Facebook/Twitter integration – I’m not a fan

Published May 5, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I realize that I’m a big late to this game, but as of this morning I stopped syncing my Twitter feed on Facebook. A few thoughts behind the decision:

  • My Twitter network and Facebook network are just not the same (yet). Random, techy Tweets were received a bit differently than they were on Twitter (i.e. a few of my friends commented, “what the hell are you talking about” in reference to a tweet on the new Google News Timeline).
  • That fact then led me to question each tweet. Will this information be valuable or interesting to my Facebook friends? Will they even understand what I’m talking about? In turn, I didn’t tweet as much because the answers consistently were ‘no’.

I will say that, for the period of time that my tweets did show as status updates on Facebook, the awareness of my presence greatly increased. Specifically, as more people commented on my statuses, I got a slew of friend requests. If anything, that just underscores the viral potential for marketers that Facebook’s newsfeed provides – the more people engaged around your brand, the larger the network that you’re getting exposed to. The critical factor is, of course, the content must be good (i.e. no boring tweets :).

Social media measurement explained

Published May 3, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I spend a lot of time thinking of measurement in the digital communications and marketing world. One issue that has always bothered me is that I’ve never seen anyone talk about, in one place, all the components of the full spectrum of online behavior. All online activity leaves a digital footprint, and the role of PR and marketing is essentially aiming to influence that footprint. But in order to measure the impact of that influence, it is critical that we consider every single way a person can “behave” online.

So what does the full picture of online behavior look like? It is a critical question because you first must understand all the ways one can measure online communications/marketing impact before you can successfully do it. So, I’ve spent some time thinking about this and have come up with the below list. I think that these four categories capture the comprehensive picture of online behavior.

Social media monitoring: Defined as the analysis of a defined ‘pool’ of social media content such as blogs and blog comments, forums, microinteractions/Twitter, etc.

  • Measurement/metrics include:
    • Keyword associations
    • Conversation and influencer identification
    • Quantity of social media content focused on your brand/product/service
    • Perception of your brand/product/service within that social media content
    • Share of voice/share of conversation
  • Important for:
    • Gaining high-level insights into the perception of a brand/product/service among online audiences
    • Mapping online influencers for particular topics/conversations
    • Determining share of voice among social media channels

Social action analytics: Defined as the analysis of social actions – online actions taken by customers based on their knowledge of the brand, message, or product – around specific pieces of content.

  • Measurements/metrics include:
    • Engagement: comment count, Twitter activity, votes, ratings, reviews, no. of friends/followers, no. of inbound links, URL click-throughs
    • Social intensity (quantity and frequency of social actions related to the brand)
    • Online influence, including both the influence of who you are reaching via social media activities and how influential you can help make your clients
  • Important for:
    • Measuring engagement around social objects and digital content – the heart of social media

Search analytics: Defined as the analysis of how and what people are searching on search engines, and how “findable” content is via organic search.

  • Measurement/metrics include:
    • Page rank of content
    • Share of search: the percentage of traffic volume being driven to your site vs. your competitors’ sites for one keyword
    • Identifying keywords that people use to find clients’ sites as well as internal site search
    • Awareness: search volume over time
  • Important for:
    • Keyword identification for SEO
    • Determining how well brands “own” topics
    • Determining how well content can be found naturally through organic search

Web Analytics: Defined as the capture and analysis of web site data.

  • Measurements/metrics include:
    • Site traffic
    • Unique visitors
    • Avg. time on site
    • Visitor Recency – how many times did visitors come back after day 1
    • Visitor Loyalty – number of times visitors have visited the site
    • Depth of visit (Pages/visit): How many pages long visitors’ visits through the site were?
  • Important for:
    • Determining impact of social media activities on clients’ web properties
    • Determining whether activities are driving higher-value traffic to clients’ web properties

Some are connecting the dots. Jeremiah Owyang sees the need for two types – web analytics and ‘community’ analytics. But what about search? And what about data on how your audience is acting upon specific social objects that you create (i.e. a video, a widget, etc.)? Some vendors are starting to catch on as well. Searchmetrics can integrate SEO page auditing, search ranking and web analytics data. Tealium can merge social media data with web analytics. Of course, both of these vendors leave out core components – social media (Searchmetrics) and search (Tealium).

