Digital Influence Mapping Project

What is Social Shopping Becoming?

   

Shopping can be one of the most social activities. Then again, I often shop alone. It really depends on what I am going for. On the more social side you have:

• asking friends what they think of a particular Victorinox rolly bag

• reviewing ratings or reviews by strangers or friends
• group buying which is really a form of crowd-buying - still quite social
• finding endorsements from friends or 'strangers with expertise'
• Wish lists and registries
• Affiliate sales networks (e.g. Amazon)
• Relevant recommendations (e.g. iTunes Genius function)

As word of mouth is one of the most influential purchase drivers across many product categories, it only makes sense that we will all continue to push the intersection of social media and shopping.From product reviews like the robust ones found in Amazon, YELP and TripAdvisor to the offshoots like Trusted Opinion, review have been around since the dawn of time. For any brand that sells a product or service, I would rank reviews as the most underleveraged social strategy just behind search engine optimization. If you don't have one, get a product review strategy especially if you are a retailer or sell a retail product of some kind.

If product reviews are fundamental, then what is next? Three things I can see emerging fast:

• Real-time Recommendations via Facebook, Twitter and other social networks
• A new wave of Affiliate Marketing
• Event Shopping

Real-time Recommendations

While reviews may have defined social shopping over the past 10 years, now it is about "real-time recommendations" - a phrase I first heard from Sean Muzzy at Neo@Ogilvy. When I am shopping - that search, assess, decide and purchase activity - how can I tap into my own social graph to get an opinion or some type of feedback?

Some retailers are doing this by integrating Facebook Connect like the backpack manufacturer Jansport. By embeding the Facebook login in the ecommerce pages, I can share my interest in the 22" Purple Sunflower via facebook. I can see what my friends may have said or if they have "liked" it. This will become standard practice for many of us on those products where we value a second opinion. As a business traveler, luggage is one of tehose categories (and I would hope as a Facebook friend you would wave me off the purple sunflower motif for my own good).

Many of us in digital marketing especially on the social media side of life have been creating and stewarding programs for brands that pay off in the middle or top of the funnel - Engagement up to Awareness. Or our approach to driving action or conversion has been a click-through or coupon download or similar action. Now we really can apply "social" to not just shopping but to conversion or sales.

Affiliate Marketing
While the power of building authentic positive word of mouth and even recommendation for a product will drive product preference (see our Conversation Impact measurement model), using social to drive sales will become a new focus for many of us.

As a blogger, would I raise my hand to become an affiliate marketer for the brands, I myself, use and appreciate? Yes. As marketers continue to over-do influencer outreach - trying to capture the attention of influentials like mombloggers and food bloggers such that they authentically talk about products - we will see some simpler and more direct solutions to transparently engage those influencers as affiliate marketers. The benefit back to them is a percentage of sales - all very transparent, of course. Clearly that works best for retail brands vs. manufacturers. I could easily imagine having a Hugo Boss store widget on my site ads the ultimate storefront for black jeans (hell, just my clickthroughs alone would move the needle).

Curated Event Shopping
Remember the Amazon "Gold Box"? It was a collection of time-sensitive specials on Amazon that you could browse through. I never bought anything and I guess others didn't fare much better as the feature is gone.

Now I subscribe to ideeli.com. They send me emails of sales events on great stuff - mostly for women. I have bought some great jewelry there for my wife. If I knew anything about bags, I am certain I could score some gems there as the always seem to have some great ones. The pricess are advantageous - but like the Home Shopping Network, sales are timed so you need to act promptly. The goods are curated and high quality. The combination of timeliness and quality curation makes it sweet. I have told many people about ideeli.com which is another way the "social" quality of the service works. (Essentially, it gives me a little bit of 'social capital' to spend with people I know.)  

There are a lot more innovations on social shopping happening than just these three trends. In fact, the social shopping space is exploding with innovation.

The Lesson Beneath "PR in Silicon Valley"

The NYTimes.com ran a story over the weekend (that finally ended up in the print edition Business section) about the social nature of public relations efforts on behalf of Web 2.0 startups in Silicon Valley called "Spinning the Web - PR in Silicon Valley." They mean old school "social" as their example is a PR pro in the Valley who makes hay of who she knows and her ability to get clients mentioned by those who's who of tech.

Is this back-to-the-future? Hasn't Silicon Valley always been a club of sorts? Now that some of those influencers run popular media properties like Digg and social networks like Twitter that have the 'reach' previously reserved for older more established media properties, now that every business analyst worth her salt gets "news" via an eclectic RSS collection complete with new influencer blogs and Twitter search results (see our TheDailyInfluence.com), this evolution is now complete. I have visions of Pam Alexander and her notorious networking social events that helped her rise to mythical status.

