Crowdbooster is the latest in social media marketing measurement dashboards and helps users identify what content is resonating and when. More than just providing numbers to users, Crowdbooster performs analysis and data mining to come up with insights that explain the best time to post content and how far the messages reached. What results is a color-coded graph that explains, “How are my tweets doing?”

The various dots provide more details: the higher up on the y-axis, the more impressions the tweet received; the farther right on the x-axis, the more retweets a tweet received; the larger the circle, the more replies. Hovering over a particular dot provides additional insights to the reach of a specific tweet:

Once a Twitter account has been in the Crowdbooster system long enough for it to measure a user’s patterns, the dashboard provides insights on the best time to schedule tweets:

On Fridays, Crowdbooster also recommends other users who might be worth a Follow Friday (#FF) mention for being your top retweeters and “mentioners” for the week:

Crowdbooster offers users the opportunity to link up to three accounts for free (paid users can link up to 10) and also offers a subscription to a weekly digest of activity, which recaps each account’s updates for the week: the change in followers, number of retweets, number of @ mentions and best tweet that week by impressions.

With any analytics tool, however, there are a few things that should be taken with a grain of salt. Crowdbooster provides a list of a user’s “most influential” followers, who are, in theory, the users who could have the biggest impact on overall visibility. However in taking a look at my most influential followers, Barack Obama is at the top of the list:

True, of all of my followers, Obama has the highest follower count – but the likelihood of him actually seeing my tweet and responding or retweeting? Slim to none.

The other issue to note is how Crowdbooster calculates a particular tweet’s reach – by taking the number of a user’s followers and adding it to the followers of the users who retweet or respond. A simple calculation, but likely not accurate because every follower is not reading every tweet that crosses his or her tweetstream. In any case, the stats are still useful for seeing how many retweets and replies a tweet received, which can allow users to make assumptions about how far a message reached relative to others posted.

Crowdbooster continues to improve its service and has plans to roll out a full reporting suite as well as a Facebook analytics dashboard. For now, the site is in beta and available to users by invitation-only (request an invitation here).

People care more about how their social network views products and services than how they’re ranked by Google or portrayed in an advertisement – according to the Neilsen Company, 90 percent of consumers say they trust peer recommendations over anything else. As peer influence becomes more important, a handful of companies are trying to come up with a formula which would accurately measure the social reach and influence of users.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Research recently took a deeper look at Klout – arguably the most-heavily used for obtaining social media influence metrics. Klout looks at a user’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and, using a specific algorithm, comes up with a score from 1-100 that explains how effective a user is in his or her network. Many brands are using these companies to “prioritize the elite,” as Owyang explains, but warns that relying on a single metric is dangerous.

For example, following the Kenneth Cole debacle, the company’s Klout Score increased nearly 30 points. This indicates that the Klout score takes into consideration reactions such as @ replies and the overall growth of a network, rather than measuring sentiment of the tweets being generated. This makes it relatively simple for users to cheat the system by posting an excessive number of tweets to raise their Klout scores.

While Klout and other influence measurement tools can be useful, brands should keep in mind that influence is all relative. A well-known technology journalist may have a high Klout score and seem influential, but may not be relevant for a brand focused on fashion or food, for example. Consider the end audience for your client’s product or service – are the “influencers” you’re working with reaching those communities – or something else? Brands should not rely on one single measure of influence, but instead come up with their own algorithm for determining influence in their markets.

These sites duked their way to mainstream media influence in our study of the most influential political blogs

“As we all know, Barack Obama has completely changed what new media means to all of us. His campaign revolutionized the way a campaign uses technology, the Internet and the media to get its positive message about change out. While I believe the message and the person were more the reason than the technology per se, the technology was pivotal in helping the campaign organize a grass roots network for change like never before in our history.

“And he completely changed the relationship that the White House has with bloggers. In his first press conference, he called on Sam Stein of The Huffington Post for a question (Obama Calls on Huffington Post’s Sam Stein). That was a first in history and I am sure he’ll make many more firsts in the months ahead. Think about it – our new President calling on a blog that didn’t even exist just a few short years ago (and one created by a very smart woman – Arianna Huffington – that once showed up for a political debate against my old boss Senator Feinstein in place of her husband Michael. Thankfully, Mrs. Feinstein said no to that arrangement).

“So many of us were blog junkies during the campaign and I for one had to go through ‘blog detox’ for a few weeks after by not checking the great sites of Huff Post, Daily Kos, FiveThirtyEight, Talking Points Memo or others on a minute by minute basis.But as this intriguing report from Context Analytics shows, these sites are here to stay and have changed the way Americans consume news and information forever. Let’s just hope we stay as tuned in and engaged to the big, important policy issues such as reforming our health care system like we did during the campaign. I promise to try…”

Jim Hock

Partner, 463 Communications

This post is a part of a series on the Power 50, a study of the most influential blogs as cited by mainstream media.

Photo credit: David Yu

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing entirely straight can be built.”

- Immanuel Kant

Talk about random inspiration for a blog post. I spotted this quote the other day at the Bryant Park subway station here in New York and it got me thinking about social media. Kant would either spin in his grave over a profound insight turned so relatively mundane, or being the free thinker he was maybe he’d grant poetic license. But I digress.

What hit me is that social media is in some weird way becoming the manifestation of human thinking online, there for the entire world to see, consume, dissect, react, participate, etc. (Cringing even as I write that but bear with me while I attempt to do the guy justice.) This obviously lies in stark contrast to media as we knew it not even a few years ago. Add the real-time element of platforms like Twitter and it’s like watching the pulse of, well, us…unfolding across not only microblogs but blogs, forums, social networks and some chaotic combination thereof as information is pushed and pulled across a variety of channels and around the world. Case in point: Jeremiah Owyang’s observation on the recent earthquake in San Jose and the ensuing reaction flying around Twitter and the Web at frightening speed.

Running to catch the F train that morning, I was also thinking about the increasingly crowded social media monitoring and measurement space and all the new tools popping up every other day. I’d recently talked to a client who was weighing the benefits of automated analysis versus human analysis, particularly in the context of gaining insights that can be turned into actionable ideas. It reminded me of the nearly relentless pursuit of refining social media into an automated science, driven by a mix of SEO, influencer metrics, workflow, CRM and so forth.

Advancement in all these areas is unarguably important, but as Kant might remind us (again, bear with me), we’re still dealing with people after all. And so long as people remain the quirky, opinionated, sarcastic, and fickle animals we are, social media will never be a science.  There will always* be a role for people to interpret, analyze and make judgment calls. I wouldn’t call that art, but the process, sort of like this post, isn’t entirely straight.

Joseph Kingsbury

*If some MIT kid invents a black box technology tomorrow that renders this entire point moot, please disregard this post.