credit: Nina Matthews Photography

After Barcamp Seattle and the Privacy Identity Innovation Conference (pii) I am struck by one painful truth about business and technology: All economic incentives favor inefficiency.

I gave a rant-style presentation at Barcamp titled “Your Product Sucks.” The central premise of the talk was that you have a single value to any given customer; either you fulfill it, or you suck. No matter how you strive you will not fulfill every customer need. The customer doesn’t care if you fail; they only care if you fail them.

pii focused on how we protect, legislate, and value personally identifiable information. There was an ongoing current of how people self-report and transport personal information through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The introduction of Facebook Places has created an interesting problem: in order to differentiate from the existing self-report location services, Facebook has introduced other-report location.

During a screaming match passionate discussion I realized that Facebook Places is the continuation of a regular cycle. There are countless businesses that hemorrhage value. Every missing feature means money, every loose piece of data means money, and every support system means visibility.

“Broken” products and services create secondary and tertiary economies that become sustaining for the cycle and the starting product.  Think of tracking programs, cell-phone cases, and demographic data.

Two of the major secondary economies online are the protection of personal data and the reclamation of reputation space.  PayPal and Google Checkout both provide “security protection” by creating an intermediary between your bank instruments and online sellers. This comes at the expense of your credit data and personal data being centralized, the intermediary charges you for the transaction, and they keep a log of your transactions.

Think about that. Logging is a cost. The frightening truth is that there are very few laws about your information. Once people have the information there are few ways that they can’t use it. People can’t charge things to your credit card, but they can sell your e-mail address, home address, and what you like to purchase.

Every time you see information about who buys what, who uses a specific service, or any other identification of a demographic, is in an indication that information has been sold.

Facebook is a prime example of a business that takes advantage of the broken cycle they offer a clear function, connecting your online presence with your friends, but at the cost of sucking at privacy and security. They leave companies like Reputation Defender to clean up after the mess that Facebook “privacy settings” leave in their wake.

Read this infographic to see more data on how Facebook, Google and Apple use your data.

I strongly suggest that you visit the privacy settings at your free products and remember that your personal data is part of what these companies make money from.

credit: Ivan Walsh

Earlier this week, and again today, I was presented with a new term: Social Conversion.

What is social conversion? I think that the best working definitions use one of the following as their starting point:

• A Social Conversion is when a person clicks your link on a social media platform.
• A Social Conversion is when a person shares an opinion about you.

Clicks = Conversion

If you are defining your conversion as the click-through to your site from a third party site you are putting the platform content as the pre-spin for your on page conversion funnel.

Tracking tasks include:

1. Tagging your social media links.
2. Segmenting the particular refer.
3. Tracking visitor latency.

Click-through valuation reduces “Social Conversion” to a synonym for channel tracking, and with it the simplicity of adding just one step to the funnel from the on site conversion.

Opinion = Conversion

If you are defining your conversion as sharing your content or mentioning your brand you are making platform content creation your conversion.

Tracking tasks include:

1. Site specific monitoring.
2. Sentiment monitoring.
3. Volume monitoring.
4. Message reach.
5. Platform user engagement.

If you are using content creation as your “Social Conversion” you are adding two steps to your conversion funnel, creation and action (click-through).  You are also focusing on a more nebulous conceptual action.

Why Social Conversion should mean clicks.

Clicks are traffic, they also are clearly defined in your existing process and are highly traceable. They decouple you from less-reliable platform specific tools and allow the medium, social platforms, to be handled as a whole rather than piecemeal. Driving content creation on a platform is really just one tactic for driving click-through to your website. Your job in analyzing users and customers will always be easier when it is tied to a specific action that connects to your website, rather than a conceptual action that occurs off of your website.

I recently attended the Coremetrics 2010 client summit.  My role there was dual purpose.  Officially, I was there as an advanced Coremetrics user for the company that I work for.  As a three time attendee of the conference, my main goal was to make sure that my co-attendees enjoyed themselves and gleaned some good information specific to their role at our company.  Unofficially, I attended the conference as a published author of a web analytics book and co-owner of the website on which you are reading this post.  My main goal in this capacity was to continue making contacts and crowd source the topic of the next book that Carlos and I will publish in January.

The gist of the Coremetrics conference is this: keynote speeches, breakout sessions on specific web measurement and web marketing topics, meet and greet with a multitude of vendors, showing off new features of the new analytics tools, and socializing between clients.  The gravy of the conference, as is with most conferences, is the time available for socializing and bouncing ideas off of each other.  I balanced this time between being a web analyst for a large company and engaging my peers as a fledgling thought leader in the web analytics arena.