But underneath the story of one publicist/PR person who manages a network of influencers vs. pumping out press releases, is the true story of change.

Public Relations is quickly adapting to the practice of identifying new influencers who have their own public platform and following and can do more to raise awareness and engagement with relevant companies and brands than traditional media relations. This is not new. And for as many examples of old school PR shops who rely on press releases to gain "coverage", there are 5 more sophisticated "new communications" firms who not only understand the phenomena of word of mouth marketing via new influencers and networks of interest groups. Many, like ours, have gotten pretty sophisticated with the process of connecting with vast, new collections of third parties. 

The Silicon Valley tribes (Tech companies, VC, Web 2.0 startups, popular bloggers/twitters) is but one microcosm.

Influencer Segmentation
Turning 'working a crowd' into an effective and scaleable approach to engaging relevant third parties such that they will authentically want to share about a new product, an intriguing service or just cause is about seeing the millions of affinity "groups" online, gauging inlfuence amongst their "members" and then taking the care to provide them a true exchange of value.

For a recent automotive project, we purposely went beyond the car bloggers and even the social media echo-chamber (top bloggers in social media) to identify 6 additional segments. Each is relevant to the brand from parent bloggers (don't forget the dads in your mad-dash to court the mom bloggers!), to design geeks to eco-dabblers (regular folks who care about being 'green' and are willing to make some decisions to be more so).

For a financial services project, we have identified 16 interest groups - things that draw people together online - passions. Within each are different influencers defined by data and qualitative analysis. While Silicon Valley relies on influencers within the tech and social media circles we all know; the rest of the broad universe has its own influencers who you might not instantly recognize.

The article captures the relationship-driven nature of Silicon Valley public relations now dominated by new media properties and individuals. What it's really pointing out is the explosion of new influencers that we identify, build relationships and rely on to reach relevant people on behalf of companies and brands. The Silicon Valley tribes are but one small slice. 

Choosing Marketing Partners With "Social Juice"

Why do we ever choose marketing partners?

Why did Mars ink a deal with Nascar?

Why would SkiDoo partner with Burton snowboards?

Why did Duracell partner with the Children's Hospital at UCLA last winter?

Why did Kellogs partner with Feeding America?

Partners are either willing to fund marketing efforts or, more often, extend marketing reach via a new channel, affinity group or customer base. There are also the partnerships driven by endorsement. Celebrities and non-profits come quickly to mind here. The marketer needs the celebrity endorsement ususally to drive earned media attention. They need the non-profit to lend credibility to their drive to give $100K to charity (tied to selling more of their core product or driving up relevant awareness, of course)

Today, you should always choose a partner with strong social media marketing muscle. This is particularly true in the case of the non-profit endorsement partnership. Many brand marketers form partnerships with non-profits to earn some good will with customers or prospects for aligning their product with a 'social good.' Certainly, many brands have a deep commitment to social causes that are organic to their brand. Starbucks and fair trade coffee come to mind. Many more have a more transitory, campaign-long commitment.

Too many brand marketers select a non profit partner based upon simple relevancy to an issue - are they supporting clean drinking water in parts of the globe; are they supporting breast cancer research?

Beyond the relevancy and responsibility of a non profit partner, brands should look for non profits who understand social media marketing and have built an advocacy network that they will activate on behlf of the partner initiative. They shoudl think of these partners as the most modern of marketing partners.

Look for a partner with:

• A strong email list with whom they connect regularly

• A Facebook presence with a clear sense of mission and growing fanbase
• Experience activating their members to action via digital channels
• Growing use of Twitter to keep followers up to date and driven to deeper engagement
• A "social Web" site: one that is designed for action and sharing not self-aggrandizing Flash movies or simple brochureware

Brands partner with non-profits to support those causes and introduce their supporters to the brand. Brands want to market products on the backs of causes. That's a bit of a cold way to put it but still true. Beyond their authentic interest in supporting a cause, brands are using the partnership as a marketing hook. They are using the "borrowed interest" of the cause to generate interest in their product.

To be as successful as possible, brands needs to leverage the grassroots marketing infrastructure of the non-profit. Many non profits are savvy advocacy organizations. Brands need that social media muscle to connect with people who will care about their partnership and drive them to some meaningful action.

Where is the Perfect Social Media Conference (for Marketers)?

There are too many social media conferences.

