Bloghound

Two new services featured at Demo 08 are big hits at our office and at my house: Silobreaker? (office) and HubDub (home, my husband in particular).

Silobreaker provides contextual and graphical search results, allowing you to “see” a map with the hot spots where news is happening, create trend graphs, and, my favorite, see a network map of the search items that visually shows contextual relationships among the items. This latter feature is particularly helpful in understanding what issues are most closely related, how close — or far apart — your company may be from an issue of industry significance, and what issues are rather irrelevant. Here’s a network map I created from searching on “social media” and “social networking.”? I see value for this service for competitive insights, corporate issues management, brand positioning and issues monitoring.

For more about Silobreaker, check out this post from Patti Anklam.

I fear my husband is addicted to HubDub, a week-old service that lets people forecast how news stories, sports events, financial markets and other happenings are likely to turn out. The addictive part is that you can compete in the leaderboard feature; the more and better your predictions, the higher your leaderboard ranking. I hope my husband;s business sales don’t show an inverse relationship to his leaderboard rankings.

The value of HubDub?? it certainly gets people more involved with news and issues., and has potential as an educational too. And it’s much safer than gambling.

I’m guest blogging over at the International Association of Online Communicators. Here’s today’s post.

What does a person’s writing say about the person? Plenty, especially if you learn how to use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.

You run text through the program and it categorizes words into 70 linguistic or psychologically-relevant categories. I inputted the several recent blog posts from three popular CEO bloggers — Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Bob Lutz, vice chairman of GM, and Bill Marriott — and here are the partial results:

Some admittedly oversimplified takeaways:

· Bill Marriott comes across as most honest, outgoing, and positive.

· Paul Levy appears to be especially intelligent, with highly cognitive and big words; he’s also quite outgoing and more negative than the other two CEO bloggers. Interestingly he’s done an extraordinary job of turning around Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and has been writing about union issues, which may account for the negative emotion.

· Bob Lutz comes across honest and smart.

What does this have to do with online communications? It’s an area I’m studying and have no answers yet, just some questions I’d like to ask you:

· Should we “test” executives writing and analyze it before they start blogging on behalf of the company? If they score very negative, low on honesty and low on cognitive thinking – would this person be a good representative of the company?

· Does using an analysis tool like this help us be more aware of our selves – and help us change our language, and, in turn, change our behavior?

· Is it a good tool to coach others in communicating in this new conversational world? (Note that many people think that using the first person “I” is not professional and makes you seem too self-absorbed. But linguistics has found that not to be so; use of the first person implies honesty.)

· Should we never talk about this tool as it may scare execs about being naked out in the blogsophere – especially if they aren’t all that buff when it comes to being positive, cognitively complex and honest?

· Lastly, can writing a blog every day make us healthier? (Studies have proven that writing about personal topics 15 – 30 minutes a day improves people’s emotional and physical health.)

Why is John Edwards lagging Clinton and and Obama in the Democratic presidential race? It may be his use of language. Not the words and “messages,” but his style.

A study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, “Winning words: individual differences in linguistic style among U.S. presidential and vice presidential candidates,” computer analyzed the linguistic styles of Bush, Cheney, Kerry and Edwards during the 2004 campaign across six linguistic style categories related to voting behaviors and political personality characteristics.

Some highlights of the findings, by James Pennebaker, Richard Slatcher, Cindy Chung and Lori Stone:

• Edwards’ language was the most feminine. (Studies show that when asked to describe ” a good president” 61% of the participants characterized the role as masculine and 0% as feminine. The remaining percent were androgynous or undifferentiated.)

• Edwards’ language use was the least presidential. (The Republicans used much more presidential language than the Democrats. Presidential language is has high levels of articles, prepositions, positive emotions and big words.)

• Edwards used more depressive language than Bush or Cheney; Kerry was most similar to a depressed person. (Studies show voters are most favorable toward candidates who are the most optimistic.)

• Edwards and Bush were the least cognitively complex in their use of language. (Cheney was the most cognitively complex — his style being the most concrete, complex, and detached.)