Will the industry get there? Absolutely – it will just take some time. Marshall Sponder hit the nail on the head when he said that web analytics, search and social media are converging. Measurement vendors will eventually catch up. Last year seemed to be the year that social media/online metrics became well defined and understood amongst the industry. I predict 2009 will be the year that companies begin figuring out how to bring the various areas of measurement together to paint a comprehensive picture of how their digital communications and marketing activities are influencing the digital footprint.

Data visualization: a key element to digital storytelling

Published March 24, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Check out my blog post over at Bite’s blog, BiteMarks:

http://blog.bitepr.com/2009/03/23/data-visualization-a-key-element-to-digital-storytelling/

Applying ’social’ to market intelligence

Published March 2, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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One of my big focuses right now at work is to apply social media and other web technologies to internal account processes to help my teams be more efficient and do their job better.  For me  and every other communications professional out there, the media coverage monitoring process can be a daunting task.  Not only do you need to actively read tens and hundreds of media publications and blogs on a daily and weekly basis in order to be fully aware of industry trends, but increasingly you need to know what’s being said about your clients in every social media channel.

So I had an idea. Why don’t you turn every single coverage/blog/social media search you’d ever want to do on a daily basis and aggregate them into one dashboard using a RSS aggregator tool.  Obviously using RSS aggregators for subscribing to all the relevant blogs you should be reading (and even mainstream media targets) is not a new idea by any means.  However, my thought was to take it to the next level.  Why can’t you pipe in feeds for all Google News and Google Blog searches you should be doing on a daily basis in order to keep up on what’s being written about your clients and their competitors; what about subscribing to Twitter searches for specific keywords in order to know exactly when people are having conversations of relevance to your clients; and of course, make sure you subscribe to every single media outlet you should be reading.  The result would be a comprehensive market intelligence dashboard that pushes to you every bit of relevant content that you need to know in real-time.

Once you aggregate all your RSS feeds, the next desired step would be to add a social element to the dashboard so you can quickly share important articles/blogs/tweets to your team members. Sure you could always copy and paste URL’s into an email and send it off, but that involves extra steps and time.

The answer (as of now) is Google Reader.  Google Reader not only is a highly capable and functional RSS aggregator, but it provides a great social aspect to it.  The service allows you to select specific people that you’d like to share articles with  (so long as they have a Google Reader account) and you can choose to write special notes with specific articles that you share.  So you can create a network of Google Reader friends comprised of your team members and transform the market intelligence gathering process into a more efficient, collaborative team activity.  Also, you can export your RSS subscriptions into one file and upload it into a new Google Reader account, so your team members can easily set up identically organized accounts.  Here are some screen shots from one that I set up.

Market intelligence dashboardMarket intelligence dashboard
Sharing an article

Sharing an article

Shared articles from my team members

Shared articles from my team members

I won’t kid myself – PR professionals and marketers may have been doing this for years – but if not, I hope this was helpful. And in the spirit of always seeking ways to improve, are there other sites/services that are better at this than Google Reader? What do you use?

Word of Mouth (WOM) and analytics: A match made in heaven

Published February 2, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
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We live in a reputation economy, right? So why do so many businesses keep thinking customer interactions end when the phone hangs up or the customer physically leaves the store?  Word of mouth (WOM) marketing, as Glenn Gabe writes, “is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business.”  Conversely, it also can be one of the most powerful ways to inhibit growth of your business.  I’m currently dealing with an issue with New York Sports Club that made me think about just how clueless some managers are in today’s reputation economy, and given my interest in data analytics, how simple data could help foster positive WOM.

The Incident

I’ve been a member of NYSC for almost 2.5 years. Like many other members, I have recurring payments set up to charge my debit card each month so I don’t have to remember to manually pay.  For 2.5 years, there hasn’t been an issue and my bill has been paid on time every single month.  However, last week when entering the gym, they told me that my account had been canceled.  Apparently, my recurring payments had stopped and I hadn’t paid my bill in 3 months.  I’ll spare you the details, but not only did I have to pay the 3 months that I missed (which is obviously fair, but very annoying considering I had thought I was paying the whole time), but I had to pay a $50 fee because my payments were late.

Now, considering a) I have never been late with a payment in 2.5 years, b) I was never contacted to be notified that my payments had stopped, and c) my bank said they never received requests for payments during the 3 months nor did my debit card expire, I was at least expecting the manager to be sympathetic to my situation and offer to drop the late fee.  Instead, I encountered an unsympathetic and standoff-ish manager who refused to even acknowledge that NYSC may have been at fault.  The manager offered to “see if he could” cut the late fee in half, which frankly was unacceptable to me.

