Wanted: One more social media measurement provider to put in the spotlight

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The Third Tuesday Measurement Matters #TTMM conference will put three social media monitoring and analysis providers on the spot and in the spotlight.

Each will be asked to tell us about a social media measurement challenge they set out to solve and how they did it. And then, we’ll ask them to look ahead and tell us what challenges they think must be overcome in the next year(s).

We have confirmed the first two monitoring and measurement providers who will be put in the spotlight: Radian6 and PostRank.

Radian6 was on the leading edge of developing an algorithm and index to measure influence. PostRank linked its fortune to the concept of engagement. Both have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to research and constant improvement of their monitoring and measurement suites. Clearly, they belong in the spotlight.

We have room in the spotlight for one more company. And I’d welcome your views about who it should be.

Which social media measurement platform do you think is on the leading edge of social media measurement? Which do you think have tackled a tough challenge and come up with an approach that is worth sharing?

Leave a comment on this post and help shape the agenda of Third Tuesday Measurement Matters #TTMM.

After all, if you want to understand the state of the art, why not ask those who are investing their money to explore it?

Social Mediators 4 – Social Media in Government and Automated Sentiment Analysis

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In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Terry Fallis, Dave Fleet and I talk about government and social media as well as the measurement of sentiment in social media.

Terry suggests that government departments seem to be lagging government agencies, with their narrower focus and specific mandates. Government has found it difficult to leave shed the command and control approach to management. And this holds them back from engaging in the give and take of social media. Dave offers, “Social media is really built on trust and that’s something that is lacking in government.” Terry adds, “Government often moves in geological time and it’s hard to move into social media in that environment.”

We also talk about machine measurement of sentiment in social media. Dave feels that the tools aren’t up to scratch. He offers props to the approach taken by Radian6, who offer automated sentiment measurement, but counsel that it’s just a starting point and that most organizations will want to add a layer of human review to any critical analyses.

We conclude the episode with the idea of running a comparative test of the automated sentiment solutions offered by Radian6 and Sysomos.

Organizations and people mentioned in this episode:

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner

The Ombudsman of Ontario

Parks Canada

Genome Alberta and Mike Spears

Nick Charney

Ralph Mercer

Advanced Learning Institute‘s Conference on Social Media in Government

Radian6

Sysomos

Proving PR Works

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The Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms (CCPRF) is holding a series of thought leader breakfasts to explore topics of importance to organizational communications and public relations. (disclosure: I’m currently the Chair of the CCPRF.)

This morning, the CCPRF brought togetherin Toronto a group of top level corporate communications executives to discuss best practices in communications measurement. The discussion was led off by a panel of measurement experts: David Alston from Radian6, David Scholz from Leger Marketing, Jacqueline Taggart from Watson Wyatt and Alan Chumley from the CPRS Measurement Committee.

What follows is the highlights of the Twitter coverage (hashtag #CCPRF) of the discussion that I captured using CoverItLive. Enjoy.

Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms: Measurement

AideRSS' PostRank measures engagement

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AideRSSAre you interested in a tool that will help you sort through the flood of new posts to find the most interesting and talked about content in your RSS subscriptions?

Are you a writer or content creator who wants to figure out which content others have become most engaged with?

Are you a corporate communicator or marketer who wants to understand which content and authors are having the greatest impact on issues and online conversations that matter to you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on.

A Time Saver for Readers

Since AideRSS first launched just over a year ago, I’ve used it to identify online content that others have also found interesting and engaging. AideRSS provides a simple calculation of what they call PostRank which analyzes the frequency and type of interaction with online content and provides a relative score of how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. By sorting the posts by PostRank, I can easily spot those that seem to be generating the highest levels of engagement.

On days when I’ve let the posts in my FeedReader accumulate, I can spend more than an hour scanning them all (more time than I should invest), delete them all (What if I miss something that really matters to me?) or I can filter them with AideRSS so that I can review only those with the highest PostRank. I’ve installed AideRSS’ Firefox Extension for Google Reader to incorporate PostRank right into my RSS aggregator. A great time saver.

Measuring Engagement

From the outset, I was impressed by AideRSS’ approach to measuring what’s important in social media. It struck me that AideRSS-Co-founder Ilya Grigorik’s PostRank algorithm was a smart way to begin to measure engagement. When AideRSS launched, it wasn’t important whether Ilya had the definitive algorithm. What was important was that he was working toward a holistic calculation that incorporated both offsite and onsite interaction.

