The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Your Guide to Survival in the World of the Social Web

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR
by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge
ISBN-13 978-0-13-715069-4
Published by FT Press

Reviewed by Katie Delahaye Paine

I'm a big believer in the "Meant To Be" factor, a.k.a. synchronicity, and the law of getting what you need when you need it. If ever an industry needed a book, it's the public relations industry, and it's this book. (See The Paine of Measurement, also in this issue.) Read more about the book at Brian Solis' PR 2.0 blog.

Solis and Breakenridge begin by laying out all the problems with PR in the new age of social media, and they explain why the old rules no longer work. They make some great arguments as to why the reputation of PR is in serious trouble and why there's some question as to whether it will survive as a profession at all.

But beyond that gloom and doom is where Putting the Public Back in Public Relations really shines. It's the GPS that PR people need to guide them out of the weeds and wilderness.

This book tells you how to build relationships, not just accumulate eyeballs. It talks about how to do blogging right and how to "release" news into this new environment. It covers video news releases, corporate blogging, and how to participate in social networks.

Best of all, it provides some great "rules for engagement" for the PR people who are confused by all this new media. These rules will be invaluable to anyone trying to navigate their way through the social media maze. They include:

• How to target people in social media,
• Rules for breaking news,
• 10 principles for ethical contact, and
• 9 rules of engagement.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am quoted in the chapter on measurement. I strongly agree with Solis and Breakenridge's recommendations on how to measure social media, and I can't help but congratulate them for devoting 20 pages to metrics. It's good that they also get into the whole web analytics discussion. Knowledge of this tricky field is a requirement for PR people in the new world, but too often overlooked or avoided.

So, for anyone just taking the plunge into the world of the social web and PR, this is the lifesaver you need to survive.

What's Important About Social Media Is What Happens Because Of It

 

It's time to take the "media" out of social media.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

If you're from New England, you know the expression, "Light dawns over Marblehead." Marblehead being a quaint little New England seacoast village, and "marble head" being a reference to someone's incredibly thick skull. It roughly translates into "Duh!"

Which is what happened to me while sitting through the umpteenth discussion about measuring social media at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in DC last week. Don't get me wrong, it was a great conference. There were dozens of stories and case studies on how the use of social media is changing government -- making it more open and transparent, facilitating brainstorming and collaboration, speeding up response time, and generally making it easier to deal with bureaucracy.

And that's when light really did dawn over this marble head: As long as we call it social media, we want to measure it the way we do all other media -- with hits, or impressions, or column inches, or AVEs, or eyeballs, or GRP, or some kind of old-fashioned metric.

Why do we think an old-fashioned metric is the right way to measure a very newfangled thing?

Here's the rub: Social media isn't really a medium. OK, yeah, it's a communication medium. But, for measurement purposes, what's really important about it is what happens because of it. It's a way of doing business. It's crowd sourcing, it's opening up the kimono and getting everyone to throw ideas around.

So... it's time to take the "media" out of social media.

75 years ago there were probably people trying to measure the effectiveness of the telephone by counting how many people were on your party line. At some point, the telephone had proven its ROI often enough that CEOs stopped questioning its value. It became a workgroup tool, a process improvement tool, a must-have-to-do-business tool. And the telephone measurement industry went the way of the buggy whip and corset stay companies.

That's what I predict will happen for at least part of social media. Sooner or later, monitoring and listening to what your customers have to say will be as obviously valuable as picking up the telephone or asking customers what they think. No one has to justify listening to customers any more. So if we just call it "listening" and not "measurement," chances are everyone will adopt it.

But more to the point, the metrics that we need to use to measure the effectiveness of social media are totally different from anything that PR or marketing folks are familiar with.

We need to be working closely with the data geeks and the market research folks and measure the things that happen faster and better because of social networking:

• process improvement,
• time to market,
• the number of new product ideas,
• the number of suggestions,
• the length of time it takes to find a solution to a problem,
• the efficiency with which a product is launched,
• the level of social capital,
• the churn rates amongst your customers and/or employees,
• the cost of recruitment,
• the turnover rate among top management...

...you get the idea. It's the change to our business habits and efficiency that we really should be measuring. Not how idiots track success.

