Traackr Blog - Latest Comments

Re: New TRAACKR feature – Add Influencers

Nisha — Sat, 05 May 2012 11:09:55 -0000

Hi Derek/Courtney,
I arrived here while googling for core.traackr.com
I don't understand this influencer, traackr, etc (too techie for me!) - but I've recently seen several visits from this site core.traackr.com/grails-crawle... on my blog, going mostly to my About & Contact pages, and was wondering if someone's trying to hack my blog or what is it about?

Re: Waking the Sleeping Giant

Oscar Del Santo — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:59:47 -0000

Thank you so much for your citation

Re: Brian Solis’ “The Rise of Digital Influence” – a bit too shallow?

Dsdd — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:00:28 -0000

test

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

David Chancogne — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:41:54 -0000

Ewan -- We are also running a good amount of ad-hoc queries, which MongoDB makes a breeze (with the right indexes of course :-) ) to do.

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

gstathis — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:12:28 -0000

Hi Ewan, this is actually a bad omission on my part because we actually ran on CouchDB for an early prototype. We quite liked it too but the moderate level of maturity at the time made us shy away from it. We just did not see it as a serious production candidate at the time. Other than that, I don't think we had terribly sophisticated technical reasons for not going with it. In retrospect, CouchDB might have taken us as far as HBase did but hindsight is 20/20 when one works with new tech.

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

Ewan — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:56:21 -0000

Was disappointed not to see CouchDB included in the round up of noSQL candidates. I am not saying it would have been the best choice but was hoping to see what you saw as its reasons for being rejected. CouchDB has an incremental map/reduce capability that potentially could have made your weekly full scans a real time affair for example. It also is a full document store and can include native file attachments which might be a plus for your application. On the other hand it has no dynamic query capability...

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

gstathis — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:57:46 -0000

Hi Cosmin,

This week's count of our largest collection is about 65 million records and we are adding about a couple of million a week. It tallies up to about a quarter of a terabyte in Mongo including indexes.

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

Cosmin Lehene — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:34:48 -0000

George, how much data do you iterate over when you run the weekly influencer re-scoring?
Also what's the total amount of data you store in Mongo?

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

gstathis — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:59:02 -0000

While I can't generalize for all folks outside the US, I can verify that MongoDB supports internationalized content out-of-the-box for most languages since all strings are stored by default in UTF-8 format (see http://www.mongodb.org/display... ). This was really important for Traackr as we are slated to support language-filtered search results sometime later this year, so we need to be able to store and search content in practically any language.

A quick look at the documentation also shows that it's been translated into several languages, Spanish and Portuguese included: http://www.mongodb.org/display... .

What I can't speak to is the size of the developer community outside the US. For that, I would ask around the forums: https://groups.google.com/grou... .

I hope this helps.

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

AnswersAbroad — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:57:13 -0000

Your comments do sound very exciting regarding the way MongoDB works, and how it facilitates your life at Traaker. Can you hypothesize as to how a non-English speaking user base would relate to the product, insofar as its key capabilities and uses? Specifically people in Latin America who speak Spanish or Portuguese, would they likely get the same joy and deliverables from the product, given what you said about documenation and other goodies that the current version of MongoDB offers? Thanks.

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

gstathis — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:49:39 -0000

Thanks for the support! Looking forward to seeing more of you around this blog. If you are interested, you can also follow our dedicated engineering blog: http://traackr-people.tumblr.c...

Re: Traackr’s migration from HBase to MongoDB

BigData — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:48:27 -0000

Liked you post. Excited reading it and can imagine the emotions going through the whole exercise. Wish was part of it :)

Re: Traackr’s Relevance Science

Mikael Gravé — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:35:23 -0000

Thank you Chris!

Re: Traackr’s Relevance Science

b2bspecialist — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:29:10 -0000

This is a great improvement and something that I'm glad to see and use. I like the fact that an influencer and an expert can now be defined using the relevance score. Keep up the good work!

Re: Who Let the Gorillas Out??!?

Gopzap — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:34:57 -0000

dickheads

Re: What’s in store for 2012

Courtney — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:13:30 -0000

Thank you so much for the kind words, Chris! We are absolutely thrilled to hear all of this and really appreciate you taking the time to share it with everyone (it was a great Christmas present for our team too) ;)

Our clients have always been an integral part of the direction of our tool, so it's great to hear about the value you've gotten out of it. Thanks again and we hope you have a truly wonderful holiday!

Re: What’s in store for 2012

b2bspecialist — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:32:59 -0000

Congratulations on a great year! It's been a pleasure working with the Traackr team!