We are in a recession. Budgets on discretionary spending like travel and training are tight. And yet there are more social media conferences per square conference facility than before the crisis. This abundance of events speaks to a few trends in the marketplace:

• Marketers are taking social media seriously and want desperately to get a handle on how to do it well.

• An entire consulting industry - a bit of cottage industry - has sprung up over the years around social media and these folks bake in conference commitments in their "business plans". They must attend to drive awareness and business.
• Professional conference planners see the urgency around social media inside the enterprise and have shifted gears away from less popular subjects.

Many of these events are just no good.

The trends don't inherently deliver a great experience. I have been to a few this year, some that I would consider very valuable, some that were engaging or otherwise worthwhile and some that were just plain a waste of time. Now I seek the Perfect Social Media Conference.

Problems

• Same speakers: The trends I described force the same speakers out in front of folks again and again. Two problems with that. The first is obvious in that you hear the same key points - usually intended for newcomers - over and over again.

• Designed around speakers: The second problem - most conferences are designed around speakers - their needs, their credentials, their willingness to travel for free to speak. In today's economy, conferences should be designed around the learning experience they deliver for the paying attendee not around the speakers. This makes it difficult for the professional conference business with no skin in the subject matter to pull off any type of event that delivers significant value. All they can do is assemble speakers - usually the same ones - and hope that enough of them are informative, entertaining or inspiring.

• Over narrowing of the niche: One of the reasons I got a lot out of 140 characters, WOMM U. and even We Media was the diversity of the program and the participants. It wasn't all marketers. While I generally benefit from a marketing focus, marketing does not live in a vacuum. Too many conferences have an uneducated view of a profession. They believe that so long as all of the speakers come from the "marketing" organzation, or that all of them claim to be "bloggers" that they have created a focused event. I look at conferences as learning events. I learn from storytellers, media entrepeneurs, artists, non-profit advocates and more.

The Perfect Recipe for a Social Media Conference
There is no "perfect," but here are the ingredients for an event that is worth this brand marketer's investment of time and money:

• A program that is designed around learning not around speakers: if you start by outlining what your attendees will "know" and be able to "do" upon leaving, you stand a better chance of creating a compelling experience filled with great discussion leaders, engaging formats and tangible deliverables.

• Rigorous case studies with results: nothing teaches professionals better that really great stories of how others have done it. Many conferences include cases but take no care to ensure that rigor. We need business and marcom problems, insights that drive a program, creativity and real results. Too many people dress up a collection of social media tactics with no clear impact as a case study. That approach serves no one, not even the novice. As for results, I would argue we need good and bad. As someone reminded me, "what do we learn from success? Nothing."  I need case studies where we are not afraid to talk about failures and where we learned valuable lessons.

• Practical training from, get this, practitioners that is clearly distinguished between beginner and advanced: how many events have you gone to where the content and delivery was too basic to be of use. You tell yourself, "well, I guess that was designed for those new to social media marketing."  There is nothing wrong with social media 101, although if ever there was too well-trod territory, it is the introduction to social media and word of mouth marketing. identifying whether a session is intended for those just starting out or those with years of experience can only help set and meet the expectations of all those involved. 

• I need to hear practical lessons from those who actually do the work. If you are listening to someone tell you how social media marketing works and they have spoken at more than 6 events in one year, look a little closer. Chances are they are really a professional pundit with a shallow set of real experiences to pull from. Social media marketing is a new discipline that can best be learned from doing vs. observing. Look for those really doing the work for insight.

• Surprising inspiration: Conference organizers need to think long and hard about who will surprise participants espcially when those attendees are jaded marketers. Getting the CMO of brand X to speak is all well and good but often the real inspiration comes out of left field. Ray Bradbury once keynoted an unusual conference staged by Silicon Graphics way back when. I never would have expected such an inspiring talk about creativity and marketing.

• A social platform for discussion: conferences are as much about networking and being "social" in the service of business as they are about content delivery. Too many conferences don't plan for social interaction either by jamming in too many content delivery sessions (that "speaker-driven" mentality, again) or they rely on big meals as enough of a social platform. How can a conference plan around networking and even facilitate it? When I was with Discovery Channel some years back, we participated in a 'digital day' at MIT Media Lab (we were sponsors of the Lab). We broke down into groups of 12 or so and my group which also included Walt Mossberg participated in an hour-long exercise with a professor and his grad students studying filtering as it relates to email and messaging. That joint activity brought us together and gave us instant common ground for discussion. Not everything needs to be so structured nor does it need to just be the usual lunch hour here everyone spins off to address email business.

