Do You Believe Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing?

It’s being equated to Moore’s Law of early Internet days; the now-validated prediction that computing power will double every two years as costs fall by half. I don’t know whether it meets that standard, but here’s what Zuckerberg originally said in 2008:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

My attention was drawn to this by a recent infographic on a Bloomberg Business Week site—more about that in a minute. The infographic is too large to reproduce easily, but it has some interesting factoids. Of course, the growth numbers are based on the Z. prediction; it’s not clear whether they used actual Facebook numbers to validate them. Whether the sharing figures are accurate (and who could tell with precision anyway??) the phenomenon is real. I found some other interesting things while looking around.

Aol & Nielsen content sharing study

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The consumer behavior behind sharing is important. There is a recent study by Nielsen for AOL that is worth paging through. Among other things, it finds that email is still the most-used sharing tool although social networks, especially Facebook, are gaining fast. Most Internet users share but they share different content on different networks. That’s interesting and important to the marketer who wants to have her content shared.

The difficulty of doing that was brought home to me by this chart. It is the multichannel options for the ShareThis multichannel bar. I use the simple icon on this site and it’s reliable and it produces interesting analytics. They’ve also added a real-time widget that other bloggers or website owners might enjoy. There are a lot of options here: how does the marketer select the best ones? Start with any analytics you can get. You might want to test different options of a multichannel sharing bar, although you don’t want to confuse your visitors. Finally, you might resort to marketing research among key users or the most avid sharers on your site. You have to understand the behavior of your own target audience.

Marketers also struggle every day with issues of keeping up with their discipline, given the torrent of content. I ran into two interesting services. The infographic I referred to was created by Summify, a personal service that creates a daily summary of news from the user’s social networks and sends it by email, to the desktop, or by mobile. The infographic was posted on a BBW beta site called Business Exchange. It describes itself as a social sharing site, with items “filtered by like-minded professionals.” Those professionals can view, comment, and suggest new topics. I don’t see a distribution tool, but if there’s not one, it will probably come.

These services represent two different and interesting approaches to taming the torrent of social sharing. They fall short, however, of actual content curation, adding expert judgement to the equation, as practiced by Huffington Post and others.

It’s a big world, full of content. The job of marketers is to make their content entertaining, relevant, and worthy of social sharing. A big job indeed!

Collaborating with Customers - B2C and B2B

Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Respond
Step 3 - Engage

I’m ready to write a post about the 4th step in the revised social media strategy development model. The old model called it CoCreate. This one uses the term Collaborate. Collaborate maybe sounds a little less formidable, a little easier to do. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized it’s just not so. It’s really hard. Sometimes it seems impossible. I’m going to explain why by using recent data on Forrester’s Social Technographics data and add some insights I’ve derived, virtually all from mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve written about the Technographics ladder before, because it’s a real asset to understanding what’s going on in this space. With the 2009 data, they’ve added a new rung on the ladder. It’s called “Conversationalists” and it primarily reflects the influence of Twitter on the social media scene. Obviously these categories are not mutually exclusive; most of us fall into one category at some point, or in connection with some brand, and into another category in a different situation. That’s life. But what is key to understanding the difficulty of encouraging collaboration--of getting customers to create content-- is the size of the Spectators segment; 70% of consumers fall into that segment at least part of the time. Add to that the next step on the ladder. Joiners aren’t cocreators; they have a profile, but beyond that they are consumers, just like Spectators. In fact, it’s not until you get up to the Critics and the new Conversationalists that you get content creation, from ratings to status updates to Tweets. Those are fine and increasingly important to marketers. However, it’s only a small part of the online population that creates content that generally goes beyond 140 characters!

Looking at the total population is, of course, useful. But it’s not your target market. I found a good example in the B2B space. I used Forrester’s profile tool (which doesn’t yet have the Conversationalists), just set for the entire B2B market. I got a profile that’s not hugely different from the consumer population profile, which isn’t particularly surprising because these activities carry over from our private lives to our business lives—and vice versa.