The Implications

Any smart business manager must recognize that in a reputation economy, every single customer touch point has to leave the customer satisfied. If not, you risk a bad experience permiating through that customer’s social graph and influencing other current or potential customers.  To date, I’ve spent over $2700 at NYSC if you add up all my months of membership, and it’s likely that I’ll spend thousands more so as long as I live in Manhattan.  I certainly don’t have social networks as big as some, but even with my modest 200+ followers on Twitter and small blog readership, let’s say I have the influence to sway 10 people in NYC who are currently looking to join a gym to NOT choose NYSC.  Let’s also assume that the average NYSC member is a member for 5 years.  That means that my negative experience has caused NYSC to lose over $55,000 in potential revenue (and that’s obviously a rudimentary, conservative cost analysis).

In fact, taking another cue from Glenn Gabe, I wanted to see what type of online reputation NYSC had. Alas, in a simple search for “New York Sports Club,” a consumer complaints site appears on the FIRST PAGE of Google results.  What’s more, all the complaints are about recurring payments issues!  I’m obviously not the only member experiencing it.  ALERT TO NYSC: This despicable area of customer service is generating terrible WOM for you.

The Lesson (and where analytics fits in)

This incident got me thinking of how analytics could be used to foster positive WOM.  What if every business had an analytics tool that identified “valued customers.”  As mentioned above, I’ve been a member for 2.5 years, have paid every month on time without issue, and I’m willing to bet that my actual visits to the gym are above the average.  I think that makes me a valued customer.  If only the manager could see this data when looking up my account, perhaps he’d be more inclined to trust me that it wasn’t my fault, offer to drop the late fee, and as a result, make me a very happy customer that would go off and recommend NYSC to every person I know who wants to join a gym.

I’m not saying customers should be treated differently.  I am saying that in a reputation economy, businesses better damned be sure they know who their best customers are and be ready to energize them through recognition and great customer service.  Analytics offer the power to do this.

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Social media as the amplifier

Published January 26, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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There are countless debates surrounding social media. Does social media deliver ROI?  If so, how do you measure it? Should it even be called social media?

I’m not going to try to answer those questions in this post. Instead, I’m going to state an observation I had today: social media is the amplifier for your marketing campaign.

I’ve spent the day reading as much as I can about search engine optimization (it was the first Sunday without NFL football since September, cut me some slack) and discovered some fascinating insights.  Most notably, social media is an integral component to amplifying your SEO strategy.  Hubspot had a great post on this fact. Blogging creates more inbound links, increases keyword density, expands reach, and helps create fresh and consistent content. Other social media channels further expand reach by distributing content and increases the likelihood of links to your site.

Kristin Maverick at Carrot Creative echoed this fact for PR communications in a recent post.  While some say that old fashioned advertising, word of mouth, and favorable reviews are what actually gets a product noticed, Kristin correctly points out that social media is increasingly exactly the medium that helps get those things noticed.

The key takeaway is that no marketing tactic can be done in isolation, even social media.  Yet, no matter how you choose to try to get found by potential customers, use social media as the amplifier.

Digital marketing is the new digital anthropology

Published January 25, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
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The only benefit to having an incredibly busy few weeks at work is being able to sit back, observe, and ponder more about the social media conversations being had.  Two weeks ago I began thinking of writing a post about the emergence of digital anthropology; the idea that social media is transforming previously immeasurable consumer data — thoughts, intentions and ideas obtained from social media channels — into a dramatically deeper understanding of consumers.  My hectic workload, however, was a blessing in disguise. As is usually the case, some incredible conversations transpired online over the past two weeks that back up my point completely.

The writing is on the wall. Digital and online marketing is becoming a crash course in digital anthropology.  My former colleague Michael Chin discussed this at Digital Media Conference 2008 last summer.  In response to a question about how people can make money from social media, he said companies ought to go out and hire as many anthropologists as possible to try to figure out what’s going on with this new behavior–and then figure out how to make money.  David Armano built this idea out a bit more in a post from last July:

As with many professions, digital has made certain things more accessible to people with potential.  Some of the most forward thinking companies like IDEO have invested in hiring anthropologists,  people who combine an intuitive curiosity with a learned skill for observation and pattern detection.  These anthropologists come from all backgrounds, and the really good ones have developed methods and toolboxes for capturing behaviors in the hopes of uncovering the insights they are looking for.
 
