John Lovett is a Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. and the author of Social Media Metrics Secrets (Wiley, 2011). A former Forrester Research Analyst and current President of the Digital Analytics Association, John blogs about web analytics industry trends, strategy, business culture, and social analytics.
Social media technologies are massively confusing today. Not because they aren’t powerful or capable of substantially benefitting your organization, but because there are so many to choose from…
During my research while writing my book, Social Media Metrics Secrets (Wiley, 2011) and through countless interviews with social media practitioners and leading vendors in the industry, I developed a categorization schema for understanding social media technologies. I call this the Social Media Technology Spectrum. Across this spectrum, there are five primary functions that businesses can accomplish with social media technologies:
Discover > Analyze > Engage > Facilitate > Manage
While, I go into great detail about each category in the book, I’ll offer an overview here:
The Discovery Tools (Social Search) Discovery tools are social media solutions that effectively act as search engines for social media channels and platforms. Typically, Social Search technologies are freely available, but they don’t allow you to save search queries, download data or export results. Example Discover vendors include: SocialMention, IceRocket, Backtweets, Topsy, and hundreds more.
The Analysis Technologies (Social Analytics) These tools are most commonly associated with listening platforms, but in my view, Social Analytics vendor requirements include: filters, segments, visualizations and ultimately analysis. Example Analyze vendors include: Alterian SM2, Omniture SocialAnalytics, Radian6, Sysomos, and many more.
The Engagement Platforms (Engagement/Workflow) Vendors in this category extend their Social Analytics capabilities to include workflow delegation and engagement capabilities from directly within the interface, it places more controls at the fingertips of your internal business users. Example Engage vendors include: Crimson Hexagon, Hootsuite, Objective Marketer, Collective Intellect, and many more.
The Hosting and Facilitation Tools (Social Platforms) If you need to offer your community a social media destination like a user group, a forum, or a designated social media website. That’s where the Social Facilitation technologies provide a platform that can facilitate the conversation, the dialogue and the learning experience. Example Facilitate vendors include: Mzinga, Pluck, Ning, Lithium, Jive, Telligent and many more.
The Management Solutions (Social Management) This group of technology offerings includes social customer relationship management tools, internal collaboration solutions, and social media aggregation services that enable businesses to manage their social media efforts in an orchestrated way. Example Manage vendors include: BatchBook, Flowtown, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and many more.
As you can see, each category has associated vendors. While there is certainly some cross-over here, there is also a lot more depth to each of the categories. For each category, you can delve deeper by specific social media channel (i.e., there’s a whole cast of Social Analytics tools specifically for Twitter). Yet, in a technology environment that is so cluttered with options and new entrants, I feel that some categorization is merited.
But what do you think? … Am I on the right track here? Do you use technologies from multiple categories? …What did I miss?
There’s a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) in the hearts and minds of consumers regarding their privacy online. While not totally unmerited, this FUD is fueled by mainstream media sources like The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, that typically paint the issues with a stark black and white perspective. Unfortunately, this perspective corrals all advertisers, website operators, and would-be digital trackers into a single category of shameful voyeurs.
While some tracking practices may indeed be dubious, other allegations are accused of slander. Both scenarios are reason enough to give conscientious consumers pause, thereby placing your online business and the way you track customers in jeopardy. The root of the problem is a fundamental communication breakdown.
What’s Really Going on Behind the Privacy Curtain?
The majority of first-party digital measurement (“first-party” data is obtained by the entity that owns and controls the domain) is designed to improve the user experience online by making processes easier, enabling faster access to relevant goods and services, as well as offering time-saving conveniences for everyday users. These practices have been going on since the dawn of consumerism, and for the most part are tolerated and even appreciated by consumers as long as they adhere to some semblance of consumers’ rights. However, consumers must retain the right to shop, browse, and otherwise interact online in an anonymous manner if they choose to do so. Thus, the opt-out policy. But technologies today have inadvertently enabled ways to circumvent the opt-out by regenerating cookies (dubbed “zombie cookies”) or embedding locally stored objects into users’ machines. These practices are wrong and deftly explained and criticized in Eric T. Peterson’s whitepaper, “Flash LSO’s: Is Your Privacy at Risk?” (registration required).