Josh Berman fortunately published a more detailed example in early 09, also based on their survey of business buyers. I’m including the chart with his commentary, which just deals with the “overall” and “for business purposes” categories on the right. Virtually everyone in the B2B space falls into the Spectator category—that’s a critical insight. 69% of them are doing so for business purposes, and in the blue bars you’ll notice that is not really different for IT managers and managers in a line of business who make technology decisions. A few more of these business decision makers fall into the active categories of Critics and Creators. That gives them an opportunity to be influentials in their business discipline.

And that begins to get to my points. I would suggest that:
• It’s really hard for a brand to get people to contribute if they already do not. You can—and should work on it—invite people to write reviews, for example. In the consumer space, it’s relatively easy to reward people for doing it; loyalty points are an interesting consideration. Incentives are always useful, and you may be able to find useful incentives in B2B as well as B2C.
• Once you identify customers who are taking the “baby steps” of, say, writing reviews, can you encourage them to do more? Whether it’s a blog comment or a wiki contribution, it’s a good step. Business customers love to give their opinions and ideas as sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm demonstrate, so it may be easier to give them an opportunity and let them go to it.
• All the chicklets that are encouraging us to Tweet or Digg content items are trying to get people to be more active in the conversation arena, and it’s worth making it easy to do. I’m not sure how much it contributes to a feeling of collaboration, but it’s great additional visibility. It might even create a customer perception of supporting the brand over time.
• Can you encourage customers to become Creators? All the B2C video contests like “Help Flo” are an example that you can. And those will probably continue to work well in the B2C space as long as you have a creative campaign.
B2B seems to offer a lot of opportunities to help customers become thought leaders. It’s the standard “speak at the conference” appeal. Now that can be expanded to blogs and other content repositories. That clearly leads to a feeling of being valued and I don’t see how it can do anything but strengthen the relationship between brand and customer.

I see two key take-aways in this. First, you can’t easily get people to participate in activities they aren’t already familiar with. If you have a target audience that’s pretty much Spectator-only, don’t try to make them Creators overnight. It’s just not going to happen.

Second, the marketing practice of trying to locate the opinion leaders (influentials) has come into its own. Customers are self-identifying by their blogs and other online creations. Find them and reach out to them. The case of the Coke fan page has become the classic case of doing just that. Your outreach may not always have such spectacular results, but it will be worthwhile. It just takes the patience and persistence that’s mandatory in the social media space!

Customer Experience Counts in All Channels

Forrester recently completed its 2010 customer experience ranking. Data was collected from 4,653 US consumers in November 2009. The full report is available only to Forrester clients, but Bruce Tempkin released key summary statistics yesterday.
His summary of the findings, much of which is displayed in this chart, is interesting:

• Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. I’m happy for them, but I also wonder why retailers appear to think that customer experience is more important than do other types of businesses that sell things—B2B or B2C, products or services?
• Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. Quelle surprise! We all have our stories. My most recent one is yesterday. I called a physician’s office for an appointment instead of her competitor whose office’s customer service was dissed on local ratings services. So far, so good—the appointments secretary was nice to me on the phone!
• There was very little excellence. Again, not news to most of us. Excellent customer service, and it’s outcome, excellent customer experience, is a sustainable competitive advantage. Why? Because it’s hard and it requires upfront investment.
• Liberty Mutual improved the most. Interesting. I’ve actually paid attention to their “responsibility matters” TV advertising. I wondered how that fit into their ability to improve customer experience, so I decided to look around.

What I expected to find was some trade buzz that Liberty Mutual had really been working on its customer service. Maybe they have, but that’s not what I found. I found The Responsibility Project. Business Week had an article and video interview with Stephen Sullivan, senior vice-president, communications services at Liberty Mutual. Sullivan talks about the challenges the firm faced in 2008 as it tried to expand market share in the face of competitors who could outspend and customers who didn’t trust. He says:

"It's a wonderful thing to say that we do the right thing, but it's also a more difficult message to get across to consumers because so many people want to say that," says Sullivan. "What we wanted to say is 'We recognize that personal responsibility is one of your core values and if this is true, then you will like doing business with a company like us because we share that value; in fact, we celebrate it on your part.'"

