The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

How to Measure YouTube and Other Video Sharing Sites

"Evolution of Dance" is the most watched YouTube video ever.

Set up a simple YouTube measurement program, decide if particular videos are really problems, and prepare for the worst case scenario.

by Peter Kowalski

Quick: How many people have watched the most popular YouTube video? Now, how many people watched the last Superbowl?

If you answered 87 million for the first and 98 million for the second, then you probably already know that video is the most popular type of shared content in Consumer Generate Media outlets. And with video technology becoming simpler to use and bandwidth growing, we can expect huge video sharing growth in the future. So, if you are not measuring YouTube now, then you will be sooner or later.

Actually, YouTube is only the most popular of at least 40 or so video-sharing websites. You will want to check most of these to see if the content is relevant to your organization or products. And maybe you will want to monitor some of them. As a practical matter, however, if you keep an eye on YouTube, you've pretty much got the field covered. Here's how to get started.

Welcome to YouTube

If you are absolutely new to YouTube, then first just go there and look around and watch some videos. Be amazed at a few of them. Be amazed at the inanity of many of them. Notice that some of the videos have been viewed 30 million times, and some have been viewed 30 times. There is even a movie being made about the YouTube video "Battle at Kruger."

Do a few searches. Do a basic search for your name and your teenage daughter's name and the name of your ex. Take a look at the Channels page, and at the TestTube page. And if you want to really get to know the place, create an account and upload your own video. Here's a hot tip: If you are going to upload that video of you doing the Wild Chicken Dance at the company party, don't put your own name on it.

Why Would You Want To Measure YouTube?

Now let's get a little more complicated. There are three basic reasons why you would want to measure YouTube:

1. You want to measure other peoples's videos about you, and need to decide if you should really care about them.
2. You are thinking of making a video, and you want to know best practices.
3. You already made a video and you want to know if it achieved your objectives.

We will leave #2 above to a separate article. But in the meantime there are some resources on the Web that might help. Just google "How to make a good YouTube video."

Measuring Other People's Videos About You, and Should You Care About Them?

Your Five Minute YouTube Measurement Program
First off, here is the quick and easy way to stay on top of YouTube. Do a search for your company and product names every day or every week. If you come up with nothing, great: You can tell your boss there are no videos posted, and you are monitoring YouTube. For each video you do find, decide: "Would we approve this video, or would we not approve this video?" And so put all the videos into those two files. Now you can report on YouTube activity whenever you need to.

(Note that these searches will pick up all text in the headlines, descriptions and user tags [it doesn't search the actual video itself]. Knowing user tag behavior for your organization is key on YouTube and elsewhere for this reason.)

When Should You Get Excited about a Video?
If you find an number of videos that mention or concern your organization or product, then you will want to do a more careful analysis. Do you appear in the title, description, tag, or just in a very quick glimpse? What are the positive points? What are the negative points?

Thumbs Up? The videos that are favorable can often teach you something about your products or image that you didn't know. Keep track of them, and see below for techniques to examine them more closely.

Thumbs Down? The only ones to worry about are the negative ones, and even then, don't go getting all excited until you examine the situation carefully. How many people are actually watching the negative video(s)? Did the video(s) get low ratings and bad comments, or good ratings and lots of links? Maybe a negative video actually proved strong brand loyalty when viewers gave it negative comments.

You can deal with the problem videos on a case-by-case basis, and/or compare them to see if there is a pattern or a larger problem that needs to be addressed.

How to Survive the Worst Case Scenario
So, it comes to pass that there is a video out there that says strongly negative things about your product or company and lots of people are watching it, commenting on it and passing it on. What to do? First, recognize that you have a full blown crisis on your hands; any video that gets really strong response indicates a major problem that needs serious attention. Respond to the video as you would respond to any crisis: Monitor the press, get your replies together and get your messages out. Details depend on the situation. Maybe you do a response video, maybe you do a press release. But the good news is you have plenty of opportunity to learn what people's problems are and, by analyzing comments, to learn specific ways to fix them.

Indepth YouTube Measurement: Basic Metrics

If you find a number of videos about your products or organization, you may decide you want to examine them more closely. If so, here are the basic metrics that you want to collect for YouTube or any video site:

Most important:

• How many times was a video watched?
• How many times was it rated and what were the ratings?
• How many comments did it get?

Also record:

• How many times has it been favorited?
• How many times has it been embedded?
• How many times has it been linked to?

See below for ideas on how to compare coverage to other media, and how to analyze comments. Be aware that it is often very complicated to understand the impact of a video that mentions your product or company. (For instance, KDPaine & Partners looks specifically at what characteristics of brand strength or organizational reputation are affected.)

So You Made a YouTube Video:
Did it Achieve Your Objectives?

