The trust and influence around brands, products has moved to discussions around communities’ lifestyles, often in blogs, social networks and other locations ‘off’ the corporate domain. A new class of measurement tools have emerged, that measure the impact of social media, among them is the BuzzLogic group out of SF.

What’s interesting is they look at who’s being influenced by what data node, and who the influencers are in any given topic area. For example, Scoble may have influence in the early adopter technology space, but has little credibility in the alpha moms space. This is important, as leaning on an universal wide measurement system (like Technorati) isn’t relevant as we create more niches around topics and markets.

This video talks to the employees, as well as showcases a demo of their products. If you’re seeking a segmentation and rating and ranking of the buzz monitoring space, colleague Peter Kim has done a Wave Report, which is also available on the Forrester site.

Have you used BuzzLogic? What did you think?

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Marketers and individuals know how important it is to track conversations in websites, especially where peers connect to each other (sometimes, where the highest trust occurs). A handful of new tools are starting to emerge that give specific tool based search, which I’ve started to list out below.

This list is specifically for tools that track discussion boards, forums, and communities, for a broader reach, see this list of companies that measures brands on the social web.

How to use these tools? Plugin your company name, product name, executives names, for your own company and your competitors, to see who is saying what about your brand.

Companies that Track Discussions in Forums and Communities:

Boardtracker
“BoardTracker.com, a Pidgin Technologies property, is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted. Boardtracker brings the most targeted audience closer to the boards, by being a search engine only for boards and by supplying a categorized and highly effective searching and browsing experience to users.”

Linqia
“Linqia creates an independent search for online communities and groups with user ratings and comments. From the biggest and most famous online community to the smallest most hidden group, Linqia surfaces existing online communities and groups which can either be uploaded by our users or just commented and rated according to YOUR opinion and experience.”

Twing
Our goal is for Twing to work perfectly every time, and that you’re quickly and easily able to find exactly the information you’re after. But should you need help, we’re here for you. After all, online communities are about people helping each other, so as a community search engine, we take the same approach.

If you know of any others, please leave a comment, and I’ll add it to this list.

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If you’re in need of a vacation, take this roller coaster ride with Shel Israel, who’s on a mission to explore social media when it comes to companies, a topic I’m focused on as a researcher. Sea World worked with Kami Huyse to “move the needle” to reach out to an influence community called “American Coaster Enthusiasts” to reach them using social media tools.

They used YouTube, Flickr to publish their media and encouraged the community to use the videos (creative commons rights) and were encouraging content to be created. You’ll learn that this six week campaign reaches specific downloads and activity, some were downloaded 100,000 times.

What about this makes a good strategy? Sea World found their passion community (many brands have one) figured out how to have a discussion with them using their tools, let go of their own content for it to spread and be used by that community, and resulted in positive increase in product (park visits) usage.

What could they do better? Sea World should involve the coaster enthusiasts to help design, build, and promote the next generation coaster. Sea World could also sponsor their site, hold and event for them, and figure out other ways to make them brand ambassadors.

Towards the end of the video, they make some pretty incredible findings on how people found out about the real-world park through the web.

Also, I recommend you follow Shel’s Israel’s blog, or his Twitter account to learn more the impact of social media on culture.

Is it just me, or did the opening remind you of an older (ok a lot older) version of Johnny Knoxville?

Update: Kami gives an summation of the whole campaign, over a year later. For counterpoint, econsultancy raises important questions about metrics and measurement.

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I would love to do some formal research on this on the day job, the following is just highlighting a probabble definition and formula, it certainly doesn’t include any formal methodology or practiced process.

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There’s been a great deal of talk about ‘virality’ or ‘word of mouth’ but when it comes to measurement, we need something just a bit more substantial.

When I was on the vendor side at PodTech as Director of Corporate Social Media Strategy (client facing), I worked closely with Darold Masaro, VP of Sales. We frequently bantered over new ways to improve measurement as this is important improving existing programs and increasing budgets.

For many of those in the social media space, the goal is to ‘let go’ of your message and let it fly all around the web, getting folks to come to your irrelevant corporate website isn’t the goal –fish where the fish are.

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Defining Social Media Velocity: Distance over Time
But how do you measure a distributed web strategy? We looked to one of many attributes called “Velocity”. This is not a new term, in fact, Physicists define this as distance traveled per unit time. As I described to Darold what we should be measuring, he quickly pegged I was seeking the term ‘velocity’, it’s stuck with me ever sense, the credit should go to him. The same applies to the web, and here’s how:

[Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget or other like unit spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy]

Distance: As units (text, audio embeds, video embeds, widgets, memes) spread from one website to another you can track the URLs where they spread to.

over

Time: Depending on how fast a unit moves, it can vary from day to week, or less effective, perhaps a month.

