What’s holding brands back from becoming social: staffing & measurement

November 17, 2011

The future of social media is in the shift from ‘doing social’ to ‘being social’.

Today – there are many owners of social media, let alone digital, within an organization.  Social media forces marketing, PR, customer service, and other departments to work together.

When you get many owners of social, the business starts to understand how social plays an intimate role in what they do.  That social is a behavior, a philosophy, a new way of operating and not a simple tactic –  that social evolves from a function to a discipline.   When business understand this, they will shift.

Employees will become digital citizens, its experts surfaced to its consumers, and act socially on an enterprise level.

But the pathway to becoming social is held back for two major reasons:

1.  Social media is relegated to a junior person on the marketing and PR team.

Importantly, I’m not trying to undermine what often is a passionate, intelligent,  social savvy crusader.   Social moves forward in a companies due to a crusader, a crisis or executive level support.   But that said, the crusader method of organizational change is a rare one.

My rant — as a result of a junior appointment,  these social media leaders deal with rounding error budgets, may have engagement that is more damaging to the brand than helpful.  They focus on tactics not strategies  (Should I advertise on Linkedin?, I have followers on foursquare, now what do I do?.. you know the situation).  They are operational players and may not even be responsible for strategy.  They often measure the wrong things.

When you understand that the future of social is becoming a social brand – you see that the number of digital owners must increase.  There will be required alignment to strategies and plans.  Cross functional leadership puts a heavy load on a junior social media individual.   These social media specialists are promoted to their level of incompetence.

2. People measure the wrong things in social media
I’m a pretty harsh critic when it comes to measurement.  I believe measurement is a systemic, abominable situation in most organizations.  Really.

When I measure for success, I focus on  4-5 different categories.  Market, Recruitment, Engagement and Conversion/ Monetization.

  • Recruitment, or traffic includes the volume and size of your social presence, your rate of growth, hopefully compared to the industry.
  • Engagement typically includes metrics that measure the level of interaction between your customers and your content and/or own community management.   You can dive deeper into analyzing influencers, etc.
  • Conversion represents a focus on moving customers to action.  You can include or separate out monetization metrics.  [I like separating then - consider relabeling KPI – key performance indicators to key purchase indicators - it gives focus to what metric individuals are looking for]
  • Other – where I can, I like cross reference metrics to validate the integrity of the data.. but I digress.

The problem with much of the social media success metrics – is traffic is the domain that people stay in.  They don’t broaden to look past traffic to engagement and conversion metrics.  They only measure, and so are only concerned with, 1/3 of their success.    These tend to be the same people who don’t believe SoMe can deliver ROI.  Well no wonder.

This was the crux of a recent keynote I delivered at IBM’s Retail Fall Showcase recently, invited by retail futurist, former colleague and friend @drodgerson - sharing the stage with two very impressive gods – deep analytical genius @eeksock and global retail emerging tech deep sme @smarterretail.   I was grateful to be honest with a crowd of 200 retailers/ibmers on my frustrations.   My full presentation is available from my linkedin profile – through slideshare.. [linked above].  Presentations from the event are also available.

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Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

Klout – emergence of social influence metrics & interview with founder Joe Fernandez

February 28, 2011

Klout rates the social influence of individuals in social media.   oooooooo.   This is an inflection point in social media (metrics anyways).  The founders of Klout are working on the first application that measures social influence and so introduces an algorithm for determining which social media bloggers/tweeters/fans, etc are creating the strongest influence.  For brands, politicians, media – whatever your poison – can now understand those who influence the crowd.

Importantly, Klout has only integrated twitter and facebook so other social medias, like Linkedin or blogs, are yet to come.   AND… Klout has an API – which means that developers can integrate the Klout score of individuals into their services.   Hootsuite, the popular twitter client for instance, has klout scores integrated into the profiles of individuals.  There is rumour that Google will also be factoring in Klout in its own algorithms – which raises the voice of the influential.

Understanding klout is worthwhile and although I would hesitate to run a Klout perk program without ample investigation or verifying of influencers – unlike how some in the industry are starting to (and hats off pending your investment in this new area) – I do watch the growth - 1500 companies are using its API, people are adding klout profiles to their linkedin profiles (I did!) and young americans are putting scores on resumes.

