TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

engagement

Measuring marriage – and social media

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I’ve been involved in a lot of discussion about measuring social media and social networks, particularly around readership, influence, and social media and community marketing. And I quite often hear the quote that such measurement is like ‘figuring out if you have a good marriage’, which comes from Ian Schafer of Deep Focus. The Adweek article in which is appears goes on to say: “Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. “You can’t assign a number to that,” he said.”

I’m no analytics or statistics expert, but when I thought about, it occurred to me that there’s actually quite a lot of quantitative measurement of marriages that does go on. And judging whether you’re in a good marriage certainly requires benchmarking in some quantitative or qualitative way. Just the same as social media measurement can go pretty far in indicating whether your audience sees you as their one true love:

Anniversaries: Wedding anniversaries have rules (Paper for the 1st year? Gold for 50) to indicate the length of time to all interested parties – because a general trend would be that longevity equals a good marriage. By the same token, longterm, loyal, returning readers indicate you’re doing something right!

Divorce rates: By the same token, you can watch trends on divorces to see if a group is happy in marriage. And you can watch single visit users, and definitely unsubscribers and users deleting their accounts to gauge the same thing for your site. And unlike general figures for splitting up, you’re able to easily isolate individuals to explore the reasons in more detail.

Holidays and presents: Whether it’s a dowry, or the amount your partner spent on the wedding/honeymoon/Valentine’s Day/Birthday presents etc, at some point even the most romantic soul has probably looked at how much is being spent as a guide to how much their partner cares. That’s why engagement rings are supposed to cost 3 month’s wages, for example. And a key metric in the website/user relationship is definitely click-throughs and sales conversions.

Romantic dinners: One of the big tips about marriages is to make time to go out and spend quality time romancing each other. You could see that couples in a good marriage enjoy this time, chat all night, gaze longingly at each other across the table, etc. By the same token, you can monitor the bounce rate and time on site of your visitors to see if they’re visiting several pages and enjoying your company – or splitting at the earliest opportunity.

Doing the housework: Does your partner invest time and effort in doing their share around the house? Do they help to make it a home? And do your users invest time and effort in submitting User Generated Content? Do they customise their profiles? Do they comment on stories and forums?

Are they faithful?: In the modern digital world, it’s highly unlikely a visitor will use just one site in any area of interest. But rather than sulking about their polygamous ways, it’s about following them and looking at who their affair is with. Figure out what is so attractive about the other websites they visit, and look at whether you can beat it, or use it in some way. Rather than seeing them continue to stray, inject some romance by dressing up your website in the RSS feeds of the other destinations, for example.

Talking about your partner: One of the big qualitative and quantitative benchmarks is seeing how often your friends talk about their partners, and whether it’s normally in a good or bad way. That can be with friends over a coffee or a beer – or in a survey by a magazine. Whatever the source, it’s what prompts you to go home and ask why your partner doesn’t treat you as well, or tell them how badly someone else is doing. And it’s the big one for social media measurement, because it’s all about the referrals and the recommendations. Recommendations and links are the equivalent of public displays of affection.

Now, if you combine all that information about two individuals in a relationship, you start seeing that actually, there’s quite a lot of ways you could build up a reasonable idea of whether a relationship is being enjoyed by the people within it, and then be able to compare it to other marriages. It’s not 100% accurate, and maybe they’re staying together for the children, but metrics never cover ever 100%

And by the same token, there’s a huge wealth of information already available on social media marketing, especially if you’re already tracking the normal metrics via a standard analytics package.

The trick is working out what to add to what is already available (influence of prominent couples/recommendations for example), and how to bring it all together into something that is understandable. That’s the alchemy.

A market crying out to engage your brand?

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Last weekend my willpower collapsed and I bought Xbox 360 blockbuster Halo 3. I’d tried to resist, but when 31 friends are online, and 30 are playing one game, it’s near impossible to hold out.

On Sunday evening, over 900,000 players were online, and numbers have topped 1 million. That’s people online at any one time, and people that have paid not only for the game (Up to around £49.99 for the limited edition version), but have also most likely spent out on buying an Xbox Gold subscription for 12 months of online gaming.

Now imagine if your brand or publication had access to a code to make the main character in Halo3 run faster, take more damage, or even a special character design?

Think the chap that has paid £40 to get a game on release, rather than waiting for a discount, would find it easy to resist? Especially with the peer pressure of 30 of his friends waiting to be impressed by his new skills?

And whatever the brands, there’s a likely game to tie in. Whether it’s a racing game, an adventure game, a sci-fi shooter, or something oddball and cute like Viva Pinata.

Dealing with negativity…

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It seems that there are two ways to deal with the negativity of your customers, readers, and colleagues…

One way, is to ignore it, or to censor it. Pretend it isn’t happening and try and turn away. Dave Cushman’s post about BT sums up how well that normally works, here…

The other way, which is most likely to turn the negative into a positive, is to find out why colleagues, customers, or readers are unhappy, and attempt to explain why decisions have been made, and then look at ways they can be changed…

Even if it’s not something that can be altered overnight, I’ve always found that a prompt reply and honest explanation normally creates a better response and more loyalty in the future. Indeed, it can turn someone with a complaint into a vocal supporter and explainer inside the rest of their community.

And apply the same techniques to your staff. Don’t dimiss their concerns, but try to find out why they feel a certain way, and ways it can be changed…

The biggest and best weapons a company can have in the modern age is enthusiastic and engaged workers and customers. They’ll give you money, do your PR, and feel able to make changes which will help your company grow. And if you don’t engage them, eventually they’ll find someone who will…

How to quantify online status….

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Most people have slowly come to terms with the concept that ‘hits’ is meaningless as a value, due to the fact it refers to every item downloaded from a page, and can therefore easily be rigged.

So unique users and page impressions are the most common metrics. Unique Users refer to visits from an individual IP address, whereas page impressions are the number for a full page to be downloaded – including ads and any modules you may have included.

But are these the full story?

I’ve worked on site which have had huge jumps and then huge falls. And the people in charge can’t figure out why, because there’s no qualitative measurement of the site. If we spend the time, we can go and see that a number of people viewed a section or individual story, but we have no idea whether it was what they were looking for, or whether they enjoyed their visit…

That’s why it’s important to listen to your community. Generally they may only be the most vocal 5 per cent of your users (Unless you’re running a solus forum), but they’ll give you clues to whether people are finding error pages, or are bored of certain content.

The other idea would be to provide a simple “Did you enjoy your visit”, or “Was this what you wanted” option. I’d recommend not setting it as a pop-up due to blockers, and the fact pop-ups are likely to annoy your users anyway…but you should be able to find somewhere relevant on the page to slot a simple measurement of enjoyment….

So was this post helpful? Did you enjoy it?

The User Generated Content myth.

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You know how everyone, their dog, and their dog’s dog is talking about User Generated Content, Engagement, and how everyone is dying to upload their lives onto the internet, if only they had the chance?

Bill Tancer from web audience measurement firm Hitwise has some stats for you:

0.16% of the people visiting Youtube are uploading videos.

0.2% are visiting Flickr to upload images.

Wikipedia has the biggest involvement at 4.6%

That’s not to say they aren’t immensely popular, and getting more so by the second.

“But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years”

The lesson is that millions want to be able to take a peek at the private lives of others, and displaying User Generated Content is a great way to build an audience and get traffic. But don’t expect a huge amount of content to suddenly appear overnight. Especially if your site isn’t a giant like Youtube or Flickr. Because if they’re getting 0.2%, you can bet a site with a smaller audience will get far less than 0.2% uploading. After all, what kind of exhibitionist targets smaller groups of people?

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