Example:

Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.

Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.

Also, you could look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

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Now here’s how Darold further explains velocity:

“Velocity is the speed, direction, and size of conversations traveling the Internet around our brands. When I talk about velocity it’s from the perspective of a wave. So in that case we need to answer this question…What do markteers and sailors have in common? They should both be concerned about waves. Marketers should think in terms of conversational waves. Conversations are more effective for building brands than buzz, but this requires keeping the conversation alive.”

I asked Darold for just a definition but I see he couldn’t help but share more, I guess his days of getting an MBA just compelled him to think this through further. What’s interesting is Darold is a sailor, no not the cursing, one-eyed patch sailors with a parrot named jenkins, but pilots sailboats in Santa Cruz bay over wine and cheese.

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He extends the sailing metaphor further, here’s just a portion of his thesis:

“It’s helpful to understand the four key aspects of a wave in order to gain insight into conversations around our brands. Hey I am a sailor and I see the world as a series of nautical metaphors.

Velocity represents both speed AND direction. This is important to point out as most use the common term of velocity which is just speed. I associate speed with what I hear a lot these days … “I want my campaign to go viral.” Where viral represents speed (how quickly, by how many), but we should also look at who is consuming our messages (direction) and sustaining the momentum. So there is more to velocity than speed and direction, and is important to understand if we are to build sustainable conversations around our brands.

We need to understand amplitude which is the size of the wave (this is equivalent to buzz), and frequency. The IceRocket graph below is an example of amplitude and frequency. The size of the wave is easy to understand, but frequency is less clear. In sailing we replace the word frequency with period. That is how long (in seconds) between the crest of one wave to the next. In the world of sailing the amplitude and period of a wave is very important for understanding the sea state. In marketing we have a sea state around our brand. To often the sea is calm, choppy or pounding with large unsustainable waves that come crashing down.”

If you want to reach Darold he can be emailed at darold@podtech.net

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I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, pass them around.

Social Media FAQ #3: How Do I Measure ROI?

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This question often creeps up at the end of a webinar or presentation that I give. While we often sing the goodness of social media tools, (and challenges) a web strategist will have to return to the workplace, and demonstrate to their management the value of any program –especially if it’s new.

Is it possible?
In 2005-2006 we debated if this was actually possible, the argument against the ROI of blogging was as difficult as measuring humans. In fact, until we can measure the impact of a conversation between an employee and a prospect at a coffee shop, it was difficult to measure social media. For me, that all changed when Charlene posted the ROI of GM’s Fastlane blog (this was long before I even thought about working with her).

What are you trying to accomplish?
Measuring “new” media isn’t as different as measuring “old” media, the trick is to figure out what your goal is first, is it to spread a message among a community? Is it to reduce support costs? Is it to learn from your community? In each of these cases you’ll have to then assign the right attributes to measure against.

New attributes for new tools
Next, you’ll need to realize that this new media actually has some new attributes (the limited page view attribute is no longer sufficient in this dimensional world), and there are some new attributes to think about (read the white paper I co-authored with Matt Toll of Dow Jones), such as authority, interaction, velocity, attention, sentiment, and actions. You’ll notice I left out the elusive engagement word, it’s used differently by everyone in the industry that it still hasn’t taken hold.

Benchmark
Lastly, you’ll benchmark your programs based upon your goals and those attributes, and you’ll come to some specifics. I’m actually leaving many, many steps out, but those are the high level tasks. You’ll likely need an expert, new tools, and probably a vendor (see my full list), doing it manually is very tedious.

More resources, posts, white papers, videos
Actually, nothing I’ve said here is new, I’ve written about it time (here’s a similar post with more detail) and time over, read all my posts tagged social media measurement.

Update: A few hours later I see this timely article from Computerworld on Life after page views: Web analytics 2.0

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Don’t forget to attend this Complimentary Webinar on Social Media Measurement How to Listen Effectively and Engage in the Conversation this Thursday at 12:30 EST/9:30PST with Glenn Fannick, Product Development Manager at Dow Jones.

It’s not often I’m able to do free webinars, often they require membership or payment, so this is real treat. I’m told there are over 800 registered, so please pass the word.

Need to prove successes to your boss? Measure your results in flight? learn more by viewing my other posts on social media measurement.