That view is the core of The Responsibility Project. TV is the responsibility of Hill, Holiday. PR comes from Ketchum, which describes the project as follows:

The Responsibility Project, created by Liberty Mutual, uses entertainment content to create a forum for people to discuss personal acts of responsibility. Through short films, online content and television programming, The Responsibility Project is a catalyst for examining the decisions that confront people trying to “do the right thing.”

Take a look at the project website. The entertainment content is obvious with short films from Liberty Mutual and “responsibility partners” including NBC, Slate and BeliefNet. I was interested in the box that describes their outreach to bloggers at the summer BlogHer conference. The site is reasonably interactive with a blog and an opportunity to post stories, vote on issues and make comments.

Individually, the pieces are impressive. More impressive is the degree to which Liberty Mutual integrates the “doing the right thing” into all its messaging—from the blogger outreach this summer to the career pages on its website. In the Business Week interview Sullivan made the point that employees had to believe in the message in order to be able to deliver on the promise. That starts with hiring the right people, as they are obviously trying to do. One assumes that management at Liberty Mutual is behind the program in both word and deed. Otherwise, the results wouldn’t be showing up in customer experience rankings.

Where did this all start? Liberty Mutual, of the 133 organizations in 14 industries that Forrester surveyed, improved its customer experience rankings the most. That means it supported its words with actions in a most impressive way--another best practices example.

Social media is nice. However, marketers have to use all their channels and use them in an integrated way. If the message doesn’t resonate and the experience is not satisfactory, all social media can do is to reflect customer discontent. If social media is to reflect a strong and trusted brand, business actions are going to establish the foundation. Getting the message out is important, but the actions of employees and the everyday experiences of customers are the ultimate test of strategy.

Social Media Best Practices for 2010

As social media marketing matures, there’s a continuing stream of firms and non-profits that are doing significant things. I looked back over 2009 to find some of the ones I had characterized as “best practices.” If you look down the list, consumer products companies appear to be underrepresented. I’m not sure whether that’s a reflection of reality or just a reflection of what I pay attention to. Stay tuned for some additions to that list!

Legal Zoom applies consumer marketing techniques to legal services marketing and does so in a way that supports instead of devaluing devalue the professionalism of their offering. A lot of the posts to their Facebook page continue to promote their contest, but there’s a cool New Year’s Resolution app. They don’t appear to have a blog, so the posts are more than blog feeds and the they seem to have a number of employees involved. Worth the attention of non-lawyers!

Starbucks gets a lot of votes in best practices lists. I think the “Listens—and Acts” phrase pretty much sums it up. The My Starbucks Idea site is still going strong. A lot of the current ideas are about products; notice how many of them would make Starbucks greener.

Kraft is another skilled social media practitioner that might be seen as unlikely, since their products are sold through channels to consumers at retail. However, they’ve found ways to engage their customers and to reach them at the point of purchase with the iFoodAssitant iPhone app. Their social media efforts are well done, one reason being that they understand the needs of their customers.

One of my favorite social media initiatives is the Pickens Plan. I’ve written about it several times including a late 2008 post that describes their community monitoring efforts. You only have to look at all the activity on the site to understand how much effort it takes to start a community—even more, to keep it vibrant. Think also the Christmas card post from the Obama campaign office. When I finish this post, I’m going to replace the simple badge on this blog with one of the Plan’s interactive widgets. That’s the sort of community fuel that keeps it running (pun intended)!

Finally another of my favorites is the McKinsey Journal represented on the blog with the McKinsey marketing content widget on the sidebar. I find the widget useful; I hope readers do. Since I’ve written about their social efforts (and got an almost immediate comment—very social!), they have added a “What Matters” page. It’s a thought leaders page and not overly social, although it does appear to be built on a blogging platform. Perhaps more important to the McKinsey Journalit provides additional content that supports the McKinsey brand.

The most impressive thing about these five examples is that all of them are keeping up the momentum; most have added new activities since I wrote about them sometime in 2009. That's a sign of commitment to social media. It also reminds me of some rants I've read lately about it not being "social media campaigns" or "social media programs." Ok, how about social media initiatives? Just as long as there are measurement milestones!

If you search “best practices” on the blogger search bar you’ll get others, both recent and older. All are nourishing food for thought, and I have no doubt that 2010 will produce more!

