CIL - Day 3 - Cool Tools : Measuring, Visualizing and Analyzing

Darlene Fichter from the University of Saskatchewan, Jeff Wisniewski from the University of Pittsburgh, and Michael DeMars from California State University - Fullerton each presented in this session which covered some interesting ways to evaluate a library's online presence.

Darlene Fichter started out with one of her always great lists of different online tools and ways to use those tools. After she provided her list, Jeff Wisniewski added a few more. Some of the more interesting items on the list of tools included:

• boardreader - A site to search message boards. A good way to find out if your organization is being mentioned on any message boards.

• omgili - Like boardreader, except for social networking sites.

• howsociable - Shows how frequently a brand is mentioned on different sites

• addictomatic - Similar to howsociable, but shows recent examples in the box for each site

• socialmention - Similar to the above but with a smaller user base and some interesting evaluative measures like strength of mentions, and passion.

• Klout - Measures influence on Twitter.

• MyWebCareer - Provides a credit score-like number to indicate brand popularity on social networks

• Twendz - a tool that analyzes activity and sentiment on Twitter

• Hootsuite - a social media dashboard

Michael DeMars added to these recommendations, describing tools that he had used in a project to get analytical data to drive decisions regarding the website.
Using a combination of Google forms and Zoomerang for user surveys, javascript, and Google Analytics. I liked seeing the way that he was able to use these things together and also to see some of the ways to use Google Analytics data.