Archive for the ‘Social Media Measurement’ Category

Video: KD Paine on Social Media Measurement, on Program Plans, Strategies, and Best Practices

Categories: Interview, Social Media Measurement, Video, Web Analytics, Web Marketing, Web Strategy ShowPosted on November 26th, 2007

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.

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!

Posted in Interview, Social Media Measurement, Video, Web Analytics, Web Marketing, Web Strategy Show | Comments

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

Categories: Community Marketing, Industry Index, Social Computing, Social Media MeasurementPosted on November 22nd, 2007

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.”

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.”

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

Posted in Community Marketing, Industry Index, Social Computing, Social Media Measurement | Comments

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Video: Web Measurement Standardization, CEO Gary Angel on Functionalism (15 min)

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Video, Web Analytics, Web Strategy ShowPosted on November 13th, 2007

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.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

Posted in Social Media Measurement, Video, Web Analytics, Web Strategy Show | Comments

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The ROI of Blogging? Intangible

Categories: Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on September 4th, 2007

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.

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Measurement | Comments

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Facebook to rank applications by Interaction –not Engagement

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Social NetworkingPosted on August 31st, 2007

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.

Posted in Social Media Measurement, Social Networking | Comments

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Social Media White Paper “Tracking the Influence” (Factiva of Dow Jones)

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web StrategyPosted on August 20th, 2007

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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Article: Social Media, From the Drawing Board to the Board Room

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web StrategyPosted on August 13th, 2007

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.

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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Welcome Marketing Profs Community! Resources for you (and Survey Feedback)

Categories: Conference, Podcasts, Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on August 9th, 2007

(This following post is intended for the folks who attended my webinar, if you’re a regular reader, there’s still some healthy content in the links below)

You made it!

I just completed a Webinar with the Marketing Profs (a large and respected Marketing Resource group) with a few hundred folks, the topic: Podcasting, Video Blogging, and Live Streaming Video. In my final slide, I linked to this blog, and directed them here, so welcome!

I also promise to answer any questions that I wasn’t able to answer on this blog, depending on what it is, It’ll take time, so come back soon

There’s a few other resources that I’ve put together on this blog, it’s a great way to get started with social media, or dig in deeper with your existing strategy. As you know, I help many of our clients with social media strategies at PodTech.net.

Recommend Reading for your Social Media Strategy

Thinking Bigger
10 Social Media Strategies for 2007
Social Media Strategies (Podcast Interview)

Podcast Resources
Top Marketing Podcasts: Learn from the top Marketers

Video Blogging
Online Video is great for your executives (a project to get started)
Responding to Bad Press using Video, and Video Brand Hijacking

Online Streaming Video
Ustream: Jeremiah at Web 2.0
List of live streaming tools

Social Media Platforms
List of companies that provide White Label (Tools you can rebrand) Social Networking Tools
List of companies that provide online Collaboration Tools

Social Media Measurement
Companies that measure Social Media

Social Media and events
How to have a successful community event
Impacts of BlogHaus (An event that had 600-800 bloggers)

Advanced Concepts
Marketing is not on two domains only
Extranets move off the Corporate domain
Impacts of the Social Media on the Customer Reference Program
The many forms of Web Marketing
The Corporate Website is Irrelevant

Leave a comment if you’ve got suggestions or questions.

Get dialed in!
Want more? Aside from the excellent resources available at the Marketing Profs group, you can subscribe to this blog (I publish just about daily, check out my Web Strategy Video Show, join the community at the Web Strategy Group on Facebook, and add me as your friend. For the very bold who want to crawl inside my head, you can follow me on Twitter, and I’ll reciprocate)

Thanks again Marketing Profs for the great platform and resource to the Marketing Community.

Updates: Questions I didn’t answer in the live Q&A I promised to answer questions that I couldn’t answer, I’ll be leaving updates here:

1 Question: 41% of who was surveyed in your stats

2 Resource: The Many forms of Web Marketing (Folks may not know the difference between social media and interactive marketing)

3 Good Video Editing Software
-From the comments in the chat room uLead was recommended.
-PC Mag reviews several software suites
-The pros at the PodTech office use Final Cut Pro for Mac (high end software)

4 Recommendations for Cameras

5 Need to convince upper management Social Media impacts Sales and Marketing? Read this very important report that shows that IT decision makers are influenced by Social Media.

