In my blog post Why social networking groups fail, I wrote about four rules a group moderator should follow to facilitate engagement and provide greater benefits to members:

1. Provide structure and focus.
2. Support and nurture.
3. Share the gardening duties.
4. Continuity is king.

But what about you, are you effective as a group member on any of your Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik, Xing or other groups?

Have you succeeded in building your reputation through these networks?

If you want to know more, we outline four tips that will help improve your experience below.

Tip 1 – Be a good listener

With all the chatter on various social media channels and other noise, we may no longer grasp the meaning of what is being said or written.

Listening means that we read the responses to questions we pose in forums, instead of abandoning them like orphans due to lack of time to read responses, or worse, not expending the energy to compose a thoughtful reply.

Successful social networkers make the time to monitor groups of which they are members to stay informed. We all want people to listen when we talk and acknowledge the intelligent things we have to say. But do we listen in return?

My advice: In order to participate successfully, it is necessary to spend time reading about group activities on a daily basis. Failing to do so results in failing to reach the first milestone to making group membership beneficial.

Tip 2 – Be an active listener

Reading other people’s contribution carefully is a first step to becoming an effective group member. But people want to be acknowledged for their thoughts and insights left on various forums or discussion threads in a group.

Accordingly, responding to a comment someone left in response to a question you posted is wise.

Successful networkers manage their memberships in virtual groups on social networks in such a way that they can spare the time to participate in discussions. Participation can happen in many ways but it requires responding to replies posted to one’s question or replying to other people’s questions.

Participating also means visibility, but as importantly, it gives others an opportunity to develop some level of trust in the quality, depth and tone of your responses.

My advice: Active listening means one regularly contributes by writing a comment to other people’s questions and contributions or threads started in a group.

See also ComMetrics – Engaging comments: Where is the beef?

Tip 3 – Make sure others feel comfortable

Commenting and contributing your insights puts you in front of an audience. This allows members to get to know you better as a first step toward increasing trust. It also means gaining recognition and improving one’s reputation as a member of the community. But more is needed.

For instance, Queen Victoria is famously said to have drunk the water in her finger bowl. She had no choice: her guest, the Shah of Persia, did so first.

“Correct etiquette, also known as good manners, is all about making other people feel comfortable.” People must feel wanted and appreciated to open up and engage.

In turn, engagement champions are the people that welcome others as new members, write a response when nobody dares to or provide support in many other ways such as taking a phone call and giving free advice if asked.

My advice: Make a special effort to ensure other group members feel appreciated and comfortable. Acknowledge other people’s contributions by replying to their comments and keeping them engaged.

See also ComMetrics – Making sure the source is trustworthy: Facebook, Twitter, Xing, LinkedIn

Tip 4 – Be sure to keep your contenance

C’est le ton quit fait la musique, is a nice, French way of saying, it is not what you say, but how you say it. Finding the right tone while never losing one’s temper while responding in writing is a true challenge.

Ensuring someone does not feel they are being talked down to or misunderstood is something that effective group members seem to master better than most of us.

My advice: Successful networkers make an effort to stay polite and give others a chance to appreciate, if not like, them.

Take-aways
Following the above suggestions and exhibiting similar characteristics in our networking lives means being liked, and if you are liked you can be more effective.

1. Out of nothing comes nothing: Participating means posting an answer to somebody’s question or adding your thoughts to their comment. In turn, people recognize you, read your input, start trusting your assessments and, as importantly, provide you with feedback and additional insights by commenting on your stuff.

2. A fine red wine takes a few years to mature: Being acknowledged or recognized as an expert in a group will take time. So you need to contribute twice a week on different days for several months before thinking about reaping the rewards. By the way, if twice weekly is too much, prune your group memberships now.

ComMetrics – 3 golden rules for best practice: LinkedIn and Xing

What is your take? How do you see these issues? Have you tried to apply any of these approaches for your group memberships? Worked, failed – share, please! 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 – Building a social networking reputation: 4 golden rules

This blog post is related to our webinar held on Wednesday 2010-05-19 ComMetrics University – Building one’s reputation on social networks.

Upcoming webinar:

2010-05-26 – Helping a client attain goals on Twitter, Facebook and Xing (coming soon)

Attend our webinars by registering for ComMetrics University – we help you improve your social media performance faster.

We are back with another week’s worth of tidbits, tools and other happenings we came across while surfing the internet, blogging and posting on Facebook or Twitter.

In case you missed previous weeks’ memorable moments on social media, just point your browser to:

ComMetrics weekly review – social media going’s on

Don’t miss the upcoming week! Sign up right now with your email to get it first:

So here come the highs, lows and oddities I discovered through my various social media channels.

Sunday, Monday

Social media expert Soenke Dohrn brought another paper to my attention, this time about how many degrees we are removed from the person we want to connect with. While we know about six degrees of separation, with Twitter it is supposedly only 4.12 degrees.

=> The Twitter network effect – 4 hops to success

The paper also mentions that a re-tweet reaches 1,000 Twitter users on average, regardless of how many followers the first tweeter has. But one re-tweet quickly results in several more, demonstrating the fast spread of information via this channel.

Tuesday

SPSS (originally Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, now a division of IBM) released a new add-on for its statistical software package that will allow users to monitor social media space as much as possible. In contrast to Mashable, which simply released press material supplied by IBM’s public relations office, we tried to analyze where and how this tool succeeds or fails, but news about the tool is still sketchy. Still, several people have raised concerns about the possible usefulness of this product.

=> IBM first – SPSS = Add-on for sentiment analysis & monitoring

Wednesday

We held another successful webinar entitled ComMetrics University – Bill Gates, Greg Grunberg, Lukas Podolski, Ronaldinho and Kaka.

While the feedback has been good, Deborah Drake and myself are still learning to leverage one another’s strengths and talents. We have succeeded in improving cadence, making it more interactive and finishing within about 22 minutes, three minutes less than we had scheduled.

While we finish presentations in about 16 to 18 minutes, answering questions from participants and responding to comments takes a bit more time.

Read some of the ideas, feedback and opinions in the social media monitoring group.

Why not join us this Wednesday for 2010-05-19 – What makes us better at social networking?

=> Want to influence the content of an upcoming webinar? Join the discussion – Is this building brand or being obnoxious?

Thursday

Thursday was a public holiday in most of Europe so things were relatively quiet. Nevertheless, I took the time to look at 30 very creative ads, including Bosch by the Von Matt crew and others. Just enjoy, some of this stuff is pretty amazing.

=> 30 superb ads – something to watch during your next coffee break

Friday

Here we go again: Facebook has decided to make our lives even more difficult. We now have:

- Pages that represent an organization or person,
- Groups for communities of interest, and
- Community pages that are theoretically about topics, causes or experiences, but can also be about brands, apparently.

The problem is that Facebook does not give owners any way to control community pages that may be about their brand. I found a very good, must-read kind of blog post about this challenge here:

Why Facebook’s community pages could give brands headaches

Saturday

Have you ever asked yourself how many people use social networks? Some estimate around a billion.

Social networking has been following Silicon Valley’s motto of Ubiquity first, Revenue Later (URL) for years, so high diffusion of this type of networking practice is clear. But is it profitable? Well, here things get a bit fuzzy.

While a billion users mean social networks have achieved the first objective of ubiquity, some estimates indicate revenues of $6 per user, per year. Of course, that’s hardly enough to pay taxes and have enough left to keep a roof over your head and put food on the table.

=> Social networking: Not profitable so far for shareholders

Sunday

I asked myself what to tweet about today or where things are happening, but decided instead to take some time off.

But later in the day I came across another Twitter tool that is falls somewhere between vanity metrics and providing useful information, if you use bit.ly (or minu.me) as your URL shortener. The tool tells you which tweets people like the most: I did not know that not long ago I had a tweet that about 1,000 people clicked on even though I have only 700 followers.

=> See most-clicked tweets, which ones your followers liked – interesting metrics

That wraps up this week’s social media diary. Please let me know how you feel about it – your opinions matter to me!

Article source: ComMetrics weekly review: Control, profits and stats in social media

So many social media platforms, so little time…

We have already discussed some issues regarding time-optimization for using social media platforms and networks:

ComMetrics – Recipe for success: Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing metrics
ComMetrics – Bloggers: Can I trust you?

In this post we discuss four points to keep in mind when trying to develop or improve your social media strategy.

The points below should be considered from the beginning and get revisited six months later.

1. What types of social networks do we belong to?

All of us belong to several types of social and virtual networks. Below I have sorted social networks into five categories according to the continuum of weakest to strongest social ties:

a) Virtual network: These are the people who are your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and so forth. They might follow your updates to gain information or just want you to follow back.

b) Knowledgeable ideas crowd: These are the people who live and work in different worlds. We respect them for their knowledge, as well as feedback and comments left in forums like this one.

c) Support and coaching team: These are the people you work with, trust… and ask for advice. You respect them, and email or speak with them from time to time. Most importantly, your relationship is close enough that you take their feedback and criticism seriously – i.e. taking action to remedy a problem someone points out to me here.

d) Rescue team: These are the people prepared to ride out with us, so when things get really tough you can expect a quick response to your email and understanding for your problem… They provide support and help – I might have about five people in this group. I try to talk to members of this group via phone or meet face to face if geographically feasible.

e) RECHARGING BATTERIES team: This is a real physical place with real people who know and love you. Getting together, sharing dinner or going for a sleigh ride makes all the difference in feeling connected… This one is important to each of us and an ever greater challenge for people in cities who might feel a bit lonely.

Quite likely your Xing or LinkedIn connections belong to group A. You might be able to move some people from your LinkedIn network of connections into group B or C, but you will never really know some of your Twitter followers or follow back their tweets. They remain part of your virtual network without really being connected to you. In fact, they might not even read your tweets.

2. What difference do weaker and stronger ties make?

Having close or strong social ties with more than 150 people, including family, is difficult. Hence, some of us use asymmetric follow (see 4 ways to Twitter success) to keep the number of status updates to scan at a manageable level on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

The challenge is knowing whether your 100,000 Facebook fans, Twitter followers or LinkedIn group members can become closer connections by moving from your virtual network of a relatively anonymous mass of people to the more personal support and coaching team.

It is certainly possible, and it is key to getting the necessary volunteers for future fundraising. However, few will take a risk and stick their neck out to come to your rescue in a forum if you or your brand are getting attacked by some nasty follower on Twitter or friend or fan on Facebook.

3. Is our strategy working?

It is obvious that some people need to be identified and moved along the continuum to strengthen ties. In turn, these individuals may write a helpful review about your product, an insightful comment on one of the corporate blog posts or participating in discussions with the company’s group on Xing.

The above examples support the company’s reputation with clients and help get new ones, no doubt about it. But when it comes to tracking these effects, things get fuzzier. For instance:

• our fans on Facebook have increased from 1387 to 1447 in two months, and
• our group on Xing now has 2113 members.

BUT

- What do you do if your boss wants to know what these numbers mean?
- Did the new members purchase something?
- Did engagement efforts on your social networks do your brand any good?

Needless to say, unless we started with a precise strategy and objectives before launching on any social media channel, it is difficult to show how our efforts supported the company’s activities.

While having weak ties with millions of people is great for a consumer brand, we know that this might not make a difference in the capital goods business, such as manufacturing container ships or managing harbors.

In these cases, stronger ties with fewer people who are or could become your clients (e.g., engineers, regulators, and energy suppliers) could be more beneficial. Hence, the challenge to manage is how close your relationship with Xing group members or Facebook fans is.

4. How do we know we are succeeding?

A safe way to find out whether things are working is measure them. Here it is helpful to outline your success criteria, including metrics, before embarking on your strategy. Moreover, these criteria and metrics must be understood and agreed upon by you, your co-workers and stakeholders.

And unless we try things out we are unlikely to discover if things worked out or not. As a luxury brand, selling more watches, bags or sweaters thanks to your Xing or Facebook group is highly unlikely. But a small group discussing issues, providing advice or inspiration to people in your target group can help foster greater engagement and customer satisfaction.

Having a presence on the networks that your clients hang use is a start. However, some may not want to engage with your brand on certain platforms, such as Facebook, but the client may be happy to do so by joining a LinkedIn group.

To illustrate this further, our owners are happy if we can report back that some of our clients got to know us first through social media channels like our corporate weblog or Xing group on SM monitoring. This may have happened months before they signed on the dotted line.

Take-aways

1. Setting a strategy with goals to be measured through actionable metrics is a good start, but unless you take many small, frequent steps while measuring to see if they have an impact, it will be hard to show progress.

2. THE best strategy for small companies is word of mouth: focus on getting 100 people tweeting praises about your organization, because that is far more beneficial to your bottom line than having 100,000 passive followers. The latter likely will not catch and read your tweets or ever write a comment on your Facebook wall. Nor will they tell others good things about your customer service over coffee.

More resources

ComMetrics - Social media metrics: 5 critical steps to success
ComMetrics – Yes Virginia, social media client-engagement IS a myth!
ComMetrics - Social media policy – resource page for those that work like magic
ComMetrics - 5 reasons NOT to seal your social media borders
ComMetrics – Why social networking groups fail
ComMetrics – Social Media Monitoring group on Xing – 2010-04-28 webinar – what do you do when your SM strategy fails?
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?

What is your take? How did your team develop your company’s social media strategy? How was progress or failure in realizing the strategy on time measured? Did it work? What needed changing? Share, please! 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 – 4 things Mom forgot about social media

ComMetrics University – coffee break webinars
Webinars are held every Wednesday at 8:45 AM CET AND now also at 4:00 PM CET for no more than 20 minutes – the time you spend on a coffee break.

Why not sign up for next week’s webinar – Wednesday, May 5, 2010 – right here:

==> Reversing the razor and razor-blade model: Learning from Gillette & Apple

What do Foster’s, Nestlé, UBS, the City of Zurich and Starbucks have in common? They are all trying to figure out whether staff spending two to three hours on Facebook, Hi5, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. each day increases customer engagement or just wastes time.

Some are unsure and therefore blocking or controlling access to certain social media destinations:

City of Zurich blocks access to social networks (as have Credit Suisse & UBS).

Moreover, Google’s showdown with China’s censors highlights increasing official efforts to control the web, ranging from selective to substantial censorship.

