as well and really enjoying
the level of data and information that seems to be coming from the tool and
the stuff that you're providing.
How did you come up with this algorithm that you have? What was the
genesis of all this?
JK To answer your question, the genesis was little over a year ago, it was
actually my business partner Eric Peterson who was, myself and a few other
people, who were several months before that goaded him to get onto Twitter.
He runs a global web analytics consulting firm and we were telling him, you
know you really need to get the word out.
You have this website, this blog, he does lots of speaking engagements
across the world and he wasn't on Twitter. He finally caved in as you would
say and did it and after a little while he was trying to figure out whether
there's a worthwhile kind of business in a tweet in a business or even for
personal reasons.
He looked at some of the productive tools that were out there at the time
just a little over a year ago and he looked at them and they gave him all of
these squares that to him didn't reflect how he uses Twitter. I mean, he
would always say and continue to say, to me you know, “He's just not a
good Twitter-er, I mean to me he's just always out there.” and the scores he
would get, these very high scores that weren't reflective of how he was using
the tools.
So like the good data geek that he is he stayed up for about a month or so,
you know, the hours of 8 to 2 am and building and implementing what he
called the “Twitter Influence Calculator” where he had myself and a bunch of
other people in the web measurement space kind of take a bang at it and
get feedback and what came out of that, what was born out of that, was
Twitalyzer.
It was still kind of side project for a couple more months and then what
happened, I think last March at a tech show. . . I think it was AdTech down in
San Francisco, there was an off-cuff remark by Guy Kawasaki who said, “If
you're serious about measuring Twitter, you should use Twitalyzer” and it
actually crashed the servers and literally, we have the spikes for it and that
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Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

was kind of the “A-Ha!” moment you know, there's something more to this
than just a side project.
It was then that Eric asked me to join him to help him with some real product
management background and really productize the product and take it
forward realizing that Twitter is here to stay, it's viable platform for
companies and individuals. They're using it all over the world and it needs
to be measured so that's kind of the history of how Twitalyzer came to be.
GP How do you see how people are using it. . . well, I guess I mean by that
individuals as opposed to companies using it? You see much difference
there? And how are they using it from their Twitter influence, I guess.
JK Well, how we see individuals using it is certainly different than how a
company would use it.
What we're seeing from the individuals is they're more focused on their user
profiles than benchmarking reports. They just really want someone to get a
glance at a trending view, how they're doing over a certain amount of time
or within the last days look. They're not necessarily taking any action on it
but they are using it for the individual consultants say and it's just a practice
and they just want to see it they have anymore. . . you know, whose tagging
us, the tagging feature, whose talking about us potentially.
What we see with organizations, whether it's a large company or a small
non-profit here in Portland, is that they're starting to use more of this
dashboard authenticating features. You know, setting goals for certain
metrics but they want to measure themselves against goals that they set for
their organization. To be able to understand whose talking about them
negatively or positively from a sentiment analysis point of view. So the
organizations are really starting to use it as you would expect an
organization to look at data, very much from a benchmarking perspective
and continue to improve their views on Twitter and optimize whether it's
content or how they engage on Twitter itself.
GP Right and actually that goal-setting feature I really liked it. It was kind of
interesting to be able to say, 'Okay, here are the goals that we think we want
to shoot for' and then you can actually develop an action plan, monitor
against what you're doing, then update the goals or how you're getting
there. It provides that instantaneous feedback you have as a business or
even an individual wants to drive a certain level of activity on there.
Looking at it though at this space, kind of a 50,000 foot level, and looking at
tools in general and looking at measuring tools and I don't know exactly how
you categorize this, but where do you see things like this going in the future?
Do you see them hooking into and connecting with other tools and social

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Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

media? So where do you see the future for this?

JK Yeah, to the first part, obviously for Twitalyzer and probably for other tools as
well, I think we're really at the starting line as far as what the platform can
do. Obviously we're very much tied to Twitter's API right now and where I
see Twitalyzer going is we actually built our own series of API's and we are
talking to various other tool sets out there to integrate our data into theirs.
That’s where we kind of see our next natural phase, not the functionality, the
product itself but we have companies that want to integrate either
completely white-labeled and people don't even know its Twitalyzer data, or
a ‘powered by’ or a combination of both. So, potentially dealing with some
of those social media platforms. We do have one right now with Google
Analytics and we hope to extend that to the other analytic vendors since the
state that both Eric and I come from and too us it’s a natural fit, where in
keeping with social media and site analytics collide and so yeah, that's where
we see ourselves going in the. . . at least in the next 6 to 12 months.
Functionality aside.
GP Right, right. Well, functionality is kind of a never ending battle with things
like that.
JK Exactly.
GP The old feature creep comes in but certainly the API is an interesting way to
help incorporate this high value into their operations. The other thing that's
kind of fascinating with these tools and I kind of don't know what you see
happening over the next. . . you know I was going to say a year but that's a
millennium in the Twitter space, but how do you see things like sentiment
and semantic analysis, is that going to be coming into the equation anytime,
you think?
JK You know that's a great question. We built a sentiment analysis tool and we
intentionally left it as a manual process that we would store certain positive
and negative words into a library and then individuals can copy and then
extend it. You know we, Eric and I go back and forth about it, how to
automate this completely or a variation and there's still a lot of debate
happening even this week with a lot of Radian6’s and a lot of SM2's of the
world. There's a lot of buzz going back and forth between those type of tools
and what's proper, automated or manual? Because manual as it says is time
consuming and you have resources dealing with it and it's automated
analysis is preferable from a resource constraint but it's flawed in many ways
especially when you get to the different languages.
GP You know and that's right and we played with Radian6 and SM2's and it's
really interesting to see the tonality and sentimentality, but unfortunately
they've been very inaccurate when you use them automatedly and so it
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Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

