Automated Sentiment Analysis via the social web is a relatively new field. The idea is to analyze status updates, tweets and blog posts on topics and assign a positive, negative or neutral view of them. It relies on analyzing content through Natural Language Processing (NLP). Maria Ogneva at Mashable recently wrote an excellent article on the topic and outlining the technology, but as for usefulness for most businesses we disagree.

Our view is to beware and not get star struck by the idea of Automated Sentiment Analysis from any vendor trying to sell you on it. This is what you need to look know before paying for any Automated Sentiment Analysis system:

1- Are you a big enough brand, with a unique name? Blue chip companies get people talking. If you are a small business chances are not a lot of people are talking about you. A simple search at something like Scoopler.com can let you know. Hopefully as well you have a unique name. Good luck if the name of your brand or company are common words. A bakery called “FreshBread” will have a lot of trouble finding people only talking about their business.

2- Are you engaged in Social Media?
If you are tracking conversations about your brand, it helps if you’re engaged and adding your own voice. For example, if you don’t Tweet how can someone re-tweet and add their opinion?

3- Are you products something easily identifiable?
If you want to track a recent product you have release make sure it has a name you can track. Something unique. Common names, like Bread or Cupcake might be hard to track, unless you have a unique company name.

4- Who are your customers and what is your industry?
If your customers are older, and don’t even have a computer how do you expect them to be online talking about you? Or examine if are you in an industry that even uses social media. Do your competitors use it? I know it’s hard to believe but some industries, don’t engage in social media. Therefore, it very likely no one will be talking about them and Sentiment Analysis would be a waste of time and money.

5- Where are you customers located? Will they be speaking English?
Sentiment Analysis has issues with sarcasm, jokes, cultural factors, linguistic nuances and more. Basically, just there are issues with automated translation, automated sentiment suffers from the same. The only way automated sentiment analysis would work are huge complex algorithms, that have the permutations in the native language and how sentences are constructed. We are far from here.

If you are able to answer these questions with positive answers and still intent on exploring Automated Sentiment Analysis, the one vendor that has been most promising in this field has been Radian6. We believe this tool only makes sense for companies with large brands with a highly engaged audience.

In a nutshell, Automated Sentiment Analysis is a great idea, and can be helpful, but vendors still have a lot of work to do in getting it right.

Automated Sentiment Analysis: A Good Idea, But Still Sucks is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

We knew the day would finally come and today it has. Google Analytics is now letting users opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics. It also works in all major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. The beta version of the opt-out app can be downloaded here. This is a double whammy when you consider Google has also just released SSL search which is the start of worrisome trend for the analytics professional and webmaster: The death of the referrer. Danny at SearchEngineland has a good take on it and its hard to see where this will end. What if analytics as we know it go back 15 years to just hits.

I can’t blame people for wanting privacy. Besides if you’re tech savy, you can block any web analytics easily. Heck, you don’t even need to be that technically inclined. There are dozens of plugins to make this happen. The concern I have is this: Google with their impressive trustworthy brand has just lowered the barriers for people who wouldn’t normally bother. They will get the kind of press and coverage any plugin developer would dream of. The result of which could be a mass of users who might not understand why or what they are blocking. They won’t even consider the consequences of blocking Google Analytics will have on their favorite websites. In case you aren’t aware, analytics are gold to webmasters. It is an essential tool to ensure the content created is popular to their audience. Analytics are used to sell ad space to potential advertisers and to set rates. Most importantly, analytics are used to make sure users have the best experience possible on their site. Now this can all come into jeopardy.

So what can you do? There are a couple of options. One is to pray that this announcement goes the way of Google’s other privacy tools, hidden in the Google Dashboard and hardly anyone notices or uses it. The second is to deploy another analytics program, such as Piwik or these alternatives . The last option is to consider the BETA solution called YMMV Real Websats to keep an eye on your Google Analytics Accuracy.

