In a post entitled Altmetrics everywhere – but what are we missing? #solo12impact #solo12impact Alan Cann, the workshop co-facilitator, has provided a taster for the session.  In the post Alan describes how:

In the last couple of years altmetrics (the creation and study of new metrics based on social media for analyzing and informing scholarship) have popped up across the web. 

Alan refers to a recent guest post on this blog entitled Social Media Analytics for R&D: a Catalan Vision which suggests a range of parameter which may be relevant. However Alan feels that:

The reality is that this is too complex for those of us with lives and jobs. We need services / dashboards to provide and digest this information.

I agree, the research community will need similar dashboards which can provide indications of engagement and outreach. Alan mentions a number of possible solutions. He is dismissive of Klout (which I would agree is not appropriate in our context although if you are an advertising agency and wish to decide which Twitter star to employ to post sponsored tweets this might provide useful information to assist the selection process). Alan is more positive about  Kred, but his preferred tool seems to be CrowdBooster. Alan’s post includes screen shots which illustrate the data visualisation provided by the tool.

I have also recently started to make use of Crowdbooster. However I feel that the dashboard provided by the Twentyfeet service is better.

The screen illustrates one of the dashboard views of  my Twitter engagement during October 2012.

However Twentyfeet (also known as 20ft.net) is not popular in some quarters as the free version sends a singly weekly tweet summarising the data over the previous week.

It is possible to disable this alert for a small annual fee (of, I think, ~$12 per year), although since this is only a single weekly tweet it is not be too intrusive.

I will be making comparisons between these services once Crowdbooster has aggregated a sufficient number of my tweets to make valid comparisons. For now I hope this contribution to the #solo12impact session will be of interest to the participants.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]