 
There are plenty of other things that can contribute to a worthwhile experience. Some things that help:

• I like smaller gatherings. Once you break the 500 person mark, I get a little numb.
• Focused sponsor exhibits where as much care has gone into curating the sponsors as teh sessions, themselves
• Diverse group of participants
• Easy to get to location (relatively inexpensive and a near airport)

These are the key ingredients I will look for in the events through the end of the year.  If you know of one, please let me know. Thanks.

The Exhuberance of Twitter: 140Characters

About 3 years ago, I attended Vloggercon in SF. It was held in the funky Swedish American Hall. Schlomo and company did a great job of extending the experience out for a few days and into a bar he owns. We brought a big brand there  and there were a few others there. Mostly it was the spectrum of folks who loved creating video programs online. Rocketboom were the video royalty at the event. Great pioneers like Zadi Diaz (EpicFU now) and Ryanne Hodson were there. Exhuberance. People were jazzed. It was a flat universe....mostly. Schlomo gave out "Bullshit" cards for audience members to hold up should someone on the altar start "selling" vs. sharing, so-to-speak.

A Twitter Community Emerges

I thought of this as I participated in Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters this past week in NYC. There is a flurry of Twitter events happening. From conferences to workshops to Tweetups. 140conf was a rapid-fire 2 days of folks from the social media "center" (sounds better than echochamber), publishing, news and media, politics, social causes, brands and much more. Rick Sanchez was there sticking his ....let's say 'foot' in his mouth. Wyclef Jean was there doing a gracious shout out with Jeff's kids. I was there with 3 brands on twitter. Folks came from across the globe for their 10 minutes on stage and two days of tweetups. People are as excited about Twitter as they have been about deomcratized video creation and distribution as they were about the historical tip of the spear - blogs.

People all over the world are excited about the flattening and immediacy brought on by Twitter. As more and more news (not News but news) is first transmitted via Twitter, people are once again comparing a new, more populist platform to the entrenched News businesses. Lots of mentions of the Tweets from Iran during the post election controversy and potests.

Twitter and Marketing

What does this have to do with marketing? Everything, of course. But unlike a marketing conference where just marketers come together with pre-packaged ideas of how to use social networks and ascending platforms like Twitter to sell stuff, 140 Characters, throws a whole bunch of enthusiasts together from different backgrounds to spark ideas and discussion which may lead itself to some real change and innovation. It reminds me a bit of what Dale and Andrew are doing with WeMedia.

We need more marketers at 140 Characters - both to learn and listen, but also to participate in the discussion about how Twitter and social media will continue to change how we communicate, who we trust, how we make decisions to buy stuff we need.

5 Steps to Choosing the Right Listening Post Solution

We always start with listening. We listen to what people say in blogs about things that matter to them, when they tweet about the brands in their lives, public discussions in forums and review sites. The social media (r)evolution has eaked along enough that most marketers would say they start with listening. We are presenting today at OMMA Social in NYC alongside our good friend Pepper Roukas at American Express. Our topic is Listening Posts. I wanted to share my experience choosing and creating solutions for ourselves and our clients.

Choose Wisely

How do you select the right listening "solution" for you? I say 'solution' as it isn't as simple as choosing a technology provider - one of the 120 or so who provide some form of cgm monitoring. Thinking it's all about technology will leave you with a technology contract and 2 months of data for which many execs in the company scratch their head and say "so what." To select and implement a program that has a quantifiable impact on your business, I would suggest following these five steps.

1. Define Your Listening Goals Across the Enterprise
CGM Listening can be a powerful additon to marketing, communications, customer service, product development and more. Different groups within the company can benefit. Since the infrastructire of a listening post has significant combined hard and soft costs, it only makes sense to try and leverage a solution across as many needs as possible.

There are really three essential purposes of a Listening Post:

• Guide marketing, communications and product strategy via insights from conversations
• Establish a rapid-response system to what is said across the Social Web
• Create a measurement benchmark and reporting system for word of mouth

Different groups will want a system that does different things. Marketing may want 1 and 3. Communications 2 and 3. Product development may want to learn insights from what customers are saying about the product. Customer Service may want a way to respond quickly to concerns and complaints.

It is possible that you need all of these bases covered. Just as likely is that one of these has become the urgent interest and you need to satisfy it without cutting yourself off from the future.

2. Map Out the Work Flow That Fits Your Organization
Whether your a communications team member, part of marketing or trying to solve cgm listening needs across the enterprise, taking a moment to map out how the information is collected, translated into insight and then applied to action will save you time and frustration later.

