Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Hashtag was the word of the year in 2013, there was a baby named Hashtag, and the word was outlawed in France (mot-dièse).

Hashtags continue to have enormous benefits when utilized appropriately in social media – especially as their use has expanded beyond Twitter and into Facebook. If you’d like some hashtag basics, see the Hashtag Guide that we’ve published. You can also read our post on finding the best hashtags for each social update....

Our technology and method

Using NLP (natural language processing) to turn text into data, we extract reported speech (the things people say) from the text of online news, along with the associated metadata (things like: the name of the speaker and where they work). We use this data in a variety of ways: for our article ranking, when we manage churnalism (lots of news sources use the same info), and when we display the quotes themselves to create an at-a-glance version of the news.

Why do we focus on quotes

Because we're convinced that a valuable news experience is one that includes a variety of points of view - so more quotes means more value. At Trooclick, we understand that news is the same as anything else you might invest time or money in: it should be a good value....

A hardened corps of volunteer editors is the only force protecting Wikipedia. They might also be killing it.

Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— but nothing is as comprehensive. The English-language edition, the largest of Wikipedia’s 287 language editions, now includes more than 4.5 million entries, and 11 other editions have more than a million each.

Few of the tens of millions of readers who rely on Wikipedia give much thought to where its content comes from or why the site, which is crowdsourced and open (at least in theory) for anyone to edit, doesn’t degenerate into gibberish and graffiti. Like Google or running water, it is simply there. Yet its very existence is something of a miracle. Despite its ocean of content, this vital piece of informational infrastructure is the work of a surprisingly small community of volunteers. Only about 3,000 editors contribute more than 100 changes a month to the English-language Wikipedia, down from a high of more than 4,700 in early 2007. Without any central direction or outside recognition, these dedicated amateurs create, refine, and maintain millions of content pages....

Social analytics service Topsy announced that it now offers the full archive of tweets on Twitter, meaning that anyone can search through the entire library of messages ever sent on the microblogging service.

You could, for example, look up your own first tweets — probably for the sheer delight of embarrassing yourself — by heading to Topsy.com, searching for ‘from:@yourusername,’ hitting search and then sorting by oldest first.You can, of course, do that with Twitter’s archives, but Topsy lets you do it for any account....

Vizir is a free web app which facilitates the creation of online surveys and the analysis of the respondents data.

Vizir questionnaires can be viewed on any type of device and can be shared via social media, or can be published into your website easily. It also works hand in hand with MS Office.

No initial registration required to create a survey.

Free plan includes unlimited questions and responses.

My comment: Good tool for those not needing sophisticated and costly survey tools (SurveyMonkey).

It provides a simple and non-technical way to create good-looking questionnaire and to easily analyze incoming data. It is better than Google Forms relative to interface design and data analysis and a good alternative to Typeform if you need something that allows to spend less time creating your survey. Try it out now: http://vizir.co/en/...

Ever wish you could read the minds of your target audience? Google Consumer Surveys is the next best thing. It allows you to survey the web with a tool so precise, it predicted the 2012 U.S. presidential election. And don’t worry – it’s affordable and easy to use.

How does it work? You start the process using the simple three-step creator, which will walk you through targeting your audience. You can choose to get a representative sample of your country’s population, or target a more specific audience by age, gender, geography, and a screening question to help further narrow your audience. You also have your choice of ten different question formats, including multiple choice, star-rating, image selection and more.

So when your survey goes out into the world, where is it going, exactly? That’s your choice. You can choose to distribute your survey through Google’s network of online publishers, or via the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app....