Really Makers of TV? There's a game show, where one event is to stack apples. This is why I prefer the internet :)

Archive for the ‘Social Media Measurement’ Category

« Older Entries
View Comments

To Understand Your Market, Harness The 7 Elements of Customer and Social Data

Categories: Social Media MeasurementPosted on February 8th, 2011

Who has more information about US’s Gen Y? Facebook or the United States Government?

Each time I ask this question on stage, most hands vote that Facebook has more information, although someone usually suggests the United States Governmant can obtain it if they need to.

In fact, the amount of consumer data emerging in the social web only continues to hockey stick (see this graphic from Twitter) The following is a summary of a research project we did to understand how to harness new data types in their online experiences.

The 7 Elements of Social Data

The 7 Elements of Social Data
We segmented data that has been tried and true for years on the top tier: demographics and product. Then, we segmented data that digital marketers are striving to tackle now in the middle tier: Pschographic, behaviroial, and refferal data. At the bottom tier, we listed out experimental new types of data that most companies have not harnessed, the newcommers location based and intention data.

Demographic Data
This data types enables an effecient way to create context about consumers, yet broad survey-based research may not yield specific nuances and needs about specific individual taste as today’s consumers are given more choices and have more discrete needs. Some marketers are able to glean demographic data from social accounts gender, age range, by profile data, profile pictures, or searching public records like Zabasearch and Spokeo.

Product Data
A data type commonly used in ecommerce websites, this data type is used to match similar products with each other, in order to cross-sell and up-sell products. Often combined with demographic data, this data type, mixed with referral and behaviorial data yields greater accuracy. Visit any ecommerce website from Amazon, BestBuy and beyond to find examples of product matching.

Psychographic Data
As the social web exploded in the past few years, consumers are volunteraily self-expressing their woes, pains, and aspirations in websites. This provides those who want to reach them increased opportunities to market based on lifestyle, painpoints, beyond just product sets. This data type is useful in both message and conversation creation as well as identifying features and products to improve or fix. To learn more about lifestyle and pain point positioning see the 5 stages of positioning by Lifestyle, Pain, Brand, Product, or Features.

Behavioral Data
There’s at least two ways to find this data, it’s in both existing customer records like CRM or ecommerce systems or also in the “digital breadcrumbs” that users are leaving in social networks using a variety of web techniques from cookies, FB connect, and other social sign on technologies. The opportunity to suggest content, media, deals, and products to them that matches their previous behaviors will yield a greater conversion.

Referral Data
Customers are emitting their recommendations for products, but positively –and negatively. Both explicitly through ratings and reviews, as well as implcity though gestures like the ‘like’ button to their social network. Vendors like Bazaarvoice (disclosure: client) offer a suite of tools for customer feedback and intelligene, Zuberance fosters positive WOM through positive ratings, and ExpoTV is a catalyst for conversation using video reviews, and see the well known case study from Levi’s who implemented the Facebook Like button.

Location Data
As location based technology and services emerge for consumers to emit signals where they are using mobile devices, this data helps to triangulate context around location and time for brands to reach them. From Foursquare checkins and the associated contextual ads that emerge to ‘players’ to Facebook places, consumers can now emit their location, in exchange for contextual information, see how Awareness Hub (client) is able to surface influencers by location in Foursquare Perspectives.

Intention Data
The most innacurate, this volatile data type holds great opportunity to predict what consumers will do in the future. Wish lists, social calanders like Facebook Events, Zvents, and aspirational websites like PlanCast, 43 Things allow consumers to broadcast their future plans
Savvy marketers will harness explicit content and serve up the right messages in advance – as well as poach from competitors. Learn more about intention data –which is faster than real time.

Conclusion: Use Data Elements in Combination to Yield a more Potent Elixir
In our initial findings we had many other types of data, but organized these in as discrete buckets as possible. While this seven segmentation types makes sense today, we expect many other types of data to emerge just as technology and consumers do.  Be sure to use in combination for reaching maximum potency in your ‘data elixir’ –relying on only one is no longer sufficient.

Want to learn more? I did an hour long webinar on this topic, you can watch the replay at NetBase, who hired me to present this original research. Scott attended the webinar, and reviewed the highlights. Thanks to Altimeter’s Christine Tran for help on this project.