Online Shopping Gets Social

Today’s eMarketer newsletter reminded me that I had intended to follow up some recent articles on social shopping. As so often happens, I found more than I expected. Start with the chart from eMarketer which compares the information sharing behavior of Gen X women (born 1960 to late 1970s) to those of Gen Y females (born late 1970s to late 1980s; see a discussion of cohorts on Wikipedia, also search the various generations). Whatever the exact “gen” definition you use, the older segment is more likely to share by telephone or email; the younger ones are more likely to share online. Not a huge surprise, so I went onto look at some of the material that had recently floated through my inbox.

Most of what I found we already know; retailers have established a presence on the “big 4,” Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter. A recent post suggested that the effort is worthwhile, but it’s admittedly hard to measure results. What I was interested in, though, was what retailers should do to encourage social shopping or sharing, however you want to characterize it. I focused on an article by Heidi Cohen in ClickZ. She lists 7 ways to exploit the social phenomenon. I’ll list just 2 that I found especially compelling:

1. Make your message consistent across platforms. . .ensure that it's integrated with the rest of your marketing, both online and off. Consistency is key to having a believable and trusted brand!
2. Make attractive offers to social shoppers. They like them and pass them on!

I kept reading and found a comment by Keith Wiley of DecisionStep, a company I had not heard of. So I checked out his tool for social shopping, called ShopTogether. It looks like fun; more important, it looks like something women would do. I, for example, can visualize shopping with my daughter for presents for my grandsons using this tool. Check out their video. You can try the tool on Mattel’s ecommerce site.



Also think about how I found this social shopping tool. Someone from DecisionStep made a comment on the ClickZ article that led me to the site. The site had good content, and a blog post happened.

Food for thought for retailers; the rest of us can just go shopping!

Parsing Generational Differences in Social Media Use

I was as surprised as everyone else I know to find that older demographic segments were adopting Facebook and Twitter until I began to think about the reasons. They include keeping up with our younger family, friends and colleagues and having time to learn to use new social media platforms. That assumes the platforms offer relevant benefits—and they do, to all generations. However, the pattern of differences in motives and usage between generations is fascinating.
It’s well summarized by this graphic from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The slideshow, below, focuses on teenagers. That’s a group we know to be Internet-savvy and social, but they have their own pattern of uses.

The slideshow is worth paging through, but here are a few of the key findings:

• 93% of US teens use the Internet. No surprise there.
o 87% of parents of teens go online (slide 4). Hopefully some of that time is spent monitoring what their teens are doing.
• 64% of teens are content creators and they solicit feedback on their content (slides 10,11). While the content may not have lasting literary or artistic merit, what does it mean that they are creating and sharing?
• 91% use social networks to keep in touch with offline friends. Here’s a quote worth considering, “Rather than replace offline relationships with online ones, social media tools work best when they augment relationships that have other dimensions.” I’m not about to downplay the dangers to teens of people they meet online, but that’s not the reason most of them go online. Have social networks largely replaced the telephone for my generation and email for more recent ones? I think so.

Eating, Thinking and Staying Active with New Media

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The report recommends (slide 20):

o Connect with teens using the tools they already know. That’s essential advice for all the generations. It’s the essential message of the pyramid.
o Make your resources infinitely sharable. Teens (and Gens X and Y) are prone to share information. Older generations, including Boomers, are active online but much less likely to share content.
o Create opportunities to collaborate. Give them opportunities to do things they like to do!

I keep coming back to my classroom mantra—developing social media strategy is really hard! The differences in usage patterns are a major reason. The Pew Internet and American Life Project is the best source I’ve found for a lot of wonderful data. Search the generational monikers on their site to find important data about your target audience. And don’t make the mistake of assuming that groups only a few years apart in age use the Internet and the social media platforms in the same way. They don’t!

GM--Cautious Use of Social Media in Brand Reinvention

My early morning multitasking included listening to an interview with the GM CEO on CNBC and reading the article about their new campaign in Ad Age, so I’m not sure where I heard it first. I’m reasonably sure that I heard Fritz Henderson say they had already posted the ad on YouTube although it will not be aired until tomorrow.

