A social media tool released earlier this year is able to track a corporate brand across 22 social media metrics. (Hat tip to Beth Kanter)
Users can input a brand name into a box, and a spinning wheel will run while searching for online references, ranging from the number of photos with that keyword on Flickr and Photobucket, the number of Google and Twitter results, how many Facebook pages promote it, how many social bookmarks it has, and so forth.
HowSociable is like Google Trends on social steroids.
Typing my name into the box, for instance, yields the following screen shot:
As you can see, I have a HowSociable score of 28. That’s not surprising, as I don’t use some of those metrics to brand myself.
While intended for corporate brands (Coca-Cola has a score of 986 and Boston has 3,387) to determine where and how to gain more visitors and increase one’s online reputation, I wondered how the tool would work for other personal brands.
Here are my results, based on a random sampling of folks who I read in the social media industry. I’ve linked each person’s name with their blog, aka personal brand:
- Seth Godin: 318
- Robert Scoble: 273
- Chris Brogan: 267
- Guy Kawasaki: 234
- Chris Garrett: 136
- Darren Rowse: 114
- Shel Israel: 95
- Rick Mahn: 78
- Liz Strauss: 72
- Shel Holtz: 61
- Dan Schawbel: 54
- Louis Gray: 46
- Jacob Morgan: 41
- Max Gladwell: 37
- Christoper S. Penn: 37
- David Mullen: 35
- Mack Collier: 34
I’m not surprised that someone like Seth Godin, who’s written numerous best-selling business books, is at the top of this list. Nor am I surprised that an ex-Micosoft employee is fighting for second place with the reputed technologist king of social media.
However, I find the results amusing when I see Dan Schawbel at 30 more points than me when his blog, rather his brand is all about personal branding. Maybe his sociability rank has nothing to do with his brand?
I’d be curious to hear from Jonathan Markwell or someone else from Inuda Innovations about how best to extrapolate these results. I didn’t type anyone’s name within quotation marks, so maybe some of the scores are higher than they should be?
Related posts:
- Guest Post by Kenneth Weiss: When Social Media Becomes Slightware, Your Brand Does Not Stand a Chance
- From a Mom to You: Sharing Your Child Online
- What is the Cost of Online Friends?
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 6 comments }
It doesn’t accept quotation marks anyway
I’m kind of surprised by the difference between searches using my screenname (jilliancyork, which i use just about everywhere online) and my actual name.
Tricky, too, if you’re known differently!
http://howsociable.com/Christopher%20Penn
gives a different result than
http://howsociable.com/Chris%20Penn
So, useful to a point.
Hi Ari. Thanks for the great post about us. Very happy to hear you’ve found HowSociable interesting.
I’m afraid I don’t yet have any answers for you yet on how best to use the score we provide. We know it’s far from perfect and we have plans to make significant improvements to ensure it provides a better reflection of a brand’s visibility on the web.
@jillian we treat all brands as if they are provided with quotation marks around them. Not all the services we interrogate take this into account though.
@christoper supporting a range of different versions of a brand is something we hope to include in a future version.
Interesting idea but they need to allow people to enter multiple variations on their names, perhaps comma separated. When I entered my first and last name (with a space in between), it did not find anything on Twitter. So, I entered my name as it appears on Twitter, (one word: frankejames). Then it found lots of references — but lost other social media. Their programmers have some work to do. If they can get it right it will be a fun tool.
That has the potential to be a really valuable tool. Have to say I have some suspicions about the reliability though, since I had a higher rating than Mack Collier. Not sure how that happened with relatively new and somewhat small corner of the online world.
I echo others here about the ability to search for multiple user names. I’m @dmullen on twitter, so that may have changed things.
Thanks for sharing it.
@Jillian: If you look at the metrics the service correlates, that may explain the rise of numbers in one entry and lower in another.
@Christopher: That’s true, and as I recall, I searched you with the middle initial! It’s no less useful that searching for “Chris Penn,” “Christopher Penn,” “Christopher S. Penn” or “cspenn” on Google.
@Jonathan: Thanks for stopping by. Clearly the service is intended for corporate brands, such as your blog notation of Coca-Cola, but had you considered it could be used for people’s names, city names, or abstract ideas, e.g. freedom?
@Franke: You bring up a valid point for companies. What if Jane types “Coca-Cola,” Jill types “Coca Cola,” and “Julie types “Coke.” Shouldn’t all revert to the same brand name?
@David: Maybe your name is more common than Mack’s.
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