Twitter-Omniture Integration SiteCatalyst Reporting

2009-03-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

So one thing that I forgot to include in my previous post is what you get out of the Twitter-Omniture SiteCatalyst integration! Here are some handy screenshots. I've chosen the iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm Pre brands to track.

Raw # of Tweets per brand:

Hmm, that looks interesting. Now if you're interested in understanding who's talking most about the iPhone, you can dig into that to subrelate by author:

From here though, I really wanted to weight the value of each author's tweets differently based on what they were saying and how many followers they had. Stay tuned for the next post that goes into how I did that. For now, though, here's a screenshot of the additional reporting I'm seeing now! (Looks like the Palm Pre took a hit)

6 Easy Steps to Integrate Twitter & Omniture SiteCatalyst Without IT!

2009-03-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have to start with a disclaimer. Some of you may know me from Omniture, but this post is in no way a recommendation or best practice from Omniture :) I just decided to dust off what few programming skills I had and give the Twitter + SiteCatalyst integration a whirl.

With that said, I'm going to cover how to implement the integration, all without the need for IT to get involved!

Here's what you'll need in order to follow along:

- a basic understanding of programming (I will be using PHP)
- a basic understanding of SQL
- a basic understanding of Twitter
- an understanding of Omniture's data insertion API

Update 3/9: For those who are just interested in getting the plugin code and not the nuts & bolts, you can download a plugin that Jason Thompson created over at http://emptymind.org/?page_id=69 and skip the technical details. :)

Step 1: Download SimplePie library
In SimplePie's own words, they are "a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the 'simple' back into 'really simple syndication'." That means it's going to be super easy to parse Twitter's search feed! Once you've downloaded and expanded the files, upload them onto your server. I'm assuming that you have a server to put files on. It can be as basic as GoDaddy hosting, which is what I used. There are many other options as well - FatCow, HostMonster, DreamHost, etc. All of them roughly $6/month or less.

You should see something similar to this structure now:

You'll want to make sure that your server is good to go, so hit the compatibility page first. You can find it at "/compatibility_test/sp_compatibility_test.php". Here were my results, important parts highlighted:

Step 2: Create new PHP file and include SimplePie
Once you've included SimplePie, you should go through the steps to parse your twitter feed to make sure it's working as expected. In this example, we're storing our feed URL in the variable $feedURL as "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=omniture", where omniture is the search term:

Step 3: Verify PHP file output

Hopefully you've got a nice output showing each individual tweet now, like this:

Step 4: Incorporate since_id to Avoid Duplicate Tweets

Each tweet has an id associated with it that looks like this: "tag:search.twitter.com,2005:1290809923". The last part of that id is essentially a timestamp. When you call the Twitter search feed, you can append that value in the request so that it only pulls tweets more recent or fresh since that date, like so:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=omniture&since_id=1290809923

In order to append it, we have to store it. That's where SQL comes into play. You'll need to create a very simple table to store your key values. Here's an example of how you can structure it:

CREATE TABLE `feeds` (
  `id` int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `since_id` varchar(32) NOT NULL default '0',
  `query` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
);

I'm thinking a few steps ahead by assuming that you may change up what you want to search twitter for, which means you should have separate rows with separate since_id values.

Here's a screenshot of how I added SQL to my php file:

You'll also need to add an insert or update after cycling through the search response in order to update the since_id value in the table.

Step 5: Add Omniture Data Insertion API Call

Okay, you're really almost there! Last thing we need to do is make sure we make a call out to Omniture's Data Insertion API for each item in the for loop. I'm not going to go through forming the header and passing client-specific authentication data, that can be found at http://developer.omniture.com and you can leave a comment if you'd like to speak directly about it. Here's the Tweet-specific stuff you'll want to add:

$page_url  = "http://www.twitter.com";
$pageName  = "Twitter Mention"; 
$events    = "event3";
$evar4    = "omniture";

$xml .= $page_url ? " $page_url\n":"";
$xml .= $pageName ? " $pageName\n":""; 
$xml .= $author ? " $author\n":"";
$xml .= $recipient ? " $recipient\n":"";
$xml .= $events ? " $events\n":"";
$xml .= $query ? " $query\n":"";
$xml .= $title ? " $title\n":"";

Step 6: Set Up Cron Job to Run Script Hourly

Here's what the interface looks like in GoDaddy for setting up a cron job:

These are the details I input for setting it up to use my script on an hourly basis:

And now you're done! If you found this post helpful, please Tweet it! :)

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Twitter-Omniture Integration SiteCatalyst Reporting

6 Easy Steps to Integrate Twitter & Omniture SiteCatalyst Without IT!