Five Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed

*

Twitter Search, Social Mention, Twendz, Twitter Sentiment, and Twitrratr

by Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?" The sentiment analysis tools in the article on this page look specifically at the tone of individual tweets, while the Twitter analysis tools of the other article rank a person's entire Twitter profile in terms of popularity and engagement.

There is big, big, big demand for the ability to measure sentiment in social media. Sentiment -- also called "tone," and typically rated as positive, negative or neutral -- is shorthand for what the world thinks about something. And everyone, from junior high kids ("Do they like me or not?") to billion-dollar corporations ("Do they like our latest product?"), wants to know what the world thinks of them.

So, now that Twitter rules the social media roost, it would be very, very handy to have an accurate sentiment analysis tool that could quickly and easily gauge the tone of Twitter conversations.

When my company, KDPaine & Partners, wants to do very accurate measurement of Twitter, we have to use human readers. It's the only way to really understand the language. But, to have human eyes read and rate every tweet often takes a lot of time and money. For fast and free measurement, there are automated online sentiment analysis tools, five of which I review below. They, however, have their own set of problems.

Yeah, right. I got your total accuracy right here!

For a computer to determine sentiment for traditional print media is difficult enough. But when you try to get a computer to understand and interpret social media, it gets infinitely harder.

Social media, Twitter especially, is a very casual format, one that lends itself to inside jokes, symbols, emoticons, abbreviations, and jargon. Oh, and don't forget about sarcasm; what might appear positive might really be negative, and vice versa. Add to that the fact that Twitter only allows 140 characters (fewer characters and words makes it more difficult to assess tone) and errors in automated analysis go way up. So we may never attain total accuracy in measuring sentiment for Twitter. (Even with human readers you often don't get 100% accuracy.)

Most automated Twitter sentiment analyzers are very up front about the difficulty of what they are trying to do, and that they will be changing how they do it in the future. Before we get to the reviews, let's think about...

The Ideal Twitter Sentiment Tool

To my way of thinking, and for the type of work we typically do at KDPaine & Partners, the perfect Twitter sentiment analysis tool would include the following features:

• The ability to search by any word, abbreviation, symbol, or emoticon that would ever occur in a tweet.
• Advanced search features, including by date, by user, by hashtag, and by tone.
• The ability to distinguish between posts from a person/company, posts to a person/company, and posts referencing a person/company.
• Results charts with colors that distinguish between different sentiments.
• A dashboard with quick totals for each tone type, as well as overall numbers/percentages.
• The ability to search over long periods of time.
• Instant charts to show trends and relevant occurrences.
• At least 80% accuracy. 90% - 95% would be better.
• Real time updates.
• It should be free. (That's not too much to ask, is it?)

None of the tools reviewed below come even close to meeting this wish list. But some are on the right track. Here they are:

Twitter Search

Twitter's own Twitter Search sentiment option does not use words to gauge message tone, rather, it is limited to only those tweets that include certain characters used to symbolize mood, e.g., :) or :( or :D or :P. For this reason, when you use Twitter Search to search any given topic, you may find only one or two results showing positive or negative tone, because they are the only Tweets that used the above symbols.

On the day I used Twitter Search to run a sentiment search on #unfollowdiddy, it was the most popular topic of the day, with 2629 tweets (according to #hashtags.org.) But my search brought up only a single tweet, which Twitter Search mistakenly rated as positive:

Knot2serious: @TheTZA Glad to see you doing the #unfollowdiddy thing too! :D He really has a crappy ego & no talent. He's all hype. So, how are you? :) :P

The eye of the beholder: The above tweet exemplifies a major problem with sentiment search: Sentiment is many times a matter of perspective. Most sentiment analyses grade an item's sentiment based on the overall tone of the message and not necessarily the sentiment towards the subject of the message. For example, the above tweet has three positive sentiment symbols, yet the words make it clear that the tweet is actually extremely negative towards P. Diddy. To be fair to Twitter Search, all the tools reviewed here suffer from the same difficulty.

