Why?

On April 15th, the United States Department of Homeland Security, Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a warning of an “ongoing campaign targeting the content management software WordPress…”

On the Department of Homeland Security site… 

CloudFlare, a web performance and security startup, has to block 60 million requests against its WordPress customers within one hour elapse time. The online requests reprise the WordPress scenario targeting administrative accounts from a botnet supported by more than 90,000 separate IP addresses. A CloudFlare spokesman asserted that if hackers successfully control WordPress servers, potential damage and service disruption could exceed common distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack defenses.

Why should we care?

According to Wikipedia,

WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, powering over 60 million websites worldwide.

According to WordPress.org, WordPress 3.5 has been downloaded 19,370,337 times (as of this article)

So what?

Imagine for a minute that 20,000,000 websites were running code for personal blogs, corporate websites, and local stores.

Imagine if four million of those were out of date and had security holes.

You don’t have to imagine.

WordPress 3.5 is currently the most current release of WordPress.

Roughly 65% of them are out of date.
*pie chart is directly from WordPress.org

Two-thirds of the WordPress sites are out of date…

Creating a  ‘feeding frenzy‘ of criminal hackers looking for easy victims.

We can see by searching Google Trends that search volumes for words such as WordPress Security and WordPress Backup are trending up with no sign of slowing down. If we look at small segments of time related to keywords in the marketplace we can see that backup and security solutions for WordPress as follow-up remedies after the situation has escalated.

In other words: WordPress users wait until a problem happens, then they complain they left the door unlocked.

How does this affect me?

Imagine the value of your personal data.

Think about the previous line item “WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites”

• How many times a month do you visit a WordPress site?
  (hint… you are on a WordPress site right now.)
• How many of those sites have you joined up as a member?
• Did you release your e-mail or privately talk with another member?
• Does your e-mail, username, and password match one of your utility or bank logins?
• Did you click on a message link from a friend only to realize it was spam?
• Did you download a nasty virus on your computer off the web?
• Did you wait a few extra seconds waiting for a site to load?

Simply said: there are hundreds of ways that a WordPress virus or hack can affect you, your business, or the people you care about. Some of them are simply nuisance items and others are a complete panic.

If you own a site that has been attacked, the resulting damage can cause irreparable damage to your business and your community members. Repairing a site can often cost thousands of dollars in lost income and technical fees (and the trust of your users.)

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

If you use WordPress: UPDATE IT along with ALL of the plugins you use.

Share this article with anyone who uses WordPress.

Encourage them to update the software they use and make frequent back-ups to protect themselves and their users.

We all have a responsibility to help each other have a positive and safe experience on the web.

Big Names (outside of the Department of Homeland Security) are talking about it.

Techcrunch, ArsTechnica, Hostgator…

Global WordPress Brute Force Flood – Gator Crossing – HostGator
Apr 11, 2013 … Global WordPress Brute Force Flood … The main force of this attack began last week, then slightly died off, before picking back up again …

Fix For Recent WordPress Brute Force Attack Is Easier Than You …
Apr 14, 2013 … Over the past couple of days it has been widely reported that WordPress based sites are being targeted by a massive brute force attack, one …

Brute Force Attacks Build WordPress Botnet — Krebs on Security
Apr 12, 2013 … Brute Force Attacks Build WordPress Botnet. Security experts are warning that an escalating series of online attacks designed to break into …

Hackers Point Large Botnet At WordPress Sites To Steal Admin …
Apr 12, 2013 … For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to … that CloudFlare saw attacks on virtually every WordPress site on its …

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen …
Apr 13, 2013 … According to CloudFlare’s Prince, the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, …

Worldwide WordPress Security Admin Attacks: Secure Your Blogs Now
Apr 16, 2013 … WordPress Security is always an important part of running your blog, but right now it is even more important than ever. There is a severe …

Update WP Super Cache and W3TC Immediately – Remote Code …
Apr 23, 2013 … Shame on us for not catching this a month ago when it was first reported, but it seems that two of the biggest caching plugins in WordPress …

Competitive research isn’t just for major corporations

There are hundreds of competitive research tools out there that provide *FREE* insight to what you should be doing as a business.

This article is going to go through a few of my favorite free tools. If you have any questions about how to apply them, please make sure to zip me off an e-mail or leave a comment below.

As an example for this article I am going to use the Samsung Galaxy S4 product launch.

***************

Samsung has a basic microsite for the Galaxy S4 and has a variety of promotional campaigns and partners around it. By using Samsung (and the Galaxy S4) as an example we can think about this process from several different perspectives of why I might look at this data:

1. I’m Samsung and I want to know what I am doing right/wrong
2.  I’m a direct corporate competitor (HTC, Sony, etc)
3.  I’m a distributor or retailer and I want to know how I can best sell the product
4. I’m a ‘little shop’ and I want to know where I can use other people’s marketing budget

There are all sorts of questions you can apply to the basic tools below to drive greater insight

• Is there a local niche opportunity?
• Were there trends that had common synergy we can plan for?
• Are the global opportunities for other product roll-outs?

Traffic Research

SimilarWeb.com is a relatively new tool on the market. It allows you to take a look at any website and see all sorts of data about it.

