Category: Social Media

Measuring Blogs and Consumer-Generated Media

Blog Measurement Social Media

The first afternoon session at the Institute for Public Relations Measurement Summit is entitled: How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media. Panelists include Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, Kami Huyse from My PR Pro and Todd Parsons, BuzzLogic. Donald McLagan from Compete, Inc. is a late addition. His firm monitors (with permission) every click online for 2 million people. Katie Paine is moderating, and she’s something of a legend. This is the first time I’m getting to hear her or meet her, and I guess we’re going to dinner at her house tonight. It’s a really big house.

Shel says blogs and social media aren’t really about measurement, but instead are about conversations. They are “push” media, and the real value of what’s happening is their two-way nature and the ability to listen.

Should there be standards for measuring social media?

Todd sees standardization as a weapon that kills progress, and that with the speed of change with new products being introduced so rapidly any standard is always somewhat behind the times. For instance, Kami said she used to count her comments on her blog, but now she often gets comments through Twitter, so it’s difficult to get your arms around these fragmented data.

Don said MySpace has lost 16 percent of attention in the last year, while Facebook has more than doubled.

How can you get ROI for social media? Don says ROI can be complex and doesn’t just come from the web (e.g. Auto sites get lots of traffic but almost no one buys a car online.) Todd says it is hard to make the value of social media explicit, so he tries to find some simpler means. He works with a job site that he describes as a mash-up between Monster and eHarmony.com. People listening to people they trusted (through social media) were 45 percent more likely to sign up for the paid service. They went from spending money on Google Adwords to spending less on “influencer relations.”

Katie asked, “Is it easier to measure ROI for social media than it is for PR and advertising?” Kami says it seems so, and Todd agrees. There is just so much data available that you can’t get with counting eyeballs in advertising and PR. You can make connections that simply aren’t possible in traditional media.

A question was asked about people with seven tabs open in Firefox, each refreshing regularly via AJAX, which gives an overstated estimate of how engaged people are. Kami says she hasn’t seen time spent on site change much with adoption of Firefox.

Shel had some interesting anecdotes of what he has found through his blog:

  • Having a big picture on a post increases time on site by 34 seconds
  • A medium-sized picture is only worth an additional 14 seconds
  • If he has two links in a row to a site he wants to feature, it’s much more likely someone will go there. Adding a third link in a row makes people tend to stay on Shel’s blog because it confuses them; they can’t decide which to click, so they don’t click any.

Shel changed his blog name from Naked Conversations to Global Neighbourhoods because people Googling the term “Naked” who were looking for something very different from social media. He also told the story of the guy who was on the Alaska Airlines flight who took a picture of the hole in the side of the plane, who had almost no traffic on his blog previously, but whose picture ended up on national TV. People who are not in the top 2 million blogs in Technorati today can suddenly be incredibly influential.

Shel says we haven’t been doing this long enough to have “best practices.” People need to get comfortable with experimentation, be responsible in what they do, avoid standardization. “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.”

He also told of how when hot movies open, what happens is that one kid goes in and sends a text message 15 minutes into the show to all of his friends, and if he says “sucks” it doesn’t matter how much the studio spent on promotion. It ripples through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and the movie is toast.

As Shel says, “We are in a transformational time.” And for those who are concerned about getting into blogging from a corporate perspective, he says “It’s much better to be shouted at than shouted about.”

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Weekend Reading

Some links to stories and posts I’ve found interesting:

Later: Check out Mike Musgrove’s Washington Post article on his first few days in Facebook, too.
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What’s your answer?

I think Daniel is right when he tells his fellow REALTORS that the fate of their business ten years (or less) from now depends on their answer to this question:

Are You on Facebook?

Click the link above to read his whole post, which is quite thoughtful. Also, check out his take on how internet marketing is going to change the real estate industry.

Daniel’s posts indicate that he’s thinking about this in the right way: instead of bemoaning how technology is undermining your current business model, it’s much more productive to look for ways to use those technologies to add value for your customers.

By abandoning its TimesSelect pay model for a portion of its content, the New York Times showed that it is understanding this reality.

In the customary SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis, it’s easy to fall into focusing on the T’s. But if you don’t take advantage of the O’s, that itself will be a long-term T for your business, because your competitors will find the opportunities presented by social media tools.

Given what so many businesses spend on advertising, why would you not take advantage of the free stuff?