(#unfollowdiddy was a controversial effort to encourage people to stop following P. Diddy on Twitter. Each post on the subject usually included a reason why people should unfollow him. Taken from P. Diddy's perspective, most of those posts would be considered negative. Taken from the perspective of the person who started #unfollowdiddy, most of the posts attacking P. Diddy would be considered positive.)

Conclusion: Pretty much useless. If you are trying to gauge the overall tone of a topic or Twitter user, then Twitter Search is not the tool to use. Symbols should be part of a sentiment search, but they shouldn't be the only part. Twitter Search is sentiment search in its infancy, at best: It's a fun Twitter toy people can use if they want to see how many happy or unhappy faces were used in a tweet.

Social Mention

Social Mention, a social media search platform, assigns a tone/sentiment to every tweet: Positive, neutral, or negative, distinguished on their charts by color (green, gray, red). They also provide a sentiment ratio designed to give you an overall feel for the tone of a given topic. Social Mention offers an exhaustive breakdown of information by top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and top sources beyond Twitter. Their breakdown column lets you sort by sentiment as well, allowing you to see all the positive, neutral, or negative tweets grouped together.

According to Social Mention's creator, Jon Cianciullo, they, "use textual analysis, symbols, emoticons, and a few other things," to measure tweet sentiment. "We developed a method to achieve the highest level of accuracy that was reasonable to implement. We based it on some great open source projects and designed it specifically for the type of media we process. We leverage word, symbol, and phrase analysis to yield a ratio which is then used to grade the overall sentiment."

I tweeted back and forth a little bit with him, and he told me candidly that sentiment analysis is extremely difficult. Their research has found Social Mention's sentiment analysis to be roughly 60% - 80% accurate. He also said that they are developing a new Social Mention product which will provide more analysis, saved searches, and reporting.

Based on a #unfollowdiddy analysis using Social Mention, those numbers seem to be accurate. Social Mention's Sentiment Ratio was listed as 2:1, twice as much positive as negative. Of course it's all a matter of perspective as I noted above, (for Twitter Search), and as demonstrated by the following examples:

• Mistakenly listed as having positive sentiment:
  • 1. @jamalahmad lol yeah the #unfollowdiddy is getting pretty old and quite mean, why cant they just not follow him like us?
  • 2. #unfollowdiddy cuz it's his fault that the Palm Pre ain't out in stores yet, they had to put a Let's Go button on it, BOOO, lol...
• Mistakenly listed as having negative sentiment:
  • 1. got lots done...time to relax but I won't #UnFollowDiddy!! Go diddy go!
  • 2. #unfollowdiddy or #followdiddy.. oh shit damn he so gooood lol

Conclusion: Moderately useful. If 60-80% accuracy is close enough, then Social Mention is a tool you can use. It's the best overall among the five reviewed here.

Twendz (beta)

The Twendz site, a project of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, is an in-the-works-project entirely devoted to measuring sentiment in Twitter conversations. It uses a combination of keywords and symbols to compare and cross reference against a dictionary to make an educated guess on the sentiment of the posts. It measures tweets as positive, neutral or negative. Beyond that it breaks down sentiment by topic and then by reoccurring words found in the tweets. Twendz lets you highlight all tweets by individual tone type as well.

Twendz is really geared toward current topics. When a search term is entered, it pulls the 70 most recent tweets with that term, and then updates the results as newer tweets on that subject come in. There is currently no way to look at tweets prior to the first 70 they pull up. My impression is that Twendz is somewhat less accurate than Social Mention.

Conclusion: May be useful, depending on your needs. If you are only interested in the most recent 70 tweets, great. If you want to do any history at all, this one can't do it.

Twitter Sentiment

Twitter Sentiment, also entirely devoted to measuring sentiment in Twitter conversations, is, as it says, "strictly a school project." Like many of the other sites it ranks sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative (distinguished by color – green, white, red). It's probably the simplest looking of the five sites reviewed here.

It offers a feature that allows you to change the sentiment results if you think they aren't correct and submit your feedback. That doesn't mean that your edit becomes permanent, but I like the idea.

The bad news -- really bad news -- is that no matter what topic you search, Twitter Sentiment only pulls up one page of results: If you click the "next page" button, it starts your search over. So your results are limited to about 17 or so tweets. With such a small sample, it's hard to determine how accurate Twitter Sentiment is. The good news is that the site's "submit feedback" button works. So you can tell them the "next page" button doesn't work. So maybe they'll fix it.

