Posts filed under ‘Social media monitoring’
Measuring social media
An interesting post from the Buzz Bin which provides a good summary of current thoughts on how to measure social media such as blogs, social networks and podcasts. Well worth a read…
Glenn
Measuring online behaviour – statistics to indicators
I’ve written previously about measuring online behaviour and how it can be linked to overall PR evaluation. I found of interest the recent news from Nielsen that they will now rank websites by time spent on sites rather than number of pages viewed. Interesting, as this is a recognition that an indirect indication of “interest” or “engagement” is the amount of time spent on a website, e.g. watching a video, clicking through a slide presentation, reading a text, etc.
When looking at measuring online behaviour, I’ve seen quite some organisations simply drowning in data from web metric software packages and are unable to pull out a real analysis of what they have achieved – or not through the web.
Ultimately indicators should be set to measure success by. These could be:
- “engagement” (average time spent on website),
- “interest” (number of podcast downloaded),
- “conversion” (number of sign-ups for a sales offer),
- “preferences” (growth in visits to a new language version) ,
- etc., etc .
On a related note, when thinking about how to measure online social networking, the Measurement Standard blog provides an interesting list of suggested indicators to measure.
Glenn
Online PR Evaluation – do we need new models?
An interesting post here from Tom Watson on his new blog Dummyspit. Tom poses the question – do we need new models of measurement for the emerging social media? I certainly believe we do as I’ve written about previously.
As Tom points out, most current measurement proposed is based on “message distribution” and is an adaptation of what has been proposed for many decades in classic media measurement – an “output” measurement.
Tom goes further and proposes that “out-takes” – the audience reaction to and processing of messages – may be the most appropriate measure of effectiveness. Food for thought..
Glenn
Social Media Measurement
As organisations increasingly look towards the so-called “social media” (which most people usually interpret to mean blogs, wikis, mash-ups, 3D environments etc.) for supporting communications, marketing and other projects, there will certainly be questions asked such as “well, what’s it all worth?”. And that’s fair enough.
Of course, someone is already thinking about it. Constantin Basturea has put together a wiki page (what else?) on social media measurement (found on the NewPRwiki). A brief perusal of the page will show that a lot of the resources are focused on the monitoring aspect – how are publics using social media tools and how companies can track “buzz” or interest. All very good and well, but even more interesting (and substantial) is what is the impact of these social media tools – what do they change? There are some pointers in this direction, I liked very much this photo taken from a workshop that lists what attributes the participants believed should be measured: top of the list is “participation & engagement”. Interesting….
Glenn
Beware: dodgy Blog ROI in circulation
Forrester Research have published a new report on the “ROI of blogging” (at USD $ 379 a pop). And I’ve seen that many bloggers have jumped on this with utmost enthusiasm.
Well hold on….
Although Charlene Li of Forrester explains well the ROI model there are some fundamental flaws of the ROI calculation that KD Paine and David Phillips explain further. As KD Paine put it:
“The false assumptions and inaccuracies in this report are scary”
What is the main flaw? Well, the whole blog ROI calculation falls down as it is based on comparing purchased advertising to editorial content, which is a highly discredited way of measuring PR value (read more about comparing advertising to editorial content in this report (pdf) by some leading scholars).
The report does have some interesting points in that it attempts to pull out some of benefits of blogging (such as customer insights) and comparing this to the cost of market research). Certainly the idea of showing how visibility grows from a blog post (through generating comments, thoughts and referrals) to changes in attitudes and behaviors is heading in the right direction, as I’ve written about before.
And as for blogging ROI, I would look more at the cost of working hours in blogging and comparing it to working hours needed to mount a traditional campaign – and comparing the changes to behaviour and attitude using both methods (admittedly easier said than done). That would be more a measure of “efficiency” than anything else.
Glenn
Measuring Online Behavior
A lot has already been written about how we can measure online behavior through looking at indicators from web site statistics or “web metrics”. As part of PR measurement, web metrics can provide an interesting complement to other measures being taken. For example, in campaigning, online behaviour such as signing a petition, referring a page to a friend or uploading a message of support can be measures of behavior change and supplement “offline” measures. In advertising, the use of web metrics is making advertising more “measurable” and impacting the business model in general. This article in The Economist sums up well this change.
I found this explanation from a Google representative quoted in the article of interest:
Old way of “offline” advertising:
“Advertisers are always trying to block the stream of information to the user in order to blast their message to him.”
New way of “online” advertising:
“On the internet, by contrast, advertisers have no choice but to go with the user, the information coming back from the users is more important than the messages going out.The interactive nature of the Internet makes this possible; the medium more measurable and a two-way symmetrical approach to communications feasible.
Glenn
LIFT06 and Blog Monitoring – Part 2
As an indication of the level of interest and noise concerning LIFT06, I’ve looked again at the number of blog posts that mention LIFT06. In the first graph below from Technorati, we can see the some 70 posts mentioned LIFT06 on 3rd February, the last day of the conference. The second graph from BlogPulse of Intelliseek shows out of all blogs posted globally, what percentage mention LIFT. We see a jump from .001% on 1st February to .008% on 3rd February. I presume these charts are compiled based on posts that tag with “LIFT06”, so they probably do not register all posts. Nevertheless, the jump is quite significant.
Glenn
LIFT06 and Blog Monitoring
As part of the evaluation of LIFT06, I am looking at what the attendees are blogging about concerning the conference. This chart from Technorati shows the number of posts that mention LIFT06 – it will certainly peak over the next days of the conference. From an evaluation point it’s limited in its use but it provides an indication of the interest and noise concerning the conference.
Glenn
intelligent measurement 