I was curious to see how many people had viewed it in advance of the TV campaign. I found more than I anticipated. As I thought, only 314 people had viewed it since it was posted yesterday. More interesting is the fact that there are two PPC ads on the YouTube page when you search “general motors.” One leads to the GM Reinvention site.

The site is slick and professional and hits all the right notes. It links to their Flickr, Twitter and Facebook pages. I also note that Bob Lutz’s groundbreaking Fast Lane blog now includes posts by many other GM executives in advance of Lutz’s retirement at the end of this year. Point is that the site is totally devoted to GM’s message, but it offers social media opportunities for people who want to talk.
And I’m always interested in the conversation. The first comments I looked at were on the YouTube page. There were 7 comments at the time I looked. Two were from the same foul-mouthed lout, two were clearly cheering GM on, 1 was about the ad itself, and 2 were commenting on the comments. About what you’d expect—or did you expect worse?

The (9, at the time I looked) comments on the Ad Age article were also predictable. They discuss the ad itself, the historical vision and strategy (or lack thereof) of GM—all about the message, not about cars.

The Facebook page is the most interesting of all. (Note: there’s a careful/good disclaimer that the viewer is leaving the GM site for an open site.) There are lots of “likes” of the GM material and many comments. There are many positive comments about the cars and about the importance of “buy American.” What’s even more interesting is the people who are heatedly refuting negative comments about the cars and about the importance of buying cars manufactured in North America.

It’s interesting to watch and to recognize the level of support for GM that exists among the consuming public. It’s even more interesting to wonder if GM will find a way to mobilize this support to its advantage over the coming months.

Right now it’s slick and professional and relatively controlled. Will GM find a way to put consumers in the driver’s seat—something like Ford did, perhaps? Since we’re all now shareholders, we should hope so!

Survival of the Fittest--Marketers, Media, Agencies

I saw the Digital Darwinism article in Booz & Co’s online Strategy+Business magazine a few weeks ago. I read it, thought it summarized important ideas, then pushed it to the side of my desktop where it languished until a couple of days ago. When I received an email that it had been republished as a Resilience report I reread it and was again impressed with its insights.

Part of the reason is some good case studies; author Christopher Vollmer talks about HP and there are sidebars written by Carolyn Everson of MTV Networks and Ajaz Ahmed of digital agency AKQA. That represents their three key players in this struggle for survival; businesses, media and agencies.

The report identifies 5 behaviors that the fittest will use to survive:

1. Getting close to consumers. Hardly a surprise! The point is to “activate” consumers, making them “prosumers.” I think we used to call that brand advocates, but whatever we call it, it’s hard to do.
2. Stimulating conversation. Again, not a surprise. Advertising is out; listening and dialog are in.
3. Recognizing that content and context are inextricably intertwined. This puts a premium on careful media choice and integration.
4. Making better use of customer data and insight. In this fragmented media environment we lack integrated metrics to measure the progress of our efforts.
5. Building new, more collaborative relationships. This is where marketers have to work in close collaboration with their agencies and media to create the kind of meaningful, two-way dialog that will “activate” customers.

This report is essentially analysis of the fall Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010 report, which I've written about a couple of times previously. While there is nothing startlingly new in the analysis, it is cogent, focused and a good reminder.

A friend commented to me recently that a brand of our acquaintance didn’t seem to have the basics in place. Good point. These are the basics. If your company/your brand doesn’t have them in place your chances of survival in a challenging environment are seriously diminished!

Social Media Marketing Myths

My first semester teaching social media marketing is drawing to a close. I hope my students at Harvard Extension School have learned a lot. I know I have, both about social media itself and how to teach it. This week I took the opportunity to summarize what I’ve learned—see the entire slideshow at the end of the post.