Conclusion: Very limited usefulness. For a school project, it probably gets a A. But in the real world, it's only useful if you are only interested in the most recent 15-20 tweets. I'd use Twendz before I'd use this one.

Twitrratr

Twitrratr is another site devoted to tracking sentiment on Twitter. It cross-references your search term against a dictionary of positive and negative keywords. It offers a clean, polished dashboard that shows the total number of tweets containing your search term and how many were positive, neutral, or negative. The individual tweets are then shown in corresponding columns, with the category-triggering words highlighted.

At the bottom of the page are links showing exactly which words and symbols count as positive and which words and symbols count as negative. Twitrratr shows 174 positive words, abbreviations, and symbols, and 185 negative words, abbreviations, and symbols. Certainly not an exhaustive search and a lot of room for contextual error, but at least you know what you're dealing with. My impression is that there were not enough tweets categorized negative, and that Twitrratr is less accurate than Twendz.

At the top of the page they show the number of all the posts, but I couldn't find any way to actually see any of the other posts beyond the results that appear on the first page. Under their About link they make it quite clear that this site is a Startup Weekend project, and a work in progress. At least they are aware of their limitations and freely admit it.

Conclusion: Only moderately useful. Smooth layout, and the total numbers are nice, but still limited by lack of history. I'd use Social Mention rather than Twitrratr. A bit limited in concept right now, but future potential to watch for.

And finally...

The current efforts to track sentiment through a machine are a great beginning and, even for the tools I ranked poorly, what they've accomplished thus far is quite impressive. The best of the group is Social Mention, but it's certainly not accurate enough for many purposes.

The big picture here is that, although there is demand for free automated sentiment search, the technology to pull it off isn't quite there, at least not yet. What it comes down to is: What percentage of accuracy are we willing to live with?

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?"

Chris Near is Director of Research for KDPaine & Partners. Chris recently graduated with his master's in communications and currently devotes most of his time to measuring PR and developing social media methodologies. That is, of course, when he's not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie, or chasing around his tireless two year-old son, Brendan.

* Thanks for the icon, SmashingMagazine

 

Seven Steps to Measurable Social Media Success

 

How to get started in social media --
and how to know if it's working for you.

This article is a summary of one of Katie Delahaye Paine's most popular presentations. If you'd rather just watch the PowerPoint slide show, here it is:

7 steps to measurable success in social media

View more OpenOffice presentations from kdpaine.

Step #1: Conquer your fears

• Typical fear: "I'm afraid of what I'll hear!"
--How to conquer it: Remember that, if you're deaf to the conversation, your enemies will still hear it. There is a lot of talking going on out there, you might as well listen in.

• Typical fear:"The lawyers won't let me!"
--How to conquer it: It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. Try it, prove that it works, and you'll trump the lawyers every time.

• Typical fear: "I'm afraid of losing control!"
--How to conquer it: Remember that you never had control, anyway. You just sometimes thought you did.

• Typical fear: "I don't have anything to say!"
--How to conquer it: Don't talk, listen. And learn.

Step #2: Set clear measurable objectives

Goals drive metrics, and metrics drive results. So figure out what problem(s) you need to solve, and those goals will determine your metrics:

If your goal is improving reputation or relationships with your audiences, then measure:

• relationship scores
• recommendations
• positioning
• engagement

If your goal is sales, then measure:

• engagement index
• cost per customer acquisition
• web analytics
• sales leads
• marketing mix modeling

Remember: You can't manage what you can't measure, so set measurable goals. And if, for some reason, social media is not going to add value to your program, just don't do it.

Step #3: Investigate your stakeholders: Who, What, Where?

Should you blog, or Twitter, or go on Facebook, or what? Before you can decide, you must find out about your customers or audience by asking them.

• What's important to them?
• Where do they go for information?
• What do you want them to know?

Step #4: Start listening

Search for relevant topics; what are people talking about that is important to you? Monitor those topics with:

• www.socialmention.com
• Google Alerts
• Join Twitter, then search Twitter and use TweetDeck.

