Social Media Metrics Worth Noting

I’ve writer before about the pressing need for integrated metrics systems for social media. All the platforms provide metrics, but tracking them individually quickly becomes an impossibly large and complex task. Last week I was interested to receive an email announcing that Andiamo Systems, a provider of social media metrics, had been acquired by Techrigy. I took a quick look and was interested enough to set up a free account and take it for a trial run. I entered my five free keywords--the local wildlife sanctuary with which I work and keywords related to one of our current projects and created my trial account.

I first ran a search for roughly the last ten months, expecting to see results of more active blogging during that time. What I found was a tremendous amount of conversation on Trip Advisor and other local and travel sites. The general tenor was “great place to visit,” but I gleaned one useful nugget on Trip Advisor. There’s free local bus service that goes right by the sanctuary. It was recommended as much better than riding a bicycle on a busy two-lane highway. That’s a useful piece of information to add to our web page! Since then I’ve been getting daily reports by email. That’s not desirable for any high volume use; focusing on the dashboard that gives the most pertinent reports would be much better.

A word about the service. Techrigy has a huge database compiled by daily monitoring of social media including blogs, wikis, discussion forums, video and photo sites, mainstream media sites, microblogs and social networks. Searches are run on this database, not on the web itself.

Their demos page gives the best overview of the kinds of reports available. As you can see, the categories are numerous and each provides multiple reports and opportunities to drill down. Their professional plans page lists programs beginning at $600 a month.

There are lots of interesting ways to filter search data, but I found two to be of particular interest. One is a rating of the popularity of the source. I’ve searched the website for a definition but can’t find it. However, I also find the word “authority” used in the same context, and it seems to me that the meaning is the same. Wikipedia gets a 10. What I see when I look at a report for the same post is a popularity rating of 0 for our member-oriented blog (few links is my guess) and a 7 for Cape Cod Today, a major online local medium. That makes sense, so the popularity rating would be useful if you want to reach out to authors.

Another thing I found particularly interesting was the sentiment analysis. According to their fact sheet, “Using natural-language processing and Bayesian analysis, SM2 discovers the sentiments around each discussion and aggregates these to provide a top-level view of social media.” The products of that analysis are brand references (on a positive/negative scale), content tone, and content emotions. Here’s a content tone chart and a snapshot of the items included in the analysis. A lot of these mentions are from our own material, so of course they’re positive! I didn’t take time to filter out our own posts, but it looks pretty easy. Then we’d know what others are saying about us. That’s key. The sentiment analysis also catalogs 16 emotions expressed in the items. Not surprisingly the wildlife sanctuary scored highest on “social” followed by “bio,” “achieve,”and “leisure.” I looked at some of the highest “achieve” scores: the sanctuary had received a grant, rescued three dolphins, and recounted the story of children finding an intact whale skeleton during a long-ago summer camp. Makes sense to me!
That’s the key to good metrics—once you learn to use the platforms. A good dashboard with graphic reports and the opportunity to drill down to the numbers and the data behind them. Oh, yes—and integrated!

The need is great. Expect social media metrics to be an active space. This morning Bob Collins Tweeted a post on ReadWriteWeb about Sysmos. The post has a lot of good information and already one good comment. This startup doesn’t yet have a free version, but that’s said to be coming and will be worth watching for.

Marketers have been asking for integrated social media metrics—followed by integration of all Internet metrics—followed by integration of all metrics. Clearly the request has been heard!

B2B Use of Social Media

This is hardly a new subject. In the past I’ve suggested that business customers often have strong motivations for participating in communities and that corporations can dip their toes in the social media waters with internal applications.

When a newsletter from IBM crossed my desk this morning I was reminded of this chart from Marketing Sherpa a couple of weeks ago. They surveyed mid-sized and up B2B marketers about their plans for 2009. Identifying new audiences/quality lists had the highest priority, developing social media and integrating it into their marketing efforts was considered hardest, and the most common activity was developing traditional content. All of it makes sense, but clearly all of it is pretty traditional, quite the opposite of an interesting article in today’s iMedia Connection, which argues that all media is becoming social. Schumacher’s examples are mostly of consumer brands, but all his arguments apply to B2B also.
Pursuing one of the many links in the newsletter I came across an IBM white paper. It looks as if it is from late 2007, but the points it makes are relevant and still need attention from B2B marketers. This quote particularly caught my eye:

(Web 2.0 technologies) can enable large companies to more efficiently and effectively market to small customer segments that have specific interests or requirements. Without Web 2.0 approaches, cost constraints may force these companies to broaden their marketing message to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Isn’t that exactly what you see in the Marketing Sherpa chart; we need more lists with better names. Even if those lists are out there, and they often aren’t, isn’t this the higher cost approach IMB speculates about?

