Filed under: blogs analysis
Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent conversation between some Moreover employees. My hope is that this post will give you some insight into who we are as a company and why we do what we do.
Numbers Do Lie (or Can Mislead)
Moreover is strong in the Media Monitoring field — our online news coverage is second to none. But why do some other media monitoring brands tout vast numbers of social media sites, compared to our more humble-sounding index?
The answer lies in what information our customers are trying to glean from their research. There is a considerable amount of noise that becomes a distraction (information overload). Effective monitoring of impactful sources is the driving force behind our efforts to grow and maintain pertinent coverage of social media.
Quantity of Data vs. Quality of Understanding
Just like any media monitoring company, we have competing goals. We want more coverage and more data, while keeping the tools that our clients use lightning fast and giving them only the data that helps them solve their needs.
That “only” is important.
Beware the Big
Moreover owns the ping server Weblogs.com. We have access to data of millions and millions of blogs posting content daily. We know where to look if we’d ever want to inflate our numbers, but we won’t.
Instead, we choose a “White List” approach, in which sources are vetted before they make it into our clients’ search results. When our Newsdesk clients run their searches, the data they want is more likely to be at their fingertips, rather than scattered amongst poor quality data.
More data is better only so long as it can be seen and used. Adding more content to sift through can make finding usable content more difficult. Having too much data can be worse than too little when it hinders the discovery of relevant content.
Drawbacks and Trade-offs
Of course the White List approach has its own issues. An important blog may not be covered when it’s needed. And, it makes it harder to track all mentions of keywords across all social media.
To mitigate this, Moreover’s Client Services and Editorial teams work with our clients to add the blogs and other social media that are important to them. This customer-focused coverage expansion process ensures that we provide broad coverage across multiple industries and niches. We also look at our own data for mentions of new sites, while seeking out other high-value sources of data.
A brief note on “full coverage”: With countless blogs being created and abandoned daily, it’s unlikely that anyone has full coverage. It is more accurate to say “less incomplete coverage”.
Pride in our Numbers
Moreover is proud of our 3.5 million social media feeds and our 55,000 online News sources. The number that makes us most proud, though, is our 90%+ customer retention rate. That number clearly shows we are on the right path. And we’ll continue to grow our source list in ways that bring customers value and help them find the data they need to solve their unique problems.
If you’re a Moreover customer and there are sources that are relevant to your needs that Moreover does not monitor, let us know. Our Client Services team will be happy to work with you to get these into our coverage.
November 14, 2012
As we are all rather pleased with our new beaming Social Media Metabase Portal then it can only be expected that we’re keen to put it through its paces and see what interesting stats are possible to glean from it.
Of interest is to take a quick look at the figures surrounding the major blogging platforms. In particular, five of the bigger ones, namely WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and MySpace. One comparison being to look at is the average number posts per feed over the last 30 days for each platform:
- Blogger : 0.46
- LiveJournal : 0.25
- MySpace : 0.08
- TypePad : 0.42
- WordPress : 0.45
As can be seen Blogger, TypePad and WordPress all run pretty close when it comes to the average post count, with LiveJournal lagging somewhat behind, and MySpace propping up the list averaging just 0.08 posts per feed a day. As MySpace is primarily a social networking service, rather than blogging platform, it is less surprising to see it coming in at the bottom there but anyone care to speculate why LiveJournal users seem to be less prolific bloggers than the rest?
If we then compare similar figures from blogs to microblogs, we see a real contrast between the two feed classes:
In terms of raw figures microblogs make up just over 7.5% of the feed count, when compared with blogs, but return a whopping 69% percent of the posts in the same comparison. Or blogs return an average of 0.43 posts per feed daily and microblogs a hefty 12.45 average daily posts. The very nature of the two media types offers a simple explanation behind the stats here, but it still remains a fascinating comparison between the ease and simplicity of microblogging when set against the more considered nature of blogging.
With plenty of other trends and number crunching possible with the portal we keep an eye out for any figures that grab us and be sure to share!
April 22, 2010
We are pleased and excited to announce the release of our radiant new Social Media Metabase customer portal. The new portal is a full re-write of the previous version and accompanies the dramatic increase in recent months of the number of feeds and different types of social media covered by Moreover. Today’s release underlines our commitment to providing our customers the most comprehensive – and best supported – social media monitoring index available.
The portal is updated daily and provides detailed information of Moreover’s coverage of the social Web, including source lists and numbers of posts over time. Customers can then use a number of filters and criteria to create custom lists and drill down even deeper. This complete insight into Moreover’s continually expanding social media universe provides customers with detailed, complementary information to help manage, prioritize and communicate all the media covered by the Metabase service.