In the end, there is no need for panic. We have to remember that for us, these types of issues seem larger then they really are to the public at large. This does not mean we can ignore them. We just need to keep it in the back of our head: Google Analytics opt out is another variable to consider when you analyze your analytics.

Google Analytics Opt-Out Plugin and Analytics Accuracy is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

With all the talk about social media, it can easily make a website owner or company think they need to create a community. But it’s not as easy as getting a great script, software or integrating Facebook. Running or creating a community is a full time job. It takes work, not only to promote it but also to make it remain popular and engaging. and once it up, who will monitor it?

This is not even to mention what happens if you fail. What message does it send to have a forum with no posts, or a fan page with 5 subscribers? Sure there are ways to promote a forum and a community, but before you leap into creation, make sure you study your market. Does it even make sense in the business area you are in? For example, if your focus is B2B (Business to Business) your users may very well not have the time or the ability to engage with your content. Demographically your audience might also have no interest in it as well.

Then there are other barriers, such as  technological, in the B2B sphere. There is a growing number of companies blocking Facebook and Twitter. If you rely on their Authentication or content, this alone could kill the involvement in your community. The old thought of: ” build it and they will come”, is no more a fallacy with community as it is with a new restaurant thinking by simply existing and having great food means people will show up.

Before you begin to even consider creating a community we suggest you think long and hard about the pros and cons. If you are serious about communities (and have the money), we suggest you use a reputable company, and have a detailed action plan. You can also consider free self-hosted options like Elgg or BuddyPress, but be aware of the hours of customization this will take. Just like a website, your community is a reflection of you.

In the end, should you decide to create a community, have patience. Very rarely does it explode to success over night. Much like a website, it takes time to get traffic. We also suggest you start small with a select handful of your best customers to try it out (in Beta), so you can slowly build content. Most importantly you can gather feedback before you launch and get the word out. And don’t be shy to pull back if it does not fly in your industry. Not all solutions are one size fits all.

Creating A Community: Does It Make Sense for Your Business is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Brand recognition is a huge part of marketing. No matter if you have an online business or not, one of the things a business needs is a unique logo or graphic which allows them to be recognizable to their current clients and potential future customers. So what can you do when you want a logo or new banner ad? Sure you can try your own hand at creating it, with some time and Photoshop. You could hire a teenager you know with some skills. You could even try one of those online low cost (or free) logo generators. While those are all great solutions, if you’re serious about having a real choice with a professional unique design, we’d like to introduce you to a great website called 99designs.

Around since 2006, 99designs offers everyone (especially a small business owner) access to a pool of great graphic talent. If you’re serious about looking good its worth the investment.

Last month, 99Designs announced their new logo shop. They have over 4,000 logos ready to be purchased and customized for just $99 for a non-exclusive license, or purchase the logo exclusively for $298. After selecting the logo you want the original designer will customize the logo with your business name and within 24 hours it will be all yours.

If you wish to get something beyond logos, like a banner ad or a customized website theme,  99Designs “helps you run a design contest, where thousands of designers compete to create the best possible design to meet your needs. All you need is a clear idea of what you want designed and how much you’re prepared to pay for it.”

What we like about 99Designs is that  you get what you want at the price point you choose. This is  especially important in those instances where you do not have access to a graphic designer but you want a professional look to your project. We highly recommend you check out 99Designs for your next design project.

99Designs: Over 65,000 Graphic Designers For Your Next Project is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

A couple of weeks we asked the question about Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? Google announced the ability coming for users to “block” Google Analytics. Those using Google Analytics already have plenty to be concerned about. As Mozilla Firefox takes more share from Internet Explorer and more users install Adblock, No Script and other plugins, the quality of web stats has declined. You can deny it all you want but as more users choose to remain invisible, your Analytics numbers will become less accurate.

