Facebook’s stats page indicate that they’ve 250mm uniques users, with 120mm unique visitors per day. I rarely believe numbers provided by vendors as they can easily be stretched so it’s important to compare third party data sources. Looking at just one source is never enough, but comparing trend lines across 3 multiple data sources really gives a greater view.
The specific numbers themselves aren’t as important as the overall trend that all three are indicating: Facebook continues to grow in unique visitors from three separate data methods. Two of the data sources indicate Yahoo.com is slipping.
Below Image: Alexa indicates Yahoo is trending down while Facebook trends upwards over last 2 yearsBelow Image: Quantcast indicates Facebook’s on the rise over a 6mos periodBelow Image: Compete indicates while Yahoo and Google remain relatively flat, Facebook angles up in last year
So what’s it mean? Not a lot really, while Google a search portal, Yahoo, now a media and applications site, really are different than Facebook, a communication and social site. While Facebook may be receiving more unique visitors over time, their business model hasn’t lined up to profit from direct page views as advertising performance is sub-standard. Unique visitors, while certainly an indicator of mainstream adoption –arn’t an fool proof way to measure revenues of any website.
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.
I was watching the chatter, and participating in the conversation, with great fascination. I’ve recorded some data using free social media tools (minutes after Obama left the stage), that look at keywords on twitter, as well as ‘traffic’ to websites of the runners. I rarely place much weight in any single use of these tools, but there is a clear trend towards Obama getting a great deal of activity. Is this telltale to the future? I’m not sure.
Above: Twist provides activity of keywords over last 7 days. I recorded this immediately after Obama spoke. No surprise that Obama frequency would be higher during this event centered on him.
Above: TweetVolume, date range unknown, making it difficult to place any weight on the value of this graph
Above: Tag clouds comparing the three keywords, interesting, but not telling much, other than idea association, of course, context is everything, so the terms could be used in a negative way.
Above: Blog Activity Over last 30 days, this is telling, Obama keywords much higher frequency.
Above: Alexa Website activity to Candidate sites, Obama has higher traffic
Above: Compete website activity to Candidate sites, again Obama
Related Forrester report from Josh Bernoff: The Social Technographics® Profile of Voters. Love to hear your analysis on this. Also, leave comments below if you know of other websites that are tracking the web strategy of the campaign.
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.
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!
I had the pleasure to interview with one of the Web Analytics gurus, Jim Sterne, who is the host and coordinator the popular eMetrics conference that takes place around the globe. I asked Jim on the broadpicture of the web analytics industry, and he gave us some specific goals, strategy, and objectives for web analytics.
Find out how this growing (yet small) industry is getting underway, find out what you can do to get involved and get started into this industry. It’s a small niche and growing industry, so get involved and show interest.
At 14:00 minutes into it, we get into another discussion, focusing on web campaigns, and answer “How to determine where your resources go in a web campaign”. Many web marketing departments arbitrarily place resources on campaigns, perhaps focused on political reasons, but another way to look at where resources should go is by using web analytics.
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!
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.
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!
I was sitting next to Avinash Kaushik, one of the top web analytics bloggers out there, he works for Google and evangelizes Google Analytics (which I use) and analytics at large. I was one of the folks that prodded him into blogging, and took this example to show him how I was using MicroMedia (Twitter and Utterz to start with). Since I missed his speaking session, I asked him to summarize his presentation. A while ago, I interviewed Avinash on the Web Strategy Show, I think it was one of the most viewed shows (second to Michael Dell).
If you’re passionate about Web Analytics, former Jupiter Analyst and current Web Analytics pro Eric Peterson is running a survey on web analytics, take the time to help him out, he often releases his data at his keynote presentations and his blog.
During the Mark Cuban keynote, I used Twitter to give real time alerts to my followers with just the high-level nuggets that Mark was saying, if you couldn’t afford to be there (Vegas can be expensive) this was a good way to hear the highlights. You can read many of the highlights still on my Twitter feed (it’s in reverse chron order).
So how do you measure the success of your blog? What attributes do you use to define that you’re blogging is time and resources well spent? Even if you don’t blog to make money, you still need to be mulling this over. I blog for thought leadership, which results in all kinds of great real world opportunities and gives me certain attributes to measure.
Interesting the traffic from this post completely outnumbers the traffic from the last time I was on Digg, the audience grows larger. The last time I was on Digg, it hit 8000 readers. It’s nearly 10 times that amount a few months later. If you’ve questions about SMO, talk to ACS.
Update: Here’s the traffic data from the Digg spike. I was averaging 1450 visits a day before Oct 11th and then it spiked to 55k and it’s still trailing off
In the spirit of self analysis, Dennis McDonald often posts the top downloaded documents on his blog. If you don’t know Dr Dennis, he’s an experienced, and level-headed IT consultant that I’ve known and been communicating with since 2005 (I guess we were thinking ahead). In fact, we started a white paper in late 2005 called “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools”.
If you’re a new reader to my blog, you may be surprised to find out, that before I became so focused on social computing, I was actually an enterprise Intranet manager on the business side, and have worked on a total of 4 intranets, for some of my career, internal knowledge management was my passion.
Although I don’t have many docs on my blog, I logged into Google Analytics, and pulled this data.
Here’s the top 5 posts in the last 6 months:
The first was the blog index page, so I don’t need to include that.
Views are ‘page views’ and Attention is duration spent on post (very important), I’ve included other interaction elements too such as comments, add them up and you’ll get a sense of user engagement.
You’ll notice that for the most part, the traffic for these posts are not high, but it’s the interaction, the multiple comments, that make them stand out.
If I had more time, I would go into Delicious, Magnolia, Technorati, and Stumbleupon to find others tags, comments and metadata associated around the content.
I hope you list out your top 5 posts for the last 6 months, it’s a good exercise to learn what’s worked for you, leave a comment when you do, I want to see.
