Paul's Web Space 2.1

BlogPotomac - June 13, 2008

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending BlogPotomac at the State Theater in Falls Church, VA, hosted by Geoff Livingston and Debbie Weil. I thought it was a great (un)conference, filled with interesting talks, lively Q&A, and great networking opportunities. On her blog, Debbie recapped the event, linking to varied social media coverage; she also highlighted two of my favorite talks (but all the presentations were interesting).

Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post, recently spearheaded the launch of the WashBiz blog. He spoke about local business blogging at a newspaper, and how social media is affecting the Post and the newspaper business in general. (Read the preconference interview with Dan.) Then Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, one of the world's largest PR agencies helping business navigate the world of Web 2.0, spoke about the impact of social media on traditional PR.

Frank Gruber, gave the post-lunch keynote talk. Frank is principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite, and spoke about social media efforts underway at AOL. He then led a lively discussion on "Bright, Shiny Objects" — his favorite social media tools, ultimately a fairly comprehensive list of the most interesting and useful social tools available today.



KD Paine is author of "Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success" and is the publisher of KDPaine's Measurement Blog and The Measurement Standard. She presented a methodology of measuring engagement in social media, and later sent me numerous presentations and links, most of which are catalogued at her company web site, Measures of Success. In an interview conducted by conference co-chair Debbie Weil, Katie states that measuring engagement goes beyond counting clicks or visits, but rather should seek to determine the quality of the interaction.



Kami Huyse closed BlogPotomac by leading an interesting discussion of ethics in PR and marketing; she posed hypothetical cases involving creating fake campaigns, and discussed a real fake campaign by Coach, astroturf (fake grassroots political movements conducted by lobbyists and trade associations), and even mentioned The War of the Worlds (different media perhaps, but many of the same issues). They opened the State Theater bar for this last speaker, which may have enlivened the conversation.

I also met up with several people I know from the local social media marketing scene; for the first time in person: Chris Abraham, George Brett, Suki Fuller and Helen Mosher. Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda was among a raft of Flickr shutterbugs, Shireen Mitchell, and Jill Foster bent my ear about the BlogHer conference and blogging the Democratic National Convention; Jill also captured many attendees using Utterz.

Labels: blogging, blogpotomac08, marketing, measurement, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.blogpotomac.com/

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Social Media Measurement

Social media applications are developing at such a rapid clip that measurement technologies haven't really kept pace. I have the daunting task of determining what success means for the social media efforts underway at edweek.org, and then even more challenging, how to measure it. In my mind, success in our community efforts can be envisioned following a continuum of goals:

1. Traffic. Since we're an advertising-supported media site, for various reasons, a simple increase in traffic represents perhaps the most basic target. More traffic means more ad inventory to sell, and increases our standing with both advertisers and funders. We hope that simply adding social media features such as comments and forums to our site would boost traffic, but the challenge will be to determine how to measure these results.
   
   I intend to analyze our overall traffic to see if there is any increase in growth coincident with the introduction of comments, forums, blogs, etc. to our site. Since we've been introducing these changes over time, however, we'll also need to figure out a way to distinguish traffic trends on parts of our site that include opportunities for community participation from trends in areas little touched by these efforts. We could also hypothesize about how usage patterns might be altered by increasing use of social media, such as perhaps time spent on site, or differences in usage patterns exhibited by readers who have created social network profiles, or who have commented on the site, compared with less active users or simply average traffic patterns.
   
   
2. Engagement. The theory is that community media features and opportunities create more engaged readers, so measuring page views, time spent, and return visits per visitor among community participants would presumably indicate increased engagement with our site. We could also analyze the volume of participation — number of comments/forum posts, etc., both aggregate and per community member, and maybe even undertake to review a selection of the posts, trying to ascertain quality and appropriateness, even attempting to track trends in this area over time.
   
   
3. Impact. This gets even trickier. Our qualitative analysis of community contributions could perhaps demonstrate the effect that our journalism – and the conversations surrounding it – is having on people who care about education policy. We will also attempt to build in feedback systems, so that interesting or provocative comments – or suggestions, leads, and potential sources – would be passed back to reporters and editors. From there, we could try to track the number of times a comment led to a correction or a story idea, and thus actually informed our journalism.
   
   We could also search through forums for people posting follow-up comments indicating that a particular bit of advice helped in the classroom or informed the policy process. This is trickiest, and perhaps least quantitative, but useful both to help us justify this work and demonstrate its impact on the educational enterprise. We intend to identify active participants from the community as well as staff to help us track and utilize quality contributions made by readers.

These ideas cover only the measurement of social media content contributed to our site by our readers. Left untouched (so far) is the impact that will be felt as we engage in the larger conversation on the World Wild Web, via RSS feeds, social networks, widgets, social bookmarks, tagging and the like. Look in a future post for my treatment of the measurement of and ROI related to these efforts, the effects of which are even less well understood at this point.

I realize that this is already way too long, but I also want to pass along quality reference and background material from some of my favorite thinkers in this space.

Beth Kanter has created numerous resource devoted to examining the subject. She hosts a wiki entitled "Social Media Metrics, Measurement, and ROI: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach" which contains numerous links to quality resources, and her presentation at Podcamp Boston:


Beth's Blog also covers this topic extensively:
Why Your Social Media or Social Fundraising Plan Should Include Success Metrics

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research frequently blogs about social media:
Why Your Social Media Plan should have Success Metrics

Finally, Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs gave a great presentation at the WidgetDevCamp he helped organize and I attended a couple weeks ago, making a strong case for the growing importance of social media and of devising a strategy for utilizing it:

Labels: measurement, metrics, socialmedia, strategy

   Link: http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com/

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