We outline five critical questions that must be answered before blocking employee access to social networks.

1. Which SM channels does your company use?
Before blocking web access to certain destinations, you must distinguish between different types.

For instance, there are four different types of social media channels or networks, including those that:

a) foster collaborative work and knowledge sharing (e.g., corporate blogs and/or wikis),
b) facilitate professional networking and information exchange (e.g., LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo),
c) provide methods of quick information distribution (e.g., Twitter, Naijapulse, Identi.ca, instant messaging), and
d) help us stay connected with friends and family (e.g., Facebook, Hi5).

Some companies may encourage internal methods and versions of the above, but frown on employees contributing to them from outside the corporate network.

Hence, the challenge is to make the right choices when it comes to deciding which of the four channels employees are given access to. One thing is certain, however; if the company is very active on Facebook, it is counter-productive to block employee access to it.

2. Could legislation make things more difficult?
Besides which channel you use and which you allow your workers to access during business hours, you must also consider the local legal landscape.

For instance, regulation regarding privacy, data protection, product liability and intellectual property rights may set the stage for what can and what cannot be permitted on work computers.

Moreover, most courts follow the principle that if something has been quietly tolerated over a period of time, it is permitted. In fact, rules that are not consistently and fairly enforced cannot be used to justify later sanctions against staff.

So we need to carefully assess what it means if workers use company tools, services and work-time to access social media destinations like Viral Networkers. What are the legal implications and/or possible consequences? How can the risk of damage be minimized without cutting employees off altogether (i.e. the middle road)?

3. Could resistance be futile?
Besides having to carefully decide which networks employees may use for work and assessing how local legislation affects the equation, one must decide whether corporate resistance is a futile exercise.

For instance, the company can prevent workers from accessing these websites using company technology and services, but what they do during a break must be left to them. Using private mobile phones to surf or send out status tweets is the employee’s decision.

The resistance versus acceptance issue may be decided for the company by its customers. For instance, if clients reach out to workers using instant messaging or writing a comment on an employee’s Facebook wall, resisting this type of connection seems outright stupid.

Employees already use their mobile phones to send text messages to clients if they are delayed on the way to a meeting. No smart employer would object to an employee using the technology to inform the client. These days, it might just happen via a direct message using Twitter and an iPhone. As long as it helps the client, it should be okay, no?

4. Could greater collaboration increase know-how?
Maybe we agree that resisting the increasing pervasiveness of social media in people’s lives is futile.

Of course, the Internet can facilitate collaborative work efforts. For instance, with the help of internal networks, companies have used blogs and wikis to better share information and know-how among staff in different divisions and countries. Even participating in wikis run by an association or professional society (e.g., IEEE, ACM, APA) may help foster learning and staying up-to-date with the latest developments within a profession or industry.

But we disagree that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge for the average Joe, as claimed by experts participating in a recent Pew study.

If you know about such work, please provide this information as a comment below – we love reading up on this.

5. What factors may influence social media usage?
Depending on market regulation and wealth, the majority of employees under the age of 40 may have a smartphone with the option of mobile Internet access (e.g., Finland, Sweden & Denmark).

Nevertheless, status updates on Twitter or Facebook from my tax assessor or neighborhood cop will not foster greater citizen engagement, will they? Nor does the crane operator or brick layer on a construction site need to provide status updates on Twitter via their iPhone. In fact, this might distract from the work and become a serious safety issue.

However, worst is when a company fails to grasp the culture of social media in a global virtual environment. A perfect example is the viral attack launched by Greenpeace against one of Nestlé’s brands:

Stop Nestlé from buying palm oil from companies that destroy the rainforest – ComMetrics to Nestlé’s rescue

Response needs to be such that a global audience gets the message and understands why the situation may not be as black and white as Greenpeace claims. This is difficult to achieve considering cultural factors. Nevertheless, seeing Nestlé make such a blunder of this does raise the question of whether its marketing department needs a serious shake-up to wake up.

Take-aways – a control list that works
Here is how social media access can be managed to benefit the company, workers AND customers:

1. using social media to engage clients suggests that employees must be encouraged to reach out to clients via these channels (no, Nestlé’s Kit Kat flop against Greenpeace on Facebook does not qualify the food giant),
2. leveraging usage of these information channels at work is critical to the bottom line (e.g., how to do better while using no more than 20 minutes a day), and finally,
3. educating staff about using social media (e.g., hi5, Naijapulse or Second Life) to limit the chance of wrongful or unethical use thereof (this social media resource page helps).

More resources about social media 101 and your corporate brand:

ComMetrics – Yes Virginia, social media client-engagement IS a myth!
Bernhard Warner – Will Nestlé Ever Reclaim its Facebook Page from Protesters?
Pew Internet and American Life Project – The future of the internet IV (research report – summary – download full report)
Advertising Age – Five reasons companies should not block access to social networks
ComMetrics - Social media policy – resource page for those that work like magic

M. Bamieh – Carlton Draught Beer – Learn Social Media by Example – don’t fail to see an opportunity when you have one. Foster’s did, deciding not to air TV ads like the one below. Putting them on a special website was smart, but pulling them off the web when they started going big-time viral was plain stupid (see also 5 steps beyond viral marketing).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bottom line
Instead of pervasive limitation or outright blockage of access, following the above hones in on using selective censorship, allowing employees the opportunity to use social media smartly for job-related purposes.

Whatever you do, benchmark your social media efforts – you can register for FREE with My.ComMetrics.com to benchmark smartly and improve performance.

Companies will be held accountable by social activists, traditional media and bloggers. As the Nestlé case illustrates, most viral marketing is at the expense of your brand (see also US Airways and the Hudson River landing).

When this happens, it helps to have vigilant workers that know the facts and share them with their own social networks. Just laying down to take a beating is never a smart thing to do.

What is your take? Will Nestlé Waters North America learn from the Kit Kat social media debacle and use social media smarter? (See 2010-03-29 – spearheaded by Food and Water Watch – consumer groups launched campaign against Nestlé Waters North America’s proposed facility in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.)

This is your chance to contribute your expertise and experiences. Please share; we love dialoguing in the comments. What would you advise Greenpeace, Nestlé or Foster’s to do next time this happens?

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 – 5 reasons NOT to seal your social media borders

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 addressing issues pertaining to this blog post and others was held this morning.

Register for future webinars here:
2010-04-07 ComMetrics University – coffee break webinar: Drop the useless social media metrics

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.

“Blogs are part of a social network where the generous thrive.” (see p. 9 in Blogging Best Practices).

How many social media enthusiasts who say blogging is critical will it take to convince you? For as many bloggers as there are, there are just as many who choose not to participate in blogging or do so haphazardly, at best.

As one who compassionately counsels both clients and friends on all things marketing and the value of integrating social media elements such as blogs, I like what Andy Wibbels and Peter Flaschner, hosts of BusinessBlogBasics seminars, suggest: “Everybody who is anybody in business is blogging. Shouldn’t you?”

Let us assume that you admit you should be blogging and have established a blog that – once set up with an appealing design and a few bells and whistles – is surprisingly easy to maintain. Now what?

In order to move forward with the fewest detours, you must answer the following questions:

What does maintaining a blog mean to you?
Did you map out blog-maintenance strategies before or after set-up?
How will you know you are succeeding?

In doing research for this guest post – which appears on a blog I appreciate very much for its owner’s consistency, content and congruency and am happy to report gets a lot of definitive recommendations – I read voraciously for days before landing on a focus for my first offering.

This is not about recapping blogging basics. It is my personal and professional manifesto about why I love blogging as a tool to get the word out and help your existing and prospective clients find you.

The point is to help your readers quickly learn who and what you are, what you care about, and begin to build trust and rapport.

A sticking point for many of my peers and clients is the perception that blogging is hard and too time-consuming, especially since

- they already spend too much time on the computer,
- do not really have time for Facebook,
- do not ‘get’ Twitter quite yet, and
- are not clear on how to make the most of LinkedIn.
(These are just a few of the best social networks on which to create and regularly update an active profile.)

It does not need to be and I am known to evangelize on this, one person at a time when I encounter a ‘reticent blogger’ who may simply need a little support.

When I myself took a four-month, full-time position, my own blog was left to collect dust, but I NEVER felt good about my abandonment of it. We all manage to make time for the things we deem important, right?

Below you will find my best simple advice, the same that I would first prescribe for myself.

1. Plan to be Consistent
It is important to plan how much you will be committed to blogging consistently, be it once a week or more. If you cannot attend to your blog weekly, what can you reasonably commit to?

It has been suggested that optimal blogging means posting two to three times a week. I would agree if the content is interesting, topical, compelling, and relevant to your themes. It is important to give as much thought to how frequently you will blog, as you did your design and presentation.

2. Plan to be Content-rich
Although printed publications are regarded as archaic as digital offerings multiply by the hour, one valuable tool of this ‘archaic’ system should not be left behind: editorial planning. If you are really stuck, consider brainstorming with peers to capture all of your great ideas well in advance. Organize them and rely on this list of timeless ideas if a more recent theme is eluding you. Thoughtful content is recognized!

3. Plan to be Congruent
According to Wikipedia, “In psychology and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), congruence could be defined as rapport within oneself, or internal and external consistency, perceived by others as sincerity or certainty.”

I appreciate congruency in any writer’s tone and voice, and it is pretty darn impressive when you meet that individual and find out they sound like they write. Congruency also accelerates a reader’s enthusiasm to read more and follow a blogger.

The question to ask yourself is, what is your authentic voice? Speaking or writing with that voice makes achieving consistency much easier. And one last tip for first-timers about to start or those revitalizing a ‘dusty’ blog: monitor and benchmark what you are doing to see how it is working and so you know what to refine as you go.

Visit My.ComMetrics – register yourself
Benchmark your blog(s) => Improve performance

Take-aways
As an avid blog reader, I appreciate:

1. Great content showcased in design that is easy on the eyes,
2. A writing style that reflects who the author is, and
3. A blog that offers me things I want to keep coming back for.

The above prescription goes into action for this dormant blogger on April 1, 2010, and I invite anyone to hold me accountable to report and post a meaningful piece at least once a week.

More resources about blogging, best practice and what benchmarking is worth to you

StressLimitDesign – A white paper: Blogging best practices
ComMetrics – Write it down BEFORE launching! Why use Facebook or Twitter?
The BlogHerald – 100 Helpful Stories
ComMetrics – Social media: Metrics to know and metrics to skip FAQ #1

Bottom line
Is there a fresh opportunity to establish more credibility by being consistent and congruent with good content that inspires livelier interaction and truly engages readers? And just whom will you attract if you do?

Whether you are a private or corporate blogger, whether you blog alone or as part of a group, realize that now is the best time to re-evaluate your reasons for blogging. Then commit to doing so with purpose.

What is your take? What strategies have you used to manage being consistent, content-rich and congruent? Please share; we love dialoguing in the comments. What has worked with your blogging efforts?

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

Article source: ComMetrics – 3 blogging principles: Simple yet important

Strategy and new media experts cannot seriously answer management’s question of whether ’social media works’ without first asking themselves some more fundamental questions about what the company should be doing with social media and what it should leave alone.

Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Dell have deep pockets when it comes to social media marketing. Hence, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to copy their strategies (Social media: What is so special).

At the recent iStrategy 2010 Conference in Berlin (9 – 10 February), Michael Donnelly talked about ‘Online Marketing Today, Tomorrow and in 2020′. Considering that 2010-02-04 marked Facebook’s sixth birthday, who can predict anything more than a year in advance these days? Predicting 10 years into the future seems like trying to read tea leaves.

At the same conference, Susan Lincoln, Europe’s self-proclaimed social media expert taught a 90-minute workshop about social media using 166 slides. No kidding. (Read how she uses Twitter in 4 steps to Twitter success.)

The question is whether global brands’ approaches to social media or so-called experts’ interpretations can be replicated by a SME (small and medium enterprise), the Davos-Kloster tourist region (site of the recent WEF Davos) or your favorite bakery. Below we will address what can be done.

Step 1: Invest 10 hours in understanding social media
Some people will tell you that social media is a way to build trust, others suggest it will foster better engagement with clients, while some claim it helps build brand. Some try to tell you that it affects their company’s bottom line (as in Return on Investment (ROI) – cost-benefit analysis).

It can do all of these things but to get a better idea you must educate yourself and discuss what you have learned with people whose judgment you trust. Ask these individuals what they and their company are getting out of all this. This should yield strategies to copy and some ropes to skip.

Rule 1: Buckle down and teach yourself about social media in order to concisely respond to what purpose social media will serve for your company.

Incidentally, as the slide show below indicates, the presentation by Michael Donnelly left me hanging regarding the next 10 years (forget 20). Considering how many millions of dollars the company spent on social media marketing the question remains: Is it money well spent?

Step 2: Decide what purpose using social media fulfills for you
So we can all agree, most companies will never have the resources of Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Dell at their disposal. Hence, our social media splash will be far smaller. Nevertheless, we can still do it better and smarter than they can.

It is essential to determine what exactly you wish to accomplish (objectives, goals, dreams, etc.):

a) What is the purpose of social media for your company?
b) What is social media’s value proposition?
c) What results must be achieved with social media and in what context?
d) Besides a strategy, what is required for effective benchmarking?

Remember that progressing through the learning curve might suggest a change in focus is warranted down the line.

Rule 2: Figure out your purpose for social media and what should be achieved. Be specific and write it down. Set your objectives, which will then allow performance-tracking.

A free webinar that could help: How benchmarking improves social media performance – March 11

Step 3: Learn to crawl before you walk, and then start running
Imagine someone who has never touched ‘real’ snow in their life that you take to the Whistler Olympic venue. On your way there, you discuss the virtues of snowboarding, tobogganing, skiing, bobsledding, etc. Their head might explode from information overload.

Social media is the same. Start slowly, such as by launching a corporate blog. Make sure new content is posted every other week (i.e. same time, same workday – consistency is critical).

Rule 3: Easy does it – using social media effectively takes time and resources. Invest a limited budget wisely and start blogging with content that suits your target audience.

A conference that could help: Social Media Influence 2010 conference – June 23, London UK (discusses strategic and hands-on issues)

Step 4: Follow best practice and measure smartly
To do well with social media, performance must be assessed to see if targets have been reached. Start by establishing a baseline right away to have an idea where you started from.

