Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

Elyse Petersen is the founder of Tealet

Tea Drinkers Anonymous is a guild on the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game Guild Wars 2. And no, they are not trying to fight a tea addiction: On the contrary, they brought it online. Its members sip tea as they explore the world of Tyria together. The connection between tea and games could stop there, but it turns out tea connoisseurship relates to gaming personas, as modeled by Richard Bartle. More, these might apply to many other kinds of products and experiences.

A model for gamer’s personas

While Bartle’s research comes from early MUDs (multiuser dungeons, ancestors of current online games and RPGs), it laid a foundation for the personas of gamers that has been used to describe many other online communities. Other models compete, but Bartle’s is widely used.

He found that the four things that people enjoyed most from MUD games were: achievement, exploration, socializing, and competition Most players exhibit dominance of one or two traits. And consciously or not, game developers manage the balance of these elements in order to sustain a healthy ecosystem of players.

Achievers want to complete the game and gain levels and recognition.

Explorers enjoy their knowledge of the game world and finding out hidden corners of the game’s world.

Socializers spend a great deal of their time interacting with the other players in the game. Their influence and network of friends in the game keeps them motivated to play.

Competitors are more aggressive and find fulfillment in “winning” and domination.

From MUDs to tea leaves

“Herbivorous” tea lovers are – like gamers – on a journey, and they exhibit many similar behaviors.

In the tea world, here are the equivalents of Bartle’s personas:

Achievers are the enthusiasts that will spend their life becoming a tea master. These connoisseurs will stop at nothing to learn more about the artistic mysteries of the Camellia sinensis plant. They might share their enthusiasm in detailed blogs about the teas they taste and stories they learn. They might not have a mastery level attached (unless they practice Japan’s cha-do), but the community respects these achievers as experts.

Socializers are the backbone of the new tea lover community. These tea community builders love tea not just for its wonderful taste and healing powers but also for the bond that forms when people share a tea experience. Since the beginning of tea’s history, it has played a significant role in bringing together communities – from India to East Asia and to England and more. With technology, you can share a cup of tea across the world — regardless of the time difference involved.

The tea journey for explorers is motivated by the desire to try every tea they can. Believe it or not, those adventurers may find themselves traveling around the globe to well-hidden tea-growing regions just for the taste of something that you can’t find anywhere else. More than likely, these explorers have so much experience tasting teas that they can taste the difference between two Dragon well teas harvested from the same plant just days apart. They are not unlike wine lovers or birders.

Competitors, also referred to as killers, are not out to drown others in tea or poison their cup. These passionate tea lovers enjoy heated discussions with others about their favorite beverage. They are always sure to correct someone’s tea ignorance or disagree with someone about the degree of muscatel of a Darjeeling. A quick browse on subreddit /r/Tea will show a list of engaged discussions on proper tea pouring and tasting etiquette. These discussions are had in good fun and help create bonds between the community members.

Communities increasingly dominate industries

As the Internet is connecting isolated enthusiasts in all sorts of fields, similar personas are emerging and gaining power from their knowledge, network, attitude or opinions. Offline experiences that used to be isolated are being shared and influencing in turn which companies succeed by harnessing those powers to serve customers better.

Thinking about your own interests you can surely identify how much of an achiever, explorer, socializer, or killer you are.

While at Tealet our passion took us on the way of tea, the lessons from online games and virtual communities as Bartle describes are taking over. Is life a game, or were games life in the first place? We might ask the members of Tea Drinker’s Anonymous around a virtual campfire and … a cup of tea!

Thanks to Benjamin Joffe for suggesting this connection between tea and gaming and reviewing drafts of this article.

Elyse Petersen is the founder of Tealet, an online community and marketplace for tea lovers. She is an advocate for tea growers and technology and wants to connect growers and tea drinkers around the world. Tealet is part of the 500 Startups Accelerator Batch of Winter 2012.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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And … do you give back to the social community that you’re hoping to profit from?

These are the types of questions Sprout Social’s new #BePresent project is focused on answering — and answering for free. Starting today, brands can go to Sprout Social’s MustBePresent website and get a free checkup on how well they respond to fans and followers.

Source: Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s new engagement report shows how you rank compared to your competition.