Its not hard to understand in a time where privacy is a great commodity, why people are choosing to hide themselves. At the same time, though, Analytics are essential to any serious webmaster who wants to cater to their audience. For those that don’t know, Analytics is more then hits. Analytics tell a story. They can play a big part in how a website operates. The information lets a webmaster know what topics/products are popular. It lets a webmaster know which pages work and which ones fail. And in some cases the ad rates a website can command is dependent on the amount of traffic it receives. So where does this leave the webmaster facing an accuracy issue?

There is a new tool that answers the challenge which we recently discovered called YMMV Real Web Stats created by Adrian Speyer. Its an open source PHP script using flatfiles, that gives you a new insight into your Google Analytics. Below is an image from a small test we ran (click for larger image):

In the example run on a sample page for during the week, we got 71 pageviews according to Google Analytics. According to YMMV Real Webstats, we really got 77 pageviews, with 6 pageviews blocked by Google Analytics. Also we learn 9 users blocked ads, and 4 had No Script. According to the tool, our Google Analytics is 91.31% accurate. While this tool is not super detailed it gives you some interesting information nonetheless. What I liked about it is it quickly gives you an idea of what plugins are used by your visitors and potentially how much info your webstats could be missing. What will be interesting to see is if they can develop the tool to take account of unique visitors, rather then page views and include an easier way to drill down to the page level. In the meantime, YMMV does give you access to the raw data (they need to work on this a bit more) so should you can use the data to make some deeper assumptions on your own.  We hope to see its development continue and look forward to seeing what the future has in store especially as Google Analytics accuracy continues to be threatened.

Now for an experiment of interest:  We’d love to see some other people download YMMV Real Webstats and share their data. Once you have a chance to deploy it, come back and post your stats, your url and the audience you’re after. It will be interesting to know how accurate everyone’s Google Analytics actually is and if certain verticals have a major Analytics crisis.

How Accurate Are Your Google Analytics? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Have you ever seen the below in a Google Search for a product or a service?

Last year Google introduced this feature under the name of Rich Snippets (or structured data). Google will recognize this information when you mark up your  HTML content with one of three formats:  microdata, microformats, or RDFa.

Once you markup the pages, you can test you Rich Snippets with Google’s handy testing tool. Once implemented, you have no guarantee that your mark up will be included in the index, but you can tell Google here you have made the change or have an interest in Rich Snippets.

So now you have the basic info, how can you get Rich Snippets  for reviews and ratings easily in WordPress? Its really simple and will literally take you five minutes. We first highly recommend you download Lester Chan’s WP-Post Ratings Plugin and follow Lester’s read me file. Please note this solution only works when the plugin is used in a post or page. Once installed, here is how you get your blog Google Rich Snippet ready. You want to add the following found in lines 3-5 to your single.php before the function for ratings found in line 7:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<div class="entry">
<span xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="v:Review-aggregate">
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<span property="v:itemreviewed"><?php the_title(); ?></span></a></h2>
<?php the_content('Read more &raquo;'); ?>
<b>Add Your Rating:</b><?php if(function_exists('the_ratings')){ the_ratings(); } ?>
</div>

The next step is to open the ratings template plugin in options and to copy and paste the below into the template area called “Ratings Vote Text”:

%RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE% (<span rel="v:rating"><strong><span property="v:count">%RATINGS_USERS%</span></strong> votes, average: <strong><span property="v:average">%RATINGS_AVERAGE%</span></strong> out of %RATINGS_MAX%)<br />%RATINGS_TEXT%</span>

Once all the info is in, modify as you need. Test your deployment with Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool. That’s all it takes. Play around with our code above until its in the format you like. Now all you need to do it  tell Google you have enabled Rich Snippets and hopefully they add your rich content to their search results.

