Social media is one of several options for communicating with other people. In an informal survey around the office, I was asking people how much time they spent talking with people they don’t know on the phone. I also asked how much time they spent on social media talking with people they don’t know. I don’t want to taint results, so I’ll just ask all of you the same question.
Jeff Katz recently sent me a link to a post from a blogger complaining about the state of technology in social media monitoring. While I agree with many of the points in the post about the challenges of the industry, I was very put off by the insulting manner the blogger used. I was also surprised to see how many start ups in the social media monitoring space seemed to just learn the challenges of the market.
In a comment string on that post, Ari Herzog asked me to elaborate on this point: “If you think the amount of person hours spent using the current systems is a lot now, just wait for what is coming.” So, this is that elaboration.
Jeremiah Owyang will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t think social media scales. He’ll also point you to Best Buy as an example of a company to watch. Have you seen their Twitter background for their @Twelpforce account? It’s an army of people. Best Buy is doing something unique: they’re solving the volume of conversation with, gasp, people!
Most of the business interest in social media has been around marketing. As a social media marketer, I know it’s only a part of the long term business value of social media. The truth is social media is a communication channel, which plugs into every business department just like email and phone. Speaking of phones, former CEO of Zappos.com now acquired by Amazon.com, Tony Hsieh said, “We don’t really think of social media as a marketing channel; that would be kind of like asking about ROI on answering phones.”
Having started by building social media programs with systems that I rolled myself to building out a global social media program for Webtrends; I can say that a big realization has emerged from what Jeremiah and Tony have been talking about. Businesses need to think about social media as a communication channel. They should be planning for it and evaluating it using similar KPIs as they do their phones. It’s not a question of if they should talk to customers, prospects, partners, etc. The question is how efficiently they’re doing it.
However, that’s not what businesses are currently thinking or doing. Most businesses are still sticking their toe in the water of social media and as a result have seriously under invested in the space. Large Fortune 1000 companies are gripping about spending $30K on software and handing it over to super small teams–sometimes a single person. Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team? Or a single intern?!! How can they expect to evaluate performance when the team is so under water that they can’t even think?
The reality is that if businesses want to be successful in participating in social media, they’ll need to allocate resources in proportion to the volume that exists for their brand. Small companies can get away with small teams. Large corporations will need large departments. They will be structured like call centers with IVRs, scripts, answer trees, etc. It will take a substantial investment in staff training, infrastructure, and rolling out business processes. Everyone in the company will have to know how to use the tools and different departments will be responsible for different pieces of the conversation.
There is wide spread confusion about how much to invest and how to measure value. To help, Forrester or someone should do a study comparing the amount of conversation hours large brands have on phones, email, and social media. That would help businesses understand the relative investment to make. It would also help them determine which channels are most efficient so they can push conversations to their most efficient channels. We’re deploying a cross-departmental, multi-channel, global social media program here and we plan to share the details for our customers’ reference.
Had the clock just struck thirteen? Had I just been subjected to 2 minutes of hate? Was I living in a dystopian society?
The answer to all the above is no—I’m not Winston Smith and the year is not 1984. Phew! But, Big Brother IS following me on Twitter.
The Big Brother I am talking is not the totalitarian state (not is this blog anyway) but of course the successful reality TV show.
WHY?
In the UK certain events quintessentially define British summer time these range from Wimbledon and Royal Ascot to the Glastonbury music festival. Over the last 10 years the phenomenon that is BB has rowdily forced its way into this, creating a televisual feast of reality on our screens 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the entire summer period.
Rewind to the beginning of this years “summer”, Webtrends had just launched social measurement (if you haven’t seen it call your local rep and demand a demo! IT’S AMAZING) and I had been working through some demo ideas to show customers. I chose Big Brother for a topic idea as it has an element of community—stuff happens and the power of social media means that people want to talk about it instantly. One of my initial ideas was to compare traditional summer events with Big Brother and the results are of this are below:
Astonishing, but actually Big Brother gets far more mentions in social media than “traditional” summer events. I just guess sports events haven’t captured the hearts and minds of Twitterers in the same way reality TV has.
During the time of the MP expenses scandal exposed superbly by one of our customers, The Daily Telegraph, one of the housemates called “halfwit” (read here to find out why he is called that) had shown an interest in becoming a politician after the show. So I did a comparison of mentions for that week betwixt him and the major political figures in the UK today:
Amazingly again the housemate, even in these troubled times had more share of voice than the 2 leaders of the opposition parties in the UK and on one day eclipsing the Prime Minister himself!