As you might have previously seen on this website, we’ve published a poll of four different book topics for you to choose from.  We’ve done some crowd sourcing over the multitude of social media forums and have had a good response from our friends and followers as to what book they would most like to read.  I felt that it would be a brilliant idea as I was chatting with my peers at the conference to give them the opportunity to peruse the four book options and make their voice heard.  So I set out to this task in the midst of enjoying the rest of the conference and learning some brilliant new marketing and analytics ideas.

It was interesting for me because most people at the conference recognize me from my company name, but not as many knew me from my previous book.  Such is life sometimes.  It definitely added an interesting perspective for me and for the peers that I spoke with.  Most analysts it seems, are content with their single job and don’t necessarily take it upon themselves to b ranch out.  For me, writing a book and keeping up with a web analytics blog has allowed a great outlet for me to expand my analytics knowledge while at the same time, allowing me to share some of my knowledge with my readers.  If you are reading this I hope it is because you are like me and are seeking additional knowledge and are not satisfied with just doing your job.

If you have not attended a web analytics conference, or any type of web marketing conference, I encourage you to do so.  Specifically, if your analytics provider is hosting a conference, there is a mint of information you can glean off of the presenters and your peers alike.  It might be very minute and tangible such as how ad retargeting works, or it might be more topline and holistic like why tagging matters, or why segmentations helps better identify what your customer is doing on your website.  As well, if you are like me and you want to make a bigger name for yourself, attending a conference is great for making acquaintances and garnering a following.

credit: *^ ^* Sherry

Over the last three weeks I’ve seen a rather stupid rash of posts claiming that social media experts are a myth. Most recently an article at ereleases went popular on Sphinn.

Many of these articles are ridiculous, duplicitous, and unhelpful. They make claims like:

1. Social media is new and constantly evolving
2. There is no right way to use social media
3. What works for one may not work for another

Social Media is NOT New

First, social media is not new. The name is new but the content is not. The modern social media platforms started wide scale use in 2002, more or less, with Friendster and Myspace. Blogs, and their communities, predate that (1997). Before that there were already forums, user groups, and Bulletin Board Systems! The Internet has been a social medium for a very long time. All the way back to the 1970s the back-bone concept of Twitter has been available, but without the character limit. People have been using written telecommunication interactions to pass information and have conversation for more than 30 years.

While social media is evolving it isn’t really moving forward; platforms like Facebook and Twitter are actually taking retrograde action into behavior that is more like forums (Hashtags, Groups, and Fan Pages).

There IS a Wrong Way to Use Social Media

Second, there is a wrong way to use every platform. Reddit has different etiquette than Digg, Facebook has different etiquette than Myspace, and every platform has a different group that are their power users. The background and important issue for the power user group creates a clear set of negative actions on the platform; Dan Zarrella just shared why you don’t bash Twitter on Facebook.

What Works for One May Not Work for Another

This is a truism. Every time you use a truism to make an argument Socrates shoots a kitten from a cannon.

Defining Experts

Experts are people who know considerably more than the general populace about a given subject. It doesn’t matter the number of hours (though 10,000 is a popular distinction), even after a year in a profession you will know more about the job than most people. There are countless people that have been working on the web who have been actively engaged in multiple social platforms, forums, or blogging reaching back for 5 to 10 years. There are thousands of people who understand marketing strategy, web analytics, blogging, etc. and also spend thousands of hours on multiple platforms and communities to understand the etiquette of the most popular sites. These people can easily describe the communities and their norms, in addition to offering other value to your web presence.

If you are worried about the expertise of the person you are talking to ask, “Yes, and how does that support your other work?” If they don’t have some way of leveraging the knowledge, they can’t really help you, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know the landscape in and out. A social media expert is not really useful unless they have some additional skill to connect to their knowledge.

</end rant>

I’ve seen SEO + PPC = SEM referenced a number of times this week. I don’t agree with that formula.

So, here are the terms the way I use them.

Search Engine Optimization = Actions taken to improve position within organic search placement
PPC = Pay Per Click
CPM = Cost Per Thousand
CPA = Cost Per Action/Acquisition
Paid Inclusion = Search placements that are bought but not attributed as sponsored
Paid Search = Paid placements in search engines (includes PPC, CPM and Paid Inclusion)
Social Media Optimization = Actions taken to improve results from social media platforms (paid or organic)

Search Engine Marketing = All actions taken to drive traffic, money or impressions through search platforms. This term is currently evolving through the debate over whether Facebook and Twitter should be classified as person to person search platforms.