“This is a way for brands to measure themselves against their competition,” Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard told me yesterday. ”There has been a lot of conversation about brands needing to be responsive, but there hasn’t been an efficient way … to be measured against each other.”

The report engine charts 45 billion social signals, Sprout Social says, to arrive at not only a score for your company, brand, or organization but also a comparison of your score with your industry’s average score.

Which also means, of course, that your data will be used as part of other companies’ benchmarks. But Sprout Social anonymizes the data, Howard told me, to ensure that your brand’s privacy is maintained.

The result is the kind of report that you might see created specifically by analysts or social research firms, but it is now available anytime, specifically for your company and industry, for free.

The Twitter part, that is.

“Any brand can go to mustbepresent.com, plug in a Twitter handle, and get a comprehensive report,” Howard said.

Of course, Sprout Social also does Facebook analytics and more, but those features and functionality, including analyzing multiple profiles — a dedicated support account, for instance — are reserved for Sprout Social clients.

Howard is careful to say that this is not a panacea report that will diagnose all of a company’s social media problems. And it’s a not a leaderboard or a badge to put on your site. It’s simply a way to check, objectively, how well you’re engaging your audience in social: something that you and your team can use to improve.

And it will help you to be a good social citizen, says Howard:

“Brands need to be aware that as valuable as social is as a marketing channel, it’s important to be responsive and return some of the value back to the ecosystem.”

photo credit: JefferyTurner via photopin cc

For laptops, Samsung and Apple were tied, according to the Brand Keys’ 2013 Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, released today. But Samsung led in flat screen TVs, and, in perhaps the biggest shocker, beat out Apple for consumer loyalty in smartphones.

“This is the first year that Samsung beat out Apple in smartphones,” Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff told me this afternoon. “When Apple was number one, everyone said, ‘Well sure, it’s Apple.’ But the fact is that Samsung always had a larger share of the marketplace.”

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – smartphones

If you’re wondering whether this is just some dinky little no-name survey, think again. The Brand Keys customer loyalty index surveys 39,000 people, making it generalizable to the entire United States population with 95 percent confidence. And if you’re also wondering how big the delta between number one and number two actually is, Passikoff says there’s a “significant difference.”

“It’s not terrible to be number two,” Passikof said. “But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction.”

Asus followed Samsung and Apple as the laptop vendor with the third-most-loyal customers, with Toshiba and Sony right on its heels. In smartphones, LG took third place after Samsung and Apple, followed by Nokia and Sony, who were tied for fourth. Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry rounded out the top eight.

Amazon handed Apple some more bad news in the e-reader category, leading the field with its Kindle tablet. Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second, with Apple, Kobo, and Sony following. One big caveat here: it’s likely consumers don’t think of the iPad as an e-reader first and foremost, but rather as a general-purpose tablet, which may have affected these rankings.

I asked Passikoff about exactly that:

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – laptops

“That’s absolutely so. When we initially added the category, iPad never showed up. And then later it did … its primary product value is not as an e-reader. But we don’t define what products go in which categories: consumers do.”

But, adding injury to insult, Amazon beat out Apple in the dedicated tablets category as well. Apple and Samsung tied for second in that category, followed by Barnes & Noble in a tie for third, and Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba in a tie for fourth. Google showed up in the tablets category, also in a tie, in fifth place with Sony.

Clearly, consumers are a little confused about what is a tablet and what is an e-reader — a rapidly disappearing difference — and that confusion played a role in Apple’s rankings. But just as clearly, Samsung’s products, innovation, and advertising are helping that company shape an extremely positive reputation.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

“The core reason for the deal is that we have a killer Facebook advertising solution, and they have a killer Facebook analytics solution,” Unified VP of corporate communications Dave Donohue told me this morning.

Unified, which will have Mayor Ed Lee cut the ribbon on its San Francisco office tomorrow, wants to provide a holistic solution for marketers that bring together “paid, owned, and earned media,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen said in a statement. It currently offers solutions for building social audiences, encounrage customer actions, and measuring the value of social marketing. Unified launched just a year ago in January and boostrapped to 35 employees, Donohue said, before bringing in outside investment.

The goal in adding PageLever’s analytics and management tools is to deliver the industry’s “deepest and broadest” real-time audience insights, audience engagement, and social advertising. PageLever offers a solution for maximizing fan engagement inside the Facebook news feed by targeting posts, identifying what is most viral or engaging, and managing multiple pages.