I also made a conscious effort not to watch the actual TV show itself , but actually use mentions and conversation cloud to understand what had actually gone on within the house.
This sort of fun insight is better shared with the Big Brother community than locked away in a demo, so I started tweeting the outcomes of some of the trends I had discovered and two things happened…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKS2qV1FKVs]
One of the features that got me really excited about Analytics 9 is the RSS overlay. Being in charge of social media marketing, there’s not much that I care about more than how offsite activity translates into website analytics, which then connects to our sales funnel. RSS overlay makes it easier for me to report the ROI of our social media activity. Anyone involved in social media marketing knows what a challenge it can be to demonstrate the ROI of our work, so anything that makes it easier is my friend.
I use Webtrends Social Measurement to track a variety of topics around the web, including our reputation. I wanted to share how I use our WSM reputation tracking data to quickly understand the impact of our offsite work.
Recently, we launched a social media campaign that had strong results. Using Analytics 9, I was able to get a visual on what social media caused an impact on our site. Below is the screenshot from that campaign in Analytics 9 using the RSS overlay view:
Seeing that data allowed me to send an informed request for a deeper dive on analytics to Elizabeth, who is in charge of Measurement and Optimization here. I was then able to use the RSS overlay graph and Elizabeth’s stats to report our campaign’s success to the company. I looked good. The company benefited. It was a win win and here’s how I did it:
1. Select the “Configuration” icon on the River of News (RoN) widget you want to use and note down the “wiid” number found at the top left hand corner of the widget.
2. Send an email to Webtrends Technical Support with the subject of “Requesting RSS Feed” and the body of “Please enable a RSS feed for the RON of this wiid:_____”.
3. Webtrends Technical Support will reply back with a RSS feed URL for them to use.
4. Within Analytics 9, select the RSS view, then add in your new RSS feed URL.
NOTE: Any configuration changes made to the RoN widget will create a new wiid. This will need to be passed back through the above instruction chain to ensure that the RSS Feed will continue.
This is the first post about the cool stuff you can do with RSS overlay. We’ll be releasing weekly tips and tricks including:
Nate DiNiro interviews Jeremiah Owyang at the Social Media Club's event at Webtrends.
It was great hosting the Social Media Club with Jeremiah Owyang at our offices this week. Pizza, beer, and beautiful weather for the rooftop patio added to the great discussion facilitated by Nate DiNiro. Owyang spoke about things like the scalability problems with social media, utility of Twitter to small businesses, and how email is still the largest social network. The event was standing room only and several people commented to me how much they enjoyed it and how time seemed to fly by.
Thank you to the Social Media Club for organizing the event. Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for taking time to join us. Thanks to Widmer for sponsoring the beer. And, thanks to everyone who attended making the night fun!
Social media is changing the way businesses connect with markets. Conversations take place where the participants choose and are often spread across multiple sources. Pulling the conversation together in order to make informed, engagement decisions is at the heart of marketing’s challenge in this new media landscape. To demonstrate how Webtrends Social Measurement helps with a social media campaign, we advertised on the outside of Portland’s light rail, MAX, to monitor Twitter for responses to our ad. The idea is to publish the results on another MAX ad in October. We forecasted it would take 3 months to get a volume of results that would tell a compelling story, but a compelling story emerged in less than a week and spanned Twitter, blogs, and mainstream news. This is an update on that campaign.
The following are results from our measure of conversation on social media driven by our marketing campaign.
If a source had two or more posts, we combined the results. KATU had the most comments. BikePortland had the most commenters. Also worth noting, after we filtered for duplicates we discovered that the number of comments that KATU reports on their site are nearly double the actual amount. Unique commenters are considered unique usernames.
Sentiment is a hot aspect of social media. We recently wrote a post challenging the use of algorithms to determine sentiment, and this campaign is a great example of how NLP falls short. Sentiment is a complex tapestry of human emotions, not just positive, negative, or neutral. In this case our criteria was:
As our results are human scored and could be interpreted differently by other people, we are providing our data so that it can be reinterpreted by anyone who is interested. We showed the top four sources broken out to show what impact sources had on the overall sentiment. Overall, the sentiment was that people favored either the same or less taxes than cyclists currently contribute. The strongest opposition came from Twitter, our original target source for monitoring conversation for this campaign.