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I’m watching more closely the movement within the widget industry, it’s growing quickly, and we expect 2008 to have some serious growth from this market. Expect widget advertising networks to appear this year, and as a result, the need to measure and watch this distributed industry is important. Here’s a list of companies that measure widget network growth.

How is widget measurement different than traditional web analytics? Widgets spread (velocity = distance/time) over networks, and are distributed. Users will embed them, interact with them and share with them with others. Also, you can identify unique nodes where applications have spread, these are influencer nodes, and should be treated with extra care. When deploying your widget, since it’s managed by a host, demand that you’ve access to metrics so you can see how it performs, and more importantly, who it works well with.

List of companies that provide widget measurement or metrics

Appsaholic from Social Media
“SocialMedia developed Appsaholic, an analytics suite that allows you to track the success of your application and see how it compares to others”

Clearspring
“Clearspring is the leading provider of cross-platform widget services. Our goal is to make it easy to use content and services from across the Internet to weave personalized experiences. With our flagship service, digital content and service providers can easily package, distribute, and analyze the performance of widgets via a single platform. Clearspring is a privately funded company based in McLean, Virginia.”

Gigya
“Gigya serves the world’s largest brands with a full-service widget advertising model covering design, development, hosting, distribution, viral promotion and tracking.”

Widgetbox’s Syndication Metrics
“Widgetbox’s Widget Syndication Metrics is an analytics dashboard for widget developers. It is free and comes with every widget on Widgetbox.”

Mixercast
“A Multimedia Player With A Revenue Model ”

MuseStorm
“MuseStorm’s breakthrough analytics give publishers and marketers previously unattainable precise distribution and audience interaction metrics, including impressions, video playback, rollovers, and clickthroughs. With this intelligence, companies can optimize their content and delivery in real time to maximize the engagement of their audience.”

If you want to learn more about widget strategy, this podcast with Clearspring is very helpful.

Know of others? Please leave a comment.

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A few months ago I co-wrote a webinar with Matt Toll of Dow Jones on Social Media Measurement. I know this topic well, as I had to measure the community program at Hitachi Data Systems, and I partly used their product in addition to other tools. I hope you can join us on this free webinar, details here:

Complimentary Webinar - Latest Trend in Social Media: How to Listen Effectively and Engage in the Conversation

Date: January 31, 2008
Time: 12:30 – 1:30 EST
Join Dow Jones as we partner with IABC to discuss the latest trends in Social Media with Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and former Director of Corporate Media Strategy at PodTech.net and Glenn Fannick, Product Development Manager at Dow Jones

Discover how social media is being deployed throughout the enterprise and how listening to the conversation can help you identify your audience and their drivers while seizing opportunities and mitigating risks.

Using advanced text-mining and visualization technologies Dow Jones Insight helps you easily discover what’s being said about your company in blogs, Web sites and message boards. Learn how to easily monitor and understand the latest news, market trends, and business challenges relevant to your organization and your customers.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to leave questions in the comments, I’ll address them in the webinar, See you then!

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Thanks to you all I was alerted that my feed was acting screwy, (thanks Matt Dunlap for the extra help) I was able to identify the problem in my recent post. I believe that when there’s a problem with something, you should quickly identify it and let your community know, and keep them updated.

The Problems?
1) A special character had gotten into one of my blog posts, resulting in one post to result in summarized versions in RSS, it caused some havoc with other ones. As a result, I switched the RSS feed in Feedburner and it sent everyone my latest 20 posts.

2) As a default, Wordpress offers three feeds, RSS full, RSS partial, and an atom feed. Different people were subscribing to different versions

Solution:
Thanks to Rick Klau of the Feedburner team (Constantin pointed me to him, thanks), now part of Google was quick to help me fix the problem. His title is Strategic Partner Development in the Content Acquisition group, so I’m under the assumption his job is to be a community facing role and help people use the tools, as you know this is Google’s core strategy, organizing the world’s information. I installed a Feedburner for Wordpress called Feedburner Feedsmith. It consolidated ALL my feeds into one.

Previous Setup (notes from Rick)

feed A –> feed A (partial)
feed B –> feed B (full)
feed C –> feed C (partial)
FeedBurner feed –> FeedBurner feed (full)

Now it does this this:

feed A –> FeedBurner feed (full)
feed B –> FeedBurner feed (full)
feed C –> FeedBurner feed (full)
feed D –> FeedBurner feed (full)

Results:
All of my RSS feeds are being measured in one location, my reader subscription went from 4500 to 7500 in 24 hours as the native wordpress feeds are now being routed into Feedburner. Secondly, all my feeds should all be full feeds now, making everyone happy.