Owen said that the result would be the “most complete social advertising platform to access all major social networks.”

PageLever’s seven employees will be joining Unified’s 50 in both their new San Francisco and existing New York offices, the company said, and all existing PageLever clients will continue to be able to use PageLever’s solutions as standalone products, although an integrated product roadmap will become available shortly.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

photo credit: IBM Events via photopin cc

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Apple products are usually big hits, which helps.

But more importantly, they punch above their weight for content consumption. For example, even though Android smartphones have been outselling iPhones for some time — accounting for 68 percent of smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2012 — it was only in the last week or so that Android phones finally outpaced iPhones for mobile web share.

Most importantly, mobile marketing experts Velti say, mid-size tablets perform much better for advertisers.

For example, tablets in general have two times the clickthrough for full-size ad interstitials, a fact that Velti says is due to rich media ads achieving higher engagement due to the larger display. But within tablets, the 7″ midsize is even better. The Amazon Kindle Fire clickthrough rate for large banner ads is more than double iPad 3′s and about 50 percent higher than the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s.

Velti says that the lower price Android tablets, including mid-sized versions, brought in new tablet purchasers last year. It’s likely that a smaller and cheaper iPad will do the same.

That all adds up, according to Velti, to potentially the most successful mobile device for consumer engagement with mobile marketing.

photo credit: la legra negra via photopin cc

Lithium Technologies has issued $5.6 million in shares to power its acquisition of Social Dynamx.

Lithium helps brands build social networks that can be used to drive sales and marketing, inform product development, and improve customer service. The idea is that corporations with large user communities and heavy product support needs can engage their most passionate fans to build brand nations.

Social Dynamx’s platform monitors social activity to help large businesses stay tuned in to relevant online conversations and manage their customer care. With this acquisition, Social Dynamx will become part of Lithium’s suite of solutions under the heading Lithium Social Web.

Lithium closed $53.4 million in January for its fourth round of funding (DD-sized Series D…). That funding was raised to expand the company into new verticals, expand internationally, and grow Lithium’s “digital agency ecosystem.”

The most recent offering lists investors from Shasta Ventures, Emergence, Benchmark and New Enterprise Associates. These firms all participated in the January round, as did SAP Ventures, DAG Ventures, Greenspring Associates, and Tenaya Capital.

Read the SEC filing.

Brands on Facebook and Twitter are all about engagement, right? Sometimes it seems as if the answer is only yes when engagement means brands talk and consumers listen. Particularly in the automotive industry, where only 26 percent of customer queries get answered.

Socialbakers, the social analytics company, measured companies’ responsiveness across nine different industries to arrive at what it calls “social devotion:” using social media effectively to improve customer satisfaction — and ROI.

The results are not great.

Less than 50 percent of customer questions asked on Facebook pages were actually answered across all industries during the July-September time frame. That includes alcohol companies at 30.8 percent, electronics brands just a bit higher at 34.2 percent, and, of course, the aforementioned automotive companies, which manage to answer just a hair more than a quarter of their customer inquiries.

But at least the recent stats are better than earlier in 2012. From March-May, brands across all industries answered only 30 percent of social media customer questions. So Socialbakers found a 60 percent improvement.

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: x-ray delta one via photopin cc

The company, which helps clients connect with and respond to customers and fans on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, recently celebrated a second birthday with its 10,000th corporate customer, 10 percent month-over-month customer growth, and an astonishing revenue explosion of 750 percent over last year.

That growth, chief executive Justyn Howard says, is due to two factors.

New clients are certainly a big part of the story, he says, but not only is the company growing its customer list with names like McDonalds, Microsoft, and Adobe, SproutSocial is going deeper with each client. In fact, Howard told VentureBeat, where once small numbers of people — two to three at each client — managed social, many of its clients have dozens of social media managers, and some now have literally hundreds of employees using SproutSocial.

That’s a significant development in social media, and it shows that more companies are adapting a Zappos-style communications strategy: Every employee is a brand advocate.

But it’s taken a while to get there.

Source: Info-Tech Research

SproutSocial was recently recognized as a leading social media management tool

“Our product’s been in the market for just over two years now,” explains Howard. “We spent the first year testing, looking at different directions, and this year we’re bringing on a lot of new customers and are adding new features.”