I purposely didn't say "document your requirements" - not because you shouldn't but more because its obvious. Starting by mapping data-to-insight-action and how the workflow can actually happen in your organization is a great place to start.

If you are prmarily looking for Marcom insight, who is responsible for that now? Is there a insights and research person in your midst who can shepard this new source? If so, how are their reports and insights recieved now? Are they used to working at a fast, real-time clip? How geeky are they from a lexicon to a technology way?  Can they handle the interface themselves or will they need help?

Who owns the action taken from the Listenin Post goals you determined above? That will tell you a lot about how the path the information must take to convert into first insight and then action.

You may need to outsource or get help from a trusted partner to do some of this. By mapping out the process, you will discover your needs ahead of time.

3. Create a Prototypical Report
It's always helpful to envison the solution. Then you can make decisions and build to get yourself there. Creating a prototypical report with real data is a giant step towards knowing what you want. I suggest that you think of two reports - the voluminous one that you just can't help yourself from making and the 1-pager that will get to the C-suite.

Start by defining the 'conversation criteria.' These are the terms and phrases that will help you find conversations on brand-related topics. It may be brand mentions, competitors but even more important are those topics that intersect between customers and the brand. If you are a bank or financial services firm, it may be discussions parents are having about sending their kids to college or buying a house. 

The conversation is what you put into the listening engine. How well you do this step will determine how useful the output of the engine.

You can actually get data two ways:

• You can ask one of the technology companies to do you a solid and let you test drive the service. This is tricky as many of the them require a significant 'boot-up' phase where they feed the conversatoin criteria in and weed out erroneous or spam data. Still it is possible with some.

• You can also do this by hand. Using many of the available listening programs out there, you can get a pretty good bead on what people are saying

4. Review 3-4 of the Recommended Leaders
Don't look at them all. You'll go blind, become resentful or just plain lose all your time to the task. Find the 2-3 you think fit what you need and then throw a wildcard choice in there.

Depending on your answer to #1 above, you will weight these things differently. Most listening post tasks can be broken down into four steps:

Collecting

• What is the source collection the service is using? Many subscribe to third party sources that are limited in terms of what they have in them (e.g. some may only look at 10m blogs)
• What types of cgm do they collect? Blogs, Twitter, Video, Traditional media, Forums, Review sites....

Rating and Sorting

• Are they keyword-based or is there a more rigorous sentiment process?

• If they claim a machine-driven sentiment rating system, can you see it in action? (this is one of the hardest things to get tech to do well)
• How do they facilitate cleaning up the most likely spam? This is asking how they optimize the collection.
• What is the interface for adding human rating to the results?
• What is their proprietary vocabulary for things like influence? Every technology company comes up with something and often it is quite...let's just say 'special.'
• Do they identify "influencers" or whatever they call them from within conversations and what criteria do they use to determine influence?

Reporting

• What are the top three reports the system can generate?
• What is the most useful visual report they can make? ( I know of whole systems that provide little value beyond a couple of cool visuals. I am not saying that is enough but don't underestimate the value of a great social graph visual to a senior executive)
• Can you create a one-pager, preferably a pdf, to make that C-suite deliverable? How easy does thsi system make that?

Insights into action

Does the technology provide insights and action steps? This is a big, trick question. None can do this and anyone who claims this is likely lying or positioning their staff as expert strategists. This is the big reason why my team only offers Listening POst powered by X(we use three different technologies). Our listening Post is made useful because of the care we put into efficiently distilling data into insights and action (and determining the objective and defining the conversation criteria at the head of the program.)

5. Run a 3-month Pilot Program
Everyone needs results quickly. Many of the platform choices you may make require time to get up and running and refine results. If you plan a 3 month pilot, you give yourself a reasonable amount of time to prove out the choice, refine it and be able to communicate to the rest of the organization the value the solution is providing.

3 Brands Amidst the Twitterverse

Brands were in the minority at the recent 140 Characters conference. All sorts of people were there with no single tribe majority.

Chris Brogan looked into the audience and declared, "...this is the makeup of Twitter...." With maybe 30 million people on Twitter I am not sure that statement is true but his intent was correct - there's a diverse collection of people and tribes on Twitter.  This diversity made the conference more interesting than many of the social media marketing conferences out there.  