This is a good starting point if you have any competitors who have enough traffic to show up on the results of SimilarWeb. They don’t have results for low traffic sites or niche services, but if you explore some of the bigger players in your marketplace you can find the sweet spot of sites they have information on.

The Samsung site results give me a list of top keywords sending traffic, ranging from Samsung Galaxy to Samsung Mobile. It also tells me that 57% of social traffic is coming from Facebook and that 32% of social traffic is coming from YouTube (key indicators I should check those out.)

While it appears rather insignificant, the box (image left) that highlights traffic source breakdown and subdomains is a great way to shed light on where you should look next. High traffic sources from direct means looking at traditional channels (print, television, etc), referrals means looking at partner sites and online ads, search is for paid and organic keywords, and mail means you should sign up for a newsletter or two.

BONUS TIP: looking at subdomains is a great way to find ‘secret’ projects that web developers and product managers are working on. In many cases larger projects (and larger clients) merit customized sub-domains.

Keyword Research

While there are plenty of other keyword research tools out there, Google Trends is on the top of my list.

It has the simplest and most straight-forward visualization for quickly comparing interest levels based on timeframe and geographic area.

The chart below show me when top Samsung products gained traction. This information allows me to drill down into specific segments of the promotion campaign to examine press releases, partner announcements, and advertising campaigns associated to the product. I can also see how traffic volume was influenced by major holidays, seasonal shifts, and weekday/weekend changes.

For every term I look at Google provides me with a list of top related keywords and provides me with an interactive map to drill down on specific regions.

BONUS TIP: when looking at a specific result, make sure to click on ‘view changes over time’ directly underneath the map on the lower left. This will play an animation for your selected time frame. For global or national items you can see how different cities, states, and regions were affected by a promotional roll-out. 

Social Research Tools

SocialMention.com is a ‘go to’ research tool. It basically works just like Google, but it focuses on indexing social media sources such as blogs, comments, events, and video.

Whenever you do a search it provides you with a quick visualization of how often a term is being used, what the general sentiment is, related top keywords, and top users. For people who like data and using other tools it also provides RSS feeds, e-mail alerts, and the ability the get a CSV/Excel download file.

A search for “Galaxy S4″ lets me know that every 32 minutes there is a mention, that the positive to negative ratio is 32:1, and that there are about a dozen related keywords, hashtags, and sources.

By using the advanced search parameters and adjusting my search query I can quickly see what terms and trends are associated to the item I want to look at. When I am doing basic review work I often examine company names, URLs, top products, and key executives.

BONUS TIP: the download CSV file gives the information with some extra details, breaking up the volume of information by date, title, link, and user/user link. Make sure to download and check it out if you like charting data in Excel or other visualization tools. 

 YouTube Research

Do a quick search on YouTube for competitor brands, products, and industry events.

There are some easy to see ‘gems of wisdom’ to see hidden behind a click or two on YouTube.

We’ll look at this example video from Samsung Mobile for the Galaxy S4

It has roughly 130,000 views and a decent number of ‘thumbs up’

If you click on the little metrics icon (see image) it will bring up information about  when the views occurred, how it was publicized, and what sites embedded the video.

Take a quick look at the provided data:

If we look at this information, we can accurately see when videos were released and who supported the videos by promoting them.

By examining a series of videos we can quickly construct a list of sites and communities that would likely support a similar video, and by looking at the the ‘key discovery events’ we can identify if a specific event drove an unusually high amount of exposure.

The key discovery event timeline can be compared to the engagement and audience demographic to highlight if a specific event caused a spike in comments, likes, dislikes, or favorites.

BONUS TIP: you can also take the name of the video and do a search on Google.com for it if there is a key discovery event that says “First referral from Google” – as it generally means the video is ranking for a decent keyword.

What did it all tell me?

Each of the tools above led me down a path of research, even without deeper research I can see:

Traffic Research – SimilarWeb highlights that Samsung relies heavily on search campaigns to drive traffic (%49)  - I could use this to copycat tactical action plans for other products and have a million dollar tactical plan paid for by Samsung.

Keyword Research – Google Trends tells me that the interest level for the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4 are nearly identical for the first part of the campaign. A savvy competitor could look at phase two of the campaign for the S3 and derail the same process happening for the S4 (which would be a multi-million dollar issue.)

Social Research – SocialMention gives me a list of all the social users who are talking about the Galaxy S4. If I wanted to do some influencer analysis on them I could stack rank them by follow/friend/traffic count and create an outreach campaign to contact them about a similar product.

YouTube Research - YouTube Analytics tells me how promotional messaging was consumed and promoted by video watching audiences. By examining multiple videos around the S4 I would have a list of sites that would promote my content.

Using the above techniques for your own business, think about local competitors you could use these tools to take a look at and ask yourself if there is a ‘big fish’ that is simply providing you with a million dollar roadmap to follow.

Hopefully you learned a thing or two.

If you did, please share!

As someone who has been involved in social media before it was social media, I’ve been doing a lot of learning.

Roughly one-third of my day is  learning. 

I read blogs, listen to audio casts, and play videos on my secondary monitors while I work.