In today’s media landscape, it’s challenging to track many viewpoints from many stakeholders. Making sense of a high volume of conversation from disparate sources isn’t easy for anyone. After tracking this conversation with our tools, here are some of the main points we learned:
1.) There is a lot of confusion on the facts about who pays for what currently
The most quoted source was the Federal Highway Administration (FWHA), which reported that 92% of the funds for local roads come from property, income, and sales taxes. It was the lack of general awareness of this fact that we believe causes a lack of empathy with cyclists as it pertains to taxation/registration. We did notice that the mainstream news sites that had the most “yes” answers to our question, many of which were accompanied by messages that indicated people didn’t think cyclists paid taxes currently. Others pointed out that cars, boats, motorcycles, airplanes and more have additional taxes including licensing, registration, and fuel taxes. Respondents pointed out that many cyclists are also motorists and therefore not only pay the unique motor vehicle taxes, but that it would be double taxation. To which people replied that the additional taxes are paid for per vehicle regardless of use, which therefore doesn’t constitute double taxation.
What is clear to us is that more conversation around this point could help clarify for everyone where contribution currently comes from, which is key to having a discussion about where obligations should be moving forward. While the information is out there, it doesn’t appear to be widely distributed, nor agreed upon. We see this as the greatest opportunity for constituents involved in public policy development around transportation.
2.) More taxes on cycling could be bad for everyone
There were two reasons for arguing this point. First is that people pointed out that less traffic, less damage to the environment, and more benefits were good for everyone. Participants reasoned that anything that discouraged cycling, such as taxes, prevents the community from reaping those rewards. As bikes do not use fuel, the only additional per vehicle costs that could apply would be licensing and registration. The only argument we saw against this point was the feeling of it being unfair that road faring cyclists didn’t have to pay these costs as well. Contenders pointed to the fact that state governments and municipalities who have adopted bike registration programs have later abandoned them due to the loss of the revenue to overhead.
3.) Some cyclists want more taxes, but under specific conditions
When people said they’d be willing to pay more taxes, they were only willing to pay more if the money went to bike specific infrastructure (we’ll include numbers in our final report). Nearly every answer for more taxes included the word “if”, often in all caps, and ended with extra exclamation points–indicating that people felt strongly that paying more was critically tied to the conditions that the money went to bike specific infrastructure. People expressed interest in better maintenance of existing bike lanes, more and better bike lanes, new bike-only paths, theft recovery, and more.
Other themes that came up were: Motorists are rude and sometimes dangerous about sharing the road; Road laws are not enforced equally on cyclists; Cyclists aren’t required to have liability insurance; Some people consider “cyclist” a loaded word.
As part of our campaign, we are being transparent. That means we share openly about all details of the campaign. It also means our employees are free to discuss their thoughts publicly, even if they are critical. So, let’s talk about how we make money with this campaign. As I mentioned earlier, this campaign is part of a larger campaign called The Open Campaign. The Open Campaign will have it’s own microsite that will openly display the methods and results from various campaigns we’ve run using our tools. The concept is to provide a reference to businesses for what running campaigns with our tools looks like. It is that site that we’ll use to build leads for our sales team. While we do have a landing page for the MAX ad with a form on it, that form is to enter to win a free TriMet pass. Information from that form is *not* given to our sales team. It is strictly a promotional offer to encourage participation.
Want to see the results and make your own reports? Download our data »
Our question surfaced a diversity of viewpoints in much less time than we expected. As a result, we have an opportunity to progress the conversation by asking another question. If you have a suggestion for a follow up question, please share it as us a comment below.
Last Friday we launched an ad campaign on the MAX posing the question “Should cyclists pay a road tax?” We tracked a significant amount of conversation in a short period of time. In fact, it was much more conversation than we had anticipated and agreed with Thom Schoenborn it would be better to get results out sooner. So, in addition to our October rewrap of the MAX, we would also like to provide an update now.
Before we get too far, we’d like to clarify a few points:
Using Webtrends Social Measurement we were able to track this conversation’s 918 comments across 13 sources. As our first update, we wanted to share the list of sources where the conversations have taken place so far:
Starting today, we will continue to share updates on this blog. Our final report will contain the following:
Tomorrow we will publish an overview of the comments broken out into the following sentiment: those who support the amount of taxes paid now, those who want less, and those who want more.
Sentiment comes up more and more in the conversation about social media measurement as the demand for insight in this arena increases. What savvy marketer doesn’t want to understand the sentiment of their audience? With the rise of social media, the voice of the consumer has more venues to be heard than ever before. Marketers have had to rely on highly sampled attitudinal response, largely collected through direct survey and other traditional market research tactics, so the promise of broader sentiment measurement is highly appealing.