The key here is that you want to be able to show that you communicated what you were supposed to. So, right from the start set your video design objectives so that the video expresses what your bosses want to communicate about the company or product. O.K., yes, it seems elementary, but if everyone agrees that your video says to the world what you (and your boss, board or board room) want to say about your organization, then you have a video you can measure. If there is an uncertainty about what your video should communicate, then all the metrics in the world are not going to tell you how effective it was.

Once your video is posted, you want to collect the basic metrics described above. Measure at standard times from posting: say, one hour, one day, a week, two weeks, a month, and then once a month thereafter. After six months your video has probably finished its YouTube lifecycle, but check at one year just to see.

Now compare your video's metrics to those of your competition, or to your videos in the past. Are you doing better or worse? Which stats are different and why? What do comments reveal about each video and what do they teach you about how to make your next video?

Comparisons to Other Media

Your YouTube metrics will be put in context if you can compare them to other media. So, for instance, you can provide some meaning by comparing number of views to newspaper circulation, or TV viewership. It's not exactly apples to apples -- you can make a case for YouTube views as being much more powerful than print or TV impressions, for instance -- but it is a place to start.

For the Advanced Student: Comment Analysis

If you have plenty of comments to analyze, then things get much more interesting. If a viewer leaves a comment, you can argue that the video had a greater impact on that viewer than did some other video on which the viewer was not moved to comment. So for two videos with equal viewership, the one with the most comments can be said to have the greatest impact.

You will find, however, that many comments are not relevant to your objectives or relate in any obvious way to your product or organization. So, analyze comments based on to what extent they achieve your original objectives. Also check to see if they indicate any other important sentiments or reactions that you did not anticipate:

• Positive or negative responses to your organization, brand or products
• Demonstrations of increased brand strength of loyalty
• Unusual engagement with product or company

More advanced analyses, like that those available from KDPaine & Partners, include teasing out exchanges of particular sorts, debates on particular topics, and threads on topics of choice.

How to Impress your Boss and Justify Your Existence, Video-wise

Here are two quick ways you can demonstrate that your video has been particularly effective:

1. Compare your video against other media (ads, newsletters, etc.) for transmission of key messages or brand reputation.

2. Use comment analysis to show that people are interacting with your brand(s) and are more engaged with your company and products. Remind your boss that non-social media -- like advertisements -- can't encourage or measure that sort of engagement at all.

Extra Credit: Do focus group or survey analysis of video viewers to determine if they, after watching the video, are more likely to buy your product or visit your theme park or whatever. If you survey all customers, ask "Do you watch YouTube videos, and did you see ours?"

Peter Kowalski is Director of Research Strategy at KDPaine & Partners. His research interests include international inter-media influence, agenda setting and network analysis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations from the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

Can Twitter's Reputation Be Saved?

Tempest in a Twee Cup?

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the microblogging site Twitter. I cite it frequently in speeches as a source of ideas, entertainment and breaking news. It got a lot of good press recently when one Twitter user managed to get out the message "arrested" as he was being hauled off to an Egyptian jail. That was all his friends needed to launch an international campaign to get him freed (it worked). Twitter was also recently hailed for getting the word out about the Chinese earthquake before the USGS did.

All this good press, however, has resulted in (see it works!) a rise in usage and a subsequent increase in the number of Twiccups (as outages in the Twitterverse are known.) Actually, it's more than just an occasional Twiccup; sometimes the entire service is down for extended periods of time.

Twitter has responded with cute messages of mollification, but that's done little to assuage the ire of thousands of Twitter addicts who are loudly expressing everything from sadness to outrage, many blaming it on Twitter's owners being distracted by a recent round of VC funding.

Then, to add to the Twitstorm (as they're called) one Twitterer, Ariel Waldman, went public with a problem she was having with the Twitter Terms of Service. She had received a number of hostile responses on Twitter that amounted to what she perceived as bullying. She invoked Twitters Terms of Service agreement which states:

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Use.

When Twitter refused to block the hostile comments she took her concerns to the Twitterverse which responded en masse with the vast majority of people expressing sympathy to Ariel and hostility and disappointment with Twitter. Twitter's founder Evan Williams responded with a blog post of his own explaining the situation. However, Twitter's fundamental response was to change the Terms of Service rather than comply with Laurel's request.

Now the fact that Laurel was a community manager at Pownce, which some see as competition to Twitter, may have something to do with Twitter's response (or lack of it). My hunch is that it didn't, and that the general hostility this has stirred up towards Twitter has been aggravated by the frequent Twiccups. But I have no data to base that on.

What I do know is that you get what you pay for. Twitter is, so far, a free service. And when you're getting something for free, its hard to complain when it goes away. On the other hand it is people like me and millions of others who contribute our Tweets and Twocents that made the service popular -- and presumably valuable enough to secure that VC funding. So we want our opinions to matter.