When bringing any tool to a wide audience, user experience is key. Companies who give hundreds of employees access to a comprehensive social media toolkit will likely not be able to train all of them intensely.

“We take a different approach than a lot of the tools that have been in the market for a while,” Howard says. “You see a lot of columns from some of our competitors … we’ve tried to distill it down and make it a little easier to grasp.”

So SproutSocial brings all conversations from multiple social networks down to a single stream, with full conversation history in one place. Multiple users can dip their toes in that same stream without crossing wires, and queue up content to be released at optimal, spaced times.

“For people who aren’t used to a bunch of information on the screen, something about the efficiency of our interface resonates,” says Howard.

One of the new features SproutSocial launched recently is “Optimal Send Time,” which automatically schedules tweets or status updates for times when they are most likely to get maximum engagement and go viral. SproutSocial launched this functionality to compete with social engagement tool Buffer – as did competitor HootSuite – and its clients are seeing about a 30 percent increase in response, and a 100 percent increase in clickthrough.

As social media spreads across the entire company, SproutSocial is looking at better ways of integrating into enterprise data via, for example, customer relationship management software. But the company is not releasing any more details about its plans in that area at this point.

There has been considerable consolidation in the social media space lately, with Google buying Wildfire, Oracle buying Involver, Vitrue, and Collective Intent, and, last year, Salesforce acquiring Radian6 for $326 million.

I asked Howard if he would consider a buyout.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said. “A lot of the acquisitions have focused on social media marketing … but the engagement space hasn’t seen a lot of that activity. It’ll be interesting to see when Oracle and Google and others start to make that a priority.”

And I noticed that the company’s last funding round was early last year. With the company’s recent growth spurt, however, SproutSocial may not need any more capital.

“We’re thinking about another round, but we haven’t made it a final determination. We’re not in a hurry — growth has been strong.”

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc

If you haven’t heard of the tool, Buffer saves your tweets, posts, and shares in order to automatically publish them at times that maximize retweets, likes, and comments. That allows social media users to post any content at any time, secure in the knowledge that they won’t either overburden followers or miss the biggest opportunities to get their attention.

Source: Buffer

Buffering tweets in TweetCaster

This is a big integration for Buffer, and co-founder Leonhard Widrich is exited about the integration, which is in line with the company’s strategic goal of working with as many partners as possible:

“I think it’ll be really amazing to finally allow people to Buffer retweets and Tweets straight from one of the best Twitter clients on the web, which was one of the most requested features over the past few months.”

TweetCaster profiles itself as “the #1 mobile Twitter app” with millions of downloads and users, and features innovative functionality such as “zip it,” which allows you to simply not see messages from a particular follower or fan for a period of time.

TweetCaster can also cross-post to multiple social networks, search in very fine-grained ways just for images, or videos, or topics — features unavailable from Twitter itself.

Buffer, which has been around for some time, saw some competition when HootSuite, the social media management tool, added “AutoSchedule,” a function that does much the same thing. But HootSuite is focused on social media managers and marketers, while Buffer is focused on individual social media users.

One question that remains: How will Twitter’s recent API changes affect TweetCaster? Twitter has made it clear that the consumer/consumption space is one that it intends to own itself, with its own tools … and TweetCaster seems to be right in the crosshairs of that particular initiative.

However, by its very success, TweetCaster may have won itself some degree of special treatment. Twitter has no desire to anger its own users, whatever tool they’re using, and killing a popular Twitter client — the most popular, according to TweetCaster — would certainly generate PR problems.

(I’ve asked TweetCaster chief executive Evan Conway for a comment and will update if we hear from him.)

photo credit: Vainsang via photopin cc

Speaking at a BuzzFeed panel in New York yesterday, Twitter co-founder and board member Evan Williams said that reach is a much more important measure:

“The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet.”

Engagement is certainly the metric that matters to marketers: if people don’t see your message, they cannot act on it. But follower count has long been a source of perceived legitimacy for some, and Twitter has previously taken steps to reduce its impact. Twitter even completely hit the reset button on follower account temporarily, after the infamous auto-follow bug.

Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.

It’s unlikely any new metrics would completely remove follower count from the picture — that would likely cause a huge user backlash, particularly from popular users. And follower counts can be a valuable measure of interestingness, for lack of a better word, as long as it is authentic.

