Quantifying the Impact of Social Media: Where the Edelman White Paper Got it Right, Got it Wrong and What We Should Do Next
January 31, 2008 | 23 Comments
If you're new here, and interested in the latest news and insights on social media marketing, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting Ignite Social Media.
Earlier this month, Jonny Bentwood of Edelman published “Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media.” Edelman gets picked on a lot (often deservedly so) for the highly visible mistakes they’ve made in the social media space, but there’s no question that they are both deeply involved and pretty darn thoughtful on the topic. This white paper fits the latter; it was a thoughtful analysis by some major players in the game on how you measure online influence.
What they got right:
1. This white paper builds on the concept of a Social Media Index, which is an effort to get all of us in this space to think about a standard way of measuring of influence. The index is not perfect (as they openly admit), but it is thought provoking. It’s a good starting point and a must read.
2. They gave some additional insight into how meme’s get started, concluding that there are:
- meme starters,
- meme spreaders,
- meme adapters,
- meme commentators, and
- meme readers.
This is analogous to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder, which measures web participation from low to high as:
- Inactives (52%) –>
- Spectators (33%) –>
- Joiners (19%) –>
- Collectors (15%) –>
- Critics (19%) –>
- Creators (13%).
3. They begin an interesting discussion that influence as measured by the power of an individual isn’t the way to go, but by the power of the idea and how much it actively moves within the space. Credit to Jeff Jarvis for that thinking, which I think is 100% right. This is similar to what Radian6 does in their monitoring tool when they allow you to search content by the activity surrounding it (i.e., total comments, unique commenters, etc.). I firmly believe that this is likely to be more useful than chasing an amorphous, ever-changing group of influencers for reasons I explain below.
What they got wrong:
Early on Bentwood acknowledges that this white paper doesn’t even try to be the definitive answer we’ve all been looking for, but another piece of the conversation. It’s a valuable one at that. These “got it wrong” statements are meant in the same way: to contribute another series of thoughts to this conversation, not to criticize even in a small way. So here goes:
1. For the bulk of this white paper, the roundtable seems to conclude that influencers are influencers by their very nature. I don’t believe this is true.
Relationships (both online and off) are contextual. A powerful influencer in one situation is a meek influencee (or someone who simply doesn’t care) in another situation. Steve Rubel has influence in social media conversations, but likely has no influence in conversations regarding women’s shoes, vitamins, Bollywood, etc. (Steve, if you are, in fact, a player in the women’s shoe world, more power to you, but hopefully the point is well made.
2. Social networks and trend starters are too complicated to ever be identified in advance.
That “influencers” exist and “do their thing” is the premise of the Tipping Point, a favorite book of mine. But we all know (or hopefully should know) that the world is vastly more complicated than that. Duncan Watts of Yahoo has done some groundbreaking research on social network behavior that suggests that the power of the idea is in the context of the moment, and the influencer on a given idea varies widely and unpredictably. As a result, we should not be trying to pin down the “powerful people” as some fixed set (n=what?), but rather build better systems to help us quickly identify powerful people by topic.
3. Personality-type is not the horse we should be betting on.
According to Bentwood, the roundtable concluded that “a system equivalent to Myers Briggs was needed for micro-communications. This would enable people to be able to map target media, meme creation, consumption and sharing habits.” In my view, that sort of effort would miss the boat entirely and be of dubious value. As someone who works in a multi-client social media agency, I have to work within conversations by topic. I believe that people’s passions and influence are not innate qualities of the individual that make them either an influencer or an influencible, but rather vary widely based on their comfort in and knowledge of a particular topic relative to others in the discussion. (Think of the bossy know-it-all around the office who is meek and mild when his big brother is around.)
Whether they ever choose to participate may relate to their personality type, but among those willing to participate, influence-level is not fixed. Max Kalehoff’s statement in the white paper that, “You don’t go for the most influential but the most easily influenced” is interesting, but misdirected and sounds suspiciously like targeting 1.0. (I acknowledge that I don’t know the context of Max’s statement, so I may have missed some nuance he injected.)