Feedback from the Community: At the end of the webinar, folks were leaving responses on a survey, here’s what they said:

How well did the content of this online seminar meet your expectations?

Extremely well 41.9% 13
Very well 25.8% 8
Pretty well 29.0% 9
Not very well 3.2% 1
Not at all 0.0% 0
answered question 31

How could it have been improved?

1. really enjoyed the music at the beginning … a very nice touch — wish more people would do this type of thing. Thu, 8/9/07 10:39 AM
2. more troubleshooting tips….felt some questions were answered like a politician with dancing around the topic Thu, 8/9/07 10:36 AM
3. More information about content and messaging that works best. Thu, 8/9/07 10:36 AM
4. Better clarification on statistics and source Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
5. evening out audio during the Q&A — Jeremiah was “miles away” so the volume had to cranked but the mod was much louder. it was a painful experience at times. eliminating the non-topic related chatter — i don’t need to know about someone’s tech geek hubby, etc. etc. it’s hard enough to follow the text and listen; don’t need the distracting back-of-the-class schtick Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
6. more specific information in the presentation about recommended products & service providers show blog site websites as examples were good but hard to see. would be nice to have embedded links in PPT. more real life success stories personal response letting me know my question was in the queue Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
7. live streaming of the presenter would have been an appropriate enhancement! Thu, 8/9/07 10:34 AM
8. It’s still a little bit of a “nebulous” subject… good overview tho. Thu, 8/9/07 10:33 AM
9. capability to see the referenced websites live Thu, 8/9/07 10:32 AM
10. live linking to the web for better illustration? Thu, 8/9/07 10:32 AM
11. nothing. Wait. winning the iPod. But that’s it. Excellent! This one seminar made me a lifetyle customer of Marketing Profs! Thu, 8/9/07 12. More non-basic insights. Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
13. A few more examples of how these strategies are being used in B2B. Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
14. transcript of the audio — lots of gems whipped by too fast to write Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
15. links and lists during the Q&A Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
16. It was very well organized and showed a depth of subject matter knowledge. Not sure what I would suggest to improve it. Thu, 8/9/07 0:31 AM
17. more about webinars Thu, 8/9/07 10:29 AM
18. incorporating some live examples of podcasts, e.g. linking to a couple of them Thu, 8/9/07 10:11 AM
19. Less of an overview, more tactical how tos.

Would you recommend the seminar to a friend or colleague?

Yes 93.3% 28
No 6.7% 2

answered question 30

If you would recommend the seminar to a friend or colleague, what would you say?

1. you need to see this Thu, 8/9/07 10:39 AM
2. n/a Thu, 8/9/07 10:36 AM
3. Good info about the technology of online marketing through podcasts and streaming video. Gives a good overview. Thu, 8/9/07 10:36 AM
4. Good overview on podcasting and streaming – general intro was useful. Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
5. wicked intro to podcasting and new technologies — view it and let’s figure out a way to make it happen Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
6. good basic overview Thu, 8/9/07 10:35 AM
7. Our marketing team needs to have a better understanding of social marketing and its something we need to incorporate into our strategic marketing plan in the future. Thu, 8/9/07 10:34 AM
8. As most, interesting, informative and packed with residual benefits – always good resource material associated. Thu, 8/9/07 10:34 AM
9. it was a useful webcasting 101 kind of tutorial Thu, 8/9/07 10:34 AM
10. great 30,000 ft. view of what you need to consider for next year’s marketing plan/budget Thu, 8/9/07 10:33 AM
11. Jeremiah did a great job presenting information that can be somewhat techno geeky to we novices. Thu, 8/9/07 10:32 AM
12. great insight into ways you can extend your brand using new technologies. Thu, 8/9/07 10:32 AM
13. Marketing Profs is as essential to your business success as your phones. Never stop learning from the best in the industry. Thu, 8/9/07 10:32 AM
14. Great overview to Social Media Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
15. Great overview! Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
16. Attend this with a tape recorder turned on. Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
17. Jeremiah gets the space on both a strategic and tactical level. Thu, 8/9/07 10:31 AM
18. Jeremiah held my attention throughout this webinar, which is tough to do! Thu, 8/9/07 10:11 AM
19. If you need a good primer, take the time. Thu, 8/9/07 10:11 AM
20. Very knowledgable.