seems like if you really want to get somewhere you have to have a manual
process in there.
JK Exactly. And you know we talked about this and it's obviously not
revolutionary but it's an idea potentially. You know crowd sourcing now,
especially when you get to multiple languages. You know Mebo.com did a
great job of crowd-sourcing when they went to multilingual a couple of years
ago. Great model for that. I don't know how well it exstends. . . the only
issue with that is. You know even in English you obviously have variations in
English but then you have vertical words that are different. Even in
American words that are different.
It's something that's a new feature for us, where we're really monitoring
right now and see how people are using it. And we're getting a lot. . . it's
probably the one year after year that we get a lot of feedback from users
offering ideas and suggestions. I'd say more than the compliments on the
new product, we get a lot of questions or ideas on functionality. So I think
we're going to probably put a lot more resources into that. How it shakes
out, our next release. Couldn't even tell you right now.
GP Yeah and you know that area of sentiment is a real area of concern and we
do acknowledge it and certainly we've used both Radian6 and Alterian on the
SM2 product. They admitted that it's really more of an art than a science to
get the sentiment and tone out of it. Then the very best you're going to get
at this point is really a trend by not trying to deal with the entire data just
pieces of it.
JK Yeah, that's a good point because one of the things when you talk about the
process and argument, it's very much just as much an art as it is a science
and again what I spoke about earlier with the social media monitoring is
where web analytics was a few years ago. It's very similar because even Eric
and Abinash, from Google where you talk about web analytics, it's not just
the technology it's the people and how you use it.
So, what we're seeing is people looking for these trends or taking words and
tweet in the context of what the discussion is so. . . we don't expect this to
be an automated process and organizations will take the data out of
Twitalyzer and really look for the nuggets and a person will be in charge of
that to look for trends and potentially read.
Depending on what type of organization and how they use Twitter it may be
for marketing purposes or the typical customer support services.
To your point around whatever our biggest obstacle is. It's the ever-changing
market right now, especially with Twitter and their API's and we're expecting
good things when they open up the fire hose. The API's will certainly allow
us to do a lot more than we can do right now and then everybody. . . it will
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Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

be apps on top of Twitter. Pretty much the same, copy and paste. That's
really our biggest concern right now is having a stable data set that we can
ping all the time. There's very few down times, there's no missing data
that’s returned and that's what we. . . you know our current obstacle is
people don't trust our data even if it's us reflecting when we get back from
the API's and they're not going to use our system or anybody else's. They're
just going to. . . they could just possibly throw up their hands.
SG No, they really would and that's a great point. You know, we're all dealing
with this question from a perspective of really wanting to uncover the
answers and, we are most about looking for people who have approached
different pieces of it so that as we move forward with the book, “The ROI
Social Media Book” we're able to bring many different perspectives to it so
that the readers can really get a sense of: A.) How complex this question is
and B.) get a sense of at least a framework of dealing with the question. I
don't think there's going to be one solid answer to it.
JK I totally agree.
SG We're beginning to wrap up and again, Jeff, I want to thank you so much for
the time you've given us today.
Guy, as we wrap up here, did you have anything you wanted to ask Jeff?
GP No, I guess just, thank you very much Jeff and you know it's fascinating and I
think you're term for the Twitter API and in the opening up and the fire hose
of data, it's just got to be absolutely immense and you know it's going to be
where Twitter has all of its servers is going to be this enormous fire hose of
electronics cable coming in and others like you and can get some data out of
this so they can do some real-time things out of this. What's going on with
Twitter. It'll be a fascinating time, that's for sure.
JK It certainly will be. We're giddy with anticipation.
SG Absolutely. Jeff, if anybody wanted to know more about Twitalyzer or wanted
to work with you guys on an API connection or whatever, how would they get
hold of you?
JK Sure. So, the site is Twitalyzer.com. Email address is jeff@twitalyzer.com or I
on Twitter as @Katzpdx
SG Okay, anything you want to share with our listeners before we wrap up here?
JK No, I just want to thank you too for inviting me to this caucus and I'm looking
forward to seeing and hearing this one when the book comes out soon.
GP Absolutely and we're certainly excited to have you share that information
with your followers, your friends on social media and all the rest.

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Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com
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ROI of Social Media Transcript

We're really grateful for the time you've taken with us today.
JK Thank you very much.

About the Podcast and Credit For Where Credit is Due – This transcript was
developed from a live interview on January 19, 2010 between Jeff Katz, Guy
Powell and Steven Groves on FreeConferenceCall.com.

The podcast interview was downloaded and processes in Audacity, which is

available from SourceForge.com, and with ‘4toFloor.wav’ music loop from
member ‘Rooks’ and posted at SoundSnap.com.

The initial transcript was provided courtesy of Social Marketing Conversations,

and the introduction voice is Ms. Cynthia Propst.

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Steven Groves / SocialMarketingConversations.com Recorded January 19, 2010
Guy Powell / DemandROMI.com