I ran a session with smart marketers who are using Twitter and social media in their business and trying to figure out how to expand that use. We had:

• Kodak: Jennifer Cisney aka Chief Blogger

• Marriott: John Wolf - Senior Director,PR
• Time Warner Cable: Jeff Simmermon - Director Digital Communications

Each is actively on Twitter. They all shared some common experiences:

• The demand to use Twitter internally came from below not from above. While that may not be surprising, I would expect that by now plenty of CMOs and CEOs have felt the peer pressure to get their brands active in this space.

• Everyone has made mistakes on Twitter and survived. When I asked the audience who had made a mistake on Twitter a vast majority raised their hands. Most people there see Twitter as a forgiving universe where those who behave like human beings will earn acceptance from the heterogeneous community.

• Measuring ROI on these efforts lies in the future for now. While each company may be at a slightly different place in terms of adoption of socila media marketing as a core strategy, their twitter handles are embraced as a 'must-do' experiment.

Marriottintl talks at the corporate level (lots of sub-brands in the Marriott universe) with travelers interested in the brand. Often they offer deals or reminders of services. (like Marriott's free night promotion at 300 hotels outside North America)

Jennifer Cisney tweets about all things at the intersection of photography, social media and Kodak.
She has been with the company ten years and as her title suggests is very active in social media on behalf of Kodak.

Jeff and others at TWCable are trying to be helpful to customers by directing them towards customer service solutions while at the same time develop a communications-driven dialogue with customers.

Brands Must Proceed With Care
Earlier Peter Fasano from Coke commented on his own challenge driving social media inside the brand - "How do you steer a big ship with the agility of  a personal brand..." 

Via Twitter @macala made a point that I thought was dead on: "... More brands will try Twitter & create noise for visibility." We need to be careful how we use the platform. We cannot fall into the trap of just counting "mentions" of our brand in Twitter. It's teh quality of those mentions and teh conversations they are a part of that is valuable.

Some folks at the conference piped up that brands shouldn't be marketing at all and shoudl focus on just delivering great customer service. Many more people seem okay with brands on Twitter as the followers of major brands reveal (we do "choose" to follow, after all) 

Brands want to build real relationships with people for benign self-interest (being good to customers is good for business), or because they are actually staffed by people who want real, authentic relationships and see the transformative power of social media. That's who was on our panel. Yes, they want to achieve a business goal but they also respect the personal and trust-based nature of social media.

RESOURCE: Twitter for Business

We relaunched a new version of Twitter for Business: 6 Ways Brands Use Twitter. It features a presentation and a deeper-dive How-to guide that are very useful.

A Photography Brand Gets More Experiential

I always loved the Kodak photo moments I once saw - brand yellow dots on the ground in a public park or sightseeing stop."Kodak Moments" has since earned its way into our vernacular as anything worth photographing.

Now another brand is taking that experience concept farther. Canon is running what looks like a pretty routine photography contest online called, Canon Photography in the Parks, between now and September.  What's supercool is the Workshops they are running in Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Acadia throughout the summer. Travelers can shoot with Canon cameras and lenses and even rub shoulders with some expert photographers like Darrell Gulin.

Ultimately this is not new. This is the 4th year Canon has done this. We often overlook some great solid brand experiences trying to find the next new thing. I merely loved it because of a brand providing a useful and real-world experience for its fans. Not sure how many people will show up for the 60 or so workshops throughout the summer but given a good experience they could all turn into word of mouth ambassadors worth their weight in gold....

Thanks to Springwise....

6 Directions on Social Media Measurement: How Will We Come Together?

There are lots of interesting efforts to make sense of Social Media Marketing which I often refer to as Word of Mouth Marketing since that is the outcome of most social media-based efforts. We are somewhere in the second third of our journey towards meaningful, shared measurement. We are in that part where we wrestle with credible yet cimbersome models and pine fo rthe simplicity that came before. Don't we all wish we had "reach and frequency" goals? Doesn't it seem like social media marketing is being held to ahigher standard than the disciplines that came before?

Recently, I have been drawn into or tracking at least 6 different efforts to make sense of soaicl media marketing measurement. It's useful to become aware of them all. Still, the question remains - are we better off with this English-garden growth of discussions, forums, white-paper symposiums, or do we need "one ring to bind them all?"

IAB Social Media Measurement
The IAB recently releasedtheir social media metrics guidelines. These tackle the space from an "advertisers" POV. They are also trying to develop meaningful KPIs that acknowledge what the space does well - foster conversations - and what marketers want - a way to place their brand in the conversation. Here is a snapshot from the Guidelines:

"Ad campaigns can target a single blog or multiple blogs by category using traditional
interactive reach and audience metrics. However, additional targeting value can also be
derived by mapping campaigns to blogs engaged in common “conversations” through the
form of shared links, referencing each-other’s content. The social connection of publisher-to-publisher relationships through these content links aggregates engaged consumers into a
desirable and topic-engaged audience.