There is no doubt that Twitter got two big black eyes this week. Were they fatal blows? Probably not. But they may prove fatal to Twitter's ability to monetize its service. --KDP

Establishing the ROI of Social Media

The Paine
of Measurement

 

The true value of social media is in bottom line benefits and improved relationships.

All this week Twitter has been the scene of furious debate, later picked up in conferences and in blogs, over how to establish the ROI of social media. One side says that without a solid monetary return, it's all just "pixie dust." The other side says that social media is all about building relationships, credibility and trust -- things that don't necessarily translate into bottom line benefits.

I argue that both are right.

To assume that there is no bottom line benefit to improved relationships is simply wrong. Vince Hazelton's team at Radford College demostrated in their paper from the 2006 IPRRC that improved internal relationships lowered operating costs and legal fees, and increased efficiencies. Sandra Duhe in her seminal paper on the impact of CSR (given at the IPRRC 2004) showed that there was a direct connection between an organization's relationships with its community and its financial performance.

And beyond the academic literature there are a ton of additional current examples:

• In a field known for its notoriously high employee churn, Best Buy measures the ROI of its internal "Blue Shirts Nation" community in terms of lower turnover rates.
• The National Association of Manufacturers measures the ROI of its blog in terms of greater access to the halls of Capital Hill. What's the value of that access? I suppose you could calculate it in terms of LFEs (Lobbyist Fee Equivalent), but I bet they don't bother.
• Dell measures the success of its IdeaStorm community both in terms of lower support costs and in the number of new ideas generated. How much is a new idea worth? Technically, it probably depends on how much revenue it ultimately brings in. But you could calculate a "consultant fee equivalency." Just calculate what you pay to outside consultants to creatively solve your problems, I bet it's a lot higher than $100 per idea, which is less than what Dell's costs are.
• Sea World reached out to roller coaster enthusiasts with its social media program and measured its ROI in terms of lower outreach costs as well as tickets sold.

Monitoring vs. Measurement

There's been too much confusion of late between monitoring and measurement. It's great that companies like BuzzLogic and Radian6 can calculate your share of discussion, or even that KDPaine & Partners can calculate your tone, positioning, prominence and dominance. That data tells you which programs work and don't work in terms of improving your messaging and positioning. But we need to get our calculators out to go beyond those easy numbers and start calculating the impact social media is having on organizational mission and the bottom line.

Measuring Naked Relationships: How to evaluate the impact of a social media program on your public relationships.

Your step-by-step guide to using relationship metrics to evaluate the success of your social media program.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

I've talked a lot here -- also in my speeches, in my blog, and of course in my recently published book Measuring Public Relationships -- about the importance of measuring relationships. I believe that without factoring in the impact that your social media program has on your relationships (with employees, community and constituencies) you are undervaluing your efforts.

So, how does one actually measure relationships? Well, now that you asked, my book explains this with regard to most types of public relations programs. Social media being all the rage right now, I thought it would be appropriate to provide a step-by-step guide as to how to actually do it for social media programs.

Whatever type of program you want to measure, the basic technique is similar: You conduct a survey of your audience using a special set of questions designed to specifically measure the different components of relationships. You do this before and after your social media program is in place, and you do it for your organization and as many competing organizations as you can afford to. Then you compare the data before and after, and between your organization and the others, and then you know where your relationship with your audience stands and where you need to go.

The Grunig/Hon Relationship Research

Before we get to the nuts and bolts, here's a bit of background. A decade or so ago, University of Maryland Professors Jim and Laurie Grunig and Linda Hon synthesized communications and sociology research and theory into a paper published by the Institute for PR called "Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations." Their feeling was that, amidst all the brouhaha about quantifying public relations, we were forgetting the essential truth that PR was about relationships. And so you needed to measure the impact that your efforts were having on those relationships.

Their research isolated six fundamental components of relationships -- Trust, Satisfaction, Commitment, Control Mutuality and Exchange/Communal -- and they designed and tested 75 statements to measure those components. These statements are of the sort: "This organization treats people like me fairly and justly," and, "I feel a sense of loyalty to this organization." You can see them all, and copy them for your own use, on my blog or in the Grunig/Hon paper. For an example of these statements successfully used to measure public relationships in a non-social media context, see this research by Forrest W. Anderson and Paul Raab.

Nine Steps to Measure Your Social Media Relationships

Before we start, remember that to isolate the effect of your social media program, you must begin your measurement before you launch that program. Then you'll have a benchmark to compare against later: Before Social Media vs. After Social Media. Without a Before benchmark you won't know how your social media program has changed your relationships.

Of course, you can always begin measuring after your social media program has started, and by doing so you will be able to do ongoing evaluation of your relationships. Which is a good thing. But a better thing is to isolate the effect of social media, and to do that you must compare before and after.

