These days, it seems a communications or social media conference is incomplete without obligatory mentions of social media measurement, social media metrics and web analytics.

Unfortunately, more often than not it is difficult to show that social media can help improve ROI (Return on Investment).

Is it possible to manage the big headaches of super-abundant information to reap the rewards?

ComMetrics University – Coffee break webinar: Social media measurement: Help! I am drowning in data

If you sometimes feel that you are overwhelmed with data, this post outlines four steps for reaping the rewards – from social media measurement to boosting ROI through social media efforts.

But first, we offer some irony: sign up with your email to be among the first to get our next blog post.

Information management step 1: Remember, efficient is not always effective

Whatever we do we have to describe and define the purpose of social media analytics.

We need two definitions to understand the issues at hand:

- effectiveness of collecting a particular social media metric means that it achieves its stated purpose – requiring a business or individual to spell out: What should collecting a particular social media measurement or social media analytics accomplish?
- efficiency means the desired results are worth more than the resources required to achieve them: measurements collected and insights gained from them must be worth more than the efforts and money needed to get them.

Number of unique visitors to a blog post can be collected efficiently (i.e. quickly and easily). Unfortunately, this metric may not provide us with the information we need.

Rule 1: Collect one or two ‘efficient’ metrics such as pageviews or unique visitors, but focus on the trends over time. Most importantly, define a couple of ‘effective’ measures that help you achieve your strategic objectives.

Sentiment analysis is an efficient way to collect data, but the findings are often invalid = ineffective way to do things.

Information management step 2: Immediately take real action – you must walk the walk

Retailers commonly collect data from their customers and Wal-Mart has confirmed that it handles more than 1 million transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes in size (i.e. 167 times the books in the US Library of Congress).

The above numbers are certainly impressive, but for your business you should ask: Why are we collecting data, or put differently, what actions are taken once the numbers are in?

If no actions are taken within 30 days after receiving numbers about lower pageviews or higher conversion rates, why collect the numbers?

Rule 2: Any collected metrics must result in actions. If no decisions get made based on the insights gained from your data, collecting data becomes a waste of resources and should stop immediately.

Information management step 3: Your data is never accurate – guaranteed

While we collect increasing data, they are often inaccurate, such as those collected through a customer loyalty program. For instance, sometimes I forget my loyalty cards when shopping or purchase my favorite toothpaste or shaving gel at another store.

My Ph.D. advisor once cautioned me, saying:

“Urs, the challenge is to acquire quality data that one can gain insights from in order to improve one’s understanding of the phenomenon investigated.”

In fact, we tend to collect more data than we need, and its quality may not allow us to reach the correct conclusions.

Rule 3: Collected information is never perfect, thereby requiring that inferences be made by watching trends. However, insights gained and decisions made may not be what they first appear.

Information management step 4: Focus groups cannot design products

Often users are given samples or an opportunity to take a test-drive (e.g., toothpaste, laundry detergent, My.ComMetrics.com) in the hopes that after testing the product, they will purchase it.

For instance, Flexity, Tangotram and Combino are all tram manufacturing companies that were invited to Zurich for a 2-week test-drive on Route 11. Passenger feedback was collected with the help of surveys and used to improve tender specifications (i.e. for some seats passengers wanted more leg room which was then included in the tender specifications).

Test-driving any product for a while will result in insights that would not be gained otherwise and can markedly improve user experience. The data can also help improve technical specifications, as well as lowering warranty and maintenance costs.

It is hard to design products ‘by focus group’ or ‘by engineer’. Focus group participants may not know that they hate or love a feature until they try using it in their everyday. And believe it or not, engineers can forget things. A/B testing and product tests are relatively simple and cheap ways to help reduce the risk of a product flop in the case of a new webpage, user-community or corporate blog.

Rule 4: Instead of just using focus groups or asking engineers to design the product or service, take the prototype for an extensive test-drive. Use the data to make strategic decisions for improving your social media measurement ROI.

Bottom line
Somewhere, somehow, more data is always available. Following these four rules should help reduce the hazards of having too much unimportant data. Eyeball measures are easy, but rarely tell you whether you achieved your strategic goals with the help of social media, thereby boosting ROI.

Effective data collection means getting data that is good enough to gain insight as far as your Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) are concerned. In turn, one can take action to improve the company’s bottom line. Unless you have good-quality data at an affordable price, decisions will be based on an unstable foundation and could result in disaster.

Have an opinion on this? How do you manage best? Please share in the comments; I love to hear what works for you!

2010-07-14 you can listen to the podcast – ComMetrics University – Coffee break webinar: Social media measurement: Help! I am drowning in data

Article source: ComMetrics – Measuring social media to boost ROI

The first step is simple: start monitoring numbers that measure something and draw the right conclusions. For instance, when the temperature reaches 35 degrees Celsius, air conditioning helps office productivity, making it a mediating factor for, though not a cause of, your Return on Investment (ROI).

Similar reasoning applies to social media measurement. We have addressed some of these issues previously:

Budgeting for SM: Cost-benefit analysis vs. ROI
Measuring ROI: Why it fails
KPI experts’ 5 secrets

In this post we focus on measuring smarter, while ensuring that we correctly work out the statistical pattern and address five critical pointers for establishing a successful monitoring program.

Assume nothing, question everything.

Qualitative and quantitative measures
We love to use quantitative measures because these are easy to acquire. Often, traditional measuring follows a script similar to this:

a) Number of unique visitors from each source (e.g., search engines, referrals, direct visitors),
b) Size of network (‘likes’ on Facebook formerly called fans, subscribers, Twitter followers), and
c) Quantity and quality of commentary about brand or product (of limited importance for SMEs, but crucial for big names like Nespresso and Perrier).

However, the above data is usually biased (e.g., a unique visitor is not necessarily unique), or the pattern we discover is incorrectly attributed to a cause.

So while collecting quantitative data saves time and is relatively easy, as Aldo Gnocchi points out, qualitative assessments are critical but difficult to do systematically without using huge resources, such as time to analyze how engaging comments really are.

Metrics that make sense
Qualitative and quantitative data, as well as a combination thereof all help improve performance. Most importantly, we must be clear on how we intend to measure our social media efforts. More often than not, numbers do not convince those holding the purse strings.

1. What do you want to achieve with social media activity?

If you are a small business, building reputation (i.e. what others think about you, your product, etc.) is all there is, since the cash available hardly enables building a global brand.

Social media is not for selling, but staying in touch with and keeping your current clients engaged, while connecting to potential new ones.

2. What social media activity are you trying to measure and assess?

It is obvious that different social media channels (e.g., corporate blogging, micro-blogging, participating in social networks) require different methods to measure your efficiency.

In fact, you may not want to use certain tools to engage clients, but to gain intelligence, learn and build a reputation as an expert (e.g., Twitter).

This is in contrast to corporate blogs, which focus best on serving clients’ needs for information and tools.

3. How much is enough?

In the same way that making a quiche or soufflé does not make you a chef, surfing the web does not make you an expert on social media measurement. You may need advice to set things up properly in order to:

a) Require no more than 10 minutes to get the info you need daily, and
b) Spend an optimal amount of money for your situation (e.g., subscribe to the Freemium version or 30-day trial and check data weekly at My.ComMetrics.com).

Figuring out what data are used for are the next critical steps (see points 4 and 5 below).

4. We’ve got data – now what?

Once we have collected data, we need to focus on:

a) Watching the trends, and
b) Comparing our performance to benchmarks (e.g., best in class, competitors).

Whichever competitor keeps your boss awake at night is a good place to start for comparison.

5. How can we get actionable metrics?

Noticing that crops grow under trees is fine, but concluding that bird droppings increase yields may be incorrect. The challenge is to work out whether a statistical pattern is caused by what we think it has. For instance, a regression analysis can demonstrate correlation (the two variables just happen to move together), but it cannot tell you whether sales increase because of A/B testing (i.e. causality).

One can use what economists call an ‘instrumental variable’ (also sometimes called a moderator or mediating variable), which is some outside force that partly mimics the effect of a properly randomized trial.

Another technique is to look for sudden jumps in variables that have nothing to do with the matter at hand (see Angrist and Pischke, 2010).

The challenge is two-fold: making sure the boss can follow your statistical explanations (not an easy task if you have to explain what an instrumental variable is), and ensuring you don’t confuse causality with correlation.