What we should do about it:
Based on all this, what do we do about it? What’s the ideal situation for moving forward? Here are my thoughts to add to the conversation:
1) To move the social media index forward, we’ll need a system that serves as the white pages of social media with RSS.
In other words, one of us needs to build an open directory into which people can voluntarily put their various online personas (blog, Facebook ID, Flickr account, LinkedIn, Twitter name, Utterz account, etc. etc. etc.). There’s no question that everyone would not do this, but social media types are openly creating online personalities and want to be found, so active “creators” users would. While Naymz and a few others do something similar to this, the utility comes not from just a “look-up” feature, but the ability to use this data to analyze contribution levels. (The social media index is interesting, but to make it work in the long-tail we have to be able to both automate it and use it as a tool within a monitoring platform.) So we’ve got to be able to allow folks to query this data in an automated fashion as part of our monitoring.
2) With the dataset we’ve created in Step 1, we will be able to improve our online monitoring so can identify both the most virulent ideas that are percolating within each conversation (measured by the activity around the idea including comments, photo tags, unique commentors, length of the comment, etc.) and cross reference it with the most active contributors in each conversation (by volume of contribution, across multiple platforms and media type).
3. If we then build an algorithm that weights the activity around contributions (audience receptivity to a contributor as measured by their engaging with that contribution) with volume of contributions (across multiple media like blogs, Tweets, Flickr tags, etc.), we’ll have a useable, ever-changing snapshot of which individuals are controlling and guiding a particular topic at a particular time. Ideally, this system would allow you to adjust weights like a graphic equalizer to get different outcomes depending on exactly what you’re trying to learn with your search.
Summary
When you work for a social media agency, you end up participating with the “true believers” in the world (like the folks on this roundtable), but you also participate with the openly skeptical and the cautiously optimistic. They neither know nor care who Robert Scoble is and their universe (online or off) is unlikely to intersect with his. But I firmly believe that there are billions of interesting conversations taking place out there, being steered (intentionally and unintentionally) by hundreds of millions of micro-influencers. To chase them all as somehow wired differently than us is not the way to go. To have better tools by which to find them within the conversations just as you need to is the way to go.
With that, I’d like to tag Jeremiah Owyang for his thoughts on the concept of context-based influence versus personality-based influence. I’d also like to tag Duncan Watts for his thoughts (although I can’t seem to find his actual blog, so doubt he’ll see this). I’ve likely bastardized and twisted his brilliant thinking into something he’ll barely recognize. I’m always curious as to what Geoff Livingston thinks. And, finally, of course, since I’m contributing to a roundtable that I did not attend, I’d love to hear from the actual participants, including Jonny Bentwood, Max Kalehoff, Sarah Petersen (who is either too shy to blog or needs some SEO help), Henry Copeland, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, Keith O’Brien, Richard Edelman, Rick Murray (another hidden/nonexistent blog–irony noted), David Dunne, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Dr. Walter Carl (congrats on the baby by the way–she’s very cute).
Now, who wants to build this tool I described? I’d certainly pay to subscribe to it… Heck maybe we’ll build it, who knows…
The Marketer’s Foray Into Social Media…
January 28, 2008 | 11 Comments
Lately we’ve been working with quite a few CMO’s at companies that are considering the leap into social media marketing, many of which are in the process of choosing a social media agency, nailing down scope of work, and all of which are still unsure if it will be a good or a bad investment. To be honest, this is a scary leap for marketers, who are being pushed from competitors and internal staff to enter this space , and who then feel the inevitable pressure to quantify their results.
And so the Marketer’s journey into social media begins as it usually begins: with the issuance of a request for proposal (RFP).
