Geoff Livingston , author of Now is Gone , is video blogging. While we were both at New Comm Forum , Geoff recorded a quick video that gave me a chance to talk about Third Tuesday and the upcoming Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics . You can view it on Geoff’s blog or watch it here.
Thanks Geoff!
I trying to assess a social media monitoring service called Social Radar . If you’ve used this service, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the Social Radar service, its strengths and the things that could be improved upon.
If you’re new to this area and you want to know more about what’s out there by way of social media monitoring and measurement services, read Jeremiah Owyang’s post on Companies that measure social media, influence and brand .
Yesterday I proposed that we organize a roundtable on social media measurement and metrics. The response I’ve received via comments on the blog post and email has been overwhelmingly positive.
So, let’s move forward with this.
Number of participants
As a first question, what do you think is the maximum ideal size for a productive discussion? Is it 15, 20, 25, 30?
In choosing the ideal size, I think we need to balance opportunity to participate with the quality of the experience for the participants. The group should be small enough that individuals are able to exchange points of view. On the other hand, if it is too small, we risk excluding participants with valuable perspectives to share.
Format
How about format? My initial thought is that we should have one discussion table for the entire session? Is this a good idea? Or would another format work better? Perhaps a common session to open the day followed by breakout groups on specific topics before reconvening for a general discussion?
Your opinion?
What do you think is the best size for a discussion of this sort? The best format?
How do we measure the value of social media to an organization? What should we be measuring? What are the metrics that accurately capture the things we want to measure?
Over the past year, people like Jeremiah Owyang, Kami Huyse, Scott Karp, Christopher Carfi, Mike Manuel, the Research Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research, John Bell, Flemming Madsen, Geoff Livingston, Katie Paine, David Brain, Brendan Cooper, Brian Solis and Jeff Jarvis have made valuable contributions to our emerging understanding of social media measurement and metrics.
The online discussion is great. But sometimes, it’s even better to sit down face to face and talk things through.
This is what I’d like to do. Let’s bring together a group of experts for a roundtable discussion of social media measurement and metrics.
Participants could be drawn from three groups:
Let’s engage a moderator or group of moderators who would frame the questions and then attempt to draw out major issues, points of agreement, and lines of additional discussion. The roundtable format should enable participants to have a full discussion of each topic, with free exchanges of opinion, and hopefully the development of consensus on principal issues.
The product of the roundtable could be a white paper that will follow on the Jeremiah Owyang-authored white paper, Tracking the Influence of Conversations.
We’d also organize a special Third Tuesday social media meetup at the conclusion of the roundtable to enable the broader social media community to discuss these issues with a panel of the roundtable participants.
It looks like 2008 Mesh Conference will be held the third week of May. If we could organize the roundtable the day before or after Mesh, that would enable participants who travel to the roundtable to attend Mesh. The fourth week of May is the U.S. Memorial Day holiday week. Holding the conference the Memorial Day week would give U.S. attendees a chance to spend a long weekend in Toronto. Either way, May is a great time to visit Toronto. The leaves have emerged and the flowers are in bloom. The patios are open. And the streets are alive with Torontonians rediscovering after a long winter just how great their city is.
What do you think about the concept of a roundtable on social media measurement and metrics?
If we organize it, will you come?
A set of links about start ups:
Tris Hussey edits the new BlogNation Canada. There’s lots of interesting things going on in Canada Web community. So, Tris should have a steady stream of posts.
Scott Karp announces his new venture, Publish2, “a social network and 2.0 platform … which aims to put journalists at the center of news on the web by creating a journalist-powered news aggregator.” Grounded in the belief that humans make better news judgments than humans, who better to make these judgments than journalists, including practitioners drawn from old and new media. Should be interesting.
A look at Blogscope, a new measurement tool for blogs
Jeremiah Owyang looks at Blogscope, an “analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as a research prototype at the University of Toronto.” In Jeremiah’s view, “The most interesting thing about BlogScope is that it’s feature set is available for free, so if you work for Nielsen, Cymfony, Factiva or others, … you should pay attention.”
Katie Delahaye Paine led off the afternon with a presentation on New Rulers for a new century: How to measure consumer-generated media.
Why bother? Christian Science Monitor found that information distributed to bloggers generated 3.4 times more traffic than ABC News. Bloggers fit the profile of “influentials.” Blogs have eyeballs.
How to measure blogs? The methodology is similar to traditional media. Measure traffic. Examine content. Analyse.
Another indicators to look at with blogs: The ratio of postings to comments. If you post regularly but generate few comments, you might conclude that your content is not really having impact.
Measure three things:
Steps to perfect measurement:
And how about ROI? With blogging, why bother? If it costs you $14.99 to do something – and blogs can be done for virtually no cost – why spend thousands to measure it.