Thereafter, data have to be interpreted correctly and the right decisions must be made, such as:

a) What can we do with the data and metrics to improve performance? Should we (e.g., get more pageviews)?
b) If we are over or under budget (e.g., pageviews) what caused this result AND how can we further improve and/or achieve our goals?

Just collecting metrics and feeling good about them is not useful because this makes them vanity metrics. What matters most are the insights data can provide and our actions to improve our performance as a result.

Take-aways
Telling a manager that the company got ‘10 favorable tweets’ or ‘5 positive comments on Facebook’ is nowhere near as valuable as the single tweet that recommends a specific action to others (see right).

Besides, we look for:

- baseline measurement: establish a baseline so you know where you are starting from.
- annual audits: why did some blog posts, tweets or ad campaigns work while others failed, and can successes be repeated?
- trend monitoring: watch trends and make comparisons with past results (e.g., April 2010 with April 2009), while taking the necessary actions to improve.

In order to properly measure your baseline and complete future audits that will yield good information, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be agreed upon right away, and you must always verify references and data to ensure they are what they seem.

Beware potential fallacies in data, as pointed out by Tim Gier: “I think, though, that often the results that we can measure cause us to chase after goals that are actually at cross purposes with long term success, goals which are not worth having.”

Finally, let us not forget that learning about metrics and putting an effective measurement system in place is a process, not an event.

More resources

Marketing Sherpa – What social metrics are organizations monitoring and measuring? => Not a representative sample but interesting.
Social Times – The 10 social media metrics your company should monitor
ComMetrics – Sentiment analysis for online content: Honest?
ClickZ - After a sour start in social media, skittles gets sweet results => Giving away discount vouchers and free product helps now, but does it help in the long term as well?
Angrist, J. & Pischke J.-S. (March 2010) – The credibility revolution in empirical economics: How better research design is taking the con out of econometrics. Discussion Paper Series No. 4800. Bonn, Germany: IZA

What is your take? What measures have you taken to arrive at actionable metrics that help your organization improve its social media effectiveness? Are you planning any new measures? Are there metrics you measure that we did not mention that you feel are more important for your organization? Please let us know in the comments!

You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics, get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:

Article source: ComMetrics – Social media metrics: 5 critical steps to success

ComMetrics University – coffee break webinars
Webinars are held every Wednesday at 8:45 AM CET for no more than 20 minutes – the time you spend on a coffee break. In order to make each webinar as interactive as possible, we will limit attendance to about 15 people, so please register yourself NOW, since space is limited and filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Our inaugural webinar was held last week. Today we have:
2010-04-07 ComMetrics University – coffee break webinar: Social media metrics: 5 steps to increase productivity

Or just leave a comment below and we will make sure that you get a personal invitation with the particulars for next week’s webinar, including presentation slides that include links to further resources and freebies.

Recently, I was invited to give a talk to a small group of managers about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) used to measure social media (SM) campaigns.

Some of the points we discussed that evening are outlined below.

Harsh reality 1: Goals attempt to be strategic BUT…
John F. Kennedy once said: “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”

For corporate strategy, this means once employees understand it they need to put their heart into reaching the targets. Our first attempt to master this challenge resulted in failing in our first strategic objective.

Attempt 1: Reaching out to customers with the help of SM.

We learned a few months down the road that we had not spent enough time developing a strategic goal suited to us. We tried again as shown below.

Attempt 1a: SM should help improve client and potential customer engagement.

Harsh reality 2: Developing comprehensive objectives takes time
The revised objective above made more sense, but the next reality check came with having to formulate up to three KPIs that would align with our SM strategy.

For this we needed to define objectives that address these issues:

- what objectives need to be accomplished (spell it out)?
- what quantity is expected?
- what time-frame will be looked at?
- what quality level represents acceptable performance (define quality, please)?
- what kind of budget are we talking about (human resources and money)?

Considering our revised strategic objective, we specified the following:

Objective for SM: We want to improve the number and quality of blog comments we get in the next four months. We budget about fours hours to write and prepare each blog post (i.e. we post twice a week).

Sounds simple, but you have to identify what you mean by quality regarding comments. For instance, is it based on the number of words in each comment, links to posts or white papers elsewhere on the web, or something altogether different? (See also: KPI experts’ 5 secrets.)

Harsh reality 3: Did you remember your baseline?
As the above outlines, two to three KPIs or objectives must be identified and spelled out properly. But in order to monitor your KPIs, you need a baseline to start with, which is a picture of your blog and its ‘vital’ statistics at a certain point in time.

Without the Baseline you have nothing to measure against and little, if any, control of your blog project and the progress you want to make.

With the baseline you can start to compare your performance improvements over time and show how you are getting better at your job…

Reality check: Because we thought fixing other things was more important than watching trends, we did not calculate the baseline at the beginning of the project. WRONG! Trend watching loses relevance if you cannot trace things all the way back. Calculate the baseline as early and quickly as possible, and watch the trend like a hawk from the beginning.

Harsh reality 4: Using the wrong benchmark measure is expensive
According to the dictionary,

Return on Investment (ROI) is a measure of a company’s profitability, equal to a fiscal year’s income divided by equity and long-term debt; and,
ROI measures how effectively the organization is using its resources to generate a financial profit.

Some experts suggest that we link SM expenditures to how they affect sales, or improve average sale value and reduce service center costs. This is then supposed to help us measure ROI. Unfortunately, it fails.

For instance, how can one show that social media has increased sales? Dell tried to do so with its Twitter tweets about special offers. But neither they nor anybody else can show beyond a reasonable doubt that such efforts actually increased sales, rather than simply cannibalizing other channels.

Reality check: Last week I had lunch with a client who engaged me in a lively discussion about one of my blog posts he had read.

This could be one of the qualitative indicators for social media campaigns - how to measure soft ROI (check the examples from her job) that may not be part of ROI but part of the KPIs for assessing benefits attained with social media, such as gaining expert status and trust with clients.

More resources on how to measure ROI for social media:

Jeff Bullas: 8 steps to demonstrate positive return on investment for social media marketing
Don Bartholomew: Social Media ROI Part 1: Framework
Erik Qualman: Video - Social media ROI: Socialnomics – this is GREAT, it explains why ROI fails to work…

Bottom line
By New Year’s Eve we will once again have resolved to better measure our SM efforts in 2010. I suggest you start now with these pointers.

Take-aways (in random order)

1. Use statistics to compare to traditional media: Remember, clicks seem to garner the most appreciation from the c-suite for what Social Media can give in terms of cost-benefit analysis.
2. Set 2-3 comprehensive goals for 2010: Clicks, views, sales re-tweets (RTs), lead generation and so forth – establish a baseline for December and watch the trends go in the right direction.
3. Cost-benefit analysis is required: Use quantitative as well as qualitative/soft measures. Develop KPIs that make sense and your stakeholders find relevant.

One thing we know is that measuring social media ‘buzz’ is probably about as difficult as measuring PR ‘media impressions’.

And keep Maddie Grant’s insight in mind when addressing cost-benefit issues of ROI, namely:

“I think while we’re all continuing to think a lot about this issue, it’s becoming less and less about simply proving our case to the powers that be and more and more about finding a simple, replicable system for what’s worth measuring and why.”

Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you think costs and benefits from SM activities like using Twitter or blogging should be measured? Here is a chance for anyone with first-hand knowledge (this means you!) to share your insights. How does your company do this?

Benchmarking requires setting objectives and measuring performance to see if one has surpassed it.

Here we propose five best practice steps to help you develop useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will result in actionable metrics for your social media activities.

Not a subscriber yet? Want the scoop first? Just leave your email address in the field below.

1. Ensure management understands the difference between operating and financial metrics.

As Anthony (Tony) Tjan put it in one of his recent posts:

“The financial ‘numbers’ ultimately represent the scorecard we care about, but they do not help us understand how to score.“

It is critical to understand what the most important drivers or operating metrics are when it comes success or failure. Accordingly, what contribution for achieving the company’s operating metrics, such as higher customer retention, will come from social media efforts, must be addressed.

Tip 1: Define, write down and agree on the operating metrics you want to use and stick with them.

2. Know your customers and derive everything, including social media activities, from that knowledge.

Companies produce their corporate magazine or place brand advertising in a daily to reach and communicate with the targeted audience. Improving a magazine’s or corporate blog’s reading attractiveness works even better if it:

a) provides information that helps customers do their work smarter, and
b) empowers readers to get more out of services they purchase from the company.

Tip 2: Choose a social media tool that at least 20 percent of your current and potential clients already use themselves (e.g., would they read blog content delivered by email and/or RSS feed) AND provide content that is perceived as useful and adding value.