The flip-side to first-party tracking is third-party tracking, (“third-party” data is obtained from the first party and typically not reasonably known to the end user). This data is often employed by ad-serving technologies as a method for targeting consumers. The primary objection to third-party data is that it can be used to track visitors across multiple domains (“history sniffing” or “daisy-chaining”), thereby creating a history of multi-site browsing behavior that reveals aggregate details on consumer actions unbeknownst to the user.
Most third-party data sources still don’t know names, nor do they profit from selling any personally identifiable information. Instead, anonymous user data is brokered to a slew of third-party advertisers, ad exchanges, ad networks, ad platforms, data aggregators/exchanges, and market research companies who work to serve up relevant content based on the websites users visited. I hate to break it to folks, but that’s how most content websites work. Visitors get free content, hosts deliver ads. It’s a trade-off that most of us are willing to accept. It’s also this trade-off that’s sucking any remnants of serendipity out of the Internet, because things just don’t happen by coincidence today; they happen by marketing.
If They Want Out, Show Them the Door!
The fact is that if consumers don’t want to be tracked, then you must offer them a simple and permanent way out for the wary. Of course, browsers can do this today and consumers can take proactive steps to delete cookies, but it’s still the responsibility of the business to offer choice. Your primary responsibility as a vendor or business is to educate your users through effective communication. This is where most of the confusion festers because vendors don’t provide easy-to-understand guidelines about how their technologies are designed to be used; and businesses often don’t educate their customers about how they treat personal data. As a result, technologies are used inappropriately and consumers feel violated by targeted content and there’s typically a whole lot of fingerpointing going on to pass the blame.
If you’re a business, it’s your responsibility to understand how the technologies you use for digital tracking work, but also to give consumers a choice regarding their ability to remain anonymous and to opt out of all types of tracking. For first-party data collectors, this should be a relatively straightforward exercise; don’t retain customer information if they don’t want you to. If you need more guidance on the right thing to do as a practitioner or data collector, visit the Web Analytics Association’s (WAA) Code of Ethics that outlines the core tenets of ethical first-party, data-handing practices.
For third-party data collection, organizations like the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) or the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) offer third-party opt-out choices for consumers. Consider joining one of these coalitions to join the ranks of the self-regulated. Alternatively, you can brush up on third-party data collection guidelines issued by organizations like TRUSTe, who act in the best interests of consumers by offering guidance on what to do and what not to do regarding digital data collection.
Create an Action Plan for Maintaining White-Hat Digital Tracking Practices
Finally, the best thing that you can do as a vendor, a marketer, or a business is to operate above the fray of privacy pundits by following a few key principles. Take these steps to use digital tracking in the way in which it was designed and to deliver value for your customers and your business:
1. Understand the technologies. While this sounds relatively basic, you must know what the technologies you build or deploy are capable of doing. While getting inside the minds of the devious shouldn’t consume all your time, vendors should issue guidance for utilization as well as educate constituents about how technologies function.
2. Keep PII safe, secure, and private. It should go without saying that keeping customer data safe and private is a top priority, but go beyond offering lip service and spell it out for consumers. Demonstrate how you protect and secure data by communicating to your audience about the measures you take to do so and instill confidence by provisioning multiple safeguards.
3. Divulge data usage practices. If your business is collecting and utilizing first- or third-party data, make it known by divulging your practices in clear and readable language. This requires keeping the legalese to a minimum and offering consumer-friendly policies and explanations for what you’re trying to accomplish. Transparency is the best practice here, so explain what you’re doing and how visitors benefit.
4. Empower consumers to opt out. This one bears repeating…give consumers a way out. And for crying out loud, don’t opt them back in if they don’t request it. This is potentially the biggest threat to online privacy today and as more and more organizations abide by consumer preferences, the ones who don’t will be outed and ultimately tarnish their reputations.
