Want to know what customers think about a company? Try Googling the company’s name along with the word “sucks.” Or create a Google alert that will notify you when it’s being mentioned online. Better yet, make use of the scads of social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytic tools on the market today that can give detailed insight into consumer sentiment toward a brand depending on specific demographics, suggests Todd Weiss for CIO. READ MORE
Netvibes is raising its social analytics game with the launch of Social Pack, a compliment to the Instant Dashboard product it released last year. Social Pack provides brands and agencies with additional control over the sources from which they pull data, allowing them to monitor and analyze data simultaneously. READ MORE
Small business owners need an online presence to survive these days, but regulating a website becomes difficult when you don’t know a lick of HTML. Targeting this demographic, Intuit has announced the latest upgrade to its Intuit Websites platform, providing tools that make it drop-dead simple to create websites and boost online visibility. READ MORE
Adly, the online advertising service that connects brands with celebrities and influencers to create social media advertising campaigns, has now launched a comprehensive analytics dashboard solely for Twitter’s uber-celebs. READ MORE
If you’ve been following these blog posts, you may have read about the coming validation era, in which influence will be paramount as users seek to filter a flood of information from all directions. Apparently, Twitter sees it coming too. The company is buying BackType, a start-up whose purpose is to measure Twitter influence and identify the most valuable Twitter accounts for your industry or objectives. READ MORE
Considering that successful blogging takes a good investment of time and effort, it’s no wonder that a Technorati survey found that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned. According to Shane Snow writing for Mashable, part of the reason for low blog success rates is that most of us have a hard time predicting what kind of return blogging will achieve and measuring the return on investment is difficult, especially if you’re not judging success by ad revenue. Snow suggests three ways to effectively measure your content strategy: READ MORE
The FTC has begun an inquiry into Twitter. Although the specifics are not clear, it might have something to do with the company’s recent moves toward greater control of its platform. The FTC as a matter of routine, examines companies to ensure compliance with anti-competitive rules, but generally “after receiving allegations from rivals,” says The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati. READ MORE
Hackers and developers now have a simple way to showcase their involvement in the developer community, thanks to new start-up Work For Pie, based in Memphis. The company, which creates a score between 1 and 100 in a similar way to a Klout score, takes into account a developer’s contributions to dev-centric communities like Hacker News, StackOverflow, and Github. Soon, WFP will allow developers to see how they stack up against their friends, as well as the very best developers out there. READ MORE
Earlier this month we wrote about Google’s +1 feature, which allows people with a Google profile to “+1″ a web site while they’re on it, similar to how you can “like” something in Facebook. Every time you +1 a site, it’s saved to your profile so others can see your site recommendations. Regardless of the fact that some people aren’t convinced +1 is catching on, or noticeably increasing page views, Google just made a way for Website owners to see exactly how much of an impact +1 is having on site clickthrough rates. READ MORE
While StumbleUpon has always been a fun way to find interesting and relevant Web sites and Internet content, publishers have always struggled to keep stumblers on the site once they land there. Now, in an effort to help generate more traffic for StumbleUpon’s site recommendations and keep users on the page, the company created StumbleUpon Widgets, which are small embedded boxes on the page that link to other content on the same site. READ MORE