Posted in Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

Framework: The Social Media ROI Pyramid

Categories: Matrix, Social Analytics, Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on December 13th, 2010

Often, our industry can appear complicated, and yearns for simplicity.  One such technique to glean simplicity is to develop frameworks which the corporate social strategist can then apply to achieve their business goals. I’ve been working on this “ROI Pyramid” framework for a few months now, and am ready to share in greater detail than on my keynote at LeWeb (slides and video) where I introduced this to the public for the first time.


[The novice provide executives with engagement data --causing themselves to be stuck in the churn of obtaining more followers and fans --without a clear business goal]

figure7_blog
140 social strategists around the globe at enterprise class size companies indicated their top internal objectives for 2011 is to “Create ROI Measurements”

Measurement, the Number One Priority, Is Important to Social Business
In our recent research report on the buyer of social business, (read research report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist) we learned that measurement is one of the most important aspects to social business, in fact the top priority stated by 48% of corporations was “Creating ROI Measurements” for internal programs, (see data).

  • Experimental mediums require proof they work. The corporate social strategist is constantly being challenge as they grasp more budgets to prove their efforts and teams are making a difference.  In addition to proving these new mediums are worth the time spent, the corporate social strategist is being challenge by their peers in incumbent positions who may be giving up effort and budget to support social efforts.
  • Down markets put greater scrutiny on spending. As spending across the board reduces in a recession, focus on proving new efforts is required by all parties involved.  Those that can effectively measure improvements can make the business case they can truly obtain more budget.
  • The Corporate Social Strategist Must Develop Frameworks Now. Most corporations are already forming in the “Hub and Spoke” formation (see data) which means a small cross-functional team is helping a variety of business units.  Establishing a standard way of measuring now is important before corporations move into “Dandelion” where measurement strategy fragments into spokes.

[The seasoned professional provides executives with business metrics first. They know fans and followers aren't a business goal, but what you do with them is]


Yet, Measuring Social Media Is Challenging
While we learned that measurement is the key, we found (see data in slide 20) that 65% of corporations are using engagement data as the top used metric, with only 22% using product revenue as a metric.

  • Excess variety of data options, and disparate platforms. Due to the thousands of applications, dozens of social networks, and millions of combinations corporations are stymied by how to make sense of this disparate space.  In addition to the variety of choices to deploy, each has a different set of ways to measure from fans, engagement, followers and the like.
  • Technical limitations vast in a fast changing environment. As if the choices weren’t staggering enough, there are significant challenges to measuring.  Corporations are unable to apply web analytics tools on third party sites they don’t have ownership on, and therefore are often relegated to manually counting data, or relying on one of the 150 brand monitoring platforms to scrape it for them.
  • Hard to tie engagement to bottom and top line efforts. In addition to being a new program, understanding of this disruptive set of technologies causes friction.  Additionally, social media is frequently known for driving awareness (second to ads) through WOM then through customer engagement through interactions –yet rarely tied to transactions or ecommerce which often occur on a disparate platform.

Apply the Social Media “ROI Pyramid” In Your Measurement Strategy

The ROI Pyramid: Provide the right type of data to the right folks
(Above: First, recognize there are three types of role, all who need different types of information about your social business efforts)

The ROI Pyramid: Metrics that are often formulas comprised of data types
(Above: Secondly, understand the high level types of data they need in order to be actionable)

The ROI Pyramid: Examples of Metrics (Note there are many more than what's listed)
(Above: Finally, assemble this information using the metrics and creating formulas. The above are just examples, as customization within every corporation is required)