3. Establish how a particular social media channel can drive cost reductions and/or new product/service uptake.

Every office building has air conditioning and nobody asks for ROI on this. Plus, ROI (Return on Investment) or ROE (Return on Engagement) are the wrong measures for social media.

ROI is the outcome, but we need to understand how social media efforts contribute to operating metrics. Hence, we must establish how the input – social media or corporate blogging – drives the desirable output, such as lowering marketing costs or improving customer satisfaction.

Tip 3: Make sure your operators are clearly tied to your social media efforts.

4. Focus on the 3 to 5 KPIs that represent the most important drivers of value creation for your social media activities.

We suggest that a few clearly defined KPIs are more likely to assure people paying attention, without getting too distracted from the real job at hand.

Most important, KPIs must fit your company’s needs, like custom-made loafers or black heels. Otherwise, who would want to wear or make use of them?

Tip 4: Assure KPI buy-ins from your stakeholders, including your team, superior(s) and possibly key clients and/or investors.

5. Establish a baseline and timeline.

A baseline is a measurement used as a point of comparison. In turn, it can be used to asses progress against the budget or set of other objectives, including KPIs.

So it is advisable to first collect data whenever one begins social media monitoring to see where you stand.
Benchmarking against your own past performance is the only completely relevant measure. Therefore, improvement over the course of several months is what really matters.

For this reason, we developed the ComMetrics Footprint, ComMetrics Health Check, and ComMetrics Resonance, which are each made up of several measures. These allow tracking from the baseline onwards, as well as benchmarking against the ComMetrics Blog Impact index.

Tip 5: Establish the baseline numbers and compare such as Q1 2008 with Q1 2009 in order to improve.

For example, if you focus on backlinks, have they increased over the last quarter? And what about Quarter 3 2008 compared to Quarter 3 2009, what kind of improvements are seen there?

Bottom line
Surely nobody tries to quantify the ROI of air conditioning. Having it when outside temperatures reach 35 degrees Celsius helps office productivity, making it a mediating factor for, though NOT a cause of, ROI. Similar reasoning applies for social media measurement.

Above we outlined five tips that should help in developing KPIs that make sense to your company’s decision-makers and, most importantly, provide social media monitoring that helps your company improve.

More resources on KPI and benchmarking:

- Beth Kanter: Riffing on David Armano’s Listen, Learn, and Adapt: Need Your Organization’s Adaption Stories!
- Vijay Rayapati: Why social media ROI is the most over debated & misunderstood topic?
- Olivier Blanchard: Basics of social media ROI slide presentation.
- Mikey Ames The Hermit: Alumni Association Twitter Use – Baseline Comparisons.
- Beth Kanter: What’s Your Social Media Baseline?
- ComMetrics: Social media analytics and KPIs: From simple to refined.

Looking for telework as a techie? Join our virtual team NOW!

Now, it’s your turn.  What are some of your organization’s metrics, analytics and measurement stories for blogs?

2010-06-01 – Update – new tools – heated discussion – see bottom of this post.

Recently a customer asked why we have not yet included sentiment analysis in My.ComMetrics.com. Yes, the customer was fully aware that sentiment analysis (also called opinion mining and sometimes semantic analysis) involves classifying text using natural language processing, computational linguistics and text analysis to reveal the sentiment (e.g., positive, neutral or negative) of a particular text.

Recently I came across this statement by Nathan Gilliatt:

“This NY Times article doesn’t include “brand monitoring,” “listening,” or “social media analysis” as it focuses on “sentiment analysis,” but they’re all more or less the same thing.“

Gilliatt puts the finger on a sore issue that indicates how critical it is that we DEFINE sentiment analysis (see above) and then test not only the reliability, but the validity of the results.

Is it reliable?
Reliability means getting the same results for the same text analysis regardless of how often the test is run. According to this criteria, the Financial Times’ Newssift service is strong. It lists the two articles in the Financial Times mentioning ComMetrics (see image below). Repeating the string of keywords with other terms such as social media measurement or social media tracking resulted in the same articles appearing on a larger list.

Sentiment analysis is it reliable – probably is … but being reliable while measuring the wrong stuff cannot be the answer as we explain below.

Is it valid?
That all depends how you define the term validity and which sentiment analysis software one uses.

Using the keyword ‘ComMetrics’, the data served by the Newssift tool revealed:

- one neutral article
- one positive article, and
- one article that has nothing to do with ComMetrics, but is still positive.

But can these findings be interpreted as valid? The article classified as neutral raised some important questions and explained how certain blogging challenges could be successfully resolved. How this sentiment would suggest neutrality while brand monitoring is a bit difficult to understand. Further, the last article listed in the image above has absolutely no relationship with ComMetrics. Accordingly, its appearance in the user’s results list is an error.

In conclusion, 33 percent of search results were correctly identified and classified, regardless of what keywords were used.

What about Twitter?
Various sentiment analysis software is available for Twitter. For instance, the image to the right is from Twendz, which provides new visitors with a hyped-up description of itself. Unfortunately, its analysis is neither well-described nor are the findings coherent.

A similar software called Tweetfeel fails to work for small brands and does not even bring up all tweets for the biggest brands out there. Hence, we could not really test it.

Twitrratr is another one of these tools, but it stopped tracking some of our brands in late 2008. Maybe the system was put into hibernation?

Worse, it is nearly impossible to figure out what criteria are used by any of the applications to decide whether a tweet is positive, neutral or negative.

How such tools and their findings should “…take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics…”, as the NY Times article claims, suggests that the journalists did not take the time to take these tools for a test-drive. This kind of ’investigative’ reporting will not help reestablish the value of content.

In short, the sentiment analysis tools we were able to quickly test and review for Twitter seem reliable, but they do not pass the validity hurdle (i.e. they do not measure what they are supposed to measure).

More posts about Twitter from this blog

Bottom line
Sentiment analysis is an important, but very hard to master, science and it is still in its infancy. While it can be quite accurate (reliability => maybe high => 80 percent or higher), it does not necessarily make the data valid or useful for making strategic decisions grounded in effective brand monitoring.

Finally, when it comes to languages, things get way more complex than simple tweet or text analysis, making success an ever more elusive concept for sentiment analysis, as illustrated below:

- cultural differences:
When Americans say ‘quite’, they mean ‘very’, and ‘interesting’ implies they want to hear more. In England, ‘quite’ means ‘not at all’ ‘interesting’ equals ‘I can’t think of anything nice to say’, and calling something ‘quite interesting’ indicates the speaker is desperately searching for the nearest exit.
-  positive versus negative meaning: sinful isn’t always sinfully good chocolate

The above is nicely illustrated by a comment I recently emailed regarding a story about buskers working in the London Underground.

The ’busker’ emailed back saying something like: “… you make some interesting and very true observations…” Depending on where the busker makes her home (e.g., United States versus Great Britain), this sentiment can be interpreted in many different ways.

Takeaway: All of the sentiment analysis programs I have tested – not all were mentioned in this blog post – are seriously challenged when it comes to coping with the intricacies of language. Reliability is an important factor but if a tool does not meet validity requirements, I don’t want to use it for brand monitoring or social media tracking.

Your turn: Did we miss something? If you know of any tool that works better magic than those we looked at, please give us a shout. What is your experience with, and opinion of, sentiment analysis?

More resources about social media marketing and the c-suite:

2010-06-01 – Update – discussions about new tools and validity concerns on Xing SM Monitoring group

Previously in this series we published:
1) Lessons 1 – 4: Starting your blogging off on the right foot (2009-06-03)
2) Lessons 5 – 7: Setting the stage – ready – go (2009-06-03)
3) Lessons 8 – 11: Whatever domain, home you choose – beware (2009-07-08)
4) Lessons 12 – 13: Getting the basic SEO issues right (2009-07-08)

Today we release the last two installments of these tips and lessons, the fifth of which can be read here:
5) Lessons 14 – 17: Authenticity and quality are key

In this final post, the focus is on continuous improvement and exceeding good practice.

Lesson 18: No improvement without measurement
It is smart to benchmark but you should not begin until at least six months after the launch of the blog. For instance, we learned about changing our plugins the hard – and smart – way, as outlined in this post: WordPress plugins.

Improvements will only show over time and the first few months following the lessons we outlined in previous posts will bring more traffic. Nevertheless, mistakes happen and your team should learn from each one of them.

