Q & A Thursdays: Mark Ghuneim, Founder and CEO of Wiredet and Trendrr
I love the offering at
Trendrr.com, which is a site that allows you to track any topic you choose across leading properties in social media. It is of tremendous value, and the price is right: free. To find out more about this great service -- a service you should avail yourself of right at this very instant, and then quickly return here to give me another page view -- I got in touch with
Mark Ghuneim, CEO and founder of Wiredset and Trendrr. There's some great thinking behind this service!
Without further delay:
1. For the benefit of those who may not have heard of Trendrr, can you give us the elevator pitch?
Created by
Wiredset, Trendrr is an online service that tracks and graphs consumption trends and activity across the digital spectrum, including social networks, blogs, torrents, Amazon, Craigslist, Twitter, Google News and dozens of leading video sites in a community setting. The platform allows users to easily track dynamic data trends over time; compare and mash up data using a virtual scratch pad, and share findings via embed codes, links and easy data exporting. Whether tracking the number of plays for a song across MySpace, the aggregate views and engagement data for a content segment on YouTube, the number of blog posts about a topic, or the buzz halo around any given company, person or term, Trendrr captures and illustrates accurate, real time market intelligence in an easy to use, digestible format. Designed as a dynamic service for individuals who want to track trends for free with an enterprise level solution for businesses, Trendrr provides holistic measurements of consumption on the web.
2. Trendrr is from Wiredset, a digital agency. Please give us the two minute drill on Wiredset, so we understand from where Trendrr came from.
Wiredset is a full-scale digital agency that provides online and mobile marketing services, strategic business consulting, market intelligence, and cutting-edge web production, all enabled by proprietary technologies and services. We founded the agency in 2004, and it is currently led by entertainment and tech industry veterans. Wiredset incubates ideas, creates technology products and executes innovative digital marketing campaigns for leading television, music, and entertainment properties, as well as established brands. Our current and former clients include Microsoft, Apple, Puma, VH1, ESPN, MTV, Comedy Central, HBO, Capitol Records, Sony Music, Coachella, and many more:
http://www.wiredset.com/our_clients.php
3. How can one start Trendrring?
We aim to make it easy. Those wishing to start can sign up for a free Trendrr account in under 3 minutes, and the social web is theirs to track and trend. To start tracking your own graphs, click the “start tracking” tab in the upper left corner. To search for crowd sourced graphs, find the search box on the right hand side, type in what you are looking for, and click enter. A plethora of graphs within your search topic will appear, and they are yours to run with. The scratchpad in the upper right hand corner allows users to mash up graphs, and customize the display options.
4. I have a research background, and one of the things that one quickly learns in research is that there is “need to know” info, and “nice to know” info. What makes social media discussion “need to know” for a brand? It may help you to know that the readers of this blog are mostly brand marketers and agency folks – planners, buyers, and account people.
Great point, not all metrics are of equal value. It’s up to the brand marketers, agencies and planners etc. to determine what data sets fall into the vital category, and which are nice to know for broader industry knowledge but don’t immediately translate into actionable intelligence. There is no question brands absolutely “need to know” the buzz and velocity around their online campaigns and the campaigns of their competition before they launch their assets and while a campaign is rolling. So for instance, if a Brand is launching a web video campaign, they should be looking not just at the amount of views, they should be tracking engagement indicators such as comments, times favorited, blog buzz, search velocity and so on. Also, gaining market intelligence, not just once a month, but each day, allows marketers and brands to respond more effectively, or call an audible to adjust to what’s working and quickly scrap an idea that is not gaining traction. By doing this, marketers are creating more time for analysis and execution.
5. I am frankly amazed that you are giving away all of this value. From a business standpoint, how does this free offering “fit” into the model of Wiredset?
We don’t look at offering a free service as giving away value; quite the opposite. We created a consumer facing community site knowing that the more data that is tracked, the more trends that are identified and mashed-up, the more value everyone (including Wiredset) realizes. Keeping a portion of the site open for everyone allows us to see trends we never would have thought of or had time to track- it’s crowd sourcing metrics for the benefit of all. From a business standpoint, we also know that brands, advertisers and marketers who need the holistic view of viral buzz will eventually want the options contained in the enterprise solutions such as comparing real time data to their private in-house metrics and measuring a vast amount of data sets. (The free version is limited to tracking 20 data sets at any time)
6. Trendrr lets you select the data sets you want tracked. Can you give us a sense of the range of social media you are tracking?
