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Quick Pitch: Socioclean crawls through your Facebook profile photos, groups and wall posts, and alerts you to anything inappropriate.
Genius Idea: In a 2009 Harris Interactive study for CareerBuilder.com, 45% of employers questioned had used social networks to screen job candidates. Thirty-five percent of them decided not to hire a candidate based on what they found.
When this study started to generate press, Priyanshu Harshavat started to think about a way to help job candidates get their social profiles in shape before they were virtually audited by potential employers. The result is Socioclean, a program that scans social profiles for 5,000 words and phrases that are racial, profane, drug-related or alcohol-related.
After a user gives permission for the program to assess his Facebook profile (for now Socioclean is only offered for Facebook — other social networks are on the way), he receives a letter grade and a list of inappropriate items from his profile. Each item has a link to that item on Facebook so that he can easily delete it.
As a generally inoffensive person, I was shocked at how many flagged terms that Socioclean dug up from my profile. Wall messages left by other people were my biggest offense (I got demerits for “beer,” “booze cone” and “hell,” among others). The program also reminded me about the “Aaron Burr, you son of a b**ch” group I had joined sometime during my freshman year of college. I posted one mildly offensive status message to my profile before testing the program, naively thinking that it wouldn’t have much to find otherwise, and it found that as well. Most of my infractions were things that I would never have noticed, and many were innocent — discussing about a bon “fire,” for instance, was flagged as “aggressive.” But it definitely didn’t miss anything. There were enough flags to earn an overall grade of a “D.”
Businesses like Reputation.com and Brand-Yourself also help polish online reputations, but these startups are taking an SEO approach that helps push down negative and pull up positive search results for your name. Socioclean is the only service we know of that focuses on deleting offensive items from your social profiles.
About 5,000 other people and I have run our profiles through the program at no cost. To help make it profitable, the company is currently courting job website and dating website partners. The hope is to offer a social profile scrub as an option to applicants and daters to make them more successful on their respective online services. Socioclean’s developers also created a version of the product for employers who want their employees to self-monitor their social profiles.
Yet another potential revenue source is to sell site licenses to universities to use in their career services departments. Some universities have already expressed interest in helping spruce up their graduates’ online resumes — Syracuse University, for instance, purchased subscriptions to Brand-Yourself for 4,100 of its graduating seniors.
Even if schools decide to teach students to set their Facebook privacy settings instead of similarly embracing Socioclean, there are likely enough situations in which a squeaky clean profile is necessary — college applications, job applications, dating and professional networking included — to keep Socioclean in business.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
THResq points us to a fun, but thorough, law journal article by law student Benjamin Arrow, looking at whether or not Duff Beer, from the Simpsons, is protectable as a trademark in the real world (or you can go directly to the paper) (pdf). The analysis is actually more complex than you would think, noting that as you shift from the fictional world of the Simpsons to the real world of beer production, the issue switches from being a trademark issue to a copyright issue, where the beer is a form of a derivative work on the copyrighted expression known as the cartoon of Duff Beer.
Fox and The Simpsons’ creator, Matt Groening, developed the
idea for the fictional brand, Duff. Therefore, when a real-world
manufacturer puts out a product by the same name, one might
think that it has stolen Fox’s idea and that, as a matter of equity,
intellectual property law ought to furnish a remedy. But
intellectual property law does not protect ideas in the abstract.
While a real-world Duff manufacturer may have taken more than
just an idea, it is difficult to articulate how much more. Part of the
reason it is so difficult to conceptualize the injury Fox suffers
when another producer introduces a Duff Beer to the marketplace
stems from the fact that Duff Beer is a fictional product sold in a
fictional universe under a fictional brand name. Fox’s injury looks
very different when we suspend our disbelief and plunge into the
fictional world of Springfield, accepting the fictional reality as our
own and when we pull back, remind ourselves that The Simpsons is
nothing more than a cartoon and view Duff Beer as one element of
a vividly imagined work of animated fiction. As a consequence of
this puzzle of perspective, Fox suffers a different intellectual
property injury depending on our vantage point.