So use Steps 1 through 9 below to survey your audience before your program begins, and thus establish your benchmark. Then begin your social media program, and after an appropriate time, say three or six months (depending on your situation), re-survey to see what has changed.

To be sure that whatever change you find is solely attributable to the social media program, you must hold constant any other PR programs that affect your social media audience's perception of your organization. Yes, it's tricky, and it's not always an ideal world. But if you are trying to measure the effect of your new blog at the same time as the Promotions Department decides to give away A Free Cadillac With Every Purchase, then you can kiss your results goodbye.

Step 1: Define the audience for your social media program.
Social media is about conversation and engagement, so decide with whom you want to converse and engage. If you're starting an internal blog, your audience is your employees. If you're starting an IdeaStorm-type customer community, your audience is anyone likely to buy or recommend your product. If your mission is advocacy, your audience might be voters, politicians or industry influencers.

Step 2: Get a list of your audience's email addresses and/or phone numbers.
To get a representative sample you will need at least 500 names for each organization you are testing (more on that later). If you already have a list of your members, subscribers or customers, then you are ahead of the game.

If you have to purchase your list, then potential vendors vary with the type of sample you're looking for (mail, phone, web). Most lists are sorted based on demographic or title data. There are a lot more resources out there for mail addresses and those resources do not necessarily need to be survey sample companies. For email addresses, some reputable firms include Survey Sampling, e-Rewards and Zoomerang.

Step 3: Pick a survey methodology.
The Grunigs would recommend in-person surveys for the best results, but most researchers find that to be very expensive. Phone surveys are fast and provide very accurate results, but again, depending on the audience, may be cost-prohibitive. Email surveys are an increasingly accepted methodology, and for social media can be appropriate and highly reliable, since, presumably, your audience is all on email.

You may be able to piggyback on an existing survey going out to your community. If marketing, customer satisfaction, business development or anyone else in your organization is doing a survey, see if you can add a few of the Grunig/Hon statements to it.

Step 4: Select which of the Grunig/Hon statements are most appropriate to your organization.
You can probably only impose on someone for 7-10 minutes of their time, so you need to pick which statements you will include. Grunig and Hon suggest that if you want to shorten the survey, you use only the boldfaced items. Not all statements are appropriate for all organizations, so pick and chose the ones that will be most meaningful to your audience.

Step 5: Prepare your survey.
If you are using an electronic survey system like Survey Monkey, you need to create an introductory screen that explains what you are doing and how the scoring works. For instance:

In order to better understand the needs and perceptions of our marketplace, we'd like to ask you some questions. Please tell us whether you agree or disagree with the following statements as they apply to X company/organization.

Explain that 1 means "totally disagree" and 7 means "completely agree," and give them an option for "no opinion." You also need to ask them the same questions about a competing company or organization, so you have comparable data on the competition to compare to.

Step 6: Send out the survey.

Step 7. Resend the survey.
Depending on your audience it may take several tries and an incentive to get sufficient responses (I'll do just about anything for an Amazon or Starbucks card). How many is sufficient? Well, it depends on how you plan to break down your analysis, but in general plan to resurvey until you get at least a 10% return. If in doubt, talk to your local survey expert.

Step 8. Analyze and learn from the results.
Calculate a mean score for each relationship component. There are both positive and negative statements in the survey instrument, so make sure you take that into account. Compare your mean on each score to the competition. (And of course to your earlier survey results, if this survey is not the benchmark.)

Step 9. Implement your program and measure again.
If this is your pre-social media program (benchmark) survey, then implement your program now, and measure again in six months. Or, if your program has been running for a while and your analysis indicates you need to make changes, then make the changes now and let them work on your audience for six months before you measure again.

Good luck, and let me know how things go.

Chipotle Uses Social Media Against Hepatitis Scare

Mitch Wagner has a very informative interview/post on his blog with a guy who works for Chipotle Restaurants and is replying to bloggers about the hepatitis scare. Nice anecdotal measures of the value of social media to a large company.

The Not-So-New Social/Anti-Social Media

Jim Macnamara"s "Measuring Up"

 

 

Welcome to a new age where media are software and the audiences are the networks.

I don't know about you but, as fascinated as I am with media developments, I am fed up with hearing the term "new media." And I am not too enamored with "social media" either.

What's So New About New Media?

Why? First, because many of the media that we are talking about are increasingly not new. OK, so Web 2.0 has upped the ante with interactivity and participation, but newsgroup chat rooms celebrate their 30th anniversary next year, having been conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Trucott and Jim Ellis in 1979. The term "Weblog" was created in 1997 and bloggers have been blogging for a decade. Google is into its second decade, celebrating its 10th anniversary as a company in 2008, while MySpace will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year. Even YouTube and FaceBook are three and four years old respectively and, with hundreds of millions of users between them, are hardly new.

