Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Just a few cool tools/links I found today:

• Use social networking for keyword research (I especially like the Facebook Lexicon link for PR purposes)
• ScribbleLive (live blogging software, this is great for events and allows your users to follow everything as you record it, instead of constantly refreshing a site for updates)
• Howcast - a video site built specifically around How-To videos. I’m totally trying this one soon.
• Google Sites expands its features - pretty nice if you just a quick website or don’t have a lot of technical expertise
• Online Bookmarking - a few different sites to create bookmarks online

Enjoy!

I’m still kind of in shock from this news, but apparently, according to comScore numbers Yahoo! Buzz’s traffic numbers were higher than Digg’s for April. Seriously? Kind of hard for me to believe, but I guess unless we hear from Digg and Buzz as to their exact traffic numbers, it’s the best we have to go on.

I’ve been seeing more and more that marketers and regular users on Digg have been saying “it’s impossible to get on to the homepage of Digg” and that “digg is broken“. But this is really surprising news for such a young site. I’m thinking that the marketing team at Yahoo! Buzz should be given several gold stars for pulling off this feat. Either that, or marketers have discovered a way to exploit Buzz for everything it’s worth.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but I definitely will now. Does anyone have any experience with Buzz? Easier to use than Digg? Better information? What’s the reason for someone to jump from Digg to Buzz or vice versa?

There must have been something in the water the last few days because it’s been stats, stats, stats lately.

AdGooroo SEM and SEO Tracking
At work recently, we’ve started using AdGooroo, which is a fantastic SEO & SEM monitoring application. It can keep track of your paid and natural campaigns, as well as your competitors. The great thing is that you don’t even have to define your competitors. It will simply aggregate everything it finds, and those logically become your competitors.

Facebook Application Tracking
I was reading today on TechCrunch that a new startup called Sometrics (Some Metrics?) is shooting to start tracking applications in Facebook. From their site:

We’re a developer-founded, developer-friendly company that gives you the analytic tools you need to understand your audience.

All of your demographics are compiled every single day. You can even see statistics for specific hours of a specific day. Who was using your app or social network at 3 AM last Tuesday? We’ll tell you.

We track:

• Page views and unique visits
• Installs and uninstalls
• Age
• Gender
• Number of friends
• Locations (down to the specific state if in US)

Features:

• Pie chart for age breakdown
• Maps show saturation of different locations
• Calendar tool that allows you to see statistics from a single day as well as aggregate statistics from multiple days
• Export data to Excel (.csv)

Sounds pretty interesting and, depending on the cost, worthwhile, but what do you do then with those numbers? 13,000 page views - is that good? 200,000 downloads? Ok, so what? It’ll be up to the interpretation of that data that will ultimately lend value and prove ROI. Regardless, it’s exciting to see these kinds of metrics being available for marketers.

YouTube Video Statistics with YouTube Insight
I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier, but YouTube has released YouTube Insight, which provides demographic data to marketers, users, or anyone interested as to who’s watching your videos. It provides insight into views, demographics, and popularity. Again, it’s great to know these numbers, but unless you know your competitor, can show some actionable result (users bought something, traffic increased, etc.) it’s not going to do marketers a lot of good to know that 20,000 from Turkey watched this video.

What other online metrics or statistical platforms are out there? I’m always looking for “the next best thing”.

TechCrunch writes today that Yahoo is testing out a new universal search feature called Glue. To be honest, it’s a bit of a mess, especially when compared with Google Universal search or my all time favorite Ask.com.

Take a look for yourself:

Yahoo Glue - Barack Obama
Ask 3D - Barack Obama
Google Universal - Barrack Obama