A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to measure success with social media marketing. Today I ran across a great real-world example of the difficulties marketers have when setting up and measuring meaningful metrics in social marketing from Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily.

I agree wholeheartedly with Aliza Sherman’s point that we are “using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictates measurement in their own proprietary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my consultancy, we’ve created and re-created custom dashboards to measure the specific interactions that are important to clients. We’re reinventing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the limitations of proprietary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the problems with social media marketing measurement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any others that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is nebulous. The term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depending on who is using the term and what they are trying to communicate. There is no definitive, well-understood, totally agreed upon definition of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lacking clearly defined and agreed-upon terms is a big barrier to measuring anything.
2. It’s not social media, stupid. I don’t think any of us are actually trying to “measure social media,” per se. We’re looking to measure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the problems with measuring social marketing here.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that everyone is buzzing, blogging, tweeting, and talking about geolocation. Research firm Borrel forecasts that location-based mobile spending will hit $4 billion in 2015, an increase of nearly 12,000% from the $34 million spent in 2009. With highly anticipated location-centric announcements looming from both Facebook and Apple, the buzz over geolocation is not expected to diminish any time soon. Leveraging location will drive the next wave of consumer marketing, but based on the current pace of services and apps going to market, we’re setting ourselves up for geolocation apocalypse.

Leveraging location will drive the next wave of consumer marketing, but based on the current pace of services and apps going to market, we’re setting ourselves up for geolocation apocalypse. In this scenario consumers gorge themselves on a plethora of location-based services and spam, gut-busting data profusion and promotional push acid-reflux. If we’re not careful, the coming cataclysm could consume us with:

• Swarms of Geolocation Services. Already in full swing, new services are appearing with an alarming frequency. Ranging from the more popular/mainstream (Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Yelp, MyTown, Whrrl and Loopt) to the more obscure (PlacePop, BlockChalk, Bump, FoodSpotting and Graffiti), services are being piled high. Gauging by the more than 25 companies that made location-based announcements at SXSW, consumers will soon be choking on an overabundance of geolocation services.
• Armies of Aimless Apps. Each service wants you to use their app, so can the marketplace sustain a massive rush of apps? Of course not. When I sit down for dinner at my favorite tapas place, how many apps can I “check-in” with before everyone else at the table starts throwing flatware at me? Most likely one, possibly two, if I snap a photo for upload when the entrees arrive. Check.in, by the team at Brightkite, is addressing this problem with their upcoming app (one checkin to rule them all). But how many apps (and features within each service) will they need to support to effectively fulfill consumer needs?
• Drowning in a Deluge of Data. If you’ve seen SimpleGeo’s Vicarious.ly, or the visualization video of geolocated data they collected during SXSW, you can see the potential for massive floods of personal geolocated information that may or may not be relevant to your consumers. Bing recently added Foursquare data results to their maps. Now imagine them adding results from a dozen other services, or maybe four dozen other services. As a user, I just wanted directions to the post office, now obscured by thousands of user notes, to pick up my bacon-of-the-month. Does it help to know that 600 of my closest friends also hate going to the post office?

Read the rest of the article at AdAge here –>

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Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & loving voices on the boutique stereo speakers. Video from the CEO is playing telling you about the boutique, and all the wonderful things you’ll find there. You listen, and you’re entranced.

The visuals are heavenly and soothing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see products from other women you recognize, or would like to get to know better, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the magnitude and quality of products at this boutique, you feel compelled to give kudos to management. So you search around a bit to find someone who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by yourself in this huge boutique! Why aren’t there any sales people here, you wonder? You’d like to buy something here.

But wait! Did someone call your name? Yes! But it sounds very distant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s calling to you from outside the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoying the boutique, but she insists on talking to you outside of her lovely boutique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frustration of this potential customer?

This may seem like the beginning to a short fiction story, but it’s a scenario I see carried out all to often with new social networks and online communities. The community manager of a new or recently updated social network community oftentimes prefers to chat with community members outside of the community entirely. Any contact with customers take place at other communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…all great networks, but competitors for your customer’s time. If your community manager is spending more time on these networks than your own, then your community is suffering.

In a recent Online Community Culture Survey, one of the top 5 most influential factors listed in a community’s culture was participation by the Host. And as women in social networks, this study agrees wholeheartedly with our viewpoints about the kind of networks we feel connected to. Network execs that instruct their community managers to pump out editorial information, then leave the brand community and convene elsewhere, yet expect community users to somehow feel connected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

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How wideband social media is changing the world’s cognitive structure

People working together is like a large brain performing a computation, but in which each neuron has legs and tends to wander off at random moments. Hutchins coined the phrase distributed cognition for when people work together to achieve an outcome (see the book “Cognition in the Wild”), but for my taste, “neurons with legs” paints a sharper picture.

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If you can imagine that people working toward a common outcome – whether a play, a business initiative, a software release – are like neurons with legs, then it is clear why working in a war room with project maps on the wall has always been the preferred mode of intense collaboration.

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Working in different locations is comparatively unattractive, even if it is the “way of the world.” Communication wasn’t really free to start with, and the cost shoots up dramatically as soon as the neurons can’t see or hear each other, or notice when the others have wandered off.

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Software teams are getting practiced at working intensely across distances. The best teams use phone, voice– or video–Skype or equivalent, voice conferencing, online chat, online document collaborative and code synchronization tools to keep up with each other as much as they can … and of course, plane trips when they really want to communcate heavily.