Step #5: Take the plunge

Learn about social media by using it yourself:

• Join Facebook and find family and friends.
• Join Twitter and start following people important to you or your organization.
• Join Linked-In and find a job.
• Join Flickr and share photos and images.
• Join YouTube and podcast.
• Use Ping.fm, a simple and free service for updating social networks.

Step #6: Obey the rules

Do:

• Be interesting
• Share things that excite you
• Ask advice
• Join the conversation
• Comment on blogs
• Reply to Twitter

Don't:

• Talk about boring stuff
• Scream about your product
• Be a narcissist
• TWI (Twitter While Intoxicated)

Step #7: Measure success

These measurement tools are powerful, but most any marketing person can use them (no IT staff required).

• To measure web traffic, use Google Analytics. It's free and easy to use.
• To measure your incoming marketing (search) effectiveness, use Hubspot. Get started with their free Website Grader.
• Measure your relationships with online surveys at SurveyMonkey.

Finally, learn more by reading lots of blogs, especially those by these social media experts:

• David Meerman Scott
• Shel Israel
• Joseph Jaffe
• Brian Solis

How Do You Blush in Social Media?

 So I'm reading this intriguing article in the NY Times this morning ("Hold Your Head Up, A Blush Just shows You Care") about how important blushing is in human social interactions: "...reddening cheeks soften others’ judgments of bad or clumsy behavior, and help to strengthen social bonds rather than strain them." And: "Blushing seemed to accelerate the formation of a possible friendship rather than delay it."

And then I started thinking about social media: maybe a blush would be a useful thing. I know there are emoticons used to indicate minor embarrassment, or as an apology for a possible foot-in-mouth situation.  But a blush is involuntary, right? Part of its effectiveness is that it is not fake-able. So doesn't it defeat the effectiveness of a blush if you indicate it on purpose?

And, of course,  many people who blush do not enjoy that it happens to them. So a blush that you apply to yourself, on purpose, cannot really be a blush. I'm thinking a blush is the result of an interaction, rather than a one way thing. Maybe it takes two or more to blush. How does that work in social media? -- Bill Paarlberg

15 Ideas for Low-Cost Social Media

Social Media Brainstorm

KDPaine & Partners advises MADD on starting conversations without breaking the bank.

by Erica Steller, KDPaine & Partners Non-Profit Team Leader

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a longtime KDPaine & Partners client, and maintains conscientious measurement of its PR. Misty Moyse, MADD's Director of Media Relations, has been named our Measurement Maven of the Month.

The Problem: MADD wants to make greater use of social media, and, as an organization with active and involved stakeholders, MADD is ideally suited to do so. However, as a non-profit in parlous economic times, MADD also faces some very tight budgets.

The Solution: KDPaine & Partners' Non-Profit Team, lead by Erica Steller, sat down to generate some ideas that would allow MADD to get started in social media at minimal cost. Here they are:

1. Listen, learn and engage. Monitor blogs, understand their influence, and react when necessary.

2. Work with local police to set up a "drunk spotting" Twitter account to identify drunk, dangerous drivers.

3. Work with local police to set up a "checkpoint spotting" Twitter system to spread the word about driver checkpoints. (The police like to have more people know about checkpoints, because it makes them drive more carefully.)

4. Create an online event on Facebook to promote the next fundraising or victim-support program.

5. Create victim podcasts to spread the word about your mission and the need for your services.

6. Let your audience be your voice: Blog, Tweet, and Facebook your messages, and let your audience re-post and link to them in their own social media conversations.

7. Follow the numbers with Google Analytics to see what works. Create unique URLs and share them in your posts, tweets, etc. to track the direct impact of posts and topics.

8. Piss people off and then show them why you are right. (Carefully!) The highest levels of engagement stem from things that people are very passionate about. Carefully monitored debates can really drive engagement and showcase your point of view on a topic.

9. Connect with donors through sites like Facebook. Someone made a donation on your Facebook page, now what? Make them feel good and give them a reason to do it again.

10. Don't wait to start the conversation until the next big campaign. Say "Hello!" now and keep in touch periodically to keep communication open and to build trust and relationships.