5. Spread the word. The Internet offers many incredible opportunities for networking, commerce, education, and entertainment, but collectively we must act as stewards of consumer data. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I believe that most data collectors are ethical and simply need to do a better job of describing what they’re up to and where the value exchange exists for consumers.
I personally applaud researchers like Ashkan Solanti and Jonathan Mayer for the work they do and for keeping vendors honest about the realities of their digital tracking applications. We need more education and we desperately need to voice the digital measurement side of the argument to crystallize the validity of what we do as analytics professionals.
The online privacy discussion won’t dissipate anytime soon, so the best we can do is communicate effectively, demonstrate value, and offer choice. Do you agree?
This week the Demystified Partners forfeited our weekly meeting to hang out with our fellow #measure peeps on Google+. We felt that the thread about web analytics technologies and where innovation would surface in our industry needed a deeper discussion. If you haven’t seen the original thread yet, make sure you go check it out. Also, if you need a G+ invite, let us know we’ve got plenty to share.But our exercise was as much about continuing the conversation as it was testing out a new social medium.
Before going live on G+, we practiced for about a half hour, where all of our browsers crashed and we experienced various video connection in’s and out’s as we tinkered with and tuned our machines. By showtime, we had a few stalwart veterans join, including Tim Wilson who was dialed in on a 4G connection while driving home with his wife from camping. As our discussion grew, We added up to nine people, which didn’t quite push the limits of G+ as we had hoped, but it was an all-star #measure cast including: @erictpeterson@adamgreco@mymo@Exxx@tgwilson@joestanhope@OMlee@keithburris and yours truly.
Our conversation began with quips from each of the participants about how we’re still grappling with digital measurement technologies. Despite most of us being in this web analytics industry for years, and in some cases decades. Time passed quickly as we debated from all sides of the vendor/consultant/practitioner perspective. After a brief privacy sidebar, we asked each other where innovation would emerge from in analytics and really why we were pursuing these digital data anyway? I think we edged the needle just a little bit by agreeing that what we do matters because we’re educating our employers and clients on the power of data; and just possibly making the Internet a slightly better place. Ok, when I chatted this in the G+ hangout mid discussion, I warned everyone not to throw up on their keyboards, so I’ll do the same for you. But as cheesy as that sounds, our quorum agreed that wasn’t such a bad goal. What do you think?
So, the technology of G+ did prove that it was up to the task of handling this type of group discussion. People could talk and share their ideas on video or contribute to the conversation using the chat functionality. But we’re curious to know if you’re interested in joining us for a future G+ hangout?
If you are and willing to hang out with us to discuss the hottest topics is digital analytics, let us know because we’ll plan another one soon. Heck, we’ll even make this a regular event if you’re interested. What do you all say?
In my experience, I’ve found that the vast majority of practitioners measuring social media currently rely on the wrong metrics. Metrics such as fans, followers, +1′s, shares, likes, and dislikes are easily captured and readily delivered by social networks, but they represent merely the low-hanging fruit of social analytics. These are the “counting metrics” of social media because using them typically equates to counting up digital trivia. Effective measurers of social media go beyond counting metrics to create outcome-based metrics and ultimately report on business value metrics to senior stakeholders across the enterprise. In this column, I’ll elaborate on the minutia of counting metrics and where they can add value to your social media operations, as well as how to take the next step of creating outcome and business value metrics to ratchet up your social analytics game to the next level.
Testing the Social Media Waters
The temptation for businesses to experiment with social media is practically irresistible. And in fact, you’d be foolish not to venture into new and emerging channels if your target audience leads you there. But experimentation and ongoing participation in social media must continually prove out the potential for business value. Often times, this potential is demonstrated in metrics that are indicative of volume and activity. Counting metrics do just that because they are measures that tell you how deep the social media pool really is. These counting metrics are typically the freebies offered by social media networks that quantify the basic observational statistics of participation. The stats include: number of users, number of fans, number of followers, number of posts, number of comments per post, number of check-ins, number of ratings, number of reviews…and so on. You quickly see that there’s numbers on top of numbers.
