At Looxii we’re not only striving to provide a simple social media monitoring solution. We’re also striving to consistently blow your mind, to that end please find a comprehensive list of lists – so meta – of social media analytics providers below…
A list of lists of social media analytics providers

• A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions – Ken Burbary
• “a complete list of social media monitoring/listening tools” – creativetraction.com
• Social Media Monitoring Tools – netzpiloten.de (ein Deutsch)
• The increasingly crowded market of Social Web Analytics – Marcom Professional
• 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools… – Web Design Booth

That’s five, do you have any more? Feel free to leave your favorite SMA compilations and tools or any suggestions for future mind-blowing lists in the comments.

photo credit: Kevin Dooley

Looxii likes are short posts where we share some things we just like.

Olivier Blanchard’s slide deck “Basics of Social Media ROI” provides some great insights for newbies or established pros (sometimes we need refreshing) working professionally with and in Social Media. Enjoy:

This is the second part in a series of posts detailing how to maximize your listening efforts by following the social media search cycle. This post will cover how to categorize and report on your social media search results.

The first step in the social media search cycle is defining and refining search terms to suit your need. After adding your terms the data begin to flow. This can be the most difficult point of the social media search cycle.

Staring at a mass of qualitative data can be daunting, especially for marketing departments, P.R. firms, or small businesses that are new to social media. Using the proper social media tracking tools you can turn this flow of data into useful, quantifiable, and persuasive information.

Categories, Organization, Success

After adding your search terms, it can be enlightening and even fun to check out your search’s feed. This is a great place to start thinking of how your business, product, service, or personal brand can be categorized. Looking at the results is helpful because you can see how the public defines or identifies your brand in their own terms, which may be contrary to your expectations.

If you were tracking social media for a local university, mentions would span a wide variety of categories: sports teams, blog posts about the history of the school, people attending events, staffers chatting about work, student complaints, graduation, student orientation, alumni, and even foursquare check-ins through Twitter.

These categories are interesting, but should be refined depending on what you and your organization want to accomplish. If you want to gauge student satisfaction, tagging every post written by a student with “student” and adding sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) would be useful. If you want to track student problems, tagging student posts with “student” and “problem” would allow you to track student issues against the general student mentions.

Tagging is a common and well understood activity on the web, but the Looxii system takes this process a step further with tag groups. By grouping your tags together, creating a useful report becomes much easier. Taking the example above, a useful tag group would be “author type,” with tags to account for “students,” “parents,” “alumni,” “visitors,” etc.

This allows you to gain insight into who is conversing about your brand and why. When using these categories in conjunction with other tags (i.e. “promotion,” “complaint”) you can easily see and chart where you should focus your promotional or crisis response efforts.

Don’t forget the personal

A common trick of P.R. firms and agencies is to pull out a couple of key Tweets, Facebook posts, or a YouTube videos that are insightful, funny, or support their findings. While you work through the social media mentions in your feed, it can be easy to get distracted by an interesting post. Social media is social after all. For these items you should create a tag called “quote” which you can pull up later when you begin to create your reports. Keeping the personal aspect in your reporting helps to remind everyone why tracking this information is helpful.

Reporting Made Easy

After you feel comfortable with your categories and and you have tagged recent mentions, you have done 90% of the work. The Looxii Graphs page automatically breaks each of your tag groups into its own graph, showing your data over time and in summary in an easy to read format. All that you need to do is set your time frame and export the graph images that are most useful to you.

If you are interested in a subset of data, i.e. just the “students” in the tag group “author type,” you can use the filters near the top to view subsets of data. As you create your reports, don’t forget the interesting mentions that you tagged “quote.” You can pull these up by going to the Looxii Feed page and filter the feed by the “quote” tag.

Refine the Process

Ultimately, it’s about looking at your data and determining what you want to get out of social media reports. Because of the social nature of the mentions and the differing web presence that each organization may have, determining the best categorical breakdowns for your reports and refining which categories you use over time is important. Thinking of social media tracking as a cycle can help to keep your reporting relevant to you and your organization.

This is the first part in a series of posts detailing how to maximize your listening efforts by following the social media search cycle. This post will cover how to identify and refine your social media searches.