(Why is it business people so often set up all the contract details by internet, but then fly to be in the same room when it comes time to close the deal?)

So far, pretty standard.

However, those communication mechanisms are deliberate, operating with the directed intention of transferring information from one wandering neuron to another. “Directed” is the key word.

Wideband social media adds a twist. By “wideband” social media, I mean broadcast media such as Twitter, Facebook, and geographic location revealing apps.

With wideband social media, the group of wandering neurons contribute to an emerging picture, which none of them could paint alone. The data that arrives is spontaneous, unpredictable, and informative in surprising ways.

“I’m going to lunch at the Mac.”

What information could this possibly hold? Well, if sent on Twitter or group-linked geopraphic locators, it produces a spontaneous get-together of friends and not-yet-friends, which produces a conversation, a company, a manifesto or a new friendship, all with long-term unexpected effects.

We’re only seeing the beginning of the story here.

Like any new technology, there is a dark side as well as a light. You can follow, but you can also be followed. Police can take steps to increase safety, or to oppress. The new GIS (geographic information systems) frankly scare me. I wonder how long before we forget who’s watching our movements and what they’re doing with it. However, that scary scenario is not part of this particular blog entry.

What is part of this entry is the question about what this means in a commercial context ( beneficent, let’s pretend, just for now .

Wideband social media extends a company’s ears.

• A person doesn’t like (or does like!) your product – you get to hear about it in a casual online complaint. You can move to take care of it immediately, long before it would hit a customer service rep.
• You get to see trends in the marketplace early, through gossip, long before the retailers publish the trend in their public reports – or even before it hits their cash registers.

And getting back to the start of the story, how does this impact commercial cognition?

I don’t have the answer to that yet, but I see an outline. The outline is real and current, just not yet tagged with words. Competitive companies will work it out long before we writers have words around it.

What I see, though, is a corporate idea with millions of remote dendritic connections, remote cognitors that live inside a picture that changes as rapidly as whitewater rapids. The people help paint, recognize, understand, and further change the picture, all at the same time.

(End note: Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” (no-o-sphere) in “The Phenomenon of Man” in the early-mid 20th century to describe what he saw as the natural evolution from atoms to multi-cellular organisms (us) to a cognitive entity in which we would be only contributors. Scientific meetings, then the www were considered to be early versions of the noosphere, but from what I’m seeing, both of those pale in comparison to what’s about to happen with broadband social media as enterprising groups realize the power of so many dendritic connections wandering around acting with wideband social media attachments.)

Alistair

Short URL: http://Alistair.Cockburn.us/neurons+with+legs

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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I must admit being pleasantly surprised by this new application. SalesForce Inc. is helping corporations harness the real power of social networks — namely the Twitter community. Comcast has been a model in providing solutions to customer problems via Twitter, and is one of the first customers of SalesForce Inc’s new app.

It basically seems to be a way to easily track conversations on Twitter, and is not the only app to provide tracking, but could be the most expensive. Pricing is ”$995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the possibilities for Twitter if it were to create it’s own CRM/brand management tool on his Web Strategist blog.

Read the full BizJournals.com article about SalesForce Inc’s new Twitter CRM app here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/23/daily4.html?

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A key graph from the report:

Most Twitter users are new and 70% signed up in June 2008–

Twitter User Growth

If you’re a business and are using Social Media to find and engage your customers, understanding how they use Twitter can be highly valuable for your marketing efforts. Download the full PDF report.

Want to create a Twitter strategy for your business? Contact Ghennipher to learn how to use Twitter for marketing, PR, customer service and feedback.

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Brian Solis from PR 2.0 has published a comprehensive list of Twitter tools for community managers and communications professionals. Businesses implementing a social media strategy will find a wealth of value from this list of tools, and by using them in a way that creates transparency and authenticity.

One reason I haven’t spent a lot of time on this blog writing about social media tools is because the old habits of marketing die hard with regard to using tools. SEO/SEM seems to have lulled marketers into laziness with all of the automated tools that merely require setup and monitoring. Twitter — and all social media, to be sure — requires actual engagement with the users of the media. That requires authenticty, transparency, and not hiding behind an organizational brand. In the past, I’ve found the most effective way of helping businesses understand how Social Media is different was to train them on the culture of Social Media and to incorporate that culture into their organizational communications. Now that many businesses are starting to understand this concept of transparency and open communication, more and more businesses are intelligently using the tools available for social media to improve their customer communications. So, I list these tools with the caveat that effective use of them by organizations require a real understanding of the Twitter culture of openness.

How to best use this list of Twitter tools:

• Develop a Twitter strategy with the help of a Social Media consultant
• Tie your Twitter strategy into a larger Social Media strategy
• Choose the tools which uniquely fit into your communications strategy
• Always keep a spirit of transparency and 2-way communication foremost, as some of the tools can create broadcast type messages which annoy and alienate many social media users

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Here’s the Tweetup details — we’d love to have any Twitter friends, old or new:

Coffee Break
435 E 400 S
Salt Lake City, UT
7 PM -

I’ll be uploading photos of the Tweetup soon, and here’s a little advance notice — we’ve got a very special Tweetup planned for October 20. Please clear your calendar and join us.

See you at the Tweetup!

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