Matrix: Understand the Social Media ROI Pyramid

Who it’s for How to generate What no one tells you
Business Metrics Executives, and everyone else who supports them, which of course, is everyone. This is a roll up formula of Social Media Analytics. Use tracking software or referral traffic to infer how customer engagement moves down marketing funnel. Existing CSAT methods should also incorporate social channels, and measure a sample of sentiment from customer communities. Cost reduction is a formula based on reduced costs and time in these lower-cost channels. The pyramid is smaller at top as their are less metrics to give to busy executives. There’s really only three: increased top line, reputation, and reduced costs. Compare these lower cost channel to existing marketing efforts to get additional budget, and benchmark over time.
Social Media Analytics The Corporate Social Strategist and the internal stakeholders and internal clients (leaders of the ‘spokes’ in the hub and spoke model) This is a formula based on Engagement Data (the tier below), there are no industry standards, so pick one and benchmark over time We’ve identified there are 16 analytics, but there are many more in existence, you’ll have to create these formulas on your own
Engagement Data Those who are deploying social media: community managers, developers, designers, agency partners, IT. This data is already created by many social tools, and a variety of analytics are already available to gather this info from brand monitoring to the analytics provided by Facebook and Twitter and others. Don’t forget to include traditional web analytics. Read our research report on Social Marketing Analytics to learn about the existing formulas. Don’t ever give this to executives until you’ve first given them business metrics or expect many months focused on ‘more followers’ without a business purpose.

The ROI Pyramid: All Roles, Metrics, and Data Types
(Above: Here’s a single slide with all three columns of info on it which you can use as an instant reference)

Five Steps To Start Using the ROI Pyramid Now
Corporations must develop a standardized way to measure first based on business goals.  Next developing a standard way that the entire company and agency partners can think about measurement is key in 2011 as social business will fragment to every customer touchpoint.

  1. Start with a Business Goal in Mind. Expect significant challenges to occur if your social media efforts don’t have a business goal, so clearly you should first start with a purpose.  It’s easy to spot when this happens as the goal will be on getting ‘more fans and followers’ rather than moving the business needle forward. Start with a clear business goal and define ‘what success looks like’ or don’t start at all.
  2. Give the Right Data to the Right Roles. Not all roles require the same types of data, and be sure to give the right type of data to the right segment.  While all the formulas of the pyramid should be accessible by the corporation, understand the viewpoints needed from each vantage point.
  3. Frequency and Quantity of Data Varies in Pyramid Tiers. Recognize that executives need reports less frequently that the deployment teams, hence their size on the pyramid.  Also, there is more data needed at the bottom tiers than at the top, remember the top tiers are roll-up formulas from bottom tiers.
  4. Know the Customization of Formulas is Required. This industry lacks any form of standards, so don’t wait years for an industry wide formula to appear as it likely won’t even apply directly to your business needs.  Invest the time to create the social media analytics needed to support your business goals now, which you should expect will take massaging over a period of time.
  5. Benchmark Over Time and Cascade to All Spokes. The specific numbers aren’t as important as the trend lines over months, quarters, and years, yet in order to obtain these, you must start now.  Looking at how these numbers trend over time will provide more insight to the teams involved.

I look forward to hearing how you implement this framework in your measurement efforts, let’s open up the discussion in the comments below, please share this with your teams, agencies, partners, and staff. Thanks to Christine Tran and Asha for design help. Feel free to use these slides, flickr images, just provide attribution to Altimeter Group.

Posted in Matrix, Social Analytics, Social Media, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

Altimeter Report: Social Commerce, How Brands Are Generating Revenue in Social Media, by @lcecere

Categories: Altimeter, Social Commerce, Social Media MeasurementPosted on November 2nd, 2010

I’m frequently asked “What’s the top challenge the corporate social strategist is struggling” and over and over, ROI comes up very high. To tackle this challenge head on, Altimeter has conducted a research project to find out how companies are connecting social technologies to the overall buying process as well as analyzing how they increase revenues for brands.

In conjunction with our recent conference on Social Commerce, we’ve now published the findings from interviewing top social commerce vendors and brands that are connecting commerce with social media. Our lead researcher analyst on this project is Lora Cecere who stems from Gartner and AMR and stems from Supply Chain Management, her and I will be doing a no-cost webinar to discuss these findings, I hope you join us.

This report is intended for you to use, share, and spread, under creative commons, feel free to embed it on your own blog, comment on it, and discuss. I look forward to hearing your feedback.


Rise of social_commerce_final

View more documents from lora cecere.


Related Links:

Posted in Altimeter, Social Commerce, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

Enhancing Net Promoter Score (NPS) with Total Social Customer Value (TSCV)

Categories: Matrix, Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on June 20th, 2010

Net Promoter Score has served the industry very well as the standard in satisfaction intention, and can now be enhanced by adding explicit customer satisfaction data, influence and customer reviews already on the web.