In the eyes of Big Blue, which is clearly interested in pushing its own social media technologies, what should enterprises do? They should:

• Harness the collective intelligence of your people.
• Discover and tap into specific communities of interest.
• Connect people to one another and to relevant information more efficiently.

None of that sounds radical or dangerous. Is it as hard as B2B marketers think it is?

Look at the technologies IBM recommends and their definitions:

• Wikis—Collective authoring environments that enable people to easily populate and edit a Web site based on project or community needs. Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian term for fast.
• Mash-ups—Applications that combine content from more than one source to create a new service.
• Blogs--Web pages where users can keep a personal diary or share information with teams, a social network, the company or the world, helping businesses to drive new viewpoints and harness the wisdom of crowds.
• Tagging—A method of tracking online items that can help you discover
related items and help improve searches and expertise location.
• Folksonomy—The categorization system that emerges from tagging.

Folksonomy—did IBM make that up??? Turns out they didn’t; I missed something else. Here’s an interesting brief description with a good link to some academic work. It’s the difference between a formal taxonomy and the categories that emerge from user tagging. The idea is appealing and reminds me of techniques from quality management that I’ve applied to website content to develop user-centered groupings. It works and user input has merit.

A new term aside, none of this is radical or even particularly difficult. IBM’s arguments about the value of collaboration—throughout the value chain—for increasing speed and improving business processes are hard to refute.

I add the argument that this allows the B2B enterprise to become familiar—maybe even comfortable—with these collaborative technologies. Letting customers participate is the next step. Customer engagement and true community is the result.

Isn’t it worth the effort?

Guest Post: How Much Control Over Internet Content?

I'm delighted to have Ailsa Leadbetter as guest author today. She is Crossmedia Manager for vdBJ/Communicatie Groep, a Dutch media firm, and an astute observer of the European Internet scene. There seems to be both questionnable individual and governmental actions in this tale of the German Wikipedia site. Alisa wrote this on Monday, November 17 and notes that the main German Wikipedia page was still closed. It's open now. Her links all work, if you read German. I made the link to the English Wikipedia version because it tells the original story in considerable detail and gives updates as recently as today, all suggesting that the German politician learned an interesting lesson about the power of the Internet. Perhaps we should all pay attention!


Here's an interesting legal story: a German judge has closed the homepage of the German Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.de). Apparently, a German politician was not pleased with his entry in the German wikipedia and asked the courts to close the homepage. He has also filed cases against 3 authors of his entry (http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/heilmann100.html, in German, sorry).

Thanks to the fact that the German wikipedia and wikipedia.org are separate legal entities, German content is still accessible (through de.wikipedia.org). According to the Dutch article I read (http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/20081116_rechter_sluit_homepage_duitse_wikipedia/), this injunction has caused the German politician in question much embarassment, probably more embarassment than the sections of his wikipedia entry that he originally objected to!

A few Dutch bloggers see a similarity to Nazi practices, specificially book burning. The injunction from the German court limits the freedom of communication, freedom of information exchange, in their opinion (and mine too, actually). Ironically, this politician was a member of the East German Stasi (secret police) before German reunification. It's a bit of a creepy tale, in that respect.

I just looked this guy up on the English Wikipedia and his entry there discusses this too. It says there that he will drop his case against Wikipedia Germany (but not against the 3 authors) but this morning when I checked the page was still closed.

Want to Wiki?

A few days ago I noticed a reference to an article by Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review. He’s a thoughtful observer of the business scene, so I wanted to read “The Contribution Revolution.” In spite of the fact that I teach at Harvard, I can’t get access to their educators site (read that “free for review” stuff), so I looked around hoping I’d find a summary somewhere.

I found something much more interesting! Cook has posted the article, complete with an incredible number of links to examples and resources, on a PBwiki. (This page has the article enhanced with links, the one originally published in HBR, and a podcast with Scott Cook.)I was familiar with the PBwiki service through a friend, who decided to try it out by posting a resumé there. It look fine, but I think he took it down when I pointed out that it could be edited by others! So I remembered it as an interesting free service (for a wiki with 3 or fewer users) but I hadn’t gotten around to really checking it out.

