Paul's Web Space 2.1

ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

Labels: freeculture, journalism, metrics, ona08, semantic web, video

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/

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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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