Recently in Social Media Category

On an average day, I don't spend much time with Twitter. It's the social media water cooler, where there's always something interesting but rarely anything I can't afford to miss. I know, I should make better use of lists to manage the load, but on a typical day, it just doesn't matter much. To me, it's the unusual days that really prove Twitter's value.

I recently experienced two events—one good, one bad—that show Twitter at its best. The first was Social2011, Radian6's first user conference (#Social2011). The other was April 16, when North Carolina experienced a record-setting tornado outbreak. One twister passed within a few miles of here, so we were paying close attention.

Conferences and Meetups
Back in 2007, I followed the back-channel conversation at the NewComm Forum using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It was a fairly geeky tool, and it was real-time only, but it was nice to connect with the event I couldn't attend.

Now, of course, the back channel is always Twitter, and it sometimes threatens to overwhelm the front channel (the person on stage). But Twitter and the hashtag make connecting with the people at the conference and those following remotely easier than ever. If you can keep from being completely distracted by it, the back channel is a great source of connections, discussion, and sharing that enhance the event experience.

Emergencies
The back channel has been running at conferences for a few years now, but what's really changing is the role of Twitter in major emergencies. Lately, the news has been the earthquake and its aftermath in Japan, and the continuing unrest roiling the Middle East. The New York Times had a good article on how NPR's Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is experimenting with real-time news coverage on Twitter, just one of the ways in which the platform is proving useful.

Closer to home—way too much closer, thankyouverymuch—was the tornado that passed within a few miles of my house on April 16. We're fine, but the storms killed 24 people in NC and damaged or destroyed many homes and businesses. Twitter got a workout that day. Here's some of what I saw:

• Sharing official warnings as they were issued. We had a lot of those.

• Sharing damage reports. One user drove around Raleigh and tweeted what he found in several areas. Lots of people shared what they could see.

• Relaying information from broadcast media to people without power in their homes (who were presumably using smart phones for Twitter).

• Pointing to information. Of course, people tweeted and retweeted links to pictures, videos, news coverage, and other information.

• Reassuring and checking on friends. "I'm OK" messages went out as the storm passed, and people started asking about friends known to be in the storm's path.

• Tracking the storms' progress. Tornadoes are over almost as soon as they hit, and you can tell from the tweets where it was over. I ran a trend report on state-specific hashtags (#ncwx, #scwx, #vawx, #mdwx) to see if it showed the storms' advance, but what it showed was a lot of activity in NC—which was hit hardest that day.

• Media reports. Our local TV stations are on their social media games. They have weather-specific accounts and know how to use the hashtags.
  
  
• (Not much) official communication. I don't remember much official use of Twitter except for National Weather Service updates. It's interesting to see that NWS is experimenting with crowdsourcing storm reports via Twitter. Note to the #smem folks: remember that social media channels are good for both gathering and disseminating information, especially during emergencies that cover large areas.

I've been interested in things international a lot longer than I've been blogging international topics (just look up careers in international affairs). At work, that translates into tracking down companies globally; it's one way my research is different. So when somebody takes a good look at social media patterns beyond the US, I'm usually interested.

Global view

• Trendstream created a great source in Global Web Index, which is based on an ongoing survey across 26 national markets. The full research is subscriber-only, but the site offers free summary data on 16 countries.

• Paul Butler's visualization of Facebook friendships gives a global view of Facebook connections. (Dec 2010)

• Vincenzo Cosenza's world map of social networks (shown above) gives a different kind of high-level summary. December 2011 update

• Global Publics Embrace Social Networking, Pew Global Attitudes Project (Dec 2010)

• Global Social Media Usage and the Language Factor, Lionbridge (2010)

• Social media around the world 2011, InSites Consulting (Sep 2011)

Regional view

• Asia Pacific Social Media Report (highlights), Nielsen (Jul 2010)

• European Social Media Trends, Trendstream (Sep 2010)

• Social Media in Latin America (PDF), Synthesio (Feb 2011)

• 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review, comScore (Feb 2011)

• Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

Country-level view

• Bhutan
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Bhutan, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• Brazil
  Top Social Networking Sites in Brazil, comScore (Aug 2010)
  Usage and behavioral habits of Brazilian internet users in social media , E.Life (Mar 2011)

• Cambodia
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Cambodia, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• China
  Chinese Consumer Report 2010, Roland Berger/CIC (Jul 2010)
  Social Media and Censorship in China (PDF), Synthesio (Mar 2011)
  An Overview of the Evolution of Chinese Social Media, CIC (Mar 2011)
  The Social Media Landscape in China, CIC (May 2011)
  The Voice of Luxury: Social Media and Luxury Brands in China, CIC/GroupM (Aug 2011)

