At Spiral16, we are dedicated to making sure our clients get the most out of our web monitoring platform. To that end, we’ve added an important person to company. She has been a presence on our blog for many months now, but Spiral16 is happy to announce that Michelle Lamar has joined the S16 team full time as the head of our expanded Account Services.

We’re excited to welcome Michelle to Spiral16 so we took some time out to shoot a quick video introducing her to everybody and letting them know what kind of help and advice they can expect from her.

Michelle was an early social media adopter, has over 15 years of experience in the marketing industry, and is eager to help Spiral16 clients stay ahead of the game with the actionable web data they are receiving from our comprehensive web monitoring platform.

As partner of Smith-Lamar Advertising and VP of Media at V3 Integrated Marketing, Lamar developed and executed strategic marketing plans for national brands and companies, advising clients on how to mix online marketing, online media, online content development, and social media with traditional marketing plans.

In addition to helping clients integrate Spiral16 data into their existing marketing research, Lamar will assist the Spiral16 analytics team in creating and managing customized company reports that identify online benchmarks, volume growth, sentiment measurements, and important trends and influencers.

She’s also a pop culture junkie like myself and in this video reveals one shameful secret–watch to find out what it is!

Spiral16 is honored to be  nominated as one of the the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s Small Businesses of the Year and we are excited to participate in the largest celebration of small business in the nation!

Three months of activities from March through May kick off this month with the Chamber’s Business After Hours 2011 Small Business Candidates’ Showcase on Thursday, March 24 at the historic Muehlebach Hotel in downtown Kansas City.

The site is pretty amazing, as are the companies that will be there. The Muehlebach Hotel is a restored building in downtown KC that was visited by every President from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. It is currently operated as one of three wings of the Kansas City Marriott Downtown. The city’s best and brightest new businesses will be present, showcasing their products and services.

It is one of one of The Chamber’s most popular annual networking events, and its just $5 for Chamber members and $25 for future Chamber members, and they take walk-ins for this event.

Here’s some more info from the KC Chamber’s site:

It’s an event 25 years in the making! Our Small Business Celebration is turning 25, and we are showcasing the top small businesses in Kansas City at the Candidate Showcase. Old and new will come together for another year of great businesses changing the face of Kansas City. The time is now, so have your business cards ready for some top shelf networking.

We’ll be there, and so will all the other SBOY nominees, so come on out after work on Thursday and say “hi.” Kansas City’s best and brightest new businesses will be there, and it sounds like a great way to make some personal connections.

Rolling out Spiral16 2.0 has been a great way to kick off the new year. Our unique web analytics platform was built by our developers to provide you with maximum flexibility to measure your online efforts. I’ve held several webinars to do quick run-throughs of Spiral16 2.0 and will continue to do so. The next one is scheduled for Tuesday, February 1 at 2pm CST (3pm EST).

Since we identify influence by topic, visualize the spread of messages in 3D, and have a human-guided data validation process, Spiral16 2.0 is pretty different from the other social media monitoring solutions out there. In a recent presentation, Jason Falls recently classified us not in the Monitoring category, but rather as an Online Research Solution.

Come this Friday, we are rolling out even more improvements to the platform to improve speed, give you more global filtering options, and introduce a new system for report templates, among other things. Here’s more info on the newest rollout:

Click to see hi-res image.

3D Visual-Mapping – This feature allows you to understand complex data connections at a glance. Besides making the Virtualization faster and more intuitive to use, we’ve added some seriously cool features that allow you to see more information in the 3D map itself.

• You now have the ability to favorite/unfavorite pages by clicking on spheres. Tracking important web pages in your topic is way easier now.
• Viewing sentiment excerpts is a one-step process. If there is an overt piece of sentiment for that page, you’ll find it by clicking on the sphere.
• It’s now possible to adjust start time and end time for timeline, as well as the ability to pause the motion on the data visualization as well.

Templates – Being able to quickly access the data you’ve saved within your topic is important.

• You can create and save filter templates across the entire Topic Dashboard.
• These templates are saved and viewable at any time from a dropdown menu.
• Saving your work will be useful for reports and exports, whether you’re showcasing your results for your team or your CEO.

Click to see hi-res image.

Even More Filter Options – This will give you more freedom to slice up and measure your data in a way that fits your goals.

• You can filter relevant charts and graphs by date range, site type, and topic tags. This adds even more functionality to an already flexible dashboard.