• Edwards and Cheney were similar in honesty of their language; both of the vice presidential candidates’ language was more honest than Kerry or Bush.

According to James Pennebaker, professor and chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin and developer of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software program that categorizes words into linguistic and psychological categories:

“Over the years it has become apparent that is far more important to see how people talked about a given topic than what they were talking about. People’s linguistic styles provide far richer psychological information than their linguistic content.”

It is possible that Edwards’ language use has changed since the last election. Yet this scientific use of language analysis does provide some fascinating clues into why he’s lagging.

PS — I’ll be writing more about what our words can say about us, particularly as it relates to business, when I guest blog at the International Association of Online Communicators next week.

At last! A simple, intuitive ways to edit videos. And it’s free. Check out VideoThang, digital editing software so easy that even adults can use it.

While the Mac crowd has had iMovie, VideoThang provides something even better for the PC crowd. For years I’ve tried to make Adobe Premiere do its thing but it was too much work. Now I can look slick — dissolves, music, video and pics. In an age where we need to be as proficient using video to tell stories as words, this tool makes it easier to do the production so we can spend more time telling the story.

Many thanks to my friend Scott MacIver over WalkSign for the tip. (Scott always has the best new tech suggestions — cool things that solve real problems.)

Innovation and entrepreneurism is thriving — and developing more and more new Web 2.0 tools and applications will just keep changing how we live, work, market and play. Check out highlights from this week’s TechCrunch40 Conference over at Don Dodge’s Next Big Thing and Frank Gruber’s Being Frank. The ideas are so much more interesting than the 1990s dot com era.

What’s your visual DNA? Imagini, a new social networking site dedicated to creating a new language of visual communication, helps you determine your visual personality profile. It works by asking you to reply to a series of statements by clicking on a photo that best represents your response. (”The ideal vacation…” That’s my response at left.) It then gives you profile, kind of like a Briggs-Meyers, and connects you with people who have similar profiles. (I’m closely matched with men about my age in the Netherlands and younger women in Asia.)

The personality categories (and my DNA in parentheses):

• Mood: dreamer, go-getter, easy rider, wildcat, sofisticat. (Go-getter)
• Fun: worker bee, escape artist, thriller, conqueror. (Conqueror)
• Habits: junkie monkey, back to basics, new wave puritan, high time roller. (New Wave Puritan.)
• Love: Touchy feely, home soul, nice ‘n cheesy, love bug. (Home soul)

So what does this have to do with marketing?

1. It’s a new way to do research. Rather than categorizing people by traditional segments, this type of approach “is going to enable finding things according to your Visual DNA code,” says Imagini CEO Alex Willcock.

2. New commerce opportunities. Imagini has a beta Gift Finder service that let’s you profile the person you want to buy for, and then gives you gift recommendations based on the person;s Visual DNA. With my wedding anniversary coming up, I profiled my husband and the Imagini database presented some great idea. I was surprised at some interesting ideas that I would never have thought of, but know would work. (And this is a hard guy to buy for.)

The site also provides travel service recommendations based on your profile. Again, I was pleasantly surprised at how relevant the recommendations were to my interests.

We rely so much on words and talk in marketing, but keep an eye on how visual communication will open up interesting new opportunities.

PS — Thanks to Colin Beasty at CRM Magazine for his nice article last Friday on Beyond Buzz.

Does your writing say you’re a man or a woman? Check out The Gender Genie, a free site which uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Insert about 500 words of your writing and the Genie predicts your gender, allegedly with high accuracy.

I submitted two recent articles and the first chapter of my book. Alas, the Genie thinks I’m male. The articles scored high on the male gender; the book came out male but the score was more balanced: 834/female and 892/male.

TouchGraph offers a free visualization tool that helps you see connections and relationships among books, music or movies on Amazon, or among search words on Google. Really interesting. It helps you quickly “see” and make sense of information in new ways.

Some people have asked whether they’d find my new book Beyond Buzz interesting. My new way to reply is to show them this TouchGraph map that shows other books that people who have bought Beyond Buzz have bought.

Beyond Buzz Touchgraph