Archive for the ‘Social Media Measurement’ Category

The Importance of Social Media Audits

Categories: Social Media MeasurementPosted on July 28th, 2009

In addition to constant listening and alerting to their market, brands should conduct an initial, then annual social media audit to be successful in their endeavors.

Just as brands conduct audits of inventory, employees, and budgets on an often annual basis, they should also survey the landscape to find out what customers, influencers, partners and employees are participating on the social web. Audits are key for identifying priorities, benchmarking previous efforts, and planning for future efforts; the same applies for social media. I’ve been reviewing social media strategy documents from a variety of large brands, and I’ve noticed the following three common traits:

Understand the Three Types of Social Media Audits

Initial Kickoff Audit. Brands should audit their social sphere as part of their initial planning process. Brands should work with a partner to find out the conversation index, top competitors, top discussed phrases, and customer experiences with products and services.
Conduct Annual Audits: Social media teams should work with management and marketing managers to understand how and why the social web responded to activities in the market. Benchmark top advocates and detractors, and determine which topics or products are most talked about. Most importantly, benchmark your own social efforts, measuring the change and analyze what caused them, you’ll need this data as your budgets are questioned. Finally, use this knowledge to set quantitative and qualitative goals of where you want to be next year.
Conduct Ongoing Monitoring: This really isn’t an audit but is key as listening doesn’t just happen in spurts. Brands should be constantly monitoring their brand using alerts and reports. Ongoing monitoring is helpful in responding to the real time web (crises can breakout even on a weekend) but may miss out in seeing the bigger picture and macro changes.

Key Takeaways
I was involved (I come from practice within corporate) in the brand monitoring when I was running the social program at Hitachi Data Systems, I leaned on Converseon and Factiva, now owned by Dow Jones as well as setup Google Alerts and tracked Technorati links. Here’s a few things you’ll need to take into account:

Don’t conduct your audit in a vacuum. Identify the keywords and phrases to measure by involving a variety of stakeholders. Be sure to distribute the findings to stakeholders as well as conduct a findings meeting to discuss next steps
Find a brand monitoring vendor as a long term partner. Find a listening platform that understands your business, and gets the social web –beyond just mainstream media. Forrester has conducted research Wave on this topic to find the right listening platform vendors to meet your needs.
Appropriately Staff and Fund. Don’t expect this partner to understand the nuances of your markets’ discussion, assign a few part time resources internally to champion this audit internally –and don’t forget to budget. I’ve seen many annual pricing proposals at the 100k range –varying on services and number of keywords used.

Love to hear your tips, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid in the comments when it comes to developing an active listening strategy.

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Measurement, A Priority for Online Communities. Lithium Offers Community Intelligence with ‘Insight’

Categories: Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on February 25th, 2009

Left: Lithium’s Insight Report provides brands with key community attributes, and automated recommendations.

Measurement is more important than ever
I was briefed by Lithium, one of the vendors in my Community Platform Wave report, of their Insights listening product, which they announced today. In the Wave report, I heavily emphasized the need for measurement, here’s a few key reasons:

First of all, “new” media like social is already under scrutiny, measurement was already important.

During a recession, with dollars stretched, marketers are under increased pressure to prove their programs.

Social media, being largely experimental for many brands, need to measure to quickly ‘course correct’ programs in real time.

During times of cutbacks, marketers must know what to cut, and in order to do so, measurement is key.

Go beyond web analytics
Beyond this need, I quickly noticed there are two types of measurements when it came to communities, the first is server analytics, which we already are aware is web analytics, Google, Omniture, WebTrends provide these services. Secondly, the more advanced measurements are ‘community’ analytics that actually track the healthy, influence, and sentiment of a community.

Lithium’s entry to this space, is a blast at Telligent’s Harvest measurement product, the current best-in-class, and Lithium’s Insight product offers community health metrics (in the form of a 6 attributed ‘rose’ graphic), baseline reports, and premium reports with additional services from account managers for the brand wanting the white glove service. Read Joe Cothrel’s blog post to learn a bit about the history of the project, and about the product itself. The Lithium product, which is based off the research from a scientist Michael Wu, they hired that’s conducting similar research to HP’s Bernard Huberman, has been able to identify the attributes that will help predict if a community will be successful within the first few hours of launch. Another key feature is that the community health metrics will not only indicate which attributes are strong or weak, but will offer practical recommendations to improve the community.