An analogy to Internet law helps explicate the puzzle. Writing
on the problem of perspective in this area of the law, Professor
Orin Kerr posits that “whenever we apply law to the Internet, we
must first decide whether to apply the law to the facts as seen from
the viewpoint of physical reality or virtual reality.” Kerr terms
the perspective from inside virtual reality the “‘internal
perspective’ of the Internet” and the point of view of an “outsider
concerned with the functioning of the network in the physical
world rather than the perceptions of a user” the “external
perspective.” In attempting to apply law to the Internet, our
perception of who is doing what to whom is not a mere cognitive
tool for conceptualizing difficult problems, Kerr contends.
Instead, our selection of perspective is itself outcome
determinative, because “[b]y choosing the perspective, we choose
the reality; by choosing the reality, we choose the facts; and by
choosing the facts, we choose the law.” While Kerr suggests
that courts may dismiss this problem of perspective as “a minor
skirmish in the ‘battle of analogies,'” he notes that courts “already
choose perspectives when they apply law to the Internet” without
realizing it.
While this may just seem like a fun, little intellectual query, the second paragraph above highlights why it’s actually pretty important. For nearly a decade, we’ve been pointing out the problems that occur when you take laws from the real world and pretend you can just apply them naturally into a virtual world. The same thing applies here to some extent. In this case, it’s resolved via copyright law, since the creation of Duff Beer may be protectable under copyright in the real world, and any such beer would be derivative. Trademark, on the other hand, which would apply in the fictional world, does not apply in the real world, since there’s no real “use in commerce” of a product known as Duff Beer.
Either way, the paper is a fun read, and actually raises a series of issues that are important and worth thinking about when discussing how the real world law applies on the internet in general and in wider “virtual” worlds.
Measuring social media is one of the areas of online marketing that is still frequently discussed and we still haven’t found that magic number yet! But there are lots of free tools that can help to monitor and track your social media activity to ensure it’s working for you or you’re reaching your targets.
The list presented below is intended as a guide, I don’t recommend you use them all at once, but find the ones that fit best for you and make sure you continually measure and record results, to see how your social media activity is performing overall.
Facebook Analytics
Starting with my favourite free social measurement tool – Facebook Insights. Facebook provide you with a comprehensive analytics suite for pages that allows you to get a full insight into your fans and how they’re interacting on the page. Facebook Insights is split into 2 main sections : users and insights. Users gives you all the basic information you need on your fans, including active users, the number of unlikes on your page, as well as information on traffic sources and referrers. Interactions gives you a deeper analysis into the individual updates you’ve made on your page and how people have interacted. This is great to get a quick overview of the kind of content that works and doesn’t work, so you can find out what your fans really want from your page
Topsy
Now Twitter’s own search tool is certainly pretty advanced, allowing you to search by location, keywords you want to include and even sentiment on particular tweets. But a more comprehensive search engine that allows you to scan back further through tweets is Topsy. The screenshot below shows the insight you get into search terms, showing you how many others have retweeted, preview of the full links contained in tweets and allowing you to filter easily by hour, day, week, month or year. It is certainly one of the most comprehensive Twitter search engines I’ve seen, which doesn’t seem to get talked about as much as it should be!
Youtube Insight
Youtube analytics can be accessed on youtube channels by clicking on ‘Account’ then ‘Insight’ along the top of the page. Youtube have made a lot of changes to their Insight product lately and it’s incredibly useful for channel owners. As well as giving information on the total video views and demographic breakdown, Youtube Insight offers a lot more than this, such as which countries your videos are popular in and a summary of which of your videos are getting the most interest as well as how long people are watching them for. If you’re investing in branded video content then you should be looking at these stats constantly to make sure you’re improving your videos as you go, reacting to what people are interested in and what’s holding their attention.