It’s hard to cut through all the noise, but if you want to know what I read this morning…

Some great Friday reading

70+ epic social media case studies, stats, blog posts … – Econsultancy
Today … At Econsultancy, we publish a huge amount of content related to digital marketing and ecommerce. One particular area that gets a lot of …

Study: 55 Percent Of Mobile-Search Driven Conversions Happen In …
Mar 13, 2013 … Large numbers of people believe that the majority of mobile search activity happens “on the go.” However, according to an extensive new study …

Demystifying How Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm Works – HubSpot
3 days ago … Two infographics that explain how Facebook EdgeRank filters which content gets displayed in users’ News Feeds.

Black Hat or White Hat SEO? It’s Time to Ask Better Questions …
Mar 21, 2013 … Debates over black-hat vs. white-hat SEO conjure up images of cartoon cowboys and villains, and probably aren’t much more useful than …

If you prefer video

SEOMOZ on ‘Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics’

As we dive deeper on how Seattle News is consumed, we need to understand how keywords are related to it.

This section will cover some strategies for the keywords involve in Seattle News.

For most of the numbers I’m reviewing here I used the Google Adword tool and Google Traffic Estimator.

STEP ONE: Related Keyword Traffic

Whenever I look at a marketplace, I always look at some of the ‘common sense’ words that drive traffic (via Google Traffic Estimator.) In this case I’m looking at ‘Seattle News’ as a keyword and examining the top related search keywords. This first thin I do is look at the volume of traffic, as I want to understand where the eye balls are and if there is a branding or impression scenario to consider.

STEP TWO: Related Keyword Cost

The next item to look at (using Adwords Keyword Tool) is to examine the most expensive keywords related to the original term. This often exposes areas that businesses can have an opportunity around, as well as keywords that other businesses have bid the price up. If someone is willing to spend money on these, basic logic says I should ask the question of whether or not there is reasonable business opportunity there.

STEP 3: Where is our Audience?

You can’t just assume that everyone is searching for “Seattle News” is in Seattle…. the chart below details how a good chunk of the search volume is coming from Port Angeles and Tacoma, anywhere from 25 to 75 miles away.

If I had made the mistake of pursuing “Seattle News” as a local Seattle business, I may have been reaching an audience that was simply outside of my business market. You can explore this data using Google Insights.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

STEP 4: Keyword Funnels

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Any single keyword leads to another, leads to another.

When you are using Google you can see this in action by paying attention to Google auto-complete when they try to provide options as you type in your phrase.

When you are typing in the search box, pay close attention to the words and phrases that appear. This is invaluable for discovering what journey an online audience takes to discover new information.

The chart (left) details how  the search audience goes from keywords like “Seattle News” to keywords such as Seattle Traffic News, Seattle Times, Seattle PI, Seattle Traffic, SeaTac Airport, etc.

One of these keyword funnels may be the exact audience you want to communicate with (for advertising or search optimization and Adwords) or simply help educate you on how your consumers are exploring relevant information.

 STEP 5 : The Local Market

I’ll be digging into this topic on part 3 of Seattle News & Social Media.

Let me know if you have any questions and make sure to check out some of the related articles below.

If you are part of an entrepreneurial endeavor, you probably owe it to yourself to read this.
There are some important entrepreneur tips to absorb.

When I left the typical corporate grind working for a Fortune 50, one of my goals was to help others succeed, to push further, go farther, and find something bigger for themselves.

In many cases I have succeeded.

I have an amazing network of people ranging from social media clubs, alumni associations, industry groups, small business owners, and corporate executives that I’ve help take to the next level. Many of those people have become both professional and personal friends. In many professional groups I’m the “go to” guy that looks at things holistically.

When people know they’ve broke something I’m usually the guy who has cognitive skills to fix it.

I could relay incredibly complex recommendations, but it basically comes down to this:

Of all the things I say to entrepreneurs: be happy.
Treat people like your friends.
Expect good things of them.
When they have fault, help them overcome.
and like Mom said, treat people like you want to be treated.

One would think that achieving happiness…
would be a simple act.

We know better right?

For me the past few days happiness proved elusive.

I had the displeasure to watch a group of people I had grown to care about severely falter and I had to make the personal choice to stop my support.

In my entire professional life I have done that three times.

When I titled this as Entrepreneurial lessons of Humpty Dumpty I was simply trying to identify one of the largest obstacles that any entrepreneur faces:

Surviving the fall, but failing to learn from the experience.

Entrepreneurs often become confused by taking actions that are repetitive in nature.
This is a human trait: we do the things we inherently know.
It could also be said that most of us take the easy way out.

For Humpty this flaw was simply an urge to sit on the wall.
Perhaps he simply thought it was the best place to sit.

In real life we choose our personal defaults by a life-long indoctrination of personal experiences. These personal ‘defaults’ become a harness, a box, and a leash that prevent us from experiencing things in a holistic and unbiased way. We allow our perspectives to limit ourselves simply by allowing ourselves to be restricted to the box our past experiences have placed us in.

The longer we are in the box, the higher the perceived walls that entrap us become.

Trying to break the cycle

Since most of us take the easy way out, we need to rely on qualified coaches and mentors who are willing to push our boundaries and convince us to explore the unknown.

