Monitoring Online Conversations with Yahoo Pipes

Last week we concluded our discussion of online monitoring by building a Yahoo Pipe designed to capture conversations about SXSW. Considering all the excitement SXSW generated, I'm assuming the pipe we built kept your RSS reader busy over spring break! For those of you who weren't in class, I have embedded the slideshow/tutorial on how to build this pipe below. You don't necessarily need to monitor the same keywords (SXSW and southbysouthwest in our class example) - just use any tags/names/keywords you are interested in monitoring.

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You may also want to read Brian Solis' new post on Social Customer Relationship Management with regard to the need to listen in on online conversations. Yahoo pipes offer a very basic, yet easy way to do what Solis is describing here:

Listening to the dialog related to specific keywords within every community, initially, will help us define and chart an accurate social map that pinpoints the exact communities that require our attention, the volume and frequency of relevant conversations, and the tonality and reach of those conversations within their respective networks.

A new way to grade blogs?

I just found a fun new way to grade your blog posts. Here's the deal:
First, I'll run your blog URL through the MoneyPath Bailout Calculator (via @BarbaraNixon). Then I'll rank order your blogs based on the bailout money you received and assign a corresponding grade...

Okay, just joking! Tempting though :-)

Explaining Twitter in 140 characters or less - is it possible?

Good talk by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams on how Twitter evolved from the original idea of letting people share moments of their lives into something a lot more complex. Williams contends that although Twitter was initially designed as a broadcast medium, it's the users that ended up shaping the system into what it is today. Some of Twitter's current uses go far beyond the original idea of allowing people to stay connected and were completely unanticipated according to Williams.

I think that's one of the reasons many people have a hard time "getting" Twitter. Twitter is many things and continues to evolve in directions that are hard to anticipate - even by its co-founder. The ever-changing nature of Twitter means that we need to stay open to its many possibilities and that we can't just categorize it one way. It's another good example of what I talked about last week in a short guest post on the PRSA ComPRehension blog: the danger of static views of social media technologies. It's difficult to summarize what Twitter is all about. Imagine having to do so in true Twitter fashion: in 140 characters or less. I don't think I could do it. Could you? ABC tried to explain Twitter last week and they did a nice job but it took them 7 minutes to do so!

One other thing worth pointing out in this talk is the demonstration of Twitter as a backchanneling tool for presenters. We've seen it with Sarah Lacy's interview of Marc Zuckerberg at SXSW last year and we saw it again last night at the Texas Public Relations Association (TPRA) awards when comedian Sherry Belle offended her audience and was castigated in real-time on Twitter.