Tweetstats
Tweetstats is a handy free tool for measuring Twitter, who, according to the site are ‘in ur tweets, graphin ur stats’. This is pretty much exactly what they do! All you need to do to use Tweetstats is enter your Twitter name then it will access your tweets to show you a graph of how many tweets you’re sending each day and the number of replies you’re getting. Now on its own this may not really tell you much, but I think this site is best used for looking at competitors for example, to see how often they’re tweeting and how you compare, as well as looking at how your account and level of interaction is growing over time. It also gets pretty clever as you can click into any month to see a more detailed breakdown of tweets sent :
bit.ly
A super-simple, must have tool for anyone that is managing a social media account online. Bit.ly is a universal url shortener that not only provides a handy service in shortening urls but also allows you to access analytics to see how many people are clicking on your link. This is information that you often wouldn’t have access to when posting links on social channels, particularly if you don’t have your own site analytics installed to check referral traffic. While you can use bit.ly to create short urls without logging in, make sure to always create links from your registered account so you can access historical data.
Twitter Analyzer
Twitter Analyzer bills itself as the most advanced Twitter analytics tool in the world, and they’re probably not far wrong. Simply enter your Twitter name – no need to register – and you have access to a host of information around your Twitter account. The first graph shows you your level of tweets over time, but check out the icons below and you can access tailored graphs that show you useful information such as your conversation level, popularity (how many times you’ve been retweeted) and the particularly sexy ‘reach’ graph. This shows you how many readers have been exposed to your tweets. There’s still a few improvements to be made to the site, for example clicking on the graph to show you the links you’ve shared just presents you back with a load of bit.lys without the option to preview, but keep an eye on this as a handy site to use with hopefully lots more to come.
Klout
Klout is certainly getting a lot of attention at the moment, as the emerging standard for online influence. I would advise you to use this tool as a way to benchmark against your competitors, but take the numbers with a pinch of salt. Klout is very easy to use, just enter your Twitter name and you’ll be presented back with your Klout score that takes into account your true reach (how big your audience is), amplification (how likely people are to interact with your content) and network (how influential your community is). The information then gets a lot more complex, giving you a matrix of how influential you are and a summary of the kind of person you are on Twitter. As with any measurement tools, use it continuously to measure and compare, but make sure you’re putting your own meaning on the numbers you’re presented back with.
Also highly recommend you try PeerIndex, another, some might say better, alternative.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a useful real-time search engine, with a bit of a twist. As well as functioning as an easy-to-use search engine, this site offers you more, with the option to receive email alerts every time there’s a new piece of content across social media that contains your keyword. You can also use their widget to display on a blog or site to show visitors a summary of your social buzz. Their search engine is a great way to get a comprehensive overview of your presence on social media, split down by content type to see the areas you’re active in or being discussed.
Twitter Counter
Twitter Counteris a service that, at its core, tracks your activity on Twitter. This includes followers, following, rate of follower growth (or decline), your average number of tweets per day and much more. There’s a convenient graph feature that illustrates your climb or fall pace, but it also allows you to compare yourself to other accounts so if you have direct competition in your niche, this could be an interesting way to compare your progress. Twitter Counter also has an embeddable widget for your blog or website sidebar which highlights the number of recent visitors to your site, but also provides a nice and easy way for people to follow you. Twitter Counter’s premium offering provides you with priority support and a wealth of features. (disclosure: Twitter Counter is part of The Next Web incubator)
Backtype
Backtype is an interesting social media measurement tool, that is helping companies to understand the real business impact of activity through social media. It gives you a comprehensive statistical overview of how people are interacting with your content. To use the site you put your url in, to see information such as comments on your site, tweets, comments on Digg and FriendFeed. But where it gets really clever is with the option to compare your site to others. This allows you see, in numerical terms, how you’re performing among your competitors to give you an idea of how engaged your audience is. Again this is a good idea to benchmark and make sure that you’re constantly improving. There’s lots more to come from this site than what’s currently available and it looks like the site will be introducing paid options soon, but I expect a large portion of information will still be available for free.
Boardreader
This is one of the best forum search engines around. It’s incredibly easy to use, and has a great analytics suite that can be used, if you have a real interest in finding out what people are saying about you in forums, with a view to interacting. The site does have a few faults – the search functionality isn’t that intuitive – but the results available make up for it. You can group search results by time and either view an overall trend in forum mentions, as well as drilling down into individual results to see mentions.