The problem is that no one has solved the problem of sentiment, which is compounded by the fact that many vendors are claiming to have sentiment (Forrester Wave: Listening platforms). We wanted to provide some clarity around sentiment and explain what we know to be accurate.
At the moment there are two emerging approaches to determining sentiment: humans and natural language processing (NLP). Let’s take a closer look at the two.
Human Power Sentiment
Because automating sentiment analysis is a difficult problem to solve, some vendors are using people to determine sentiment. Many use the service Mechanical Turk, which is an API that connects to people. The name comes from the 18th century chess-playing automaton “The Turk”. An example, if you wanted to know if a comment was positive, negative, or neutral (establish sentiment) you would send that comment to a Turker who gets paid per request to decide the comment’s sentiment. To ensure accuracy, three Turkers are asked to assess the comment.
The inherent problem here is that the process doesn’t scale. Large volumes of data can only be sampled. Analysis also isn’t real time and delays can be in terms of days. To scale, more bodies need to be thrown into the analysis. Since three Turkers are paid per request, the cost becomes prohibitive to deal with high volume.
Algorithmic Sentiment
Natural language processing is the algorithmic approach to text analysis that doesn’t have the cost and scaling problems of human powered sentiment. Companies like Google are working on this problem, but they still haven’t cracked the A.I. nut to accurately map text to the author’s sentiment. Currently NLP technologies fail to accurately decipher the sarcasm, slang, and irony that we so frequently push out in our blogs, tweets, and pithy status updates.
Don’t get us wrong, we love the idea of sentiment analysis! We’re eager to hear more about progress made in this area, let us know when you hear about it. We look forward to this maturing into something that will help all of us marketers better understand and communicate with our customers. We’re following sentiment technologies closely because we want to incorporate the technology into our solutions. For now, we’re not employing automated sentiment because the human powered approach doesn’t scale, and the algorithmic approaches are as unreliable as voice recognition. If companies are promising you features that depend on automated sentiment, be sure to ask them probing questions about their approach so you don’t get sold on vaporware.
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Not too long ago, I asked a former colleague to give me his view on the implementation of a measurement tool. While I had partially expected a response related to the technical implementation, his response aligned with an important truth–implementations are only as important as their inherent backbone–a measurement strategy.
With that I would like to introduce Martin Cook, a Performance Measurement Consultant for EMC Conchango. Based out of London, England Martin has a deep background in measuring online behavior and helping organizations understand the benefit in producing sound measurement strategies as a basis for all digital investments. Implementations and the software used are merely tools – while some are better than others none of them will do the job without proper application.
Next week at Engage we will be discussing implementations in my workshop, Planning for Success: Implementation Strategies. While the content will be focused around how WebTrends can be implemented on your website, I’d like to think of this idea of measurement strategy and ROI during our workshop discussions.
Why are measurement strategies so important?
Measurement strategies enable us to measure performance against business goals and justify the business case.
In this day and age how many clients still do not know how their online offering is performing? Especially in the current economic climate, it’s vitally important to understand your company’s performance against its goals and what is working well and more importantly what can work harder! Without this knowledge it can and has proved catastrophic to many businesses throughout the world. If your organisation is even the slightest bit slack at establishing an effective measurement strategy, your competition will be more agile at reacting in these times and capitalising on opportunities. We need to look beyond the credit crunch and economic downturn to focus on the opportunities that will arise, upon the upturn.
More than a month ago we started the search for a communications company that could integrate, and make stronger, our vision of PR, AR, and Social communication being a single effort. Our marketing goals, much like our customers, are focused on growing our business and delighting our customers using Digital Marketing, Traditional Marketing, Sales, PR, AR, and Social communications collaboratively. Of course, like our customers, we want to do so objectively with data. We wanted to work with a team that, collectively, understood the rules of the traditional communication world, but had experience with new media and share the same passion for turning data into insight that we do.
Today, we are extremely pleased to share today that we’ve concluded our search and selected our new communications partner Voce Communications.
Voce is a 50+ person firm with offices in San Francisco and Sunnyvale with people in Orlando, Portland, and Ketchum. They cut their teeth in PR and have since added AR, social media, and more comm skills. The deciding factors for us was their knowledge of the tech space, impressive skills in social media, use of technology, and passion for data. Voce has successfully grown the bottom line for companies like NetApp and using their integrated communications approach, and we’re looking to benefit from their experience.
We have some exciting plans we’re rolling out including increased executive participation in our our local community here in Portland, social media (extending our support and sales team into Twitter as an example), and a few big ideas that we’ll share as they develop.
Stay tuned,
Jascha
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