Granted, it takes your time for interaction and engagement with your customers and prospects, but isn’t that what you do right now by phone and in person?

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12-Step Social Media Program for PR Pros

NOTE: With the founding of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), this post has been incorporated into the curriculum as Social Media 101. Click the link above to learn more.

The Arthur W. Page Society annual conference this week was certainly eye-opening for me. I wrote here about how much I was anticipating this conference, and if anything it exceeded my expectations.

The feedback on our social media panel was positive, too, and it’s been great having several of the Page members “friend” me in Facebook and also join the Page Society group.

One thing I said during our panel was that

for communications professionals, being unfamiliar with social media tools borders on malpractice.

Think about it: Technorati tracks about 100 million non-spam blogs, and MySpace has more than 100 million active users. That’s also roughly the number of video streams served by YouTube each day. And Facebook, with 41 million members, has added a million a week, every week this year. This is mainstream activity in our society for ordinary people; we who communicate for a living on behalf of our organizations certainly need to understand the implications of these media. Far from “costing our employers dear” by involvement in Facebook, we actually cost them much more if we don’t know about all of the new means of communicating; not just “getting our message out” but actually engaging in conversations with customers, suppliers and employees.

Please note that you can take every one of these steps without spending a dime and without involving your IT department. Procrastination is your chief enemy. Take one step each day (starting by reading the rest of this post as step 1), and within two weeks you will have a good preliminary familiarity with social media. Then you’ll be able to start thinking creatively about how social media can be used on behalf of your company or clients. And you’ll be aware of how those with agendas contrary to your organization’s may be using social media.

So, with apologies to 12-step programs in which people have banded together to battle addictions, here is my 12-step social media program public relations professionals can join.

  1. Admit that you have a problem. See above. Unfamiliarity with social media is a serious gap for PR professionals.
  2. Browse some blogs, both to get a feel for the blog culture and to learn how blogs work. This backgrounder in Wikipedia will be helpful. As for blogs you should explore, any of those listed in my blogroll (at right) are good places to start.
  3. Check out TheNewPR/Wiki. This is a great resource for white papers, lists of CEO blogs, sample corporate blogging policies, blog directories, business podcast listings, and much more.
  4. Go watch three “Plain English” videos: RSS in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English and Social Networking in Plain English. These will be among the best few minutes you’ll invest in your social media education.
  5. Get an RSS reader/aggregator. If you use Safari for Macintosh or Internet Explorer 7 for Windows, you have an RSS reader built into your browser already. Google Reader is a great free online RSS aggregator. If you have a laptop and would like to be able to read your feeds when you’re not connected to the Net (like when you’re on the bus), you might want to get a standalone reader like NetNewswire (Mac) or NewsGator (Windows), or one of the Attensa products (they’re free).
  6. Subscribe to some blogs. You can subscribe to mine here, or as you are checking out others, look for the RSS or XML links, or for the universal feed logo.
  7. Get a free Gmail or Yahoo! email account. You’re about to start actively engaging in social media as you follow the next steps in the AAse program, and using a non-work email for blogging and commenting is a good practice.
  8. Over 90 percent of blog readers are “lurkers” and aren’t contributing to the conversation. That’s fine, but your next step is to comment in some blogs. If you find the information on a blog post helpful, say so in the comments. If you don’t understand something or have questions, ask them in the comments.
  9. Get a Facebook account and a MySpace profile. I’ve devoted a whole section of this blog to business-related uses for Facebook. I expect I will be writing a bunch more in the future. If you subscribe to my blog by RSS you’ll get these sent directly to your reader automatically. Or if you follow me on Twitter (see below) you’ll get more cryptic alerts. If you friend me, you’ll see some of the Facebook groups I’ve joined, or if you join my Professional Contacts group we can have conversations about social media within Facebook, and I can use that group to send special alerts to you through the Message All Members function. Once you’re in Facebook, spend some time exploring applications. Find high school and college classmates. Upload some photos and videos, and tag yourself and some friends in them. Then watch your News Feed and your mini-feed, and begin to see some of the networking power. I much prefer Facebook over MySpace, but I still need to spend some time with MySpace because so many other people do. It’s too big to ignore. And especially if you work for a company that needs to reach a younger demographic, it’s too big for you to ignore, too. Explore a variety of social networking sites like this so you understand their similarities and differences.
  10. As Sylvester’s prey would say, “Twy Twitter.” Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that lets you follow the actions of others and lets them follow you. Posts are limited to 140 characters. You can get alerts on your cell phone by text message, through your Twitter home page, or both. And you can send “Tweets” by cell phone, too. Here’s my Twitter account. As I’ve said previously, Twitter could be a great way to activate a crisis communications group.
  11. Share videos and photos with the broader world. YouTube and Flickr are the market leaders in these areas. In Facebook you can share photos and video with just your friends. YouTube and Flickr make it possible for anyone to access and share these digital resources.
  12. Get your own blog. WordPress.com is free. So is Blogger. I prefer the former, and use it for this blog. One of the main benefits of WordPress is the Akismet spam protection; I’ve been protected from more than 18,000 spam comments in the last year. You can incorporate your YouTube videos (as well as others you find interesting) in your blog, and likewise can embed photos, like this one of my family at my in-laws’ 50th anniversary:

12-step social media program

And in WordPress.com you can make your blog private if you want, and not available for search engines or even visible without your permission. So you can experiment without worrying about other people seeing your blog, if you just want to explore.

But if you follow step 12 and create a public blog you will be doing the social media equivalent of the 12th step of Alcoholics Anonymous:

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I’m not promising spiritual awakening as a result of getting involved in social media, although here’s a blog with spiritual awakening potential. But as you learn about social media and its implications for PR and corporate communications, engagement in the discussion through your blog, or by inviting your co-workers to join social networking sites like Facebook, is a way to”carry this message” about social media to other professional communicators. As the cutesy cliché puts it, this is how you can “pay it forward.”
Members of addiction-fighting 12-step programs find it necessary to meet regularly to support, encourage and challenge each other to stay sober. By following the 12 steps of the AAse Social Media Program for PR Pros you will have this built-in support network for continued learning and growth.

But you may find you need a new kind of 12-step group to help with your Facebook addiction.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to Ma.gnoliaAdd to TechnoratiAdd to FurlAdd to Newsvine

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Facebook Tip: Don’t Be Just a Number

One of Facebook‘s limits is that with more than 40 million users, and a million added each week, it’s sometimes hard to find a person searching just by name.

Facebook tip don't be just a number
For example, last night I met Adam Brown from Coca Cola (with whom I am participating as part of a panel today at the Arthur W. Page Society conference.) I went back to my room and wanted to “friend” him, but when I did the search by name for “Adam Brown” I got this result:

Name number facebook

I don’t know exactly how many Adam Browns Facebook has, but it’s more than 500. Finding him would be an arduous process if I had to click through, screen-by-screen, viewing a handful at a time. Fortunately I was able to use the search within other networks function to narrow it to the Coca Cola network and send him the invitation. (By the way, the Coca Cola network has 915 members.)

Then last night I got a friend invitation from Mari Smith, and after I had accepted I saw that she had added an application called Profile Web Address, which lets you create a more memorable URL so people can find you on Facebook.

Which is more memorable? This:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=777087888

or this:

http://profile.to/leeaase

To ask is to answer, isn’t it?

This application isn’t that essential for someone like me because my name is unique enough. When you Google Lee Aase, you get my blog as the first result. When you search for Lee Aase in Facebook, you get four results (one of which is my Professional Contacts group.)

But the reason I added this application anyway is so someone else doesn’t take my name, so I would encourage everyone in Facebook to add this application and stake your claim. It would be great if profile.to would create a similar application for groups, too. That would enable organizations to create official groups within Facebook and not have them lost in less relevant results that may also use the organization’s name.

If you have a common name like the Browns and Smiths listed above, and if you have a Yahoo or Gmail account, you might want to use that as your Profile Web Address. That way, when you’re meeting people and they want to know how to connect with you, you could tell them, “I’m joesmith23@gmail.com or profile.to/joesmith23.”

When Facebook profiles become available in Google (which should be in a couple of weeks), it may make this tool less relevant. I may be able to search for “Adam Brown Coca Cola” and have his profile show up on top. But for now, I think this is a worthwhile application.

And this is why I typically accept friend requests from people who read my blog, because by seeing what they are doing and the applications they’re adding, I learn things I can apply myself. And I’m still about 4,900 behind Scoble.

For tips and background on using Facebook in business or in your non-profit or not-for-profit organization, click here or the Facebook Business tab above.

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