CoComment
CoComment is a very handy browser extension to keep accurately monitoring reaction to comments on blogs. Unless you choose to specifically subscribe to followup comments, it can be hard to keep track of replies left on comments. That’s where CoComment comes in. By using their browser plugin you can help make sure that you don’t lose conversations you started. If you’re commenting on blogs as a business representative then this is especially useful as it’s important to maintain a conversation that you may well have started on someone else’s blog! It also offers an easy to view summary of comments within a page, and get instant notifications when there’s new followup comments.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great tool for monitoring social media, particularly if you have a larger amount of people using the same profiles. It offers much the same functionality as the likes of CoTweet, but has a better analytics tool. The site analytics offered through the site allow you to see profiles for different sites, making it an efficient way to monitor your activity.
Yahoo Site Explorer
This one’s a bit more old school but definitely deserving of it’s place on the list! Yahoo Site Explorer is a great way to track the inbound links going to your site. It might not be 100% accurate but it’s incredibly useful to get an overview of the kind of people/sites that are linking to you and importantly in what context. When you use the site you’re able to click directly into the results to find your mention or link. It’s also a good way to identify possible links you should be going after, based on what sites are linking to your competitors
Omgili Graphs
It might not be the prettiest site, but Omgili Graphs allows you to access useful information, comparing different search terms. Their graphs show you the amount of Buzz a particular term is getting, which is the level of mentions it’s getting online. It’s useful, real-time information that can be incredibly useful when running campaigns to see how many mentions you’re getting, but can also be used in other ways, for example if you want to find out which of your products is generally more popular online or getting talked about more. It can also be used to highlight particular trends, if you want to see which upcoming events have a higher talkability factor. Don’t be put off by the design, as this is a very useful site, with each graph embeddable on sites.
IceRocket
IceRocket is a blog search engine that allows you to monitor across blogs comprehensively to see where you’re being written about. You can easily enter any search term, but I wouldn’t take the results as 100% accurate as a few test searches I ran didn’t return results that I knew should be there. To get a general overview however it’s a handy tool. You can also view trended results, to see peaks in mentions over time, though you can’t select posts from particular dates.
Compete
This doesn’t fall completely under the remit of social media monitoring, but Compete.com is a useful tool for accessing site traffic either for yourself or your competitors. While the full suite of tools is available as a paid service, there’s still a lot of information available for free, with the ability to compare up to 3 sites to access traffic trends over the past 12 months. As well as showing traffic levels, Compete also gives you a free overview of traffic sources for the particular site and which keywords people are mostly finding you by. I find Compete.com a very useful site to get an overview of how sites are performing over time and if you use the information well, you should also be looking into key peaks in traffic historically, and how you can maximise that through your marketing activity for the next year.
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]
Ever since Yahoo Connected TV launched at CES in 2009, there has been a steady stream of TV app platform launches, including Google TV, Samsung, Broadcom/Adobe, Boxee, Blu-ray players, MythTV, and even Microsoft Xbox. However, there haven’t been any breakout apps for Internet-connected TVs — so-called “smart TVs.”
And the dirty secret? The TV apps out there are rarely used. I know this first-hand: At Transpond, the social apps-developer I founded and sold to Webtrends last summer, we made a couple of connected-television apps for one of the major broadcast networks, and the apps had almost no traction.
So what happened? It’s pretty simple. TV apps are cumbersome and awkward to use. Using a remote control to navigate across a bunch of app features is slow and confusing. In the process, you annoy everyone else watching the TV. This is the reason that Apple is not supporting apps on the Apple TV, even though it is essentially an iPod Touch with an HDMI port instead of a touchscreen. Games are the only apps that people want to run on a big screen, and they usually want to run highly interactive, multiplayer games that are well beyond the capabilities of connected televisions. In addition, delivering TV apps required implementing a ragtag assortment of quirky APIs from players ranging from Yahoo Widgets to proprietary offerings from Blu-ray manufacturers.
Instead, people are using their smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers for all of the much-ballyhooed interactive TV scenarios. Who’s that actress on Entourage? Let’s look it up on IMDB. What’s that song at the beginning of Gossip Girl? Let’s Shazam it. What are people saying about this episode of Glee? Let’s search Twitter for #Glee. Even the onscreen guide, the one staple interactive unit that you’d expect to run on the TV screen, is moving to your palm, with apps such as the Comcast’s Xfinity Remote iPad app (show above) that lets viewers browse TV listings and even program their DVR.