The ability to aggregate audiences by topic is dynamic, following the dialogue consumers are having. Following these “conversations”, an advertiser or brand evangelist is able to tailor creative to incorporate the messages, language, and tone audiences are using at the current moment and effectively speak directly to them, rather than building creative which is solely based on statistical reach and audience metrics."

Their general social media  metrics are nothing new. It is the list of KPIs that we have all been tracking: unique visitors, page views, visits, interaction rate, time spent, etc.. The new territory (for IAB) is their method for assessing the conversation space.

• Conversation Size means they are now looking across the social Web for relevant mentions of an advertisers campaign language. This is the equivalent of Ogilvy's Conversation Criteria which I would argue is a more relevant approach than:

"Number of Conversation Relevant Sites: The count of sites in the conversation whose content contains conversation phrases from the client’s Request for Proposal (RFP) or Insertion Order (IO)."

• Site relevance - are their a lot of relevant mentions of topics that intersect with the brand

• Author Credibility - we have been doing this for years in our Influencer Maps and includes metrics from inbound links to earliest and latest relevant posts.

• Content Freshness and relevance - IAB is suggesting that beyond earliest and latest post that the delta in between or "Mean-time Between Posts" on a subject is important.

If your primary goal is to determine which social sites to advertise on, these all seem like useful metrics. The power of social media lies in between the advertising, however. It lies within the conversation itself. It's hard to see how the  IAB approach will account for the power of earned media.

Word of Mouth Marketing Association Metrics Best Practice Guidebook
Last week, WOMMA (discl:board member) released a draft of what hopes to be a very useful book for brand marketers on the fundamental building blocks of word of mouth marketing measurement. The draft will be revised between now and November. Still, it serves as a useful guidebook even now.

The WOMMA Metrics Guidebook covers the fundamentals of Conversation Volume and Share, Influencer Value and offers up examples of some of the ways companies are fashioning measurement models to guide perfomance metrics, advocacy valuation and even the ever-elusive "value of a conversation."

This will help marketers understand and share a vocabulary about what matters in measurement. There remains at least two extra steps to tackle to make this Guidebook all that it can be:

• A closer connection to the real ways marketers want to use social media. If you accept, as I do, that word of mouth marketing is a bigger tent yet inclusive of social media marketing, you must also agree that the main ring in that circus is social media. The Guidebook will be stringer if it ackoedges that marketers want to know now how to measure social media and make more direct mention of how they are doing that.

• Cast a broader net to capture more ways that more marketers are measuring social media. Our model, Conversation Impact, is not covered here and I assume that many others are not as well. Perhaps I am pining for more of a complete index than a "guidebook" but still, there is a lot of good thinking on measurement out there beyond what is currently captured in the Guidebook.  

Social Media Advertising Consortium
The new kid on the block, SMAC has developed in a small corner of the social media "in-crowd" as a non-profit association determined to make sense of the value and impact of paid evertising in social media. What they will accomplish beyond what IAB sets out to do remains unclear. Looking at the membership with nary an ad agency in sight, I am guessing that they will focus on the combined impact for marketers of paid and earned media in this landscape.  Here's what they say about themselves:

"In 2009, social network advertising revenues will hit an estimated $1.825 billion.* Yet the industry is still fuzzy on the details – what they’re selling, what they’re buying, and how to measure success. As a result, players, big and small, are eager to unite to find solutions for social media’s challenges.

SMAC fosters collaboration throughout the entire social media ecosystem, diving deep into critical issues and staying ahead of this constantly evolving industry. By bringing together buy side, sell side, and research professionals to develop relevant standards, comprehensive research and definitive measurement tools, our goal is to grow revenues and increase engagement."

Advertising Research Foundation
The forum for paid media modeling, ARF has been scartching in the dirt trying to find meaning behind the concept of "engagement" for a few years. There efforts led to this slightly etherial gem of a definition for engagement: "Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context."

They are a good forum for those of us who really care about meaningful masurement. their Audience Measurement 4.0 conference is on June 23 + 24 in NYC.