Apart from being increasingly inaccurate, the term "new media" leads us to an inevitable terminology trap when the next wave of media developments arrive. Web 3.0 is already under construction and new hybrid forms of media are evolving – what Roger Fidler calls "mediamorphosis." Rather than a choice between "old" or "traditional" and "new" media, which suggests a simple two-horse race, we are living through a period of ongoing media and communications change.

What's So Social About Social Media?

"Social media" is also a problematic term. As much as social networking has wide interpretations and social network mapping is all the rage, "social media" suggests to most that these media are primarily used for chat and gossip, friendship, dating, etcetera. It is this confusion that is causing many businesses to ignore these media or underestimate them. In reality, so-called social networking utilities and social media are making and breaking brands and products every day, building and destroying political careers, and shaping corporate reputations. They are used for civic and political engagement, research, job searching, marketing, shopping, knowledge sharing, and a host of other purposes.

While the U.S. progresses through its primaries in preparation for the November 2008 Presidential election, Australian had a national election in late 2007 which was widely dubbed "the YouTube election," and resulted in a new government. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and his party were elected in a landmark campaign spearheaded by Kevin07, a Web-based strategy which extensively used MySpace, blogs, YouTube and other so-called social media. Even though many conservative politicians clung to traditional media advertising -- particularly those who lost the election -- Web 2.0 type media were used for political communication and civic engagement by a large number of both politicians and interest groups.

The U.S. Presidential race is also seeing Web 2.0 media used at an unprecedented level -- even more than in the 2004 election which was described as a critical turning point in media use for political electioneering. (See, for instance, this article, previously in The Measurement Standard.)The term "social media" fails to reflect the serious and substantial communication that is flowing through these channels.

To take the point further, a few hours of research will show that many of the so-called social media are also downright anti-social. Political spoofs and parodies that ridicule, mash-ups of children's nursery rhymes with lyrics replaced by obscenities, and various types of pornography, racism, and other abuses are features and challenges of the Internet and the new forms and genre of media that it facilitates.

What's In a Name?

So what do we call emerging media forms and genre? And is it important what we call them? I suggest it is because our way of describing things frames our understanding. Language limits or delimits the concepts we deal with. It seems clear that we need a review of terminology in relation to media as convergence escalates. In preparing a public lecture which I am due to deliver in June, I compiled a list of 32 different terms used for media today. Many of these are based on delivery systems that are increasingly redundant -- such as film, video tape, broadcast, and so on. Even traditional terms such as "newspapers," "press," "broadcast," "radio" and "television" no longer adequately describe our media, as newspapers are less and less provided on paper, radio programs are increasingly distributed as podcasts rather than broadcasts, and television content is being "transmitted" via the Internet and watched on computers and even hand phones. And "phones" are not phones any more.

The benefit of a review of terminology is that we would find we can dispense with more than half the terms in use and simplify discussion considerably. What does it matter that content is distributed on paper, plastic, magnetic tape or disk, celluloid, cable, broadcast waves, or in jello? Only two things seem to matter: content and users -- whether they are producers or consumers, or a combination of both, as reflected in the terms "prosumers" or "produsers."

This raises three points that I will throw out there for comment. The first observation is that media are becoming immaterial. By that I do not mean that media don't matter per se; I mean the materiality of media is becoming unimportant. With convergence, content pays no mind to the medium on which it is distributed -- nor do most users. In the digital art world, Lev Manovich talks about "post-media" referring to the same notion, so I am not alone in this thinking.

In the same way, hardware technology such as computers and telecommunications networks are disappearing and becoming invisible. The invisible computer was first forecast in 1998 by Donald Norman and research continues through the Disappearing Computer Initiative in the U.S. Similarly, cables and wires are disappearing as we move to wireless. And "logging on," which was an often troublesome ritual that regularly reminded us that we were entering a complex world of machines, is increasingly being replaced with "always on." But it is not only the increasing physical invisibility of hardware that is significant; what is most significant is the growing psychological invisibility of hardware. Today, what Marc Prensky calls "digital natives" and assimilated "digital immigrants" move seamlessly and effortlessly between sources of content without a moment's thought to the hardware infrastructure that delivers them.

Today media are software -- intellectual property in the form of both applications and content. And audiences are the network, actively connecting, linking, redirecting, forwarding, and injecting local comment and static into communications.

Welcome to a new age in which media are software and audiences are the networks.

Dr Jim Macnamara MA, PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC became Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney in late 2007. His 30-year career in journalism, public relations and media research culminated in the 2006 sale of CARMA Asia Pacific, which he founded, to Media Monitors. He worked as Group Research Director with Media Monitors - CARMA Asia Pacific following the sale and continues as a Consultant with the Group.

