Marketing Pilgrim

One of the cool features about Trackur’s social media monitoring is our InfluenceRank scoring system. For every web site, blog, or Twitter user, we’ve always shown you just how influential they are–with a simple score out of 100.

With news sites and blogs, we provided further analysis with screenshots, traffic details, backlink numbers and more. Today, we’ve added a similar dashboard for Twitter users influence.

As you can see, we have all the info you need to make a quickly decide if this person is someone that is exerting an influence on your brand.

The Trackur dashboard includes:

Wow. If there is one thing I can take away from these end of year lists of trends etc. is that social media is truly a mile wide and about a ¼ inch deep. In other words, what gets the most attention in places like Twitter is very shallow. All of the talk of the social media revolution and passing information along that will change the world blah, blah, blah and this is what Facebook tells us are the biggest trends in status updates in 2010.

Again I say Wow. For all the issues facing the world from global warming, financial crisis, war and just about anything else that actually impacts a person’s life in a real way the number one trending mention in status updates is the newest acronym for the virtually lazy, HMU (hit me up)?

The trend today seems to be about what’s trending. Of course, part of the interest in this is how trending is defined then carried out as we discussed yesterday regarding Twitter’s take on trending.

Google in its usual fashion has created videos to help us understand the service. The first one is pretty entertaining (while being mildly informative).

Video number two is more about the service’s nuts and bolts.

How Google, I mean YouTube, will be able to trend the 35 hours per minute it receives is kind of mind boggling but that’s what the back room developer, PhD types get paid for, right?

The Trends blog puts some of this in words if you aren’t ready for video this early.

YouTube made an interesting move this week that appears to be a portent of things to come. Only a few months after raising the maximum video time from ten minutes to fifteen, they’re now removing the cap completely — but only for the privileged few.

To see if your account has been selected, log in and click the upload button. Chances are you’re still stuck on fifteen but for how long?

In the past, limiting video time might have been related to bandwidth issues both on site and for the average user. But with faster processors and the switch from dial-up to cable, downloading and watching a fifteen minute video isn’t a problem for most users.

In an average day, I log-in to no less than twenty different websites. Some of these are blogs I work on. Some are communities I follow. Then there’s Amazon, eBay, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.  Each place has its own username and password and some make me change my password on a regular basis. Firefox remembers most of them for me, thank heavens, but it’s not an exact science.

So in comes social media logins. These are the sites that allow you to bypass their own login system by using Facebook, Twitter, etc. At first glance, it seems like a great solution. You only have one front door key to your house, so why not one “key” for the entire internet. But which key?

Well, I was sure holding my breath on this one and now I can breath easy. Twitter has released its Top 10 Trends list for 2010. Now that Twitter has gone about explaining just how their trends feature works this list makes sense …… I guess.

Twitter is pretty sure though that it has the pulse of the 8% of America that has a Twitter account (Honestly, how many of those accounts are really active, Twitter? If you told us that you would be actually telling us something.). In their blog they give some insight about their list