Recently in Social Media Category

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.

Is listening creepy? I'm seeing that word more lately. As much as we tell companies that The Right Way to do social media is to listen and engage, some people just don't want to hear back from companies they talk about. Somehow, they've developed an expectation of privacy in public communication channels.

They're mistaken. But it's in your company's interest to avoid creeping out the customers, anyway.

The party metaphor for social media describes a social approach to entering existing conversations, but partygoers need to remember that we don't have loud music or quiet corners here. Unless they pick a private spot, their conversation is public, and modern search tools make it available to everyone. Conversations about a company—especially complaints—are going to catch the company's attention.

Think of the executive who overhears a conversation about his company at the party. He'd listen and find a way to enter the conversation if needed.

Avoid the trench coat
Companies can do everything right, and some people will find it creepy, anyway. They're not thinking about what it means when companies don't pay attention. We have plenty of examples where the lack of a response (or an insufficiently speedy response—*cough* Motrin) becomes the basis for a new round of complaints—I don't have to convince you that silence is not usually the best response, do I?

So what can we do to minimize the creep factor?

• Don't stalk everyone who casually mentions your business. We've all had to shake a hungry salesman, and nobody likes it. Twitter follows may be especially likely to trigger a shudder.

• Work on your approach; avoid language that falls on the floor like a bad pickup line. Clear, open and helpful are a good start.

• When you respond publicly to a public complaint, offer to take the follow-up discussion to a private channel, such as email or phone. Expect anything you say or do in the private channel to become public, because it might.

• Be very careful about using everything you know about a customer when you respond. People probably aren't ready to learn that you can map their social media activity to their account at your company (with all of their personal contact information). Give them time.

• Expect some people to react badly to the most well-intentioned contact. Apologize, recover and move along. You can't win 'em all.
  

Tales from the trenches?
What are you doing to avoid that uncomfortable response to your online engagement? How's it working for you? Has anyone called you creepy for responding to them yet?

If teenagers think Twitter is creepy, they're not going to like company responses in Twitter, either.

Photo by byungkyupark.

I'm starting to think that matrix management is a critical skill for corporate social media efforts. That's not to suggest that companies have to start with their reorg boots on, but the combination of low budgets and cross-functional impacts suggests that a little matrix thinking could be constructive. For companies where the social media team taps the resources of multiple functional groups, you're already there.

Two data points in today's information flood reminded me of the ad hoc approach I've seen before:

• Forrester (via RWW) found that three quarters of marketers in their recent survey have $100,000 or less budgeted for social media.

• During today's Blogwell recap call, Lizzie Schreier of Allstate answered a question about team size by saying, "The social media team is Marcia." Others are involved, but it's not a full-time assignment.

It makes sense, really. The challenges—and benefits—of social media touch the company across functional silos, and no one group is likely to own responsibility for all of it. If you shift from an ownership mindset to a leadership mindset, you start creating a form of matrix management, working with people who aren't assigned to the project full-time.

Look at these matrix management challenges and decide if any of them sound familiar. It strikes me as another opportunity to apply lessons learned from earlier experiences.

Update: The Allstate call is now available as a free audio download. I recommend it.

One of the more interesting sessions at BarCamp Charlotte was on using social media for social change. We didn't make much progress for the non-profits in attendance; mostly we learned that they need to connect with people who would like to help them. The session did, however, prime me to notice when two different programs focused on truly global issues wandered across my awareness the same day. What started as a discussion about building word of mouth for a fundraiser shifted to something much more ambitious.

zyOzy
I learned about zyOzy (zee-Oh-zee) when @zyOzyfounder followed me on Twitter. For me, at least, that still gets some attention. zyOzy applies a mix of events, social media and entrepreneurship to support efforts to end extreme poverty in Africa and India.

In addition to their blog, the site links to an extended online presence that includes Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and a wiki. Who says you need a budget for an integrated media campaign?

Ushahidi
An old friend who now works in the NGO world pointed me toward Ushahidi, a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information. Ushahidi's original project compiled and mapped incident reports in Kenya during its 2008 post-election crisis. Reports were collected from citizen reporters using mobile phones.

The underlying technology is now being developed into an open-source platform that will be available for public and private monitoring of active situations anywhere. While in private beta, Ushahidi is being used for current projects focusing on Gaza, Congo, and South Africa, as well as a follow-up Kenya project.