Search Engine Optimization + Paid Search = Search Engine Marketing

Last week, Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends announced features that allow their respective users to measure certain aspects of Facebook.  My review of these announcements, so far, indicates a parallel product from these companies.

Omniture announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow customers to refine their Facebook ad campaigns. Utilizing their Search Tool “Search Center Plus”, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network.

Coremetrics announced that they have been able to partner with Facebook to utilize their Impression Attribution tool,  which can record something as passive as an ad impression on the Facebook site and, utilizing cookies,  tie it back to the customer activity on your website.  As well the data is set against your other ad campaigns so that you can compare and contrast.

Finally Webtrends’ announced (technically Webtrends’ announcement was the week prior to the others) that they have a way to “scrape” data from Facebook, Twitter etc, using an API and can tie the data against other ad campaign data.

Sounds a little redundant doesn’t it?  That’s because for the most part it is the same thing.  The key here is that Facebook has finally opened itself up to these companies to allow the respective API code into their system.  My understanding is that this API has been working for Twitter measurement for some time now.  The ability to do the same type of tracking that you can tie into your main analytics program is a big step forward in Social Media measurement.

Its important that Facebook is allowing these partnerships.  It’s too bad that they didn’t make the announcement themselves.  Not that Web Analytics needs validation from social media (I’d say Web Analytics is more commonly accepted as a company need than social media in most businesses today, but that might not be the case tomorrow!)  It is important that all three companies have announced a product that will help with social media measurement and that the product is fairly similar.

I’m interested to know how analysts will use these tools to analyze their respective clients’ social media engagement.  These announcements show that social media tracking is an important piece of web analytics and should be an important piece of your social media campaign.  I’m glad that the big boys in the web analytics world are taking social media metrics seriously.  My only concern is that the analysis stops here.

Engagement is only once piece of social media measurement but it is a big piece and right now seems to be the most tangible aspect of SM tracking.

My hope is to follow up to this article with a side by side comparison of the Social Media dashboard / report for each vendor’s system.

Would love to hear from anyone utilizing any of these three companies’ social media tracking tools on what you like and don’t like about the tool.

Editors Note: We are taking votes on what our next book should be about. Please give us your opinion.

In November we ran a survey to better answer the question how does gender affect compensation in social media jobs. After over 600 responses we compiled 460 responses from US, UK and Canada. We corrected for currency and separated out the largest group (25% of time spent in social).

Women spend more on social media projects.

More than a quarter of women responded that they spend between half and three-quarters of their time in Social while only just slightly more than 20% of men spend are in that range.

Most frequently position: Manager with 5+ years experience and 25% of time in Social projects.

Female managers are 50% more likely to have blogging among their duties than their male counterparts; however male managers are 2x more likely to have web design as part of their duties, albeit a rare occurrence.

Across all org levels/positions, women are 46% more likely to have blogging among their duties; women are also 30% less likely to be in roles that include web design or web development when they are involved in Social.

Higher floor, but lower ceiling

Women who have Social as a part of their work have a tighter pay range than men (from $35k to $115k). While women are don’t seem to reach as high in salary they do make up more of the population in high pay range. After 5-years experience 62% of women of women are making $75,000 or more; only 41% of their male counterparts make it that far.

Men make up both outliers groups extending up to $200k and down below $20k; men are more frequently on the higher end of pay scale (15% in $115k-$200k) while only 4% of women reach up into that range. Just below 10% of men report their pay between $15k and $35k.

Women have great opportunity in Social Media

At five years of experience women are 50% more likely than men to be making over $75,000 and none of our female respondents are making less than $35,000 by 5-years of experience. On the other hand, men are more likely to be making under $35,000 than they are to be making over $140,000 by the same experience level.

DOWNLOAD the survey data (ZIP File) Please Cite Us When You Use This Data

Special thanks to Bridget Hughes for compiling the data and making the graphs.

credit: luc legay

Social media is supposed to be a conversation. How do you make a conversation tangible with standard measurements? We would liken it to the term “engagement,” which defines how deep a visitor was on a site regardless of purchase. Typically engagement is measured by looking at several metrics. We can do the same thing for measuring your conversation rating. For our purposes engagement means the three-Rs: reference, response and retweet.