AideRSS’ CEO, Carol Leaman, participated in the Toronto Roundtable on Social Media Measurement this past spring.  During the day, she made some thoughtful contributions, both in the things she suggested and, equally importantly, the questions she asked. As I listened to her, it was clear that the folks at AideRSS were also thinking through their place in the social media metrics and measurement puzzle.

I didn’t have to wait very long to see what Carol, Ilya and the AideRSS team were working on.

PostRank: A New Standard?

A couple weeks ago, AideRSS launched PostRank on a its own site, PostRank.com. The site highlights PostRank’s utility for measuring online engagement. It also offers a set of APIs to encourage developers to incorporate PostRank in their own Web Apps. At the same time PostRank.com was launched, AideRSS also introduced Thematic PostRank to enable the PostRank calculation to be applied to any collection of content assembled from a variety of feeds and sources (not just blogs, but Twitter and others services.)

AideRSS is attempting to promote PostRank as a standard measurement of online engagement. And to date, the AideRSS approach to measuring engagement is the best I’ve found.

Have you used AideRSS or PostRank? What do you think of them?

More on AideRSS and PostRank

TechVibes: AideRSS -Now it Gets Interesting

Video of AideRSS co-founders Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason demonstrating AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14.

Measuring the ROI of Word of Mouth Marketing

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The final panel at the CMA Word of Mouth Conference deals with measurement.

The panellists:

  • Dan Hunter, Partner at IMI International
  • Malcolm Faulds, VP Media Services, BzzAgent
  • Andrea Wojnicki, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Session Moderator)

I’m live blogging the session using CoverItLive. My notes are below:

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Measurement – ROI of WOM Marketing (06/12/2008) 
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3:15
 Wojnicki: What are the quick and inexpensive measurement tools that everyone should implement tomorrow?
3:17
 Faulds: Google trends; Google Analytics; Twitter tracking
3:18
 Hunter: Conduct surveys to test awareness and perceptions of WOM campaigns.
3:20
 Wojnicki: Should Word of Mouth be campaign or something longer term? What are we measuring? Campaign results? Or longer term reputation?
3:20
 Faulds: Include both organic and accelerated word of mouth.
3:22
 Faulds: BzzAgent recruits consumers to try and discussion products. They measure reach: how many people can be reached?
insights: what are people talking about and what are they saying?
impact: Are we able to move people’s perceptions fo the brand. And more importantly, can we move sales?
It’s easier to measure online WOM. But offline makes up 80-90% of WOM. So, we have to find ways to measure that effectively.
3:23
 Hunter: Impact is the key net measure that should be measured across all programs. The impact I can make measured agains the dollars that were spent. This will enable us to compare campaigns against one another.
3:25
 Wojnicki: Everybody’s jumping on the WOM bandwagon because it’s so pervasive and easily measured online. How do we measure the offline WOM.
3:26
 Hunter; Consumer research will provide the answers for offline WOM. You have to invest in order to learn.
3:32
 Faulds: Whenever there is a new medium out there, people have to measure it with old metrics. It takes some time for new metrics to be developed that fit the new medium. So, with Word of Mouth and “viral,” it will take some time to develop new better metrics.
3:47


Social Media Measurement Roundtable

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We’re just one week away from the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics .

We’ve assembled a great group of participants who represent measurement experts, developers of social media metrics applications, corporate communicators and marketers and social media thought leaders. (I’ll publish a list of the participants in a separate post.)

We’ll be picking up the discussion from the previous roundtables that yielded the Tracking the Influence of Conversations and Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media White Papers.

It is our intention to produce a White Paper that advances the discussion begun in these previous roundtables and White Papers.

For my part, I’m hoping that we be able to develop suggested guidelines for a social media measurement dashboard. As a minimum, we could suggest what components should be part of the ideal social media measurement dashboard and how should each should be weighted. Of course, this will vary by specific objectives and context. So, I think a good start would be to produce two model dashboards for two common scenarios:

  • a dashboard that could be applied to social influence marketing and
  • a dashboard to measure community building and engagement.

What do you think? If we produce this, would it be a useful next step? Are there other things we should be aiming for?

Other related posts by Roundtable participants :

Katie Paine on the concept of Engagement in Social Media

Have you used Infegy's Social Radar?

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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 .