• France
  Echo v.2, Scanblog (Nov 2010)

• Germany
  Social Media Governance 2010, Fink & Fuchs (via Attentio) (Sep 2010)

• India
  Overview of Leading Indian Social Media (PDF), Open Source Center (Dec 2010)
  Social, Digital and Mobile in India, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• Indonesia
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Indonesia, We Are Social (Dec 2011)
  
  
• Iran
  Mapping Iran's Online Public, Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Apr 2008)

• Italy
  Analisi del ruolo dei Blog nell’informazione di attualita, Liquida/Human Highway (via Vincenzo Cosenza) (Nov 2010)

• Japan
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Japan, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• Laos
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Laos, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• Nepal
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Nepal, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• South Africa
  South African Social Media Landscape 2011, Fuseware/World Wide Worx (Oct 2011)

• Taiwan
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Taiwan, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

• Vietnam
  Social, Digital and Mobile in Vietnam, We Are Social (Dec 2011)

Some lists are more incomplete than others. What sources of regional or country-level information on social media usage have you found?

Today's Wall Street Journal had Twitter abuzz about social media monitoring and privacy in closed communities ('Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web). Specifically, a health discussion board and a social media analysis vendor using individual accounts to access personally identifiable health information. It's obviously an ethical question, but whose ethics apply? As far as I can tell? Nobody's (yet).

People are sharing personal stuff online, sometimes sharing more than they realize. We need to be careful about how we handle this information, but from what I can see, the ethical standards are just as siloed as the measurement standards. People brought along whatever ethics they subscribed to before they started dealing with social media, but the existing standards don't really cover the new activities.

Think about the different functional roles where you might find companies using social media data:

• Market research
  Market researchers have strong ethical standards that come from social science research. They get into things like informed consent, but does that really apply to data mining of publicly available data? Do they apply if the data is aggregated, and no personally identifiable information is preserved? What ethical standards apply to desk research?

  Jeffrey Henning wrote about the etiquette of eavesdropping and presented a webinar on consumer attitudes towards social media market research. The short version is that people persist in expecting privacy in their online conversations, despite the public nature of the forums they use. But does their expectation of privacy online translate into an ethical obligation for researchers?

  Update: IMRO and CASRO guidelines may apply to social media research.

• Public relations
  PR ethics say a lot of being honest and transparent in public statements, representing the client and the profession well… but what about the ethics of monitoring and measurement? A recent discussion of ethics in PR measurement suggests that that conversation has only just begun.

• Marketing
  WOMMA takes strong positions on its members' marketing activities, but the closest it comes to mentioning monitoring or research is when it commits to "promote an environment of trust between the consumer and marketer." Other marketing codes I found had a similar emphasis on outbound marketing over inbound information collection.

  Update: WOMMA also calls for members to "respect the rights of any online or offline communications venue (such as a web site, blog, discussion forum, traditional media, and live setting) to create and enforce its own rules as it sees fit."

• Customer service
  Is customer service sufficiently organized as a discipline to have its own code of ethics, or does it simply inherit the company's overall standards? I'll bet you that any existing ethics deal with one-on-one interactions with customers.

• Human resources
  HR ethics related to personal information are based on information that companies aren't supposed to use in hiring decisions. danah boyd shared some thoughts on regulating the use of social media data in hiring.

• Strategy/intelligence
  SCIP's code of ethics doesn't commit to much more than obeying the law. Other types of intelligence organizations get some leeway even on that. If you don't want competitors spying on you, your only real defense is to learn about INFOSEC.

• The source of the data?
• What you do with it?
• The job title/professional affiliation of the user? What if the labels themselves lack agreed definitions?
• No ethics, just laws?
• Nothing—there are no rules?

Update: Is it time for Ethical Standards for Listening Vendors?

Related:

• The Ethics of Listening
  
• Ethics, Open Sources and CI

Bruce Schneier's taxonomy of social networking data (via Tim Finin) provides a helpful starting point for thinking about the various ways that personal information finds its way online.

Just in time for the social holidays, Seersucker Social Media introduces social promotion, a powerful new social marketing tool for your social media toolbelt! Our advanced social intelligence and buzzword-compliant social functions will help you build social capital in your social networks—

Bingo!

I don't know about you, but I'm about done with prepending social to every word in the business vocabulary to "invent" a new, socially enhanced concept. A few years ago, Web 2.0 led a rush on 2.0 Jargon, and before long everybody was sick of it. All we need now is Social 2.0 to complete the cycle.