Using the company’s baseline measures, set objectives and start tracking performance. A social media appraisal will have to be done every quarter to illustrate how you can improve your performance.

Finally, focus web analytics or blog metrics by looking at a few metrics instead of the whole gamut. There are only so many hours in the day, so do not spend more than an hour on this. Instead, clinch the next sale or get another contribution for your charity.

Rule 4: Measure for accepted management best practice, such as performance-tracking, target-setting and channel appraisal regarding your social media activities by using FREE tools such as My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance), Google Analytics, and so forth.

A conference that could help: Monitoring social media bootcamp – March 31, London UK (VERY hands-on)

More resources about metrics and benchmarking – what is it worth to you?

ComMetrics - Social media: Metrics to know and metrics to skip FAQ #1
ComMetrics – Twitter FAQ #5 McCain vs. Obama
SM Monitoring Group – Xing – Pepsi fails SuperBowl social media challenge
ComMetrics – Twitter metrics: Does it make sense?
ComMetrics – Write it down BEFORE launching! Why use Facebook or Twitter?
Roberto Kusabbi – Learn from the biggest organisations – often not a smart move
iStrategy 2010 conference (see all speakers and sessions – pdf file) Will there be anything for SMEs this Fall in London? Seems unlikely.

Bottom line
Pepsi spent millions on Facebook to promote activities to improve its brand and reach. So did Coca-Cola. Unless you have such vast resources, do not try copying their strategy.

Instead, find your purpose, write it down, set objectives, and start benchmarking against:

- your past performance (are things improving and if so why), AND
- your competitors or best in class examples (e.g., company blog or Twitter account).

Social media is not about selling but fostering social engagement.

At this point nobody knows what is best when it comes to social media. What you have to figure out is what is most effective for your organization. This is something no one else can do fo you without you contributing important insights (so you might as well do it yourself).

Finally, don’t believe those who try to convince you that we are moving away from campaigns to constant engagement. Who wants to be engaged constantly with their butter brand? Please, get real.

I cannot stress enough that one has to benchmark social media activities. It is hard work, and is not qualitative or anecdotal, but quantitative. What action are you taking now and what will you do in the future? One does not just measure to improve performance; making sure you stay focused and on-message is critical.

Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you feel about social media and your business? What is your experience with this subject? Have any tips to make sure we use social media channels more effectively on a shoestring budget? Please share your insights.

P.S. - Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:

Article source: ComMetrics – 4 ways to success: Pepsi and Coca-Cola

Our international staff  (Canada, Germany, Jordan, Switzerland, USA) demanded a social media policy that fits on a napkin: ComMetrics Social Media policy that fits on a napkin – short and straightforward – approved by our associates

As the video below shows, Coca-Cola is still struggling to create a unified social media policy that is simple enough to be remembered and followed by its associates around the globe, in spite of its vast resources and social media investments (see above slide presentation).

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you are blogging for business, and not about your cat, baby, fashion addiction, or celebrity-crush, you need to set some success metrics.

Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?

However, even in the business blogging world, there are a wide variety of potential measures to gauge your momentum. It is imperative that you select the most relevant ones that match with your blog’s purpose and intent.

What’s the point?
The first step in that processis knowing why you are blogging. This sounds simple, but it is shocking how many bloggers are unclear on the core business rationale behind their blog initiative.

There are three options here:

Blogging for content: This is when you write with considerable emphasis on search optimization, attempting to drive traffic to the blog via strategic content creation and keyword inclusion.
Blogging for commerce: Related to the first, but commerce-oriented blogs are more interested in conversion events than in traffic generation. Funneling traffic from the blog to some other destination (typically a corporate website or lead form) is the prime objective.
Blogging for community: These blogs seek to guild a consistent readership that interact with the blogger(s) and advocate on behalf of the content through other social outposts.

Measuring the point
Depending on the rationale for your blog, you need to select the most appropriate success metrics.

These are your key metrics when blogging for content:
- Total visits,
- Percentage of new visits (a recent study to be released soon by Compendium Blogware shows that among 86 percent of corporate blogs, first-time visitors comprise over 60 percent of their total traffic), and
- Visits from search engines.

These success measures are best for blogging for commerce:
- Average length of stay,
- Number of pages viewed per visit (both of these metrics measure depth of engagement, a key consideration when you’re trying to educate a potential customer and get them to take action), and
- Referrers from other sites (if other sites are driving significant traffic to your blog, you need to know what they are, to replicate that success with other, similar sites).

Pay closest attention to these statistics if you are blogging for community:
- Repeat visits,
- RSS subscribers (repeat visits and subscribers both measure stickiness and consistency, blog elements that build community over time),
- Comments, and
- Referrers from social outposts like Twitter or Digg.

Note that the recommended success metrics are entirely different for each blog type, yet in much of my social media consulting work, corporate blog owners are invariably most interested in total visits and RSS subscribers.

This is especially misplaced with group written blogs, where the broad content focus and inconsistent tone makes RSS subscription less likely. Imagine subscribing to a magazine that was about tennis one month, and about cooking the next month. That is what a lot of multi-author corporate blogs feel like, so is it any wonder that there are few subscribers?

Blogging success is a slow march, not a mad dash. If you create consistently good content, and promote it vigorously, your blog should eventually succeed. But to ensure you are not disheartened in the meantime, select success metrics that are appropriate for your goals.

For more on advanced blogging, please see my post or slide presentation below:

View more presentations by Jay Baer.

Bottom line
Just because you have a blog does not mean your blogging objectives are the same as everyone else’s. There are three reasons to blog (other than personal blogging): content, commerce, or community.

Each type of blog has a different set of appropriate success metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), so it makes no sense to measure your success based on blogging for commerce, if you actually blog to build community.

There are three KPIs based on type of blog, to which you should pay the most attention. Do that, and you’ll be a happier and more successful blogger.

P.S. - Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:

Article source: ComMetrics – Using the right blog metrics

Please register for our Free webinar: Benchmarking with the right metrics

Commenting on other blogs has been, and continues to be an integral part of blogging. However, the challenge is to get blog comments that add depth and insight to the original post. Better engagement is also fostered if the blogger manages to provide thoughtful replies to commentators. That’s all great in theory, but how to put it into practice?

This blog post discusses five steps to writing a high-quality comment and three ways to elicit game-changing comments, outlining some of the obstacles to getting there and why low-level brickbats need not apply.

Recently I came across Why the retweet is a powerful engagement tool

“… This is where the retweet, and now the via feature in Facebook, really come to the fore. They are a very simple way for all people to say “I agree with this” or “I want you to see this too” without actually having to articulate their own opinion from scratch, or start their own discussion…”

I certainly hope social media’s value proposition is more than getting people to re-tweet our Facebook or Twitter material. I left a comment:

I am sorry but maybe I am missing something… just re-tweeting as you suggest: “… very simple way for all people to say “I agree with this” or “I want you to see this too.” “
Does this add much value to the discussion or debate?
In many cases, people have not taken the time to read carefully the story about which they might send out a tweet (e.g., using Google to feed Twitterfeed that, in turn, triggers your Twitter account to send out a tweet).
So how can I recommend something before having studied the material? Is this a scenario where sheep is following other sheep or my answering machine is talking to yours so we can meet next week?
As a brand, I want to be sure that people support something – my brand – based on product experience, knowledge and insight not just by blindly and wildly re-tweeting other people’s opinion or tweets.
Respectfully
Urs

Comments like the above can add some value to the discussion, especially if the blogger writes an insightful response.

Unfortunately, our comment never made it up on Matt Rhodes’ blog – whatever the reason, this does not foster engagement (see Take-away section below for a comment about this).

Blog comments: Brickbats need not apply
So why are blog comments important? In 2007 Dave Winer explained why he thought they were in The subject of blog comments. Clay puts it another way in this blog post:

“…spirited disputation and emendation, alternate points of view, linky goodness, and a conversational sharpening of the argument on all sides, in a way that doesn’t happen blog to blog.” – Clay Shirky (Corante Blog)

5 steps to a high-quality comment
Unless we are willing to spend 10 minutes drafting a sensible comment, we might provide the blogger a better service by just tweeting the post’s title and url on Twitter. But here are five suggestions one should follow to craft a comment that adds value to the equation:

1. Relate your comment to the post: Quality comments refer to the blog post by quoting a portion and then refining or expanding on the thought (e.g., I agree with this point. However, in my line of work…).
2. Have a train of thought: Make sure the comment contains a main theme from beginning to end (Why ROI fails or may work).
3. Wrap-up the comment: A conclusion in a comment is more than, “This is my five cents.” Drawing a conclusion makes a fashion statement, so to speak (make a splash – thank you).
4. Tell the blogger why the post helps you work smarter: We all want to write stuff that makes a difference in other people’s lives. But please, explain why it is helpful or how you were able to apply it (e.g., don’t just tell me I am great, explain why).
5. If you disagree you should explain: Please explain where this disagreement comes from. It might very well be that the blogger forgot to consider an important angle of the problem, made an incorrect assumption or fell prey to misinformation, to mention a few examples (tell me where I have erred and how it can work – I love it).

Finally, please remember leaving a blog comment is like a digital trace and its quality will reflect upon your personal brand and reputation.

Comments mean more work for the blogger – really
When I write a comment on someone’s blog, this quickly takes more than 15 minutes, especially if a conversation develops. Commenting is far more time-intensive than writing a tweet or re-tweeting. Of course, both are needed: one to spread the news and the other to add more depth to the post.

Unfortunately, one will often come across comments that seem somewhat shallow or where the commenter had little time. Other times it seems to be ‘feel good’ feedback.

The comments to the right surely made Bernie feel good. Unfortunately, they do not add content or substance to the discussion of an important topic. On the positive side, writing this kind of feedback did not take the commentators more than one to two minutes.

But the blogger does not really raise the performance bar either. His comment (see last one in screenshot) provides a pat on the back for each of the three commentators above.

The ‘I am great – You are great’ approach is fine and makes sure nobody is offended, but it also does not move the discussion to a higher plateau.

All things being equal (ignoring how much traffic the blog has, language it is in and country, etc.), there are three things that affect your comment count:

1. Write a blog post that is interesting to many people, such as ‘Calculating ROI for social media activities’.
2. Keep your blog post short (under 300 words), and
3. Don’t try to be too in-depth.

Guaranteed, with a short post you will always get the type of visitor willing to spend another 60 seconds to add their two cents by leaving a comment.

The challenge is that complex subjects like calculus can hardly be explained in under 300 words. We can try and people might even believe they have grasped the concept, but if we were to put it to a test, 80 percent would likely fail. In turn, addressing a complex matter in 1,600 words as done here may turn some people off, since they might feel that it takes too much time to read and comprehend the issue discussed.

More resources about the importance of quality comments

Jody Hedlund - Do blog comments really matter?
Read Write Web (Sarah Perez) - Blog comments still matter – but not those about organs – really
Paul Graham - How to disagree – disagreement hierarchy
The Herald Blog (Lorelle VanFossen) - How is your comment quality quotient?

Bottom line
While tweeting about something does not take much time, writing a blog comment that adds value to the discussion does. Lastly, thoughtfully responding to comments is time-consuming for the blogger.

Building on your audience’s comments is a real challenge that few, like Jeremiah, manage. He tries to add value to each comment whenever possible and/or steer subsequent comments in the right direction.

However, it is probably better to approve each comment or reply before it goes up on the blog. If one fails to do this, then what happened to Jeremiah can happen to you, too. A spammer replied to several comments made on the blog (one shown to the right) and this, of course, does not foster your all-important reader engagement.

Take-aways
I have been blogging for a while and developed the following three insights that I would like to share with you:

1. Quality attracts quality: It is perfectly okay to ask somebody you know to comment, if you are quite certain they will add substance. Even better if the person brings a different viewpoint. Our data shows that getting a high quality first comment usually attracts other quality comments and, most importantly, those afraid of going first have this hurdle removed…
2. Being humble pays off: Try to acknowledge each commenter. Make sure that you add beef with your reply to their comment. Writing something like the comment below is okay but is this person taking her commentators seriously?
“Thanks @Laya, @Andrew, @Laura  Thanks for your comments on the same.  Looking forward to your views / comments in the near future too.”
A response like that lacks depth and makes you wonder if the blogger cares… please take your readers seriously.
3. Fostering engagement means letting nothing fall between the cracks: Make sure no comment is inadvertently lost in your spam box; check it daily. Also, both negative and positive comments must go up on your blog. Otherwise you throttle engagement, even while talking about it.
Finally, as Jeremiah’s example shows, monitoring the many comments he gets takes time, and therefore suggests all comments should be pre-approved before going up. Nobody wants spam to end up in a set of otherwise nice comments.

Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you feel about managing blog content and encouraging greater engagement for your blog? What is your experience with this subject? Have any tips to make sure we use the commenting feature more effectively? Please share your insights.

P.S. - Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:

Article source: ComMetrics – Engaging comments: Where is the beef?

Some of you may remember the Wendy’s TV commercial in the US in which Clara Peller (August 4, 1902 – August 11, 1987 – lived in the Chicago area) posed an important question about the golden arches’ burger: Where is the beef?

Next time we write a comment or reply to one, let us all remember - adding substance is key.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki popularized the notion that, under the right conditions, canvassing the aggregate opinions of many people could be more efficient than relying on the expertise of a few.

Jeff Howe applied this approach to decision-making using the buzzword ‘crowdsourcing’ in a Wired article in October 2006 (see video below).

Crowdsourcing assumes that customers know best what they want and need. Hence, more heads are better than one. We discuss why crowdsourcing may fail in a few important situations that concern social media.

Crowds innovate – NOT
For us at ComMetrics, innovation is a step-by-step process (idea to prototype) where each stage of development is combined with regular measurements of factors critical to achieving success. For example, time used and money spent leading to success in the market, as reflected by new subscribers and their feedback.

The ideas came from various places but then we went to the lab and built. Social networks came in when we had the prototype and wanted feedback.

Our approach is reflected by Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen’s The Innovator’s DNA (December 2009). Five ‘discovery skills’ separate true innovators from the rest of us (Harvard Business Review). The authors concluded that innovators apply these behaviors more skillfully than the rest of us.

Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.
Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom – why, why not and what if?
Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.
Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.
Networking: Innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

It seems a bit naive to think that going to Dodger Stadium or the LA Coliseum in the hope that most people attending the game might be exhibiting the above behaviors, and therefore help us innovate faster…

Crowd-wisdom helps consumers – NOT necessarily
While crowds may not innovate, they still provide wisdom when it comes to product reviews. Superusers’ product reviews on Amazon or eBay influence many. One could ask how reliable these ratings and reviews are. A recent comment on a blog post addresses this in more detail:

Dear Bridget and Lin,
This is a really interesting post. Some would suggest that explaining why the current fashion was going to end in our financial disaster would have been dangerous, especially if it then turned out that the crowd was right.
=> Wall Street Blues: 4 lessons learned

A real concern is the wisdom of crowds who are herded by power-users writing the first review for a product. Any attempt to turn mob opinion into a test for truth is pernicious.

The notion that a book might be a must-read because it is highly ranked by many on Amazon does not make it Nobel prize material. The earth did not stand still just because Galileo fell out of favor, nor has evolution been shown to be false due to the faith of believers.

Hence, product reviews driven by superusers and crowds who follow just means that the wisdom of crowds can only be conventional. Volume against quality.
=> SocioTwitting: Developing metrics for Twitter – volume vs. influence

Thanks for sharing this,
Urs – @ComMetrics

Thumbs Up or Down works but fails to explain why
Crowds do not drive and bring innovation to successful fruition in the form of a marketable product. Nor are they the best source for assessing quality – the one that shouts the loudest is heard the most.

Nevertheless, crowds can tell you if they like or dislike something.  For instance, Bonobos found that they can come up with a name and choose the one they like the most. Bonobos emailed customers and asked them to name a new pair of trousers – the winner was the Dark and Stormys brand.

“We’ve got all these bright guys sitting at their desks, procrastinating during working hours by looking at our website, so we figured, why not harness that creative power?” says Mr Dunn. FT: The internet trouser seller who made great strides

But using crowds for things like A/B tests (i.e. comparing several groups’ reactions – including a control group – to different versions of a webpage to improve it) or getting the thumbs up or down sign risks two things:

a) crowds voting with their fingers still leave you with the question why, and
b) small changes (e.g., darker font for titles to make for easier reading when viewing a screen in a room with bright lighting) can result in product A being preferred over B again.

To minimize the chance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is best to talk to some clients to find out the why, as we had to learn the hard way when re-designing this blog.

More resources about crowdsourcing and innovation

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada – Idea to Innovation (I2I) Program
Jeffrey Phillips – Creativity versus innovation – no, innovation is not getting things to market; some are stillborn and discarded.
Samir Balwani – 5 Things I would tell a social media professor – hands-on course is needed. Maybe so…
Edward Boches – A crowdsourcing ad agency: can it work?
Philippe De Ridder – Crowdsourcing innovation in innovation crowdsourcing (meta-enough, yet?)
Schacon – Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing crisis info
My Starbucks idea – MSI Milestone – 50 Ideas Launched and Still Counting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bottom line
Crowdsourcing depends on two things:

1. a very specific call to action, AND
2. the clear understanding of participants’ motivations.

These two conditions for successful crowdsourcing are illustrated with the UK Guardian’s call for readers’ help digging through MPs’ expense-documentation to identify individual claims and what merits further investigation. It specifies what members are asked to do and the motivation: to catch one’s local MP if they cheated taxpayers.

Take-aways
There are some crucial things to remember about innovation when crowdsourcing enters the pictures.

1. Real innovators do not swim with the school: Fashion changes may be a mystery, but forming an independent opinion and pursuing the idea is what characterizes successful innovators – not crowds.
2. Crowdsourcing may border on exploitation: Lowering a company’s overhead by using a web-based workforce with minimal rewards for non-winning participants (e.g., Jeremiah Owyang crowdsourcing his blog’s banner design means winner takes it all while Jeremiah pays for the one design he likes – exploitation).

Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you think crowdsourcing can work with Web 2.0 applications or social media monitoring? Here is a chance for anyone with first-hand knowledge (this means you!) to share your insights.

We recently came across a three-year study that tracked the research behavior of ‘Generation Y’ doctoral students (those born between 1982 and 1994). The focus was on how these students are using library resources, including traditional library, librarian assistance, electronic libraries and Web 2.0 tools.

The media headlines were focus on the fact that just under half of those polled use RSS feeds. Journalists also noted that only about 10 percent use social bookmarking, with Generation Y students exhibiting the same behavior as other age groups.

What does this mean – if you don’t use RSS or Del.icio.us, you must be a bad student? This post debunks a few myths.

In her article Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0’s ‘on-switch’, the Times’ Zoë Corbyn highlighted several sections of Researchers of Tomorrow, a study jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the British Library.

“Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.”

Based on the above and after having read both the survey used to collect data, and the preliminary research report, I felt compelled to respond to Corbyn’s article:

This is a very interesting post and I also looked at the preliminary research report to get a better grasp of the findings. For me, the big question is whether Web 2.0 use has anything to do with outcomes that we want to monitor.
An example would be whether RSS use helps reduce the time needed to finish one’s studies. In fact, some US data about Facebook usage by undergraduates shows a positive correlation with lower grades and less time spent studying.
Is this desirable?
Like the US Pew Research Center, we have found in our work that the majority of our readers do not want RSS feeds; however, they have good reason(s) to prefer getting the information via email.
Most of our readers prefer to get blog posts via email - RSS is one of many choices we have to get information on the net, but is it the best? Worse, does it necessarily follow that Ph.D. students are less Web 2.0 savvy if they do not use RSS feeds?
It could actually represent a choice made by some Ph.D.s to focus on getting their work done as fast as possible instead of tweeting or spending time on Facebook.
Conclusion
Some Ph.D. students may have decided not to turn the Web 2.0 switch on when it comes to RSS feeds, using Voice over IP (VoIP), or surfing the web from their smartphone. However, not using Web 2.0 technology extensively does not make a student an inferior researcher. Nor does it mean that it will take more time for that student to complete their studies.
Neither the summary above nor the preliminary report allows us to answer the above question. Accordingly, we still don’t know why the Ph.D.s chose not to switch Web 2.0 tools on more often.
What do you think?
Regards,
Urs @ComMetrics

Needless to say, I never got a reply to my comment from Zoë Corbyn. Could this be another example of why newspapers fail the social media test?

Is data-bias an issue?
I recently pointed out that data-bias is becoming a major issue for those interested in web analytics. I could also have pointed out that questionnaire design is something we absolutely must be careful about.

Double-barreled questions are two questions (generally inadvertently) asked as one. For instance, in the previously mentioned study, question five asks what kind of information technology user I am and provides me with several response choices, of which the respondent must choose the one that most applies.

Considering the broadness of the question, researchers cannot be certain how the respondent understood and answered the question: being a Blackberry addict, occasionally using their mobile phone or almost never accessing the Internet from a computer.

More resources on data bias and the report:

British Library and JICS: 2009-10-Summary-Report-Final: 3-yr study tracking the research behaviour of ‘Generation Y’ doctoral students – Web 2.0 issues
ComMetrics: Häagen Dazs or Magnum ice cream – methodology, artefacts and bias

Bottom line
The study tries to track information‐seeking behavior and changing attitudes toward research. Among the findings reported were that 75 percent of Generation Y students (those born between 1982 and 1994) found the information they sought in an e-journal article.

I am not sure the study makes me feel confident enough to accept the findings regarding the use of the information and research resources, both online and off, by Ph.D. students in the UK.

If we want to improve web analytics, research policy and our students’ doctoral education, the methodologies used to collect data should assure a certain level of reliability and validity. To advance our work we must follow best practice and address the issues outlined in this post, as well as the take-aways below.

Take-aways (in random order)

1. Validity of research findings is important: This means the questions must measure what they are supposed to and unless we can be certain of that, reaching conclusions from the data is impossible.
2. Understanding bias is key: If one does not understand the bias in one’s research data, once again, conclusions are impossible.
3. Ph.D. and Web 2.0 – switch on or off by choice: Maybe the study indicates that Ph.D. students are smart and, instead of spending hours in virtual nirvana, they have a richer social life in the real world. Most importantly, they may complete their studies that much faster, while delivering high-quality dissertations. Sounds great to me.

Please, share your experiences with us! How have you dealt with these issues in your research, web analytics and/or benchmarking work?

Every week we tweet about a lot of fascinating stuff, highlighting great content that is of interest to social media folks and corporate bloggers. This weekly compilation provides you with our top tweets for the previous seven days.

Our top stories include how eBookers fell into the spam trap using Twitter, why Google should be pushing open source with Chrome OS, an illustration of why ROI fails with social media, how Twitter groups tell something about your reputation, why LinkedIn is losing against Viadeo and how Xing beats both by making more money. Plus, check out some free Twitter tools to better manage your brand on social networks.

In case you missed the last six weeks’ best links:

ComMetrics weekly review: BarCamp to Morgan Stanley via eBay for week 43.
ComMetrics weekly review: White House to Google Groups for week 44.
ComMetrics weekly review: Xing to Picasso via MoMA for week 45.
ComMetrics weekly review: Google to Barcamp Liechtenstein via Amazon for week 46

Don’t miss the upcoming week! Sign up with your email right now to get it first:

If you are a #Xing member (Europe’s LinkedIn – if not, you can join for free): Recently, we launched the Social Media Monitoring group – be one of the first 100 inaugural members! Your personal invitation is here #measure #publicrelations

B2B – Luxury Labels, Manufacturing and B2B
#usability => VERY USEFUL: 6 reasons users hate your new product feature

#things2read – Measuring ROI: Why it fails

FREE Tools for Twitter, blogs and Facebook: Tips and tricks
#tips2follow ComMetrics Footprint: Technorati nixes blog rankings

1 => #Reputation + brand = #Twitter lists you are on – take a copy of the lists your Twitter feed is on and copy it into the ‘input’ box here #tools2watch
2 => #Reputation + brand = copy converter output you get from link above, and click on create your own to get your graphic (see image at right) #tools2watch
3 => #Reputation + brand = word cloud shows words used to describe YOU on #Twitter #tools2watch

Benchmark social media – best practice
VERY USEFUL: Google Trends for Websites – do you trust it? neat analysis by @MichaelNotte #metrics2watch

#bcli09 Soziale Medien für gemeinnützige Einrichtungen: Wie nutzt man diese besser – Slides ONLINE inklusive Checklisten und Links zur Umsetzung (how non-profits can use Facebook, blogs and Twitter - slides and contributions made during session by Barcamp participants – very insightful).

RT @dkasrel @michelelinn Social Media: It’s about engagement, not pageviews @diannahuff #metrics2watch

READ – Viadeo, LinkedIn & Xing are fighting it out – who do you think is the winner: #Economist says…

White and research papers – presentation slides – trendwatch
#trendwatch #tips2follow: People don’t buy products and services, they buy solutions to problems.

Interesting A/B test: 54 percent improvement on email newsletter sign-up page.

Social Media – information security, privacy
MUST READ – All Your OS Are Belong to Google – Why Aren’t We Worried? WE ARE! #threats2watch #things2patch

Cases – failures – how you don’t want to do it – Social Media 101
#SM101 #trendwatch 1 #Continental started the #sweepstake #spam mania #pr #publicrelations #badgovernance

#trendwatch 2 #ebookers CH failed the SM101 test by following #Continental down the Twitter spam trail. All those who re-tweeted spammed their followers, or was it just their greed that got the better of them? => #reputation mgmt 101 : users spam followers to get a chance to win a voucher worth Sfr. 500 #pr

What did we miss this week? Please add your tweet about what we missed in a comment below. Thank you.
Interested? You should follow us on Twitter.

It is not the technology – it’s what you do with the information that counts.
I tell you why successful social media activites build on performance objectives and metrics that exhibit four characteristics.
Without, you may not accomplish what you really needed to, in order to improve your bottom line.

Previously I addressed some of the issues that must be addressed when trying to establish the metrics needed to assess if your blogging or social marketing efforts are a success or not:

Tip 1 – choose your metrics carefully and then stick with them – it takes time to succeed
Tip 2 – don’t wait to measure ‘conversation’ for your blog – the accepted metric to do this properly will not be here next month

I explained this here: social media – metrics to know and metrics to skip – FAQ #1

So now you have chosen your metrics carefully (tip 1) and figured out that some things cannot be measured, now you need to choose what you want to focus on as addressed here:

Tip 3 – focus on outcome the rest is just fluff – figure out what outcome measures you want to focus on and yes, quantitative measures might not always give you the insight you want.
Tip 4 – focus on two outcome metrics that you will act on – this means that unless you will use this information to make a decision that is important to you, don’t worry about it.

I explained this here: social media – metrics to know and metrics to skip – FAQ #2

Therefore, the above suggests that some concepts are tough to measure and it takes time to succeed. As well, unless you use the information to make decisions and you focus on two measures (focus – do not get distracted from measuring too many things that are irrelevant) – why do it? Unfortunately, in many cases we have a tendency to wanting to measure nearly everything and anything. This is not smart.

5) What measure should one use?

I have pointed out before that metrics are in the eyes of the beholder. Nevertheless, do the two measures you use make sense? While using unique visitors to a web site is a good start, it fails to tell one how many of these might just be search engine robots. Stowe Boyd suggested the conversational index To illustrate; one could have more than one comment added to each of one’s blog posts. Unfortunately, most might add little to a great story (see an example here Top 142 Social Marketing Blogs on the Web) and other times the comment may provide more insights than the original post. As well, the age group and profession you attract – accountants – may explain why you get fewer comments than if your audience are teenagers that hang out using Facebook.

Using primarily volume or traffic to measure potential success may not result in one’s cash register ringing. In the performance appraisal and goal setting literature, people talk about comprehensive goals generally exhibiting four characteristics, namely:

a) time (within what time frame – performing today but getting deferred rewards – what it means for profits and trust 12 months later),

b) money (revenues, profits, costs incurred by firm),

c) quality (what is acceptable performance and what risks must be taken to achieve it), AND

d) output level attained (how many gadgets made, new clients signed-up, blog posts written).