Next steps for measurement –and what Lithium must improve
Despite Lithium’s momentous launch for this measurement tool, there’s still more to be desired: 1) Measurement should be based on business objective, not just attributes on a dashboard, to learn more, understand the difference between dashboards and GPS. 2) Although we’ve yet to see great tools to glean opinions, demonstrating qualitative information such as quotes and even sentiment will be the next step. 3) These reports will need to export and be seamless to other measurement systems and dashboards, although they have a partnership with Omniture, there’s still many other marketing tools used for analytics.

Lithium isn’t alone, there are a variety of listening platforms in this space that are offering social media measurement tools, you should also expect the other community platforms to launch competitive products.

Key Takeaways

Social Media Measurement is important, and now with the recession, critical.

Tremendous amount of customer and prospect data is available in these communities, the savvy vendors are hiring bright minds to analyze what works –and what doesn’t.

Measurement must evolve beyond web analytics and now focus on community insights, vendors are now hiring scientists to help decipher the community ‘code’.

Analytics tools on their own are worthless, without actionable insights, brands will suffer, vendors must provide recommendations.

To be successful, Lithium must continue to partner with the ecosystem around them, customer communities span the enterprise, that’s why I held this roundtable

Expect other community platform vendors to launch similiar products, most will come before the end of Q3 to meet the needs of the recession.

If you’re a customer of Lithium, leave your opinion, or email me if you want to be off the record. I’m your advocate.

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Community Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving a Recession

Categories: Community Manager, Community Marketing, Social Media MeasurementPosted on January 28th, 2009

I’m a former community manager, and many of my friends are currently in this role, and I want to make sure they are armed with the right knowledge to succeed during hard times –I know some of them may get laid off.

Community Managers are at risk of being let go
During a recession, we know that marketing, sometimes new media and unknown expenses get cut. Unfortunately, to some, the Community Manager role may sit in all three of those areas of scrutiny. Although I’ve been tracking quite a few Community Managers working at enterprise class companies, they must quickly learn to measure, and demonstrate ROI or risk getting cut.

Community Managers must educate stakeholders and management.
Measurement depends on which objective they are trying to solve, so I’ll break it down into specific objectives and tasks. During incidents the community manager should report in real-time to key stakeholders. Secondly, they should provide weekly updates that can be quickly scanned in 30 seconds to community managers. Each month, they should provide a detailed report, and initiate a 30-60 minute meeting with key stakeholders to discuss changes.

Among these changes they should measure:

Improvement in marketing efficiency
Community Managers should measure increased speed from word of mouth or marketing awareness, the best way to measure this is time from awareness to close –or spread of WOM. This could also include increase understanding of customers (listening) for marketing research, or warning stakeholders about potential detractors before they become real issues. Unfortunately, these metrics aren’t valued as much as the next two, so focus accordingly.

Reduction in support costs
The bottom line is always important to business, so if you can measure a decrese in customers going to physical stores, emailing account reps, or calling the support center as they instead rely on community to help self-support themselves, you can start to put dollar costs on this actual community savings.

Actual improvement to sales
This matters most. Community Managers should start to measure how clicks from community directly impact ecommerce, go to product pages (perhaps if you’re B2B) or to affiliate marketing to demonstrate how community interaction increases revenue. If you can demonstrate this (like Dell’s million dollar sales in Twitter) tout this loudly to management.

Conduct additional research
If you’re like most companies, layoffs are coming, therefore Community Managers must educate the powers that be the value that they offer when it comes to customer service and support. Rather than focus purely on the role that they have, they should demonstrate the overall of the community –then discusss why a role is needed (like a physical store manager) in order to keep it running smoothly. Consider running quarterly surveys that measure Net Ratings or customer satisfaction, and don’t forget to quote qualitative responses from community members themselves, there’s nothing like a pure customer testimonial about why they are customers.

If you’ve other tips for Community Managers during a recession, leave a comment below.

Update: Bill Johnston has some additional tips you should read, he also left a comment below.

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Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement, Web UsagePosted on January 6th, 2009

I used to promote my blog posts on Twitter, then when I left Twitter, noticed a significant loss in traffic. Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, being on a Twitter hiatus gives a unique opportunity to try out some experiments.

By the numbers:
Here’s the stats from the experiment: In the last 24 hours, 199 folks tweeted these words “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” within 24 hours.

Although not all of them used the snipurl I created, there were 2,000 clicks and unique clicks 1,280. This means that the average tweet that linked to the post generated 10 clicks, and about 6.4 unique clicks per person.

There were 145 new followers to my twitter account, the daily average is new daily followers 88. This is a lift in follower increase of 60% beyond the daily average.

Google Web Analytics showed that to be the top viewed page in last 24 hours, with 954 views, the graph below indicates that traffic returned to patterns before I took my Twitter hiatus.

