analytics vs. the real world part 3: PeerIndex

Components

Next up in the social media analytics analysis is PeerIndex. PeerIndex is supposed to measure social capital using three components: activity, audience and authority. It measures each of these components individually, then creates a composite score. It gives you a ranking based on the composite score. It also provides a diagram of your "topic fingerprint."

I think they've added components since I ran this, but the site is down today so I'll go with what I've got.

Audience measures how people respond to your posts. It's not just how many followers you have but how many people pay attention to what you're saying. Basically this reduces the effect of being followed by spam bots. They also claim it accounts for the relative size of your audience compared to the rest of the community.

Activity measures the amount of relevant content posted about a topic area.  Basically this accounts for the people who stop paying attention to you because you tweet too much or too little about the topic of interest to a given community. This is also a community-relative score. So if you're party of a highly active community around a topic, you'll need a higher level of activity to score higher.

Topic Fingerprint

Authority  measures reliability and trust.  That's basically how much your followers can rely on your recommendations and opinions on a given topic. They calculate authority around eight benchmark topics.  These topics are also shown in the topic fingerprint diagram.

The benchmark topics are (clockwise from top of the diagram):
AME - arts, media and entertainment
TEC - technology and the Internet
SCI - science and the environment
MED - health and medical
LIF - leisure and lifestyle
SPO - sports
POL - news, politics and society
BIZ - finance, business and economics

With all that said, I really don't know what to make of my scores. The biggest surprise to me is my topic footprint. I would have expected more authority in science and environment, given that I tweet about piping plovers and beach ecology a lot of the time.  Technology and business seem about right. I can't remember ever tweeting about politics, so have no idea how I got any footprint in there at all. As for arts, media, and entertainment, unless they count soup as entertainment, that one's a mystery too.

So what does all this tell me about the real world in which I write technical documentation, develop New England day trip travel content, and talk to people about piping plovers?

Certainly in the piping plover sphere, I have way more influence when I'm standing on the beach with the USFWS logo on my hat and shirt and talk to people one on one about how cute piping plovers are and what we're doing to save them and why people should pay attention to laws and regulations. The three-year-olds that I'm telling not to disturb the baby birds are not following my tweets, nor for the most part are their parents. Maybe one or two of the striper fishermen are, for news purposes.

As far as New England day trips, I don't tweet much about what I'm doing with New England Day Trips at Hand. What would I tweet about it that would increase my credibility as a travel writer/content developer/photographer?

As for technical communications, since it's a relative score, much of what I have to say about how to do #techcomm, has already been said a thousand and one times.  Again, much, if not all, of my influence is and has been live and in person in the workplace. Getting the same level of street cred in the social media sphere as I've had in the real world is going to take awhile. Meanwhile, I've got stuff to do, places to be, and people to see.

Mass Innovation Night Foodie Edition #MIN29

Banana from Edible Arrangements

It's not every day that you meet a guy in a banana suit at IBM. This must be the annual foodie edition of Mass Innovation Night. Edible Arrangements is promoting their new tropical collection and they did it up with lots of tasty samples and great costumes. I loved the coconut-coated banana. 
Edible Arrangements wins the best prop award this time for their fruit costumes. Aris wins best hat again, of course. Aris' hats are becoming a regular feature. Aris was chatting with Lisa from IBM when I ran into him. IBM Waltham did another great job hosting. They even led off the presentations with a video about sequencing the cocoa genome. Big thank you to IBM.

Aris and his hat with Lisa from our host, IBM Waltham

The four chosen presenters were:

• Brew1 Single-serve Coffee Brewing System - great tasting coffee, recyclable capsules.
• Local Pickins -  online guide to all things fresh, local and edible in the ever expanding local foods marketplace.
• Evocatus - a community for discovering, sharing, and combining new tastes.
• Smiling Sauce - unique, whimsical cooking sauces and condiments.

The crowd filtering in. By the time the presentations started it was SRO.

I enjoyed talking with Adam from Evocatus about  combining tastes and Caleb's presentation zeroed right in on how to cut thru the web clutter of opinions on food and beverages.

Adam from Evocatus

The condiment queens from Smiling Sauces presented "the next condiment." Zing is a healthy hot sauce, spicy, whimsical and local. I fell in love with it at first bite: the flavors that jumped out at me were cilantro and jalapeno with tomatillo underneath. I immediately imagined adding Zing to egg salad.

 Condiment Queens from Smiling Sauces

Brew1 is taking on Keurig with  a single serve coffee machine. I tasted the Peruvian Dark Roast and agree that they have it all over K-cups on taste. And the capsules are recyclable! I can see this as a great system for office coffee.

