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Like Minds: Measuring Social Media conference

October 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Commuting is a reminder that there’s live outside of London, and it’s amazing how many great events and conferences can slip by if you’re not looking beyond the capital.

One case in point is the inaugral Like Minds conference, taking place on Friday, October 16th, in Exeter, Devon. The topic is ‘Measuring Social Media and making it sustainable‘, including measuring social media ROI, carrying out online campaigns to compliment an offline mix, how to target and best engage online audiences, and turning customers into brand advocates.

Not bad for £35 (discounts for students, unemployed and freelancers).

And there’s a great line-up of speakers, including a couple I can personally recommend. The full list is: Trey Pennington, Olivier Blanchard, Darren Forsyth, Dhaljit Bhurji, Nick Tadd, Andrew Ellis, Laura Whitehead, Andrew Davies, Rick Waghorn, Carl Haggerty and James Barisic.

I’ve shared drinks and chatted with both Darren and Rick, and spent a lot of time chatting with Andrew Davies about the magazine and publishing industry – particularly as I’ve closely followed the start-up he co-founded, idiomag.com.

In fact, I’m feeling a bit hard done by – a chat with Andrew normally involves buying a couple of drinks at London prices. But with 11 speakers for £35, you’re getting each one for the price of a pint. And it’s compacted pretty tightly into just four hours, and after-party drinks – and it’s easier to get out of work for a half day at the moment than it is for a full day of talks. Check out alikeminds.org for details of the venue and booking.

Some real proof of social media transactional revenue

February 23, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Respected Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson often talks about the action taking place in the comments of his blog.

So I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up and reposted his comment from a post at the end of January.

If it’s a bit too small – Fred is revealing Twitter is the 3rd biggest referrer of transactional visits to handmade marketplace Etsy, with Flickr at number 2, and Facebook at number 4.

And Etsy is generating over $1 million a month in revenue, with $100 million worth of goods sold in 2008.

Now this might not convince everyone – after all, Etsy sales are by a large number of individual and small retailers who will be promoting their items individuals through Flickr, Twitter and Facebook – and the scale is the aggregate of those referrals – the ‘Long Tail‘, if you will!

So essentially there are 100s, if not 1000s of people handling social media marketing and customer service for their products, which doesn’t tackle the scale issue of large companies changing the way they do business, and utlising social media.

But there were 300,000 people in the California Gold Rush, and noone continued to deny there was gold in those hills.

Breaking the habit of broadcast media

October 21, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s only when you try and break a long held habit that you realise how much we’re all influenced by the way we’ve always done things. Since starting my efforts to cut down and stop smoking, I’ve managed to get to the point where I only have the occasional cigarette once the family has gone to bed – but it’s the hardest one to drop. And when I get writers block, my intake rapidly goes up because I’ve spent so long finding inspiration by getting outside and getting the hit of nicotine while my brain kicks into gear.

UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

And I’ve also started to try and challenge the broadcast media habit of trying to get the biggest audience with the least work. For years we’ve focused on audience figures to suggest that by doing the bare minimum, you’ll reach the biggest audience.

Whereas in the modern world, we need to work harder than ever at making as much of what we do remarkable, and to pursue as many opportunities to the maximum as we can. Otherwise we’ll keep finding someone else that does!

It reminds me of a post I read earlier today, which sadly I seem to have misplaced, commenting on the problem facing the A-List of blogging. Namely, the fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are finding it hard to scale to respond on an individual level to every email, post and tweet they receive, and in effect, become mini-broadcasters.

The simple answer is that they still remain increasingly popular because they put in a huge amount of effort to stay more accessible than mainstream media. They don’t have to make time for everyone, but by attempting it as far as possible, it gives hope to those who don’t grab their attention at a particular time. It’s why I count myself fortunate to have had messages from the likes of Chris Anderson and Hugh McLeod, but I don’t bombard them with emails, or suddenly thinkg they’re my best friend and will respond to everything I do – they’ll do it if what I say is interesting and they have the time available.

The other option is to scale it, and for them to find someone as similar as possible, or someone they can trust, to work alongside them.

That’s where broadcast media should be. We still have far more resources than the top bloggers, so why not scale back on the coverage that everyone else is parroting, use link journalism, and focus on becoming closer to the spirit of individual response that blogging has fostered.