To see how well your blog strategy works register your blog here:
My.ComMetrics.com – benchmarking your blog – improve your score - sign-up for FREE

Lesson 19: Benchmark smartly
Some people suggest that regular benchmarking against others provides encouragement – a sort of benevolent peer pressure. While this helps, one of the smartest ways to benchmark is to benchmark against yourself. All things being equal, how much improvement occurred in your blogging between Q1 and Q2 of 2009 will tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Answering this question will provide information that helps adjust and improve performance.

Comparing one’s blog against another similar blog (e.g., company of similar size, same country and industry) is an effective way to benchmark, gain insight and subsequently improve performance (see also social media – benchmarking the smart way – FAQ #2). We will start a new series on this topic next month: Benchmark smartly (first post in September 2009).

Lesson 20: Continuous improvement is key
Our work preparing the FT ComMetrics Blog Index (KISS the blog-bride) has taught us that successful corporate blogs try to continuously improve, which should be a great deal easier if you have addressed the issues covered by Lessons 3 and 4.

By its second year, a corporate blog should be posting regardless of vacations or holidays (see Lesson 14), and the authors should preferably have settled into their stride, yielding more interesting posts for the target-audience.

Improvements might also include new useful features or things that increase the blog’s user-friendliness. For instance, we decided to improve the content by getting professional editorial help – the result is before you: more concise and straight-talking posts …

P.S. – Don’t believe those that try to tell you that a corporate blog will help you make money quickly, since that is almost never the case for businesses (see why social media does not work this way). Nevertheless, remember that blogging is a very important channel for distributing information of value to stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers and investors.

Takeaways

Without measurement improvement is difficult – but make sure you pick smart benchmarks that yield actionable metrics.
Comparing against one’s own and similar blogs makes sense – compare apples to apples.
Improvement takes continuing and diligent efforts – don’t expect wonders in a month but budget at least a quarter and then check your trends.

I will keep it brief, love to dialogue more in the comments. What is your take? Please share.

How much is too much? How much information can a website collect without infringing on users’ basic right to privacy? When does information collection become a violation of basic rights to transparency and control?

Advertisers and bloggers want to know who reads a message or ad, but while cookies can be used, once a user blocks them, statistics become inaccurate. Some experts suggest:

“… we should all admit that cookie deletion, cookie blocking, multiple computers, multiple devices, etc. have enough potential to distort the numbers as to render the resulting numbers useless when used to quantify the number of human beings visiting a site or property.” (Eric T. Peterson -Unique Visitors ONLY Come in One Size)

There are at least four reasons why statistics collected with the help of cookies may be inaccurate:

1) The more savvy your surfer, the more likely s/he controls acceptance of cookies or refuses them altogether (e.g., about 40% of surfers in Poland use Firefox). The graph on the right demonstrates now much this can skew hits acquired by counters (click on image for full-screen).
2) A user may visit the same website using different computers or ask their anti-virus software to delete cookies during each scheduled scan.
3) Business users cannot install any add-ons for their browser; one reason why Alexa.com continues to fail businesses with inaccurate usage numbers.
4) Some services like Quantcast work fine, but only if the blogger embeds their cookie with each blog post. We embedded one in a September blog post, but none since: the result is that Quantcast can no longer estimate traffic figures with any accuracy whatsoever.

The IAB’s Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines indicate that measuring traffic is a challenge:

“… in order to report a Unique User, the measurement organization must utilize in its identification and attribution processes underlying data that is, at least in reasonable proportion, attributed directly to a person” and “In no instance may a census measurement organization report Unique Users purely through algorithms or modeling that is not at least partially traceable to information obtained directly from people, as opposed to browsers, computers, or any other non-human element.” (Section 1.2.4) (see Interactive Advertising Bureau – Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines – Version 1.0—February 23, 2009)

Deep-packet inspection to the rescue
It’s not surprising that, based on the above, ISPs have come to the rescue. With the help of deep-packet inspection (DPI) providers can track online activity even though consumers may have blocked cookies.

While advertisers always want to know more about website users, privacy advocates have become increasingly concerned with the growing use of DPI. DPI allows ISPs to block, shape, and prioritize traffic.

Bottom line, or, Why you need more than inaccurate statistics
If we want privacy, allowing DPI is a big no-no, however if we require more reliable and valid server-side statistics, it is one, if not the only, way to go. Something will have to give. Until then, the various services described in here should be looked at with caution.

If you are not in business to sell advertising clicks, there are more important statistics and trends to watch than just unique or repeat visits each month as delivered by your server-side statistics program.
Footprint, Usability, your Return on Connection and your Return on Microblogging scores, as well as their trends over a few months or comparison across years might be of greater interest (see image at right).

More, having your customers comment on your blog posts or building a reputation for serving quality content that results in many back-links might be of greater interest than unique monthly visitors. Plus, driving value from non-revenue generating activities such as blogging or micro-blogging requires innovative ways to communicate with your target audience. We invite you to register at My.ComMetrics.com to compare yourself, watch your improvement and learn how you can increase blogging value beyond the theoretical.

In practice, this means using the tool effectively, as well as measuring unique visitors. For instance, European Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva gave a keynote speech for the Roundtable on Online Data Collection, Targeting and Profiling (Brussels, 31 March 2009). Unfortunately, she forgot to post a blog entry inviting citizens to comment about this important initiative. As this case illustrates, using social media and blogs effectively to have a conversation with customers or constituents means going beyond unique visitors or page-views.

What is your take? Please leave a comment and share your opinion on this. Thanks.

Shortly before the World Economic Forum (WEF) started on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, WEF published its Agenda 2009.  Economic turmoil, wars and poverty all feature prominently, but will delegates move forward on finding possible solutions to important issues raised in this document?
We previously informed you about the World Economic Forum in such postings as:

Corporate microblogging or Twitter-squatting?
WEF Davos without gas

In recent years, WEF has promoted the idea that a cocktail of innovation, globalization and free-market capitalism will deliver a better world. Unfortunately, with the financial crisis upon us, delegates’ confidence in those ideals has been shattered.

However, people watching from afar still tweet things like:

Prad @WEFdavos everyone is looking forward to WEF09 to see how the world leaders solve economic crisis #davos

We wanted a bit more fodder and asked a few people. Jim Goodnight was the first to respond via his UK PR pro Sheila Parry:

WEFdavos Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, will be in #Davos informs us @sheilaParry http://snipr.com/a3ups #trends2watch

WEFdavos so SAS CEO attends #Davos our question: what does he expect to get out of it,3 objectives he set himself? Care to share #Davos #trends2watch

We got an answer:

WEFdavos RT @sheilaparry @WEFdavos SAS CEO Goodnight’s 1st objective #Davos #WEF = reinforce importance of solid risk mgmt models to address global challenges
WEFdavos RT @sheilaparry @WEFdavos SAS CEO Goodnight’s 2nd obj #davos=to persuade policy makers to take 1st obj into account via new regulatory models
WEFdavos RT @sheilaparry: @WEFdavos SAS CEO Goodnights 3rd objective #davos #WEF discuss innovative ways to educate kids,science tech.engin.& maths

Find more answers at our Twitter feed for Davos WEFdavos . Nonetheless, we are still waiting for answers to tweets like:

WEFdavos @hcltech CEO Mr.Vineet Nayar:we asked SAS CEO Goodnights to state 3 obj for #Davos http://bit.ly/EXNm pls. state yours for #WEF #trends2watch
WEFdavos @csommer we ask participants to state 3 obj for #Davos http://bit.ly/EXNm pls.tweet yours & Dir Leipold’s for GREENPEACE #WEF #trends2watch

Where is the challenge
While economic turmoil, wars, poverty and so forth are all on the agenda and the crisis talks moved to Davos, there are some things we should keep in mind when absorbing information from the WEF:

Gillian Tett: “So much of the current battle is not just about the tangible numbers, it is about psychology, and sentiment, and that is very fluid and potentially quite fragile in many sectors,” (FT Guide to Davos 2008-01-27, pp. 7-8).
Lucy Kellaway: “Too much childishness has also been banished at Davos. The Swiss resort will this week be a martyr to some of the least attractive traits of adulthood: self-importance, long-windedness and the ability to sit through politically correct sessions on corporate social responsibility without fidgeting,” (Lucy Kellaway, FT 2008-01-26, p. 12).
Thomas Cooley: “The modern business corporation is one of the most important and complex drivers of economic and social change in the world. At the highest level, it demands the serious study that only thorough research can provide.
Anecdotal approaches can take one only so far. Serious analysis of ‘why to’ and ‘why not’ questions needs to drive the decisions and choices that shape the global economy,” (Thomas Cooley, FT 2008-01-27, Business Education p. 5).