Recommendations for you:
Start with QuickStart Guides for Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, MySpace, Podcasting. If you’re using wordpress (I assume there’s a plugin for typepad to) and haven’t used Feedsmith, I recommend you do this if you care about accurate stats. In my line of work, accuracy is important. Caveat: Of course, realize that Feedburner is owned by Google, and how data could be used for monetization. Most of us use Google products hundreds of times a day, so that’s non-issue.

Other Concerns: China blocks Feedburner?
I heard from one of the Chinese readers that Feedburner is blocked in China, but apparently, as of last weekend, there may be reports that China is no longer blocking Feedburner. If your country is blocking feedburner, sadly, you’ll have to visit my site directly.

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Measurement is important
I’m pretty particular about stats, measurement has always been pretty important, in the corporate landscape measurement is needed to help justify success (or failure) even if you already know something is working to executives. After defining ones goals, you should setup a measurement process to benchmark your progress.

Growth in referring traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon
Lately, I’ve been noticing a crescendo in the referrals from both del.icio.us and Stumbleupon, websites, their currently the 5th and 6th top referrer yet again. Much of the traffic has been coming in my recent Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008, (Update: which has 578 tags on Delicious, and reinforcing comments) which would didn’t do well on Digg (more entertainment geared) I suspect that Delicious and Stumbleupon are more geared towards web professionals. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where members can tag content, share it with others, and find similar information. Stumbleupon, provides content based upon behavioral matching; as one specifies likes or dislikes, it also recommends content that other members like you prefer. Both are like social based search, as you can see how people really think about your content and how they self-organize.

Others sources
Although there’s not been much change with the dominant referrers to my blog is direct visitors, then Google search, Google refferals, then Twitter, I’m noticing this increase in traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon. Unlike Digg, which gives high levels of spike traffic, both Delicious and Stumbleupon are providing consistently growing traffic patterns and are often in my top 6 refferes

A Web Strategist should incorporate these tools
If you’re a web strategist, you should be looking inside of these tools, look up your content (and your competitors content) and see how the content has been tagged, commented on, and what members have said. You can both find influencers in your market, learn about how to create metadata, SEO, SEM keywords, and gather other intelligence. If you’re truly savvy, you should be tagging all your own content in both of those websites. More here: Web Strategy: Using Delicious for Marketing Research.

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Update: I’ve just published all that I learned about Twitter on a subsequent post, please read here.

I’ve been watching the various twitter ranking, measuring, mashups appear, and most have little utility (other than some of the search tools). I’m pleased to finally run into Tweeterboard, which has metrics (see my profile), rankings, a ‘newsfeed’ of content, and it starts to tie relationships together of different users. There’s even an RSS feed of all the links I put on my twitter account, I often share what I find interesting on this feed, so please consider subscribing.

You can check your stats too, it’s much like Technorati, but it maps out your social graph. I’m thankful to the following users for ‘giving me love’. martysmind (40), mickeleh (24), jspepper (21), dough (20), shashib (20), jagath (18), tetesagehen (17), tastybit (16), shawnz (16). For any of those folks, you can add them by going to www.twitter.com/PutNameHere.

Why is understanding who talks to me and vice versa important? Because you can see who influences me, and who I influence.

If you haven’t figured out Twitter yet, it’s a chat room, and information and conversations are happening there before it hits blogs. In fact, even the press are getting stories by watching the conversation in Twitter. If your job is to watch the conversation (many early adopters in here) I recommend you follow some of the top posters. Then when you’re ready to dive in, there’s over 400 other users that want to connect! Please note this tool isn’t for everyone, so figure out your objectives first.

If you haven’t done it yet, try these tools
Because of the API and RSS feeds, third party developers are experimenting with the output. True useful business tools haven’t really emerged, but it’s only year one.

1 Search for your brand, see who’s talking about you
2 TwitterVision is a map that shows the global conversations, interesting but low value. It would be great if this could be segmented by role, topic, region, or industry.
3 TwitterBlocks shows a graphical representation of who your neighbors are, again, not sure of the value, although the interface sure is neat.
4 There’s over 100 applications available that have been created by the developer community. I’ve used Snitter, an Adobe air app, but it started to be a resource hog.
5 There’s already a twitter application in Facebook, or you can embed it on your blog, and because I can update my account from my mobile phone, I’ve used it to meet up with people.

Update: Marshall at Read Write Web thinks the tool is valuable, and James Governor sees the value of Twitter.