But that's just hype, and we can filter that. What's really bugging me is how the social buzzword generator is running roughshod over existing concepts—expropriating perfectly useful terms that had the temerity to get there first.

It all started with social marketing, meant as a more manageable contraction of social media marketing. The problem is that social marketing was an existing specialty, having nothing to do with social media. You could probably even make a case for social media social marketing, but I'll deny it if you tell anyone I said so.

I'm seeing more social takeovers lately, and to help you keep up, I'm collecting them here. Just to speed things along, I've taken the liberty of making up some that haven't shown up in the wild yet. See if you can tell them apart.

Just remember, social x is not the same as social media x. We've been social a lot longer than we've had the Internet to mediate our connections.

</curmudgeon>

Photo by greeblie.

Add to the list. You know you want to.

I had a long lunch today with an old friend who's active in the social media space, and I mentioned that to me, Twitter is now the water cooler. His first reaction was that I was using some new social media site called Water Cooler (Watercoolr?), and he had somehow missed it.

Not quite what I meant. Is social media buzz turning us all into hamsters, trying to keep up with the wheel?

Photo by sualk61.

Let's pick on one of the social media crowd's favorite buzzword bingo entries: engagement. Amber's thinking about what engagement means, so I'm going to bypass that question and move directly to the follow-up questions. Who is the object of your engagement? Why do want to engage them online? How does your relationship with them affect your engagement tactics?

Is this the party to whom I am speaking?
—Lily Tomlin as "Ernestine"

Engagement—responding, conversing, connecting, sharing—it sounds like a good thing. Whatever you mean when you say it, I'm sure I support it. In the spirit of and not or, I want to suggest that you consider some different types of people you might engage online.

This isn't an academic exercise. In my recent review of social media analysis platforms, I found engagement features with implicit assumptions about the object and purpose of engagement tactics. Click on the Engage button in one product, and you're in a tool for managing responses to customers. In another system, the button takes you to a media relations tool. The different objects require different tools, which will be used by different groups for different purposes.

Before you can decide which one works for you, you have to know what you mean by engagement.

• Customers
  Well, duh. This is probably what everyone assumes engagement is all about—using social media as a channel for building a stronger relationship with customers (past, present, and future). Good stuff, but not the whole picture.

• Influencers
  People you value because of their presumed ability to influence others. They may be customers, but the goal and approach are different when you think of them as influencers.

• Media
  Professional influencers with different motives and expectations. You're probably already engaging reporters, but how does that play out in social media?

• Employees
  You remember these people, right? How do they figure into your social media environment? Did I miss the memo that says that engagement means external?
  

If you want an answer other than "it depends," ask a more specific question.

Measuring Social Media must be the new black. Everybody's doing it—the in-crowd is, at least, and the rest are starting to realize they're missing something. Just look at the agencies who've suggested their own take on the little black dress—that is, on how marketers should measure social media.

• Conversation Impact, Ogilvy PR

  Ogilvy proposes a framework with three sets of metrics that correlate to the traditional marketing funnel: Reach and positioning, based on a combination of web analytics, media analysis, and search visibility; Preference, based on media analysis and traditional research; and Action, based on measurable client objectives (such as sales conversions).

• Social Influence Measurement, Razorfish (with TNS Cymfony and Keller Fay Group)

  The SIM score, as introducing in the Fluent 2009 report, compares sentiment for a company to sentiment for its industry. The report also mentions share of voice and weighting for influence, although the formulas for the metric do not.

• Digital Footprint Index, Zócalo Group (with DePaul University)

  Evaluate a brand's online presence in three dimensions: Height, which represents the total volume of brand mentions; Width, based on consumer engagement with online content; and Depth, based on message saturation and sentiment.

It was my understanding that there would be no math.
—Chevy Chase, as Gerald Ford

Razorfish's SIM score is all about perception. How does the client look compared to its competitors and industry? Despite the "influence" in its title, this score is entirely about sentiment, with none of the usual indicators of influence. As a single metric, the SIM should be compared with the Net Promoter Score or MotiveQuest's Online Promoter Score, but I'll be honest here. I'm having trouble figuring out the significance of this ratio of ratios. I tried a few scenarios to get a sense for how the numbers change and got some strange results: divide by zero errors, negative scores... The intermediate Net Sentiment metric is the more meaningful number here.

Zócalo's DFI addresses PR effectiveness, as telegraphed by the "earned media" headline in the announcement. The focus on presence, engagement and sentiment pick up on important aspects of social media, but without more detail on the math behind the overall index value, this seems like another framework rather than a metric.