Traackr is an integral tool I use for thought leadership programs, B2B networks and communities I'm building for and with Mi6 clients.

I test and try many marketing and sales SaaS services and what sets Traackr apart from many others is not just the quality of the tool (engineered well, works well, easy to use, produces results, priced fairly) but more importantly the quality of people (their attitude, passion and genuine interest for me to be successful using their tool) from the company.

It's critical that marketing SaaS providers deliver better value and ask their users/customers how and why the tool is working or not working for them. Too often I see marketing SaaS providers exhibit a "set it and forget it" mentality. They get the order and are charging monthly fees (probably to bow to pressures of VCs/Angels) but make no effort in understanding how the tool is or is not providing value. The result: I cancel the service.

Specifically in Traackr's case your team has been curious about how I use the tool, and how I need to use it. They've not pretended to have all the answers and have recognized shortfalls. This is refreshing as other SaaS providers seem focused on shouting about their capabilities, how many "best of whatever" awards they won and press coverage they generated. Awards don't matter to me!

What matters to me and my clients is: does it work, is it easy to use, is it fairly priced, can I partner with this SaaS provider and share my experience using the tool and focus on how we can be successful together.

Traackr is and will continue to be a core partner of what I use to help my clients build their own B2B networks, communities and markets.

Re: Media Relations vs. Influencer Relations

Courtney — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:32:00 -0000

That's a great point, Tim. I had a conversation around this post with @brianreid who made the same point. While these two practices may be called different things by different people, they still require the same skill and rules. I think we're at a point in the industry where everyone is trying to define these new practices and they all have their own ideas of how to do this. Ultimately though, it comes down to what you're saying - bad relationship practices shouldn't be done in any form of communications regardless of what you're labeling it.

Thanks for chiming in!

Re: Media Relations vs. Influencer Relations

Tim MacDonald — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:59:11 -0000

Influencer relations and media relations are basically the same thing. In neither case should you just send "blind emails". In both you should work to understand the person you're reaching out to. And sadly, we'll probably see plenty of PR pros sending blind emails to "influencer" lists just like they would to media lists. It's not about who you're reaching, it's about the way you reach them. The PR industry has too many people taking shortcuts, and unfortunately that drags down the reputation of the entire practice.

Re: Media Relations vs. Influencer Relations

Courtney — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:53:30 -0000

Thanks Matt! I tried not to lean to either side too much, but the old-school, "cold-calling" media relations practice seriously has to go. There are just far too many tools at everyone's disposal to do this anymore. It may take a little longer to begin that process, but in the end the results are so much better. Thanks so much for sharing your feedback and experience.

Re: Media Relations vs. Influencer Relations

mwkelly — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:41:52 -0000

Terrific job providing clarity without going to far to either side, Courtney. We all have to remember it takes a mix of both types of outreach to make our efforts bear fruit. However, those tactics are merely a byproduct of building context FIRST. Thanks, again.

Re: What’s Your TRAACKR score? (hint – you don’t have one)

dskaletsky — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:50:18 -0000

:) Thanks, Soulati.

And if you insist, here you go. Your Traackr score is 1,458,980 (times) pie^3 (divided by) what you ate for dinner last night (plus) the average frequency of your tweets over the past 3 months. It's an easy formula, really :)Thanks for the comment and making this post new again!

Re: What’s Your TRAACKR score? (hint – you don’t have one)

Soulati — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:42:02 -0000

Uhmm, can I have my Traackr score? Pretty please? Hilarious. What the masses get programmed to do is kinda the reason why drinking the kool-aid was such an easy task, eh?

Thanks for sharing! You never know when older posts are new again, Derek!

Re: Today, We Are All Yankees Fans

Skcej777 — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:49:24 -0000

yankee season ends today

Re: PR to Advertising: Bring it on!

pierreloic — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:32:19 -0000

Fair enough but couldn't you make the counter argument that Ad agencies don't (want to) understand earned media? My point is that the imbalance between paid/earned media is shifting in front of our eyes and that as earned media gets more attention, ad agencies lose. Ultimately I agree with you though that integration is paramount but brands are moving away from letting Ad agencies do it all as they place more value in earned media. Example: I was at a P&G alum networking event a couple of days ago in NYC. Bob McDonald, CEO of P&G, was talking to us about their more exciting campaigns. What does he pick for a topic? How they played off the success of Old Spice TV campaign in social media and generated an estimated 1.8B earned impressions, making their social media campaign way more successful than the 100 fold more expensive TV campaign. Trouble's ahead for ad agencies if the biggest ad spender worldwide is seeing better ROI outside of buy media...