Measuring Social Media

Social media metrics are all the rage, but I still think people are asking the wrong questions. More often than not, I get asked how to measure the effectiveness of a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, or even a blog. The problem is not in measuring those tools, but in what to measure. Most of the time, we focus on the tool, and not the strategy or the thing that we're trying to effect.

For instance, the other day I was asked by one of our departments if our health plan could use Facebook. My response was "Sure, but why?" There is this overwhelming sense that we need to be using social media, but no real reason why. Without fully understanding the why a tool gets used, the measure of effectiveness is always going to fall short of usability.

I had the privilege of interviewing Jim Sterne, an international and seasoned veteran in the relationship between marketing and customer interactions. For 25 years he's been working with companies, helping them measure the value of the Internet as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. He's written six books, the latest being Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. You can listen to my podcast interview here.

Sterne reinforces the need for having solid business objectives. If a marketer fails to start with a clearly defined problem they're trying to solve, or a quantifiable gain/achievement they're trying to make, then measuring social media tools as a means to achieve those objectives is going to be difficult at best, and likely less actionable than you want.

All that said, I did ask Sterne what he thought was the single most important thing to look at when evaluating social media as a tool. He offers three things: 1) Did the tool help you to earn more? 2) Did the tool help you to spend less? 3) Did the tool make your customers happier? Though this sounds pretty basic, I have to agree that this approach is fundamentally the best. Social media doesn't have to be complicated, and it can be measured -- we just need to start with clearer objectives so we know what we're trying to measure.

Lastly, I asked Sterne who should own social media in the organization. You'll appreciate his answer in the podcast. But I'll hint at his response..."who owns the telephone?"

-- David Kinard, PCM

Going Viral

Though his book at times reads like a gripping novel, Adam Penenberg has written a roadmap for any marketer wanting to know more about how viral works, how to think viral, and why viral happens the way it does. Penenberg writes from the trenches as he provides the back story on how some of today's most successful viral companies started. But the podcast takes you deeper into how to make viral happen for your company.

Gripping is insufficient to describe Pennenberg's ideas. I am usually pretty good at taking notes while I am interviewing someone, but I was so enthralled in listening I found my notepad relatively blank after our twenty minute discussion. However, here's what I asked Adam -- you can listen to the answers in the podcast interview:

1. What is a viral loop?
2. Is this someting you create or something that just happens to you?
3. What is a viral coefficient and can you use them in real time to predict your viral success?
4. What is the difference, if any, between stickyness and viral?

And loads more....

-- David Kinard, PCM

Inbound Marketing -- Move from Megaphone to Hub

How do you transform a web site from a "one-t0-many" megaphone to a collaborative platform that engages your target community? That's one of the key questions -- and answers -- you'll find in the new book Inbound Marketing by author Brian Halligan, co-founder of Hubspot.com. I recently had the chance to interview him for the AMA podcast (listen here) and he's got a practical and knowledgeable perspective on moving from traditional broadcast marketing to what really works in today's consumer-driven marketplace.

Fundamentally, shopping has changed in the last five years, but many marketers have not yet caught on to this shift. If you look at the online presence for way too many companies, their sites are brochure-ware, listing their stuff in a way that makes sense to them. Even with all the knowledge, research, and consumer input we have at our fingertips today, marketers still are holding fast to the "I've built it so they should come" mantra that drove most of the last thirty years of marketing's efforts.

Today, however, consumer find their preferred products and services through HUBs -- web sites that have lots of ways in and connections to relevant and remarkable content. This is a simple, key difference that Halligan highlights in his book as one key to success. Your web site should have lots of connections (think a major airport versus a small town single-runway airport). Those connections are ways into the site -- whether they be from other flights, or different transportation means (think trains, buses, taxis, consumer-driven cars, etc). The point is there are lots of ways in, and once you're there, you are rewarded with great content.

It used to be said that content is king for the web. After listening to Brian, I think this is still true, but we have lost sight of what makes for good content. He suggests making it REMARKABLE. In other words, content that others will WANT to remark about in their own communication channels, or on your own site. Simply bragging about your stuff doesn't suffice. You may have achieved your keyword density, but you've deprived the reader of the ability to engage in a conversation.

Halligan's book, Inbound Marketing, reads like a user manual for how to generate leads in a world where the marketing rules have changed (see David Meerman Scott for those rules). Halligan provides very specific instructions on how to use popular social media channels, and how to set up your own efforts, measure them, and then try again. It's an easily accessible read for those who are just starting out to those who think they know everything but want a nice refresher.