NPS, a Industry Standard Before the Social Web
There’s no better way to measure customer satisfaction and intention to refer than the Net Promoter Score.  In fact, this simple mechanism asks consumers  on a 0 to 10 rating scale:

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating)

NPS ,while effective at capturing the intention of advocacy, does not measure actual advocacy or detractions that occur in the social web.  As a result it’s difficult to capture the entire ‘net’ experience as the social web has demonstrated.

Now The Social Web Provides New Data Sources
The social web actually records customers making explicit ratings, rankings, recommendations or warnings about products in services, I’ve given some pragmatic reasons on why this is important.  You can find these reviews in Amazon, Twitter, Plancast, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and beyond.  In particular, the social web allows brands to actually measure  three new types of public data sources:

  1. Customer Satisfaction: Customers can now provide ratings, reviews, and other critiques in online review sites.
  2. Influence:  Not all customers are created equal, in fact some customers have have great breadth of reach (like Celebrities on Twitter) or have depth in knowledge (expert blogger in your market).
  3. Referral Activity: No need to ask “how likely” they are to refer, you can see them do it live.

Get Accurate, Measure the Total Social Customer Value (TSCV)
Companies must value both the total customer satisfaction as well as influence and advocacy behaviors in order to provide a holistic example of the modern customer.

Matrix:  Know Your Total Social Customer Value with 6 Factorials

Attribute Why it’s important Data Location How you should measure What no one tells you
Net Promoter Score This is the mainstay of customer satisfaction measurement and shouldn’t go away. It’s easily understood, well documented, and is a useful metric to overall ‘referral intention’. (Intention doesn’t measure actual behavior, just the likelehood you would) Support exit surveys, primary research surveys, work with Satmetrics, the owners of this methodology 1-10 Referral score: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating) This is the standard default measurement, yet needs additional factorials to represent the modern customer.
Influence (Absolute) To determine if a customer is influential to others, such as celebrities, top bloggers, analysts and media. This doesn’t necessarily mean however they are trusted by your specific market. There are a variety of secondary sources such as brand monitoring firms, like Buzzlogic, Radian6, as well as reputation management systems like Rapleaf. Your PR firm will have this list of absolute influencers, and their Twitter/blog/RSS numbers are good indicators Total possible reach, frequency of publication. These large influencers can cause mainstream media to shift attention, and will impact SEO, but don’t expect your actual consumers to trust them as much as they trust their peers. Assume high scoring at this level is towards the wider part of the funnel and may influence the lower elements.
Influence (Relative) These are individuals that are ‘experts’ in your particular market. While they may not have mainstream appeal, they may influence consumers directly. For example, bloggers that write a dedicated blog to your market, or super reviewers that provide detailed reviews about your products in online sites Online communities, Technorati data, and brand monitoring firms Unlike Absolute Influence, we’re looking for depth –not breadth of ability. Look for how detailed, knowledgeable and how much they engage with prospects and consumers. This measurement must be factored into the overall formula as they have direct influence during the decision making stage in lower funnel.
Advocacy (Intention) Data that indicates a prospect is ‘willing’ to purchase, but has not yet. The difference here is that they do so in public. Wish lists, shopping carts, or intention based data sources like Plancast, Facebook Events, Tripit, Dopplr. This data is difficult to get, as it’s currently not aggregated. Expects Social CRM systems to emerge that will help to assemble all this data around a single profile. Intention data is has high potential and therefore value, but low accuracy. Expect to factor in the chance that individuals will not move to the next stage, so conduct weighted averages here on probability.
Advocacy (Purchase, or Post Purchase) This is the most key measure, as it measures when customers actually explicitly share with others that they have purchased a product, and may have posted an opinion, influencing others. A variety of locations like Twitter, review sites, blogs, and social networks. See how vertical based review sites are emerging like GDGT, where consumers share their technology products with their peers, influencing purchase behavior. Since you’ve already factored in their influence from above, you’ll add sentiment and accuracy. The key that most marketers don’t realize is that here’s the opportunity to be proactive. If there are positive reviews, figure out how to broadcast them to other channels, see how Bazaarvoice and Zuberance help brands with this. For negative reviews, the company can contact the negative reviewed to provide updates to service or product and request a second review.
Referral Activity The absolute measure if a single individual or community has caused others to buy. Referral codes in eCommerce systems, or surveys at point of sale, or special tracking tools from existing web analytics tools (cookies, 1X1 pixels, etc) Provide advocates with referral codes, so they can encourage their friends to buy, or special tracking features to ensure an accurate measurement. The key is to look for the path of least resistance among the social channels to identify where referral activity flows smoothes
SUM Total Social Customer Value attempts to measure the entire value of customer satisfaction, influence, and advocacy in both intention and historical data types While still early, expect this data to be collected into a social CRM system, then be exported to business intelligence software systems like SAS, Qlikview, Oracle, SAP, Microstrategy, and others Adding all these factorials will develop a more accurate view of social customers While early and mainly theory, I know of a few brands that are attempting to scrap this data together and glue it together. Expect a new analytics agency to emerge that will help aggregates this.