Above Graph: Last 30 days visitors according to Google Analytics to my blog, notice the dip when I started the hiatus on Jan 20th, also coupled by the holidays. On Dec 5th the twitter experiment started and brought visitors back up to normal levels.

Above Graph: Twitter was the top referrer of traffic over the last 24 hours.

This means that:

My experiment on ‘energizing’ (word of mouth) was successful from blog to twitter, learn about my goals.

You don’t need to be on Twitter.com as an active user to gain traffic to your site.

Since my twitter account wasn’t involved, the number of Twitter followers doesn’t matter as much as we once thought.

If you have compelling content, and make it easy for people to share, they will, and then it will rapidly spread through the twitter WOM network.

While I do have a good sized blog readership, a marketer with advertising budget could easily generate eyeballs to a blog with less subscribers, and potentially get similar results.

If you read the comments, there were several vendors that are going to offer a tweet icon at the bottom of your blog post, or wordpress plugin, so expect to see more of these.

This experiment isn’t completely scientifically done, if this were for an official Forrester report, that I’d have several control groups, sample with a variety of different websites, blogs, and twitter accounts to find a pattern. The one conclusion is that I don’t need to tweet to get twitter traffic.

Helpful? Copy, Paste, then Tweet it!

Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter http://snipurl.com/9k5xy

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Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web UsagePosted on December 8th, 2008

Left: The famed HP Labs think tank in Palo Alto.

A few months ago, I spent an entire day with the HP Labs group in Palo Alto, they’re responsible for the R&D and innovation that goes into their thousands of technology products on the market. I was pleased to see this deep dive scientific research on Twitter by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu.

You can read the free Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope (PDF). Written in an academic style, it’s a bit dense for the casual reader. I write for a business audience and I’ll strip out the most important findings, and add my own insight to what I think matters. As always you’re welcome to chime in the comments.

Understanding HP Lab’s Twitter Research:
If you just need a summary, I wrote this in a way that you can just read the bolded elements to get a sense of the report. I hope this saved you some time.

Most users have a smaller inner circle they communicate with: Within a social network, it was found that most only frequently communicate with a small segment of users –even if one has a large community. Makes sense, everyone has an ‘inner circle’. Finding the true network that an individual has (even if they have thousands of “friends”) is what’s really important. Although Scoble solicits imput from thousands of contacts, he leans on a smaller subset of folks to trust above all others.

HP Labs Sample Size is @ 6% of the Twittersphere: HP Labs took a random sample set of Twitter users, for a base of number of 309,740 users. According to my social network stats tracking page, Twitter’s total universe is somewhere between 4-5 million (still very small). I’ll value the network on the 5 mil side, so that’s sample size of about 6%, which is pretty healthy.

On average, most had 85 followers: They found that the average user has 85 followers in their network, this number seems reasonable when averaged out across the network.

On average, most had 80 friends: Most users followed back 80 others, which is close to the actual follower number. Perhaps some weren’t following spam bots, or people that follow everyone. James Governor has been discussing asymmetrical networks, but it appears that on the average, most are symmetrical.

Tweet Frequency? About one a day: On average, these users had posted 255 tweets, and since the average users has been around for nearly 7 months, thats about 36 tweets per month, or little bit over one a day.

68%: are active users Social networking stats are almost always flawed, as the vendors don’t disclose how many are truly active. I define active user base as logged in and completed an activity in the last 30 days. Among the 309,740 users only 211,024 posted. It’s unknown if this filtered out spam tweets, although nearly 2/3rds of users have returned (site stickyness. That’s a pretty good return to site rate.

Most members have been on twitter nearly 7 months: The research showed that the average person (from first to last post) was active for 206 days. This means that June 2008 (report written in Dec) has become somewhat of a trigger point, perhaps where a growth curve started to point upwards. I noticed an influx of users on April 2008, two months before HPs findings, see comment #579

A quarter of tweets (@) are directed at other users: The report showed that Around 25.4% of all posts are directed, by using the “@user” which is responding to others. This could suggest that the other 75% of tweets are updating their network of what users think is interesting or discussing ‘what they are doing’

The more followers, the more they tweet –up until a point: Figure 1 indicates frequently in posting the more followers they have, right up until about 500 followers where the frequency starts to level out (if the graph were smoothed). The data around number of friends suggests a similar graph, although there’s no saturation point (see figure 2). I’ll suggest the more connections a user has, the more value they have, and therefore are more active.

Despite having large networks, a smaller circle is maintained: For users with a high number of followers, they actually only still communicate with a smaller subset of users. This rule remains constant see figure 4.