He's got two pages of resources and tools he likes to use -- but in the interview he suggests using Website Grader to evaluate your site's HUB potential.

If you've read the book, or after listening to the interview, please let me know what you think. I'd enjoy hearing your opinion on Inbound Marketing.

-- David Kinard, PCM

Social Media Podcasts Now Available

If you haven't had a chance to stop by my Web site lately, you might want to. I've just uploaded new Podcast interviews that are going to help you with your social media strategy.

I recently spoke with Joel Comm, author of Twitter Power. We talk about how marketers can use Twitter as a marketing and business intelligence tool. It's now obvious that Twitter is no longer just a way for people to share what they're doing in 140-characters or less. Today, Twitter can be a real-time optic into consumer behavior, a trending tool, and is even used as a customer service channel.

Also new to my site are interviews with Justin Smith, author of The Facebook Marketing Bible, and Harry Gold of Overdrive Media. Both highly practical and tactical interviews.

-- David Kinard, PCM

Is There a Pathway to Social Media Celebrity?

I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at the celebrities of social media to try and see what has earned them this celebrity status. These are the people who have tens of thousands of people following them on Twitter (many well over the 100k mark), or those who have blogs everyone is referring to and commenting on.

So, I’ve been thinking about what the qualities are that these celebrities have or that their conversational feeds have. What creates stellar levels of hype around them? What I am seeing is that they are part of a larger ecosystem of four primary groups. Each part is symbiotic to the other – meaning that without one, the whole thing collapses. As well, I think that depending on which group you’re a part of determines if you’ll ever have celebrity potential.

Thus far, I’ve found there are four main ways that celebrities are created:

1. Content is the pivot point – usually.
It seems the social media ecosystem is really made up of four groups – Pushers: the aggregators and promoters of content; Creators: the originators of content; Consumers: the users of the content; and Transformers: those who see not the content, but the ecosystem as the means to an end. A more detailed profiling of the four groups would reveal greater distinctions, but suffice it to say that the primary commodity exchanged is content. The ecosystem thrives on the movement of content from one to another and the Creators, Pushers, and Consumers all live and die by it. However, the outlying Transformers do not participate in the ecosystem because of the content, but because it provides a framework for them to accomplish something else.

One example of this is Wil Wheaton (@wilw). Wil has a gigantic following but appears to use Twitter and his blog as a channel for his various streams of consciousness. Yes, his content is original, but I would submit that content is more for his own benefit – and we just get to be a part of it whereas a Creator is someone who creates for others to use and benefit from. For Wil, the ecosystem appears to be simply an outlet for his expressions. (As of this writing, Wil is ranked 12th with the most Twitter followers at 107k+.)

2. Quality does not equate status; freshness does.
I don’t deny that this is a nearly heretical statement to make, but not everyone who has a massive following is saying anything truly remarkable. Again, thinking of the four groups, those with the largest followings are typically Pushing other content.

Case in point, I was a bit disappointed when I started following Guy Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World. I hung in there for a month or so, but eventually dropped it from my reading list because I wanted Guy. I love reading his writing but what I got in his blog was other peoples’ content he thought was interesting.

And strangely, this is exactly what makes him so attractive to follow. Social media celebrity Chris Brogan wrote about this in a recent blog post noting that "the most “important” people (in at least the public business sense) I have ever met in my life have all asked me more about myself, and even with me trying hard to turn it around, they were gracious and interesting and still worked hard to know more about me than themselves.”

Now, even though the biggest of the big are not usually delivering messianic insights their key contribution is to scour the ecosystem for fresh perspectives and transmit that freshness out to the rest of us. Key to their celebrity status is their mutant ability to intimately understand the pulse of the ecosystem, find and vet content, then share it with everyone else.

3. It’s who knows you.
If you’ve read Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell you’ll instantly get this next element. Celebrities are connectors. Not only will they remember you, your name, and usually something about you after meeting, but they have the uncanny ability to do this same thing with exponentially more people than the average person while finding links between everyone and everything.

It seems that key to becoming a social media celebrity is being known by the Pushers. A good example of this is when Mashable mentioned @cspenn in an article.

Pete Cashmore (@mashable), even noted the marked increase in followers for @cspenn.

Now @cspenn has a long way to go before he hits true celebrity status as he only ranks with the 700th largest following on Twitter. However, the impact of being known by a Pusher is remarkable. Not only do you get a big bump, but if another Pusher happens to find your ideas fresh, then you’ve got more Pushers transmitting your content to the ecosystem.