Missouri University of Science and Technology Uses del.icio.us as a Public Relations Measurement Tool

del.icio.us as a PR measurement tool

What's Up with the Social Media Backlash?

I'm amazed at how many people love Loren Feldman's sock puppet satires of social media guy Shel Israel. And I notice a number of people respond very favorably to Drama 2.0's criticism of Shel and Jeremiah Owyang and Kami Huyse's rollercoaster research.

Is it just me, or is there some kind of backlash against social media? If the sock puppets are just satire, as Tom'sTechBlog claims, why is the satire so well received? Are people responding to the over-hyped world of 2.0 by being just a little too hard on some of its promulgators? --Bill Paarlberg

Who Are Bloggers? New Demographics from BIGresearch

Bet you didn't know that over 50% of bloggers' Internet searches are triggered by magazines, and almost that many are prompted by broadcast TV. Or that 38% of of Libertarians blog regularly, as opposed to 27% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans. (That's a lot of blogging.)
More great blogger demographics from BIGresearch can be found here.

Social Media Measurement and Rollercoasters: What more do you want in a video?

You have got to watch Shel Israel's GNTV interview with Kami Huyse on a rollercoaster. A great social media measurement case study combined with a near-death experience. Jeeze, it doesn't get much better than that.

Why Are Political Lawn Signs Like YouTube Downloads?

The Paine of Measurement

How online measures of engagement have predicted recent primary results.

Ever wondered what the effectiveness of political lawn signs is? Supposedly, every lawn sign represents six votes for the candidate. Or maybe ten votes, depending on what you read. And there's a theory in political circles that if you can get someone to put out a lawn sign, then that person is committed enough to not just vote for you, but also to encourage his or her friends to vote for you as well. So, each additional lawn sign means more than just one more vote, it means more of something even more valuable and a lot more difficult to pin down: more loyalty or commitment or what we in communications call engagement.

To my knowledge, no one has ever done a scientific study of how lawn sign displays influence voting habits. But my completely unscientific study of New Hampshire lawns this fall more or less predicted the outcome of our First in the Nation primary: Everywhere you went there were lots of Obama and Ron Paul signs, and both did much better than the polls predicted.

Now let's transfer this scenario into the world of social media. Can online measures of engagement predict votes? I argue that they can and have done so recently:

• Our YouTube study of candidates showed Obama having a significant lead over Hilary Clinton both in terms of viewership, and in terms of the number of videos that were rated by viewers.
• On Facebook we noted that there were some 500,000 plus groups supporting Obama, compared to Hillary's 100 or so. (In fact there are far more groups opposed to Hillary than there are those in favor.)
• In terms of Facebook's US Politics application that has Facebook voters register their opinions on a variety of topics as well as on the candidates themselves, Obama has consistently maintained a 50- to 60-point lead over Clinton.

And in the end, Obama did better in the primaries than the early polls suggested. The primary results have proven that Obama has a stronger than expected following, as hinted at by the strong online engagement we found.

The point here about engagement is bigger than just politics. How and why is engagement a stronger or different measure than just impressions? If, by joining a group, rating a video, or following someone on Twitter, you are actually thinking or behaving differently than if you just viewed an ad or a message, then measuring these signs of engagement is critical to every marketer. In order to hang on to advertising dollars, media companies will need to provide this data. And the good news is that the data is there, they just need to release it.

And finally, I can't help but see engagement as a kind of bridge between measuring outputs and measuring relationships. (Most of you are aware of my recently published book Measuring Public Relationships, learn more here.) If you measure an output like impressions, you only know what has happened to an audience. But if you measure engagement, you are measuring what is done by an audience as the result of their relationship with your output. How does measuring engagement fit in with measuring relationships? That's a good question, let me know if you have the answer.

Here's wishing you large measures of success,

 

What Is a Social Network and Why Does it Matter?

Social Media Measurement

 

Or... What's the ROI of my living room?

by Katie Delahaye Paine

As everyone who has talked to me recently knows, I'm a serious social media evangelista. And as I travel around I'm constantly confronted with business people who say: "Social media? I don't get it! Who has time? Why should I bother?"

My simple answer has always been that blogging (or Twitter, or Facebook) is a way to engage in a conversation with your customers or your employees.

(And if, Mr. CEO, you do not want to engage your customers or your employees, you deserve to be fired. If not shot.)

But I've been told that that attitude isn't particularly helpful when you're talking to people who think Facebook is still "just a college thing," and who think "twittering" must be something dirty.

