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We were able to snag some time with HootSuite’s Dave Olsen during the Source Code pre-premiere party at SXSW. Dave is excited about the recent announcement by his company about their new tool: HootSuite Social Analytics.

The tool is designed to give you a better idea of what’s going on in your social space with more powerful analytics tools, different ways to measure and reports you can customize. All of these components are designed to help you track the success of your campaign and help you gauge what the return is on your social media investment.

Using the tool, you can track your Twitter brand mentions, measure your profile follower growth, examine your Likes and demographics on Facebook, overlay social link clicks and website visits from Google and choose from more than thirty report modules to plug into the customizable report templates.

Dave is quick to point out that tools such as HootSuite are relied upon by people needing to get a message out quickly. This holds very true when there are significant world events, such as the recent earthquake in Japan and the uprisings in Egypt and other countries. People tend to turn to mediums such as Facebook and Twitter over other means of communication when they spread the word about rallys, meetings and even fund-raising drives. Social media is a much faster and more effective form of communication when you want to get your point across to a lot of people very quickly.

It’s very cool to note that during the time much of the Internet was blocked in Egypt, HootSuite continued to work. Even though the actual Twitter and Facebook sites were not accessible, the client was. This caused a huge growth spurt for the company. Dave felt that in some small way, their product was the voice of freedom in the country.

Catching up with Dave Olsen from HootSuite at SXSW

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Andy Kazeniac talking with Molly Stanberry at Gnomedex 2007.

Andy works for Compete . In 1998, a serial entrepreneur named Bill Gross started a revolutionary new search engine called GoTo. GoTo became Overture, created the business of paid search, and was acquired by Yahoo. Google quickly adopted the paid search model, grew to become the largest search engine on the web and now stands side-by-side with Yahoo as one of the most prominent Internet properties in the world.

Bill also had another big idea… In 2000, he created Compete.com to organize the clicks we all make on the web. The vision was simple: if we all share our clicks, then each of us gets smarter by knowing what’s happening across the web.

Today, search engines help us find sites, but they fall short of showing how safe, popular and valuable a site is. Through click-sharing, Compete extends search algorithms by tapping the collective online experiences of millions of people. By sharing our clicks, we create useful new information about the websites we visit that can help us answer questions like: Is this website safe from spyware and other threats like phishing, how many people visit this site and how does it compare to other sites, and are there promotion codes for this site that can save me money?

Compete.com helps you personally benefit from click-sharing. Whether it’s protecting you from a dangerous site, profiling each website you visit, or showing you promo codes that will save you money at check out, Compete wants to help create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet.

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Analytics vs Mint

FlashStats 2006 can be used for Web LOG file analysis. I’ve been dinking with Google Analytics (Urchin), Enquisite, Mint, and HitTail. The problem with hosted stat services is that they don’t track everything. Ken Spreitzer emailed me about FlashStats the other day, and I asked him if he had any kind of discount for my readers, and he responded in kind:

We would like to offer Lockergnome subscribers a 10% discount on the product through September 15, 2006. The program costs $199 or $349. They can claim the discount by entering Gnome-10 in the Offer Code field. Or they can click on this link to visit our site and set a cookie which will remember this code for them.

You can download a demo and give it a shot – FlashStats outputs ~60 different types of reports that you’re not likely to get through a hosted stats solution.

FlashStats 2006 Coupon Code