The only popular connected-TV apps are the ones that let you select video and audio content on demand, such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and Pandora. Even these apps are now being replaced with a new generation of mobile devices that can transmit what they are playing onto television screens. Much like using the iOS Remote app to play iTunes music on a stereo with an AirPort Express, Apple’s AirPlay will stream video from any iOS device to a TV with an Apple TV set-top installed.
With flat panels relatively commoditized, TV manufacturers attempted to differentiate with connected-TV features and 3D. However, the market has moved and the real differentiation is offering interactive features in the remote control. When the core differentiator for TVs becomes the controller you hold in your hand, Apple becomes a very scary competitor — and Google looks more like a friend. TV manufacturers should seriously consider bundling Android-based controllers that can run engagement apps and transfer streams to their large screens. It’s either that, or watch their customers change the channel once and for all.
Make no mistake, smartphones and tablets are disrupting typical PC behavior. The real question: Will changing behavior slow PC sales? It’s among the questions to ask, following the release earlier today of NPD report “Evolving Technology Trends: PC Activities on Non-PC Devices.”
According to NPD, about 35 percent of US smartphone owners use email less on their PC now. Similarly, about 30 percent of US tablet owners say they email and browse the Internet less on the PC; 28 percent don’t use PC social networking services as much. Welcome to the post-PC era, or at least it’s beginnings.
NPD’s report follows findings released by Gartner yesterday: US consumers are more likely to buy a smartphone than any other device this year. NPD surveyed 2,400 US consumers in December about their non-PC device habits. A stunning 83 percent email on their smartphones, while 76 percent browse the Internet. NPD found high satisfaction levels, which were greater for tablets than smartphones. Respectively, 67 percent and 59 percent for email and 60 percent and 49 percent for social networking.
Well, call me stupid — and many of you already do in comments. “About 50 percent more 18-34 year olds own a tablet than over 55 year olds — despite the high price that normally scares away the younger consumer,” Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis told me, today. In March 2010, I pegged the device as particularly suitable for the 55 and older set, which it might still be (I just want to give commenters consistently digging at my posts something legitimate to gripe about).
It seems to me that with tablets’ popularity among younger US consumers and how many Americans are shifting common Internet tasks to cloud-connected mobile devices from personal computers, there should be an impact on PC sales. According to Gartner and IDC, tablets clearly cannibalized PC sales during fourth quarter 2010. Gartner expects 95 million smartphone sales this year, up from 67 million in 2010. By comparison, PC shipments are expected to be 50.9 million, up from 45.6 million. So I asked Baker about cannibalization.
Q: Based on activities, are consumers replacing behavior — smartphone and tablets for PCs — and will that cannibalize sales?
A: “Eventually it will. But for PC companies there is still action in upgrades from old models — you are still going to have PCs — and from desktops to notebooks. Also these are positioned as companion devices, so not totally positioned as a replacement.”
Q: Understood, but what about replacement purchase — choosing smartphone or tablet over new PC? Meaning: Companion enough that people keep that old PC longer rather than upgrading now?
A: “Nope. You are going to have all three. Each has a role to play. Initially [consumers] might keep PC longer, but after a time refresh cycle will take hold — and I think tablets long term will look more like PCs for refresh than phones because the vast majority will be with no [carrier] contract.”
Call me cynical and skeptical, but I’m convinced that changing behavior will cause many smartphone buyers, and many more tablet adopters, to delay PC upgrades. That mobile device may be PC companion but behaviorally it’s a replacement. Want to bet what are the top activities consumers do on their PCs? Can you say email, Web browsing and social networking? All three categories are already displacing PC behavior, according to NPD’s survey. To be clear: I’m talking about consumers and not businesses.
What about you? Did you or will you soon put off a PC purchase for a smartphone or tablet? Please answer in comments, or email joewilcox at gmail dot com.
Name: Socioclean
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]