That is where it becomes interesting…For instance, instead of traditional detailed requests for proposals, most of the RFP’s we get are as informal as an email or a made from scratch “social media proposal”, totaling less than 5 pages in length. All of these have the same in common: they are requests to “propose specific social media strategies” and a “detailed list of pricing”.
From there, as a social media agency, we have to defend our tactics and strategies as they are met with skepticism and questions on every front - as marketers themselves are trying to make sure that they can answer the questions imposed from internal staff regarding timing, resources, and of course effectiveness and metrics.
And so, I figured that it was about time to reveal the marketer’s foray into social media by answering the most common questions/barriers that arise in the process . Some of the following questions I will be answering in subsequent posts are as follows:
1. How will a Social Media Agency Work with my current agency?
2. How long does a typical social media campaign last?
3. How will this social media campaign be measured?
4. How will content be developed?
5. What is the budget?
Hopefully this will grow into a conversation that we can all benefit from. Those on the marketing side will have a better understanding of what to expect, and those on the social media agency side will have a better understanding of how to answer these questions while sustaining ethics, generating results, and maintaining a sound business model.
Stay tuned…. And let me know any feedback or direction you’d like to see this take.
A Review of our Social Media Club Podcasting Discussion
January 23, 2008 | 4 Comments
This morning at the Triangle Social Media Club, Kipp Bodnar led the group’s discussion regarding the business applications of podcasting. I will attempt to recap some of our highlights for those who couldn’t wake up at 8am 
For those companies or individuals that may be determining whether or not to start a podcast, the group consensus was that an evaluation of assets is necessary. The following are some questions to ask:
- Do you have interesting content?
- Who cares?
- What is the information value? Are you providing valuable information at no cost?
- What is your dedication for keeping it going?
Additionally, we also defined the following specific business benefits to podcasting, listed below:
- Extra SEO Juice (thanks to video/audio)
- Brand Building/Image Changing
- Portability (providing on-demand information)
- Affordability
- Ease of Use
- Long Shelf Life
Like I said, these are tidbits, so feel free to continue the conversation by adding additional thoughts in our comments section below.
I also wanted to say thanks again to everyone for coming and contributing to a great discussion. Hope to see you next month!
(These SMC pictures are thanks to Wayne Sutton, who broke out his camera phone, uploaded pictures to Flickr, and Twittered it to all his followers in true social media style and fashion….. Click here to view the album)
Measuring the Value of Social Bookmarking Referrals
January 22, 2008 | 10 Comments
This morning I read an article by the BlogOnExpo blog, which discussed “Why 100 Organic Visitors are better than 10,000 Social Media Visitors”
Basically, the article made an argument that the quality of “social media visitors” in comparison to the quality of organic visitors is notably lower. (While the reference to “social media visitor” in this case is quite confusing, I’m assuming it was meant to refer to “social media bookmarking” visitors like Digg and StumbleUpon users). In any case, if you are a skimmer, the main assumptions I got out of this article were the following:
- Social Media Visitors (Social Bookmarking Visitors) come once and probably never again.
- Visitors from social bookmarking sites are not as valuable as visitors from referrals or organic searches – length of time on site, page depth, and participation is lower overall.
- Overall Takeaway: Invest more time in your “organic” visitors than your social media visitors.
Coming from an angle of a social media agency, I can’t help but to think this is a short-sighted view – even if it is a fairly popular attitude towards the value of referrals from social media bookmarking sites. For many, these bookmarking sites seem to provide a boost in traffic, but nothing more over the long term.
Before adopting this same attitude, I would argue that the value of social bookmarking sites are strikingly different for every business model and every business objective.
To use ourselves as an example: around 50% of our traffic comes from referring sites – most of these being StumbleUpon users. While at first, it was tempting to write this off on the above assumptions – we’ve found that a large audience of StumbleUpon users have an overall interest in social media, and are actually the users that stay on our site the longest (at around a 30% bounce rate). In our case, this increased exposure into our target audience is beneficial.