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Katie Paine shares how internal teams use measurement of social media, she’s been doing PR measurement for years, and has evolved to measure social media. She’s often told me “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Of course, trying to manage social media has been hotly debated in my last post.

She invited me to present at her metrics conference a few months ago, but new hire training took priority. She’s one of the top thinkings and practitioners in the space, so give her your full attention in this video. Learn more about her company KDPaine and Partners, thanks KD for your time.

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You may remember the video blog, Web Strategy Show I used to run at PodTech (my previous employer), the show is designed for those who make decisions for websites, (I call it a Video White Paper) and I interviewed many of the top thought and practice leaders in our industry. These videos tend to be longer in duration, I use a tripod, and we discuss the topics in advance. This is different than my quick “street” video shots I do with my digital camera.

Having left PodTech, (a great place for content creators, as I get to take my show with me) I didn’t get a chance to publish all my tapes (there’s just a few interviews left), and put out a blog post to see if anyone wanted to publish them on my behalf. Cece, from On24.com, a webcasting and media company for some well known brands, immediately contacted me and followed-up. They have a quite a few other videos focused on IT and Marketing topics, on Insight24. They’ve even created a specific channel for the Web Strategy show.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

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There’s a new class of company that has emerged, they offer insight, intelligence, and data about communities that can help improve products, service, and the interactions between customers and brands.

Not to be confused with community tools, such as this List of “White Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms these companies harvest insights, make sense of it, and arm business to make adaptive and iterative changes. And not to be confused with companies that Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand.

List of Companies that provide Community Insights, Intelligence, Research and Data

Listed in Alphabetical order

Communispace
“Since 1999, we have created and managed more than 275 online customer communities to help our clients deeply engage with, and listen to, customers in ways that deliver extraordinary insights, generating phenomenal business results. We enable companies to operationalize what it really means to be close to the customer throughout their organization by offering full service community capabilities–from strategic planning and design to member recruitment to expert facilitation, insights and analysis reporting.”

Impact Interactions
“Impact Interactions is dedicated to aligning strategies with organizations’ business goals to produce significant, measurable results. Impact Interactions has helped numerous organizations such as AARP, Cisco, Intel, and SAP create highly successful relationships with their site visitors while providing industry leading reporting on the site’ success.”

MarketTools (of Zoomerang)
“MarketTools leads the way to understanding the opinions, desires and motivations of your customers. As the defining provider of market research for the on-demand era, MarketTools helps you connect with the universe of voices within your target market or gives you the tools to do it yourself—so that you can make the right decision.”

Mzinga (Recently, acquired Prospero)
“We provide fully hosted, Software-as-a-Service solutions that provide you with the following benefits: Foster informal communication and dialog with your community, Enable your community members to interact, collaborate, and innovate, Facilitate knowledge sharing and employee training and development in the form of both formal learning (through our KnowledgePlanet Learning Suite) and social learning (through our Web 2.0 technologies)”

Networked Insight
“At the intersection of social networking, collective intelligence and search, Networked Insights discovers customers’ needs as they happen. Armed with our insights, businesses can fundamentally improve their products, the way they market them and how they communicate with their customers…built to help companies discover customer insights as they happen. We have developed the first technology platform to both engage and stimulate interactions among passionate consumers while enabling businesses to tap into the insights gleaned from these interactions…provides Customer Interaction Networks that help businesses tap into the collective knowledge and sentiments of their customers to drive better business decisions.”

Satmetrix
“Most companies gather customer feedback in one form or another, yet few are able to see financial results from that effort. We deliver the technology and expertise to: Get the right feedback from the right people at the right time, Distribute the actionable insights to employees so they can take action and change the results, Build an enterprise view of relationships and interactions that impact overall customer loyalty, Link loyalty data to financial and operational metrics to evaluate its impact on the business.”

Passenger
“With Passenger® powered communities, brands gain contextual insight, drive innovation and build advocacy - through ongoing customer collaboration.”

Other related lists: List of companies that provide Behavioral Recommendations and Social Recommendations Web Services, also see all my industry indexes.

If you know of others in this space (please understand the scope first) please leave a comment, thanks!

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I was able to interview Gary Angel, CEO of Semphonic on one of my favorite topics: Measurement. There’s three reasons why Social Media Measurement is important: 1) Proof: Companies deploying social media need to measure, as it’s a ‘new’ type of program. 2) Manage: You can’t manage what you can’t measure proves to be true, and lastly, 3) Whoever controls the measurement for this space drives the revenue, go to Ad:Tech and you’ll realize how important this is.