Therefore, if we look at the current crisis in financial markets, rainmakers are forced to make large and many deals to bring in the beacon. This generally allows banks to benefit from huge fees, in turn, resulting in bonuses for the rainmaker and his team. However, a good reward system following the four characteristics outlined above would prevent this. For instance, it would defer paying out bonuses for a few years. To illustrate, the Alcatel-Lucent merger was bad for shareholders. Unfortunately, Pat Russo was paid her bonus a while back. On top, she got a nice severance package when the board showed her the door early this month. Hence, deferred rewards and bonuses are a good idea in financial markets as well as social media and social marketing.

So what does this mean for social media activities, performance and Return-on-Investment or RoI?

If you want to improve your ranking in one list of blogs or another, you need to address such issues as:

- what time will you give yourself (e.g., 3-hours each week for six months until you assess performance)?

- what costs and risks are you willing to take to get there?

- what quality are you willing to accept (e.g., quality of posts, comments and hyperlinks provided to white papers)?

- how many posts will you write each week for your blog?

Accordingly, if you want your Google PageRank to improve, how much time will you give yourself? At what price and what increase in PageRank will you accept as representing success, while still allowing you to have time to play with your kids.

Tip 5. Use comprehensive metrics that are based on objectives entailing these four characteristics: a time, money, quality/risk and output level component. Not following this approach when setting objectives for your social media or social marketing activities, unfortunately, risks you being ineffective and wasting scarce resources.

Bottom Line

We have pointed out before that metrics are in the eyes of the beholder. If you choose two outcome metrics (Tip 4 above), make sure you set yourself comprehensive objectives that include the four characteristics outlined above ==> time, money, quality/risk level, output level it takes to get where you want to be – top 100 rankings. Then go and measure!

Tidbit

An analysis with Google Insight shows that many of these tools are limited to certain user groups – geeks might search using LinkedIn or Twitter. In addition, Google Insight is just querying the frequency of search terms not actual usage.

Web 2.0 technologies are here to stay, and social media is becoming an important tool for public relations experts and marketing gurus.One development has been the slow but steady increase in CEOs, CIOs and other topc executives blogging – communicating with important stakeholders using new media.
However, is all this social media effort worth the money spent? How will the CEO’s blog affect your firm’s bottom line?

Find out – read on — we tell you the story as published in the Financial Times.

Every other week we read about the latest twist on social networking and Web 2.0. For instance, groups of friends are now able to track one another’s online remarks wherever they appear on the web. Some chief executive officer may choose to have her blog available on the intranet. Another C-suite member may blog on the internet making the information available for investors, employees, suppliers and customers to see.
Download the version as a pdf file here:

Financial Times – Is blogging good value for the C-suite? 2-pages

Get ComMetrics now! Contact us

Or read the article online here: Read more on the Financial Times website

What do you think?

Measures is based on empiricism while metrics are a composite of measures. This affects how we benchmark social media efforts.

Find out – read on we tell you the story.

If you do not have a benchmark, ComMetrics allows you to explain why not. We began a few weeks back with setting the basics. In particular, we pointed out that our focus was on business blogs and how this social media might affect the firm’s bottom line. In fact, various moderating and mediating variables could play havoc with your plans on the road to blogging success as I outlined here:

2 sensible metrics – a framework for measuring blog success

Whatever you do, you have your benchmark, whether it is traffic, participation or conversation-plus. Nonetheless, this is a big challenge as discussed here:

Mistake 6 – measuring success of a CEO blog is easy
Mistake 7 – metrics can be meaningless when it comes to the bottom line

I explained this here: social media – ropes to skip – c-level blogs – FAQ #3

Today we begin a series of postings that focus on benchmarking, metrics, measurement and so forth for business blogs. In particular, c-level bloggers of FT Global 500, Fortune 500 AS WELL AS micro enterprises and small firms.

1) Improvements over time

I have pointed out before that metrics are in the eyes of the beholder. Whatever you decide to use (see also upcoming posts on this topic with suggestions about what works and what might not work), you have to use what is most important to you.

Therefore, if you focus on backlinks, are these increasing over the last two months?

Tip 1 – choose the metrics most appropriate for your purpose and stick with them

2) Join the conversation – NOT

Stowe Boyd proposed using the Conversation Index to measure and compare across blogs regarding this issue. This index calculates a ratio between posts and comments as well as trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks). He also mentioned that achieving a result that is lower than 1 would indicate some success.

However, a few people have raised issues with the above index and other approaches used for measuring conversation in the social media space. For instance, there are a few problems using such a measure including that one should probably exclude one’s own responses to reader comments. It is neither clear what communication is nor how it can be defined and, thereafter operationalized for a proper measuring effort. To illustrate, KD Paine suggests there are more than 23 different types of conversations in the social media space. All else considered equal, Rohit Bhargava points out that professional blogs have fewer comments than personal-type blogs.

As well, besides the above challenges affecting your statistics, some additional difficulties regarding measuring conversation have been pointed out. One is that some blogs are not accepting comments, trackbacks or else require registration. As I have pointed out, comments are not necessarily comments. Naturally, all this affects measurement and makes interpretation of the findings difficult indeed.

Tip 2 a well-established and accepted standard for measuring conversation in the blogosphere will not happen very quickly

Bottom line

Whatever we do, we have to focus on improving our effectiveness when using social media over time. Finally, measuring conversations is a non-starter, stay away from it for now.

Why some don’t need to join the conversation

Finally, a metrics is a composite of measures that yield systematic insight into the processes pertaining to social media activities. In contract, a measure allows one to obtain a number or symbol that is based on empiricism and objectivity when assessing social media activities.

A metric is a composite of measures that yield systematic insight into the state of processes or products and drives appropriate action. it consistently leads to the right control action.

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

We will bring you FAQ #2 etc. within another 10 days.

v

Benchmarking is one of the most efficient tools for initiating and maintaining continuous improvements. For smaller firms it means measuring success by the kilogram rater than the ton.

Today size and numbers (e.g., visitors, media clips) may be of secondary importance considering reputation, credibility, trust and attraction regarding your product, service & brand.
Developing measures that help you better understand how your time and resources spent on social media is affecting your company’s bottom line is what we are all after. I address some of these issues below. Feel free to pass these steps and tips around

Ever more size seems to matter less while relevance, credibility and attraction do.

If benchmarking your blog means making sure that measuring success becomes a popularity contest online, think again. Nevertheless, measuring you must.

Customers want products and services that serve a need and a desire. Hence, women do not buy black-heeled shoes; they purchase products that make them look taller, slimmer and sexier. If a pair of sneakers would give them the same benefits, women would most certainly buy such shoes:

Why women buy black high heels – the guide for everything

Here are six steps for getting started in measurement and doing it smarter:

1 – value-added content

Understanding what your customer wants is key for achieving high performance. However, social media content has to serve a need your customer might have. In turn, unless you are a very large company such as Dell with many products you might get little response and interest in blogging about your products.

However, in-depth content about the issues or needs your product addresses might get many interested readers. To illustrate, a bike user may not be interested in regularly reading (i.e. becoming a subscriber) a blog about the bicycles you sell. Reading a blog that talks about biking tours, healthy exercising with biking and other tricks and tips for bike enthusiasts and work commuters is a whole different story.

This helps in creating interest and credibility for the blog and its content.

2 – quantity is not quality

For a freelancer or a micro enterprise, public relations and marketing are far more closely tied to business outcomes than they are in large organizations. Hence, having one’s CEO blog may do much good for public relations, press and the brand. However, attributing this important activity to the number of more products sold will be quite impossible.

For a smaller company or non-governmental organization (NGO), getting three media clips might already spell success.

Define what acceptable quantity and quality is such as one media clip in a regional newspaper (i.e. most important market) and one in an international newspaper each year. Even when doing this, the media clip must be linked to the desirable outcome addressed in point 3 below.

Running an expertise-driven site means having about 90% of visitors or readers that might not be your primary target. These people might not go for the depth and quality you provide. Worst is that they most likely will never be willing to purchase your product or service.

People looking for the quick hit and free advice are not your potential customers. Focus on those few that are clear candidates for spending money on your product. Hence, fewer readers from the right target group make the real difference for your bottom line.

3 linking social media efforts to desirable outcomes

Therefore, what is a desirable outcome for your bottom line? For instance, we are quite visible in the social media space for information security and risk assessment. This resulted in us being to bid for a contract in this area. Amongst the six bidders we were the only micro enterprise competing and we won the contract.

Of course, one of the critical obstacles was our size. The client felt there was risk in us not having enough key personnel available for the contract. In particular, the client was concerned about the possibility of one of the principles leaving the firm. What this might mean in regards to our firm finishing on time and within budget was an issue. Nevertheless, the client informed us during the kick off meeting that our long-term social media efforts had swayed the vote to accept our proposal against the others.

Such desirable outcomes are hard to come by using a web analytics tool alone. Nevertheless, having a customer or potential customer subscribe to the firm’s blog is one of the desirable outcomes we are referring to here.

Whatever you do, define and write down what desirable outcomes are for your business and how to report them best in your context.

4 – everybody is in sales – but the Vice President Sales is responsible

You have to make somebody responsible to count, measure and report how well you are doing in achieving what kind of desirable outcomes as identified above.

Unless you take measures regarding the outputs and outcomes regularly, continuous improvement regarding your use of social media is difficult to track if not impossible.

5 – know your web analytics but please do not overdo it

Unless you are an online shop (no, accountants are not), keep in mind that we tend to collect everything while ending up with nothing of substance.

Knowing where people are going on your site and where they are coming from is interesting. As well, what amount of time they spend on the site and what they are doing whilst visiting might give you important insights? However, does this knowledge provide you with insights that help sell more product or services?

BuzzMetrics, Buzzlogic, Cymfony, Radian6, and Techrigy are all services that will bring a tremendous amount of data to your computer screen. However, it is your task to choose out of these data those that are most appropriate for you, in getting the information required to succeed in the marketplace. Just so we are clear, data are not information and knowing that 100 people mentioned your product on Twitter tells you something, however, what can or are you supposed to do with such information?

Hence, focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that make a difference in your line of business. Please, ignore all the fluff that programs might give you as far as numbers are concerned and, instead, focus on those indicators that empower you to improve performance.

6 – use your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for continuous improvement

When deciding about your KPIs, please keep in mind that more than four might distract you from focusing on what you should. Most important, unless these make sense to your company’s decision-makers, the set of composite indices you propose as KPIs are useless.

As well, KPIs are useful if they show you trends that illustrate improvement or negative changes if they happen. To illustrate, comparing quarterly numbers is very common in the financial and sales world. However, if many of your clients are in Europe and you use Jan-March, April-June, July-Sept, Oct-Dec as your quarters, you must be aware that July and August are the months people go on summer vacation.

Accordingly, based on the ’summer vacation’ factor, your KPIs might drop for that period without suggesting lower performance, of course. Hence, make sure your numbers reflect this reality.

As well, if your set of benchmarks or KPIs cannot be used to positively influence desirable outcomes (see point 3 above) why use such a KPI. Put differently, having 80 people provide positive comments on Twitter about your product last week is great. However, does it trickle down to a desirable outcome, such as getting additional clients or clinching another sale? If not, it is a nice number but your decision-makers will not be impressed, or will they?

Bottom Line

Even if we might agree that one should count whenever one could, a number in itself is meaningless, unless it provides you with the information that allows you to improve bottom line performance.

KPIs, benchmarks, metrics and so forth must allow you to show that your social media efforts help in generating higher sales, gain more clients or produce better grades in the courses you attend as a student.

If you spend a lot of money to get much more traffic on your blog while being unable to meet the payroll this month, what good does it? More data are not always helpful for generating better performance. Please keep that in mind.

Are you using Feedburner, Feedblitz, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups or other free services. By doing so, you may antangonize your target audience.

So before benchmarking – do some house cleaning first.

Recently much attention has been focusing on metrics and benchmarking. We have posted some material ourselves including links to important metrics stuff on the web here:

social media trend spotting – building and maintaining conversation and participation

Sensible Metrics Make a Difference or Why Less Traffic is Better

Benchmarking Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 – did the Test Follow Good or Best Practice?

If you cannot see the picture to the right, click here:

metrics – forewarned is forearmed

However, before you measure things you should address some basic issues.

Meaning, metrics are not a means to an end (traffic, more sales, etc.). Instead, they can provide you with some accurate information on where you do better or worse than you thought you were doing.

To illustrate this a bit better, one can manage traffic in certain ways whilst making life harder for the readers of your blog or social media efforts. We give you a limited selection below and explain why it might not be smart making your clients unhappy.

1) Some partial feeds (RSS or via e-mail) result in higher visitor numbers but maybe at a too high a price

Often, you may get 2 lines of text and then having to click on a URL. The latter will then deep link you to the post on the writer’s webpage.

It is somewhat ironic if not sad that PR professionals seem to be particularly inclined to give you half the story as illustrated by the:

- IR Web Report Update that allows one to get a partial feed via RSS or e-mail only.

My advice: Do not waste your readers’ time, give them your content they way they prefer getting it (offer full only or full and partial feed and let them make a choice).

2) Google or Yahoo groups can be a nuisance to your readers

Both offer you great service making your life simpler by letting somebody else do part of the work. Nevertheless, you also give away part of the control.

People are inundated with news. Unfortunately, using Google or Yahoo groups can result in your readers getting a bunch of garbage at the top of each message they have to browse through each single time.

EXAMPLE BELOW, bear with me on this one

Delivered-To: @gmail.com
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 81.92.97.242 is neither permitted
nor denied by domain of grbounce-cCrfqgUAAADpZInEZyr3WSM3GLvumBTV= googlegroups.com) smtp.mail=grbounce-cCrfqgUAAADpZInEZyr3WSM3GLvumBTV=
; dkim=neutral header.i=@googlegroups.com
Delivered-To:
Delivered-To: mailcytrap-
Delivered-To: maillistwHTML_IMAGE_ONLY_24,HTML_MESSAGE autolearn=no version=3.1.0
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=googlegroups.com; s=gamma;more and more of thisDomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:x-bloggermail; b=Z4dgAMzTfaRYd5ZuRTWK+/mdTjlZmAm6YU/zY3KlFGsIbrmfQg8im7+SFqQh9B2UYusqt NTaW9P+SYhxa3Feyy/O2czgWshWf/8/gwiBLTUegAYlb0nGVuY+oIppa7q7vlh5GvyKUDrxD

OsVpk4ULQ=
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:02:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: David
To: @googlegroups.com
Subject: [IPKat - news and fun for everyone ... and it's FREE!] 2007 UK JEB Exam Results
X-BloggerMail: b487789873434e1fa4f5f2f680d246514127cd67
X-Google-Approved: @gmail.com via web at 2008-03-31 12:06:16
Reply-To: @gmail.com
Sender: @googlegroups.com
X-Google-Loop: groups
Mailing-List: @googlegroups.com;
contact readers-owner@googlegroups.com
List-Id:
List-Post:
List-Help:
List-Unsubscribe: ,

Asking your reader to have to browse through this nonsense every time she gets a post from you is a nuisance and wastes much of their valuable time.