Ideally what you’d like to do is read, listen and watch every mention and interaction. However, without some sort of third party tool that will be next to impossible. There are several companies out there that can provide this sort of tracking. VMS is a well known and established company that has transitioned itself from a solely traditional media tracker to more robust tracking than anything you will need starting off. However, if you want to dive in head first, you should look at their software. An alternative would be a newer and lesser-known company called StatsIT. They offer a social media dashboard that is pretty compelling. Finally, Coremetrics, Omniture and Google Analytics all offer some solutions that are integrated with their existing software, however these solutions are all things that you can design yourself. You can build a Twitter API that will scrape any mention of your brand terms and will send the data to your database or analytics provider of choice. RowFeeder offers a service that populates a real time spreadsheet of your keyword (tell them Carlos sent you).

You’ll need to start with the metrics that you think are important to you. You could go as basic as appending marketing links to the tweets with URL’s and then measuring clicks, visitors, shoppers, and orders for each link. However, you can only measure your online statistics this way. The metrics you might be more concerned with, or rather will be more successful at utilizing immediately are the statistics that you can glean from Twitter itself. Our metrics are intended to save you the time and cost of a developer in the short run and help you improve your engagement immediately.

Before jumping into the metrics we recommend, there are some points you should keep in mind. You should take a holistic and a detailed approach to each of these metrics. What this means is that you should have a top level mark for all of your social media, then a secondary level for each individual account and then you should consider grouping these by brand term, category, or region. Finally, you should be able to dive into each account and break down your measurement by individual data line.

Several metrics that you could use are the following:

1. Sentiment
2. Reach
3. Experience Rating
4. Quality Score

Sentiment

As mentioned above, the search mechanism can be used to gauge how people feel about your brand. However, this is a fairly nebulous measurement and is not entirely precise. A live person looking through the tweets best determines sentiment, but Twitter Search can do a rudimentary filtering. Filter out invalid (non-actionable) tweets and if possible move them to the more appropriate bucket. We suggest that you establish a plan for responding to both positive and negative sentiment. You’ll also want to tailor these to your specific request; keep your eye out for tweets that have questions. Tweets that contain questions are the low hanging fruit for improving your sentiment values. Example of sentiment monitoring for Twitter: Twitrratr.com

Reach

Reach is the potential network of people who could be influenced by your social media. Think of a pyramid. Say your Twitter account has 100 followers, and in turn each of those followers has 100 followers of their own. Your reach would be 100 x 100, or a 10,000-person network (second-degree followers). You can then set up a query to show how many impressions per tweet you got and then divide that by your potential reach to determine a benchmark for success.

If you are doing a good job engaging your followers you should see a growing reach value. Once you have a large following (more than a 1,000 followers) you should consider refining your reach to only the people that have directly engaged in the recent past. Twitter will catalog either 9-days or 100-pages of tweets–which ever comes first. Assume that your real reach is roughly the value based on the people who engage (reference, reply or retweet) in a 24-hour period. So, if you generally have 100 users engage in a day either an expansion of breadth (engagement number) or depth (second-degree followers) should be considered a success.

The reason that reach should be considered with breadth in mind as you grow is because Twitter as a channel has a high loss rate. Only about 40 percent of Twitter users are still active after one month of sign-up. This doesn’t mean that no one comes back. If you have a large following reach is best measured by activity—not raw numbers.

Experience Rating

Experience rating is how you compare specific users based on the influence and quality of their interaction with your brand or account. So if @jhandy says that he likes your product but he only has a following of 10 and has never made a comment before, his rating would likely be 1. However if @welch says that he likes your product and he has a following of 10,000 and has made 100 comments on your product, he would likely have a rating of 100. You can aggregate your RT’s and mentions and then base them on the average rating to determine whether what is being mentioned is really impacting anything. If you find that your growth is slowing your should consider engaging your middle to high experience rated followers.

Quality Score

Finally, quality score is used to measure the number of mentions or comments you receive on your tweet. If you have one tweet and get 30 responses then you’d have a 30:1 ratio. You should be looking at your quality score on the small level of individual tweets and on the larger level of total engagement for the day versus total tweets for the day.

There will be a point where your followers and reach will slow. This is the time that quality score will be of particular interest. If you do not have a high quality score when your growth slows you should be investing in improving your engagement with your mid-rated users.

These are just some of the methods that you can use to measure your social media conversations and engagement. Creating your performance indicators will vary based on your goals and particular vertical.

Been trying to get a post up all day and not liking what I’ve written.  So I’ll say this: Who Dat Gonna Beat Dem Saints on Sunday?  Not the Colts.  Maybe Peyton Manning’s commercials.  However more than likely, I hope that Social Media has a big win on Sunday.  Many major advertiser have opted to invest in Social Media campaigns that aren’t necessarily taking place on this Sunday, but in general the money that might have gone to pay for a 30 second TV spot is now going toward brand awareness in a different aspect and social media in general.  For example, most of you have heard about Pepsi devoting it’s former Superbowl budget to it’s Project Refresh and increasing the social aspect of it’s brand.  It’s using Social media to advertise the fact that Pepsi is not entirely about getting every dollar out of you to put into their pockets but instead has a significant social awareness policy that they’d like you to know about.