Hence, comparing notes on what one may need do to emerge from a serious crisis is unlikely to provide the world’s elite with answers to questions such as

a) why regulate financial markets this way? or
b) why not regulate markets another way?

These are questions that must be asked in order to develop and implement better regulation for banks and other financial institutions. Will sessions in Davos address “Ponzi” schemes and other financial scams coming to light in recent weeks? Ponzi schemes, or pyramid schemes with slight variations, effectively “rob Lisa to pay Lucy”. Early investors at the top of the Bernard Madoff pyramid (an alleged US$50 billion “Ponzi” scheme) are paid off with money from new investors at the bottom, requiring a constant search for new investors.

Daimler, Bosch, Thyssen-Krupp, Renault and so forth are making use of government-financed schemes to help fund lay-offs and cut hours. We need real answers to resolve this crisis and so far I am not hearing anything that suggests we are getting there with the help of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

South Africa’s finance minister Trevor Manuel put a name to this trend:

WEFdavos Trevor Manuel #WEF #Davos makes sense: helping Detroit and today Fiat in Rome with financial handouts is protectionism ➡solution? NOT at all

Bottom line
Numbers are up this year. 2600 attendees including 1,460 business leaders are expected to attend the WEF. Some insinuate that this is because they hope to influence and shape Agenda 2009. Others claim that the current financial crisis has left many business, government and non-profit leaders in search of an intellectual compass. However, given the more than 220 sessions which cover a vast array of topics and issues, it is not certain whether Davos will provide much direction.
In fact, some business leaders and policy makers have admitted that they are attending Davos in hopes of expanding their influence.
It is also doubtful that people like John Thain will not return to attend Davos in their capacity as CEO of another body in the future. Mr. Thain is reimbursing the €915,000 that he authorized to redecorate his New York office at Merrill Lynch in October/November 2007. But what is worse is the fact that Mr. Thain felt it was justified since the expenditures were made “in a very different environment”. While this may be true, it still does not seem just to spend so much for an office while talking about fighting poverty and environmental disasters in Davos.

WEFdavos 4 #economic #crisis Job Cuts and #WEF #Davos ➡Citibank bailed out & then Obama team prevents purchase of corp.jet http://tinyurl.com/c8ll8z…
WEFdavos#Davos #WEF #Depressionomics #Protectionism #crisis #markets ➡the trendy words at #WEF #Davos ➡ #trends2watch

If the Citibank example does not suggest that little has changed, what will? Put differently, will talking about poverty and wars in Davos reduce the chances of having CEOs redecorate their offices so outlandishly from now on as John Thain did? You be the judge.
I am aware of only one other who followed this laudable example:

tim_weber: #davos: one chief executive says: I refused to take helicopter here from Zurich airport – out of principle and because it doesn’t look good.

As well, car parts makers Conti and Schaeffler are now in state bail-out talks because they are laboring under €22 billion in debts. Unfortunately, this has much more to do with owners’ and board members’ greed and egos than sound management practice. Put differently, talking about the environment is wonderful but questionable considering WEF’s CO2 footprint and its VIPs being ferried about by Audi limousines or helicopters to Davos. Using the public transport system would have been more responsible… It all sounds so hollow. Talk is cheap… put your money where your mouth is.

The only hope left for the rest of the meeting’s duration seems to be some reckoning, contrition, and large helpings of humble pie for delegates. But this 2008-01-27 tweet from the WEF’s own Twitter channel does not suggest this will happen:

davos #Davos is more relevant than ever before! This historic meeting will generate ideas on how to get out of the global economic crisis.

It may be relevant but will the ideas culminate in practical solutions that benefit all people around the globe or just the elites that attend Davos? And to answer our title, Davos may generate many ideas but few, if any, will improve the lives of those who lack drinking water and suffer wars and droughts.

=========>
Here’s what I’m suggesting for today. What is your take? As a participant in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland,

1) what objectives did you set yourself, and, as importantly,
2) what are you doing about achieving these objectives whilst attending WEF?

Please write a comment on the above or any other issue you want to talk about and share your important insights with us below.
And if you want the real story, follow WEFdavos to get the scoop. Thanks for your support.
=========>

When having a few subscribers, it is necessary to check where they come from, what their preferences are and if one still meets their needs.

I outline how you can create a short survey and get feedback from your most important resource – your customer.

When I checked my subscription statistics in WordPress today, I found out I had 138 e-mail subscribers. Last time I looked I had less than 10. This was, of course a few months back.

Some would argue that it is tough to get the first 10 subscribers but easier to get the next 100. I am not sure if I can agree with this. Nevertheless, it continues to go up each week. This is especially true right after I have added another post to the blog.

I have no clue how many people subscribe using RSS or any of the many feed readers. I guess it is probably about another 138. Using this type of arithmatic gets me up to about 250 subscribers. Thank you all for stopping by.

Of course, 250 customers is small too. For me it is a mixed blessing. It is small but too big to talk to everybody. Experts would say whilst it is early to talk about reader segments, I should reflect on it.

I began thinking about reader segmentation. Of course, I have been talking to some of you and taken your feedback and advice to continue improving on our content and services. But when I read a post by

2008-11-19 – Eric Ries–Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

I decided to follow his advice and use a small survey to get feedback from you. Services that allow you to construct online surveys are, for instance:

Survey Gizmo, or

SurveyMonkey,

Here you can set up your questions. To make it easy on your audience, use some scales. This makes it easier for your respondents to answer the questions and simplifies analsis of data for you. Examples are such as

- questions that allow one to check off the answering box, such as Yes or No,

- 5 or 7 points (scales), such as, disagree completely, disagree, undecided, agree, agree completely.

Make sure it is five or seven point scale. Going beyond seven such as nine points is, accoding to research not wise. In fact, people start having difficulties distinguishing beyond seven anchors on a scale. Furthermore, using an even scale such as eight or 10 points is not ideal. You should give your respondent the chance to stay undecided and not force her to make a choice between, for instance, agreeing or disagreeing with your statement.

As well, I recommend using in-depth optional questions sparingly. Not only are they more time-consuming to fill out for your readers or customers but, as importantly, they require a lot more effort from you analysing these typed responses.

I thought I follow Eric Ries’ advice and set-up my own survey. Here is my survey for ComMetrics.com:

As a loyal subscriber, I’d like to invite you to take the first ComMetrics.com customer survey:

Click Here to take survey and see how it can be done

I put this together using the free version of SurveyMonkey. It shows you how easy it is for you to create your own survey. Naturally, at a later stage you have to pay and subscribe to the professional version. In turn, you can download data or serve a different set of sub-questions based on the answer the person gave for a grouping-type of question (also called funneling).

Be sure to make the thank you page a call to action such as a link to subscribe (see my example at the end of the survey).

This seems the least you can do for a customer passionate enough to talk to you.

So, to those of you who take the time to fill out the survey: thank you for your valuable feedback

And to everyone who has taken the time to read, comment, or subscribe to our ComMetrics.com blog – thank you so much and keep reading

Incidentally, why not subscribe right now so you get the upcoming post that will discuss what the feedback tells us? Any thoughts you like to share, please leave a comment, love to hear from you.

No amount of statistical work will overcome the various inadequacies in the quality of data collected and how inappropriate these might be for measuring success with Twitter, blogging, Facebook or Xing.

Most often when ranking social media, no specific model is specified in advance. Instead, data suggest a model that is often quite vague to begin with.

Over-reliance on simple-minded statistics in assessing the impact of social media is a challenge. We must find ways to better understand ranking and statistical tools and augment these with other means of assessment.

Find out – read on we tell you the story.

Ever more we no longer just worry about the usability of a web site such as MySpace or Facebook. Usability helps to find out what possible problems could be a reason why vonersions are not happening at the rate projected. Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 metrics help in identifying the scope and cost of the problem, as well as how much earnings could be increased by resolving the issue.

Putting usability assessment and Web 3.0 metrics together supports your efforts in increasing your corporation’s profitability when it comes to its social media activities.

Unfortunately, we have been hung up on using single indicators and these may often be based on simple-minded statistics as discussed here:

CEO-suite blogger, Facebook, Furl, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter – warning

As the above argues, indicators may appear accurate, objective and simple, the rarely if ever are. Numbers are not inherently better than sound judgments. Find out more here:

Report of the IMU/IMS/ICIAM joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research (June 11, 2008). Published by the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the International Mathematical Union and the Insitute of Mathematical Statistics, available online

What is your opinion, submit your comments, critique or ideas below.