As we said before, nothing comes free. Google Groups or Yahoo Groups offer great and free service. However, your reader has to waste time by browsing through one page of garble every time she receives an e-mailed post from you until she gets to the beef of your msg.

Getting news online – reducing your biggest time waster

For instance, you can add 10 people to your e-mail list by entering their e-mail address using Google’s web-interface. Unfortunately, Google could flag the request as spam as explained here:

Google Groups Pain in the Neck

Thereafter, every single time you add addresses to your list, Google will flag this as possible spam. This is not a nice experience for you as a moderator.

My advice: Keep your e-mails short by cutting ‘garbage content’ at the top of your e-mailed posts – the less your reader has to wade through useless ‘noise’ the better.

If you outsource your mailing list, you have to deal with issues as outlined above regarding signing up users and might be market as possible spammer. Using your own system or the one offered by your blog software might offer you

- control what happens to your e-mail addresses and list, as well as

- saving you time and grief

WordPress offers you several plug-ins to address this concern. Want to know what I choose as plug in for this, leave a comment I respond to you personally with the link. Nothing comes for free as we explained here:

there is no free lunch – you pay for wi-fi at Starbucks – trust me
4) Feeburner might be great to keep track of reader behavior, however…

Outsourcing comes at a price and this goes for Feedburner as any other service you will discover.

Some people who use Feedburner to mail out newsletters or daily posts via e-mail may force their readers to give Feedburner a click. For instance, when I get a FeedBlitz email update for Communication Overtones by Kami Huyse, she provides me with a teaser (see point 2 above – why not give me the full post?) and then I have to click on the URL to get the full story.

However, the nuisance really starts when I want to open the e-mail I got from Feedburner. As a security conscious person I have set my e-mail program and firewall rules that, any JavaScript is not executed without prior permission. Hence, it could take 30 seconds and several click before you or I get access to an e-mail coming via the Feedburner or Feedblitz service. Reason being that your firewall will warn you about a Connection out alert – likely several times because with all the advertising and other stuff embedded in the e-mail … If you click on deny, when Connection out warnings pop up, you cannot view the message properly.

This does not seem user friendly. Unfortunately, nearly all newsletters work that way if they come via Feedburner or Feedblitz. Why security vendor McAfee uses this service remains a mystery to me. Being required to activate JavaScript in order to get the e-mail post in full is not according to best practice in the information security field where McAfee is one of the main players.

FAQ – Java versus JavaScript – the security basics

Outsourcing the delivery of your RSS feed or e-mail service for your posts can be risky. For instance, 2008-05-13 Feedburner was out of service from around 14:00 hours until about midnight (GMT plus 2 hours).

This service interruption I discovered via my Twitter account – get image to the right here -

2008-05-13 outsourcing entails risks – Feedburner shut down for a day or two

Therefore, nothing is free, outsourcing can save you resources and maybe even money. However, when the service fails you can do little if anything but wait until the service is up again.
My advice: Do not require your readers to be online or having to activate JavaScript before they can read your e-mail message or view your blog properly.

As well, using a service such as Feedburner or Feedblitz means you depend upon these services to function properly, otherwise you just have to wait as ProBlogger was forced to as well.

4) Successful full feeds via RSS or e-mail keep traffic statistics down, however…

As pointed out above, a full feed makes it unnecessary for your subscribers to have to visit your website. Accordingly, some people try to secure some clicks to get their server statistics up with an example like this:

http://ComMetrics.com/referer.php?url=http://www.irwebreport.com/daily

Therefore, if the reader hits a link that starts with a referrer code, your server will record a visit from this reader after she has clicked on the above link.

Instead, if you have a URL such as http://www.irwebreport.com/daily only, my website at ComMetrics does not register a visit from you before you view the post at irwebreport.com

To continue with this illustration, when you get a FeedBlitz email update for Communication Overtones by Kami Huyse, you click on the URL that might look like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CommunicationOvertones/~3/259873480/…..

whereby after Feedburner accounted for your click (to enable Feedburner to keep count of how many people click on these URLs), you are re-routed to:

http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2008/03/fastcompanytv-showing-how-measurement.html

However, if you offer people the full content via RSS feed or e-mail, your server statistics will be lower than if you do it as outlined above (i.e. referrer link or Feedburner approach).

Therefore, what is it; do you want satisfied readers or more hits on your server statistics?

In addition, readers might rarely visit your webpage or blog online. Nevertheless, they read the newsletter content you ship very diligently.

My advice: Avoid using referral mechanisms as described above or used be Feedblitz / Feedburner. In turn, you are more likely to keep them satisfied and help them manage their time more effectively.

Bottom Line

As the above suggests, you will have to do some house cleaning first before you think about metrics. Ultimately, what you need to worry about is your subscribers and those that you want to subscribe to your blog. Similar to a magazine where people pay to subscribe, you want readers to actual devour what you write so you can earn their trust. In turn, they are quite likely to renew their magazine subscription. In your case, they will refrain from unsubscribing themselves from your blog or the Twitter micro-blogging feed. Only then can you begin to address things like:

Beth Kanter’s comment – figure out what metrics you need before diving head into it

Nevertheless, even if you start to develop the metrics you believe you need, please be careful:

Twitter Metrics: Let’s Remain Scientific, Please!

Whatever your decision is about which metrics you will use, keep in mind:

A) you have to use the benchmarks that measure what you want to measure

Therefore, neither focusing on traffic nor looking at the number of subscribers may give you a good picture. However, combining the two numbers and arriving at some sort of index might give you a more useful number to benchmark yourself against, AND

B) focus on several comprehensive measures but probably no more than 3-6 in total to keep focused; we know that too many metrics detract one from doing one’s job well, such as selling.

In addition, whatever you decide, please keep in mind, it is far more cost effective and less time-consuming keeping your current readers happy than acquiring new subscribers. Hence, be careful about the potential problems we outlined under points 1-4 above. While you may be unable to get rid of all four problems, try to avoid at least 2 of them. This will improve your benchmark numbers. In fact, happy regular readers will improve a few of the classical metrics used such as:

> subscribers (higher numbers, careful reading of what you post, fewer people that want to unsubscribe),

> backlinks, etc.

It is that simple.

Web wins in White House race – but besides being good for Arianna Huffington’s daily me blogging – is it any good for you voters out there?

More than a decade ago the technology specialist, Nicholas Negroponte, pro-phesied the emergence of the Daily Me – a fully personalized newspaper.

During these times, the US presidential election campaign has demonstrated that the personalized newspaper is becoming ever more reality. As well, candidates have shown that they can use new media very effectively.

For instance, the Obama campaign folks have proved particulary adept at harnessing the viral properties of YouTube. Everybody from CNN to Realclearpolitics.com have made political blogs and websites central to their coverage and Arianna Huffington – the Huffingtonpost.com’s editor-in-chief – has created a website that is thriving.

Where is all this traffic coming from

ComScore, an internet ratings firm, has benefited as well from all this craze by being quoted much about this trend and web metrics it gathers. It estimates that Huffingtonpost.com and Politico.com, two politically focused sites, have seen their traffic roughly triple from the same period last year.

But ComScore’s statistics have some real limitations since they are based on panel data excluding any user surfing from work or using a business computer to do so as stated here:

CEO Perspective: Comparing the Proverbial Apples to Oranges

comScore’s panel does not measure usage from public or office-based shared machines (e.g. shared machines at schools, libraries, Internet cafes, group PCs at work, etc.), nor does it include usage from college dorms, government offices, the military, school/university offices, or mobile phones/PDA’s.

Ever thought ComScore provided valid and accurate data? Think again and study the readers’ comments. In fact, the CEO never responded to these, what a shame

In the above post by the CEO of ComScore it becomes obvious that the firm is not ready to manage social media successfully. In particular, when readers comment and ask important questions, the conversation has to be kept going and, most importantly, the CEO has to answer precisely. Surfers are still getting this page as one of the top results when searching for ComScore…. When will ComScore join the conversation and respond to reader comments?

Will the traffic endure when the campaign signs come down?

So know that we know that the traffic measures are not that accurate, will readers still flock to these sites once the election will be over?

Many sites, such as the Huffingtonpost.com, are news aggregators with a small percentag exclusive and in-depth content created by Huffington staff. What we think about quality content being wasted this way from the content owner’s point of view we have explained in more detail here:

Google, Digg.com and Twitter: Why such Drive-By Traffic is of Little Value

But some like Realclearpolitics.com have already seen the writing on the wall and supplement political commentary and news aggregation with sports and financial market news.

These sites hope that with expanding their coverage beyond the US presidential campaign, they will keep some of today’s readers and make them regulars by 2009.

Does all that traffic mean you have influence?

The above suggests that many of these websites that have emerged as indispensable clearing houses of election news, will have to cope with a drop in traffic, when the campaign signs come down.

Some experts believe that all this information on the web helps voters to be better armed to pick collectively through information. In turn, users can vet facts in the same way they might be doing on Wikipedia. Could be true, however, do not believe that this process means a better informed and knowledgeable electorate. We all know that validity is not reliability, neither does agreement by the masses (see Wikipedia) mean the truth.

So be vigilant and continue:

blogging for quality while attracting paying customers

Once again, unless your clients read your postings, who cares…. except that you may be pleased for the pageview statistics that are going through the ceiling. Nonetheless, will this increase sales of your accounting or investment brokerage services?

We should not forget that social media including your website or blog are about the bottom line. Namely, their only justification is helping you selling product, nothing more and nothing less.

Are we better informed thanks to Huffingtonpost.com and similar sites?

What we know for sure is that these sites have been speeding up the political news cycle just as 24-hour cable news channels did before them. And yes, campaign news may routinely break on the web by a blogger such as Arianna Huffington and her columnists that publish on her site, before working its way through the rest of the media.

But does it make a difference? Are we now better informed, do we know the candidates better, will we change our opinions having had all these additional outlets that bombard us ever faster with ever more news and data?

These things are still not known as of today or are they? And just to restate, gathering news from everywhere and feeding it to the masses via the Web does not result in readers becoming more skilled about new media. Neither does it mean your readers are more skilled in selecting quality instead of trash content, does it?

And finally, will all this bombardment with news and facts get you to change your vote or, most importantly, motivate you to go and cast your vote instead of failing to do so again this time?

Bottom Line or should you care?

Looking at sites delivering political content and their success in the US makes one wonder. Apparently it is not that dfficult to get lots of subscribers. Unfortunately, most of us will rarely if ever go beyond 10,000 subscribers to our e-mailed content.

Trying to go beyond 10,000 subscribers might be an unrealistic goal for a small and medium business (SME) . As a profitable and fast growing SME you must focus on your customers and any potential clients you want to reach. Neither do you have the time it takes to build such a huge subscriber list [e.g., on weekends - get a life - spend time with your family instead of checking the flood of tweets on Twitter ].

Having said the above, reality is that most writers, including myself, are obsessed over unique visitor or pagewview statistics. Therefore, whenever I get a chance I check on these statistics. However, putting a bit more focus on the wider measures of success such as reader comments is helpful. For instance, are these comments in depth, do they add beef? For a good example of what we mean see here:

Stephanie Booth on Safer Internet Day 2008 – 7 reasons why campaigns against online pedophiles must be coordinated

Such commentary can give you the motivation to create that great content that your readers and customers love reading. In contrast, having plenty of comments written for your posts with 99% adding little if anything does not give you the quality of conversation you wish to have with your readers – clients. See an example here:

2008-04-06 – Arrianna Huffington – Sunday Roundup

A more technical example about the low quality of much of the content or conversation blogs and websites get is shown here:

Apple lags MS in security response

Conclusion

Yes, the internet has moved from support act to leading role in delivering political content in the US. But that does not mean it’s of better quality and substance than the fare you get from traditional news outlets such as CNN, Fox or Bloomberg.

For an SME, the best strategy is to focus on serving your customers with content they care. Forget the 10,000 or more pageviews each day. Such numbers are very likely not in your cards. However, serving great content with good comments by your readers will get you more traffic. Most importantly, it will improve your standing as an expert and level of trust your clients have in the quality of your work. If that will not help your bottom line, what will?

Hence, forget Arianna Huffington – she is in a different league. However, she can teach you plenty of tricks when it comes to selling herself and using new media most effectively to increase sales. She is definitely a case study for how to market yourself better than nearly everybdoy else — except maybe for Paris Hilton — but that is another story.

Intel is using the SEC’s new default electronic delivery process for e-proxy materials smartly.
2008-04-02 Intel Corporation demonstrated that the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC – U.S. regulatory agency) new default electronic delivery process for e-proxy materials works GREAT if used correctly.

We have been watching about 200 companies or there abouts using the new default electronic delivery process for e-proxy materials. Most of these companies botched one thing or more, a dismal experience for investors so far.
Now comes Intel and yes, it is the first company using the new notice-and-access option that provides:

1) an online annual report and

2) a proxy statement properly.

Both of the above are offered online in nice looking HTML (viewing online) as well as a PDF document format (for downloading).

If you cannot see the above image, get it here:Intel 2007 Annual Report and 2008 Proxy Statement

Possible Improvements for 2009

It would have been nice if the help section (circled red above) had linked to downloading the Adobe Reader to be able to browse through the downloaded documents. Some instructions might also have helped.

Second, at a first look a shareholder might be a bit confused. The webpage makes it hard in figuring out what documents to download (see our read vertical line in above image).