But a new metric which measure virality and reach would certainly be welcome.

photo credit: id-iom via photopin cc

Not surprisingly, high up on the list is his new startup, Spreecast.

Google Hangouts on air, the Google+ video-conferencing technology that allows anyone to broadcast video to ten, a hundred, or a thousand people, just added Studio Mode, with higher quality audio — a feature aimed at musicians who are connecting with fans.

That prompted Fluhr to start telling his story a little louder … which included previewing three new features for VentureBeat that the Spreecast just launched today.

Source: John Koetsier

A spreecast with me, Jeff Fluhr, and a Spreecast staffer

Though Spreecast came out of private beta last fall, it’s still very much a beta product, sporting a beta tag just above its logo, and not even starting to focus on monetization yet. But the product is designed for real, deep engagement with tens, hundreds, or thousands of users.

And it does have a compelling story.

Social means what?

“The reason I started the company was I felt like the way we were all interacting on the Internet was dominated by text-based faceless interactions,” says Fluhr. “Tweets, status updates, posts … they’re all threaded, asynchronous conversations. There’s value to do that, but also disadvantages.”

The advantages of Spreecast, Fluhr says, include a better communication, a focus on nonverbal cues, and deeper understanding … all of which, he believes, allow people to get more done in less time. And he’s not too sure the current “social” vogue is all that social.

“Up until 10 years ago, ‘social’ meant you were going to do something with someone, live, together,” he says. “Now that word has changed … and it means something text-based online.”

So he started Spreecast to “make social face-to-face again.” And he doesn’t think that Google Hangouts on Air qualifies.

Better than Hangouts?

“Google Hangouts is limited to 10 people who are on-camera … the others are just watching,” Fluhr says. “For Spreecast, there could be thousands of people watching, and it’s very interactive. They can chat together, interact, or ask to get on camera.”

Source: John Koetsier

A viewer requesting his 10 minutes of fame

Plus, Google Hangouts is a Google+ service. That limits its effectiveness, according to Fluhr.

“You can only invite Google+ users, and anyone who wants to join your show has to sign up for Google+.”

Spreecast allows anyone to join, using Facebook or Twitter logins, and can be embedded on any site: a company’s home page, a blog, or even a Facebook tab. The service is platform agnostic, Fluhr argues.

Finally, Spreecast builds in features that enable simple management of events: the ability for fans or audience members to ask to go on camera, functionality for the moderators to preview them before putting them live, and the ability to put them on the main feed — and dump them if needed.

New features

To the existing Spreecast functionality, the company added three new features that Fluhr believes further enhances the platform for multi-directional communication.

First, Spreecast has created channels that brands, stars, or anyone can embed on their websites. Simply embed your channel once, and all your previous shows are accessible. Start a new show, and it’s automatically available to join at the top of the list.

Source: John Koetsier

Apparently Coco is popular on Spreecast. Two guesses what industry she’s in …

“We’ve also added clips functionality,” Fluhr says. “Most spreecasts are between 20 and 40 minutes, but if you want to share 30 seconds that’s really funny or really emotional, now you can grab just that clip and share it.”

All spreecasts are recorded and archived, and any user can take any slice, anytime, and embed it anywhere, share it on Facebook, or Twitter, or Google+, allowing the entire library of content to be shared in much more digestible bite-sized pieces.

And finally, the company added producer volume-control functionality. One of the problems with video conferences is differing volume levels … this allows a producer to simply level and standardize volumes for everyone.

All these features are leading to results.

Celebrities as diverse as Reese Witherspoon and Donald Rumsfeld have used Spreecast to speak to their fans. Actors from Glee and studios like Warner Brothers and Viacom have helped the site drive weekly active users up 240 percent since the beginning of this year … and overall user count has spiked by 33 percent in just the last month.

Better than Google+?

Every entrepreneur automatically thinks his or her solution is better than any competitors. If not, they shouldn’t be in the game.

Whether others agree or not … that is the question, no?

One plus to Google+ (oops) is that even though potential Hangout users need to be members, that’s still a large pool, probably well north of 250 million by now. That may not sound like much next to almost 1 billion Facebook users, but it is certainly nothing to sniff at.

And whether or not those 250 million are actually daily active users who are on the site, they’re people who don’t have to create a new account to see your content.