As this industry starts to standardize, Gary discusses his ‘functionalism’ framework that he’s put together, it standardizes a measurement methodology for any web template. Can a standardization be applied to any webpage? Gary thinks so. I questioned him if webpages can have multiple functions, hear his answer. His White Paper: Functionalism, A New Approach to Web Analytics (PDF), there’s a dozen templates listed in the framework.

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You may remember the video blog, Web Strategy Show I used to run at PodTech (my previous employer), the show is designed for those who make decisions for websites, (I call it a Video White Paper) and I interviewed many of the top thought and practice leaders in our industry. These videos tend to be longer in duration, I use a tripod, and we discuss the topics in advance. This is different than my quick “street” video shots I do with my digital camera.

Having left PodTech, (a great place for content creators, as I get to take my show with me) I didn’t get a chance to publish all my tapes (there’s just a few interviews left), and put out a blog post to see if anyone wanted to publish them on my behalf. Cece, from On24.com, a webcasting and media company for some well known brands, immediately contacted me and followed-up. They have a quite a few other videos focused on IT and Marketing topics, on Insight24. They’ve even created a specific channel for the Web Strategy show.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

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Thanks to Per Axbom, a Web Strategist, the original post I wrote called “How to evolve the irrelevant corporate website” has now been translated to Swedish.

You could check out the original post in English, to date, it’s been translated to German, Greek, Italian, French and Dutch, all by the community.

I’m hoping to get someone to volunteer to translate to Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.

Update: CernIO suggests that he uses review sites before going to the corporate website.

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Anna Farmery produces an ongoing podcast of note, the Engaging Brand. She interviews me for episode 109, and we talk about measurement in the new world. You’ll learn: What are the new attributes, how has measurement changed, and we’ll provide some specific steps to moving forward.

To access this podcast go to:

Show # 109 - Building an Engaging Web Strategy
Posted on 09/09/2007 3:16PM

Jeremiah Owyang, the web strategist, talks about how to engage people on the web, how/why to measure engagement and also how communication is changing in the business world.

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I celebrate two years of blogging this Sept 2007. It’s been a fast period of my life, that for sure. I first started blogging to understand the tools, share my ideas, so I could then deploy at my corporate job, boy, I didn’t realize the personal and professional benefits it would bring. (you hear me Jeff L.?)

The best things about blogging is that it’s an ‘open’ network. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, anyone can leave a comment –even if you’re not registered. I know who my real friends are and I don’t need to add them to any list on my blog.

It’s been a great tool, I’ve met so many people, developed relationships (many who I have met in real life because of this) built a community, and communicated my ideas. Although just a number, I’ve reached the 1060 mark in less than 1.5 years on this domain, as you know, the previous blog was on blogspot, until I moved to Wordpress.

It’s not just been about me. This blog has brought my current and previous employers many business opportunities, come talk to me in person and I’ll explain more! I got my current and future job, mainly because of what I’ve accomplished on my blogging and what that’s lead to. Allen Stern said I was an A-Lister, I shot back, “No I’m not, I’m a successful B-Lister, and proud of it!”

I remember when I got my start blogging, it was at the Blog Business Summit in 2005 in SF. I had lunch with Rebecca Blood, one of the blogosphere’s A-listers, she schooled me good on what good blogging is, and even coaxed me away from using a ghost blogger for a corporate blog –I was too naive to know any better at the time. Rebecca wrote the Weblog Handbook, which I devoured quickly. She came to my work at HDS with her husband the famous Jesse James Garrett (yeah he named AJAX, and is an Adaptive Path Founder) and was very humble and shy to sign the book that influenced me. Thank you Rebecca for your early teachings.

How did things move so fast for me? I’m lucky, I was in the right area (silicon valley) at the right time, and blogged just about every day and reached out to others. A few months back I wrote why you should pay yourself first, and why one thing leads to another, I encourage you to follow these principles too.

My future colleague, luminary Charlene Li, has already proven the value of ROI, but for me, it’s not needed, I could do an ROI report, convert to time spent, opportunities gained, and business won, but I think I’d be missing some of the point. Why? I already see an ROI in blogging, I don’t need to measure, it’s brought me so many friends, so many contacts, it would be silly to measure.

So what’s next? lots of good things, stay tuned, I’m going to start a new chapter, and I want you to join me.

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Facebook announced that it will be ranking it’s applications not by total number of users, but by engagement. Certainly an evolutionary step forward. Early on, I was trying to define the formula of engagement, so I’ve got a pretty good sense of what it is and what it’s not. Venture Beat covered the story, but I think they got the attributes mixed up between attention and interaction.