Total number of video, views, views per day, number of comments, and number favorites for a specific video or tags for a topic in most cases.
· Videos sites include: You Tube, AOL Video, Veoh, MySpace, Daily Motion, Hi5, Imeem, LiveVideo, Meta Café, Revver, Spike
· Twitter: number of followers and updates for a user
· Amazon: sales rank for a product or term
· Ebay: number of auctions for a product or term
· Craigslist: job listings for a term or industry
· Monster: job listings for a term or industry
· Quantcast: overall site rank, page views and unique visitors (US)
· Netcraft: site rankings
· Compete site analysis- number of people who access a site
· Google: search results for a word or term
· Blogs: Google and Technorati Blog Search
· Flickr: number of photos posted for a specific term
· MySpace: number of Friends, number of comments, and profile views per day for a specific profile (Note: 'Profile Views' must be visible from the public profile page).
· MySpace Song Plays: number of song plays per day for a given artist on myspace.com
7. One of the things I really like about Trendrr is that it takes a quantitative approach to tracking all this qualitative info. Using Trendrr, is it possible to track both the quantity and the tone of comments? For example, if I tracked what was being said about a company, could Trendrr help me understand whether the comments are positive, neutral, or negative?
It is certainly possible to track the quantity of comments using Trendrr. However to track the positive, neutral, or negative values of a comment requires a comprehensive approach from the person(s) when they begin tracking. The tone can be tracked through the use of targeted search terms but at this point it is very hard to distinguish positivity from negativity. For instance, we know there were 30,000 new blogs containing Obama + Muslim since July, but to decipher the nature or tone of them would require a comprehensive layer of term tracking to give greater context. Short answer is, this is possible, but requires thoughtfulness from the person collecting data.
8. Lots of great ideas begin with a story. What is the story behind Trendrr? How did it come about? Anything special here?
Prior to starting Wiredset or Trendrr, I was SVP at Sony Music USA and grew frustrated that there was very little actionable intelligence to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. So after 16 years with Sony, I started digital agency Wiredset knowing that a core differentiator versus other agencies would be the ability to provide quantifiable results beyond the standard at the time (views, clicks and visitors). We set out to create a tool that showed layers of engagement and provided greater precision and context to online initiatives. Together with some incredible developers, loud music and countless late nights, we created Info-filter, a private tool for our clients. As that progressed, we realized that this should be published under creative commons to unleash its real potential. So in April of 2008, we launched Trendrr as a consumer facing service. The late nights and loud music continue and this is and might always be, a work in progress.
9. You must have info on what people are tracking, and how they are using the info. What are people doing with Trendrr?
People are using Trendrr to track anything from Twitter mojo and blogbuzz to video plays, job listings, p2p trading, product sales and so much more….Here are some examples:
· Want to know the job market trends in a city?
www.trendrr.com/tag/jobs
· Want to see how Obama is doing vs. McCain in the blogosphere?
http://www.trendrr.com/tag/obama
· Want to see how Blue Ray is fairing against other formats?
http://www.trendrr.com/blog/mark/entry/244
· Want to see what how Showtime’s shows and characters are doing?
http://www.trendrr.com/tag/showtime
10. Can you tell us about plans for the future of Trendrr? How it will grow and evolve?
We will continue to add more data sources, expand reporting options, and add aggregate and cluster views to enable over all edge impressions.
11. Anything else you’d like to tell the readers here?
· Trendrr is very developer focused -
developer.trendrr.com. So all you developers out there, join in the fun!
· We have just launched a Firefix add-on so tracking and trending on the fly is that much easier
· We are always responsive to feedback
12. A final note: Why on earth is my little avatar Dick Cheney, of all people? Did you pick him to make sure we’d upload our own photos quickly? ;-)
Yes! We like to keep a sense of humor here at Wiredset and Trendrr while also finding ways to get people to engage in a community and show their colors. So, we made the default avatar a picture of Dick Cheney as a motivator. We have since changed it because the community said, enough with Cheney! (We also listen)
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