First, the article by Scott Cook. You simply have to read it—for the content, for the resources, and for the interesting use of the wiki technology. He has a concept of user contribution systems that is useful and that is borne out by the success of Intuit’s Tax Almanac and the TurboTax Live Community. The community is reached on the TurboTax Support page where there’s also a blog written by TurboTax employees. Not all their UGC efforts have been successful though, and that’s another piece of learning that you’ll take away from reading the article.



I was also intrigued by the fact that he put the article up as a wiki, so I joined. I’m now getting emails when users make an entry. I’m underwhelmed by that, but if it were my wiki, I’d want to know. Cook has implemented a number of features on the Contribution Revolution wiki. There’s a sandbox where the inexperienced like me can practice before we try to edit. When I publish this post, I’m going to upload it to the "Company Examples of USG folder". That will be my first contribution, but I have a feeling I’m going to be coming back to this wiki often for both its resources and its content.

PBwiki offers services for businesses, academic users and individuals. A superficial look doesn’t show any differences between the wiki features available to each group. It looks to me as if they’re using that as a way to point out the ways in which each group can use wiki technology. That’s fine, because the knowledge of most of us is probably limited to reading Wikipedia! There seems to be growing sentiment that wikis are going to be most useful for business applications as an important type of collaborative technology. PBwiki has a number of white papers; if you’re new to the area, check out “How Wikis Enable Enterprise Collaboration.”

I wrote about the GM wiki, on which they’re trying to get the public to help write the history of GM, a few months ago. I haven’t checked recently, but when I looked at visitor stats on Compete.com, it had a large initial spike and then very little traffic. I wonder if many people are interested in contributing to a history of GM, especially in the current economic situation. I’m not a member of that wiki, so I can’t get inside to see whether there is noticeable activity. Control of who can edit is a feature of all wikis I’ve seen.

Scott Cook’s Contribution Revolution wiki is a fascinating example of wiki technology in action. It also provides a wonderful opportunity to first observe and then participate in a non-threatening environment. There are plenty of opportunities to comment, just like a blog. That’s an easy first step.

None of us will understand the potential of various social media techniques for our own organization until we participate in each one. That will mean some stops and starts, because some sites you join, some technologies you investigate, will turn out to be not relevant. That’s fine. But you won’t find the relevant ones unless and until you become active in the space. Scott Cook is only one CEO setting a good example of participation in the social media space!

Knol--An Alternative to Wikipedia?

When I made my last post on Thursday there was a post on my Google dashboard about a new product just entering Beta—a Knol. It looked interesting, so I did some investigating. Of course, being a writer, I couldn’t resist writing a Knol.

A Knol uses some of the same technology as Blogger, but it has a different purpose. Knols are to be authoritative articles on a single subject. There are quite a few listed already; my guess is that some may have been imported and others written specifically for Knol. I found one listing called “Encyclopedia,” which seems to suggest Google’s intent.

Knols really work like Google Documents and have some of the same features. You can write, save, and collaborate. Notice that I can invite authors and reviewers to my just-begun Knol. I saved but didn’t try to publish it, because it was incomplete. I’m sure that publication would be the point where they would ask me to establish my credentials, which I don’t think would be a problem. However, individual articles are vetted and categorized, and I’m sure they wouldn’t take this one-sentence beginning.

Notice on the third screen capture that they are encouraging Creative Commons 3.0 licensing, which essentially says that readers can use the material as long as they give proper attribution. That seems to be the emerging standard for web content of many kinds, and it makes sense to me.

In a lot of ways this is just an extension of Google docs, which I use and really like. They are great for getting work done, but not so great for being found. There are also no standards for format or content of Google docs, and Google clearly wants Knols to be respected for their informational content. Knols are searchable from the Knol site and from a Google web search. From the Google toolbar I searched for one of the featured Knols using (and misspelling, as usual) the exact title, and it came right up.

Will this become an alternative to Wikipedia? Will it be more respected in terms of the quality of its content? Only time will tell. In the meantime, it provides a good platform for people who have something to say and wish to encourage their colleagues to contribute. Since it can be closed, it provides a forum for internal corporate documentation on specific subject matter.

My Knol on social media could be a good one. Would anyone like to contribute a case study or their own observations on the subject? We could write something together!