What are we measuring, exactly?
I'm not the first to say it: the golden metric that will answer every question does not exist. To be fair, the authors of these examples don't claim to have the ultimate answer, anyway. Social media initiatives can support diverse objectives, and so the metrics used to evaluate those initiatives or to answer questions will be equally diverse. But it is nice that we have people sharing their efforts to find appropriate metrics for some common objectives and questions. Thank you, and keep it up.

While working through the math, I was reminded of an old trick from undergrad science classes: if you're losing track of your formula, do the math with the units included. If the resulting units don't make sense (comments^2, for example), the value won't, either.

Photo by alist.

Everyone says that listening is central to social media success, but over time, we've fallen into a too-narrow interpretation of the metaphor. Think about it: if listening means monitoring, then we have too many words. Fortunately, they don't need to mean the same thing. We just need to expand the way we think about listening.

Here's the definition of listening implied by many posts and presentations:

Defensive keyword monitoring of social media for customer problems and complaints that need a communications or customer service response.

How can we expand the definition of listening?

• From a defensive posture to developing valuable market intelligence.

• From keyword monitoring to applying all of the technologies available to discover and analyze relevant online content and activity.

• From monitoring to metrics, mining, and interpretation. It's a metaphor, so there's no reason to be stuck with the word's literal meaning.

• From social media to all media and customer communications.

• From a focus on problems and complaints to an interest in all relevant conversations.

• From PR, marketing, and customer service to anywhere the information has value to the business.

• By collaborating across measurement silos to find the right methodology for the task.
  

All together, now: "Companies should listen to social media." We all know the advice, but do you have the impression that listening is a purely defensive strategy? It's not. You just have to move beyond the common, but limited, interpretation of listening.

How often does your defense score?
In a recent survey of management, marketing and HR executives in the US, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law found a strong defensive leaning in respondents' current use of social media. The top reasons they use social media?

1. Read what customers may be saying about our company (52%)
   
2. Monitor a competitor's use of social media (47%)
   
3. See what current employees may be sharing (36%)
   
4. Check the background of a prospective employee (25%)
   
5. None/personal use only (16%)
   

Put your listening on offense
Think about my earlier list of conversations you should care about, and let's come up with some things you can do with the information you find. Defensive ideas are easy (and rampant). Let's focus on putting some points on the board. I'll start:

• Spot sales leads where prospects ask questions or contact you through public channels.

• Figure out a competitor's plans from their public statements and personnel changes.

• Figure out a customer's plans (and needs) from their public statements.

• Identify a competitor's weakness in online complaints; launch a product or program to exploit it.

• Identify a product or service opportunity in online discussions; fill the gap before competitors notice it.

Listening can be defensive—and if you're not monitoring for customer complaints and other problems, start. But don't stop with defense; think about how to apply it to advantage, too. Although it sounds passive, listening doesn't have to be either passive or defensive. Don't be satisfied until you find the path to profit for your business.

Thanks to Deni Kasrel and Bill Ives for pointing out the report and the defensive tone of responses to the question.

Talking with a friend who is smart but outside of the bubble, I was surprised that one of my usual comments surprised her. If you really want to find all of the insights on social media that might be relevant to your business, you need to track down some closely related buzzwords: Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, community, and WOM.

These buzzwords aren't synonyms, but they're very closely related. Serious discussions of one tend to bring up the others. The catch is this: events, organizations, suppliers, and thought leaders tend to be aligned with one of them, so it's easy to miss significant contributions to the discussion if you focus on only one.

For those just learning social media, I usually recommend looking up some of these other topics. Here's why:

• Web 2.0
  This buzzword has dropped off the hype charts, but before social media caught on, people were thinking about many of the same trends under the Web 2.0 banner. Web 2.0 lives on in the 2.0 appended to so many buzzwords, such as...

• Enterprise 2.0
  Social media inside the firewall—that's E 2.0 in a nutshell. I realize the vision is a bit different, but the tools are the same, and those who start thinking about using social media inside their companies should know that a different group of thinkers is already on the case. We're seeing the realization that doing social media well (in business) and applying E 2.0 principles are closely related; Dachis Group's social business design construct is an early example of linking the trends.

• Community
  Who you're trying to connect with through social media. Emphasizes the strategy of connecting with people instead of the tools. Can you really talk about social media for more than ten minutes without using the word community?

• Word of Mouth
  What the marketer wants to encourage through social media. Go to a WOMMA meeting, and much of the talk is about WOM in social media.

Rather than debating the merits of a label or limiting ourselves to label-induced intellectual silos, let's focus on figuring out the concepts and making them work. The whole is way more interesting than the sum of the parts.