Brew1 brews up a delicious cup of coffee

I also managed to check out:

• Perfect Fuel Chocolate - Endurance Chocolate, dark chocolate fortified with ginseng to fuel triathletes and runners.
• Chococoa Baking -- delicious whoopie pies from Newburyport.
• Foodies of New England Magazine - a new magazine covering the New England food scene.
• Absolute One Home Drinking Water Filter  - innovative water filter for your tap water.

Perfect Fuel's Endurance Chocolate is delicious. I'm partial to dark chocolate and this is plenty dark.

Perfect Fuel

Chococoa Baking's vanilla cream Whoopie pie is awesome.

Julie from Chococoa

Foodies of New England Magazine was handing out free copies of their first issue. I enjoyed talking with them about the challenges of photographing food. I hope they visit my favorite North Andover restaurant, Good Day Cafe, soon.

Foodies of New England

Absolute One Water Filter

The turnout for this event was amazing. The place was packed. I didn't get to talk with folks from every one of the 10 products, but enjoyed the ones I did talk with.  The Experts Corner was buzzing with entrepreneurs consulting the experts. Jeff Cutler agreed to pose for the traditional Experts Looking Expert shot.

Experts Corner  includes Robert Gray from At Hand Apps consulting Jeff Cutler

Expert Looking Expert

analytics vs. the real world part 2: Social Mention

 Next up in the experiment with social media analysis tools is Social Mention, a wide-ranging tool that identifies where and how often your brand is mentioned in social media. Options let you choose which media to search, such as blogs, microblogs, video, etc.  I selected "All" and ran the search on my name "Janet Egan" with the quote marks.

My name is very common and there are at least two Janet Egans with stronger brand identity than mine: the fashion designer and the novelist. For that matter, there are a bunch of Janet Egans who go to my eye doctor, order things from Baker Books, or are listed in the local phone book. Therefore, I was expecting the designer and the novelist to be mentioned more than I am.

I was not expecting the first three mentions to be All My Children. Oddly, there is no Egan attached to the Janet in the All My Children videos. In fact, Egan doesn't even occur on the page where it is allegedly mentioned in two of the references. The quotation marks evidently don't limit the search to the exact phrase.

I tried it again from the Advanced Search page, specifying "this exact wording or phrase". Same results.

Some of the remaining results were relevant, some not.
Relevant:

• A bunch of references to a Janet Egan Frisard whose Navy father's remains had been found after 45 years.
• 4 references to the fashion designer
• 5 references to me
• 2 references to the novelist who wrote The Keep

Irrelevant:

• 3 references to Janet Jackson
• 1 reference to a French vampire
• 2 references to videos of Shakespeare plays that do mention either a Janet or an Egan but not both

All in all,  Social Mention didn't give me much more insight into my online brand than I already had. The only interesting insight is that neither the novelist nor the fashion designer are doing much better than I am at advancing the Janet Egan brand.

analytics vs. the real world

Most of the buzz I hear about measuring online influence is about Klout. Folks are always tweeting about their Klout scores or blogging about how to increase your Klout score. So, is that the only measure of how you or your brand are doing online?  A little poking around on the Intertoobz revealed that there are tons of tools for measuring just about every aspect of your online presence.

I came across this post from Newburyport's Ari Herzog:  How Tools Measure your Internet Life. He leads off with Heardable, which I'd never heard of until today. It analyzes your domain along many dimensions and does comparisons with industry leaders, generates a cool graphic of your network of influencers, gives you a brand health score, and ranks your domain. Pretty cool.

Alas, my ye-olde-fashioned web site that I've had since 1996 (or was in '95) on the world's oldest Internet Service Provider (remember ISPs) caused Heardable to become non-responsive. So for my experiment, I did the next best thing. I had it analyze redsox.com. I find it fascinating that the redsox.com brand is losing momentum even though the team is in first place in the AL East, 3 games ahead of the industry leading Yankees. Yes, the Yankees have the industry leading brand, but the Red Sox lead the division. As I write this, the Phillies have the best record in Major League Baseball at .631. The Phillies came in with a lower Heardable score than the Red Sox: Phillies 634, Red Sox 704. Oddly, Heardable compared the Phillies with CBS News rather than the Yankees. I never knew CBS News was an industry leader in MLB.

So, assuming you consider MLB to exist in the real world, what do the analytics tell us about the real world? How does brand strength correlate with winning percentage? What puts people in the seats? What sells branded merch? Why isn't Bill James analyzing this? Hmm, there's an opportunity here for melding sabermetrics with web analytics.

what's with all these infographics?

Infographics are popping up like mushrooms. They attempt to illuminate everything from how many people are really using social media to the Bruins' bar tab at Foxwoods.  Why so many infographics lately? Are we really learning anything from them?