After all, it’s what we laud Zappos, Dell and Comcast for doing.

But there is a habit of resisting the idea of putting in that much effort for what will be less profit in total. Despite the fact that everything so far has shown that it’s harder to get similar levels of profit from online audiences as you would in print, radio or TV, and that the only way to really be successful is to aggregate lots and lots of individuals monetisation.

Annoyingly, the great David Armano summed this up far more succinctly.

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (https://darmano.typepad.com/)

At the point before the curve starts to dip, we need to put in the extra effort to keep that line climbing. Now if only I hadn’t needed a cigarette to think of all this!

The Measures of Engagement meme (Convincing the disconnected)

September 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Another week, another meme! And it’s another one that not only has some real value, but it also bloody tricky to answer in a way that’s not rehashing the work of other intelligent people looking at social media. Dave Cushman started it off as Measures of Engagement – convincing the disconnected, and I think it’s important to keep the second part of the title in mind. As Cush says, if you’re blogging, tweeting, and building your own widgets already, you get it – but there are millions out there that don’t, and if you want companies etc to get involved in the right way, it’s down to us to show some leadership and go outside the comfort zone of the social media echo chamber.

I disagree slightly with Cush when he says those that get social media don’t require the numbers. Case in point – the Adage Power 150, Google analytics, Feedburner stats, Twitter follower counters and all the other things we adorn blogs with. The lack of yardsticks is one problem that currently affects social media usage within businesses, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m a keen supporter of MeasurementCamp‘s proactive focus on sharing case studies and numbers. It’s fine to quote Zappos and WillItBlend ad infinitum, (and I have), but the more relevant and close to your market you can find examples, the more useful it is in convincing the disconnected. And sometimes that’s the approach you need to take, because not every manager is just waiting for you to persuade them onto Twitter or Facebook.

So measurement is a given:

The next stage is to look at what the end result should be. Is it sales conversions or advertising clickthroughs? Are your conversion mechanisms on your website, or are they affiliated via widgets?

Either way, there are two things that work across traditional and new businesses – conversions and the numbers of them.

This is where the battle begins. Social media is an emerging and labour intensive skill. It’s unlikely to drive the same numbers as an SEO campaign, unless you’re really lucky/gaming the likes of Digg.

So what we need is to start tracing the steps of the engaged and the disengaged, and be able to compare the conversion rates – that’s pretty good evidence of the power of social media (If it works…humans have a horrible habit of doing the exact opposite of what you want, at the worst possible moments!).

And controversially, that begins with the traditional web analytics package, whether that’s Google, or a paid service like Webtrends.

That’s something that’s easy to forget in the rush to start driving traffic to the site, and worrying about sentiment. If you’re already using search traffic for relevant keywords to drive conversions, you’ve already got an effective way of getting large numbers of interested people.

So does social media make your boss money?

So you need to be able to show where social media efforts site between someone accidentally browsing round your site because they’re bored, and those coming because they want to buy something that minute. And where in the process social media can enhance the conversions for people arriving via search – is it product reviews, or a Q and A section, or customer service?

Why do we want users chatting?

And if you’re relying on click-throughs, you’ve got more impetus for social media. After all, if people are arriving for content rather than purchases, then it’s down to the content, and the strength of your brand and values to convince them that clicking on a third party will give them what they’re after. If I see a shoddy site, unrelated adverts, and no community or loyalty, then I’m going to distrust that banner stuck in the right hand column and leave for somewhere else before I can be tempted into clicking on anything. That’s where the ‘onsite engagement’ is important.

Isn’t a Facebook fan page a waste of time?

And then it’s onto ‘external engagement’. That’s the bit where you make yourselves available where ever an interested person might be, and do the utmost to serve their needs, in the hope they’ll get to know you and your brand and value it over your competitors. And the basis for this comes from the stats showing how social media efforts increase conversions, and clickthroughs from the first two.

So why bother with trying to get numbers?

If SEO is hugely effective for people finding stuff, and when they arrive they’re engaged and converted, then why bother with the outreach?

Firstly, depending on traffic levels, and the advertising model you use, a traffic boost from a social network (the second biggest source of traffic after search engines) can really drive a particular promotion or great piece of content. And if you can show engagement delivers a high percentage of conversions and a big traffic boost, then you’re really set.