What can you do with almost no budget?
"Social media are free" is the first myth to be busted—especially in a corporate marketing context—but most of the costs are driven by the need to spend time building social media programs. Free social media tools and open-source platforms, such as Ushahidi or the BuzzMonitor, put a lot of capability in the hands of NGOs that are more likely to have time and volunteers than a big budget.

Most of the continuing saga of Facebook's updated terms of service (TOS) has focused on the implications for personal privacy and ownership of personal information and content. I have a different question: how many companies are considering the TOS implications when they use Facebook for marketing campaigns? Are they casually handing over rights to their intellectual property, too?

I group online TOS "agreements" with the shrink-wrap end-user license agreements (EULA) that come with commercial software. They may technically be contracts, but most customers don't read them and don't really agree to them. It's not really possible to read all the agreements that come our way, and in any case, they're not negotiable. When interesting or useful online services offer take-it-or-leave-it terms, most of us take it.

Usually, things work out. In real life—not the world described in TOS and EULA legalese—we are able to function because terms aren't enforced to the limit. Company statements, such as those coming from Facebook this week, tacitly acknowledge that rational management doesn't enforce every right that Legal tosses into license terms. So while it may be possible for Facebook to assert ownership of users' content, they're smart enough to realize that wouldn't be a good idea.

Yes, but...
Commercial contracts, though, should be different. Companies really shouldn't agree to unpleasant terms just because they're hard to read (you have professionals for that task, right?). If the standard TOS makes claims on company content that go too far, they should be negotiated. The question is, are companies really doing that, or are they clicking "accept" and moving along, just like most individual users?

I don't have the answers on this one. I suspect that big brands are negotiating real contracts with Facebook and others, while smaller companies accept the TOS. My parting thought for you is that if your company is getting into social media, your legal folks should pay attention to the terms. If something's not right, fix it before you start. If it can't be fixed—what other ideas were you working on?

Although my wife and I cross out publicity waivers in our child's permission forms, I am not a lawyer. Anything that looks like legal advice here is just my personal opinion.

As Triangle Tweetup, our local gathering of Twitter fans, was getting started last night, I noticed a series of great points coming out of the social media discussion at IABC Toronto at the same time. Surrounded by over a hundred energetic Twitter users, I wondered how associations like IABC, AMA, PRSA, CIPR, and CPRS—forgive me for not knowing all of them around the world—could tap into the energy of local social media communities. Once the initial culture shock wore off, I think they would find huge benefits from a total immersion experience.

I promise this won't become one of those overdone "Twitter's so cool!" posts, but let me point out what happened within the span of, oh, 30 seconds last night:

• The quick presentations at Triangle Tweetup started (good stuff).

• I got a direct message (DM) through Twitter about a possible speaking opportunity (very good stuff).

• I started seeing very good points being made in a panel discussion 700 miles away (#iabcto). Sorry I couldn't be there, but the distance... (and there was a tweetup I needed to attend).

Hmmm...
For the association folks whose members want (need) to learn their way around social media: What would happen if...

• your association sponsored a gathering of the local social media crowd and promoted the (free) event to your membership?

• your association teamed up with the social media crowd for a cobranded event?

• your chapter leaders explored the local social media scene to discover local speakers for meetings?

• your members figured out how much they can learn when they discover tweetups, Social Media Club, or Social Media Breakfast?
  

The only question is, can old-school marketers and communicators handle the unfiltered social media experience? We don't want any heads to explode.

Sorry, no punch line. I'm sharing the news of Jim Tobin's new book, Social Media is a Cocktail Party (Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing). It's a good effort to condense much of the current wisdom into a quick, readable introduction for those who need a quick ride up the learning curve. (If I were a copywriter, I'd probably say something here about reading on for a special offer.)

Cocktail Party is Social Media 101 for marketers. It lacks the depth of other recent books on my pile, but it serves up most of the big ideas with a casual, readable tone. At 178 pages, it's about right for a flight, in both length and weight.

Jim's a friend, so of course I'm plugging his book. But this looks like an introduction that will help a lot of people who are just getting started.

Step right up
To kick things off, Jim is making a donation to Make-A-Wish Foundation for every copy of Cocktail Party sold today (20 November).

But wait, there's more! :-) Yesterday, Jim gave me three copies to give away. To ensure fairness (and because it'll be fun), I'm going to let my 8-year-old Junior Associate pick the winners. Just tell him that you'd like a free copy in the comments below, and I'll announce the winners tomorrow.