“Every organization must continually evaluate and optimize the social media ROI of each department’s publishing and engagement efforts,” said Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite. “For that you need measurement-driven management, and the HootSuite-Webtrends integration helps satisfy that need. This partnership is another example of HootSuite’s commitment to our clients’ success, and to providing the market-leading functionality that our Enterprise clients expect.”

The Webtrends integration will be able to track which messages and keywords drive social media conversations, which social media accounts drive the most valuable traffic, and which social meda platforms provide the greatest return or engagement. HootSuite claims this type of information will allow organizations to modify and fine-tune their social media marketing in faster ways.

HootSuite recently acquired rival social media marketing software company Seesmic. Since then, the company has integrated a real-time collaboration tool called HootSuite Conversations.

Have you tried out Facebook’s new Page Insights? Let us know.

Webtrends was one of the select companies included in the Alpha testing of this tool and Justin Kistner, its Director of Social Products, talked with us specifically about how brands could use it. According to him, the most significant part of the improved tool was the new focus on engagement.

Kistner believes there are 4 levels of social measurement including obtaining fans, driving engagement, finding a value proposition, and retaining and growing the value. Up to this point, the tool has been focused on the first level of measurement, but the new Page Insights helps the world understand the importance of engagement.

“In the past, brands have all been focusing on how you grow your fans, and now they’re going to focus on how you grow engagement,” said Kistner.

As the image shows, Facebook also introduced a new metric called “People Talking About This” with the new Page Insights. This metric combines all the levels of engagement including likes, comments, shares, as well as video plays, RSVPs for events, and check-ins. The tool takes this data and displays how it performed on a weekly basis, as seen here:

Webtrends also introduced a tool called Hoverstats that works with Facebook Page Insights to help brands understand more about their pages. Hoverstats, specifically, looks at the effectiveness of the posts that brands push out through Facebook. The core feature of this tool is the Post Strength Indicator (PSI), which scores each Facebook post based on the total reach and engagement.

“Giving them a lot of data actually makes it harder to understand, so what we wanted to do was take all of that and boil it down into a single number,” said Kistner. “That way the page admin can know whether or not the post they put out was effective.”

As Kistner went on to explain, marketers need to understand engagement in order to be effective on the Facebook platform. The way engagement works on Facebook is actually similar to how ranking factors work on Google. For instance, when a brand pushes out a post, it doesn’t immediately reach all of the fans. Instead, a brand needs to have engagement in order to break through Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and show up in the News Feed.

“So, what this new data is gonna do and what our new tool helps with that new data is really understand how your posts are driving engagement, and therefore, if you’re getting the reach that you so desire from having that audience,” explained Kistner.

Facebook’s new Page Insights are already available, and Hoverstats is available through a Google Chrome plug-in. Kistner told us that Hoverstats would also be available for other browsers in the near future.

In what ways do you see these free tools helping your marketing efforts on Facebook?

Social analytics company WebTrends monitored the discussions and found that out of all Apple mentions, the most popular point of conversation was the newly announced iPhone 4S.

This isn’t surprising, as the internet has been ablaze with chatter about the new iPhone. What is surprising is the margin – of 1,223,060 online mentions, the iPhone 4S garnered 585,306 of them. It looks like Apple users were relatively unconcerned with the iCloud and the iPod Nano announcements. The real money lies with the iPhone.

Siri came in number two for online buzz, as users were talking about Apple’s new voice assistant. Siri will allow iPhone 4S users to schedule appointments and reminders, transcribe voice into text messages, search the web and tons more with nothing but their voice. Siri evens talks back to the user, in order to clarify and give more detail to commands. This new feature has interested some, but also led to some pretty hilarious backlash.

There was also a good amount of online discussion about the new iPhone 4S camera, which is a vast improvement of the iPhone 4 camera. Apple has released some sample photographs taken with the new camera, and they are quite impressive.

In your opinion, what was the biggest part of yesterday’s Apple event? Let us know in the comments.

As we mentioned above, Webtrends Analytics 9 is now compatible with Apple’s iPhone. But how could this be – aren’t most analytics engine’s primarily flash? Not Analytics 9. It uses only HTML, CSS and Javascript – No Flash. Even if javascript is turned off, Analytics 9 automatically downgrades itself without losing any of its usability. Below is the official description from the site:

"Web standards design lets you access Insight reports and views on every major browser and most devices – including iPhone. The interface uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No Flash required."

