Posts Tagged ‘metrics’
SES social media measurement round up
August 22nd, 2008
This will be my last post for a while, as i’m off to get married and then away on honeymoon, so for my final entry as a single man I thought I would look into the noise coming out of SES San Jose this week, specifically focused on social media measurement…and there’s plenty of it.
As you may have seen, there are a whole host of informative posts on the measuring success in a web 2.0 world and social media and analysis sessions, which both took place earlier this week. My favourite posts can be found via the online marketing blog, which gives a step-by-step rundown of the sessions and valuable learnings.
Both sessions involved Marshall Sponder, senior web analyst for Monster.com. Marshall’s presentation can be seen here.
There are two things that I would like to pick up on specifically.
First a good point from the measuring success in a web 2.0 world session, where Marshall Sponder confirmed that as well as understanding that social media measurement is about conversations, we will only get to the next level of measurement if we treat visitors from Twitter for example, differently than visitors from forums, and then differently again from direct visitors. Without measuring the conversation, and the outcomes of that conversation, we are missing a huge chunk of useful data.
The online marketing blog listed the key takeaways from the social media and analysis session as:
1. There is no killer metric
2. Track anything possible to glean insight
3. Social media is not just about numbers
4. It’s all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)
5. Measuring social media does not + ROI for social media
6. View monitoring social media as a Social Intelligence programme, involving the world’s biggest focus group
So the key learnings for me are there is no holy grail of measurement in terms of a catch all metric, and to get the most out of measurement data we need to re-evaluate the data sources and begin evaluating conversations from their point of origin.
Finally, I should point out that the panel for the social media session included Edmund Wong, VP Strategy iCrossing and that iCrossing is a client of ours in the UK. This post is in no way meant to promote our client, it’s simply a review of two very useful sessions, one of which happens to include iCrossing.
Chinwag: the length isn’t in measurement yet
February 19th, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag Live event was all about measuring the effectiveness of social media - a brave subject matter, bearing in mind that many are still getting to grips with what social media is, let alone grasping the new metrics associated with it.
Sitting on the panel were Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at research firm Nielsen Online, Robin Grant from word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, Will McInnes, MD of social media agency Nixon McInnes, and Ankur Shah of data-driven measurement company Techlightenment. The panel was chaired by a big name within web analytics - Jim Sterne.
As a first observation, I found it disappointing that there was not a better balance of communications experts on the panel. Granted, measurement often goes hand in hand with technology and data collection, but monitoring is equally as important in social media and far more the realm of communicators. Although Ankur and Alex put forward their very best case for technolgy being the answer to everything, I remain unconvinced that in this early stage in social media, technology is able to accurately interpret emotion, tone, and to a certain extent the unsaid.
A pertinent observation by Jim Sterne was “getting humans to agree on language is almost impossible”. If that’s the case, how on earth can we expect computers to. In Will McInnes’ words: “humans are slow, and computers are dumb”.
If I’m honest, I came away thinking that I hadn’t learnt as much as I’d hoped to, and this sentiment seemed to be shared by other people in the audience. A Tweetscan last night for ‘chinwag’ was very telling - a lot of passive observations, but nothing ground-breaking or inspiring being shared.
One hypothesis for the night had been the notion of establishing industry-wide agreement on measurement standards. This wasn’t discussed in great depth, but there seemed to be a reluctance to address the concept and debate how it could work. This underlined my major disappointment with the evening - that being that everyone was talking from their own individual agendas. While social media is inherently about honesty and openness, the data experts were keeping their cards very close to their chests, and not so willing to reach conscensus on anything. While I appreciate this was a discussion, it would have been nice to see more willingness for collaboration, from an industry operating at the heart of social media.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.