How To Use This Formula
The above matrix is a formula to develop your Total Social Customer Value (TSCV) yet will require modification and customization for each company, as different verticals have higher rates of customer social activity.  For example, technology, consumer product goods, and hospitality industry have a high degree of customer interactions –while component parts or specialized industries like tractors may not. You’ll need to develop a formula, use your social CRM system to track this and eventually use business intelligence software that can calculate this.

Total Social Customer Value = Net Promoter Score times Absolute Influence times Relative influence times Advocacy Intention times Advocacy at Point of purchase or post purchase times actual referrals

or

TSCV=  NPS  x Ia x Ir x Ai x Ap x R

Challenges to this Methodology
My goal was to define how measurement of customer satisfaction, influence and advocacy have changed due to the social web, yet there are few challenges to this methdology, which I’m happy to point out as an industry analyst:  1) This is new thinking and not everyone will get it.  2) Data is disparate and scattered among the disparate web 3) It’s more complex, and requires more time to put together, however the accuracy of the data will be higher.  4) Social CRM is still very early, and aggregating all data into a single area is a challenge.

Relevant Research:  Social Analytics and Social CRM
We’ve conducted research and published the following reports on Social Marketing Analytics (slides and recording, and the report) with 3-ex Forrester/Jupiter analysts Social CRM Report, with my colleague Ray Wang which will be the system to house all of this data, along with intelligent filtering and workflows.  You’ll need to know more about the formulas to amend NPS, as well as understand the new processes and technologies in Soical CRM which will capture a single user profile regardless of where they publish online.

Praise to the Net Promoter Score
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we do away with NPS, it still serves a vital function to customer satisfaction, and respect the value it’s brought to the industry.   There’s no other single question that can yield so much intention data, It’s a fantastic tool and has advanced the industry, and I know we can build on top of it to reflect the moden web.  I’m thankful for the work that Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix have done to create Net Promoter Score, and I fall into the promoter score as  ’9′ on the scale, as I’m here recommending you use this methodology, with my additional caveats.

Posted in Matrix, Social Media, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

Slides and Recording: Social Marketing Analytics Research Findings

Categories: Altimeter, Social Media MeasurementPosted on June 10th, 2010

After launching the research report ‘Social Marketing Analytics‘ (also embedded below), my co analyst (also from Forrester) John Lovett and I recorded this webinar yesterday that had over 800 registrants and 300+ attendees during the hour long presentation.

In the spirit of ‘Open Research’ we encourage you to use, share, and adopt our research framework to improve your work, abiding by our creative commons licensing of attribution and non-commercial usage.


Social Marketing Analytics: A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media, by John Lovett and Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group on Vimeo.
Above: Webinar recording going over the framework, and our additional insights from the research

Social Marketing Analytics

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Above: The accompanying slides, which can also be downloaded from Slideshare.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Above: The Research Report that started it all, which you can also download and see nitty gritty details

Recognizing the Ecosystem
This was completed with the community in mind, and we’d like to thank the following folks for their contrabutions:

Our co-authors
Charlene Li, Eric T. Peterson, Christine Tran

Our Ecosystem Contributors
Lisa Barone, Connie Benson, David Berkowitz, Blake Cahill, Adam Coomes, Monica Cordina, Bill Gassman, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Rob Key, Justin Kistner, Scott Lake, Matt Langie, Alex Mann, Louis Marascio, John McCory, Aaron Neumann, Katie Delahaye Paine, Sean Power, Chris Ramsey, Boaz Ronkin, Shiv Singh, R “Ray” Wang, Alan Webber, Jennifer Zeszut