If I was Humpty’s friend and mentor I would have gave him a tour guide or teach him how to safely sit on the wall.

As an individual entrepreneur this is an incredibly hard process.

When you begin to scale the same tendencies to a group of entrepreneurs it typically becomes a quagmire as everyone has different fears and tolerance of the unknown.

Imagine trying to keep an army of Humpty Dumpties from sitting on the wall. It would be like a massive family of lemmings leaping to their death.

With this specific group, I had had multiple meetings and late night conversations with the core team regarding some of the issues, but I simply couldn’t get them to act on breaking the cycle of actions that were derailing them from success.

The unfortunate part was that the repetitive cycle had been going on for five to ten years and had been slowly and had attritioned through well-intended supporters and personal friends.   The cost was not only preventing the success of the group as a business, but it was also acting as a destructive element across dozens of personal relationships.

If you had a ladder…

When we think about Humpty and his fateful fall, we should spend a minute thinking about the steps he took to get there.

As entrepreneurs move up each rung of the ladder and get higher the chance of falling remains the same, but the perception of failure and fear is exaggerated.

For a team of entrepreneurs this means that the portions of the group will refuse to climb the ladder any higher. Eventually a few people make it to the top and the rest hang on for dear life because they are too afraid of reaching the top. This is where team collaboration and support plays a crucial role.

As a group you can’t leave people behind.
You need to get everyone to the top.
Leaders must adhere to this character the most.
If you abandon your team you aren’t a leader,
you are an opportunist willing to leave people behind.

Humpty Dumpty was an opportunist,
who acted  outside of the group and had
no one to catch him.

The Real World Ending of Humpty Dumpty

In my personal case, I was indirectly involved with a group that meant a great deal to someone I care very deeply about.

I spent days (if not weeks, possibly months) trying to understand some of the core issues of the group from various personal, professional, creative, business, and individual viewpoints.

In other groups this level of coaching  led to thousands (in some cases tens of, or hundreds of thousands) of people being happily involved. In my personal and professional experience, when people enjoy the group and  enjoy the act of being entrepreneurs- the chance of success multiplies a hundred fold.

The group had several different ladders that a few of them were willing to climb. Many of the other members were scared of success or couldn’t commit to the risk of climbing the ladder. A good number of them realized that there were no safety lines for the adventure, and only a few of them had nothing to risk (and everything to gain.)

As people climbed higher than each other, the others below them complained, shook the ladder, and even tried to push them off the wall.

When people start shoving others off the ladder…
you’ve got a broken model.

One of the interesting examples I can share for the local community happens to be the local news scene, an interesting mixture of news and syndication channels that covers multiple television channel partners, dozens of new personalities, hot topics, and both real-world and online syndication channels.

To help connect this with the ‘big picture’ I’m going to work through some of the bullet points I’m researching. This article will open up some “food for thought” and I’ll discuss some of the significance of this type of research and how the process overlaps with other business models.

The three Seattle news stations I chose to include in this review were

• King 5 News (@King5Seattle on Twitter)
• Komo 4 News (@KomoNews on Twitter)
• Kiro 7 News (@Kiro7Seattle on Twitter)

Market Penetration

The interesting part of this is that each channel has relatively little overlap, but that they have very little penetration and coverage on the web.

The total number of unique followers between all three stations is only 62,333.

While this is a respectable audience for most businesses, we need to keep in mind that within the Seattle and Bellevue communities alone there are over 150,303 people on Twitter.

Some the numbers above we can see a simply broadcast methodology to how all three stations work: between the three stations they have been on Twitter a total of 4,179 days and have tweeted 121,236 times.
That works out to roughly 29 tweets a day (roughly 1.2 tweets per hour.)

News Stations Aren’t Popular, News is Popular

The chart below is created from Google Insights. When looking at the traffic trends behind all three stations we can quickly see that all three stations have nearly identical traffic trends and online mentions. While all three stations have different shares of the market, they are all sharing the same exact market and have very few differentiating factors.

What does each Audience like?

By using Google keyword data we can see the most commonly associated words and phrases associated with each channel.

This helps detail how audiences actually search for and consume the news. In the list below you can see how most of the news brands have a high correlation to other news brands in the area: if they don’t cover the most popular story identified by the traffic trend chart above, the audience will migrate to other news channels that will fulfill their need (click to see a larger image of the graph.)

What Did the Data Tell Us?

When we look at how people seek out sources of information and consume the news we can discover how our business goals overlap with on-going trends.

News stations simple cover the news. They don’t create it.

They also don’t control the ‘buzz’ factor that is generation by word of mouth both offline or online.

In Part II of Seattle News & Media
I’ll dig into some of the search optimization and syndication of these channels.

Have a question? Drop me a note below.

This article gives a starting framework for developing a departmental matrix for on-going social media initiatives that is focused on revenue and business goals. It addresses the driving factors of why people make decisions and use certain tools (without focusing on what the specific decision or tool is.)

Social media isn’t the ‘one size fits all’ solution for business.
It isn’t really a solution for business at all.

Social media is an evolution of how people communicate.

We search, we share, we socialize.