Yet, stopping at this point and using only counting metrics to measure and manage social media is not only just plain lazy, but also detrimental to your business. These metrics are important for gauging the health and activity of your social media operations, but they fail to tell you if you’re achieving your business goals. Counting metrics can offer insights into how many people are swimming and if the water is too cold, or just right. They can also tell you how many people you are reaching with your social media messages and if your content is worthy of passing on to their friends and followers. But, what counting metrics cannot tell you is who the lifeguards should be watching, and where management needs to focus their efforts. Thus, it’s imperative that you go beyond the counting metrics offered by social media platforms to formulate outcome metrics that constitute real measures of success.
Identifying Outcome Metrics for Social Media Measurement
Stepping away from the pool for a moment, I ask you to consider why you’re participating in social media in the first place. Are you working to build awareness for your new products or services? Do you want to initiate a dialogue with your customers to solicit their input on what you could be doing more effectively? Are you building goodwill with consumers by giving back through social media and encouraging philanthropy? Or, can you increase your profits by selling directly through social media platforms? The answers to these questions reveal the business outcomes that you should be working towards when participating in social media. It’s only when you have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media efforts that you can develop truly effective measures of success. If you can’t pinpoint why you’re participating in social media today, or if your answers are flimsy and won’t stand up to the scrutiny of executive leadership, I strongly advise that you stop everything and rethink your efforts.
However, if you have a strategic vision of what you’re trying to accomplish with social media, then developing your outcome metrics will become a much easier task. For example, if gaining exposure is the outcome that you are after, then metrics like reach, velocity, and share of voice will be extremely helpful in determining your progress toward this outcome. Similarly, if you’re working to foster a dialogue with customers, focus on metrics like audience engagement, key influencers, and trending topics. Or if cold hard cash is what you’re after, then metrics like social referral source, cost per acquisition, conversion rates, and average order value will illuminate progress toward your stated social media outcomes. Each of these metrics tells you how well you’re doing according to plan and reveals valuable business information.
Demonstrating Social Media Business Value
Now that you’re straight on using counting metrics for sizing up opportunities and outcome metrics for quantifying purpose, the next step is tying all this together to communicate your fabulous progress. To do this, you need to detach yourself from the metrics that you use everyday to manage your social operations and translate these granular metrics into more generalized business language. Think carefully about the things that matter to your organization and the stakeholders that oversee the business and communicate in ways that resonate with them. In most cases, this means aligning your business objectives with corporate goals. Demonstrate which social media channels are contributing to new customer acquisition, which are adding dollars to the corporate coffers, or which are elevating customer satisfaction. This takes some skill and corporate savvy to indoctrinate non-believers into the world of social media metrics, but it’s an entirely worthwhile endeavor that will pay dividends for your organization in the long run.
I’ve found that the most effective way to present a strategic plan and communicate your successes using metrics is to leverage a framework for social media measurement. The one I use includes an inside-out strategy that begins with corporate goals, then aligns business objectives, maps these to measures of success, and then extends out to operational tactics. Using this framework allows me to solicit feedback from stakeholders by actually including them in the planning process of developing social media programs. This encourages participation and gives everyone involved a vested interest in the success of social media endeavors. Ultimately, your social media metrics should build from the basic counting metrics to outcome-based objectives that wholly support your corporate goals. Once you have a solid plan and a strategic roadmap for how you’ll stitch this all together, then you’re ready to dive into the deep end of the social media pool.
The folks over at Thoughtlead have put together what they’re calling a Digital Influence Collaborative. It’s innovative and exciting and a new way to consume content in microbursts. If you haven’t gotten wind of these events yet, you’re missing out.
They typically feature 60 influencers on 60 topics in 60 seconds. Topics vary from Social Media to Enterprise Marketing Management.