But the management and engagement functionality of Spreecast, in which any of 10,000 audience members can instantly become the star of the show, is a massive leg up on Hangouts on Air. So is the ability to embed the broadcast anywhere you want.

And they are a few features that Google should maybe consider.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photo pin cc, moriza via photo pin cc

I got a look at the new version of Chartbeat yesterday, the popular realtime analytics tool, and was encouraged to see a new suite of tools that focused on ways to engage and respond to readers so they return again and again.

“We know the pageview sucks,” said Chartbeat’s Alex Carusillo. “Sure everyone likes to see big numbers, but you can’t predict a pickup by Drudge Report that will send a huge wave of one time readers. We think it makes more sense to focus on the readers who are deeply engaged and driving other readers to your site.”

The big change is a new field in the dashboard that tracks the average amount of time readers are spending with each story. You can take a look at an example from investor Fred Wilson’s blog AVC below (he doesn’t mind sharing his numbers).

Watching the numbers from VentureBeat yesterday, I saw certain stories that weren’t getting the most traffic, but were keeping readers on the site for two or three times VentureBeat’s average.

“This is very different from the engagement you see in Google Analytics,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand. “They are looking at when someone enters a page and when they exit. But is that person actually paying attention to your site, or did they just forget and leave open a tab in their browser.” Chartbeat looks every few seconds to see if the visitor is clicking around to measure engagement.

Chartbeat has already released a specialized product, Newsbeat, for publishers. Right now the team is testing out similar products for e-commerce and gaming companies. And the new version of Chartbeat is going to break out analytics for visitors arriving through mobile sites and apps as well. “You need to understand how your audience is engaging with you, no matter what platform they are using,” Carusillo said.

And, as if Chartbeat didn’t already monkey with my ego on a daily basis, the team has built-in a new tool that tracks the performance of your site against its peer group, in our case other tech blogs. You can see the average for direct traffic, search and social across similar sites and where you rank by comparison.

“We want to help companies do more than just track their performance minute to minute. We’re trying to real-time expose data in a new way so companies can make informed decisions about where it makes the most sense to invest for the long-term,” Bennett said.

Image via Flickr user rosmary

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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User engagement is a top priority for every social network. As the average user’s number of ‘friends’ continues to increase, a critical problem for social networks has been to develop tools that help users filter and categorize relevant content

Historically, most scammers have geared their tactics towards mass audiences rather than producing targeted content as personalized filters were rudimentary or undeveloped. This is why we’ve seen many large-scale, non-targeted scams spread through social networks for so long. Last spring, we measured that the average social scam wave reached approximately 1.5 million clicks.

However, the launch of Facebook’s ‘highlighted content’ stream and Google+ ‘circles’ has lead to a decrease in threats based around mass distribution techniques as content filtration leaves such ‘impersonal’ content out of peoples’ feeds.

Facebook and Twitter, the most popular social networks, have made major changes in recent months to features, design, security and privacy. While these changes increase interaction between users and decrease the number of large-scale scams, they may open the door for highly targeted attacks.

We are seeing scammers get smart by focusing their many tools on developing seemingly legitimate personalized content to increase their “conversion rates” in the face of filters.

A deeper look at the new Facebook changes

Today Timeline, the most important profile update in Facebook’s history, is being offered to nearly a billion users. The Timeline update alone is likely to redefine the concept of privacy itself, as the tiniest details of users’ lives can now be publicly shared and indexed. Of course, we were able to share information about health, relationships and work before on Facebook, but it was never indexed in a way that was easy for people to see and search.

While Timeline allows users to avoid content they don’t find interesting, it also provides scammers the opportunity to develop targeted content just for you.

For example, smart lists, which help users control content sharing and content consumption, and a defined “Close Friends” list have been designed to increase the visibility of content from the people listed in these groups.

For scammers, this functionality offers the opportunity to create highly visible, targeted attacks. Malicious applications can request the “read friend lists” permission and then distribute attacks to your close friends, coworkers past or present and even your family.

Because these targeted attacks don’t generate large-scale issues for all of Facebook, they are also extremely difficult to detect and remove than the older style of social attack.

The new News Ticker and App Ticker have also been redesigned to increase interaction between users and serve them more interesting content in real-time. Considering that most online scams have a short lifecycle, these improvements actually increase the amount of contact of users will have with fresh scams.