We search

When we look for answers to our questions, we are driven by our core needs and personas. While anyone may use the same words to search, the meaning of those words and the intent behind them is entirely different.

We share

Humans are inherently tribal. We have basic condition that something of perceived value is useful. We collect things of value to trade, to support our friends, and to build value around our family unit.

We socialize

When we meet and greet other people we all have basic driving wants, needs, and desires. These are a combination of personal and professional motivations.

What does that tell us about social media?

It tells us the factors of being successful in social media aren’t found in technology.
The success factors of social media (and business in general) are found in human nature.

Search = finding the intent before, during, and after a word selection.

Share = discovering what tribes want; what they believe is valuable.

Socialize = look past job titles and brands, dig into *why* someone wants a relationship.

Keep those ideas in mind when you are planning how social media is going to interact with your business.

We can’t rely on technology to address the human factors driving our audiences to build our business.

An exercise

I’m going to suggest you sit down and grab pen and paper.
Step away from the keyword for a few minutes and jott down some ideas.

Answer these questions…

Goals and business drivers

• What are the top three busines goals in the short-term (10 to 90 days)
• What are the top three business goals in the long-term (9o days to 3 years)
• What are the top three business CURRENT revenue drivers

How can I segment the above goals and revenue drivers?

• locally (state, metro, city, zip code)
• globally (country, language)
• technology (real world, smartphone, tablet, desktop)
• interval (minute, hour, day, month, season)

Who are the supporters of these goals and revenue drivers

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• Employees
• management
• workforce
• vendors
• consultants

[/wpcol_1third] [wpcol_1third id="" class="" style=""]

• Consumers
• prospects
• current customers
• market evangelists

[/wpcol_1third] [wpcol_1third_end id="" class="" style=""]

• Strategic Supporters
• investors
• journalists
• trade partners
• family/friends

[/wpcol_1third_end]

Rate Each Department
High Consideration, Low Considertaion, No Consideration, Unknown

[wpcol_1half id="" class="" style=""]

• Marketing
• Sales
• Public Relations
• Operations
• Customer Service
• Quality Assurance
• Fulfillment

[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id="" class="" style=""]

• Accounting
• Legal
• Product Development
• Research & Development
• IT
• Supply Chain/Logistics
• Human Resources

[/wpcol_1half_end]

 Once We Have Some Departmental Definition

Think about the search, share, and socialization aspects of everything you rated as
“High Consideration”

For each high consideration group answer these questions:

• Can we tie departmentt cost/benefit/budget to other high consideration departments?
• How do we manage, measure, and evaluate business effectiveness for this department?
• Does this department have any unique benefits or risks?
• What leaders in this department are supporters?
• What leaders in this department are detractors?
• Does this department have project/labor bandwidth to be involved?
• How do they search, share, and socialize?

When you think about online analytics tools, chances are you immediately think about a specific niche of your online model where a significant issue resides.

Unfortunately this causes a lot of problems, as many of us  become fixated on the problems in front of us and don’t realize that the problem is being caused by congestion, mis-direction, lack of attention, or simple loss of traction.

If we think about online analytics like an interstate road that has cars zipping down it at 75… there are all sorts of things that affect how and when travelers reach a specific destination.

Some things that go wrong at 75 mph…

• You are in the wrong lane
• You missed a sign
• Its raining, the roads are slick
• You are pre-occupied
• There is an accident
• Someone thought road-work was a good idea
• You are simply on the wrong road!

As traffic managers… why should we care?

We should realize that many cases of traffic conversion and monetization are direct ramifications of process points previous to “where we are looking.”

We can’t always help people be better drivers… but if we can control the environment to limit distractions, improve visibility, reduce accidents, and optimize routes we can get a much higher percentage of travelers from A to B to C (and back to A.)

This is where a strategic understanding of online analytics helps to quantify and qualify the process points before, during, and after.

As you browse this list of tools that cover all sorts of problem areas, keep in mind some of the top questions you should be using to manage traffic.

•  Is this process helping or hurting the user experience?
• Does it meet the expectations of the audience?
• Do is exceed the expectations of the audience?
• Do you know how they got on the path? (first-touch attribution)
• Do you know how they got off the path? (last-touch attribution)
• How long does the path take? (time to completion/conversion)
• Do they stop on the path? (ads, content, pages, sites, profiles touched)
• Did they experience this with friends? (social sharing, group decision)
• Where did they get lost?
• If/when they became lost, what did they do?
• When they arrived, did they want to do it again?
• What metrics did the trip influence
  (how much gas, how many pit-stops, dollars spent, speeding tickets earned)
• Did any of them have unusual patterns?
  (why did some drive around to the back entrance?)

Measuring the behavior…

There is so much data that it is an incredible task to actually comprehend it.

Like looking at a TV screen full of static…
trying to rationalize if one pixel means something.

In order to make the data actionable we need to really focus on tools to clarify what we are looking at.

We need to think about

• the process of tuning into a specific channel
• of segmenting data
• of communicating the significance of that data
• of doing SOMETHING with the data

To that end I’ve collected another list of tools that specifically help with visualizing different types of information.

Keep in mind that some of these tools just need ‘some play time’ where you trial and test different types of data until they begin to make sense to you, your audience, and your business.