11. Only utilize social media avenues that you can honestly commit too. An inactive Facebook page will lose fans, a quiet Twitter account will get buried, and people will stop reading a blog that never gets updated.

12. Tailor your social media efforts to a platform's demographic. MySpace is a great place for underage drinking stuff, LinkedIn might work for volunteers, and Facebook might be better for donors.

13. Avoid overloading your audience by focusing on one goal and sticking to it. If you want to raise funds, make that point. If you want to get volunteers, make that point.

14. Tailor your social media efforts to your audiences' pocket books. The younger demographic who are more "in-tune" with social media are more likely to give smaller donations than the wealthy benefactors traditional media hits up.

14. Educate yourself. Read John Haydon's 22 Ways A Blog Can Rock Your Non-Profit’s Social Media Campaign and follow Beth Kanter's blog. Follow a few non-profit and PR people on Twitter.

15. Don't get confused by all the options. Take a deep breath, realize you can't do it all, and pick one or two things on the list to get started.

Erica Steller is a Senior Account Executive and Non-Profit Team Leader at KDPaine & Partners, LLC.

 

An Open Letter to President-Elect Barack Obama

The Paine of Measurement

Use social media, not polls.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

There's a lot of talk these days about what you should do with all those millions of contact names you've captured in the last two years -- those volunteers, donors and voters that helped you earn your place in history.

As a researcher, I have a novel thought: Listen to them. Hear their ideas and use them to help solve the nation's problems. If Dell can do it with their Ideastorm, why can't you create a national Ideastorm? You used social media to excellent effect in your campaign, so why not use social media to connect people to solve society's problems?

Put all those folks that voted for health care as their number one priority on a giant, virtual brainstorming committee to come up with the answers. Connect all the folks like me that are most concerned with global warming, and get us to commit to reducing our carbon footprint by 25%. I'm guessing there are more than a few economists on your list somewhere, so use them to solve the bailout issues.

I love it that you are limiting the roles lobbyists play in your new administration, and I laugh at those who complain that you are locking out their expertise. Who needs influence peddlers and lobbyists? You've got millions of smart people with good ideas that you can tap into for free.

The power of this idea came home to me yesterday as I was having breakfast with David Moore, author of The Opinion Makers.

(In the interests of transparency, David is one of my all-time favorite people. He's single-handedly taken on the political polling industry, and just might be winning. Remember all those stories about how polls may be flawed because they don't include cell-phone only households and don't determine the extent to which people haven't made up their minds? That's David's influence.)

So we're talking about the future of polling and it hit me: The millions of volunteers and donors that you have brought into the political process could be a giant focus group on what people are thinking.

Sure, there is bias in the sample, but it's no more biased than the leading introductory statements that pollsters are asking these days. And yes, you could debate that a self-selected sample of 10 million isn't as accurate as a poll. But if your polls aren't reaching cell-phone only households, and your response rate is down around 2%, how reliable is your data anyway?

The point is that the polling system, which is supposed to inform politicians about the will of the people, is broken. It's continuously abused by corporations, lobbying organizations, and agenda-setting NGOs, who have warped the process badly with their biased questions, unreliable sampling, and conflicting results. Polls are now no more a reflection of the nation's opinion than Sarah Palin is a reflection of a the typical American working mom.

So my humble suggestion is that you replace them with something more 21st century. Tap into the collective expertise of 10 million people, the wisdom of the crowd.

Sincerely,

The Measurement Summit, Part 2: Jim Macnamara

(See Part 1 of this series, on Shel Israel, here.)

IPR's annual Summit on Measurement has come to Portsmouth again, and I was lucky enough to be able to sit down over a couple beers for some great conversation with Jim Macnamara. He is a presenter at the Summit this year, also a professor at the University of Technology at Sydney, has been in the measurement business for 30 years, has written about a dozen books, is hard at work on his next, and is a regular contributor to The Measurement Standard.

Before we get to that, let me remind everyone what a great conference the Summit on Measurement is. Each year, a hundred or so of the smartest and most interesting people in public relations measurement and research get together for two or three days of exchanging ideas and eating lobster and meetings and drinking and learning about the state of measurement and how to do it better. I've been to every one of these conferences, (As I vaguely recall, I was doing the promo materials for it back when Katie Paine and The Delahaye Group started it about ten years ago.) and there are new things to learn and people to meet at every one of them. Go to it next year.