Accordingly, giving investors one file that was to include both, Annual Report as well as 2008 Proxy Statement would have been nice. Finally, even once you have downloaded the material, you are unlikely to know exactly what you have to do.

Sorry, however Intel investors living in Europe have yet to receive the snail mail explaining to them how it all works.

Therefore, while Intel did well, there is still some room for improvement.

GREEN MOVEMENT

Intel has also attempted to quantify the benefits of an electronic distribution of notice-and-access to the company, its shareholders, and the environment.

2008-04-02 in its news release Intel stated that it will save about $2mio in printing and mailing costs, avoid about 4mio pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, and prevent more than 13mio gallons of wastewater.

Why is SEC’s new default electronic delivery process for e-proxy materials a good case study for the effective use of social media?

2007-12 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC – a regulatory agency) undertook a major project to convert pay figures in the regulatory filings of 500 large companies from standard text to intelligent Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The SEC made the XBRL-tagged pay and financial data available to any developer who wanted it. Hence, you can now find details about executive pay from U.S. listed firms online here:

corporate governance – transparency and accountability for executive pay (please enable Java script to enable the interactive feature to work)

In addition to increasing transparency, using websites and social media can help in communicating more effectively with the traditional media as well as investors:

If the web is good enough for Warren Buffett – what about you?

Finally, it is even a cost-effective way allowing the saving of printing expenses and, as importantly, helping our environment. I prefer getting shareholder reports in electronic format because it allows me to search through the document using the search function. That much faster than having to look through a thick printed document.

Bottom LineOf course, my esteemed social media colleagues and friends will point out several things that might not make Intel’s approach perfect. One being that a blog communicating with shareholders about the annual report and other key financial figures is missing.

As well, Intel has not succeeded in getting the conversation with its investors going… but please, it is a FIRST for Intel. Moreover, after watching about 200 companies bodging the SEC’s default electronic delivery process for e-proxy materials – Intel just shines. As well, this is a critical step in the right direction for investors and regulators alike.

I am looking forward to 2009-04-02 when Intel will release its financial data for next year. Intel will likely show us again that blazing down the social media trail can do wonders for improving investor relations. Keep up the good work.

Google can definitely steer some traffic your way. Unfortunately, search engine traffic is quite often low quality traffic that will not stay around.

Accordingly, search engine traffic gets what it wants from your website, thereafter, it moves on to another site on the net. The same applies to traffic coming from social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com

My recommendation for benchmarking your traffic: focus on your readers and not too much on your web statistics.

During a recent meeting with one of our customers, she provided us with two interesting bits of information:

1) she learned from her webmaster that about 50% her firm’s web page traffic came from search engines, however,
2) a friend told her that such traffic was not very useful in helping her efforts to grow the business.

Therefore, the question she put to us was:

What is your reading on this, do you agree with my friend that search traffic is useless or…?

Below we will try to shed some light on this issue and we want to hear from you what you think, so please leave a comment and tell us about your experience and opinion on this matter.

1) Relying on traffic coming from search engines means getting low quality traffic

It is unreliable traffic. It is web surfers killing time. The best traffic is the traffic that comes to your site directly through bookmarks, RSS or clicking on a link when reading your e-mailed news digest. These are people that know abut you and the valuable content you offer. They know where to find you. Incidentally, we at ComMetrics.com predict that by 2009 advertisers will begin paying more for sites that get their traffic direct and not through search engines and news aggregators.

My advice: Do not commoditize your content.

2) Social bookmark traffic (e.g., Furl, del.icio.us) is temporary, whereby users grab the content and surf on to the next item

Most of the social bookmark traffic is temporary, whereby very few visitors will:

- spend much time on your site
- venture into your site
- sign-up to your newsletter or RSS feed

My advice: Take the traffic you get through social bookmarks. Best could be that you get one or two of these visitors to subscribe to your RSS or e-mail feed. Other than that, do not spend too much time on getting such type of traffic.

3) Twitter brings a spike but…

Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time. The placement of links within profiles and conversations can direct visitors to a specific website.

However, Twitter users tend to be quite webbing savvy, making it difficult to target a specific subset. Depending on how many might follow you and see when you send a link, they might distribute it on their network.

For instance, recently Going Solo referred to our past post about their conference and other matters on Twitter like this:

Great article about Going Solo (and going solo) by Urs: http://commetrics.com/?p=93 (must read)

Naturally, most Going Solo followers (at that time 93) were clicking on the link to read the post.

However, how many of these visitors looked around our web site and became subscribers to our RSS or e-mail feed? We don’t think more than 1 [we know, of course, that three of the Going Solo Twitter feed are subscribers of the ComMetrics blog already ]

In addition, did you know that just about 100 digg.com users account for more than 50% of the stories that make it to the front page of Digg?

Finally, are those additional readers from social bookmarking services your potential clients (e.g., for your investment services, tax advice, child care, IT outsourcing)?

My advice: Optimize for your customers who should be your primary target group as readers.

Do not worry about those dropping by thanks to a tweed on Twitter or a digg on Digg.com

Nevertheless, make it easy for those drive-by visitors to sign up to your feeds. Surprise, a few of them always will and, most importantly, they could end up being one of your clients.

Bottom LineMany news sites rely on search engine traffic for as much as 60 per cent of their traffic, often more. They invest heavily in making their content discoverable through keywords, tagging, metadata, URL structure, and a dozen more parameters.This is a big burden and it does nothing to improve the quality of content, only the quality of discoverability.

When I look at my server logs I see that about 70 – 85 per cent of my traffic (i.e. depends on which web site) comes to my site thanks to bookmarks or RSS (e-mail) subscribers. 10 – 30 per cent of our visitors come via referrer links. Only 5 to 20 per cent of our visitors end up with us due to a social bookmark or being sent over by served search results.

Getting a hundred people that read your posts carefully is satisfying. Some of these readers might even be influenced by your writing and feel the urge to post an insightful comment on one of your stories every other week or so.

That beats a thousand digg.com readers that barely stay to read the complete abstract any day. A spike in traffic is nice; nonetheless, focus on your target audience (i.e. customers and potential customers). Get the target audience to subscribe to your RSS and/or e-mail feed. It is those individuals that help your business grow.

When posting a story, focus on your customers’ needs, pay attention.

So what did we advice our customer regarding traffic?

Benchmarking is easy, just make sure your current clients and potential ones find your blog’s content helps them with their work. Even better is if they leave a few comments about your posts during 2008.

Leaving comments is another good indicator to get a feel if they care and are willing to spend the time to give feedback.

As importantly, discuss content with them when you meet next time (e.g., over a cup of coffee). The blog can help your efforts for establishing yourself as an expert. In turn, this will increase trust and help your sales efforts.

One of our readers has read about Going Solo – an upcoming conference in Lausanne (see logo below) and wanted to know if he should attend AND what he might get out of it.

I tried to assess this issue from my perspective. Please keep in mind that I have registered myself, paid the fee and look forward to attend Going Solo. Hence, my response may be somewhat biased, nonetheless….

As an entrepreneur or freelancer some of the things we point out below may sound very familiar to you, remember those days? How about a smile? For those of you working on a new venture, please keep these Ropes to Skip in mind. You could just save yourself some grief.

Going Solo is a conference for freelancers and entrepreneurs. I am sure many of you will be interested. Stephanie Booth (the organizer) had a chat about the focus of the conference with Stowe Boyd, one of the speakers. What they discussed you can read about in more detail here:

Going Solo: The Three Skills of Soloing

I agree with everything the say, particularly that somebody going solo needs to consider

a few things to make sure to increase their likelihood of success. These are:

1) Doing the work,

2) Marketing and networking, and

3) Prospecting, contracts and cash flow

I would probably put prospecting under point 2 but that is just a small detail. Nonetheless, my limited experience in this field has taught me a few more things that I would like to share with you here. These I see as the Ropes to Skip on the journey to becoming a successful freelancer or entrepreneur.

A) Where will your business be located? In some countries, doing freelancing is much easier than in others. The reason might be culture, regulation and possibly the people as well. Hence, when I launched a business in California during my university studies that was easy (i.e. got a licence, used one room in our condominium and voila, we were open for business). Doing it again in Canada (Alberta) was very much the same. Have the idea, get a license and start selling.

When I came to Denmark and wanted to try it there, it took a bit more paperwork and effort to get going. Same rules apply for Switzerland when I started last year. Therefore, whenever we think about going freelance, how things work in San Francisco is different from how they work in Aalborg (Denmark). In some countries, it takes more time and effort to get it right the first time.

To illustrate, in Switzerland I discovered that blue chip clients are reluctant to give work to a freelancer. Things can improve if you offer unique skills, work in a niche and have incorporated your business (hence, you have some capital invested besides just sweat equity). Being able to show that several people work for your micro enterprise does also help.

My advice: Keep cultural differences in mind and set things up properly before quitting your daytime job.

B) So you are hanging out a shingle – why should clients come to you? Others might put it even simpler: You can quit your current job after you have secured and successfully brought to completion two contracts. It will be tough to do these contracts while holding down a full-time job. However, it is the best way to get a taste of what it takes to work on your own. It is especially helpful to discover how tough it can be to succeed in the marketplace, without having all the resources of a large employer at your disposal (expertise, infrastructure, contacts, brand, etc.).

Deciding to quit your current job is the easy part. Securing a revenue stream that is large enough to pay your bills and rent is a much greater challenge.

In some countries, without the right social network and people who know and trust your skills and capabilities, it might take you months until you get some jobs that pay serious money.

Remember, costs add up from day one. Will you be able to survive the first three months without any serious income?

So do not go out renting a nice office or spend money on fancy equipment, unless you have a client who signed on the dotted line giving you the work that will pay for all this. Do not forget, you need to pay yourself a salary for the next three months.

My advice: Do not spend anything unless you have the cash to pay for it. Cash is king.

C) Do you think we need another consultant or product / software / gadget? The advantage of an older person deciding to launch her business is that you might have worked in the industry for a while. Not only have you gained experience but also, more importantly, you have probably established a network of contacts in the industry.

To illustrate the above, UK statistics suggest that starting as a freelancer or entrepreneur at a somewhat older age helps. The likelihood of a business still thriving after five years is greatest for freelancers or entrepreneurs who are around 50 years of age when starting out. Apparently, those folks know the industry, have the necessary contacts and are able to identify and exploit a market niche that helps their venture succeed.

My advice: Unless you can pass the elevator test (ground floor to first floor is all it takes to explain who is purchasing your product and why), it will be a tough uphill battle on the road to success.

D) Does your service, software or tool satisfy a need? A marketing ace just recently asked me about our ComMetrics software for benchmarking webpages, blogs and social media efforts and said:

What is the product’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?

I explained it as follows:

‘If you are in the situation where you run a social media program at a corporation (webpage, blog, online advertising) and you need to measure your success against your competitors, ComMetrics is for you. More importantly, the tool helps one to show to the bosses that this ‘new media’ program is worth its weight. The ComMetrics Social Media Health Check empowers you to demonstrate the value of your social media program as well as indicating where your program can be improved over the next Quarter.’

In simple terms, customers want products and services that serve a need and a desire. Therefore, unless your consulting service or your software tool does that, it will be an extremely hard sell. Accordingly, there is a reason why women wear black high heels when going on a date and not sneakers:

Why women buy black high heels – the guide for everything

Nonetheless, even designing and making black high heels does not mean that women will flock to your store to purchase these things. We should address that issue in another post.

My advice: Check if you can identify the need your service or product will satisfy and, most importantly, your chances for successfully exploiting that market niche.

Bottom Line

In some countries, things are a bit more formal than in others. Hence, having some experience in the industry and knowing the key players personally does help your efforts when starting out as a freelancer or entrepreneur.

In addition, large companies or blue chip outfits may not be willing to do business with a self-employed designer or software guru. Our experience has been that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) offer us the best opportunity for securing new contracts. For starters, the owner may understand very well what it takes to start out. Moreover, he or she can make a decision about your contract without having to secure support from many parties. This is often required in a large corporation. In fact, your counterpart may not want to take any risks by giving you the job and, instead, prefer to hire a blue-chip consulting firm.

The greatest challenge is to secure a regular revenue stream. Once you have a few regular clients that provide you with monthly revenues, things get a bit easier. You can plan and invest in new ventures or equipment, while being sure that the money is coming in to pay for these expenses.

Going Solo and Benchmarking Yourself

So what about Going Solo. Well if you are going solo or thinking about it, check this out:

Who is Going Solo For?

The above points we put up can be seen as important markers that you need to address before going solo. Success is the result of hard work and your family, friends or children may not always appreciate the time commitments you must make to help your venture grow.

Whatever you decide to do, going to an event such as as Going Solo gives you a chance to hear from other freelancers, learn the ropes, add a few more tricks to your toolbox. etc. And let us not forget that besides networking you will have a good time, I am sure.

One of our readers has sent us a question. We think you might be interested in hearing about our answer to this reader. The question below addresses the strategic issue about how to identify and serve one’s niche more effectively, while making one’s blog more attractive to the target audience(s).

The question posted to us is short but quite challenging and reads as follows:

Dear ComMetrics
I was hoping you could give me some info what is best for good blogging (how often to blog and stuff).

Below we list four points that we think our reader should consider when trying to devise a social media strategy that helps a blog’s success.

1 Who is Your Target Audience?

It is difficult to know in social media land who your audience is. Another challenge is to know what will resonate with them and how to tap into their interests and needs.

B2B audiences are quite fragmented. They might range from your employees, channel partners, third party vendors, customers and potential clients. Based on our experience it is most effective if you focus on three of these possible target audiences. Thereafter, just focus on their needs and go with it.

For a business, primary audience may be customers, followed by potential customers and then maybe suppliers/channel partners.

However, if your audience are students things could be very different. For instance, a student newspaper at a university may have three target audiences, namely, students, staff and alumni. Maybe the order I wrote these things in might have to be changed. Nonetheless, focusing on more than three target groups makes serving their needs too difficult to manage. So identify your niche and run with it.

Oh and just in case you forgot, remind yourself over and over when writing, what are my three primary target audiences? Most critical is to be able to respond to the question:

- is the post I am writing relevant to the audience I must reach?

Keep this question in mind when writing.