You should always keep in mind

• Some people are intellectual and other people are creative.
• Some people visualize numbers and some people visualize pictures.
• Some people read the line, others read in-between the line.
• Some people think as individuals, others think as groups.
• Brilliancy and genius is simple and straight-forward

If you have a visualization tool we’d love to check it out.
Please offer your recommendations in the discussion area below!

…..

 ”Easy to Use” Visualization Tools

• Taggalaxy.de
  Tag Galaxy is a very straight-forward visualization tool for clustering images based on tags and for exploring them in a simple user interface. The developer has setup some popular tags to begin exploring on the homepage, but you can easily search for your name, business, or popular industry hashtag.
• Visual.ly
  Is an application that allows you to create and explore visualization based on different types of social media data. They also have a fairly extensive gallery of infographics covering a wide range of topics.
• TouchGraph
  Is both a free and paid tool, giving options to explore Google Search graphs, URL clusters, and Facebook graphs. It has many additional options for color coding networks and finding connective points between clusters.

  Social Media Oriented Tools

• Google+ Ripples
  This is a hidden gem, often overlooked by many. It allows you to see the way any URL has been shared by users on Google+, clustering networks around influencers on a topic and providing a timeline feature that allows you to watch how a URL spread through-out a network. 
• Revisit (image below)
  This is a great Twitter visualization that allows you to see clustering and communication signals over the course of a specific timeframe. For social media managers and data analyst it is a good example to how some topics make a ‘big splash’ and other topics have staying power.
• Tweet Spectrum
  Great way to find words around related tweets and similar topics

 Charting Oriented Tools

• Google Fusion Tables
  Useful tool that has csv and Excel options, along with a wide variety of hidden tricks (a few searches on Google)We all know about the powerhouse that is Google.
• Many Eyes
  A useful data visualization tool by IBM, offering a variety of sample data sets to create visualizations to explore.

Web Content Based Tools

• RSSvoyage.com
  Provides a flowing based visualization of RSS feeds. Articles ‘fly by’ as the RSS feed updates.
• WikiMindMap
  This is actually a very useful tool for understanding Wikipedia and what topics people feel are important enough to detail, segment, and annotate. Great for social research.
• Dipity
  Create timelines… about whatever topic you like. Import RSS, pin markers, add hyperlink to photos,video, etc
• HTML Graph
  This is more artistic than useful; it simply breaks out a color coded visualization of a site based on common HTML components.

Newsmap
(image left)

If you want to see how the world news is currently trending, Newsmap gives you a color coded segmentation of trending topics across major news portals. You can select filters according to country, as well as limit results to what is happening in the last ten minutes.

 Personal Visualization Tools

• Visualize.me
  Connects with your Linkedin account and creates a personalized infographic of your professional life. Has multiple control options for fonts, colors, and background.
• InMaps - LinkedIn
  (see previous post, Influence Analysis with Linkedin InMaps)
  Provides a way of examining your Linkedin network and the relationships that interconnect everyone, with color coding features to highlight certain key networks so that you can visually see ‘how’ people are connected (through employers, industry groups, and personal networks.)
  

  Barry Hurd About.Me Page

• Biogrify
  In closed beta, a different way to capture yourself on line in creative way.
• Vizify TweetSheet
  Vizify’s TweetSheet showcases revealing details from your tweetstream, including: top followers, geographic impact, most-retweeted posts, and more.
• Re.vu
  This takes your Linkedin data and creates a visual resume from it.
• Kinzaa
  If you want timelines and infographics on your resume, this provides some simple tools for making one.
• About.Me
  If the above tools don’t work, About.Me lets you create a fast landing page for yourself.

Word Based Tools

• Tagxedo
  A straight-forward ‘word cloud’ visualization tool. It can form word clouds from blogs, tweets, tags, rss feeds, and text import. Allows you to control the shape of the word cloud (import a company logo…) or have font/color changes.
• Wordle
  Another fast and friendly word cloud tool that allows you to make clouds from almost any text source.
• Tag Crowd
  If Tagxedo or Wordle don’t work for you, Tag Crowd is a third option that has slightly different controls.

Map Based Visualization Tools

All of these tools do one thing… visual data on a map.

• GeoCommons
• uMapper
• BatchGEO
• Chartsbin
• Geocommons

Chart Based Visualization Tools

• Hohli
• Google Chart Tools

Data Sources (the stuff to Visualize!)

• Copernic
  http://www.copernic.com/en/products/agent/personal.html
  Copernix is a piece of software that accesses multiple search engines using one interface. It aggregates the information, provides multiple filter options, saves search records, highlights keywords, and allows import/export of the results.
• Yahoo Pipes
  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
  This isn’t really a data source, but a web based tool that allows you to aggregate, mash-up, and syndicate other sources of data. It is incredibly useful as a tool to build ‘minimum viable models’ for web research (but does have a learning curve.)
• GNIP
  http://gnip.com
  Gnip provides data from dozens of top social sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Youtube and Vimeo. By using a single API it allows you to access thousands of data fields that can be extracted for all sorts of competitive intelligence on businesses, community audiences, and specific people.
• DataSift
  http://datasift.com
  Is another social media data provider. They have a tremendous amount of information available (some overlap with Gnip, some is unique.) It is one of the few social media data providers that can provide full access to the Twitter firehose.
• Spinn3r
  http://spinn3r.com
  Yet another social media data company, but with focus on real-time indexing of the blogosphere or content that you specifically want. Very useful for  processing large amounts of social content found on niche community sites that don’t make it onto Gnip or Datasift’s lists.