Back to Jim Macnamara. We discussed social media while engaging in a very effective and enjoyable form of it: over a couple pints at the pub. He thinks a lot about communication and how people do it, and he takes the really long view of human communication and the technology we do it with. He sees humans as naturally social communicators, and the recent media we know as "social media" is only our current effort to use technology to help us communicate. He uses the term "emergent media" to refer to the various social and other new forms of media and the changes, often unforeseen and unintentional, that they bring.

To talk with Jim is to conceptualize media as a growing, changing, mutating, hybridizing family, reforming itself as new technologies become available and are adopted, colonized and appropriated. I was used to thinking about social media as The Big Deal, but after a few minutes with Jim, I realized that people have always been using some kind of social media, and our current examples are just the latest, technology-enabled examples of something that is constantly evolving.

Jim delights in pointing out that media are sometimes designed with one use in mind, yet end up being employed for another, as we humans discover how we prefer to use the technology. Take the the cell phone, for instance, which is now most often used for texting rather than voice, for which it was invented. Or the Internet itself, which began at DARPA as a military tool.

And consider his take on the the vaunted mass media. He sees it as an aberration in the development of media, as a detour in the long and continuing history of human communication. Mass media has actually been around only a century, just a blip in the thousands of years of human communication. He says the era of mass, one-way media was created by the high cost of ownership, the restrictive technology required and government regulation. Mass media distribution was unavailable to most citizens. But humans would (mostly) rather engage in two-way communication (as they have always done) and so are now embracing the many new options of social media. Emergent social media offer ways back to traditional forms of communcation, like conversation and dialogue.

Jim does not claim to know what the future holds, but is sure that the media will continue to evolve to help humans do what they have always enjoyed and needed to do: to talk amongst themselves. -- Bill Paarlberg

The Measurement Summit, Part 1: Shel Israel

(See Part 2 of this series, on Jim Macnamara, here.)

Each year, in the day or two before IPR's annual Summit on Measurement, KDPaine & Partners hosts a User Group Meeting to help its clients do better dashboard measurement. The special guest this year was Shel Israel, blogger, social media expert, and co-author (with Robert Scoble) of Naked Conversations. I met the User Group crew at Katie's house, and we sat and talked over drinks and dinner. (Also present was Jim Macnamara, with whom I had a talk over some beers, but that's a different post.) Shel Israel is an interesting guy.

Shel is, of course, all about the conversation. He spoke some about the new book he is working on, "Twitterville," and waxed enthusiastic about the special way that Twitter allows people to communicate, and how this will become a valuable business tool. His premise, as I understand it, is that the brevity and immediacy of Twitter allow a special and valuable sort of communication. Whereas email and blog posts sometimes suffer from the formal demands of writing, Twitter allows and demands that people communicate on a somewhat different and -- in many cases -- more effective fashion. For more of what Shel thinks about Twitter, see his blog, especially here.

Another thing I noticed about Shel is that he is not just enthusiastic about social media, but he's optimistic, too. For him, it's not just that social media is the center of the universe, it's the center of a benevolent universe. As you probably know, Shel spends a lot of time interviewing people, and he's run into more than his share of difficult people and situations. (I guess that's probably one thing that makes interviews interesting.) But he's not the kind of guy who makes conversational hay out of unpleasantness; he'd rather focus on what's positive.

There was an excellent example last night when the conversation turned to politics. For most of us in this part of the world, the run-up to the coming US election has got us a bit run down, and many of us are only too happy to complain about this or that aspect of the candidates or the coverage. But not Shel. In fact, he not only predicts that social media will play an even bigger and more crucial role in coming elections, but he's excited about the potential for social media to radically change US politics for the better by saving a big part of all those millions of dollars now spent on campaigns. Pleasant enthusiasm about politics is the sign of a true optimist. --Bill Paarlberg

What is Social Bookmarking? Watch this Video

Social media newbies: Watch this video, "Social Bookmarking in Plain English," for a quick and succinct introduction to social bookmarking.