The myths I’ve been collecting all semester long sum up a lot of it. Here they are—agreement and disagreement encouraged. These are the myths:

1. It’s easy. It’s not easy to understand what the social platforms can do, especially when platforms and apps are changing on a daily basis. It’s even harder to understand how social media can fit into marketing strategy.
2. It’s free. True, a lot of the platforms are free. Executing them well, however, is a labor-intensive process that has to be factored into the equation.
3. It’s about technology. Of course it’s not. It’s about people and their behaviors, their likes and dislikes, and especially about their desire to communicate with people they like and/or respect about topics of mutual interest.
4. Social media reaches mass audiences. Sure it does. But if marketers wanted to reach mass audiences, they could use network TV (if they could afford it). Part of strategy (see #1) is segmentation and targeting.
5. Marketers can talk about their products. See #3. People aren’t on social networks to talk to marketers about their products, unless marketers given them a good (beneficial) reason to do so. People are on social networks to talk about things they care about.
6. All Internet users will participate. Don’t we wish! See the 90-¬9-1 rule. And, as you do, think segmentation again.
7. Management will understand the potential. Let me ask you a question. Does the person who approves your budget have a Facebook page? Does that person Twitter? If the answer to even one of those is “yes,” good luck with your social media marketing campaign. If the answer to both is “no,” good luck convincing that person to approve a social media campaign!
8. We’ll see results right away. Boone Pickens built an active community quickly—with at least $58 million of his own money! Even the large corporations (think Johnson's®, Ford) who are using social media effectively don’t seem to be budgeting huge amounts for it. If they did, it would become a big traditional advertising program. Boone Pickens made that succeed because it was for a cause. Corporations have to be careful about making it look like “just another advertising campaign.” They are better off to plant the seeds and let the program grow--organically, if you will.
9.We’ll put it up and it will take care of itself. See #2. It takes careful planning, executing and monitoring. All of that takes effort; some of it takes serious marketing expertise.

If you have another one, we could make this a top ten list!

Social Media Final Overview

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Take a look at the slideshow and see if that helps you identify something I’ve missed!

Charting the Evolution of Social Media Marketing

I’m indebted to Tom Martin for his morning Tweet with the link to Jerimiah Owyang’s article on the future of the social web. I’m working on my final summary for the social media class, and this article and the chart it includes really hit the mark. My own odyssey over this semester has highlighted how badly we need to understand the strategy aspects of social media marketing and how hard it is to do in the midst of constant change in the media themselves and how customers use them.

According to Owyang’s analysis we are now in the era of social functionality, moving into social colonization. I see as especially relevant his comment on consumers in the era of social context—that consumers will opt in to share information in return for relevance. I’m reminded of my exhortation last week to “Ask Them!”

He identifies five contexts:
• The community
• Location
• Social
• Behavioral
• Preferences.

Note that consumers control all of these contexts, from the communities with which they affiliate to the information they choose to reveal to marketers (in return for value). Many behaviors can be observed online and mined for their implications. Marketers will have to continue to do that until they can make direct, personal connections with customers and potential customers and engage in dialog with them.

At that point “Ask Them!” still seems to be the most accurate and straightforward way of finding out what customers really want—and that may usher in the era of social commerce!

What Are Older People Doing on Twitter?

Last week when I wrote (again) about older women on Facebook, Ailsa Leadbetter was kind enough to point out that comScore had new data about the age of Twitter users—thanks, Ailsa! In the meantime Marketing Charts was kind enough to do an article and chart on the subject, so I’m good to go.

Note that this post is titled “older people,” not “older women.” I can’t find any data. Twitter has a stats page on their blog, but they seem to be focusing on traffic data, not any kind of audience profile. I did find an app that guesses gender from Tweet contents, but I’m interested in data, not silly apps.

Again, I’m left to hypothesize. Here’s what I think is going on:

1.Twitter has taken the business (broadly defined: remember all the Congresspeople Twittering during President Obama’s speech?) world by storm. The data from HubSpot confirm that. It’s mostly web/desktop applications that are used for Twittering. There’s a good representation of mobile, but almost no fun stuff with pictures!

2.Many of the business Twitterers are male; a majority? I really don’t know, but somehow I guess “yes” by a small margin.

3.It doesn’t make much difference anyway. The Tweet stream is full of business messages of all kinds; gender is not relevant there.

Still, I’m curious. The comScore data comes from their panel, for which they have gender, so I hope we’ll see gender data at some point. The age data is certainly interesting.

Business/professional use of Twitter undoubtedly accounts for some of what we see in the age data. In my reply to Ailsa’s comment, I said that I probably gave less emphasis than I should have to the greater amount of time available to older people to try new technologies. That argument, however, applies better to the 55+ women on Facebook than it does to the most active, 45-54, age group on Twitter.