And no, maybe we can create sensible statistics. However, like with one consulting with experts when practicing  Web 3.0 work,  surely one ought to consult with statisticians when practicing statistics.

We tell you why Dell may not do so well with its website and Hitwise may have missed the mark widely with its latest Twitter stats – and NO – Twitter is no longer a niche.

Of those that know English, non-native speakers now outnumber native English-speakers by 3:1
Here is a checklist on how you can limit your risks when using social media in the global marketplace, you better make sure …

We have previously discussed that across countries different social networks are more or less popular:

Alexa.com continues to fail businesses with inaccurate usage numbers

Some estimate that about a fourth of the world’s population are able to speak and understand English as outlined here:

English language rules

The above illustrates that many people might read content in English published on blogs, through Twitter and social networking tools. However, for many English is their third or forth language. Accordingly, misunderstandings are likely to happen and Irish humor will surely fail to tickle somebody from the Mediterranean.

Does your social media use account for the globalization effect?

Communication is both verbal and non-verbal (gestures, emotions, face expressions, etc.). You may communicate using different modes such as the telephone, e-mail, Twitter, Instant Messaging and so on.

Twitter: wake up and smell the coffee – have a conversation instead

At first glance, some companies have apparently succeeded in influencing the social media space. For instance, Dell’s approach is often referred to as an example for how organizations can build a virtual community. Unfortunately, usability issues and globalization do not filter through into the design at the Dell portal. For instance, clicking on the above hyperlink means:

A) you have to allow Java Script to get the page shown, as it should – not something, security experts like to see;

B) takes about a minute to load fully from over here in Europe – imagine having a slow connection trying to view the page – world wide wait (WWW) must be applied in such a case; AND

C) usability (see points 1 & 2) is a problem and exacerbated with too much information at the front page making navigating through the pages cumbersome…

Therefore, why Dell hosts blogs and community sites and, thereby engages the community of Dell product users on its turf, non-native speakers will have some challenges to overcome.

Of course, Dell will argue that one should visit the country site to get the information in the language one needs. Unfortunately, depending on the country one lives in (e.g., Italy), Dell’s localized webpage may contain little besides product information – meaning neither blogs, product reviews and so on.

What you should check immediately?You should share this post with your marketing and sales folks and amongst the issues outlined above, focus on the fact that:

Non-native speakers now outnumber native English-speakers by three to one.

Accordingly, are you aware and able to answer such questions as:

a) what is the percentage of non-native speakers reading your webpage content?

b) how many non-native speakers subscribe to your RSS feed(s) or receive your blog posts via e-mail?

c) what percentage of comments written on your blog or community page is written by non-native speakers?

d) what percentage of people following or subscribing to your Twitter feed or tweets are non-native English speakers?

With English, one has the opportunity for reaching a global audience. However, to avoid misunderstandings and dissatisfied community members and readers you must deal with the above questions.

What does this all mean for Twitter addicts?

Sometimes I wonder if our Silicon Valley friends using Twitter are aware that some people live in a different time zone. For instance, using Twitter for inviting people to comment on a blog post is great. However, half your audience might be asleep by the time you send out the tweet. In turn, it could take 12 hours until you get comments from Asia. Worse, since European executives tend to take their weekends seriously, the earliest answer you can expect is sometime later during Monday. And no, they will not tweet using their mobile at the beach, forget it.

As well, spending a few tweets on going out to dinner in San Francisco tonight might be amusing to some. Most of your global readership will perceive this as chatter or chaff that takes time to scan through, while adding little if any value to their workday.

Naturally, these issues matter only if you want to attain trust and succeed with your social media efforts by reaching your target audience. In our case, these are technical experts or c-level executives.

So how can you get the information to answer questions a-d above?

Unfortunately, some manual work is involved to get a handle on these issues, such as:

1) check your subscriber list:

e-mail – we found that 5% of our readers for one of our blogs seem to be located in Japan
RSS feed – looking at our server statistics 40% appear to be from North America, 0.5% from Japan

2) check comments written by your readers:

E-mail – we found that just about 90% out of the group of readers writing comments about our posts appear to be native English-speakers;
==> we are thinking about how we can make it easier for non-native English speakers to post in one way or another (e.g., we check and remove spell-check errors if possible, etc.)?

3) check if topics covered are of interest to your global audience:

Elections – what might create big attention in the U.S. (e.g., Democratic primaries) might not be that interesting in Eastern Europe;
==> wherever your global readership is staying, we know for sure that they are not likely to watch Monday night football or Hockey Night in Canada.

4) check to make sure that you know what your primary target audience or readership prefers:

Content delivery - do not force readers to have to use a particular delivery method such as Feedburner or RSS feed, instead, c-level folks (e.g., the chief information officer, chief executive officer) do not appreciate being told what they must do, as outlined here:
Getting news online – reducing your biggest time waster

More than 2 Twitter posts a day might turn your executive followers away – trust me – we have learnt the hard way being called on our mobile and told to shape up with our tweets on Twitter or ship out – one of our c-level followers

Do your 20 tweets really add beef to the discussions or should you cut it down to 5 and work instead?

If you cannot provide an answer to the issues mentioned under points a-d, you could be in trouble. Not having investigated points 1-5, you may neither serve your target audience as effectively with what they want, nor spend your money wisely. Moreover, yes, if you fail to deliver you pay dearly for it:

Why women buy black high heels – the guide for everything

Therefore, if you want to be effective with your social media efforts, you have to proceed systematically as we suggest above. Building trust takes time and effort while loosing it can happen faster than you think.

Tidbit – ‘peer’ review

Dell encourages peer or user reviews and tries to bubble them up by placing them prominently on its web pages.

Since research indicates that people seem to trust peers more than corporate websites, not a bad move. However, unless these reviews point out advantages and disadvantages of using a particular product in specific contexts, I wonder if people will put much trust in those published on the Dell webpage?

Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers)

The research suggests that investigators might have forgotten to take into consideration that building trust takes time. To illustrate, purchasing online for the first time might be a big step for most of us. However, after having done it a few times, you begin to trust the seller (see e-Bay, Amazon, etc.).

Accordingly, bloggers can and do develop trust over time with their readers. However, it might take more than one week, of course.

So unless you followed our blog her or Twitter feed for a while, you probably trust your friends or family far more than what you read here. Nevertheless, our IT security and risk alert subscribers will tell you that their live depends on us delivering the goods before the hackers will

PS.

While we agree with Heather Hopkins that:

Twitter Gaining Momentum But Still Niche

we find such numbers superfluous and often meaningless. What surprises us is the kind of people that Twitter attracts besides the obvious crowd, such as teenies and techies or social media experts. What about you?

Have you had a C-Level exec call you up, telling you about why he liked your tweets yesterday. We had one just do that.

What about your experience, any C-level people following you on Twitter? Leave a comment please.

By the way, if you want to stay abreast the latest trend, check this:

Twitter feed – Social Media Influence Conference – June 4 – 2008 – London

One can get lost in the conversation metrics for Twitter, so I began mapping a few measurements of my own to see if they made sense.

It might be of interest to understand how one could measure the reach, influence, reputation management through through micro-blogging using some conversation metrics that tell the whole story. I take a stab at the problem here.

I have talked about the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter here:

Twitter – means getting a better conference experience

I have also pointed out that Twitter does not really allow one to have a conversation in the classical sense of the word:

Twitter: wake up and smell the coffee – have a conversation instead

Twitter is one of these social media tools we can use to talk with others and it enables each one of us to show presence in the virtual space.

Ever more people are using Twitter for all kinds of purposes and I got intrigued about how to measure what is going on – conversational metrics.

When we visit Twitter and a particular person’s ‘micro-blog’ such as ComMetrics on Twitter, you can see the following data:

- the number of people following us on Twitter (Twitter labels this indicator with Followers – you can see the number but cannot see the list of people with pictures – only individual person that owns the Twitter account can see this),

- the number of people the person is following on Twitter (Twitter labels this group Following some like Twitterholic call them friends – a term whose use I believe is inappropriate in this context – this info can be viewed on the person’s Twitter profile page on the web), AND

- Updates – some people update the account 20 or more times each day, others 3-6 times a day and less on weekends (U.S. more frequent, Europe silent on weekends – not attempting to stereotype or generalize but my experience so far).You can get the above data points also by looking at this:

Twitterholic takes some of these public data points from Twitter about ComMetrics

Getting data about Twitter

There are several ways to get information from Twitter. One is to use the person’s RSS feed that lists the last 30 posts or so:

ComMetrics – RSS feed via Twitter

Another approach is collecting data from the people one follows. Such data enables one to obtain certain metrics as illustrated here:

Twitter spewage amongst my contacts. 2008-04-28 Dave Winer

Alternatively, one may put it in a spreadsheet as was done here:

What’s Your Twitter Noise Ratio? 2008-04-25 – Louise Gray

What metrics can be used for benchmarking?