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• datacatalogs.org
• Freebase
• World Bank Data
• Data360
• Number Of
• Gallup

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• DataMarket
• The Data Hub
• Knoema
• WorldMap
• Get the Data
• Influence Explorer
• US Census Bureau

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• EveryBlock
• Daytum
• Google Public Data
• Gapminder
• Munterbund

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 DEVELOPER BONUS

(for hard core users)

Datavisualization.ch

It features a great selection of 40+ scripts and files that you can use to create some great visualizations. These are mostly javascript functions, so you’ll have to know a bit of coding to implement.

Axiis
Axiis is an open source set of visualization tools that allows advanced charting and visualization on a variety of different data sets. They have a few colorful examples, such as a breakdown of browser usage month-by-month since 2002. This is a useful data-driven toolset, allowing complex charting visualization with mouse over effects for embedding results on the web.

Gephi
Like Photoshop for data. Graph visualization and manipulation software. Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.

Other Developer Scripts and Codes

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• VIDI
• KeyLines
• d3.js

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• FusionCharts
• amCharts
• Highcharts

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• InfoVis Toolkit
• Flare
• JS Charts

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Hopefully these tools give you some remarkable new ways to create insight to your data.

If you can recommend a tool, please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading

I review competitive information on a daily basis; Ihave to warn you that its a lot of information.

Don’t be afraid of simply sitting down and playing with one or two tools a week and seeing what you come up with. The real magic begins to happen when you start discovering that one tool provides the secret ingredient to turbo-charge the next tool.

Every tool on this list is free.

(some of them may have premium paid upgrades, but they aren’t necessarily required.)

If you would like to find out about the how and why behind using these tools, check out my competitive intelligence posts.

Google Tools

You can’t beat Google when it comes to free information and tons of data. The biggest issue with using Google effectively is understanding how to sift through massive volumes of data to find actionable nuggets of wisdom. To help you do that I’ve include two link to a advanced search parameter cheat sheet and a walk-through of using advanced parameters. If you have a few minutes, you can also watch this official Google training video on advanced search parameters.

Google Cheat Sheet – Advanced Operators
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Using Advanced Search Parameters on Google
http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html

The actual Google Tools…

Google News
http://news.google.com/nwshp
This is probably one of the easiest tools to keep track of your industry, your competitors, and your prospects/clients. When you are signed into Google you have the option of personalizing the news topics and the sources they draw from (In my personal use I have it set to review TechCrunch, Mashable, GeekWire, Venturebeat, etc to cover the start-up/tech scene.)

Custom Google Search Engine
www.google.com/cse/
This is another awesome tool from Google. It allows you to control the sites Google uses for search results. If you have a list of 100 competitive sites you can use it to search them all for investor reports, instructional guides, quarterly results, client lists, etc.

Google Trends
www.google.com/trends/
A great tool for understanding how keyword volume has changed over time. The chart to the right shows a review of Obama vs. Romney for the past twelve months and provides me with the ability to look at noteworthy news stories, drill down to local regions, or explore associated Google results.

Google Trends for Websites
trends.google.com/websites
Provides slightly different information when you enter a web domain (.com, .net, etc)
This information details demand generation over time. A quick look at BestBuy.com shows us the buying patterns around holiday spikes for the past five years, the top ten states driving that demand, and the top cities within those states.

Google Insights
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
Google Insights is one of my favorite ‘go to’ tools: it allows me to narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and tech. It shows me search volume distributed across regions and cities.

 Social Media Tools

Addictomatic.com
http://addictomatic.com/
Is a highly useful social search site that presents a ‘widget’ for each site it finds related information on. These widgets can be sorted, added/deleted, and bookmarked or shared with coworkers.

SocialMention.com
http://socialmention.com/
Has a variety of advanced selection tools to sort blogs, video, microblogs, comments, and more. Results provide multiple breakdowns such as top users, frequency, and popular keywords/tags

Monitter.com
http://monitter.com/
Provides a ‘tweetdeck’ like interface to search Twitter topics quickly. In my daily use I often plug 5-10 topics into the tool and simply let it run on one of my secondary monitors so that I can contemplate trends through-0ut the day.

FeedCompare
http://www.feedcompare.com/
Allows you to examine RSS subscribers on popular sites, a metric that can be very useful for determine where different audiences are coming from and if there are unusual trends that can be associated to marketing and awareness campaigns.

Site Based Tools

Quantcast.com
http://www.quantcast.com/
Provides a wealth of information about sites on the web: demographics, traffic trends, related websites, and topic affinity. If you examine your top ten competitors using this tool, you can often find a few related properties for press announcements and influencer campaigns.

XINU Returns
http://tools.seobook.com/xinu/
An old but still useful web script that reports on 100+ data points that include Pagerank, backlinks, social shares, code validation, and various technical details.