Most of the tracks in AM4.0 are not about WOM or social media. At least two of the tracks - The World of Social Media & Search Measurement & The Value of Cross-Media, Engagement & Influencer Marketing - deal directly with what we are most concerned with. Of all of the 'too many' social media conferences on the horizon, this is one that I consider essential and is likely to remain so for the next few years.

i-COM
Based in Europe, these folks are trying to bind all of the relevant Web associations internationally to come together via a series of events. They want to drive collaboration on standards and ways to measure. Their field of vision is greater than social media and includes all of what we consider "digital." They are a forum for conversation and debate not a binding body, per se. It is still early yet to know whether this will lead to more generally accepted social media marketing metrics but the intent is good - invite everyone to the table.

Conversation Impact
We have been planning and deploying social media programs for 5 years. we started by simply reporting relevant metrics. Sometimes this was like public relations "output" reporting (how many blog posts, comments, videos-posted, etc...). We graduated to a more menaingful "impact-based" model that we call Conversation Impact. We will discuss this model at the upcoming ARF Audience Measurement 4.0 summit in NYC.

We are jumping ahead to a credible and simple model that makes sense to brand marketers and can be implemented for most campaigns without requiring federal bailout dollars to underwrite the measurement plan. Using a mix of traditoinal Web metrics and new Listening Post methodology, we combine web behavior reporting and social media-based word of mouth to report against three big (and meaningful) categories: Reach, Preference and Action.

We purposely move beyond the trap of trying to quantify or value "engagement" and jump to what matters more to marketers - did we increase product preference?

Our model is open. Anyone can use it. the formulas are all revealed. we shall see how much traction it gains in the marketplace going forward.  

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Lots going on from across different organizations. That seems as it should be for now. We need as many brains thinking this through as possible. Eventually, we need some 'coming together' around how to measure both the earned and paid side of using social media and, most importantly, the combineed effect of both. Will that be some combination of WOMMA and IAB working together? Will groups like SMAC step up to fill a legitimate void? Too early to tell.

Social Media Marketing Measurement: Are We More Than 33% There Yet?

  Nothing has been more important than developing a credible, workable measurement model for our social media-based programs at Ogilvy. Having participated in many of the forums where masrement geeks come together to test-drive their models, it became clear last year that we were all still in the first third of the process. If you think of the inevitable arc of standards development, the first third is floating meaningful measures - no matter how convluted the model - marketers want to know that there are valuable metrics that even exist to justify spending in word of mouth-based social media.

First Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
Everyone starts with KPIs (key perfomance indicators) they find compelling. We have 100,000 video views (over 1 month? 6 months? 1 year?). Our Facebook page has accumulated almost 30,000 fans/friends. Our blog mentions add up to a fat 2m UMVs (unique monthly views). KPIs are often without a lot of context. It is safe to say that we are passing through this phase.

Second Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
As critics punch holes - rightly so - in the pure KPI model, academic braniacs develop rigorous models in response. Walter Carl's work at ChatThreads (previously at Northeastern) seem to fit here. An extremely smart guy, all you have to do is spend a half hour with Walter and you will be convinced about the strength of his process for matchbacks and other techniques that really do ratify the spread of WOM. You will of course need to hire his company to actually apply the principles.These methods are persuasive, rigorous yet like the Eniac computer, they may require more effort and shelf space than most marketing programs can afford. So, we simplify. I am certian Walter is doing the same. That is the driving pressure behind our modelling at Ogilvy. Conversation Impact was developed to provide a credible and implementable measurement model that could be applied to most projects without a separate budget allocation. We needed a simple model that made sense to brand marketers. These simpler models are still in the early stages. It will be at least a year before 2-3 of them emerge as "leading" contenders. Ours is open to anyone to use and we will see if it gains velocity (presenting next month at ARF).

Meanwhile, brands that explore the more complex and more meaningful measurement models inevitably backslide into KPIs. You can hear it now from your most senior brand marketers, "Can't we just reduce all this complex modeling to 2-3 numbers we care about most? Numbers that reflect how much reach or how much time people are spending with the brand. What if we just count video views and Tweets?"    

Final Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
This remains a glimmer in my eye. Once we have the solid and simple modeling out of the second third, we need to ramp up quickly for the inevitable: complexity. The real power of social media marketing is when it becomes integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing - ALL sorts. What is the impact of social media mentions on the performance of adjacent advertising - does it make the ads perform 3x, 10x, 30x better? When frequency of ad impressions fades away as a lynchpin metric, what is the most effective forumla of organic conversation with a brand and the paid media that drives action? As brands explore beyond their microsite-based online marketing to include their presence in Facebook, Linked In or Orkut, what formula will explain how that online footrpint adds up to meaningful action and/or intent to purchase?

Miles to go before we sleep. Lots going on in measurement of social media right now. Still, I wonder some days if we have even made it through the first third of our journey.