Secondly, not everyone is using search any more. I can’t remember the last time I actively searched for a product review before making a purchase. I still read reviews, but I start by asking my network for people with relevant knowledge that I trust, and then follow their recommendations to extra content.

If you’re not getting recommended, you’re going to be paying more to get search traffic, and you’re not getting the recommendation traffic. Effectively you’re trying to run a marathon with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears. It’s still possible to win, but it’s going to get pretty tough!

This is the bit where the new tools come in.

You can start monitoring terms via Google news alerts (And almost every social media person has a personal vanity search set-up I’ll wager!). That can get pretty time consuming pretty quickly, which is where buzz monitoring comes in, e.g. Radian6, Brandwatch, Onalytica, Nielsen etc (apologies for anyone I’ve missed). These tools provide various ways for aggregating and managing all the mentions of your brand across the internet. The one downside of having a variety of useful tools is that it prevents some of the useful comparisons – e.g. sentiment between brands using different programmes – but I’d expect the market to slowly coalesce as social media matures…

This is also where you hook into available APIs, and allow people to promote your content on the social aggregators.

And that’s about where I’ve got to!

(I should say in my defence, this has been a bit of a stream of conscious post due to upset babies, meowing cats and other distractions, so I’m really interested in as many comments as possible to help distill the right parts out of this..)

Now the more fun bit…tagging some people who will probably struggle less with this than I did at the start of my social media journey within a large media company.

If it’s measurement, then I have to tag Katie Paine, without any implied buzz monitoring favouritism I haven’t chatted to Giles for a while. I’ll also tag Ste Davies, Luke for a personal brand approach, and Chris because he normally likes to get all argumentative.

Edit: I was going to tag benrmatthews but there was some blog address confusion, which has now been resolved…So he’s back on the list!

Consumers and bosses…

June 12, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Apologies for the slightly cryptic and unexplored post yesterday – a reminder that sometimes an idea needs a bit more fleshing out before clicking the Publish button!

What was foremost in my mind is something that is vitally important to my current role, and social media/community as a whole. And that’s the fact that, despite the growth in Web 2.0 technology, and adoption of community techniques – it isn’t half as widespread as you might assume from within the tech/blogging bubble. Plenty of people, even within the digital world, find it hard to see the reason for investing time in social networking and how it applies to them – and outside that area or department, it’s even more of a leap.

And what has come out of my work, attending valuable gatherings like Measurementcamp, and reading great blogs such as Web Strategy by Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang, or KD Paine’s PR Measurement blog, is that it’s the reporting, measurement, and justification of any community work is as vitally important as doing it in the first place.

And being able to show the measurable aspects of community/social media work, and explaining the direct and indirect effects on the bottom line is absolutely essential in changing the way companies think – particularly the larger, more institutional companies.

If you need a refreshing reminder about making things clearer for the rest of your company, and particularly more senior management, bosses, and CEOs, Avinash Kaushik has some good posts on Occam’s Razor which can feel like they pour a bit of cold water on the evangelical aspects of community and social media – but actually really help clarify the most useful methods of making things simple and effective – rather than relying on enthusiasm, buzzwords, and what it’s easy to assume is the inescapable logic of enagaging communities. Particularly this one, and this one!

I certainly don’t have all the answers – although the benefit of facing these challenges to varying extents in my day job means I’m slowly understanding more of the solutions – but what really interests me is how other people are tackling the challenges, what case studies people are willing to share, where people have found value, and what levels of commitment companies, particularly larger institutions, are actually committing to community engagement – is anyone finding the returns and solutions that make community pervasive through their company – or are large companies forever destined to limit it to experimenting via the fringes of what they do? And how much real effect does that have? And is technology – targeting adverts, engaging via Twitter etc, actually moving further ahead of where the biggest value is?

Personally, I think there’s a balance between using the tool of community marketing, and traditional digital and offline marketing. And that the trick is to be ahead of the mainstream by a small amount in order to establish and experiment in a space to ensure you’re on the right track before the crowds turn up – but what views have you got?

So are you in a large or small company? Or working as an individual?

Are you attempting to convince others – particularly management of the value of community and social media?

And are you targeting the early adopter communities right now? (e.g. Twitter, Plurk, Seesmic etc), or are you going with more mainstream efforts? (Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Stumbleupon).