360DigitalInfluence

image by John Moore a.k.a. @BrandAutopsy

On a panel last week for a WOMMA event at Chicago’s Social Media Week, I had the pleasure of sitting with Keller Fay’s Ed Keller, Brains on Fire’s Robbin Phillips, and Social Media Today’s Robin Carey to discuss social media measurement under the heading of “Is WOM worth it?”.  In the context of that discussion, I talked about the siren song of social media counting (vs. measurement) and the trap that we too-frequently see: social media “cases” that end by rattling off 20 different social media metrics that do not track to a meaningful business metric.  To illustrate, I mentioned that no CEO is not banging the table looking for more tweets (which BrandAutopsy riffed into the above), he’s looking for shareholder value - sales, market share, preference, purchase intent and a legion of other measures that can not be ripped off the back of Facebook insights.

So, with that in mind and the voices of my esteemed co-presenters in my head, I put together a list of 4 potential measurement pitfalls that can kill your social media measurement program before the horses have left the stable:

1) Setting the wrong objectives.  This sounds silly, but often an activity or “client brief” will be mis-translated as an objective.  For example, “run a high-impact event” is an activity, but “increase consideration and share of voice among X audience” attending that event is an objective.  TEST: Can it be measured?  If the answer is no, it isn’t an objective.

2) Determine the meaningful (vs. diagnostic) KPIs before you begin:  Chances are, meaningful KPI’s will require measurement techniques beyond simple, spoon-fed social media metrics like likes and shares.  Take a walk through our Conversation Impact(TM) white paper to determine how to craft meaningful Reach, Preference, or Action KPIs.

3) Find where your audience is interacting on a relevant topic: Yes, Facebook has 800 million people and likely some of them are in your desired “audience” but they may not be on Facebook to discuss their mother’s prescriptions or whatever topic that you may have value to add.  The important second step to “going where the party” is already happening is not just determining where your audience is, but how they are using social media for different things - where do they share recipes vs. look for snowboot recommendations?  While they could light up for FB, Twitter, Flickr, etc it will be critical to understand the relevance of those platforms to their lives to put together a measurable strategy.

4) Plan to measure: If you put together a measurement plan after you’ve already begun, you have lost your chance at a baseline and being able to know the true impact of your efforts.  Ed Keller admitted that he often gets calls halfway through campaigns at which point, there are limitations on the types of measurements that can be taken.  The baseline is going to be the key to your “winning” metric such as “Increased purchase consideration by 45%”.  That is the type of metric that CEOs do care about and will keep your social media efforts on strategy and in budget in 2012.

I recently attended Facebook’s first studio conference held in New York City in May, 2011. The conference offered an interesting look at Facebook’s culture and how success can be achieved through sharing. Several enthusiastic presenters spoke regarding Facebook’s marketing strategies and the culture for the company.  However, the session that intrigued me the most was “Social by Design” by Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s Vice-President of Global Sales.

Ms. Everson talked about how the capability to share is perhaps the most significant ingredient in making a design successful. She mentioned two particular case studies that resonated with me since I am a gamer and love the World Cup: 1) EA Halo vs. Zynga Farmville and 2) Nike’s 2010 World Cup advertising.

EA Halo is one of the top games for Microsoft’s XBOX and generates millions of dollars in revenue.  In addition, EA spends millions of dollars on creating the best graphics with cutting-edge technology for Halo. On the other hand, Zynga’s Farmville graphics are much simpler. But as Ms. Everson rightly noted, there are far more people playing Farmville than Halo. (Farmville has over 57 million players.)  In fact, Zynga has recently been valued at $8 billion by Bloomberg, which is more than the value of EA. The main reason that Zynga has been able to be so successful is that Farmville was built to share.

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The late Jack LaLanne of The Power Juicer (May He Rest in Peace)

First, we got Lean ’n Mean with The George Forman Grill. Then, we were dazzled by the Bedazzler. Oh, the 21^st century infomercial has provided us with so many titillating, and downright hilarious, consumer goods.

So what, you ask, are the top-selling among them?

Weight loss remedies, exercise equipment, kitchen appliances, and skincare products.