Where’s the value? within the hidden network: To find out the real value of a twitter user and their network, finding out their true network of folks they communicate with on a regular basis will show their trusted network. Finding out who the Scobles’ communicate with the most will determine will help find out how he is influenced.

Business Opportunity for Measurement Vendors
If you’re a social media measurement company, and can find out the true influence model of who people really trust above all other users by looking at actual “@” behavior and follow behavior, be sure to leave a comment below showing how you can do this. Then, conducting this by topic, will find out the true influencers by market segment within the Twitterpshere.

Brand Opportunity
As we know, traditional advertising doesn’t work well in social networks, ‘carpet bombing’ isn’t effective. However, conversational marketing is also costly, as you have to spend great resources on labor to communicate with influencers. Therefore brands who want to be effective with their resources should find out who is an influencer in their market and focus their conversational marketing primarily on them.

Thanks to the HP labs team who did a great report and really helped to further understanding Twitter better, when you have time, invite me over for lunch, I’m in the area.

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Retweet: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement, Word of MouthPosted on November 23rd, 2008

Word of Mouth, the Holy Grail of Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is one of the most desirable activities to brands, why? Because research on trust shows that consumers (folks like you and me) trust the opinions of people we know more than anyone else. It makes sense of course, think about the next time you’re going to buy a car, who’s opinion are you going to trust, those of your friends or the opinion of the sales guy representing the product?

[Information within Microblogging communities like Twitter encourage rapid word of mouth --of both positive and negative content]

Twitter, Although Small, Continues to Demonstrate Influence
Twitter, which I’m seeing informal stats of around 5 million users, has continued to show it’s viral capabilities, with last week’s Motrin mom’s brand punking of an advertisement to news being spread about natural disasters faster than traditional news, this toolset allows content to spread faster and farther than we’ve ever seen. Watching how Al Gore’s Current TV integrated tweets live on their TV broadcast and how CNN and CSPAN mentioned this microblogging service during the election months is a nod to it’s power. In some ways, long form blog posts like this seem so much slower and plodding compared to how quickly information can come and go in Twitter.

[Within the Twitter community a "Retweet" is a social gesture indicating endorsement of an idea]

The “Retweet” How Information Quickly Spreads
As a result, the most powerful activity within Twitter is to watch the “Retweet” phenomeneon. A retweet is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network –causing it to spread from one community to the next –retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading. Early research from Peter Kim indicates that twitter users are brand sensitive, and spread information. Since content can be shared, consumed on mobile devices, this information can rapidly spread faster than any other infectious technology we’ve ever seen.

How to Measure and Monitor the Coveted Retweets
Expect to see social media measurement tools appear that measure the spread of retweets, URLs, and other commonly repeated content to look for how information is passed from a source to a node, to an entire community. In fact, in a very primitive way, you can see those that are repeating the content of others, for example Tim O’Reilly’s content. See this search query showing “Retweet @timorielly“, or “RT @timoreilly” (an abbreviated version).

You should do the same query for your brand, products, and those of your competitors, start with this query “retweet yourbrand“, and change out yourbrand. At some point we can expect a service to appear that will track a tweet from a single source, then track how it is retweeted, then by who (and their number of followers) then to create a numerical value of the velocity of that single original tweet as it cascades through a community.

Impacts to Users, Brands and Vendors

Twitter Users: If someone retweets your content, be and feel honored, it means that your content was so important or interesting to them they are willing to share it with their own trusted network. If you need some guidelines on how to retweet, read this handy guide.

Brands: Companies should pay close attention to how information spreads and should do searches on their product and brand to learn what type of information is being spread by who.

Vendors: Social media measurement companies like Cymfony, Buzzmetrics, Radian 6, Buzzlogic, and others should start tracking the retweet stream around a brand and product to monitor and map out community and content hotspots. It’s possible to create some type of “Digg” or “Delicious” tool that maps the social voting and bookmarking based off the data gleaned from Retweets and TinyURLs.

I’ll echo Shel Israel who posted similar thoughts that retweeting is the most powerful single aspect of Twitter.

Update: some stats are starting to appear about retweeting, see the Retweetist.

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Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008

Categories: Politics, Social Media Measurement, Social NetworkingPosted on November 3rd, 2008

Tomorrow is the big day, so let’s take a snapshot of the social media campaign results, it took me a few minutes to dive into their profiles and grab numbers. Here’s what I found:

Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

Community Platforms/Branded Social Networks
MyBarackObama: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)
McCain Space: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)

Interesting that the ratios between MySpace and Facebook are the same, Youtube nearly the same. I was not able to find data on LinkedIn, they don’t make it easy to find ‘connections’ numbers.