Rich Snippets For Ratings and Reviews In WordPress is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

As you know we are great fans of Google Analytics, naming it the best free analytics package in our test of free analytics vendors. Now comes the word that the party may be over. On March 18th, the Google Analytics team made the following announcement on their blog (our emphasis in bold):

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

Obviously it is hard to comment without more details, but this is another example where using third party software can leave you out in the cold when they decide to change the rules. We know users have for years used no-script and Adblock to block analytics packages, but a browser plugin could spread this to more non-technical users. Time will tell what happens, but we feel your web analytics are too valuable to wait. You need to evaluate your options.

Thankfully there are many options to choose from. To help here are our choices. It is not an exhaustive list, but it might help you start your search:

Best Free Alternative to Google Analytics: Self-Hosted
There are many good free webstat tools, like Statcounter, what we are looking at are Analytics tools, which provide a bit more info such as goal and campaign tracking.We are also not looking at free hosted solutions because those can disappear over-night. Our vote goes to Piwik.org which we profiled at version 0.2.3.4 and have seen lots of great improvements since. To us it’s the most like Google Analytics, so the transition will be easy. They also get extra points for the fact they are self-hosted. The other free alternative we suggest you consider is Advanced Web Stats. Both options require self hosting.

Best Value for Money Alternative to Google Analytics: Hosted
To us, the best value for the money alternative to Google Analytics is GetClicky. A quick look a the comparison chart shows why we choose getclicky.com is a great alternative. The best part is the fact, they are one of the few services that supports Google Analytics campaign tags. That means if you have historical campaigns set up with Google Analytics, you can still capture the info with GetClicky. Its also a great way to check your “Google” numbers. Their price is under $120 for the superpro package.

Best Enterprise Alternative to Google Analytics:
This is a hard one, there is a lot of competition in this sphere, but if you have a site with a million pages a month, there are not many services that can handle you. Furthermore, the reality is at this level if your analytics are business critical, you really shouldn’t be using a free solution. It really gets down to what you need and what you are comfortable with. In our view Yahoo! Web Analytics is a great choice (see a good comparison here to Google. Keep in mind Yahoo! is has recently released a new version which added even more features. If you or your company decides to really spend some big bucks, you can also check outWebTrends as a robust Enterprise solution.

In conclusion, some have noted the opt-out will not have an impact. Personally, I am not sure — it depends on the simplicity of the opt-out and how much press it gets. If opting out of Google Analytics is really simple, adoption rates could be high. I also think it makes sense to start considering alternative analytic packages you can facilitate a smooth transition should you need to make it. It never hurts to have a “back-up” plan. Most importantly, you need a benchmark to watch your site to see if a significant delta arises in your Google Analytics and the secondary vendor you choose. To stay updated on the latest Google Analytics opt-out developments we welcome you to subscribe to our blog via email.

Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

You might have heard of Click Tale. It’s a great product which offers some unique tools not offered by any major analytics vendor in such a complete package:  Visitor Recordings, Mouse Move Heatmaps, Attention Heatmaps and more. They also have a free lite version which is a tad limited, but will give you a wonderful taste of the tool (scroll to the bottom of the page to find it).

Do not take this as an ad for ClickTales, because its not – we just wanted to point out an overlooked tool if your have the budget for it. For those that don’t have a major budget and might be using Google Analytics or Piwik, there is now an option. It will require some work on your part (but not much), but it will allow you to get some of the features found in ClickTales. Its an open source script called Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) from Luis Leiva which allows you to record mouse activity on Web pages and replay mouse activity in real time. Below is a screen shot of the data you can record for each visitor (but you can aggregate it, if you choose):

You can download Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) here or check the demo here.The requirements to get SMT for yourself are really basic, like it should be for all open source projects. All your Web server needs is a MySQL 5 database and PHP 5 installed with the cURL and JSON libraries. These settings are very common on most Web servers. The install process is also very easy much like WordPress, just follow the steps in the readme file. Once you are up, you will need to add the following to the head of each document you want to track:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-aux.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-record.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    smt2.record({
      recTime: 300,
      disabled: Math.round(Math.random()),
      warn:true,
      warnText: "We are going to record your mouse movements for a remote usability study."
    });
  } catch(err) {}
  </script>

Modify the code as necessary. For example you can change the warn text to something like:

warnText: "We'd like to track your mouse activity\nin order to improve this website's usability.\nDo you agree?",

Or you can change the randomness of the visitors recorded, the amount of time visitors are recorded etc.