Thanks to off-peak advertising space and late night shopaholics trolling the broadcast networks at 3am, we have… the infomercial. And yet, these days, the infomercial isn’t just saved for the 3am crowd. The infomercial has finally made it to the mainstream. In fact, by 2009, most US infomercial spending was during early morning, daytime, and evening hours and, if that’s not shocking enough, over $150 billion worth of consumer products in the U.S. are now being sold through infomercials.

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As companies prepare to implement their new social media strategies for 2011, there’s an important metric that shouldn’t be overlooked. In addition to conversation volume, share of voice, level of engagement and monthly trends, is social media sentiment a part of your monitoring process? If not, this may be an important factor missing from your listening routine.

Included in one of the three areas in which Ogilvy 360° Digital Influence categorizes metrics as part of its Conversation Impact™ measurement model, sentiment can be one of the most valuable aspects of social media. Facebook, Twitter and blogs give anyone the power to dash off their opinions to friends, followers or readers; but more importantly, these comments leave a traceable mark online. If it’s posted on a public profile or page, companies have the ability to access these remarks and gain insight into how people feel about their brands and products. During a new product launch, brand transformation or a crisis, this kind of knowledge on consumer sentiment is essential.

There are several listening tools that offer the feature of sentiment analysis. Here are five tips to keep in mind:

• Be aware of accuracy: When pulling percentages of positive and negative mentions, the accuracy of different monitoring tools varies substantially. Human emotion can be difficult to read correctly by a computer program and may be thrown off by sarcasm or slang. Some tools are built to rank sentiment mathematically after being trained by the user. While these are capable of providing very accurate data, they will also come with a higher price tag. Simpler tools may not provide reliable statistics unless a user manually categorizes posts, but they can help to quickly (and more affordably) identify strong positive or negative verbatim about a brand. Examine your budget and priorities to determine what will best fit your brand’s needs.

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Last week i had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop on developing a social customer care strategy at the annual conference for SOCAP the association for customer care professionals. Many of the conversations took me back to a past life where I worked on a reservations knowledge management solution for a large air line.

A key dilemma customer care professionals face is that good service and bad service generate word of mouth. It just spreads farther and faster via social channels. To illustrate this point i ran a quick report. On one extreme I used “awesome customer service” and on the other “customer service sucks”. As you can see it was nearly split down the middle.

So what does this mean. Well according to Forrester “good customer service experiences boost repurchase probability and long-term loyalty,” while bad experiences lead to defections and negative word of mouth.

To make the conversation a little more lively and get a pulse of the room we did a real time poll. “Who should own the social media strategy”.

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What I am about to say is going to be confronting to some of you. To others this may be obvious, common sense. The days of total control over message are over. If these days ever existed, they are no more. Social media has created a world where a brand no longer gets to push out its message on a passive audience. Instead, through social media folks are engaging in conversations about brands with and without the brand.

The question then becomes: Is a brand present in the conversations that are happening about it and therefore able to share its point of view? When a brand is not present, there is a much slimmer chance that their point of view will be heard. This is true of social media in general and I hope to explore the impact of this in different spaces in the weeks and months to come. However, today I wanted to explore the question of how this relates to governments and Wikipedia.

Earlier this year, the European government found itself in a conundrum. A newspaper published a story which quoted the European Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani as saying that tourism is a human right. Shortly thereafter, Wikipedia picked up this third party information and stated it as a truth. When his team tried to correct the information on Wikipedia by adding the text of his speech, the page moderators blocked them. Given Wikipedia’s construct, the third party information was considered more reliable than the original source. Thus the conundrum. The information was incorrect. However, Wikipedia strongly discourages organizations from editing organization-related articles, citing conflict of interest.

If there are factual errors, organizations are asked to:
a. Leave a note on the article’s talk page
b. Post a comment on the help desk
c. Contact Wikipedia via email

If an organization insists on editing an article directly, the organization must declare their interests on their user page(s) and on the talk page of the article they edit. The conflict of interest guidelines must also be adhered to, as must the neutral point of view and verifiability. As it relates to verifiability, the changes must be backed by reliable sources, which in the Wikipedia world means third-party sources. That is why in this case the original speech was not considered a reliable source whereas the newspaper article was.

What then is the solution? In my opinion, the solution is as follows:

1- Establish long-term relationships with a grassroots community who will contribute the missing positive information to the article.