Here’s a mashed version of the one I delivered for Mtech 2011:
I’ve been playing around a bit with scheduling my Tweets and thought that I’d share some of my findings with you. But first, I’ll riff a bit on the fragility of this nascent channel and Twitter’s amazing rise to prominence as the 3rd largest social network in this universe. The figure I’m using for scale is 145 million registered users, which came straight from the Twitter CEO, Evan Williams back in November, 2010. But, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if another 55 million users joined in the past 5 months. That’s the number that’s being bandied about today.
With ad revenues estimated at $45 million and projections escalating at a 3x clip this year, Twitter is rocketing unequivocally skyward. The only problem with attaining massive growth with user populations rivaling the number of people residing in Brazil, is that Tweets are extremely perishable. If you aren’t watching, listening or searching for a Tweet, it’s highly likely that it will slip right past an entire country of users without ever being noticed. That’s a problem. It’s bad because it seriously erodes any value proposition of time or dollars invested in the channel. Thus, the argument for scheduling Tweets.
Researching Tweets
The best research I’m reading about Twitter is coming from Sysmos, where they continue to crank out valuable insights. Back in September, 2010, they found that the average lifespan of a Tweet is about an hour. Sysomos discovered that 92.4% of Retweets happen within one hour after publication and 96.9% of @replies occur within the first hour. This means if your Tweet isn’t circulated after 60 minutes, it’s likely a goner. Of course there are numerous tools that allow you to automate this process. And that’s what I’ve been exploring. Even the most pedestrian Twitter clients now allow you to schedule your 140 character missives for posting at a later time.
What are the drawbacks of scheduling Tweets?
Scheduling Tweets is a tenuous business. For the most part, you should be Tweeting to deliver good content, but also to initiate a dialogue with your followers. If you’re out on the golf course and your Tweets are generating a firestorm of activity, who’s going to respond? Be cognizant of this fact when scheduling Tweets, because if your Tweet gains velocity and lots of people hear it, you better be at the ready to engage. If not, you’ll quickly lose credence as a friendly human and instead come off looking like a bit of a bot yourself. For this reason alone, if you’re planning to schedule Tweets, do so with considered caution and release news or informative Tweets purely to gain exposure. You don’t want to provoke a dialogue when you’re not ready to interact.
Who offers Tweet scheduling?
This isn’t meant to be a full and comprehensive review of Tweet scheduling tools. These are just a few that I’ve used personally, and my observations of each. I look forward to hearing what you think about Tweet scheduling and which tools if any you use. I’ll commit to updating my list as you offer more…
Tweetdeck – Ahh…my first real Twitter client and a darn good one at that. It’s iconic black interface offers de facto functionality and does so with a fine polish. (I’ve tried to use the “light” interface but just can’t make the switch). Tweetdeck is lightning fast with Tweets posted in real-time. But more to the point, they allow users to schedule Tweets in the future by simply selecting the date and time of your desired launch.
Hootsuite – This little freemium gem is quickly becoming my go-to Twitter client. Despite their recent service outage (which wasn’t really their fault), It’s winning me over with the multi-tabbed interface, multi-user efficiency and slick stream views. Hootsuite allows users to pre-schedule Tweets as well, with the option to select the date and time and receive an email when your 140 character missive flies.
Crowdbooster – I gained access to this product only recently and have been intrigued since my first login. This beauty not only allows you to schedule Tweets, but also recommends the best times to give a shout out. I really like that they deliver an explanation of why specific times are best for Tweeting based on when my followers are active and when I’ve gained the greatest reach. Crowdbooster also has the best charting I’ve seen yet from a Tweet scheduling interface that reveals which Tweets attained reach…and RT’s and @replies as well. I’m having fun with this freemium tool and may even upgrade.
Timely.is – Here’s an interesting new app, that I learned about recently. It uses an algorithm to Tweet when your message is likely to reach the largest audience. Currently, they don’t provide any visibility into how they make this determination, but you can override it by forcing the Tweet to send within the next 30minutes. While they do offer a few cheesy “suggested” tweets, this tool is a product of Flowtown and I’ve been waiting to see what these guys bring out of their private beta. This is definitely one to watch.