This is where knowing where your audience is participating in social media comes into play. Understanding that social bookmarking sites have different audiences can mean more valuable referrals and an increase in brand awareness among an already established audience. For instance, a company that is targeting a highly technical audience with a new technology or product offering may find that tailored content (not spam) promoted to Digg can increase product and brand awareness. Another company that is trying to push a promotion to price-sensitive consumers may find that Dealigg is the way to go.
The takeaway? If you look at social bookmarking sites as all the same or useless for every business model - you will never find value. However, if you can find and participate in the social bookmarking sites where your audience is in, you may reap the rewards of more valuable referrals.
1 in 4 Have No Internet Access: What’s the Impact on the Social Media Agency?
January 21, 2008 | 3 Comments
As a social media agency, we’re very interested in reaching people through conversations on the Internet. A question many clients ask us is, “How many people use this stuff?” Today we have a few more answers to that question, particularly if you define “this stuff” as Internet access at all. Turns out that 24% of people surveyed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project report no web access.
I’m personally assuming that many of those who report access at home in this survey likely also have it at work. Nevertheless, at first blush, 1 in 4 people missing out on the whole Internet thing is a bit surprising.
The more you look at the numbers, however, the more it makes sense. When the researchers analyzed the cross-tabs to see exactly who did and did not have access, some key findings emerged:
- Only 9% of those 18-30 years old have no Internet access (while 80% have broadband and 12% dialup)
- 71% of those over 71 years old, on the other hand, don’t have web access. I’m sure many of them are reading their papers and couldn’t give two hoots what we’re doing. (Apparently 29% of those over 71 are like my 74-year-old mom who has been online for about 8 years and blogging for the last 6 months.)
- While 39% of those who make less than $40k a year don’t have access, only 9% of those who make more than $40k have access.
- Only 7% of college graduates don’t have access, while 39% of those with a high school diploma or less don’t.
So, yes, 1 in 4 don’t have Internet access. That’s not something that you can dismiss, particularly for campaigns designed to reach certain target audiences.
But for social media marketers looking for younger, upper-income, highly educated folks, we’re looking in the right place.
~Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media
P.S. This kind of info is one of the reasons that I read e-Marketer religiously. Great stuff…
Comparing Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn and More
January 18, 2008 | 1 Comment
Ok, it’s Friday. I’m busy. Grabbing lunch now and decided to search “funny social media” to see if I could find some Friday fun to share. Found Lee Hopkins Wiki, on which he had placed this image from a Wired Geekipedia page.
A little Friday fun for everyone. If you’ve ever really wondered the best uses for Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, here it is…
Finish the week strong. Have a good weekend.
~Jim
PR Heading Towards Social Media or Another Buzzword?
January 17, 2008 | 5 Comments
In doing a little PR for Ignite, I typically use free, basic services like PR.com and PRLeap. For the most part, these are pretty decent for getting a traditional release “out there” easily and affordably. It has also led to Google News inclusion, which has led to boosted SEO of our site.
So today, I was dismayed when I went to PRLeap, submitted my release and then was met with this screen:
As you can see, there is currently no free service anywhere. Believe me, I checked. Then I noticed the following announcement on the website that confirmed my speculations, “As announced on November 26, 2007, PR Leap has discontinued its free service after four and one half years.”
However disappointing this was, I decided to to look more at the pricing to see what exactly the different cost structures included, when I noticed that the first “distribution” listed on this chart was none other than “social media”.
No description. No explanation of what sites are included or where it would be distributed- just social media.
I can’t help but to look at this and think, “Is this just another example of PR trying to head in the area of social media?” or “Is the term “social media” going to be another “added feature” claimed by PR distribution channels and PR agencies?” I can’t help but to think of it as the latter.
So- I’m curious if any of you use PRLeap and use this “social media” feature? If so I’d love to hear your experience with it, and get some insight into the social media it targets.