Here at Looxii we provide you with the social media listening tools needed to monitor brands (personal or professional), products, competitors or prospective clients. Social media content and subjects are constantly shifting; anything social is usually dynamic, even chaotic. Effective monitoring means accounting for this dynamic, and sometime chaotic, environment.

There are many steps in the life of a social media search and fine-tuning your searches saves time and ensures you are getting the most out of the social web.

Step 1: Identify/Refine Social Media Search Terms

Whether you are a P.R. firm tracking major brands or an organization with a smaller web presence, choosing the correct social media searches is the most fundamental decision to make.

High Volume Searches

If you are searching for terms that have large responses such as “iPod” or “Lady Gaga” it is helpful to identify sub categories. A search for “Lady Gaga” currently returns around 30,000+ mentions/day on Twitter alone. Tracking this term can be helpful only in regard to looking at volume (total mentions) over time. A more useful approach involves breaking your search into subcategories that become more manageable. A search for “Lady Gaga concert” returns around 250 tweets/day and “Lady Gaga tickets” about 160 Tweets/day. This is a small subsection of social media mentions, but if you choose the right categories you can gain insights into important aspects of a brand.

If you are running a search for a business, non-profit, or university, categories are important as well, but for smaller searches you can easily implement tags and tag groups which we will cover in the next post.

Getting Rid of Noise

Many search engines offer advanced search options which allow you to add, with ease, complexity to your search. Looxii offers two advanced search options detailed on our Getting Started page: the all words/exact words toggle and the exclude terms box.

Starting with the all words/exact words toggle and using the previous example, an all words search for “Lady Gaga” might return results like “I’m gaga over you, lady!” but the exact match will only return results like “I’m crazy about Lady Gaga” or “Lady Gaga rocks!” It’s important to decide if people will naturally tend say the term all together or if they tend to break it up. The term “Lady Gaga tickets” could be stated with different word orders, such as: “I need tickets to see Lady Gaga,” so all words would be the appropriate choice for this search.

The exclude terms box can be used to refine your search over time. After seeing the social media mentions over the course of a week or so, you should be able to tell which mentions are meaningless for your particular term. If you were searching for “Devo” and there were frequent Twitter mentions with “Download Devo torrents” we would want to add “torrents” to the excluded terms. The Looxii exclude terms box also excludes authors, so if you are running a smaller search and you have a certain author (e.g. “@spambot-7443″) that always posts worthless mentions containing your search term, add their name (e.g. “spambot-7443″) to the excluded terms.

What’s Next?

Properly setting up your terms is only the first step in tracking social media. In the following posts we will cover how to choose important conversations, categorize mentions, generate reports, and take action. This is an on-going process, you won’t want to set it and forget it. Repeat step one until you have nicely refined searches that generate meaningful social media insights.

After months of toiling, tinkering and testing with several hundred Beta users, we’re making the jump to Open Beta. Now anyone can sign up for a Looxii account and access to real-time social media searches, top-level analytics and detailed email reports.

Here’s some of what you get with Looxii Beta:

À la carte searches

Looxii offers three types of searches for users to choose from: Lite (free, limit two), Basic ($10/mo. per search), and Pro ($20/mo. per search). Our plans page will give you a better idea of the features available for each search.

Inbox insights

For every Looxii search you have we will deliver customizable email reports. The reports are designed to give you meaningful top-level insights – buzz, volume, trends, actual mentions – and help you discern how your search term is performing over a variety of social media.

Live feed

Looxii searches also feature a live feed. Know what people are saying about your search term right now. Looxii feeds enable you tag, rate or filter social media mentions. Create tag groups and tags to track custom metrics that are relevant to you. Different searches have different access to live feeds, see the plans page for details.

That’s just some of what Looxii can do for you. Lite searches are free, sign up today to get started with simple social media analytics.

Upgrading a web app comes with challenges, some anticipated, others unforeseen. Since upgrading last week we’ve been working relentlessly to keep up with – and prevent – server errors and service outages.

As of the time of this post Appengine (the platform that hosts our platform) is down, in a big way. We do know that whenever you encounter an error, regardless of where the problem originates, that your data are tucked away and aggregating safely.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope the problem is rectified soon. If you have any questions please contact us or email us directly at support[at]looxii[dot]com.

