Conversation & Groups Tracking Tools

[Alex]

Does Ning offer any conversation and group tracking tools where we can find out the most recurrent topics about a specific subject in the activity feed, forums, groups?  And, what are the most repeated words about this topic?

I called support and they suggested I create a google custom search, but that is not going to give me any significant data other than all the messages with the keyword I inputted on the search field.

Thanks,

Alex

[Radialistas Brasileiros]

Why not use Google analytics? Or Getclicky?

[Alex]

The information is limited.  It does not tell me the gender of my users, it does not track conversations with my specific topics or mentions in different areas of my ning network.

[Alex]

Say for example, we want to know in the creator's network what is the most asked feature requests from Creators? How many people that you tracked are male, female, what do they like.

Google Analytics or Getclicky can not answer those questions.

[Radialistas Brasileiros]

I see, good point, Alex!

None of my current projects, at these development stage, need know about sex by usage for example (we already have some of those kind of info - sex, age, address,etc at profile questions) but using CSE as a valuation tool will give you the total of occurences on a given search.

This way, if youre not looking for exact/perfect numbers and have time to search, yes it will give a very good idea of the volumes of various keywords that appear on SERP and that way you can have data to figure out the aprox. volumes of mentions or topics.

[Eric Suesz]

Great question, but I'm not sure I have a great answer for you. You can ask profile questions to get info like male/female, but tracking what people do based on that isn't something we've created. Love the idea, but I'm afraid the system isn't quite that sophisticated. 

[Alex]

Can I create a PHP program that queries the db for profile information of users that are tracked in a conversation?  But how about 

How do you track Creator's Network?  For example, how can you get the most frequently asked feature without doing it manually and start counting messages and mentions? Or, do you track it at all?

[Eric Suesz]

Hoo, boy. I'm not sure I can answer that first question. Might need to take that one to the Developer's Network. I think you probably can use the API to grab that kind of information once you know who the users are, but I am not entirely sure of the details. It sounds tricky to me.

I don't track every feature request as if it were a vote here on Creators. I do, however, use Google Analytics and the built-in leaderboards to identify the most active discussions. I collect that and other information on a weekly basis. Some of that I do manually. 

Things move quite quickly when it comes to forums and conversation. The data can sometimes seem to be of only fleeting usefulness. I'd love to have more analytical tools like you're talking about, but in the end I'm not sure everything I would collect would be used. So, I think I am okay with the qualitative and quantitative things I get out of the tools I have, but it sounds like you are way more interested in quantitative stuff than I am.