So here's my new explanation (a bit long-winded, but, please, bear with me here):

When I built my house, it was designed to be the capital of social capital, with a huge living room and kitchen and dining room so that lots and lots of people could gather there. As that's just what happened:

• When I moved in, I threw a party and lots of people showed up. As always happens at parties, different groups of people gathered in different nooks and crannies of the house to talk about what was interesting to them.
• A few months later, my best friend had her wedding at the house, saving her the expense and aggravation of renting a hall. Lots of people showed up to wish the newlyweds well and to share their stories and experiences.
• A little later, we had a benefit for the Durham Public Library. The author Joyce Maynard spoke, the place was packed, and the library more than tripled its mailing list.
• A lovely lady named Carol Shea-Porter decided to run for Congress and we did a fundraiser at my house. She told the crowd, "I'm not asking for your money, I'm asking for your votes. If I have your votes, I don't need the money." She was outspent 5 to 1, but we now call her "Congresswoman Shea-Porter."
• Later on, we had a house concert with a hundred or so fans of a local musician. He sold lots of his new CDs and added to his mailing list.

So are you getting my point? Social Media is just a great big version of my living room. Any social network -- Twitter, Facebook or MyRagan -- starts off as one big noisy place. But soon, people of like minds and like interests start to find each other and sometimes they spin off and form their own separate groups.

So What's the ROI of my Living Room?

Which gets us to measurement. The hot topic right now -- and what everyone wants to know -- is: How do you measure the ROI of the effort you put into these groups?

To answer that, let's go back to my living room. The bride and groom's goal was to save money. The Library's was to build their mailing list. The politician wanted votes and the musician wanted to sell CDs. If they wanted to measure the ROI of their events in my living room, they'd compare their investment in effort to the particular return that was important to them.

And What's My ROI for Social Media?

I, on the other hand, use social media, and (often) my living room, to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and intellectual stimulation. Take Twitter: Do I appreciate the fact that traffic on both my blog and my website has picked up since I started Twittering? Absolutely. But mostly I Twitter because it makes me smarter. It allows me to follow interesting people that I wouldn't ever meet in my living room, and who would never read my blog.

I mess around in Facebook because it's a great way to share stuff with my friends and colleagues and it's a huge time saver when you're trying to pull together an event.

I blog because I like having conversations with people – about my business, my services, and the world as a whole.

And that ends my longwinded explanation of why you or anyone might want to bother with social media. It depends on you and your goals. And as for measurement, it's the same as for any marketing effort; first be clear about what you're trying to achieve, then go about measuring it.

Paul Gillin's "The New Influencers" Gets Highest Recommendation

Your Measurement Reading List

Understand the Coming Change
The New Influencers by Paul Gillin

There have been countless books written about the blogosphere, ranging from the worthless to a handful that are truly useful. Paul Gillin's The New Influencers is at the far end of the scale: It is really great, exceptionally good. It has my highest recommendation. In the Must-Read-If-You-Want-to Survive-the-21st-Century trilogy, The Cluetrain Manifesto is the prequel, Naked Conversations comes in the middle, and now The New Influencers is the sequel.

As I say in my Paine of Measurement column for this issue, my standard answer to a wide variety of questions is "Ask your customers." When asked what someone should do about the blogosphere, I tell them: "Read Naked Conversations." And from now on, I'm adding, "Read The New Influencers."

Now, I have to say that author Paul Gillin is one of the people who have changed my life. Way back when, I was interviewing for the Director of Corporate Communications job at Lotus, and I was presented with a story that he'd just written that was critical of the company. The question was: "What would you do about this!" I think I said I'd take Paul to lunch and find out what was on his mind. It must have been the right answer because I got the job. And about a month later I really was having lunch with him, learning the ins and outs of the PC media world.

We've crossed paths numerous times in the intervening two decades and he's always been just a little ahead of the pack. And that's exactly where you need to be in this new, ever-evolving world where deadlines and gatekeepers are as useful as buggy whips and 8-track tapes. So go read this book.

What makes The New Influencers really great is not just the solid practical advice, but also how Paul approaches the fundamental dynamics of the new media world. He makes you understand the DNA of this new society and how it works, which is a much better place to start off from.

Too many people do not comprehend how fundamental the coming change is. If they read Gillin's book, then they will. -KDP

Social Media Measurement, Blogging and Ego: I Think I'll Blog About What I Think About That

Last Thursday afternoon at the IPR Summit on Measurement there was a panel discussion entitled "How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media." Near the end of this I stood up and asked a question that went something like: "It's obvious that there's a lot of ego involved in blogging. In fact, the panel maybe has been talking so much about what blogging means to themselves -- about their links and their comments and their conversations -- that perhaps they haven't talked enough about the impact on the readers. What about readers that don't care so much about you, that are just there for the information?"

To be honest, I was trying to yank their chains a bit. But still, with so much ego involved in blogging, doesn't it sometimes get in the way of objective measures of impact?