[Facebook is confusing Engagement with Interaction, which is a completely different attribute to measure behavior, our industry needs to come to agreement on terms]

Facebook isn’t really measuring Engagement, they’re measuring Interaction.
The four attributes they mentioned are elements of a user interacting with the site:

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

Facebook measurement, an incomplete formula
There’s a few other attributes that Facebook is missing in it’s measurement, this is NOT an Engagement measurement. They’re missing Attention (how much time was spent on a particular widget app, Alex agrees) and Velocity (did the application get shared and spread among a network, and Influence, who share it with who? For example, if Scoble shared with his 5000ish friends, it’s certainly a higher weight than someone with 20.

As an industry, it’s really important that we start to come to agreement on terms and attributes. For what it’s worth, I predict they will release an engagement index, that will help them be the industry standard when it comes to defining a successful application. More thoughts on this topic from the Web Analytics Guru, or check out all my posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

Once I move into my new role, I may have the reach to standardize terms, give me time.

Update: Judah at Web Analytics Demystified (an authority) agrees.

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I’m pleased to share a white paper I was hired to co-write with Matt Toll of Factiva of Dow Jones. The topic? Social Media Measurement. If you’re new to the concept, or just launched a social media program this white paper is for you.

Download our White Paper: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF)

Traditional Web Analytics are not sufficient to measure what’s changing on the web, marketing is distributed across the world wide web, rendering server logs as only one small portion of what needs to be tracked. The white paper is based upon a roundtable event hosted by Factiva quite a few months ago. I lead one of the key sessions in prioritizing the attributes needed to be measured, there were quite a few thought leaders there, it was exciting.

If you wanted to read the post-thoughts of some of the attendees, they’ve documented their thoughts:

• Chris Kenton: Social Media Metrics
• Jeremy Pepper: Factiva Roundtable and Social Media
• Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones): Wrapup Post
• Glenn Fannick (Dow Jones): The Day After – My Head’s Still Spinning
• Jeremiah Owyang: Factiva Social Media Roundtable helps to answer “What should we measure”
• Images on Flickr of event (over 100)

Thought and Practice Leaders influenced this paper
This was one of the earlier conversations about social media measurement, it was attended by both social media consultants and experts as well as practitioners within corporations. I was right in the middle of a transition moving from one to the next, so I could really relate to both groups. I’m pretty sure this is just a partial list:

• Stowe Boyd, Blue Whale Labs
• Jory Des Jardins, Co- Founder, BlogHer, LLC;
• Nicki Dugan, Editor, Yahoo!’s Yodel Anecdotal
• Jeanette Gibson, New Media Communications, Cisco Systems
• Ian Kennedy, Product Manager, Yahoo!
• Christopher Kenton, MotiveLab
• Andrew Lark, Founder, Group Lark
• Mike Manuel, Strategist, Voce Communications, Media Guerrilla
• Greg Narain, Blue Whale Labs
• Tony Obregon, Director of Social Media, Cohn & Wolfe
• Jeremiah Owyang, PodTech
• Jeremy Pepper, Social Media,Weber Shandwick / POP! PR Jots
• Brian Solis, FutureWorks PR
• Ed Terpening, VP Social Media,Wells Fargo, Guided By History

Many thanks to Daniela (her thoughts on the paper), Matt Toll, Saurabh, Glenn, Sally and the rest of the Factiva crew for hosting this event, and seeing this paper through.

Measurement is important to me, as it will help drive adoption of social media in corporations, determine budgets and help those improve. I’ve tagged my many posts, so if you want to learn more, access the social media measurement tag.

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Website Magazine asked me to contribute an article on Social Media Measurement for this Fall’s issue, if you’re a web strategist at a corporate and need to justify your social media program these practical steps will help you get started.

Yes, it’s ironic that there’s a print magazine about the web, but you can read much of it online anyways.

The need to measure is especially important during these early years of social media adoption at corporations, why? The need to justify something new and different will determine resources and budgets. When social media normalizes, we’ll have less need to prove ROI, and more focus on making this an efficient way to reach customers.

You can access the article on their website or read below.

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Below: Article for Website Magazine

Social Media: From the Drawing Board to the Board Room
By Jeremiah Owyang

As the Web continues to evolve, so must corporate marketing and communications channels. Social media has become yet another way to take advantage of the Internet. But, blindly navigating the social landscape can be time consuming and costly — you need to measure your efforts. To get an idea of everything involved, let’s look at the case of one individual, Betty, who put forth a bold plan to harness the power of social media.