What should give us all pause is the comment from the comScore analyst quoted in the Marketing Charts article:

[comScore blogger Sarah] Radwanick concluded that current assumptions about who might use a technology first might need to be reconsidered. “Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the technologically inclined,” she said. “With those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.”

Marketers take note! The nature of the technology early adopter may be changing before our very eyes!

Identifying and Measuring Social Media Behaviors--Part 2

As I suggested yesterday, I’ve been struggling to organize the chaotic world of social media metrics into a comprehensible framework. While working on this I ran across thought-provoking material from comScore.












The report, “How Online Advertising Works: Wither the Click” is the result of a controlled study of exposure to online display advertising. Among other interesting findings, it makes the point that there is a long-time lift in website traffic from exposure that is not measured by mere click-through. What’s even more fascinating is that they found a smaller lift in traffic to competitor sites. When you stop to think about it though, isn’t that what shopping is all about? Do you necessarily buy in the first store you go into?

A follow-on post by comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni considers question of whether advertisers should buy ads on a CPM or a CPA basics. The answer continues to be “it depends” and it has implications for both publishers and advertisers.


This was all lead-up to preparing a presentation on social media metrics for my class tonight. I’ve got a start on a framework and some examples. There’s undoubtedly a lot more in both areas, but it’s only a 2-hour class!

Seriously, I've uploaded the presentation to Slideshare (you may need the new version of the Flash player) and I’d love your feedback. Do you think I’m on the right track? What would you add? delete? Do you have other great DIY sources for social media metrics?

Identifying and Measuring Social Media Behaviors - Part 1

One of my students just linked to Rick Liebling’s “Periodic Table of the Social Media Elements” post on our class blog. Thanks, Scott! That adds another perspective to Overdrive Marketing’s Social Media Map, Brian Solis's Conversation Tools, about which I've written before, and Robert Scoble’s Social Media Starfish, which I use in the social media course. They’re all useful to those of us trying to keep track of the social media landscape.

Look up periodic table in Wikipedia if you need to—I did. However, I was especially interested in the list of social media behaviors:

Sh = Share
Mt = Monitor
Fr = Friend
Cv = Converse
Cu = Customize
Li = Listen
En = Engage
Di = Dialogue

I tried to do the same thing recently with both a premise and a context in mind. The rather simple-minded premise is that marketers are using social media in order to get people to do something, either in the social medium itself or by driving them to the business’s website. I say that having seen the many studies that show that marketers believe they are using social media for branding purposes. I don’t deny the usefulness of social media in branding. However, the context is one in which there are multiple types of marketing/branding effort--both online and offline, both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 efforts.

Again, a simple-minded argument. Corporate (or non-profit) social media programs should be measured only in terms of behaviors that can be directly traced to the program. Using marketing research to try to tease out the effects of online/offline, 1.0/2.0 may be necessary from time to time at the corporate marketing level, but it makes no sense try to measure the branding effects of single social media efforts. It costs too much and by the time results become available the world has moved on.

That perspective makes it possible to separate behaviors that take place in the social ecosphere from those that take place after the person has reached the website. This is my list, similar to Rick Liebling’s, but not quite the same:

Behaviors in the social ecosphere:
Number of visits, impressions (eyeball measures)
Friends, fans, favs (followers of all kinds)
Install apps (widgets, etc.) offered
Click through to website
Comment/co-create
Attention/engagement
Pages: how much time spent, “heat maps” for content, etc.
Video: watched, partly/completely
Share content
Promote content (Digg, Reddit, etc.)
Number of incoming links

Behaviors on the website
Number of referrals from social media sites
Register for site services
Download—white papers, videos, podcasts, etc.
Rate products
Other content cocreation (photos, videos, written content, etc.)

All the behaviors on the website have the usual metrics problem of multiple visits and the necessity for behavioral tracking to determine, for each conversion, whether the initial referral was from a social media site. That takes some effort, but it’s actually much easier than it was in the world of mass media.

And that’s where I was going with all of this. I’ve been trying to organize the complexity of social media metrics into some sort of coherent framework for my students. I’ll share that effort with you tomorrow.