Well, the session was almost at a close, and the panel could respond only briefly on the topic. I made a point of talking to each of the panelists afterward; some had taken the question in stride and some seemed a bit taken aback. Our talks brought out some great points about social media measurement, blogging and ego:

1. Content is what brings readers. Regardless of links or comments or whatever ego the author might have, if the content isn't there, the readers aren't there. Three of the panelists, Shel Israel, Kami Huyse, and Katie Delahaye Paine are well-known and accomplished bloggers; their readers come for their content. Whatever personality or ego is also expressed is secondary. (The other two panelists were Todd Parsons and Donald McLagan, both also experts on social media and its measurement. All the panelists had important and interesting things to say, see Lee Aase's blog.)

2. Links, comments and conversations, while very gratifiying to the author's ego, are also the connections that make blogging so powerful. They are the social part of social media and in part are the source of its amazing power. One blogger's link is also every reader's link, and that's why they are important to count.

3. What the hell's wrong with a little ego involvement? Social interaction, in any context, has something to do with status and self-image and self-gratification. It's the nature of social media to involve the ego of the author, and surely ego is the source of a lot of it's power and popularity.

Kami Huyse has some excellent thoughts and data on this exchange. (I am "Bill from the audience" that she mentions in her post.) -- Bill Paarlberg

2.0 Good Books on Marketing 2.0

Book Reviews

2.0 Good Books on Marketing 2.0:

Larry Weber's
Marketing to the Social Web

 

and

David Meerman Scott's
The New Rules of Marketing and PR

 

by Katie Delahaye Paine

There might be a thousand people on the planet that fully grok the implications of social media on the world of marketing. Then there are another ten thousand or so who think they understand it. And then there's the rest of the marketers on the planet who are clueless about what is about to hit them. For any of the millions in that third category, here are two new books that should really help.

Marketing to the Social Web

In Marketing to the Social Web, Larry Weber relies on his decades of experience as a marketer and PR guy (founder of Weber now Weber Shandwick, one of the agencies I dealt with when I was director of corporate communications at Lotus) to provide a good explanation of what is about to happen and how to cope. He's great on the history and his personal stories and experience with the people he's talking about lend a level of credibility that is missing from many of these sort of books.

Here's a quote from the first chapter (and you can download the whole chapter here):

Rather than broadcasting marketing messages to an increasingly indifferent, even resentful, audience jaded by the 2,000-plus messages the average American is reputedly exposed to every day, marketers should participate in, organize, and encourage social networks to which people want to belong. Rather than talking <I>at<I> customers, marketers should talk <I>with<I> them. And the social web is the most effective way in the history of the world to do just that on a large scale.

His lists are great, like "Seven Steps to Marketing on the Social Web" and "Ten Rules for Private Communities." He covers all the bases from blogs and social networks to podcasting and the future of TV. And, of course, I have to give the book extra points because he includes a good chapter on measurement that even I can't find anything to argue with.

Do I consider Marketing to the Social Web a must read for every marketer? No. It's too focused on big success stories and broad brush strokes of what is happening in big consumer markets, and a bit too based on one man's opinion for my taste. But will I quote it often? Absolutely. It is chock-full of great stories and terrific statistics, and for many it will be a very worthwhile read.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

On the other hand David Meerman's Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a must-read for marketers, regardless of whether you are marketing a yoga studio in New Hampshire or luxury automobiles in Beverly Hills. It is truly a how-to book that gives basic instructions for any marketer to get going in the new social marketing space.

Compared to Weber, Scott devotes relatively little time to the ancient history of marketing, preferring instead to present how to write for a blog, how to podcast, how to write a press release that's not for the press, how to use social networking sites, how to change your web content to complement your social media strategy and how to use search engine optimization in this new environment.

Of course the one thing missing from Scott's book is any mention at all of measurement. But that's okay, you can read my book to get that…

Can the Votes of a Panel Measure Trust, Reputation, and Other Tricky Things?

How do you measure trust? I just read about an innovative social media approach as applied to news media, (thanks to PR Watch.org). NewsTrust, now still in beta, is "...a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources..." So, as I take it, news sources will be rated by many readers to result in an overall score that roughly translates to "trustworthiness."

And that brings up an interesting thought: If you can derive a useful measure of trustworthiness by having a bunch of people just vote on it, then why couldn't we measure all kinds of tricky things by having people vote on them? Could we compare the trustworthiness of companies or politicians just by combining ratings from enough people?

And if so, then why go to all the media analysis effort of compiling a Reputation Index for big companies when you could just get a bunch of people to rate the companies? Hey, maybe there's already a social media site called YourRep.com or something where everyone can rank companies to provide an overall reputation score.

I guess if we can use Wikipedia to provide accurate information on, say, Total Quality Management (which I happen to have looked up there just a little while ago, and I feel more or less confident that what I read was accurate), then perhaps we can use a similar consensus-of-many approach to defining (or at least getting a handle on) more nebulous concepts as well. --WTP