As the community evangelist at a major technology company in Silicon Valley, Betty had quietly implemented public blogs, podcasts and user forums within a sub-marketing department. While the traditional communication teams churned out their press releases, brochures and other broadcast communications, she was connecting with customers in a two-way fashion.

With the hiring of the new CMO, a department-wide audit process of all marketing programs was underway. While the success was clear in her mind, Betty now had to prove to the new boss that social media was important to the corporate direction.

With the hiring of the new CMO, a department-wide audit process of all marketing programs was underway. While the success was clear in her mind, Betty now had to prove to the new boss that social media was important to the corporate direction.

While some of the measurement concepts remain the same as traditional Web analytics, there are some new ideas to embrace. Unlike the traditional website where users browse and harvest information, the tools of social media are unique by allowing people to connect with one another. Also, Web marketing has expanded beyond just the traditional organizational website and search results pages — it has spread to everywhere people are talking about your industry or market.

Here’s how Betty and other social media program managers get started measuring a new type of media:

Define goals
Betty knew her support and product teams would save time if they had tools that let information flow. She had her goals in mind before deploying her program — for without a specific purpose, there’s simply nothing to measure against. For some, there could be several goals; to reach customers, drive awareness, listen to the community, respond quickly during a crisis or just connect product teams to customers to build better products.

Measurement from the start
Measurement should be baked into your program before you launch. It’s not an afterthought but a part of the process. Betty deployed free analytics tools, monitored comments on the blogs and was able to use feed subscription analytics, like those offered by Feedburner. Plenty of data was already present, even if she didn’t know exactly how it was going to be used.

Free analytics tools — use them!
There is an arsenal of free tools to initially get into the process of measuring. Web analytics (Google Analytics), RSS analytics (Feedburner), link trackers (Technorati) and keyword instances (Google Alerts) are some. The sophisticated measurement process is a method of gathering intelligence — analyzing incoming links and discovering who is talking about your company, products and key employees.

For best results, don’t over analyze
For the sake of efficiency, measuring trends is more effective than tiny movements. Once you define the goals of the program, paring down to the most important attributes will make the job easier. No one wants to be inflicted with “analysis paralysis.” While Betty was taking in loads of data from a variety of tools, she knew there were a few key metrics that would be her benchmark over time.

Staying alert in real time
Social media sites are breeding grounds for memes — series’ of ideas that spread throughout a society and often mutate and take on a life of their own. Effective memes are a crux of viral marketing, but negative memes could shatter your brand. In Betty’s case, staying alert saved her company from an embarrassing situation. While she was able to keep track of activity within the forums, customers were starting to report problems of a recently launched product. She wisely passed this information to product and support teams and a patch was quickly released before the issue grew out of hand — all in near real-time.

Measurement processes will always differ, depending on goals
Betty developed several different social media strategies that required differing measurement processes. For example, her product-focused corporate blogs served a different purpose than her audio white paper podcast program, so she learned that measurement depended on the goals. You may never measure the same way, the goals of each program will change the method in which you measure. The attributes will stay the same, but you’ll just use them in different ways to create a new report.

Reporting best practices? Tell a story!
For Betty, her new CMO knew about blogs and forums but did not know how they impacted their organization. An avalanche of facts and figures is not effective in showing trends. Betty learned to tell the story by using timelines; where she was and where she was headed. She also learned to insert a few key quips and anecdotes of successes and, of course, a few lessons learned.

Qualitative is often more important than the numbers
The opinions, voices, and experiences that people are sharing are what really matters to prospects and customers. The written anecdote that turns prospects to customers may be more important than a lengthy clip report. Betty started her reports with unbiased opinions of a customer convincing a prospect. There’s nothing more powerful than a customer evangelist. For Betty and many other program managers, new media requires a new strategy and new measurements. In addition, many of these ideas may be deemed non-traditional or unrealistic to corporate decision makers. Therefore, a strong case backed by the proper analytics data must be presented to move forward in the social networking sphere. In the end, Betty was able to demonstrate actionable success, impress her superiors and, over time, she grew her program and ascended into management.

About the Author: As the Director of Corporate Media Strategy at PodTech.net, Jeremiah Owyang (web-strategist.com/blog) is a social media consultant to Fortune 1000 corporations. Jeremiah is a blogger, videoblogger, speaker, and former Online Community Manager at Hitachi (HDS).

Thank you to the ever smiling Tina Magnergård Bjers who helped to edit this piece here at PodTech.

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