Best Practices B2B Site

I recently saw a mention of Mfg.com, and since I’m fascinated by B2B marketplace sites, I took a look. Founded in 2000, it seems to be profitable and recently obtained another round of venture funding. It is commonly described as an exchange for parts and components, but they describe their model as a proprietary platform that facilitates “the complex process of sourcing and selling manufacturing services”. They recently revamped their platform to make it easy for buyers and sellers to share CAD designs to speed the sourcing process, so they are clearly a sophisticated user of technology.


What I found was also a best practices site for B2B community building. They have numerous industry-based communities, a system of news feeds in which a member can subscribe in various ways including content channels and tags, and various blogs. They offer blogging to their members and have a company blog. When I investigated the profile of frequent poster aj, I met Mfg.com’s Director of Community Content. His profile page included his other blogs, his most-used tags, and other members with profiles similar to his. Great personalization and networking! They also recognize Top Contributors on the community home page, which is another nice touch.

The site says it helps customers:

Find content. The site is content-rich and uses tags as well as content channels (the site calls them “spaces”) to organize it. There are various search options. They have a sophisticated system of RSS feeds that allows people to subscribe in various ways including tags. They also have email notification, which seems more limited in scope. They are pushing RSS, which is interesting, given how full our email inboxes are these days.

Create content. Members are asked to create profiles. They can comment on blog posts, ask questions, and receive feedback. The other content creation mechanisms are wiki-based, allowing for various types of documents that can be shared with open or closed groups. The documents allow for many types of review and comparison.

Collaborate on content. Creating wiki-based documents on the site draws colleagues of the members (who then have to become members) to collaborate on documents. And since the site is content-rich, that offers the likelihood of the new member starting the cycle all over again.

Take a close look at those three steps—find, create, collaborate. That’s social media strategy in a nutshell. Content to draw people to the site, social connectivity to increase the usefulness of the content, and collaboration to allow members to work right on the site and bring others with them. When members are not on the site, RSS feeds remind them of the value it offers to them.

This is best practices in terms of strategy as well as execution!

Who Are the Online Leaders?

Most of us would sadly agree that we’re not one of them. What may surprise you is who some of the leaders are. Here’s some of the headline news that has caught my eye lately:
•According to AdAge, GM plans to have half its $3 billion ad budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years. GM has been active in the digital space for years with its interactive website, blogs, new wiki and more. It intends to accelerate the move from offline to online media.
•Unilever headed AdAge’s digital a-list for the year. Their campaigns included the various Dove “Real Beauty” programs and a series of webisodes for Suave. Degree deodorant sponsored webisodes for of the popular 24 television program; check out the website and click on the Absolute Protection tab. Unilever marketers are quick to point out that none of these campaigns are purely digital; they are masters of integrated communications using a variety of media.
•Some of the others on the a-list are the usual suspects among agencies and brands like Apple’s iPhone, Google, and ESPN. Others might come as more of a surprise: The NY Times online division and, if you’re not familiar with it, J&J’s baby center.
•Other online leaders like Toyota, American Express and Procter and Gamble are leading the way in the search for metrics that meet the needs of marketers in a digital world.

The corporate names I’m dropping here are not small, innovative start-ups. They are corporate giants and long-time leading advertisers. Clearly, marketers of all kinds are following their leads. Search marketing is a leader in the budget race, both because it works and because it’s easy to measure. An Ad Tech survey says that behavioral and rich media are getting even more budgetary attention. The recent SEMPO survey adds what we pretty much all know; the growth in interactive is coming at the expense of traditional media—print, TV and even direct mail.

In the last few days I’ve also read that another marketer said that digital is beyond experimentation. It is now part of the mainstream media mix, something I've been saying for awhile. There are still questions about how,when, how much and the best executions. But there should be no more questions about WHETHER!
Sphere: Related Content

The General Motors Wiki

Last week GM launched a corporate history wiki as part of its centennial celebration. At first glance that appears to be a risky idea. Won’t it draw out every GM-hater who’s had a bad experience with a GM car or truck? Won’t it become a public relations nightmare? Won’t it suck up a lot of the time of GM executives who ought to be contributing to returning the corporation to profitability? The answer to the last question is that it will absorb some time. Having looked around a bit, the answer to the first 2 is not so obvious.