It’s clear that Obama is dominating the social media activity, this could because of two reasons: 1) Obama campaign moved quicker to social networking and soical media, McCain only recently launched his own social network with KickApps. 2) The Social Technographics (behaviors to adopt social media) skew heavier towards demographics, yet these percentages are far greater than the margins shown in technographics.

I’ll link to any other social media campaign analysis, leave a link below –later, if I get time, I’ll try to do a summary.

Related Resources:

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff: The social profile of political candidates

Pew has some very interesting data about social networks and their influence, many charts

Pew Research: The Internet and the 2008 Election, stats and data about usage.

Obama campaign bullies MySpace fan out of his namesake as the MySpace Obama page wasn’t started by official Obama campaign

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Social Media Measurement: Dashboards vs GPS

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web AnalyticsPosted on October 16th, 2008

Left Image: The dashboard in a car measures key health metrics, but the most important screen is the GPS, it tells me where I’m headed, where I am. and how to get there.

Yesterday, I attended Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit in the gorgeous Presidio (my family has history there, my Grandfather was a First LT in the Airforce in WW2 and spent much time there) and moderated a panel on one of my favorite topics: Social Media Measurement. On the panel I had Rob Crumpler, President and CEO, BuzzLogic, Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google, Shahar Nechmad, Founder and CEO, NuConomy, and David Veneski, representing demand from the brands at Intel. These guys were smart.

Although I wasn’t there, apparently the first panel on this topic broke the rules on panels (pushing their products) and didn’t give the audience what they wanted, and we had a fiery conversation. Essentially, we pushed why measure, starting with questions to the brand side, as you may know Intel, a culture of engineers takes measurement very seriously, then learned about the different types of measurement from NuConomy’s X Engagement measurement, Google’s Web Analytics, and Buzz Logic’s Influence measurement style.

[Although Social Media Dashboards tell us key health readings, to be successful, brands need "GPS" to find out where are you headed, where are you now, and where are you going. Measure against an objective]

I questioned them to prove that their methdology was really going to help brands know if this triggered a true conversion all the way to buying cycle –they group could not prove it except with one off anecdotes. This is not a fault of the panel at all, but a major challenge with social media marketing –it’s generally unproven.

Also, FM (who have fielded some impressive campaigns) launched a brand new metrics dashboard called the Conversational Marketing Toolbox that aggregates data from many conversational sources (including Twitter) and was one of the first aggregated dashboards that I’ve seen out of the box, I certainly will take a closer look. I’ve seen the measurement dashboards of quite a few social media measurement companies, and have also advised large brands on how to configure their own dashboards internally, and I’ve noticed a trend across many of them.

Everyday we prescribe the POST methodology (someone published some slides), essentially, we want brands to have an actual objective before they set off and and experiment with social media tools. The same applies here:

The one piece of insight I provide them, and now you, is that social media measurement is like driving a modern car. You may have a dashboard with all the lights, toggles, gauges, and metrics, but remember, the most important piece of data to have in front of you is the GPS screen. The GPS screen indicates where you want to go (your objective), where are you now, and how to get there.

Update: Susan Etlinger has key quotes from the panel yesterday that she published from the Horn group blog, I enjoy how she stays engaged in the conversation.

Thanks to Brett Crosby for taking these pics of the panel yesterday.

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Companies that Track Discussions in Forums and Communities

Categories: Industry Index, Social Media MeasurementPosted on April 25th, 2008

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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Video: Sea World’s Social Media Program and Measurement (7:10)

Categories: Case Study, Social Media Measurement, VideoPosted on April 2nd, 2008

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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Social Media Measurement Attribute: Defining Velocity

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Word of MouthPosted on March 6th, 2008

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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

Posted in Social Media Measurement, Word of Mouth | Comments

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

Categories: FAQ, Social Media MeasurementPosted on February 26th, 2008

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?

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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List of companies that measure widget measurement or metrics

Categories: Industry Index, Social Media Measurement, Widget StrategyPosted on January 22nd, 2008

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.

Posted in Industry Index, Social Media Measurement, Widget Strategy | Comments

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Fixing my Feed problem with Feedburner’s Feedsmith: Increase of 66% measurable readership

Categories: Ruminations, Social Media MeasurementPosted on January 15th, 2008

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.

Posted in Ruminations, Social Media Measurement | Comments

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Don’t ignore del.icio.us and Stumbleupon

Categories: Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web AnalyticsPosted on January 13th, 2008

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.

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web Analytics | Comments

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Finally, a Twitter Measurement Tool that works

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media MeasurementPosted on December 18th, 2007

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.

Posted in MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement | Comments