6 Ways to Deal with Spam Blogs
January 16, 2008 | 13 Comments
Anyone who has been blogging for more than 90 days or so has likely seen their work sucked up and re-appropriated on a spam blog. (In fact, I’m pretty sure this article will end up on one or more, ironically.) I noticed on Twitter the other day someone asking how to deal with this people, who use your hard work to improve their keyword positioning. They are most certainly thieves. Some thoughts:
Two kinds of sploggers
There are two kinds of folks, in my view. Those who write stuff like, “Lisa McNeill at Ignite Social Media had an interesting post today”: and then copies all or part of the post. These folks are clearly keyword stealers, but at least they are giving credit for the work IF they provide a backlink. It’s frustrating, but in the digital age, content aggregation is becoming the norm.
The fully repugnant ones are the scrapers. They fully act like your content is their content, even when they give backlinks. Often the effort they put into making it seem like this was their content? Lisa’s name becomes a link to their site. The headline is a link to their site. Some don’t even give us the “About Ignite Social Media” and the link at the end.
Top 5 Ways to Deal with Sploggers
- Decide how much time this is worth to you. You can spend your life chasing these idiots, you can ignore it, or you can do something in between.
- Use internal links to your site within your post. If nothing else, sploggers are a reason for including internal links to your site within your posts. If they have high SEO and you can embed a link to yourself within it, at least there can be a payoff. This is often easy to do as your posts are building off earlier concepts anyway.
- Use a footer that states that the content is yours. Some folks recommend putting a copyright disclaimer at the end, others prefer a creative commons approach. There’s a WordPress plugin that puts copyright at the end of your posts. I haven’t tried it yet, but plan to check it out today. If it’s not good, someone let me know.
- Contact the site owner. The next couple of ideas come from a good post by Joel Burslem on this topic. He’s a bit more aggressive than I am on this, but he has good ideas. The first of which is to email them and tell them to stop. It could work for sploggers who still have a soul. (Doesn’t seem to have worked for Joel, but he did get his splogger to pilfer and post an article calling himself a thief.)
- Report them to Google. I learned from Joel that you can report people by clicking on the Ads by Google link on the offending site, then “Tell Google What You Thought About These Ads” and then “Report a Violation.”
- Use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even Joel says he hasn’t gone this far yet, but he does note that it is possible to use the DMCA to hit these folks.
Those are some initial thoughts, half mine, half Joel’s to help you begin to deal with these folks. My personal favorite (since it’s easy and can help your site’s authority) is the internal linking within a post. This doesn’t need to be conspicuous or repetitive, but it can be done within the natural flow of the conversation.
I’m sure people smarter than me have thought of many other ways. What else works? Or do you ignore these folks, as we often do?
UPDATE 1: I just learned that one of the examples I cited was in fact part of a larger content sharing partnership that we willingly participate in. I didn’t realize they were a partner of my partner. Boy is my face red… I’ve deleted the reference to them, with my apologies. As we all know, there are countless others who are just stealing, as your comments below attest to…
Is Mobile Social Finally Ready for Primetime?
January 15, 2008 | 2 Comments
“Things that are inherently social are inherently mobile…”
Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder
USAToday, Nov 13, 2007
Mashable said in 2007 that they were “bullish on mobile social networking.” A little early, but they were right. The planets are definitely in the process of getting aligned and mobile social is going to make much noise in ‘08. With MySpace and Facebook making moves into the social mobile space over the past couple of years, Nokia buying Twango, and Google buying up SMS companies (Dodgeball, Zingku and Jaiku) as well as making a run for a chunk of the wireless spectrum (and launching Android), things are appearing to come together. The only problem will be those pesky mounting monthly cell phone bills. Assuming Google has its way, though, this may be a non-issue.