Posted in Conference, Podcasts, Social Media, Social Media Measurement | Comments

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Personas of the Early Adopters: The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or Fleet

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web Theory, Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on August 7th, 2007

This post is a focus on the very front end of the adoption curve, long before the masses come, there’s many different groups inside of the “early adopter” persona. There’s been many extensive studies on the adoption curve and the different personas that emerge, but I’m just going to share what I see, as I’m close or in the epicenter. (I’m in Silcon Valley, and many of my friends are pebbles, or the CEOs that create these products demo in our office)

I see a pattern, and have grouped them into stages and patterns. For the purpose of this observation, I see a trigger area which I’m calling the ‘epicenter’, the point of an activity. There are many epicenters, in fact one or more for every product, and multiple companies having products. Individuals can often be many of the personas for each different product.

[Within the bleeding edge are different personas of adopters who all centralize around the epicenter: The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet]

The Five Personas of the Early Adopter

The Pebble: One away from Epicenter:
First hand demo, for many truly first adopters, they will get a first hand demo from the originators of the product. They are hunted by marketing, inventors and PR professionals to be the key infuencers that will trigger the avalanche. In Robert’s case, his video show gets him access to just about every inventor and CEO. For example, Stewart from Flickr showed the product to him before many saw it.
These are the pebbles that gets dropped in the still lake.

Swimmers: Two away from Epicenter
Many folks are two degrees away, they watch a group of influencers and once a small critical mass has started (folks from group 1), they jump on. These are the hallway demos, or informal conversations using MicroMedia.

Surfer: Three away from Epicenter
Folks in existing connected networks that wait for several people in their peer group to move first, they are waiting for group gestures. We’re now looking at new social networking tools like Facebook. The interesting feature is that we can watch adoption of tools of folks on our network without directly interacting with them. The Facebook ‘news’ page has become a gesture model. By watching this flow of adoption we can see where the masses start to adopt tools, talk about them, and integrate them into their lives.

Boater: Four away from Epicenter
These folks wait for confirmation signals from the larger bubble to trigger them, they may not have time to experiment with tools, and will look for signals from blogs or industry news. This is not mainstream sources by any means, these are posts from blogs, podcasts, or email invites from friends. For many of the early adopters the signals from this group are often useful confirmation of what’s already happened.

With the Fleet: Five or more away from Epicenter
This is outside the bleeding edge. These group of folks adopt once the mainstream press as we know it, the NYT, Business Week, or when someone at their workplace or peers convince or show them. By the time they get to the tool, a community and network has already formed by the early adopters.

Many tools are not kept
Half of the shiny tools that the “One away” adopter get dropped by the way side, why? They find something better, or when they see folks from group three or four, they now consider it ‘uncool’ and feel compelled to move on.

Usage of tools for communication
There are different tools for different needs. It’s clear to me that email is one of the slowest, blogging is becoming more sluggish as new tools and MicroMedia start to take hold. Networks among the early adopters have already formed and solidified (like Facebook’s friends, Twitter, or Pownce) and the inner circle can quickly break and share news. It’s also worth reading Jeremy’s self-analysis as an early adopter Pebble or Swimmer. Also read Forrester’s research findings on Technographics to learn how mainstream adoption can be characterized.

My adoption style
I’m a bit more conservative (within the inner bubble within the bubble) of my tool adoption, only a few tools have I adopted and not kept up, I’m carefully watching the folks in group one, and often pull the trigger as a member of group two or three. I interviewed Chris Yeh, CEO of Ustream about a completely different topic, and he showed me Ustream a few days before Web 2.0 Expo (see meme). Now, I get many emails of beta products, way more than I have time to review, so I often go down this ladder. In many ways, I was very late to blogging (Boater) but I really grabbed it and focused a lot of energy into it, this domain you’re reading is just over a year old but has moved quickly.