4. The metric is relative.
Of course, someone reading this is saying, “Hold on a minute. There are those who are celebrities but exist in smaller ponds that exist outside of the mainstream.” And therein lies the challenge of qualifying what celebrity status is and isn’t. For the most part I’ve used followers as the basis for qualifying a social media celebrity. Tracking your followers is easily captured and most commonly used as a metric of status. Blogger and social media ROI guru Beth Kanter noted in a recent post that calculating your ROI “is a much broader concept than just doing the math.”

Certainly there is merit in noting that celebrity status can exist in different circles in highly meaningful ways. For instance, another way of looking at this is to compare winning Best Actor at the Oscars versus Best Leading Performance by a Leading Actor at the Tony Awards. Ben Daniels or Mark Rylance are highly acclaimed Broadway performers, but not part of the popular mainstream conversation.

However, I submit that celebrity status is a state of relative condition within portions of the ecosystem. If you consider the long tail curve, it appears at first that there are only a few who qualify for celebrity status. But if you were to examine detail within the tail I think you’d find that there are repeating patterns of the long tail curve supporting celebrity status within various niches.

So, what does all this have to do with increasing your ability to market for good? Well, I’ve tried to withhold a label of any sort that identifies whether it is good or bad to be a social media celebrity. But aside from that element, I wonder if there is an identifiable pathway to achieving celebrity? Are there gatekeepers to celebrity? If a cause could figure out this pathway, it is possible to gaining greater exposure to your issues? A huge number of Pushers got behind Twestival’s recent event for Charity: Water raising more than $250,000 in grassroots donations. . Is this replicable?

-- David Kinard, PCM

Obama's Social Media Strategy: Lessons Learned from the Campaign Trail

A new report has just been released from Agency Giant Edelman.

Says the report:

By examining the social media success of Obama’s campaign and understanding the ways that advocacy groups are incorporating these lessons into their own engagement programs, businesses can learn what is required to remain relevant in this new environment by retooling their communications efforts to successfully leverage social media.

Aside from a bit of a run on there, the report basically says that remaining relevant in this new environment requries a retooling of communications programs. Leveraging social media is a must -- even if your organization is just starting to figure it out.

Key to understanding the leverage points for Obama's campaign and his subsequent presidency is this guiding principle noted in the report (the bolding is my annotation):

Obama is already converting the President’s bully pulpit into a social pulpit, delivering a message that is designed to be taken up and spread by others, with the tools and techniques learned during his campaign. Instead of relying on the traditional one-way, top-down approach to communications, the incoming administration is harnessing the power of public engagement to influence the conversation across various spheres of cross-influence.

What is key here is that the entire communications platform is designed to be used by others. It's not managed, not controlled, but created with the expectation and hope that it will be used in a wide variety of other channels and by a wide variety of other people.

As you think through your own organization's communications programs, are you relying on top-down channels and mediums to deliver your important messages? Is your communications platform designed for public engagement or one-way only delivery?

What organizations do you see as doing a good job at this?

NOTE: I'll be interviewing Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz, and blogger at Foghound, tomorrow (Wednesday, 1/28) at 9 a.m. PST on my weekly radio show Marketing News Radio. You can listen LIVE and even CALL IN with your questions. Go to http://www.wsradio.com. We'll be discussing social media from the perspective of not why you should be using it, but how.

-- David Kinard, PCM

Brands Using Twitter

Former radio show guest Paul Dunay has compiled a list of various corporate brands that are using twitter to stay in touch with their communities. I especially like this this for two reasons:

1. Many corporate marketers today are decrying the inability of businesses to use and engage with social media tools like twitter to connect and nurture communities of followers. Well, this list puts that to rest. Big and small, they're on here and likely many more exist that just didn't make Paul's list (see the comments for proof).

2. This list makes it clear that non profits must use tools like twitter to tap into the communities that already exist around their cause. No excuses. If you're a member of the American Marketing Association, sign in to your Marketingpower.com account and listen to the member-only Webinar that I hosted back in December. We had three amazing marketers on the program (Toby Bloomberg, Julie Fleischer, and Greg Verdino) give very specific advice and perspective on social media and how it can be used in your own marketing. (And as a side note, all three of these people will be at Mplanet later this month.)

And for those who think that that using twitter may be a silver bullet, let me dissuade you from going down that path. Like any other social media tool, twitter is a mechanism that equips you to dialogue and communicate only. It won't create relevancy, it is a poor substitute for integrated communication plans, and it will never overcome an inauthentic voice.

-- David Kinard, PCM