Jay Baer has been doing a series of live interviews on Twitter about the state of social media since October of 2008. Named Twitter 20 for the 20 questions he asks during the 90-minute interviews. The hash tag is #twt20 and Baer posts transcripts of all interviews after they are completed.

If you don’t have time to wade through 20 separate interviews, however, Baer has compiled a new eBook – Staggering Social Media Insights, the Best of Twitter 20, which is available for a free download.

Check it out:

The Best of Twitter 20

Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group have published Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. This should answer a lot of questions companies may have about utilizing social media in a pragmatic way.

The subtitle is 18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First, and the purpose of the study is to help companies find an “organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Owyang writes: “Regardless if you’re in IT or in a business unit, we wrote this to meet the needs of both groups. This architecture lays out all the possibilities (18 use cases) defines the problem and goal for each, and suggests some vendors to watch. It’s also pragmatic, as it lays out a process on how to get started, baseline needs (listening) and what to do next.”

The full report is below:

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Today at the 2010 KC/IABC Business Communicators Summit, Spiral16’s Phil Ocampo and Alex Midgley presented a breakout session on the value of social network visualizations to businesses.

Thanks to the KC/IABC for inviting us–it was a lively session and Phil and Alex walked everyone through a 3D visual map of the Conan vs. Leno insight we ran just recently. If you were there, you got to see a 3D social media visualization in action. (If you go to the Conan/Leno blog, you can get interactive with it on the website as well.)

Phil and Alex also demonstrated how social network visualizations can be applied to offline data sets by delving into a 3D visualization of quick service restaurant (QSR) customer surveys from different store locations.

Here’s the session description and the PowerPoint from the presentation below:

Measuring Influence: The Value of 3D Data Visualization

View more presentations from Spiral16.

You’ve seen the graphics—a cluster of colored spheres with seemingly random connections between them, spread out in empty space like a spider’s web. In actuality, it’s not random at all, but a 3D visual map of the links between the key influencers on the Internet talking about your brand. This session will help you understand how to identify the most influential conversations, measure the brand reach of a message, and understand where positive and negative “hot spots” are within your ecosystem. Before you engage with key influencers, you have to first determine how to prioritize your engagement opportunities, and visual mapping is a great place to start.

A new ebook compiled by Seth Godin is being passed around the Web right now, and it contains some really useful and reflective thoughts. In our workday, we often get bogged down by heavy workloads and sometimes feel like there’s never a time to look up and take stock of what you have and what you’re doing with it.

The end of the year is the perfect time to slow down and consider this.

The book is available as a free download and is entitled What Matters Now. It features contributions from forward-thinkers like Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mitch Joel, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, and new tech thinker Kevin Kelley.

Each author was asked to pick a provocative word and riff on it for a little bit. Besides deep thoughts on business and life in general, there is also useful information for brands looking into the future. This quote ties into the idea of giving away an ebook for free:

When talking of the shifting concept of ’social media’ customer service, Vaynerchuck’s quote was particularly interesting: “I believe the ‘thank you’ economy will become the norm in 2010 and beyond, and brands that fail to adjust will be left out in the cold.”

Have a great holiday and please download or browse What Matters Now below:

Last night, KCTV5 broadcast a report on Mark Mangino that included online data collected by our social media monitoring solution Spark over a two-and-a-half week period. Although the data sampling ended on Wednesday afternoon, it turned out to be quite prescient.

One hour before the data was broadcast, the embattled KU football coach resigned.

Spark was also running an insight on Tiger Woods‘ recent accident and the hoopla surrounding it. The comparison is pretty interesting.

Sentiment Breakdown

The top right pie chart represents the sentiment breakdown from Nov. 14 – Dec. 2 on URLs pertaining to Mark Mangino. It excludes all neutral content because this is a sampling of the most overt sentiment. Green is positive, red is negative. The breakdown is as follows:

• Positive: 24.69%
• Negative: 75.31%

Mangino resigned his position as head coach after an internal review of the football program was completed. During the time of the sampling, allegations of mistreatment of his players had surfaced.

The impending review, coupled with a losing streak, caused online sentiment surrounding Mangino (2007’s NCAA Coach of the Year) to plummet.

Now let’s look at Tiger Woods’ sentiment breakdown:

The pie chart to the right represents the sentiment breakdown from Nov. 27 – Dec. 2 on URLs pertaining to Tiger Woods’ accident, excluding all neutral content again.

• Positive: 41.52%
• Negative: 58.48%

Woods’ accident took place on Nov. 27 and controversy swirled regarding claims of adultery on the part of the pro golf star. The shelf-life of this story was much shorter, however, and culminated in a public apology on Dec. 2.

Sentiment Growth

If you look at a chart of the volume growth rate of Mangino chatter on the Internet from Nov. 14 – Dec. 2, you’ll notice that positive sentiment was up and down about the coach through most of November (with a positive spike on Nov. 24, when two KU players publicly defended their coach).

When the news broke on Nov. 30 that Kansas University was officially investigating an “unspecified personnel issue” involving Mangino, negative sentiment spikes. The coach himself conceded that he had lost the support of “some people around here” and the line graph bears that out.

On Dec. 2, the discrepancy between negative and positive URLs again became vast, after a report about more claims of mistreatment by Mangino appeared.

• 11/24: 27 positive URLs, 10 negative URLs
• 11/30: 58 positive URLs, 78 negative URLs
• 12/2: 22 positive URLs, 36 negative URLs

By contrast, if you look at a chart of the volume growth rate of Tiger Woods-related chatter on the Internet from Nov. 27 – Dec. 2, you’ll notice that negative sentiment always outweighed positive sentiment on a daily basis, but not by much.

On Dec. 2, however, after Woods issued his public apology, there were 32% more positive URLs than negative ones.

Because the scandal doesn’t directly involve Woods’ profession, some people believe it’s nobody’s business but the golfer’s own.

Semantic Cloud

The word cloud below shows that this story has more legs as a piece of gossip than a legitimate news story, with “photos,” “videos,” and “TMZ” being hugely popular words. This suggests that people were more interested in the salacious parts of the story. Individual comments seem to bear this out as well.

This is a list of some of the 100 most used words in posts about Woods’ accident from Nov. 27 – Dec. 2:

“wife” was in 62% of all URLs.
“photos” was in 44.5% of all URLs.
“videos” was in 40.4% of all URLs.
“Uchitel” was in 37.5% of all URLs. Rachel Uchitel is rumored to having an affair with Woods.
“Nordegren” was in 34.4% of all URLs. Elin Nordegren is Woods’ wife.
“mistress” was in 24.3% of all URLs.
“TMZ” was in 20.9% of all URLs. The celebrity gossip site fueled the fire and was the source for other posts.
“Grubbs” was in 17.6% of all URLs. Jaimee Grubbs is also rumored to having an affair with Woods.

Tiger Woods semantic cloud