I’ll have to admit, I’m late to the sms game. I hate phones — hate them. I don’t use them, when they ring I don’t answer them — I don’t care who it is. But now that I’ve spent a small fortune on my iPhone (my previous gig gave me a TREO, so consider me hooked on expensive pieces of ringing plastic), I feel compelled to get the most out of my shiny new toy. So I’ve been investigating this text messaging thing and I’m impressed.
Part of my awakening came when I visited family in Zambia a couple of years ago and saw that my parents-in-law were far more into this text message thing than I was. They manage a large part of their guest house business via the cell phone. I saw how farmers were using text messaging to get their work done. I saw how kids (teenagers, actually) were interacting with one another. All with inexpensive phones — no need to mess with messy Vista or expensive Macs. By the way, big ups to David Kobia and Eric Hersman for launching the incredible Ushahidi.com site that, through the use of SMS and other technologies, empowers people to chronicle acts of violence in post-election Kenya. Essential free plug.
In addition to the cost issue, there are some other problems that I see (obviously not deal breakers, but points of concern for me). Some random notes:
- Internet users are use to getting stuff for free, whereas SMSers are used to paying for their service. How will that gulf get bridged?
- Conformity in user interfaces and keying devices. Traditional phone keyboards vs Blackberry/Treos and iPhone keyboards — should there be a standard? Does it really matter?
- Preventing spam on your dime — Need to have trusted sources. To this end, Whrrl.com, a “social discovery” service, seems to be an interesting solution. It allows users to “share real-world adventures and discover places, events, and people through the chronicles of others.” Although only available in a few major cities, this does appear to work out the trust issue.
- Right now it seems that we are still in ramp-up mode – get as many people signed up as possible, we’ll worry about revenue later (a la Twitter). But how much are people willing to spend (monthly charges) or endure (ads)? I know who will pay – the horny. MeetMoi charges $10/month on top of your monthly charges to allow you to meet other singles in your area. AvaPeeps FlirtNation –- for $5/month on top of normal charges, you can flirt with people (”Peeps”) on Facebook, MySpace and your phone. It’s supposed to be some sort of social media game – you can create an avatar and have at it.
- Developing an interface that does not require you to click through screen after screen. Need to get in and get out as quickly as possible.
- Privacy — Those location-base “I know where you are/where you at” apps are scary (funny commercials though).
Some have argued the economics just aren’t there yet, others are obviously bullish — what do you think?
Not laughing so much now: Delta’s blog effort
January 14, 2008 | 1 Comment
One of the things we do as a social media agency is analyze what other people do and comment on it. To that end, way back in August, Lisa wrote a post called “Delta starts a blog, I’m still laughing.” At the time, the blog had just a few posts and, well, it was more than a bit lame. So we called them out on it, and that’s when we got our first surprise. Within an hour or two, Jacob Morris, the guy in charge of the blog, left a comment, basically saying, “Give us a chance, we’re finding our way here.”
That alone tells me that Jacob understood that Listening is Social Media Step One, and he was monitoring the reaction to his new effort. That was a good sign.
So today, I wandered back over to the Delta blog to check it out. It’s significantly better than it was. Jacob did a post on his recent vacation, Robin did one on surviving airport security. The best part is that they’ve started a series of little videos called Planeguage that are actually pretty cute. (Amazing that they make fun of some of the hassle of flying commercial, like kids kicking your seat, crazy people with the window shades, etc.)
Jacob and crew don’t have an easy assignment. Like any big corporation, I’m sure there’s conservative undertones. And there are a few things they could do better still (i.e., I was looking for an “email this” link at the end of one post I liked; use more keywords on your Planeguage posts, etc…), but they have done a nice job finding their voice. The posts are more human and authentic and less cheerleading, and they are a good mix of personal, fun and business-oriented.
Good lessons here for corporate social media marketing types:
- Get permission to do something.
- Start safe while everyone is watching.
- Find your voice over time.
- Loosen up as you hit stride.
- Don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself or your industry.
Jacob: You said you would get there. After this quick check-in, it seems like you’re on your way…