Today, a big part of that toolbox has become the Web, which lowers the bar for curious people who can detect patterns but perhaps haven’t earned their formal degrees in the social sciences or have the experience of recording hours of behavior via A/V equipment.  But there is a catch.  You have to be willing to investigate, spend time in the virtual communities—you have to participate to some extent and you have to develop your own system for capturing data whether it be tagging via delicious, favoriting links or archiving media.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of social media is seeing human behavior in action in real-time (and in digital form).  When you participate in it, you begin to understand what types of content people react to, what information spurs action (i.e. influences), what types of interactions people like and do not like to have online, etc. In other words, you begin to understand the origins and social relationships of human beings – the definition of anthropology.  For marketers, this deep understanding enhances your ability to think strategically on what social media channels your clients should be using to engage with consumers and how to do it.

The last two weeks saw two great examples of this, both on Twitter.  First was a prevention of a potential huge PR crisis by Priceline, explained in another post from David Armano.  Priceline initially had refused to refund airline tickets for family who could not make their trip because their baby had suffered terrible burns and was in the hospital.  The tweet with this shocking information started spreading virally through retweets.  While it’s not confirmed, Priceline presumably was tracking the groundswell of retweets and corrected the situation before it got out of control.  Hopefully, Priceline recognized that this type of information (shockingly bad customer service) has massive potential to be spread virally online and knew they had to act quickly to resolve the situation.

The second example came courtesy of my friend Kristin Maverick. She started the #myfirstjob meme on Twitter and within hours, it skyrocketed to the top of the trending list with well over 1,000 tweets.  This meme had a high probability of spreading virally because as Kristin put it on the Carrot Creative blog, “it’s simple, provides value and just a little fun to the community.”

So I end with this memo to companies: no matter if you “get it” or not, or don’t know how to make money from it, know and use social media to no end. Engage with the online community in a valuable and authentic way.  Learn how your customers are behaving online.  The amount of insights available from this knowledge is invaluable.

Influence ain’t perfect, but damn is it important

Published January 14, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Burger King’s brilliant “Whopper Sacrifice” program has set off an interesting conversation on the value of social media friends (or followers, or whatever).  Most of it, however, has focused on questions like “how many friends does one really need?” or “what’s the value of just building your follower list just because?”  My good friend and colleague Sean Mills questioned whether “the arms race to build massive lists of friends or followers actually detract from our experiences on it, and as such, make the platform less valuable to us? My other good friend and former colleague Kristin Maverick correctly points out that “there is no reason to follow 5,000 people on Twitter or friend thousands on Facebook because honestly…you’re probably not going to listen to all that they’re saying so what’s the point?”

I think those are important questions to ask and each side has much merit, but as a marketer, I think there is a different issue that needs to be addressed: As social media evolves, how do brands engage with the most “influential” people?  Because of a lack of sophisticated tools, the way to measure “influence” has been to look at aggregate numbers.  As in, “hey! this person has 20,000 followers on Twitter, he must be important, let’s engage with him!”  Yet as Sean and Kristin underscore, the problem with this is that it’s based on an assumption that each follower of “Influential person X” finds value in that person’s comments, and thus would be influenced by their perspective on new products, new companies, etc.  For a while, this assumption may have been true to certain extent, and despite it being a crude metric, I still think it holds some weight. But as millions of people continue to flock to social media technologies almost on a daily basis, the focus on “influence is aggregate” must shift to “influence is the ability to drive action.” Charlie O’Donnell summed it up perfectly by describing his offline networking philosophy: ”If you’re running groups and communities, focusing on aggregate numbers versus quality, signal to noise, or engagement can bring down the whole network.”

In other words, it is more valuable to engage with a person who has 20,000 friends, but of those “friends,” only 10 or so may actually pay attention and act on a recommendation by that person?  Or is it more valuable to engage with a person who has 200 friends and of those friends, 150 pay attention and trust that person’s opinion wholeheartedly.  The answer is easy.

So where does that leave us?  Well, tools are starting to emerge. Razorfish filed a patent on a method to track how many generations of influence a social media application achieves (i.e. getting passed around from friend to friend) and try to determine the value of receiving a social application from a friend versus media or a paid seeding strategy.  Klout is a fascinating company (and I actually had the great opportunity of having lunch with one of the co-founders) who’s goal is to measure people’s influence across the entire social web by analyzing data on the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network.  The goal is to track the impact of one’s opinions, links and recommendations across their entire social graph, and thus determine an accurate measure of social media “influence.” 