Then there are the latest granular evolutions of Facebook’s Privacy Settings – we can certainly say that Facebook has made important improvements by giving users control over the way their content is shared. However, the glaring issue remains that their ‘automatic opt-in’ policy for essential features like tagging and location-sharing, can still be exploited to create dangerous or, at the least, embarrassing personal situations.

How do social threats “engage” Twitter users?

Twitter’s delivery of fresh news in just 140 characters makes it compatible not only with smartphones, but also with phone carriers’ existing text message services, meaning access to any modern mobile device. This kind of compatibility means everything is smaller: screen names, URLs and, ominously, the amount of information we can see about a user, making it easier for scammers and hackers to spoof identities or keep you from seeing the source of a scam altogether on a small screen.

Since most Twitter users use the platform to distribute public content, Twitter privacy is not as big a concern for us as it is with Facebook. Rather, it is the rapid proliferation of content, the shortening of URLs and the ability to target audiences through simple search queries that make Twitter attractive for targeted attacks and a minefield for businesses and consumers.

Although trending topics or gossip hashtags are seriously plagued by Twitter scams, the real danger on Twitter comes in the form of Direct Messages. According to statistics gathered by our security app for Facebook and Twitter, more than half of the spam detected in users’ direct messages lead to malware or phishing sites.

Of course there are classic scams in Direct Messages like falsified donation sites, but the growing instances of malware and phishing links within direct messages is a worrying development. While our user sample doesn’t yet allow for generalized conclusions that apply to all of Twitter, other security researchers also report a high incidence of phishing and malware in direct messages. When combined with the constant stream of malicious tweets that can be easily distributed on Twitter, direct message scams turn the bumpy road of Twitter into a malware and scam laden minefield.

What’s next?

With the explosion of popularity in Tumblr and the increased visibility of Google+, you may be wondering why malicious attacks on them aren’t a concern for the near future. To put it simply, these two growing networks are in the enviable position that Apple is compared to Microsoft – they are not large enough to warrant the development of compatible scams and malware still. Furthermore, Tumblr isn’t a social network that is focused on user engagement and Google+ is still in the stage of increasing its user base meaning it will be a while before their ubiquity warrants attacks.

Still, every important update to the major social networks designed to minimize irrelevant content has been followed by scams that utilized the new features for improved social engineering attacks. These new tools designed to engage users may very well render most of the classic and, frankly, obvious mass-scams less effective. But the new user engagement experiences also means that they will place more trust in the content shared from “Close Friends” or “Current co-workers.” That alone will increase efficiency of targeted attacks.

[Conversation image via ShutterStock]

George Petre is a leading researcher in social media security. In 2008 he presented one of the first ever workshops on social media security at the MIT Spam Conference, and has since presented again at MIT and VB conferences. George holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and a master’s in Psychology applied in National Security. His work focuses on monitoring existing and emerging threat trends in social media and privacy issues. He also plays a lead role in the development of Safego, Bitdefender’s free social media security tool, currently available for Facebook and Twitter.

The San Francisco company, a veteran of DEMO,  is announcing today two new analytics tools aimed at measuring engagement of players and its relationship to higher revenues per users. The tools can be used together to create a user engagement index and to optimize the revenue generated from each user.

The tools will be part of a free suite of ApScience analytics tools that Apsalar already provides to more than 2,000 customers with 45,000 apps in the mobile app stores. Those apps have been downloaded 20 million times. Customers are already using the tools because they give mobile app publishers unprecedented levels of information on users, their progress in games, and just how much time they spend playing. They can then group users into cohorts, a groups of individuals with similar characteristics, and then run analyses related to how much revenue those users generate. Apsalar calls the engagement tools its Mobile Engagement Management platform for both iOS and Android apps.

Publishers use the numbers to figure out what to do next. Apsalar also provides targeting tools that it charges for. Those help the publishers target special offers to users who can be prompted to get more engaged or to spend more money. The resulting information includes average engagement per user and average revenue per user. That data helps publishers predict how much money they can make from a game. If publishers make macro changes to their mobile apps, they can measure the change in engagement and revenue.