Vendor Contributors
Alterian SM2, Biz360, Cymfony, Lithium, Omniture, Radian6, Scout Labs, Social Radar StatsIT, SWIX, Trackur, Trendrr, LugIron, Visible Technologies, Webtrends

Next Steps
If you’re a social analytics technology or service provider (brand monitoring, web analytics, business intelligence) and want to speak with John and I, we can help apply this framework to your business. If you’re an analytics professional and need help applying this to making it your own, please contact us: john.lovett at webanalyticsdemystified.com or jeremiah at altimetergroup.com.

Related Research From Altimeter Group:

We will continue to publish our research findings available to the public, please support us by spreading it to others.

Thanks for attending, I’ll be announcing some more research in the coming weeks.

Posted in Altimeter, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics (Altimeter Group & Web Analytics Demystified)

Categories: Altimeter, Analysis, Social Media, Social Media MeasurementPosted on April 22nd, 2010

A Collaborative Effort Between Two Firms:  Web Analytics Demystified and Altimeter Group
It’s just been over a month since we published the Social CRM Research paper (over 36k views on slideshare) and we’re continuing our cadence here at Altimeter Group of publishing widely available reports under the spirit of Open Research.  This time, it’s different, we’ve aligned with who I feel are the smartest team of web analytics minds in the space, John Lovett (ex-Forrester analyst) and Eric Peterson (ex-Jupiter analyst) both of the Web Analytics Demystified firm.  Stemming from Altimeter founder Charlene Li’s (ex-Forrester Analyst) framework, we co-developed this framework, and put our collective minds to work on measuring the rapidly changing social media marketing space.   This self-funded research effort resulted in a thorough methodology as we interviewed over 40 ecosystem influencers.

Interested in learning more?  Attend the no-cost webinar by registering.

Industry Challenge:  ”I can’t measure social media ROI”
Marketers around the globe are ranging from toe dipping to jumping all the way into the social marketing space –yet most lack a measurement yardstick.  While experiments can fly under the radar for a short term, without having a measurement strategy, you run the risk of not improving what you’re doing, justifying investments, and the appearance of being aloof to upper management.  To be successful, all programs (even new media) must have a measurement strategy, and we’ve done just that.

Social Marketing Analytics Framework

Finally, A Measurement Framework Based on Business Objectives
If you’re familiar with the Altimeter frameworks of developing a social strategy based on business objectives, then you’re in good shape, as this research report is the natural extension of the business objectives we put forth:

  • Dialog: involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its own
  • Advocacy: activation of evangelism, word of mouth, and the spread of information through social technologies
  • Supporting: customers may self support each other, or companies may directly assist them using social technologies.
  • Innovation: The business objective of innovation is an extraordinary byproduct of engaging in social marketing activity.

Our framework is a common denominator, so if you’re already measuring converted leads, or actual sales from social media, you’re already a leg up! In this meaty report, we hope you’ll share with your marketing and analytics team, and use the actual KPI formulas to create your own cookbook.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

A Nod To the Community Spirit
We’re putting a big stake out there, in order to further the industry to come together around a common set of KPIs and metrics, but we realize we don’t know all the answers.  In the spirit of Open Research, we want this to be an open framework (we’ve even licensed this under Creative Commons) to customize it and make your own for non-commercial reasons with attribution.  If you’ve ideas on how to improve it such as new KPIs, vendors, or approaches, we’re listening, and will incorporate and improve this community body of knowledge for all to benefit.

Related Links
I’ll link to others that extend the conversation (even critical reviews), feel free to embed the slideshare on your own site.

Posted in Altimeter, Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Posted in Social Media Measurement | View Comments

View Comments

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.

    Posted in Social Media, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

    View Comments

    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.

    Posted in Community Manager, Community Marketing, Social Media Measurement | View Comments

    View Comments

    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.

    30 Days Traffic on Web Strategy Blog
    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.

    30 Days Traffic on Web Strategy Blog
    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

    Posted in MicroMedia, Social Media Measurement, Web Usage | View Comments

    « Older Entries
    site design by studionashvegas proudly powered by WordPress