Domain View – This view shows you all the relevant domains in your topic so you can focus your marketing efforts where they belong.

• Domains that have the most pages in your topic will be ranked at the top, all the way down to the ones that appear the least.
• Every domain in your topic will appear, with a link to all the specific web pages that fall under that domain, their sentiment ratings, and site type.
• Domains are also filterable by site type, and you can see up to 150 domains at a time.

Query Distribution - This new pie chart will help you measure the success of your search keywords and keep your studies on track.

• Displays queries as a percentage of the entire topic so you understand which ones are producing more volume.
• On Topic Dashboard, this gadget is filterable by date, site type, and topic tags.

Our platform is built differently from the ground up and the development process is never-ending. Please let us know if you need any help, email us at contact@spiral16.com and thanks again to all our of clients for your valuable feedback!

Spiral16 2.0 — the next generation of our web and social media monitoring application — is in beta testing for the next few weeks, and we want to offer you a peak behind the curtain.

Click on image to see full-sized version

Monday, January 24 at 2pm CST (3pm EST) we are having a Spiral16 2.0 Sneak Preview Webinar to show you the new flexible user interface, designed to help you concentrate on the metrics you need for your company, and some of the new features, such as quarterly comparative charts.

Please use the link here to sign up for an invite.

After extensive feedback and two years of working with our clients to give them the social media and web data they need to drive strategy, Spiral16 has rebuilt our web monitoring application from the ground up.

As 2011 promises to be the year when companies discover the true value of online data, we want to be right there with them, providing the best way for them to measure those results.

Part of that is having the ability to offer brand overviews and other useful business reports, which we are also offering this year.

For more information on online reporting options, email us at contact@spiral16.com.

To sign up for Monday’s Webinar, just click here.

I just saw a post this morning on the GOMC Blog about the importance of keywords when setting up a social media monitoring study and couldn’t agree more.

It is important to remember in any study that the platform is only searching what you tell it to search.

It is, after all, machines talking to machines.

When we designed the new version of the Spiral16 web monitoring platform, we added some gadgets that allow you to see how those keyword searches are doing. The key to web monitoring is being able to determine relevancy and having the ability to tweak your search strings — we call them queries — to get the results that you need for your business.

Of course, having human hands touch the data is always a big help. Our data analytics team will not only assist you in setting up your queries, but they will test and tweak them to make sure you are getting the information that is relevant to you.

The last tip in the blog is:

4. Use the initial results from monitoring to define new keywords for your campaign that will produce relevant results. Keep refining!

In order to keep refining, you can use charts like these that show important information about the queries that make up your topics. In Query List, you can see the exact number of pages accepted from our human-guided validation process and the exact number of pages rejected by spam filtering. In addition, the Query List expresses a percentage of acceptance for each query.

The Query Health – Overview pie chart looks at the entire topic — all the queries together — to helps you track and measure the success of the keyword combinations that are used to pull in your results. The percentage of pages that were accepted for your topic according to your queries and their correlated percentage scores is reflected in purple. A higher rate of page acceptance means that a smaller amount of results are being filtered out as irrelevant to the topic.

Query Activity is similar to the Query List, only it allows you to compare the success of the keyword combinations along a timeline.

A simple piece of advice from The Altimeter Group was also excerpted in its study of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management:

“Use tightly-scoped keywords to define the search parameters. Yet don’t go too tight or you miss key opportunities – going too wide results in too much noise.”

Being able to view how those keywords are performing is essential to limiting noise and keeping your data as relevant as possible.

UPDATE: Due to overwhelming response, another Sneak Peek Webinar has been scheduled for Monday January 17 at 2pm CST (3pm EST). Please use the form below to sign up for an invite. Thanks!

Today we begin rolling out the next generation of our web and social media monitoring application to a bigger test group.  Spiral16 2.0 is in beta testing for the next few weeks, with plans to fully launch in the marketplace this month.

Click on image to see full-sized version

The Spiral16 web monitoring application is a powerful tool and some of the functionality that allows us to delve so deeply into the data initially resulted in our software being less user-friendly, especially for new users. The new version of the Spiral16 software has addressed this and we’re excited about the improved capabilities and overall user experience.

One of the first differences with Spiral16 2.0 is apparent as soon as you login to the system, when you see our Project Home page.