I emailed Klout founder Joe Fernandez some questions following a tweet chat that he attended:

LDS:  How will Klout account for national or regional differences in social media usage? For example, Canadians just do not use twitter lists as much as Americans do – and while we might get there, it is hard to rate a Canadian using American metrics to determine influence.  Of course, Canadians are heavily into Facebook more than most nations – and so this too requires balancing.　 I think, over time, Justin Bieber would become less of a poster child – assuming he does not leverage across multiple social networks.

JF: 　This is a big challenge. 　It’s gets even harder when you look at how people using twitter in indonesia or brazil. 　We use a model based approach so that we can have lots of features and have the weights between them be dynamic based on different factors of the account. 　This is something we’ll need to get really good at.　

LDS: I also notice a lot of follower gamers.　@SiDawson from Australia has a neat little program called Twitcleaner which highlights the potential garbage in someone’s following.　 I could see Klout offer something like this – to not only measure klout but manage klout.

JF: 　Yeah, there is tons of follower gamers. 　We actually don’t look at followers in the calculation at all.

LDS:  Last question – how do you isolate influencers for a particular brand?　 I can look up individuals but if I wanted to know the most influencial on coffee, for instance – would I do that thru social media monitoring then take those with authority and cross reference into Klout?　 It seems arduous.

JF: 　We do this behind the scenes and use it to target our campaigns. 　There really isn’t a great way to do it on the site right now. 　We have a new version of the site coming though and this will be a big part of it.

=============

I’ve been tweeting a *lot* about Klout – and at the request of a number of folks – I will summarize some of excellent discussions, blogs and information that I’ve found on Klout:

  1. Oliver Blanchard’s piece on Understanding Klout’s measurement spectrum
  2. Jason Baker’s piece on Klout..become standard online influence measurement tool  , interview with Klout marketing director.

My past tweets:

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Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

Don’t be impulsive on the impulse for social media

February 2, 2010

I’ve had a series of interesting meetings in the last few weeks with rather large organizations – belonging to three different industries including health care, big ticket consumer goods and, an old favorite, home building (condominium development/real estate).   And although the needs were different, there was a common veil and almost desperation to do something in social media.

In all three meetings the marketing leadership knew that social media was upon them and was required in their marketing planning.  And yet, there was no real understanding of where to start or what to budget – and sometimes, what questions to ask.

I’ve had past clients assume that step one would be setting up a corporate facebook fan page – which is not always the case.  Before rushing in.. I always like to start with tried and true…. for instance

  • what are your business and marketing objectives and how does digital feed them (which is often my question to answer)
  • what are your target markets, their needs, wants and behaviours?
  • What loyal and sizable networks exist today that need a place for loyalty (and so potentially for social networking)?
  • What pain points exist in your customer experience?  What creates churn and loyalty in that experience?
  • How well are your current digital efforts serving you? (which leads to analytics and performance evaluation)

There is more to do than what I suggest above as I haven’t touched on organizational readiness nor a technology tool set review.  But importantly, I do advise not to jump to social media vehicle selection before understand what goals are to be achieved.    Its a wild west out there – and strategy has to lead.

1 Comment | metrics, social networks, strategy | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

The blogging contest that almost killed my Christmas

January 24, 2010

I recently competed in an international blogging contest in Dec 2009.  Truth be told… by entering an international blogging contest during year end with the Community Marketing Blog – called Blog Off II or #blogoff ,  I wasn’t aiming for gold so much as I wanted to gain greater insight into what makes for a better blog and how people would determine a best of breed blogger.   And as  I’ve never blogged as a competitive sport,  I did gain a lot of great learning on what to put in a blog post, blog title to maximize readership and interaction.

I submitted four original stories in twelve days, all well researched, carefully crafted posts.  And spent other days just reading the mass blog posting from other contestants, relishing in quality content.  I was judged to be among the top ten bloggers at contest end though I am always skeptical on measurement.  The contest held in twelve days in December seriously threatened my ability to shop before Christmas but it was important for me. With today’s focus on social networking, I find the very powerful world of blogging somewhat neglected.  I wanted to advance my skills here and blogging in an international contest was just the ticket.

The contest itself had an impressive setup – 25 approved candidates, six countries all using Typepad (oh god.. not my choice publisher) and supported by 1 official writer (Conrad Hall from Technorati) and the caveat that some blog posts would make it to the Huffington Post for publishing during the contest.