The portal allows for fully configurable source lists to search and browse sources, or mix-and-match filters and feed classes to drill down and view custom sets of feeds to see exactly what is covered by publishing platform, rank, country, language, and more. It is also possible to view and contrast the share of feeds and posts with the Social Media Metabase by various criteria:
Feed and post stats over time display data for the past 30 days, including average posts per day and per feed:
Drilling down deeper still customers can select additional filters to query the data by, and view detailed statistics for the last 30 days. Over time, we will be adding more features to this portal, including News Metabase coverage, API documentation, and customer service options.
Should you be interested in learning more about any Moreover product then please fill out our free trial request form here.
April 16, 2010
Web strategist and blogger Jeremiah Owyang observes how the nature of self publishing on the web is changing, with the traditional blog no longer the main vehicle for expression. Instead micromedia platforms like FriendFeed, Posterous, and Twitter make it easier to post more frequently, and are better suited to the sort of constant chatter we’re now seeing. Quick, easy and often, but not necessarily richer content.
That’s not to say that blogs are disappearing, rather the new lifestreaming-type tools are leading to specialisation of the media: Blogs are still better for posting original, rich content, the larger thought-through pieces, while micromedia is better suited for continuous comms and is now taking that function away from the blog.
Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams?
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/06/26/is-blogging-evolving-away-from-blogging/
June 29, 2009
More social media is a good thing. We know because our customers say so. But with more comes a key provision: That the information streams include the metadata you need to intelligently select, sort and serve exactly the right content to the right customer, at the right time.
That’s why this week we’ve increased the number of publishing platforms available through Moreover’s UGC Metabase to more than double what it was before. The top 50 of these show up in our ‘White List’ – a spam free index of the web’s top blogs and social media:
Moreover Metabase customers receive the platform information as metadata in their XML feeds of the links and posts we send them, to help organise the universe of content.
And we’ve added country categorisation, so we can list bloggers and other social web-alites by nationality, for example, these are UK bloggers, these are Canadian, etc:
A case of more media and deeper data to drown the noise and serve the signals, or to that effect!
June 19, 2009
Following Domino’s recent YouTube disaster (and Amazon`s trouble just days before), social media and the need for brands to monitor it truly hit the headlines. To illustrate that literally, here’s a graph of the phrase ‘social media’ as it appeared in the past year across ~30,000 mainstream news sites (excluding press releases).
In April ’08 there were around 400 mentions a week, now it’s over 3000. 
(Does this represent a typical or required growth rate and volume for a new concept to turn mainstream?)
A search for “monitor social media” and “social media monitoring” as a proxy for tracking the concept returned the following chart. Not as dramatic but the trend is repeated.
Unsurprisingly, social media’s poster darling Twitter steals the chart show, and went from from around 300 mentions a week a year ago, to almost 16,000 last week, a 50-fold increase.
Graphs are from Newsdesk’s analytics tool.
April 23, 2009
In follow-up to the previous post, we thought it might be interesting to see what blog platforms are most used by the Web’s blogging elite. So we took the top 2500 blogs from the UGC Metabase and checked their <generator> tag, which (when present) tells you what blog software the author’s using. The results are compiled in the chart below.
A few notes regarding the data:
- The top 2500 blogs is based on the number of inbound links found in posts from other blogs over a 6 month rolling period, across a total index of ~250,000 blogs. This ranking feature is still quite fresh and a little coarse, but nonetheless we think it should provide for a valid aggregate view.
- There’s a noticeable lack of LiveJournal blogs in the top 2500, in fact we only counted 1. We’ll re-run this list in time and see if more start to come through. That said, seems none of Technorati’s top 100 blogs are published through LiveJournal so perhaps it’s just not a platform of choice amongst top bloggers.
- WordPress dominates, followed by Blogger, then TypePad/Movable Type.
- There’s no shortage of blog platforms out there, in total we counted 45.
- There are 509 feeds where we did not detect a <generator> tag. At the moment we haven’t looked into this further, if we gain any insight down the line we’ll update accordingly.
Some of the platforms included under ‘Other’: Community Server (18), FeedCreator (8), Nucleus CMS (7), Over Blog (6), Canal Blog (5), Subtext (3), Expression Engine (3), FeedForAll (3), Newtelligence (3), Subtext (3), vBulletin (3), Tumblr (3), Dotclear (2), GeekLog (2), Joomla (2), PidoLand (2), Reinvented Software (2), Serendipity (2), SkunkWeb (2), Text Pattern (2), WebMonkey (2), Yahoo Pipes (2), b2evolution (1), Blog Spirit (1), Blogware (1), Lemonz Dream (1), Liberated Syndication (1), LiveJournal (1), Microsoft Spaces (1). Radio Userland (1), Podomatic (1), Wordzilla (1), plus a few more.
Though we wont be working from a static dataset, it might be interesting to re-visit this in some months time and see if any trends are apparent – never know, maybe one of the smaller platforms will come through with some killer feature and eclipse them all! … (no, we don’t know what that would be either).
March 24, 2009