Buffer – Buffer offers a slick user interface allowing users to schedule Tweets across a number of recommended times. It has links to the Bit.ly API, but requires premium access to utilize this function. Yet, the free version delivers solid capabilities and collaboration functions for adding additional team members. Perhaps the easiest function is the Chome browser extension that enables you to schedule a Tweet directly from a webpage. This makes scheduling convenient and will be helpful in getting to word out on those juicy bits you discover during non-peak times.
Since drafting this blog post has taken beyond my optimal Tweeting window, I’m signing off now. But before I do, here’s a few more Tweet schedulers that I haven’t tried yet. I’m sure there’s a whole lot more too.
I’ve noticed something recently that appears to be a burgeoning trend, and I don’t like it. Startups dangling the promise of exclusivity and early admission to their private beta parties in exchange for wielding your influence to “Spread the Word”. Pssst…”The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access!” C’mon! If your product is good, people are going to use it and talk about it. Don’t patronize me with your bad Charlie Sheen references and generic html. This is lazy social media marketing in my opinion. And its a tactic that I won’t pander to.
However, it’s not nearly as bad as hitting submit on a digital form only to realize that the teeny-tiny checkbox in the bottom left hand corner, yeah…the one you didn’t UN-check?? Well, they opted you right into Tweeting to your entire following that you just signed up for the latest whatever on Twitter. These sneaky little broadcast methods are cheap trix and I say you marketers should be ashamed of yourselves.
I’ll keep this rant short, but influence is and will be a contributing factor in the success of many social marketing activities. Yet, as with all things social, leveraging influence must be genuine. Blatant solicitation of influence is only adding to the derision of influencer metrics and the narcissists who work to game the system. The real value of your influencers will pay dividends when they choose to talk about your products and services unprovoked. Doing it otherwise is a surefire way to usurp the power of the influencers you’re trying to enlist.
Omniture’s SocialAnalytics offering won’t be publicly available until summer of this year, but the early glimpses show big promise for the burgeoning field of SocialAnalytics. What makes this tool different from the many capable tools already out on the market is the tight integration of web analytics data with social brand or keyword mentions. This means that you can collect and analyze data from major social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (45 data social media sources in total) and perform web analytics style slicing and dicing on the results.
Yet, the beauty of this solution is that users can trend and analyze social metrics against any metric within the SiteCatalyst interface. Further, the SocialAnalytics offering allows users to correlate data from social media with SiteCatalyst metrics and even offers a percentage of statistical confidence. This exceeds what I’ve seen in any other social analytics offering currently on the market. To illustrate with a hypothetical example, the Omniture SocialAnalytics capabilities will allow you to imbed traditional SiteCatalyst campaign ID codes into a your social media marketing on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which could all be monitored for activity within the SiteCatalyst interface. You could then trend the social data from campaigns and mentions against any metrics that you currently use within SiteCatalyst such as visitors or conversions. Thus, you could monitor the impact of your social marketing as a driver for website traffic and determine what percentage of that traffic actually purchased online as a result of the social campaign. The tool does this by making a correlation (versus actually pinning causation), but the statistical confidence will deliver assurance as to the validity of the correlation. This is magical. It actually enables users to quantify ROI from social marketing activities with a degree of statistical confidence. No one else has this that I’m aware of today.
Further, one of my pet peeves with today’s social analytics tools is the inability to create custom metrics. In most cases, you have to deal with the formulas and calculations that vendors deliver. The exception here is firms like Radian6 that allow users to weight factors for calculated metrics like Influence, whereby users do have some controls over their metrics. Yet, Omniture’s SocialAnalytics allows users carte blanche ability to create custom metrics and report on them within SiteCatalyst and even leverage in report builder and other Omniture functions. This is a revolutionary step in controlling the way that social is currently measured because it introduces a level of customization that was formerly absent.