2 When should I post?

Look at the statistics for your blog to find out when you have most of your visitors. If you run a blog for your customers (e.g., real estate buyers, investment services, computer hardware), it could very well be that most traffic you get happens between Tuesday – Friday.

Mondays seem to be bad days because people are coming back from their weekend and are trying to catch up with work. This means that they might have less time to check all the e-mail or RSS feeds they got from you over the weekend. As well, by 13:00 hours on Friday some people have left for the weekend.

As well, we had to consider the fact that many of our readers do subscribe to our feeds using an e-mail address from their employer. Hence, most traffic for our blogs is Tuesday – Friday. Traffic drops off right after noon Friday. As well, are target audience is primarily in Europe. It appears looking at our server logs that they do not check their work e-mail account frequently during weekends. Hence, posting on a weekend does not increase our traffic much from the European executives we target.

With students, you might get much traffic on weekends because this is so-called study time. Accordingly, besides doing assignments students may give themselves some time for short breaks. During these, it could very well happen that they read blog posts. You have to check and test to see what works best for your subscribers.

3 Should I Keep a Posting Schedule?

Some people say you should keep a regular schedule. Others claim that this is a bad idea. For instance, Yahoo and other search engines might check on those dates when you are scheduled to post. In turn, if you decide one week to post on a Saturday, Google might not index the post for several hours.

However, the answer could also be much easier than worry about this. Once again, it all depends on your subscribers. If they get your posts through an e-mail feed they might read the material, whenever they have time do read the stuff. To illustrate, server statistics indicate that subscribers (i.e. e-mail and RSS feed) appear to read our content around lunchtime Monday through Friday.

Please let us know if you have had the same experience with your readers. Please leave a comment below.

4 How Often Should I Post a Story?

Some people argue that daily posts will get you more traffic. Besides the reasons why this might not suit your subscribers (see points 1-3), traffic should not matter that much to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience. Therefore, how many people read your posts might seem irrelevant. Engaging the audience you want to have a relationship with seems a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.

The other issue is also if you write all by yourself or together with others. Quality content takes time to write. Most importantly, let us not forget that quality content takes time for your subscribers to read.

How much time is your target audience willing to spend for reading your posts each week?

Having a successful career, a family with children and an active social life (e.g., doing sports, hanging out with your friends) means having less time to read your blog.

Depending on your audience, it is probably wiser to have fewer high quality posts each week (e.g., 2) instead of a stream of low quality chatter (remember the Wendy’s commercial – the key to success is – where is the beef) Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

Bottom Line

According to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs appear to update weekly.
With a maturing blogosphere, measuring success is shifting from traffic to reader loyalty. Hence, making every word count with your target audience is the best strategy.

As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.

London hedge fund Endeavour Capital loses 27%
David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group fails to save $22bn Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) fund
JPMorgan wanted to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, upped the price to $10  (remember, in Dec. 2007  the share price was over $80 and more than 30% of the stock is owned by Bear Stearns employees).
Wall Street has cut 34,000 jobs and expects the number to rise to 100,000 (Internet bubble in 2001 caused 90,000 job losses over a couple of years).
These headlines and ‘false rumours’ in the market make it ever more important to invest one’s assets wisely to avoid long-term losses

The above news was bad for sure. Publishing details of clients’ Bank LGT accounts in Italian newspapers last week was another shock. With all these negative headline’s and watchdog inquiry into City speculation in London, how is a successful investment fund supposed to communicate its successes to clients and potential investors?

Almost everybody will tell you that the key is to reach your customers as we discussed here:

- Sensible Metrics Make a Difference or Why Less Traffic is Better

The model we used was ComMetrics.com framework for measuring blogging success

The crisis at Bear Stearns triggered a series of challenges for traders and social media experts, as Wall Street tumbled towards and then edged back from an abyss.

Inefficient Markets Must be Found

The global credit squeeze made it a necessity for investment advisors to calm their client’s nerve before they took off for a long Easter weekend.

In today’s private banking and investment business large universal banks such as UBS or Deutsche Bank may provide all the services, ranging from managing the fund, selling the fund to other groups and making the investment decisions.

However, a small corporation running a small but successful fund, outsourcing may be necessary to improve operations and keep costs under control. Hence, the investment bankers may decide the fund’s strategy and investment decisions. Nevertheless, one firm may administer the fund (i.e. paper work) for the investment experts. Another, outsourcer (i.e. a bank) processes transactions on behalf of investment wizards.

What is the opportunity?

Outsourcing part of the operations enables investment officers to distribute their systematic and no so systematic risk across vehicles. If this would have to be done for each investor separately, this is far more difficult and time consuming. For instance, wanting to invest a client’s funds into more risky vehicles makes the signing of a bunch of forms necessary before the bank may even execute the trade. This all falls by the wayside when doing the same for an investment fund. Legally speaking, the fund is a ‘professional’ investor. This means investments and trades do not require much paperwork on clients’ behalf.

The problem for the investment officers is that they are far away from the customer as shown in the graphic below.

If you have trouble with the above image, get a nice one here:

How can we communicate with the customer? Relationship management 102

Who is Your Customer?

For the investment officers managing the assets on clients’ behalf it the difficulty is how they can communicate with the client. One type of client is the private banking professional who could recommend the fund certificates to the investor. Another recipient of communication through social media is the retail customer himself.

So how can social media help during a period such as last week’s seven days of shocks that unnerved investors?

How Social Media can Help

As illustrated in the chart, social media helps reaching two types of customers. These are the private banking professionals as well as their clients. One approach is to use a blog that posts relevant information for these people. Naturally, content is offered via RSS feed and/or by registering one’s e-mail address.

Since last week’s seven days of shocks that unnerved investors the latter would have wanted to know how ‘their fund’ is doing. Stock indices across Europe have been dropping since Fall 2007. In addition, as the chart below shows, the Swiss Market Index is again, where it was in Fall 2005.

Therefore, investors have gained little since Fall 2005 if not lost a bundle due to paying fees to their brokers. Here, social media allows us to inform investors how their assets are doing in a turbulent market.

If you cannot view the above chart, look here: when will the stock indices go up again?

After last week’s days of shocks, nothing calms nerves better than good news. For instance, while the market dropped amidst the US mortgage crises, your Value Fund has lost less than .10% over the last 3 months.

Social media was just the solution one of our clients needed to communicate the above news to clients and potential ones. Additionally, the fund was able to inform readers how well its clients’ portfolios were benefiting from gold hitting $1,000 amid hedge fund worries. Nothing makes one look forward more to a long Easter weekend than receiving good news mid-day Thursday.

Bottom Line

With ever more outsourcing, direct customer contact becomes ever more difficult for medium-sized firms. In the above case of an investment fund, social media provides the perfect tool to communicate with clients when the latter want to hear for sure.

While malicious rumour-mongering intended to allow one to benefit from share price movements is a crime, it is a hard crime to prove as British authorities have discovered last week. And while Bear Stearns bankers should make penance this Easter, an investor feels much better if the fund manager is able to show here a chart indicating how much her wealth has grown since Fall 2005. Very much better than the lack of positive movements as shown in the above figure by most stock indices around the globe.

Accordingly, social media offers investment fund managers a way to communicate with investment advisors and their customers. Social media provides the opportunity to communicate with clients during turbulent times.

PS 1. Additional benefit is that using social media correctly means one does not violate regulation that makes direct advertising of financial services illegal.

PS 2. Erroneous valuations became known in mid-February. Credit Suisse said it thought the impact would be confined to first-quarter results. However, detailed review of the issue has led it to revise its 2007 results. UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA – the financial watchdog) has stressed that senior management in investment banks is responsible for ensuring the internal controls are adequate and lawyers expect it to take action. Credit Suisse faces FSA inquiry on mis-marking – it took the bank more than a month to spot that some of its traders had deliberately overvalued positions. Not a situation that calms investors’ nerves, is it?

Everybody wants to measure performance of social media efforts – nevertheless, do these metrics make sense?

Telling me that defining the right objectives for my blog sounds helpful. Even advice given regarding the need for measuring accomplishments against targets set is useful. However sometimes we compare apples with oranges and confuse matters more than we clarify them.

We address this in more detail and outline what you should watch out for when working on increasing targeted traffic.

Almost everybody will tell you that spelling out your goals will directly determine the best strategy to take to reach the target audience. Therefore, you need to decide:

A) The purpose of your blog pre-sets the choice and type of success measures that you must use. So is it just for pleasure, to push your own business and/or help your employer or maybe all of these? The more purposes a blog must satisfy, the more challenging it will be to reach performance targets.

B) What are you trying to sell? Blogging about green technology such as solar collectors is one thing. Very different is the situation, where a real estate professional uses a blog to promote and grow her business. Finally, having a blog that makes money from advertising is a different story than one talking about the CEO being on a diet.

Here we explain a bit more about the ComMetrics.com framework for measuring blogging success

The key to effective blogging is understanding your audience. Second, tailoring your

approach to suit what they want is also important. Building a successful blog is a marathon with no shortcuts and having the traffic number is of little help if visitors are not those you want and need (e.g., customers and potential clients).

In the above chart, we had this rectangle (shown to the left here) included as well. Today we want to talk a bit about these control, moderating and mediating variables (Please click on the link, Login as guest – click on the link again and voila free access – to explanations for non-geeks).

Type of customer. You can target for younger customers but if your customers are interested in reading romance novels, they surely have different needs than those people interested in reading about financial regulation.

As well, unless you reach the right age group, traffic may do little to clinch the sale.

Mediating variables. In some countries, commenting on blog posts may be something of a tid for tad exercise. You post a comment on my blog, in return, I will write a comment on yours. I learned that this is quite common in India. Hence, when comparing ratios regarding conversation (i.e. relationship of comments with posts), comparing across blogs may require another control variable – country.

In turn, this makes using the number of comments on a blog as a ratio or benchmark difficult, unless one uses country as a variable to control for this effect. Thereafter, data about commenting on a blog might be again a useful benchmark for you.

Content. One can post quite frequently with short posts. In turn, this may allow the using of an easygoing style. In fact, language and reading benchmarking tools might reveal that 6 years of schooling is all it takes to comprehend what you are writing. However, a blog addressing statistics or engineering issues may have posts that require a higher level of language comprehension than just primary school. Hence, the level of complexity and difficulty of the material you write about will affect traffic. It could reduce volume but still give you the traffic you want in your niche. So better control for this possible effect.

What Does this Mean for Your Social Media Benchmarks?

Effective benchmarking of social media efforts necessitates using control, moderating and mediating variables. Without controlling some of the effects we outlined above, results may be misleading. As importantly, changing your strategy based on such data may be the wrong decision to make.

To illustrate, recently I got an e-mail from a corporate client where she pointed out that my documents contained too many hyperlinks for her liking. Typical answer from somebody who does not belong to the ‘Facebook generation’ I thought. Nevertheless, I responded to this need and removed some of the hyperlinks. By leaving a few ones in, I kept the Facebook generation happy as well. The response to this change from my corporate client was immediate and positive.

So without addressing control, moderating and mediating variables when trying to benchmark your blog or webpage content, it becomes rather difficult to interpret data. Are the effects you might have (e.g., Sunday traffic spikes) due to your posting on Saturday or that most of your subscribers come from North America (where people often surf on weekends) or countries where people work on Sundays (e.g., Abu Dhabi).

Less but More Desirable Traffic is BetterLess traffic but traffic from the targeted audience is far more important than winning the popularity contest. So make sure that some of your traffic comes from your primary market/country you sell in. Having too much traffic from some far away country where you sell neither a service nor a product makes the traffic statistics look great. Unfortunately, it does little if anything to make your cash register ring.Therefore, thinking about control, mediating and moderating variables will help you in learning more about your visitors, subscribers and clients needs when it comes to reading your blog’s offerings.

A bigger traffic snowball is surely desirable. Search loves social media. This means that if you have quality content, people having searched for phrases may end up on your site. Nevertheless, once again check if the search phrases used by people that made them end up on your blog or webpage are those you are interested in. As a tax advisor a search phrase such as ‘tax ruling for married couples’ might be perfect but make you wonder if you are a solar engineering contractor.

So next time somebody just talks to you about how much traffic they have – ask yourself or your friend if she has any data clarifying how this traffic and reading of her online content affects user outcomes (e.g., closing a sale, changing consumer behavior, increasing brand awareness, improving information security efforts and so on).

Ever more Fortune 500 and a few smaller outfits want to start their corporate blogs or have already blazed down that trail ahead of you…
Nevertheless, a successful blog is a journey and not a destination. Hence, tie your shoe laces and get yourself ready for the long run.
We address this in more detail and outline what questions you should ponder before and certainly six months after having launched your corporate blog.

One should consider a few things before starting a corporate blog. We provided you with First set of steps on the way to build brand while blogging like a pro.

In this post, we make available an additional set of questions that help you getting off a good start. It is important to review these questions before, as well as a few months into the blogging or social media adventure. The results can be surprising:

1) Where are my customers and potential customers [do they read blogs, RSS feeds or posts received via e-mail - of course, this assumes you know your target audience (point 4 in this post)]?

2) What objectives do we want to achieve with the blog, in turn, helping us to address critical issues or problems (e.g., customer relationship management, increasing trust, brand awareness, etc.)?

3) What is the Return on Investment or Return on Blogging (define it – write it down SMART KPIs for measuring blogging success) or what else do we expect to achieve within 12, 24, 36 months?

4) Does a social media strategy support the corporate strategy you have set for your corporation? In particular:

4a) How can heightened customer expectations for the company to talk with and listen to clients be satisfied better with your social media strategy?4b) How will the blog help in incrementally releasing anticipated information and needed solutions for customer problems?4c) How do you best coordinate these efforts while getting support from stakeholders?4d) How can you best benchmark progress while making sure that accomplishments meet measurable business objectives?

Bottom Line

As your conversational approach to customer service and care evolves, it necessitates a team that brings your social media tactics together, while providing cohesion.

Only this way will your offerings be perceived as being part of your corporate image and brand. As well, every six months conduct a strategic review using benchmark information and also metrics you collected over this period. Such an assessment can be more or less informal. Most important is that it happens and, yes, write down what you discover and compare a few weeks down the line.

Tracking change is needed to be able to see improvements, or else, record desirable changes as they happen on your journey to a successful social media venture.

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.