Ustream: Pebble
Blogging: Boater
Twitter: Swimmer
Podcasting: Surfer
Video Blogging: With the Fleet
Facebook: Boater
Pownce: Swimmer then quit
SecondLife: Boater then quit

I watch these early adopters, watch how they break tools, and then I adopt. I mainly want to understand these tools so my clients won’t have to break them, but rather use them right. This means I don’t move in as fast as others, and come in and want to use these tools right. After telling Robert this he replied that he’s moving to “get away from people like you”, in his mind, being two or three from the epicenter is a late adopter, go figure. So what’s on my radar? I’ve been asked to be in group one for several products (some I’ve tried, and some not) and am even getting emailed or asked about yesterday’s topic on a bloggers union, which I’ll be sure to be in group four or more.

What Persona are you? The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet?

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Posted in Social Media Measurement, Web Theory, Web Tools, Web Usage | Comments

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The need to centralize a brand in a decentralized world

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web ToolsPosted on July 31st, 2007

I’m starting to see this new type of tool and concept emerge as content gets created and distributed into many small and large buckets

Situation
Users are creating content, and often uploading, sharing, or producing to a wide variety of sites: social networks, image sites, movie sites, communication tools, blog software, forum software, etc. They are creating and consuming data on mobile devices, home computers and networks, work networks, and in public spaces. For the corporate brand, this means that media, text, voices, and opinions about a company are spread all across the wide web.

Problem
Information, data, and profiles are scattered around the web, and on different networks. While one person can be involved in many conversations around the web; tracking and managing them are very difficult as they’re scattered

[The desire to track and centralize data and media created on the disparte web is growing for both individual users and corporate brands. The need for Digital Lifestyle Aggregation rapidly approaches]

Concepts
A trend of tools are starting to come around, as they centralize all of those data points into one area, or make it easier to find. In many ways, it’s a dynamic blog roll of all ‘my stuff’. Marc Canter describes it in this early post (2004) as

“Navigating the complex worlds of multimedia, on-line content, communications, ecommerce and Home LAN based products is the key to understanding where we’re headed in the future. Enabling customers (both end-users and enterprises) to connect all of these disparate worlds, products and services together is what digital lifestyle aggregation is all about.”

In this definition, digital lifestyle aggregation is described as:

“A digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) is a computer software application which integrates and centralizes the user control of all of the user’s information and electronic devices, including personal computers, Home LANs, cell phones, digital cameras, videogames, PDAs, and other forms of consumer electronics devices.”

Players
Techcrunch has started to track a few of these players, from Loopster along with Profilactic and ProfileLinker. Sonecast creates a single page of media, using aggregation techniques from disparate buckets.

The future
In many ways, we can expect existing feedreaders like MyYahoo and Google Reader and Facebook to start offering these types of tools. This feature set will become as common as the blogroll (and integrated with it), white label social networks and some solutions will provide password management, yet another form of identity, and yet another reason we need a single trusted form of user ID.

What this means for corporations
First of all, please don’t think you can control your brand, it’s not about that. But you’ll start to need these tools to, track, and centralize one’s brand (and everything associated around it) in a decentralized world. I’ve predicted that the future websites will be community based websites, so aggregating that content in one area helps to make you the first stop for product knowledge.

For further listening listen to this podcast interview between Dan Farber of ZDnet and Marc Canter they discuss the need for open networks, and thinking beyond Google, Yahoo, MS, Apple, and AOL.

Update: be sure to check out Chris’s ideas on Attention Streams, imagine haveing all your data on a single feed.