The questions I have are these: will the companies that have been in Superbowl commercials in the past be missed?  Will the audience continue the viral campaign that’s out there about the fact that these companies are not spending money on the commercial and instead trying a different approach?  Will these companies feel any negative effect by NOT advertising during the Superbowl?  Will they focus on a social media campaign during the Superbowl and will it be effective? What will YOU do on Super Sunday?  Will you browse Twitter and Facebook during the game?  Will you see if there’s any social activity during a commercial break?  Will you tweet or update your status during the game?  Will you check in on Foursquare prior to arriving at your party or bar?  Will brands engage you after the Superbowl with specific reference to the game or to commercials?

On the company/brand aspect, I think an effective strategy would have been to engage your Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the weeks leading up to the Superbowl to either have a ‘sign up for texts during the Superbowl to win something” or follow us and look for tweets during the commercial break for a special announcement.  This could be a huge win for a company and more so than paying for a commercial slot.  If you can take the eyes of the customer off the tv for 10 seconds, you steal the advertising away from whoever paid for a commercial?  You can’t do that if you pay for a commercial yourself, you only compete to be the most memorable commercial of the Superbowl.  I also think if you utilized something like “tweet to predict the quarterly and half time scores for a chance to win xx” could be a good way to engage your followers.  Maybe bars could have utilized Foursquare to have the “mayor” host a private party at their bar?

I’m sure the talking head of these companies have their strategies in place already.  I definitely think it will be hard to utilize an effective social campaign during the Superbowl without paying for some advertising space.  The NBA All star game and the finals tried to do some social media advertising campaigns with companies, but I don’t know if they were very effective. 

As an end user, I do think that Twitter will be a great forum for me to chat back and forth about the game, maybe broadcast stuff like, “Next play – 40 yard screen pass to Reggie, callin it now!”  It’s really no different than sending a text during the game, which I’ve done in years past, except it could be more effective since I can send the tweet out to a larger audience.  Had a brand engaged me prior to the Superbowl I might have opened Ubertwitter duringa commerical break and perused to see what said brand had to say about the game or whatever their shpiel was.  I don’t really follow a lot of brands though, so I probably won’t do this.  I probably will check in on Foursquare and I’ll probably become the mayor of my friends house since I don’t think he’s ever checked in on Foursquare at his house.  Sweet, I’ll finally be a mayor!

What are your thoughts on the Social Superbowl?  Is this a big challenge this weekend, or does it really not matter and Monday will be like any other Monday for Brands and their social media strategies?

Jon Mendez wrote and interesting article about social media check in sites.

As Natasha says, the check-in links syndicated through social media verge on unclickable. The reason is rather simple. The landing pages provide no value to the referrer. Yet, the landing page is the spot where the triangulation of goals must align. The whole value chain for this product converges at the landing page.

After reading the article Jeff and I feel there is something that is a bit off about Jon’s assessment. I’m going to use the same graphic that Jon uses to illustrate the points.

1) Immediately reiterates that you are in the correct place. It also extends information by including the address and phone number.

2) The amount of check-ins and visitors indicate whether the location is popular amongst the community members. Is the Mayorship attainable? Is this a big pond or a small pond?

3) Who has been here is a quick thumbnail of whether your friends visit the establishment.

4) Map based services allow you to have a pictorial understanding of location; not everyone understands location by street address (especially if it is in a city you don’t live).

5) When you are logged into this service you can save, or add, tips for your visit to the location.

6) Tagging is pandemic on the Internet. Is it useful? In this case you can game the system to find other related business that you can take a more easily claimed Mayorship.

At the bottom line the web face of a social check in site is not the main purpose, or main channel, for the service. The value comes from support actions:

• Expansion of and increased efficiency of logging tips you want to add
• More efficient means of connecting to people you know based on location rather than media connection
• Reducing time constraints on interacting with the platform
• Tracking game element of social check in

I agree with Jon; there are opportunities to be leveraged that many venues don’t act on. However, comparing a support platform for a MOBILE app to a sales landing page is like comparing an orange to a kayak. If you don’t play Foursquare, as in engage the game elements, the web interface isn’t going to be valuable. It is the same reason why the fantasy football at ESPN doesn’t confer value to me–I don’t actually have a connection point to game.