2- If an organization is very keen on immediately changing information that is not factually correct said organization could leave a note on the article’s talk page. They could also post a comment on the help desk and they could contact Wikipedia via email.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a grassroots tool that collects information from reliable, impartial sources. In theory, if a brand has invested time engaging folks and having conversations about its win with the grassroots, this community in turn will be posting said information onto platforms like Wikipedia.

Is this a silver bullet?

No.

However, in this modern age of online WOM I truly believe that this is the best way to ensure that social media tools like Wikipedia reflect the brand’s point of view. A brand, government or otherwise, is in effect present in the conversation about it by engaging the community, making a long term investment in it and ultimately handing over control.

Latinos and Hispanics in Web 2.0 are in the sweet spot. Over the course of the last few days, whether it be at Netroots Nation in Las Vegas, the Bridge Conference in the beltway or within Ogilvy’s own LatinRed professional network during an event in New York City, I have found myself in conversations with various folks talking about the opportunity found in engaging this demographic online here in the States.

So what is the opportunity?

At the end of last year and beginning of this year, I was thrilled to see a couple of recent studies that provided a quantitative backing to what I and others in the industry have been saying for years. Latinos are in Social Media.

According to a report released by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project in December of 2009, internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points from 54% to 64% between 2006- 2008. In comparison, the rates for whites rose four percentage points, and the rates for blacks rose only two percentage points during that time period.

A recent report published by AOL and Cheskin states that the number of Hispanics online has grown faster than the growth of the total US population. Two similarly striking findings of this report are that Latinos have more confidence in online product rating sites than their friends’ opinions (78%: 28%) and that they are earlier adopters of technology, more so than general market users.

Moreover, the AOL and Cheskin report found the percentage of bloggers in the Latino community to be at 21%.

So what does all this mean?

The numbers show that Latinos are:
-A significant presence in the Web 2.0 space and growing
-Content producers
-Early adopters
-Significantly influenced by online product ratings

Although two recent studies, “How Young Latinos Communicate with Friends in the Digital Age” and “The Latino Digital Divide: The Native Born versus The Foreign Born,” just released by Pew report that Latinos are still playing catch up to their non-Latino counterparts online, the reports also state that younger native-born Latinos are embracing the technology enthusiastically. According to the reports:

- 85 percent of native-born Latinos older than sixteen use the internet
- 80 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five use cellphones and
- 78 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five with internet access use social networking sites.

With one out of every four children being born in the US of Hispanic origin, the significance of these findings should not be lost on us as it relates to this market or the opportunity it presents in the private, nonprofit and political sectors.

To not realize on this opportunity would be foolish.

It’s like catching a baseball on the ’sweet spot’ of the bat. If you don’t swing, you can’t knock it out of the park. It’s time to swing and swing now!

I see posts on lots of social media blogs with weekly updates on the most successful Facebook Pages or types of Facebook Pages (example below) and they always include the same metric: number of fans (now called “Connections”). Likely this is because that number is the most public metric to compare but a little digging into the engagement on a Page came tell you a lot about its success.

You would never measure the success of a retailer by how many people entered the store or the success of a services company by how many people visit the website so why do people get to lazy with Facebook? Here are the metrics that really matter in a successful strategy and while fan count is one of them it may not be your most important. continue reading

The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, is quickly approaching. Starting June 11^th, 32 teams representing different countries from around the world will compete for the soccer title that has been given every four years since 1930 (with an exception of 1942 and 1946 due to WWII). But 2010 is a particularly special and relevant year. Why, you ask? Because of social media!

Social Media as we know it did not exist during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Twitter did not launch until July 2006. Facebook didn’t become public until September 2006. YouTube existed but videos looked like this #6 most popular YouTube video of 2006. Now, only 4 years later, Facebook has over 400 million members and more than 50 million tweets are sent each day. These platforms, which were infants during the last World Cup, are now globally available and hugely popular.

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When I first read about a new work-around to add Google Analytics to Facebook Pages I was set to geek out and asked recent FBML experts Mike Mangi and Jay Marrow to help me set it up.  I added it to our 360 DI Facebook Page and let it run for about five days.

Verdict: Nice to have but not need to have. Not worth the trouble for basic Pages but an easy lift to add to a custom Tab for campaign tracking. Details after the jump. continue reading