"Do I Need To Measure Digg, RSS, Twitter and Second Life? And How Do I Do It?"

Ask Dr. Paine

Four Quick Questions on Measuring Social Media:
Digg, RSS, Twitter and Second Life

Q: How do I measure Digg and other aggregators?

A: The reality is that Digg can provide a temporary blip in the number of visits to your site, and in your popularity and possibly your ranking. This is important if you are running your own blog. For corporations, you need to monitor how many people are "digging" your bad news, but in terms of good news it will have less impact.

Q: How do I measure RSS feeds?

A: At the moment there is no accurate method to count the number of subscribers to your RSS feeds. At some point someone will come along and figure it out, but for now your best alternative is to add a question about your RSS feeds into your next customer survey.

Q: Do I need to pay attention to Twitter?

A: It's a way to count "friends," but will it ever have any impact on brands? Hard to tell. I'd say, for now anyway, spend your time on things that matter.

Q: Do I need an island in Second Life?

A: If you have something really interesting to put on it, yes. If you were Coos County, New Hampshire, for instance, and wanted a way to show people what things were like way up there without having them make the 3-hour trip from Boson, then yes. (Coos County is a client of KDPaine & Partners, see the blog we've helped them put together, Coos Conversations.) If you're selling just concepts (without strong visuals), then no.

Comments

[Kevin Dugan]

Katie - Feedburner does a good job of giving you a rough guess at number of subscribers. I know they count Bloglines, Feedburner and Google at the least. That said, is there one exhaustive source? Not sure.

RSS is another great way to help visitors to consume your hard-earned content. Much in the way news sites allows visitors to create a print version or forward the story as a link in an email to someone, RSS is one more option.