Regardless of which approach we use, we have to address some methodological issues, such as:

1 number of tweets posted during period - some people post a lot, others very little, so how is the impact in comparison to the number of tweets a person posts – who gets the biggest bang for the buck.

Looking at the amount of tweets (see also below) it might be interesting to compare people who tweet every few hours compared to those that post more than one tweet every hour of the day! Can you still find the gems amongst all the chaff?

2 number of tweets ‘addressed’ to a person / total number of tweets in time period – addressed tweets are those starting with the @ sign such as : @ComMetrics

domjones @ComMetrics Yes, I do sleep if people leave me alone In reality there are clones of me dotted across the time zones, inlcuding on ships.

Nevertheless, this statistic by itself may, again, be meaningless because it may just indicate who wants to influence Pistachio. She seems to ‘tweet’ to tons of people as these usage statistics suggest.

3 – beef ratio, number of tweets with URL / total number of tweets posted. Tweets with URL are those giving a link to a blog post or white paper:

jowyang @davewiner has a better calculation of “Twitter Volume” Assuming everyone grew their followers at the same rate http://tinyurl.com/5dnma7

Jowyang, besides some chatter (e.g., telling us he is going offline to hanging out at the pool), tries to provide his followers with nice links adding much beef to his tweets and keeping the conversation going.

4 Followers / Following ratio - in practice, if you follow 5,000 people and you have 6,000 following your tweets (followers) – it takes time to keep track of it all. In turn, some people revert to drastic measures, such as:

Stowe Boyd wants you (trying to get him interested in your product or service) to pitch him on Twitter using this approach only

The above helps Stowe Boyd keep track of things. This way he knows which vendor wants to pitch what product to him. Of course, why would I want to tell the world that I need to influence Stowe Boyd. I prefer talking to him without everybody knowing if I wish to influence hime or anybody else for that matter.

The problem of not spending too much time reading these tweets while not loosing those one needs is real one for people who have a huge following. Just imagine, 10% if those following you (600 out of 6,000) send you a personalized message or reply using @ every other day or so. Maybe if one scans these messages only, one spends about 10 seconds at most on average. Nevertheless, it could add up to 1 hour each day. That is a lot of time if not too much.

Nonetheless, what does it mean if your ratio is something like 5 to 6, whereby 5 times as many people follow you as you follow yourself?

By itself, it may not mean that much. However, with some more indicators it may show a trend that people care and want to hear what you have to say.

5 Influence is hard to track. For instance, Tweeterboard tracks who replies publicly to a given user with the @ symbol and their user name. An example would be an answer, such as @Stephtara or @GoingSolo. Tweeterboard also keeps track about the persons one replies to using Twitter. This means those messages one sends out with @ sign and user name at the beginning of the message.

It then claims to apply a secret algorithm [boy, everybody in the U.S. seems to use algorithms ... they all must be wizards at the numbers game ] to assign a number of points to a user. Similar to Google, value is conferred to a user through links from people who have had high value conferred to them by links from others, and so on.

Therefore, what Tweeterboard does has little to do with influence but much with what we call crowd scoring instead. In short, the more @ComMetrics messages I get from others, the more influence I seem to have. Not a very logical or helpful measure, is it?

What Tweeterboard shows about ComMetrics

Bottom Line

If you follow 500 people and they each tweet about 10 x a day, you are spending very much time with Twitter if not wasting valuable work time – remember you need to make money. In turn, maybe think about this statement:

Number following means: “It serves to enhance a user’s appearance, and is not a declaration of either interest (level or kind) or attention (listeners are not always listening).” Reputation, Conversational Index, Twitter, and Tweeterboard – 2008-04-16 – Adrian Chan

Accordingly, what is needed is a set of statistical indicators that give us a better approximation of reality than what we might get by using one indicator.

It is obvious that the indicators 1-4 presented above can play in important part in figuring out reputation and influence-related issues in regards to Twitter participation.

Stay tuned, we will bring you these indicators and other metrics for measuring your ‘influence’ on Twitter soon right here.

Addendum

Check out: trend spotting – TWITTER – checklist for building trust with your global social media audience

Everybody is awaiting Firefox 3.0 and many are in midst of testing the Beta 4 version
Recently we came across another test and we started to ask if the journalist had followed good or best practice, a mix or none at all.
We address this in more detail and outline why most tests comparing the Firefox Beta version may be of little use for users like you and me

Not so long ago we have pointed out that in some European countries 40% or more of users are surfing with the help of the Firefox browser. Naturally, we were intrigued when we came across another browser test here:

Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 – Benchmarked by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes used two tests, namely:

ACID 3 standards compliance test , and
Sun-Spider JavaScript Benchmark Results for Firefox 2.0.0.12

Acid 3 is what the industry describes as a good practice kind of test that shows how well the colors and graphics will show with the browser you use. This is especially important to graphics people and designers, of course. The Sun-Spider test is just a test that outlines how well the JavaScript (a distant cousin of Java) can run (FAQ – Java versus JavaScript – the security basics for non-geeks).

Therefore, we tried to repeat some of the tests Adrian Kingsley-Hughes did.

Running Sun-Spider JavaScript Benchmark on your Browser (just click on link – start – test your browser right now that simple)

We did a comparison with Firefox 2.0.0.12 with K-Meleon 1.1 using the Sun-Spider JavaScript Benchmark test on 2008-03-12 and found that the differences are not statistically significantly different. No surprise, we also did it with Opera browser and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Majority of these tests were not statistically significantly different for us either.

Accordingly, what can we learn from my tests in comparison to those made by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes? Put simply, we see two main difficulties with this particular benchmarking exercise:

1) unless differences shown between Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and other browsers are statistically significantly different – why bother? (Please click on the link, Login as guest – click on this link again and voila free access)

2) the benchmark indicators you choose matter, hence using a Firefox without any add-ons (e.g., various security features) or plug-ins may not be realistic because these are the features that make Firefox so useful for home-users. We have pointed this out in a comment to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes here: RE: Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 – Benchmarked

Bottom Line

Adrian did a so-called laboratory test in a controlled environment (basic version of browser, 0 add-ons). This is most certainly important for a start. Nonetheless, for business what matters is to know how these things work in the real world. Accordingly, what happens when users add their additional features they need, desire or want to the browser? How fast will it be then? Adrian’s test does not address this.

As well, unless you benchmark and you can show that things are statistically different to competitor/browser B, it may all be due to chance. In that case, it is dangerous to put any bets on the results because nobody may be able to repeat them either.

Remember, benchmarking is a very important exercise but it really depends on what measures or ratios you use. In turn, if these are too abstract or theoretical, such as using Firefox without any plug-ins or add-ons, your results may not be too meaningful. Hence, why benchmark this way?Benchmarking done carefully helps clarify things – specially what needs to be improved. Done sloppy it confuses matters and it can result in decisions based on the wrong information. Nobody wants this.Best practice is difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, applying tools improperly is surely the wrong first step as this comparison of Firefox and other browsers illustrates.

Usage varies enormously across Europe.

- bloggers may want to boycott Alexa.com rankings, and

- Silicon Valley may not always get it right.

Things around the world are getting more complicated for sure. Hence, firms that focus on understanding and respecting differences across cultures and countries will do better.

In that context, we came across a great map showing social network penetration across the world. Information from the Alexa toolbar was used to draw this map.

Get the original map including more explanations here:

Valleywag.com – data junkie the world map of social networks

Where do these data come from?

Here is how Alexa.com explains how it collects data visualized above:

Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the Firefox and IE toolbars each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more.

The above makes it obvious, install toolbar and Alexa keeps track about which web sites you visit, time spent by leaving your browser tab bar open with that URL and so on. All needed to generate usage statistics a la Alexa.

Why are some important networks not included in the above map?

Therefore, why is such a site as Xing not being included in the above statistics?