While, it’s still early days and this was only my first glimpse at the product, you can probably tell that I’m bullish already. It’s currently in private beta for a few lucky Omniture customers who will undoubtedly bang away at it and help to shape the future of this product. However, there’s still a long way to go before this new tool is street legal, so most Omniture users will have to wait until the general release this summer. I’ll also say that this tool currently does not offer a wholesale replacement for Radian6 or other enterprise social analytics vendors on the market. The primary reason for this is that there is no engagement capability from the interface (i.e., can’t send Tweets or respond to Facebook comments directly). Additionally, there is no workflow built into the SocialAnalytics solution either. Thus, while social is about the interaction between a brand and its customers, Omniture is still leaving its clients to work that out using other means. They do however deliver some of the most robust analysis and reporting capabilities of anyone out there. If you’re looking to make sense of social media and measure the impact it has on your business operations; I suggest you give Omniture’s new SocialAnalytics tool a good look.
I’m a little worried about us. At first I was really psyched to see a tweet about my friend and business partner Eric appearing the the WSJ for his not-so-small side project, Twitalyzer. I eagerly clicked through from Tweetdeck to read all about the great strides that Twitalyzer was making in the marketplace only to be massively disappointed by the article, Wannabe Cool Kids Aim to Game the Web’s New Social Scorekeepers. This article is all about gaming the social system to increase influence scores from services like Klout and Twitalyzer and to personally benefit from doing so. Is this what we’re training kids to aspire towards today?
Have you Googled yourself lately…?
Okay, just admit it. At one point of another you’ve typed your own name into to Google just to see what shows up. Or perhaps, if you’re like me you’ve even created a proactive alert that informs you every time you or your business is mentioned in media outlets? It’s not that I’m vain, but I want to know when something or someone publishes about me or about our brand. Isn’t this the cost of putting yourself out there today? Social media has accelerated this exponentially.
I don’t fault people like the ones described in the WSJ article for working to improve their social influence scores as long as they’re genuine. It’s smart to understand how rankings are formulated and how you can improve your scores. That makes the difference between individuals who are building their personal brands with an entrepreneurial drive and those who simply aren’t tuned in enough to know how. Done right, that’s commendable. But understanding the system and rigging it to your favor is potentially where we’re headed in this age of social media. It’s an environment where your potential employer will check your Facebook page prior to extending that job offer; and they definitely will follow your Tweets after that offer is extended; and you can bet on the fact that they’ll be watching your social escapades after you’re hired to ensure that you don’t misconstrue ideas that are yours alone with those of your employer. Or heaven forbid you’re passed over for a consulting job because of a low Twitalyzer score, like the story Shel Israel foretells. But, this is business today, I just wonder if we’re encouraging an unhealthy level of narcissism?
What’s your Social Media Credit Score…?
One of the topics I’ve been researching lately is Social Media Profile Management. This started with the whitepaper that I authored for Unica called, True Profiles: A Contemporary Method for Managing Customer Data (download the paper next week) where I explored what it takes to integrate data streams from disparate sources. Yet, while that’s happening on the business side, consumers are in desperate need of managing their own social profiles. Services like Rapleaf, PeerIndex, Klout and Twitalyzer all reinforce the need to know how you’re portrayed as an individual in social circles and how much personal information about you is floating around out there.
Brian Solis talks about this as well in his compelling Lift presentation where he describes the sociology and psychology behind what we do in social media. He mentions that debt collectors are now visiting individual’s Facebook pages to track them down and sometimes publicly humiliate them into paying their debts. That’s absolutely frightening! But it’s a reality of the world we live in.
Managing your social credit score is important and undoubtedly we’ll see a burgeoning slew of services like Identity Mixer and others that allow you to manage what appears in the databases of companies like Spokeo.com and whitepages.com for all to see. You’re already being indexed, ranked and reported on whether you like it or not. I just can’t help from wondering if the way we (or at least some people) operate with the aid social profile management technologies is disingenuous?
What Should You Recommend To Your Business…?
