Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

——

Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

———

Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
——–

Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

Portland’s group of tech and design innovators is one of the highest-ranked communities on Twitter. Those of us who’ve used the service have vastly expanded our friendships, happiness and experiences. A lot of us connect in real life on a regular basis because of Twitter. But I felt there was one very important thing missing.

You see, the majority of Portland Tech events happen in the evening.

So we had this one in the morning.

The event was arranged a few days before on Twitter, and, for fun, I made the breakfast meetup into an Upcoming event.

Initially, it was a meetup between @stevenwalling @hillerns @brampitoyo and I. Then @Kram and @lawduck joined in. Once the Upcoming event was posted more and more people began to RSVP. Then the article was “Floristed“, and this spurred additional RSVP’s.

I only expected a small party of people to be at Fuller’s, but when @brampitoyo, @neophillia and I walked in the door, we found that entire right side of the restaurant was taken up by Twitter people. In all, 11 Tweeple showed up, and we all had an amazing breakfast. It was especially exciting to meet @hillerns in Real Life for a longer amount of time than our brief encounter at Inverge.

Thanks to everyone who made it.

Want to know about more events like this one?

Twitterers may enjoy Tweetvolume for it’s ability to graphically display the search volumes of up to five terms at once.

While this is an interesting concept, it does not show when and where the posts were created. Neither does it provide data on what users have posted what.
My vote still goes to Addictomatic, because of the sheer volume and choice of search results.

When I type in ‘Anthropology’, I get results from 16+ sites, including Twitter (where, who, when), Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Delicious Tags, Ask.com News, ect.

Conclusion: Tweetvolume is useful for volume comparison of terms in one space, while Addictomatic is more encompassing. However, neither provide dates of data, and thus do not provide “to the second” updates useful for creating a catchy targeted post. And, since they both do really different things, I may be comparing apples and oranges.