Do you think the iPhone capability will lure some users back to Webtrends? Tell us.

Some of the other key features in Webtrends Analytics 9 are:

RSS overlay
Correlate external data from any public RSS source with your web analytics data.

Webtrends Social Measurement
Integrate social sentiment data into analytics reports using the RSS overlay feature.

Trend View
Powerful new trending data is exposed, providing you with a time-based visualization of key data. Hovering provides detailed information of the metric for the specific date.

Analytics API: Data collection
Send data from mobile applications and devices and other sources to Webtrends hosted collection service for processing and analysis.

Analytics API: Data Extraction
Simple yet powerful tool for integrating Webtrends data with Excel or your own analytics reporting applications.

For a full list of features, go here.

Will Google need to respond to some of these additions to Webtrends Analytics 9? Let us know what you think.

Though I was offered an opportunity to talk to Tim Kopp, the Chief Marketing Officer of WebTrends whom I have met on several occasions, I could not talk to him because I was in a hurry to put my post out and also Tim had already provided his view to the press and I did not expect to hear anything other than what he already told others.

Now Eric Peterson reported that Tim Kopp is the latest executive to depart Webtrends.

Tag:

Offermatica is a provider of media delivery, testing, and optimization software. WebTrends is a provider of web analytics and Marketing Performance Management solutions. This new technology partnership enables customers who have both companies’ products to improve their online visitors’ experiences and customer profitability.

This new dynamic combination of Offermatica with WebTrends Marketing Lab™ solutions offers you customizable marketing analytics. This allows you to evaluate your web site and marketing efforts, and gives you the ability to quickly and easily deliver relevant, targeted content to your site’s visitors–you can also leverage rich customer-centric information from WebTrends.

In addition, this new Offermatica/WebTrends partnership makes Offermatica test results automatically available for analysis within WebTrends solutions. The result is a quick, automated, and precise approach to deliver relevant online visitor experiences that positively impact customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

Offermatica’s dynamic profiling technologies allows you to specify visitor and customer behaviors that can serve as the basis for the delivery of personalized content. Enabled by the Offermatica Open API layer and WebTrends Visitor 360 web services, the Offermatica-WebTrends integrated solution allows you to quickly and seamlessly deliver unique visitor experiences leveraging deep behavioral insight and sophisticated customer segmentation and targeting capabilities of WebTrends Marketing Lab.

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From identifying the best acquisition sources and most popular video titles to evaluating detailed user interaction metrics (percent of clip played, playlist additions/removals and viral “send to a friend” actions, etc.), media companies now have the answers. With the power to detail what and where users are interacting online, media companies and advertisers are able to make smarter decisions for their online video initiatives and ad campaigns.

Later this week we hope to speak with personnel form Maven Networks in order to get some further insight on today’s collaberation…so stay tuned!

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The majority of Internet Broadcasting sites such as WBALTV.com in Baltimore, TheBostonChannel.com and WLWT.com in Cincinnati carried “Special Edition” online storm coverage. The coverage included advisories, watches and severe weather warnings along with school closings, delays and dismissals.

Sites such as Hartford’s WFSB.com had live video streams of their on-air coverage, providing viewers with real time updates on the changing weather conditions.

Data from WebTrends indicates that Internet Broadcasting’s weather sections experienced a five-fold increase over normal daily levels, receiving 12.5 of the days 35 million pageviews.

Also twice as many video streams were viewed compared to daily averages. Many sites had large traffic increases for slideshows of user generated weather pictures, setting their own daily traffic records.

“When breaking news or weather affects people’s daily lives, America turns to their trusted local news source,” said Julie Burrows, EVP of marketing, research and product development, Internet Broadcasting. “Our record traffic is a testament to the strength of our TV partner brands, as well as Internet Broadcasting’s 10-year history of delivering online breaking news, weather alerts, school closures and traffic information.”

Traffic numbers represent an aggregation across Internet Broadcasting’s entire national network of TV station Web sites.
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