As you can see this is a very powerful tool, but this does not replace a fully integrated system like ClickTales. Nevertheless, for the more adventurous this could be a great add-on to free solutions you are currently using. Also being it is open source and actively developed, who knows if maybe in the future some plugins will be created to make it easier to integrate with Piwik, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other CMS systems.

Mouse Tracking, Heat Maps & Record Visitors For Free! is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Statcounter announced a couple of weeks ago an update on their newest version of their tracking software. The SC4 update added two major changes. The first allowing for exit link tracking, or in other words, track the destinations of visitors leaving your site. The other was the ability to compile, download stats, as in track stats for pdf and other files available on your site. This got us wondering, what igf you were in a situation where Statcounter was not an option, and why Google Analytics did not offer something similar out of the box. In our search for answers and we found  an essential add-on for any Google Analytics implementation. Immeria started the ball rolling, with a script to to track outbound links and downloads which has now morphed into a wonderful open source project. In short, gaAddons Google Analytics implementation. Best of all, its easy to implement. The first step is download the code (we have linked to the SVN, the most up to date code). Place it in a folder and call it after the main Google Analytics script. Below is an example code, you will need to add your Google Analytics Site ID.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-XX");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/gaAddons.js"></script>

That’s it. Now just wait 24 hours, for the first couple of event to take place, and then it will appear in your report under Content >> Event Tracking. The results, will look like something below:

In short, this is an essential script for any site using Google Analytics that needs to know where users go after they leave their site, and what information they download.

Please note: gaAddons is not compatible with the new Google Asynchronous Tracking method. As Stephane Hamel pointed out earlier this year on his blog: “I intend to do a complete rewrite in a more object-oriented form that will easily support async-calls. However… this being an open-source/free project, it tends to fall lower in the list while I focus on consulting, teaching & speaking ”

Track Outbound Links and Downloads with Google Analytics is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Recently we were working on a project where we needed an email marketing software. The goal was for something we could totally configure and customize, and not incur extra costs for a license or hosting. In our research, we came across PoMMo (also known as the post modern Mass Mailer), which in our view, one of the most underrated and missed gems of the open-source movement. We do add the caveat, that work by the principal developer Brice Burgess has seemed to have stopped (no release of new version since late 2008) so you’re basically on your own. Nevertheless, the bulk of work Brice and team has left behind, can get you started to having a great email marketing software of your own. This is not a project for the faint of heart, but with some time to tweak the code, you will have a very robust system.

One freebie from us, is when you start, explore themes/shared/css/default.admin.css. Some changes need to be made. Mostly for ease of use. Trust us, when we tell you, change line 24 to the following:

#content {
    /* display: inline-block; */
    margin-left: 200px;
    padding: 5px 15px;
    background: #FFF;
}

You’ll also want to play around in themes folder in general to make it more your style. Its really not hard though, as PoMMo uses SMARTY templates, so changes can be made quickly.

The main reason we are high on PoMMo are the features already present in the software. You can read the full feature list here, but these are the highlights:

As you can see PoMMo is a very powerful software. We were able to get ours up and running to satisfaction within a week. If you have basic PHP/MYSQL knowledge and Dreamweaver, you should be able to do it yourself as well. Its too bad development has been stopped on this software, but in all honesty, what has been left behind really does a superb job. As well, thankfully, there is active forum, with users contributing tips and workarounds. There is a working demo here, so you can check it out for yourself.

PoMMo: Best Open Source E-Mail Marketing Software is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More