But if you are spending a lot on a social media program, be prepared to spend a lot measuring it’s results.
As I listened to Katie – who is one of THE experts on measurement – I realized just how much work is still to be done in developing broadly accepted measurement indices for social media. It’s still early days. But right now, we seem to be attempting to stretch ill fitting traditional measures to match the new shape of social media. It may look like it’s working. But anyone who’s involved in it knows it’s not comfortable.
RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz with Dave Taylor, Mary Hodder and Halley Suitt.
Dave Taylor led off. He posed the question, “How do you find bloggers who are writing about your space?” You have a choice of tools, including: google blogsearch and technorati.
Technorati ranks bloggers by authority – the greater number of inbound links from other blogs that they receive, the higher their authority.
With Technorati, it is possible to “subscribe” to a search. This will deliver new entries relating to the search term directly to your browser as they are posted.
An RSS aggregator such as newsgator online, bloglines or google reader is an absolutely essential tool to keep up with your RSS feeds.
Mary Hodder spoke about the difference between how Google searches and show results and the way that a blog-specific search enigne like technorati searches and displays results.
Google is best at measuring the “static web;” technorati is best for the “live web.”
Google is best for static web pages – pages that do not change regularly. Bloggers change their content frequently and a search engine is required that specializes in current information which may not show up immediately on the google search engine.
It is also possible to track images uploaded on flickr by tags.
Other possible metrics include the number of comments (some bloggers may not have many inbound links, but may have many comments. ) If you only take inbound links without looking at comments, you may fail to see the real depth of the conversation at the site.
Frequency of blogging on a topic is another dimension to consider. A blogger who writes frequently on a particular topic may not have the same authority on another subject that they blog on only once or twice.
Mary sees a difference between influence and real authority. Authority happens on a person by person basis. Each of us assigns authority. However, technorati will rank people high in “authority” – which really means they are high in popularity.
Halley Suitt showed several examples of Web sites that display RSS feeds differently. Some display them with XML chiclets. Some use the new RSS standard icon. Others have text links to the RSS feeds. For RSS to become mainstream, RSS must be displayed in a more standardized and prominent way.
Tris Hussey andAndru Edwards:tackled the topic: Audience Measurement: Quantifying and Qualifying. The program promised that I’d learn:
Do numbers matter or is it how many people are reading your blog? Of course numbers matter. But they are not the whole measure of success.
A lot of people mistakenly look at the number of hits they get.
There is still not a perfect tool to know just how many people are actually subscribed to your blog. As recently as one month ago, WordPress.com changed their metrics as they realized they had been double counting some readers.
Why is it difficult to measure? For example, some metrics will measure several people visiting a site using bloglines as only one person – bloglines.
There is not one tool to rule them all.
Clearly, writing frequently will draw more traffic. And of course, better writing will draw more repeat visitors.
Do blogrolls matter anymore? Tris Hussey feels not. “It’s still a nice way to show your friends you love them. But they do not generate traffic any longer.” Andru feels that blogrolls can be helpful if you have multiple blog properties. It’s a great way to interconnect things.
Scoble pointed out that his Shared items in google reader feed is driving more traffic to blogs he links to than does his blogroll on scobleizer proper.
Tris suggests that, given the imprecision of existing stats, it is important to look at the trends, not just the specific one time numbers. Look at the rise and fall. What is the pattern?
Tris and Andrew recommend AWStats and Urchin.
Tris also recommends Performancing as a Java script tool tailored specifically for blogs. He also uses google analytics, which provides user friendly graphs and reports.
However, because no single tool is perfect, Tris and Andrew suggest that you use two or more simultaneously to get a good picture of what’s really going on.
On the Road … Finally Shel Israel and Rick Segal’s Excellent Adventures begin! Shel will draw on his experiences and observations during this journey when writing Global Neighborhoods.
More Evidence that Media 2.0 may be less profitable than Media 1.0 Scott Karp touches a nerve with his analysis of the revenue potential for new consumer generated and social media websites. At the time of this post, he had drawn 19 strongly worded comments – both pro and con his position.
Traditional Media Still Gain Consumers Trust Debra Aho Williamson points to a study released by Lexis Nexis that “that during major national events, consumers turn first to TV, radio and print.” Not surprising. Traditional media continue to have water cooler effect for the really big events.
Edleman, Wal-Mart and WOMMA’s Code of Ethics Constantin Basturea offers a perspective on the application of marketers’ code of ethics to the Wal-Marting Across America flog (fake blog).
50 million blogs and doubling in size every six months.
David Sifry has updated his State of the Blogosphere profile using current data from Technorati.
Essential reading.