Our Community Manager recently posted a video on her blog about how excited she is (we all are) about going to the Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp in London on March 31st.
We are going to get to London early, so let us know if you would like to meet up before the conference.
We will also be available to chat during the conference.
You can either send us an e-mail (contact@synthesio.fr), tweet us, call, or comment below 
Word of mouth is a powerful force of which those that are active in the blogosphere are constantly aware of. Marshall Sponder is an analyst that is a great source on the topic and recently reviewed how other buzz monitoring tools identify influencers.
Influence is a subject that is continually being debated, but we would like to offer you 3 ways that we measure influence to get your feedback:
To get started in our look at influencers online, let’s first take a look at the first level of analysis : the site.
We look at the number of inbound and outbound links, the type of site, the frequency and volume of publications, the Google PageRank, and the site audience. Although the influence of an individual site varies with the scope and parameters of monitoring, brands must have a way of quantifying this slipperiest of slippery topics.
Forum Auto, for example, is ranked as an 8.7 on our influence bell curve. You can see the number of inbound and outbound links from various related sites below, as well as use this graphic interchangeably to bring any of the linked sites to the center to be analyzed, just as we have done with Forum Auto.
While the site on which information is published online affects how influential the information may become, an article (blog post, forum thread, tweet, etc.) itself can become more or less influential over time depending on how many times it has been shared, where, with whom, etc.
Marshall Sponder pointed out that it is the influence of an author that may weigh more heavily than that of the actual site (and will be speaking about it in London in March) ; why not go to the post itself ?
News first broke of an airplane crashing into the Hudson River when a bystander put up photos on Twitpic of the disaster, tweeting,
“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy”
This information was reposted multiple times and the author was interviewed by MSNBC only 40 minutes later about what he saw.
How IS it that some celebrities get paid $10,000 (or more!) per tweet?
If you get more, then we owe you a congratulations ! But otherwise the rest of us are just trying to figure out who it is that is leading conversations about your brand or industry and how you can connect with them.
Once you can identify influential people on Twitter within your community, or within the communities that you are monitoring, you can better determine if it is worth your resources to engage with this person.
Southwest proved that engaging with Kevin Smith was crucial when he began posting pictures of himself before being asked to step off of a flight recently ; they responded within 20 minutes!
We have recently launched our own widget for identifying influencers on Twitter that are within your scope, but there are other tools available such as Tweepsearch, Klout, etc.
This list is certainly not comprehensive and still lives much room for debate about the power of influence, how brands can tap into its power, and best techniques for gaining influence online.
What we’d like to know is how you identify influence and use it in your social media campaigns? How do you see the relationship between influence and participation? What can we do to better help you monitor and engage in social media ?
by Michelle
Our clients are likely to notice a few new changes on their dashboards (& integrated into all future dashboards) that we wanted to give you a heads up about. Though nothing earth-shattering, we are continuously working overtime and then some to provide you with the best analytics and monitoring assistance.
Please watch Michelle’s (our Community Manager’s) video below for an overview of these new features !
The upper part of the screen now has 3 different viewing modes:
1. The usual timeline
2. A dynamic tag cloud that you can navigate with by clicking on a tag (which will bring forward the corresponding verbatim). Each cloud corresponds to other filters you have chosen below to provide you with a real-time conversation digest !
3. Simplified source profile that display when you click on a source name
These 3 modes of navigation are interchangeable at any moment via the “Actions” box which also allows you to export the data in Excel format and to display a more detailed profile of the site (which will improve considerably in the coming months; we’ll be in touch 
)
We’ve added the capability for you to:
- Choose the topics to compare at topic and sub-topic level
- Look at the cumulative data by week, month, or trimester
- Display (or not) the totals on the graph
All of the parameters have now been grouped into a “Settings” icon to allow for more readable menu selections, something we aim to integrate into other future metrics.
We’ve also added some other upgrades to allow you to do more, faster: drill down on the verbatim page by topic or sub-topic and fly through the data with a higher display speed.
As always, we look forward to your comments, questions, and concerns.
by Thibault
After having the pleasure to attend Our Social Time’s Monitoring Social Media ‘09, we are proud to announce our co-Lead Sponsorship (shared with Meltwater Buzz) of this March’s
Wednesday 31st March 8.30am - 5.30pm
hosted by 
(venue tba)
There is a limited number of early-bird tickets so get yours soon and subscribe for e-mail updates.
See you there!
by Michelle
Twitter has become an incredibly powerful tool, capable of spreading buzz faster than any other Web 2.0 tool.Simply click “ReTweet” and the message is spread to followers, who can spread it to their followers, and… you know the drill.Just looking at the increase in the number of Twitter users can make any marketer’s mouth drool as they imagine the amazing potential for their brands and their clients’ brands.Even Google is a bit unsure of how to deal with Twitter, as it has pulled ahead of the giant in terms of real-time information.
But how can you truly harness this power without making some of the faux pas we’ve seen from other brands that used sensitive hash tags for SEO purposes or end up on a list of brands that are criticized for using Twitter to publish their news stories?
Identify who the key influencers are that are talking about your brand. Discover how influential they are in terms of their activity, reach, and authority and use social media for what it’s meant to be used for - finding out about your customers so that they can find out about you. Find out where they work, where they’re from, what their interests are, etc. to begin to develop relationships with Twitter users that are influential for your brand.
Maximizing your ROI on social media is a topic that has long been debated - as it should be! - and is now something that social media monitoring tools can help you quantify. As Olivier Blanchard, business strategist specialized in new media, highlighted in his presentation the Basics of Social Media ROI
Losing even 1% of your budget’s efficiency could seriously ruin your day
Our new influencer widget allows you to compare the profiles of advocates and detractors and engage with them directly from your Synthesio dashboard. You can also compare the number of their on-topic updates and overall scores of influence.
What good would an analytical tool be if it didn’t allow you to respond directly to the Internet users that interest you? Interact with your customers to encourage potential or existing brand advocates and mitigate the concerns of online detractors. Real-time comments means that your brand is under pressure to respond as quickly as possible to comments made about your brand, products, company, people, or industry.
Take advantage of Twitter and use it to answer questions, share news, identify risks and opportunities, and take full advantage of all that it has to offer.
What would you like to see added to the widget? What would help you, as a marketer, do your job better?by Michelle
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