One of the company that plans to use the new tools is Gameview Studios, a mobile game maker acquired by DeNA of Japan. Riz Virk, chief executive of Gameview, said the data is critical in helping to guide product and business decisions. It can be used to calculate the lifetime value of a customer, or how much revenue that customer will generate over the life of a game. Figuring out who pays and who doesn’t is very important to mobile game publishers, who are largely shifting to the free-to-play model, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Through careful analytics and promotional targeting, companies can raise the percentage of users who pay and how much they spend.

With the tools, developers can track anything, such as a player reaching level 5 in a game and its correlation to the likelihood of that user buying virtual currency. The point is to provide customers with actionable data about their users, said Michael Oiknine, chief executive of Apsalar, in an interview.

“We’re taking analysis to the next level,” he said. “We’re already monitoring a few billion events a month.”

Apsalar was founded in 2010 and its backers include Thomvest Ventures, Battery Ventures and DN Capital. the company has raised $6 million to date and it has 20 employees. Rivals include Flurry, Claritics and in-house analytics at game companies.

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The Qwiki editor takes content such as text, videos and photos, and lays it out in a neat presentation. It’s a drag-and-drop process that’s run in a web browser. The end result is a several-minute presentation, similar to the existing Qwiki articles, that a company can post to the web. Anyone on a device running the iPhone iOS operating system, Android or HTML5 can view the presentation.

Qwiki articles capture reader attention for an average of 6 minutes and 30 seconds on the web and 19 minutes on the iPad, Qwiki co-founder Doug Imbruce told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience on Wednesday. That’s well above the engagement level for many other websites, which usually only measure as high as 2 to 3 minutes. iPad users have downloaded Qwiki’s iPad app more than 500,000 times.

“As a result of this engagement, 800 companies have reached out to Qwiki and want to put their content into the Qwiki format,” Imbruce said. “We’re going to tap into that.”

The service feels like it’s from the future. Actors asking questions to a computer and getting large swaths of visual and spoken information back is common a sci-fi trope in movies like Wall-E, and that’s exactly what Qwiki does (though with less Sigourney Weaver). Users type something in Qwiki’s search bar and get a two- to three-minute clip of spoken information and a few pictures or videos.

Qwiki launched its private alpha at TechCrunch Disrupt, an industry conference, in September 2010 and raised $9.5 million from the likes of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in a short few months. The service got more than a hundred thousand requests to join the private alpha, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Qwiki has around 3 million topics in its database, ranging from geographic locations such San Francisco to actresses such as Natalie Portman (though being a math nerd, I went straight to pages with information on meromorphic functions and the Riemann-Zeta function). The information presented is surprisingly comprehensive without throwing out the overload of facts that might pop-up on some of the larger Wikipedia pages.

Qwiki was the darling of last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 competition for start-ups, winning a $50,000 prize and the Disrupt Cup. Qwiki was also the runner-up for best technological achievement at this year’s Crunchies awards — an academy award-style ceremony for start-ups and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company said it has worked with research company ComScore to develop a new way of measuring how people use Cooliris. In the past, if you visited, say, the website of musician Taylor Swift and looked at different photos in the Cooliris-powered gallery, that would still count as one pageview to comScore. Now, when you click on each piece of content, that counts as a separate pageview. And with Cooliris saying it increases engagement — a measure of time actively spent on a website — for publishers by five or six times, those pageviews should add up.

The company is also giving publishers more data about their Cooliris Walls by integrating them with Google’s data tool Google Analytics.

As those features make Cooliris more useful for publishers, the company also wants consumers to use the Cooliris Wall as a way to share media on their personal websites or social networks, using an application called Cooliris Express. That product is also being updated today with the ability to create a single gallery in Cooliris, then share it across all your social networks.

Cooliris says Express has already been used to create more than 40,000 walls since it launched last fall. This spring, usage has been growing, with about 400 new walls created every day.

So how does all this help Cooliris make money? It doesn’t, necessarily. The company has pulled back from an effort to run advertising on the walls of its publishing partners, said Executive Vice President of Products Michele Turner, so most of its revenue right now comes from ads in a separate product, a plug-in that users install on their browser.

But adding more publisher tools seems like a natural prelude to exploring new revenue opportunities through the Cooliris Wall. In the meantime, Turner said it’s a good way to get the company’s name out there, and to convince more users to install the plug-in.

Cooliris has raised $18 million, mainly from well-known venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.