Quarkbase
http://www.quarkbase.com/
Provides a range of statistics regarding a web domain, including key people (according to Lead411), Alexa and Compete Rank, similar sites, and socially popular sites.

Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/
Alexa is a provider of free, global web metrics: discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword,category, or country.

SEO Based Tools

SEObook Competitive Research Tool
http://tools.seobook.com/competitive-research-tools/
While there are dozens of paid SEO tools, SEObook has multiple free tools that include Keyword Suggestion and Spider Tests, along with three different Firefox plugins

• Rank Checker- check a domain for ranking on dozens of keywords (good for your site or competitor sites.)
• SEOtoolbar – get 10+ metrics at your fingertips, along with access to more tools.
• SEO for Firefox – provides metrics directly inside your Google search results (no other steps needed.

Web Tools

ChangeDetect
http://www.changedetect.com/
A service that alerts you to any changes on a specific web domain. It allows you to note things like product updates, team changes, or public announcements on auto pilot.

WayBack Machine
http://archive.org/web/web.php
Keeps track of web site changes over time. This is a critical item for understanding how competitors have changed branding and positioning.
Ever want to see what BestBuy.com looked like on Dec 25th of 1996?

Favorite Firefox Plugins

Here are a few plugins I use on a daily basis. Some of them have versions for other browsers if you are an IE, Chrome, or Safari person.

Search Sidebar by Webmynd
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/the-search-sidebar-by-webmynd/
Provides a sidebar on your search results page that includes additional results from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Wikipedia, and many more content sites.

Search Engine Tags
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/SearchEngineTags/
This allows you to search for information using an additional layer of meta data that you normally don’t see. It provides access to site and topic specific results based on using tags in your searches (it requires a little practice to learn, but provides some highly useful results.)

Autopager
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/autopager/
Allows you to automatically load results from the next page… and the next (into infinity.)  When using sites like Google you can see 10 to 10,000 results to search for specific items hidden well beyond page one of the results.

Fireshot
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/fireshot/
Allows you to take screenshots and has dozens of very useful features.When used for competitive intelligence it allows you to quickly gather visual records and note them.

Firebug
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/firebug/
A development tool that allows you to see the code structure for any web page. Very useful for finding software vendors who provide different platform capabilities to your competitors.

Scrapbook
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/scrapbook/
Add visual bookmarks into a catalog that can be tagged and categorized. Competitive Intelligence professionals can quickly sort reference sites and create visual archives for team collaboration.

List Open URLs
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/list-open-urls/
When you have multiple tabs open on your browser this saves all the URLs to a text file. Very useful for opening 5 to 25 tabs on a research project and documenting the list of source sites for later reference.

HR ORIENTED TOOLS

LinkedIn
http://linkedin.com
If you don’t use Linkedin for competitive and market intelligence you are really missing something. Linkedin provides all sorts of data about employees, relationships, company data, new hires, people that left, press releases, org charts, open positions, and more…

Glassdoor
http://glassdoor.com
Past employees share a treasure trove about the marketplace you deal with. As a standard competitive intelligence sweep I usually recommend checking the top five to ten competitors, top client/prospects, and your vendors.

DATA Sources

Copernic
http://www.copernic.com/en/products/agent/personal.html
Copernix is a piece of software that accesses multiple search engines using one interface. It aggregates the information, provides multiple filter options, saves search records, highlights keywords, and allows import/export of the results.

Yahoo Pipes
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
This isn’t really a data source, but a web based tool that allows you to aggregate, mash-up, and syndicate other sources of data. It is incredibly useful as a tool to build ‘minimum viable models’ for web research (but does have a learning curve.)

GNIP
http://gnip.com
Gnip provides data from dozens of top social sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Youtube and Vimeo. By using a single API it allows you to access thousands of data fields that can be extracted for all sorts of competitive intelligence on businesses, community audiences, and specific people.

DataSift
http://datasift.com
Is another social media data provider. They have a tremendous amount of information available (some overlap with Gnip, some is unique.) It is one of the few social media data providers that can provide full access to the Twitter firehose.

Spinn3r
http://spinn3r.com
Yet another social media data company, but with focus on real-time indexing of the blogosphere or content that you specifically want. Very useful for  processing large amounts of social content found on niche community sites that don’t make it onto Gnip or Datasift’s lists.

Visualization Tools

Tabelau
http://www.tableausoftware.com/
Provides an incredibly useful ‘community edition’ visualization tool on the web that allows you to sort and sift data using a variety of tools.

Pentaho
http://www.pentaho.com/
Business analytics tool for playing with numbers. Open source version is limited, but has some great tools for the price (FREE!)

Splunk Free
http://www.splunk.com/view/free-vs-enterprise/SP-CAAAE8W
Variety of indexing, search, and reporting tools built into a dashboarding tool with apps and developer APIs.

Google Charts
https://developers.google.com/chart/
Google Charts is a go-to resource for free charting capabilities. You can serve up all sorts of data into it, embed them, and even use spreadsheets from Google docs.

Dashboard Tools

My other article covers this: 40+ Social Media Dashboard Tools for Tracking Stuff

Let me know about any other tools worth mentioning!

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