Posted in Social Media Measurement, Web Tools | Comments

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Letters to the Web Strategy Editor: Social Networking Usage numbers, Facebook and MySpace

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Social Networking, Web UsagePosted on July 29th, 2007

I’m getting a few more great letters of folks asking for info, if I know the answer, I’ll often blog it. I track a lot of info and put onto this blog, often you’ll find it under the ‘web usage’ category tag on the right navigation. Here’s a letter I got in from a friend who’s speaking on the subject soon. Hopefully this will aid him:

The current installed base and rate of increase for FaceBook?
July 07 numbers from Business Week say it’s at 26 million.

Comscore (also this month) show that growth over past 12 months has been 89%.

I don’t have any prediction numbers for the next year, but I’ll expect it to be in the thousands of percent.

The number of people under 30 on FaceBook?
I did the math on the same Comscore report and 60% are under 35. Sorry, I can’t accurately break it down to age 30, but you can make some guesses.

Also, for MySpace: “half of the users are age 35 and older, while users age 18-24 make up only 17%. On Facebook, older users make up 40%, with college students (29%) being the next biggest group.”

It’s interesting to note that same BusinessWeek article differentiates MySpace as being blue collar, and Facebook being White collar.

The current installed base for MySpace and the rate of decline?
68 million unique users logged on to MySpace in the last month, says the same Business Week article.

Myspace’s younger demographic rates are decreasing says this Business Week’s July 07 report: “but U.S. visitors under 18 to MySpace dropped 30 percent over the past year, while Facebook’s rose about 2 1/2 times”

Any statistics or facts related to b to b and blogging or social media?
Oh yeah, here’s what I think is the most important report this year regarding social media and IT decision makers (B2B): “Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that social media content and user-generated tools have made for a more informed purchasing decision, and more than three-quarters believe they have made their lives more efficient.”

I was lucky to have recent reports in my mind (all from this month) so these are pretty up to date. Data is important, as it controls where the money goes.

By the way, I don’t use myspace, but my Facebook profile is here, if you add me, I’ll add you back. But please, whatever you do, don’t zombie bite me.

Posted in Social Media Measurement, Social Networking, Web Usage | Comments

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Why bother measuring Social Media?

Categories: Social Media MeasurementPosted on July 18th, 2007

Curt Hopkins writes me, he questions if we should ever be effective in measuring social media. Is it an art? Can ‘human’ activity truly be measured. As you know, I’ve been focusing a lot of thought on social media measurement, I believe that whoever has the measurement has the authority, and when the TV resources shift to web, they will be a key driving force.

Jeremiah:

Just had a question, a thought: How much is social media an art as opposed to a science? How much is it intuitive and conversational (in the true and long-term sense) and how much is it a quantifiable thing? Are we kidding ourselves when we treat it as a kind of science that can be measured? Is that just a way for us to justify our salaries? Is my recently recognized resistance to too much quantification a result of my nearly unbearable wisdom or of my laziness? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle, as truth has an irritating habit of usually being?

None of this means, by the way, that I question the value of what I’m doing, I’m just starting to wonder if it isn’t the intangible aspect of it all that carries the most real value, humanizing, opening up, being transparent, winning hearts and minds, etc. more than eliciting metrically provable spikes in user adoption, etc. Certainly, showing that a given move with social media produces more readers, or more buyers or more readers or buyers who return, etc. is all to the good. But are we going to far, or will we, in trying to make a spreadsheetable science out of it? Are we running the risk of turning poetry into sociology, a discipline rejected by poets and scientists alike?

I’m just saying is all.

CH

–
Curt Hopkins
blog. morphemetales.com

Thanks Curt.

One of the first things I say when defining social media, is that it’s about “people connecting to people”. When I had the charter to measure the social media program at my previous full time job, it was an important key to determine the value of the program, and to measure and improve where we were headed.

I agree, we will never be able to fully measure social media until we can fully measure people. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. Measurement is important for so many reasons, (not just because of profits) as it can help us improve how we communicate, connect to others, and most importantly, spend our time and resources correctly. Just as folks improve their public speaking by taking classes, or joining the local Toastmasters, the same with the web, folks will want to measure how they are communicating.

Lastly, I hope to see you at the blogger dinner this Thursday in Portland.

Enough of my thoughts, let’s hear from the community, leave a comment