The implications of having this capability are massive. Think about adding another layer of data to your web analytics by not only being able to determine high-value traffic (as measured by avg. time spent on site, conversion rate, etc.) but also being able to measure the social web “influence” of your traffic (and thus likelihood that they’ll become brand ambassadors for you).  Or what about adding a metric to measuring the success of a marketing or PR campaign by quantifying the percentage of social web influencers that you engaged with (again, as opposed to merely measuring the aggregate number of people reached).

This is area will be big in 2009, mark my words.

 

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PR pro of the future? Where’s the ROI?

Published January 11, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment
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It’s interesting to think that I’ve been in PR for only 3.5 years, yet it has been arguably one the most transformative periods of time in the industry.  Bold statement for a relative newbie, but one must think that the rapid decline of traditional media and the emergence (and now explosion) of social media are two the most fundamental changes the industry will ever face when people look back at this time down the road.

Given the rapid changes the industry is facing, it’s no wonder the industry’s top professionals are trying to put a stake in the ground on their vision of what the PR pro of the future will look like, which Ogilvy PR Worldwide did for PR Week magazine’s recent ‘Next‘ conference.  There are many leading voices contributing their thoughts, which you see for yourself here.  Yet after watching the video, I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed. 

Sure, there are plenty of interesting perspectives, many of which I believe are spot on.  Andy Lark of Dell said that he thinks PR pro’s will need “a really high level of aptitude around all of the new applications that are emerging” and “understand how you can fit those in with your PR programs.”  John Bell of Ogilvy PR goes even further to say that “you actually have to apply the internet and web 2.0 and social media to your life to be able to really understand how it can apply to your clients’ life,” which I firmly believe is true. There is absolutely no substitute for living, breathing, and fully engaging in social media before you can intelligently integrate them into strategic communications campaigns.

So why was I disappointed?  Not once did I hear anything about improving our industry’s ability to quantify the business impact that we’re delivering for clients.  I know this is PR’s holy grail, and has been for a while.  But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking of new ways, new tools, and new methods to measure the value and impact that PR has on a company’s business performance.  In fact, I think the industry is in the best position it has ever been in to accomplish this.  Why? Exactly because of the changing media landscape and movement towards social media (caveat: I know there is lots of debate on the merits of the term “social media.” I’m not a big fan of the term myself, but will continue to use it until something else comes along).

Think about it. When else has PR accurately been able to quantify true engagement with the most influential audience segments like you can do with emerging social media measurement tools such as Radian6?  When else has PR been able to definitively measure the amount of potential new business we’re driving to a client’s web site? The list can go on and on.  The point is that, yes, PR pro’s must live and breathe social media and think up new, unique ways to use it for clients. But at the same time, it is also up to us to be able to measure the impact those social media channels are having for clients.  And to go even further, it is time for the industry to push clients for their business data - whether it’s sales, web traffic, whatever – so that PR can measure the effectiveness of their work against it.  This will not only help improve levels of client service substantially, it will hold PR accountable. And by doing so, we will have the opportunity to become true business partners and not just a “nice to have” extension of marketing.

For this very reason, I have decided that 2009 is the year that I transform my own expertise to become a measurement/analytics expert.  I have signed up for classes to learn more about web analytics and traditional marketing analytics.  I am truly excited to use the knowledge that I expect to gain and figure out how to incorporate it into my own work.  Who knows, maybe it will lead me down a different professional path. But for now, I think PR has a huge opportunity at its feet.

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The TV ad most definitely is not dead

Published January 10, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Jeff Sexton at FutureNow wrote an interesting blog post that I thought I’d add my two cents on. He caught an interesting article reporting research which found that even by speeding through them with DVRs and Tivos, television ads can still be effective. While I find that fascinating, let me tell you why the t.v. ad isn’t dead irrespective of that fact: tv spots can still be awesome.

Real scientific, huh? And that finding is based on a statistically significant sample size of one (my own personal opinion). Hear me out for a second. Trust me when I say I am the first to hit fast-forward while watching a recorded show, but aren’t there still ads you catch on tv that make you laugh or just say wow? The folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky have made me genuinely enjoy watching Burger King ads. And yes, I still get excited for Super Bowl commercials.

The point here is that content is king. If you create a crappy, run of the mill tv ad, I’m going to ignore it and not think twice. If you create a visually stunning, unique, funny, or creative ad (hopefully of the above), I’m going to take the time to watch it. It is up to ad firms to make their TV ads immortal. And on that note, here is a recent ad that made me stop and say wow:

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