I used postpost to find all the links to infographics in my Twitter stream. I should probably do an infographic of infographic tweets according to who tweeted them or what they were about. Yeah, an infographic about infographics ... OK, just spent about half an hour going over the links that postpost uncovered and the only topics that had more than one infographic about them besides infographics themselves were social media, the Bruins bar tab, and Foursquare. I can't even begin to conceive of how to represent that in an infographic.

For the most part, they don't really communicate very much to me.  I'm a fairly visual person. I love to take photographs. I often think in pictures. I can often figure out how something mechanical works by looking at it. Why am I having trouble understanding these infographics? Let me count the ways.

Appearance

Some of them look like ransom notes with so many different fonts that I can't focus on the content through the jumble. Some of them have bizarre low contrast color schemes-- paler blue on pale blue is really hard to read on my laptop screen.  All of them are hard to read on my mobile device.

Reliance on Text

If they're supposed to be visual representations of quantitative information, why are so many of them crammed with text? I don't think that's what Edward Tufte had in mind in any of his works on graphics in technical communication.  By the way, none of the ones I looked at had any "alt=" text for anything except the title. My visually impaired partner would have a heck of a time using a screen reader on them. I mean if you're going to make stuff inaccessible to the visually impaired, why bother including text in the first place?

Get to the Point

Most of them had so much stuff crammed into them that I couldn't figure out what the main point of the graphic was. What exactly is my takeaway supposed to be? A picture can be worth 10,000 words if you have the right picture, but if the viewer is left scratching her head about what the picture is supposed to be, it doesn't communicate much. 

Context, Lack Of

Where does the data come from? Why are you comparing apples and peaches when the question was about strawberries? Or was it about strawberries? More context on what questions the graphic is trying to answer, data acquisition methodology, data analysis methodology, and who the intended audience is would certainly help.

Darn. I've barely skimmed the surface and this post has gotten too long already. I feel other posts on the subject building  up.

all about #MIN27

this way

Westward ho! This month's Mass Innovation Night was at CCR LLP in Westborough, easy to find, plenty of parking, and a huge training room set up for us. 

the check-in desk

BetterScape  snagged the best location for getting attention right as people entered the training room. I totally love the concept: a Facebook game to reward your friends for good deeds in real life -- making the world a better place. An idea whose time has come.  I chatted with the guys about how in the late Jurassic when I was a young programmer, people gave each other rides to work when their cars were in the shop and fed their cats when they had to be away on business trips. Using the ginormous amount of time people spend on Facebook to bring back that kind of behavior can payoff in a better world for everybody, even if it isn't much of a business model.

Aris in his innovative hat talking with Casey from BetterScape

Aris made sure I took a picture of the wonderful food. Folks should give Aris a BetterScape badge for wearing his chef hat to the event. The food spread in the Experts Corner had loads of fruit, vegetables, and cheeses. Just the thing for a hot summer night.


innovators like fruit

Bedford Stem Cell Research had the most attention-getting graphic display for their PVSA  Post-Vasectomy Semen Analysis mail in test kit.  They have a solution for a problem I did not know existed.


Bedford Stem Cell Research - PVSA


I checked out PostPost. They were wearing matching red t-shirts and talking about social search -- explaining how to filter the Twitter stream.  I award them second prize for costume (Aris gets first prize for his hat.) This is a great idea! There are so many times when I want to go back in time to find something I saw in my Twitter stream or catch up on what everybody has been saying about a particular topic. It's "content curation" for the Twitter stream.  Even if you think that Twitter is only about what your friends had for breakfast, PostPost can help you find historical content about those breakfasts. I have already started using it.


PostPost

On the other side of the room, I chatted with iPresentOnline  about their cool tool for adding social aspects to elearning and online training courses. I think the #techcomm crowd might find this useful.

iPresentOnline

I chatted with Rob from TourSphere about his extremely cool mobile app generator for museums and cultural attractions. It makes it really easy for institutions to develop platform-independent mobile tours. This seems like an opportunity for cooperation and mutual benefit for our New England Day Trips At Hand app. I gave Rob a brief demo of our app on my iTouch. We could get people to the attractions and the apps they build with TourSphere could take people around the attractions. By the way, the nearest attraction to CCR is Ashland State Park. Wish I'd brought a fishing pole and a picnic.

Rob from TourSphere presenting

I was impressed with the turnout in way out in I-495 land, especially on a night with the Bruins in the fight for the Stanley Cup and the Red Sox playing the Yankees.  The Bruins game did give the presenters a strong incentive for keeping to their 5 minute times slots so everybody could catch the puck drop. BetterScape badges to all for that!

the crowd is building

I saw people tweeting up a storm fast and furious, though it was hard to tweet at the speed of the presenters.

standing room

 TemplateZone's Facebook page builder demo was the hit of the night. He created, edited, and posted a professional-looking Facebook page with 12 seconds to spare on his 5 minute presentation. Spontaneous applause broke out!