Those of you who know anything about Web Analytics Demystified recognize that we’re not ones to take data and simply gaze at it in wonderment. We use data to make recommendations. More importantly, we encourage you to do this as well. So for all the measurers of social media out there, take into deep consideration the value you place on influence. I do believe that it’s a meaningful metric and I am optimistic about < foreshadowing > new developments on the horizon from Social Analytics vendors in this area < /foreshadowing >, yet you have to understand what your metrics are made of and how they’re calculated.
That’s the thing that irked me most about the WSJ article was that it implied in the subtitle that all the vendors out there keep their influence rankings secret. Twitalyzer doesn’t do this, in fact they expose all of the factors that go into their calculated metrics for all to see. While some metrics within the Twitalyzer dashboard do rely on scores from other technologies like PeerIndex and Klout, they’re labeled as such with nothing secret about them. I’m not bringing this up to tout the greatness of Twitalyzer, but more so to call out the fact that transparency in the metrics you use and rely on is critically important.
Hopefully, most of you are migrating away from counting measures like fans and followers that offer little more than a measure from an uncalibrated yardstick and adopting business value metrics that actually mean something to your organization. If you are working toward this end — and if influence is a measure that will factor into your marketing efforts — then take the time to see through inflated scores and popularity hounds that are gaming the system. It’s likely that you don’t want these people doing your bidding anyhow. Instead, use measures of success like Impact to correlate influence to action. When you begin to look at your social marketing efforts in this way, you may just find that those with the most “popular” profiles aren’t actually good for your business.
The Web Analyst’s Code of Ethics is a reality! This Code represents an industry effort to promote ethical data practices and treat consumer data with the respect and attention it deserves.
I’m writing this on the eve before the official launch announcement of the Web Analyst’s Code of Ethics here at the WAA Symposium in Austin Texas. As you can see in the video above, this effort is the culmination of a ton of hard work by a community of contributors.
Yet, the conversation isn’t a new one. My partner Eric has been writing about the fact that We are our own worst enemy since August and our internal conversations about privacy regulation and public opinion of tracking practices have been going on long before that. The issue received mainstream attention from the Wall Street Journal in their What They Knowseries, which took a bias view in our opinion. Anything that starts out with the phrase; “Marketers are spying on Internet users…“ is FUD in my opinion.
So, in September of last year we decided to do something about it. I must say that Eric never fails to amaze me in his ability to make things happen, because not 24 hours after our conversation about launching a Code of Ethics, he had one drafted and in my inbox. We decided that the best avenue for getting this code out to the community was to work in conjunction with the WAA, where I am a member of the board. Thus, I shopped it around to my fellow board members and we all agreed that it was something that our industry needed. The issue was brought before the WAA Standards Committee and a sub-committee was formed to hash out the details. And the Code was offered to the community for public comment. After numerous iterations and literally dozens of comments and contributors, we arrived at the final Code you see here.
It’s important to recognize that this Code is a pledge for individuals and not organizations. We created it as such because we know that not every individual will be able to enforce policy within their company, but every individual can inform and educate their peers. Yet, as we state in the pledge itself, “I recognize that we are far stronger as a community…”. And this effort is about a community showing it’s commitment to ethical data collection and utilization practices.
Momentum for this project has been incredible thus far, but our work is far from over. It’s just beginning. Like any good analyst, I’ve created goals and success metrics for the code of ethics that I’ll be tracking and reporting on over time. The video above is the first effort to share a glimpse of the metrics, but ultimately I’m shooting for the following goals:
1) Gain 1,000 Pledges to the Code of Ethics in 2011
2) Attract mainstream media attention to this community effort within the first 90 days of launch (e.g., recognition by @WhatTheyKnow)
3) Ensure that our collective voice is heard by legislators and policy makers before regulation is forced upon us
Let us know what you think about the Code of Ethics here by leaving comments and joining the conversation. Or simply show your support by pledging to follow the Web Analyst’s Code of Ethics.
Social media technologies are massively confusing today. Not because they aren’t powerful or capable of substantially benefitting your organization, but because there are so many to choose from…