It is surely larger than StudiVZ (Studiverzeichnis), at least in Germany.

ANSWER: Xing is a social network site for business folks. Moreover, as we all know, most corporate users do not have admin rights required to be able to install the Alexa toolbar on their PC at the office. The toolbar is, however, the way Alexa collects user data for its statistics. Hence, Alexa’s usage statistics exclude any corporate visitors without an Alexa toolbar checking their Xing account daily or more often.

Same goes for B Kontakte, a Russian network site. It is the forth largest site in the country, according to traffic data and has just about 700′000 registered users.

B Kontakte Russia – network

As well, people who do not speak English will not have the Alexa toolbar installed. I just wonder, how many users you think will have an Alexa toolbar installed in Mongolia. Here hi5 is the dominant social network (see map above) but how many users provided these statistics (= sample size)?

Do your customers and blog readers participate in these social networks?

Social networks serve different clientele with different needs. Xing.com, LinkedIn.com or Plaxo.com serve business people. Each has a slightly different focus, of course. In contrast, Facebook or StudiVZ (Studiverzeichnis) serve students. However, students are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed on their personal notebook than the corporate types on their employer’s machine.

It could be that your current and potential clients may participate in Xing.com in the hopes that it will help their work or just help them waste much time – see here for an analysis:

- 5 Netzwerkmarketing fuer KMUs – Soziale Netzwerke und Effektivitaet

Second, what are the chances that they use the Alexa bar? Third, how likely will they spend much time in those social networks?

CyTRAP Labs’ take on this issue

If you do not sell to retail customers and, most importantly, your product is not a branded household name (e.g., Mr Proper or Kit Kat chocolate, Dell computers) the question is – are social networks useful to you?

Do they help reach clients or at least potential customers if you are a chartered accountant or CPA?

Alexa data are not representative of the usage of social networks.

So do you have the Alexa browser plug-in? No? Then you viewing this page will have absolutely no impact on the Alexa ranking for this site. You simply do not count.

- Bloggers Boycotting Alexa.com Rankings

Besides this limit, however, the map shows different folks around the world use different social networks. That in itself is important information. In addition, do not always head for Facebook and MySpace to tap the social networking market. Things are different in Europe, Asia or Africa as the map illustrates.

Tidbit – yes Virginia, you can plan but things may work out very differently

Google set up Orkut.com to target the U.S. market but, interestingly, 55% of its audience is now Brazilian and probably another 10% comes from India.

Tip

Whenever you are shown usage statistics from the internet, ask yourself:

How were these data collected and, in turn, how were they used to arrive at the conclusions presented to me?

Alexa is a perfect case in point on how data may not represent the true situation for you. If you have no Alexa toolbar installed, you are not part of their usage numbers. Having no right to install programs on their corporate PC, most business people are not likely to be part of their sample… However, it may be that your site is targeting those users in particular. If so, Alexa numbers tell you little if anything about usage of the web by corporate types.

Bottom line

Whenever you come across some data and/or statistics just ask:

Can they be meaningful to my business?

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If this post was helpful to you, please consider stumbling it or subscribing to feeds from CyTRAP Labs. Cheers.

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Also of interest:

- Why women buy black high heels – the girl’s guide

- the mission of ComMetrics

- 1 sensible metrics – how to measure success of a blog – the basics

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We will bring you another interesting tidbit about browser usage across Europe and what it means soon, so stay tuned.

Assessment of blogs or social marketing efforts are important for many different reasons. For marketing professionals, metrics of a blog can provide value feedback about where their blog stands and the progress that were made reaching the targeted audience(s).For advertisers seeking to decide where to place online ads, such metrics can simplify the task of wading through hundreds of blogs and web sites to identify a subset of possiblities.

For managers, these metrics may influence upcoming budgets or result in the shifting of scarce resources to another activity.

For investors or an entrepreneur, these metrics help identify how well the company is doing when it comes to use new media to spread its message and convince others about the quality of its work or services.

For legislative bodies and boards of directors, measures of blog or social media metrics provide a means of documenting performance, ensuring accountability, and evaluating the return on their online marketing efforts.

What is there to measure?

The simplest metrics are such things as impression counts or numbers of unique users, or average number of visits per month.Unfortunately, such metrics may become meaningless when one focuses on sales. Hence, at the end of the day, if one’s cash register does not ring, one has more to worry about than impression counts ….. how to pay the rent, salaries and the piper.

Also as an SME, brand recognition is likely not in the cards. So the biggest potential audience is also the one that companies ignore most often. This audience segment is made up of people who know little or nothing about your company. These individuals are likely to have ended up on your web site or blog through being served up your site or story when getting served their search results at a place such as Google or Technorati (grand central station for blog content).

What brings people to your site is if they searched for an answer to a particular issue (rarely if ever do they type a question but a string of a few keywords is more like it). Hence, indicators, such as Click on link below – choose the option – Login as guest – click on the link again and you get the defintion – fast and easy

Google PageRank

Technorati Authority

may have to be considered. Why, because they could affect how high your site’s content may rank when a user searching on Google is giving the results of her search. We all know being in the top 6 is probably better than on the third page somewhere.

What does it not tell us?

While unique visitors may not tell the whole story and Google PagRank and Technorati Authority may be important indicators, the latter two also have their limitations.

For instance, while most people understand Google PageRank intuitively, the algorithm is not understood by many. And event then, the exact ways and means Google uses are not public knowledge. In fact, a site that ranks lawyers and won a law suit recently in the U.S., uses Google’s rational to justify its own lack of transparency when it comes to rankings published about lawyers. Avvo.com does neither publish exactly and transparently what information they try to rank, nor do they explain succinctly how they do it. See more details here:

Avvo.com ranking of lawyers

Of course, bloggers are a smart bunch of people it seems and they do know how to boost the Technorati Authority score as well. For instance, a person may launch a :

Click on link below – choose the option – Login as guest – click on the link again and you get the defintion – fast and easy

Douglas Karr – metrics – boost – Technorati Authority – free advice offer

McBilly – metrics – boost – Technorati Authority - give-away contest

Both, Douglass Karr and McBilly used a clever way to raise readers’ interest, while getting more links to their post from other blogs. In turn, this raised their Technorati Authority score.

Before we forget, of course, backlinks to one’s blog from other blogs also help with the Google PageRank one’s web site or blog achieves. However, this will take some time to trickle through to your Google PageRank and, as well, the impact may be negligible. But more about this in an upcoming post about backlinks and traffic.

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If this post was helpful to you, please consider stumbling it or subscribing to feeds from CyTRAP Labs. Cheers.

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Also of interest:

- the mission of ComMetrics

- global MBA rankings from the Financial Times – but do we need them?

check out the follow-up to this story

- 2 sensible metrics – a framework for measuring blog success

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• about ComMetrics
  • contact us
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• our business model
  • why benchmark

In corporate settings one is sometimes asked 2 questions about social media, namely:

1) what does success look like, and

2) how do we show this to our management?

ComMetrics is about answering the above two questions for management. Our tools empower you to communicate metrics (ratios, numbers, visuals, sound if need be) to management – it is all about how to benchmark your online marketing efforts smarter and faster.

The tools and software we offer focus on:

- benchmarks,

- measurement,

- return-on-investment

about social media – webpages, blogs, newsletters and more.

Of course without sensible metrics that are grounded in your objective and attributes you want to achieve (brand, influence) as well as bottom line issues (e.g., sales), a social media campaign makes little sense. Naturally, this is exactly the same as with any other type of activity, campaign or investment (e.g., an e-learning platform, wiki for a project and so on).

Hence, you will benchmark your programs based upon your goals and those attributes, and you’ll assess your performance – did your social media efforts result in an outcome that affects the bottom line. If so, how?

ComMetrics provides you with support that empower you to deliver tangible, measurable results to be gained by using new marketing channels such as blogs, podcasts, newsletters, webpages, e-learning tools, wikis and so on. Why not check us out.

Sign up and check out our product (countdown is running for our Beta release at My.ComMetrics.com)

All e-mail subscribers (sign up at the upper right of our blog with your e-mail) get an invite to be one of the first to test drive the goodies we offer – what a ride it will be. Oh yes, and we throw in a few invites for you to send to your friends after you discover that ComMetrics helps you work smarter and faster.

The blog keeps you abreast the latest developments in the rapidly expanding field of social media. Rest assured, it will take you no more than 5 – 10 minutes a week to read the material coming to you via e-mail including the invitation to sign up for free and test-drive our software and tools.

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