TemplateZone building a Facebook page in less than 5 minutes

The Experts Corner was well-stocked with experts. Jeff from CCR LLP took a break from giving accounting expertise to pose for the traditional "experts looking expert" shot.

expert looking expert

"technical writer"



Google Ngram for Technical Writer


Since the prevailing opinion in the #techcomm blogosphere seems to be that those of us who have been called technical writers for the past 35 years or so will not be called technical writers in 10 years, I got to wondering how far back the term goes, when usage peaked, and when the current decline began. Therefore, I ran a Google Ngram search on the term "technical writer". The Google Books corpus only includes works up to the year 2008, so the recent changes in terminology aren't captured, but we can get a little insight from past usage.

The little blip in 1806 is a bunch of references in various articles to the same passage in Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste about Homer's Iliad. While not strictly about a technical writer in the modern sense, the list of subjects for such a writer does sort of overlap with what we think of as technical.

The author of the Iliad has described every thing, in which error or inaccuracy might be detected, either by experience, or demonstration. The structure of the human body ; the effects of wounds ; the symptoms of death ; the actions and manners of wild beasts ; the relative situations of cities and countries ; and the influence of winds and tempests upon the waters of the sea, are all described with a precision, which, not only no other poet, but scarcely any technical writer upon the the respective subjects of anatomy, hunting, geography and navigation has ever attained.

The earliest use I could find of the term in the sense of writing about technology is from a brief book review in The British Architect from 1882. I like that the reviewer comments on how clear and precise it is. Clarity and precision are still good things to have in content.

No engineering draughtsman or foreman should be without a little work entitled "Details of Machinery" (Crosby Lockwood & Co., 3s.), which Mr. Francis Campin has just written, and which forms an entirely new addition to Weale's Series. It is a wonder a work exactly of this kind has not appeared before; it is here now, however, from a careful technical writer, and will much enrich the invaluable series amongst which it is published. The intelligent appreciation of what is required from the details of machinery is a most important matter, and it is only by the acquirement of sound knowledge of this kind that the able draughtsman or machinist is made. Mr. Campin's writing is clear and precise, and the engravings well chosen; throughout the author has adhered strictly to simple arithmetic, not having used even a plus or minus sign, or any of the calculations, which are illustrated by examples worked out in full.

As you can see from the graph, use of the term technical writer peaked in 1961, declined a bit, then started to rise again in the mid-1970s, continuing to rise with ups and downs to a new peak in 2000, though slightly lower than the 1961 peak. Interestingly,  a 1958 article in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication asks the question "What Can the Technical Writer of the Past Teach the Technical Writer of Today?" The same article also makes a distinction between the role of technical writer and technical editor. A 1957 issue of The Writer, a journal for writers mentions "a comparatively new job category, this profession of technical writer. The greatest boost came during the war..."  Ads for technical writer as a job category seem to have begun to appear between 1953 and 1958 in such magazines as New Scientist and The Manager.

The peak in 1961 marks the appearance of handbooks for technical writers, books about technical writing, and style manuals.  There are lots of journal articles with "technical writer" in the title or abstract, many bunched up between the beginning of 1960 and the end of 1962. (I could spend days going through them all, but I'm doing a blog post here, not a PhD dissertation.) Handbooks, style guides, and "how to become a technical writer" books continue to be common in the corpus well into the 1990s. References to technical writing for the computer industry start showing up in the mid-1970s. 

The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century seem to have pretty much the same kinds of books and articles, with the addition of books about how to turn your creative writing expertise into money as a technical writer and referring to technical writing as a prospective career for teens in the arts . One book, How to Become a Technical Writer: You Can Earn a Great Living as a Writer Now!  from 2001 tells us "If you can write clear, concise instructions, then you can be a technical writer."  Hmm, that was pretty much still true in 2001.

The slope of the decline after the peak in 2000 starts to get steeper around 2006.  My scan of the literature didn't turn up much change in the types of books and articles except that novels start to appear in the mix, most notably R.J.R. Rockwood's The Last Ant: Elegy for a Technical Writer in 2007. Other novels have technical writers as characters but don't deal directly with the decline of the American computer/software industry. Even Rockwood's novel seems to deal more with the place of the individual in the corporation than with the end of technical writing as a such.

I can't find any pointers to what was going on in the literature between 2008 and 2011 because the data ends in 2008.  It will be interesting to see what the literature about technical writing looks like in 2021, assuming Google continues to add new data to the corpus.

It's hard to conclude anything about the future of techncial writing from this stroll through the past. However, I will continue to call myself a technical writer.