We really can’t do Startup Riot 2010 justice in one blog post. From Looxii’s perspective it was a great opportunity to spread the word about our beta release, meet new people and get some quick feedback. That said, it was a truly humbling experience getting to share the stage with so many amazing startups. We owe countless thanks to Sanjay Parekh, Brandy Nagel, Jacqui Chew and the dozens of sponsors, volunteers and staff for making the event great for everyone involved.

We will now defer to those who were responsible enough to provide thoughtful, thorough analysis and coverage of the day’s events… this list was taken directly from Startup Riot:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Startups do some fast talking for investors

WXIA-Atlanta: 50 Startup Entepreneurs Vie For Up to $1-Million Each

David Cummings: Startup Riot 2010 – Another Success

Paul Stamatiou: Live Blogging: Startup Riot 2010

Angus McRae: Startup Riot 2010

Lance Weatherby: Hour 1, Hour 2, Hour 3

WABE: WABE Newscast (16 Feb 4pm)

Jeff Hilimire: Why I’ll be spending the day at Startup Riot

OpenStudy.com: OpenStudy Presents at the Fabulous Fox – Startup Riot 2010

Todd Kelly: Spending the day at Startup Riot

CitiSync: My experience at Startup Riot 2010 representing CitiSync!

Robyn Cobb: Can you pitch your business in 3 minutes?

Alligator: UF student hopes to expand his social site to other college towns

Alltop Startups: Startup Riot 2010 Winners

DoLeaf: DoLeaf presents at Startup Riot 2010

Link to looxii-beta press release pdf

Looxii is taking their app from Alpha to Beta at the third annual all-day pitch event for startups, Startup Riot 2010. After several months of development and design, Looxii is releasing a private beta version of their social media analytics platform.

“It took a ton of work getting to beta, we’re really excited about the new platform and the impact it will have on the field of social media analytics.” – Daniel Upton, Looxii CEO

Looxii Beta is the first social media analytics platform built with simplicity in mind. With many existing platforms the greatest obstacle between data and meaning is the interface. Startup Riot founder and organizer Sanjay Parekh says “the implementation is fantastic…the guys from Looxii have really nailed a drop dead simple interface that gives you what you want without jumping through a lot of hoops.”

With Looxii simplicity means no expensive training sessions, no time-consuming webinars, no useless features and no excessive prompts or pop-ups, just an easier way to interact with, and get use out of, torrents of social media data. Looxii Beta saves time and delivers information that helps businesses create and modify successful social media campaigns.

Currently in private beta, Looxii plans to release its platform to the public soon with a series of priced analytics offerings for businesses of all sizes. More information is available at http://blog.looxii.com. You can also get the latest Looxii updates by following @Looxii on Twitter.

About Looxii

A member of the inaugural class of Shotput Ventures companies, Looxii was founded in the Spring of 2009 by two graduates of Georgia Tech’s MS in Digital Media program – Daniel Upton and Adam Rice. Adam and Daniel have collaborated on several successful projects – academic, independent, and, now, entrepreneurial – over the past two years. Together they create common sense social media apps using an interdisciplinary approach that embraces rapid, iterative design and development techniques. Find out more at www.looxii.com/about.

About Startup Riot

Startup Riot is an all-day pitch event for startups from all industries, stage of maturity and geographic location. The event connects entrepreneurs with potential investors and buyers. Each year, up to 50 companies are selected through a simple, no-cost application process. Each of the selected companies delivers a three-minute presentation on their value proposition to an audience of potential investors and customers over the eight-hour event.

For more information, visit www.startupriot.com

We appeared on Atlanta’s Bold Ventures Radio a couple of weeks ago to talk about Looxii and social media trends in business. It also gave us an opportunity to talk about our experience in Shotput Ventures and give some advice to prospective applicants. Be sure to have a listen. We’re on right after host Jean Creech’s interview with Don Rainey of Grotech Ventures.

If podcasts aren’t your thing you can check out video of our appearance. A BIG thanks to the folks of Bold VenturesTV for recording, editing and posting videos of us on YouTube!

Looxii on Bold Ventures Radio

Looxii on BoldVenturesTV

Looxii was just profiled in a piece from Tech Journal South! Fun! Check it out and let us know what you think…

Looxii aims at providing easy to use social network monitoring tools
– Allan Maurer