First, GM has a history with social media. The best-known effort is the Fast Lane blog, the voice of Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz and other GM execs. It’s been going strong since early 2005. Lutz started podcasting in the fall of 2005. GM now has several blogs, but it probably says something that the blogs have their own microsite, GM Blogs, that cannot easily (at all?) be located from the main GM site. Was GM initially skeptical about what kind of public commentary Fast Lane and the others would draw? Probably. I’m not a follower of car developments and I haven’t visited these blogs often. However, when you look around, you get the feeling that a lot of these people are pulling for GM, whatever their reasons. Some are critical, some compliment something specific, and a lot have suggestions to offer—everything from design to advertising. I took a look at some of the recent posts, and I see Bob Lutz and many other GM executives responding, not to individual comments, but to themes that have come up. I also see notes from two people identified as “blog editor.” It takes some organizational infrastructure to keep this sort of multi-authored blog going. Is this a better role for PR people than sending out endless press releases that no one reads? I’d judge the blog efforts so far to be successful. GM is not escaping criticism, but it has a voice in the discussion.

With this experience under their belts, they decided to ask the public to help them write the history of GM. They put it in an interesting context—GM Next. They want to honor their history, but they’re moving on into the future. Good spin. The GM Next initiative is featured on the corporate home page. Does that suggest a level of confidence about their ability to manage the program? Any of the links on the home page take you to GM Next. The conversation threads are design, tech, green, ideas and global. The wiki is prominently featured. The home page of the wiki itself shows a well-thought out structure and there’s lots of information to get you started if you want to contribute. It shows that it’s a serious wiki with View Source and History tabs to help HTML-knowledgeable contributors and those who want to see previous versions of the page. Categories that are well worth exploring are the “How to Use, FAQs and Meet the Experts” pages.
A strategy issue worth considering is that the wiki was open to the experts before it was made publicly available. There is already content that sets the tone. There are “Rules of the Road” to be followed, but they are pretty minimal. In several places it is made clear that all contributions will be moderated for adherence to those rules and that their team of experts (which will grow as the wiki becomes active) will moderate disputes about factual matters. They promise that contributions will not be edited, just screened to ensure they meet basic standards.

I’ll admit that I started this exploration with considerable skepticism, even though I was aware of Fast Lane. What I wasn’t aware of is how many GM people are active in the various social media efforts and how seriously they seem to take it. As a long time advocate of managers at all levels actually meeting and talking to customers, how can I not be impressed? My sense from the beginning has been that social media provide a way for managers to interact with customers in a way that is both effective (in communications terms) and efficient (in terms of managerial time).

GM’s wiki is an experiment in social media worth following. My sense is that their intentions are good, and I wish them well.
Sphere: Related Content

A New Entry in Wikispace?

Not long ago Martha Stewart Omnimedia announced that it’s working on a Web 2.0 site to be called “Marthapedia.” It has created a lob of buzz, but it’s clearly not up yet. When you seach for Marthapedia at present you are redirected to the current site. I took a look at their Community page and, while has lots of interactive features, it doesn’t have real collaborative features.


According to MediaPost, the new “”Marthapedia" will essentially serve as an online handbook to provide user-friendly info on topics such as home and garden, family, food and others. The entries will initially be developed by Stewart's editors, but like Wikipedia, consumers will be able to link in and suggest their own recipes or gardening tips. However, unlike Wikipedia, where consumers can freely update the content, the editors will serve as gatekeepers, determining which consumer-generated info should be added.”

I’ve always been a great admirer of the Martha Stewart Omnimedia business model. It was designed from the ground up as a multimedia company. If you follow any of the publications, on or off line, you know that they really understand the use of various media and excel at cross promotion. On the web they are good at rich media, video and interactivity. The founder and her issues aside, it is a model par excellence of multichannel communications and marketing.

I’m adding my voice to the chorus of skeptics in the blogosphere on the “wiki” aspect, though. Neither marketer-developed content nor extensive monitoring of submissions is in the open source spirit. What are the expectations when consumers submit content? Is it that all content will be used? That content will be monitored for acceptability? That only selected content will be posted? You can see examples of all these practices all over the web. It's a matter of setting expectations--and then living up to them.

Maybe we’re just being purists, objecting to the use of “wiki” in something that sounds like a glorified message board. Maybe there is a real issue here that’s going to come back to bite the brand. All branded sites have to maintain some control over posted content. It will all depend on the execution.

But just don’t call it a wiki!