Project Home is a collapsible big-picture dashboard that looks at all of the topics you have running as a whole. With a simple click on the project name, a window expands listing all your topics – both active and inactive – in six different charts and graphs. This overview is a snapshot of your activity, all in one place, all viewable at a glance. It also serves as the base for the user dashboard, so that you can quickly check and get a top line view of the data.

The Project Home page also allows you to see at a glance how much of your query has been rejected and how much data was accepted.  This is critical, as this snapshot will tell you if you’re using the right terms to get the data you need.

The release of Spiral16 2.0 represents over a year of intensive market research and client feedback, along with countless hours of development.  We are constantly soliciting feedback from our clients and potential clients and that has allowed us to modify our software to include features our users want and need, as well as to modify things they felt needed improvement. Our goal was to make our application more intuitive and more effective and we think that once you have a chance to experiment with the software, that you’ll agree.

For those of you who’ve not yet used our monitoring software, here’s an overview of what we do and why we’re different than our competitors:

Focus on Relevant Data
Spiral16′s proprietary technology collects more relevant digital content, so users don’t have to waste time sorting through outdated material and spam. Our software and data analysis help cut through the noise and deliver the information our clients seek efficiently and effectively.

Comprehensive  Monitoring
Spiral16 software uses proprietary technology to gather and correlate information from any web page currently in existence on the Internet.

3D Virtualization
Virtualization allows you to understand data at a glance, because you can see a visual snapshot of the data you are monitoring.

Get a Sneak Preview
Spiral16 2.0 offers a powerful data monitoring application in a user-friendly package. We are offering a short 30-minute webinar on Monday, January 10^th at 2pm CST (3pm EST/11am PST) for a personal tour of the new Spiral16 web monitoring application, and it would be great if you would join us.

Just click here to sign up!

In today’s fast-paced business environment, ease of integration is extremely important.

It’s a time suck to copy and paste all of your information from one source to another every time you put together a report or a presentation.

Whether you are accommodating clients or creating internal communications, portability can sometimes be an issue.

Transporting data with ease from the Spark platform into your display materials will now be a lot easier.

In addition to the JPEG and Excel spreadsheet export functions that already exist, next week we are rolling out the ability to export text and graphics into PDF and Word documents on two reporting pages:

Insight Explorer (a detail-filled list of relevant URLs) and Excerpt Explorer (excerpts of relevant and overt sentiment).

First, you may want to filter your results page to your exact specifications with the Advanced Options. Only show URLs or comments that match the criteria you select.

You can use the check boxes and the display count options to pick out individual results or you can export unfiltered results if you like.

We hope you enjoy the new options this creates for your business and look forward telling you about more exciting product development that’s just around the corner!

“Where did your company get its name?”

It’s a question we’ve been hearing more often recently, so I thought I’d explain the significance behind Spiral16:

Spiral16 gets its name from the golden ratio – a mathematical constant of approximately 1.6180339887. It is also referred to as the golden mean, golden number and golden section. Expressed as an equation, the ratio looks like this:

Due to its aesthetically pleasing value, the golden ratio has been used since the Renaissance in art. Da Vinci’s the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are two famous examples. The ratio’s use in architecture dates back as far as the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Acropolis.

The ratio is directly related to the Fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci sequence is an unending series of numbers where each term in the series is defined by the sum of its two predecessors (assuming that 0 precedes the initial number of 1): 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

If you divide a Fibonacci number by its immediate predecessor, the answer is approximately 1.6180339887. For example: 13/8 = 1.625

In the 18th century, Charles Bonnet discovered that the phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves, stems, and branches) of plants are usually spirals of two series of the Fibonacci sequence. This natural spiral gives the company the first part of its name.

The numerical ratio is part of the algorithm that drives our virtualization software. So, we lopped off the extended decimals and went with Spiral1.6, which eventually morphed into Spiral16.

And that’s the rest of the story…

On Monday we added a few new features to Spark – something we are constantly doing to improve our product. One feature in particular will be useful for clients interested in organizing the list of pages that contain sentiment (emotion about a particular topic).

Watch this short video blog to see how the new sort features work. One feature I forgot to include: you can export these organized lists into Excel by clicking the icon next to the title ( )

Watch the video in high quality on our YouTube channel.

Want to learn more about Spiral16 and Spark? We have a new set of videos that explain a bit about us and our software.

This two-minute clip introduces you to our company, but we have nine more videos you can watch on our YouTube channel.