I captured a number of lessons worthy of sharing here:

1. Blogging is definitely a competitive sport – title choice, image use, linking, seeding has become more intensive, more commercial that I  realized.  My blogging experience is in personal blogs since 2006 and corporate blogs since 2007, aimed at mostly post purchase customers.  Both environments are not competitive per se.  But with the noise of the blogosphere, blog posts are fighting hard with National Enquirer title ferocity.

I gained this insight with my first post called Sex, Statistics and Social Media – a cheeky jest because I know from that popular tags can result in a lot of enduring traffic (not necessarily quality traffic) but this was more of a jest.  Jesting was perhaps inappropriate but I was trying to figure out how to compete when my focus in social media has been on collaboration.   Fortunate for me I received some quality comments from Conrad Hall, a professional writer and technorati writer.

“You can quickly give this article added interest and value by showing readers 2 or 3 ways for managing the time they spend on social media. Thanks Laurie. You have a good post with a solid foundation. Looking at it from the reader’s perspective – what’s in it for them – will make it stronger.” he opines

I countered that I don’t always want to suggest the 10 ways to improve something.. as I get quite sick of commercialized tweets and posts.   And so Conrad responded with a beautiful blog post demonstrating what he was suggesting in his comments.  The title?  On social media, prostitution and bartending.

Which leads to lesson no. 2. Groom the post for those who enter the site by the site door - directly to the post itself and not the blog.  [This is an important web design strategy as well as side door entry is prominent for well connected or linked content]

I really liked Conrad Hall’s personalized photo and short bio in the closing.  A great idea for a multiple author blog.

3.  Your blog post is easily buried and fast.

I worked hard on creating original content for my second post - Keeping the Personal Private. using Facebook Limited Profiles Upon posting it, another contestant added EIGHT consecutive posts.  The contest had a maximum of 12 post entries but no mention of adding eight posts in a row.  I was mildly tiffed at what couldn’t have been original, on the spot created eight posts but then – how is this not like real life?   Of course a day later Facebook announced new privacy rules which dominated the blogsphere on my tags.   I did get a number of great comments.. Ah this is real life.

4.  To spam or not to spam in efforts of securing greater traffic & comments in a contest.

One of the key metrics in evaluating bloggers was the amount of traffic and engagement -as measured by visits and comments – a post generated.   In my mindseye – I saw this as the clever use a tagging, digging, linking, tweeting to broaden the blog post touchpoints.  What I didn’t realize was how much other bloggers would rely on their personal networks to jam up their own posts with comments and traffic.

I’m rather opposed to spamming my network – linkedin, twitter, facebook – with explicit requests to comment on a blog due to a contest.  I value my network greatly and though I announced being in a contest and then tweets my blog posts, I didn’t spam my network.   I just was very nervous about making a request that would affect my fans, friends, followers.  And I wanted to reserve my assertive requests for charitable interests.   So when I received the following linkedin message from one of the winners of the contest, I started to debate blog post measurement.

HERE IS THE LAST BLOG….PLEASE VIEW AND POST A COMMENT BEFORE TOMORROW. THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!

http://www.communitymarketing.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/therranoliphantandtimruffner.html

I also would ask that you forward this message to anyone that you can think of, as of now I think I am still in 3rd place. You know how competitive I am and I really would love to win this contest it will certainly help my career and status in my field. I have already been asked to do seminars and workshops both in regards to Product Development and also Advertising/Marketing so all the help you have done for me already has brought me to a whole new level and for that I cannot thank you enough. Once again THANK YOU. If you have any social media Follow Me the links are under my signature line!

Importantly, these are not new thoughts.  I shared these thoughts with my fellow contestants, including the one above, and we had a lively debate which managed to move the needle on my skepticism dial a bit.  {not all the way but the needle did move].

Andrew Ballenthin, the organizer of this blogging contest, discussed active vs passive loyalty of people’s networks.  He considered the open solicitation for network loyalty (action) as a desirable action.  That this comment/traffic spike is something natural expected from bloggers.  Certainly, if one looks at the top ten retweets words – you will find ‘my blog post’ as one of them.  Andrew carries and important message here.

I did debate whether or not spike traffic would be sustainable traffic – likely not if there is little value in the spike.  Nonetheless, Andrew put a lot of time into considering the angles I put forth and came up with a recipe on measuring bloggers and their posts tactics should be evaluated.

5. It must be nearly impossible to control for a contest in a blogging environment. [ or anything goes..]

Okay so during the actual contest, Conrad promoted several blog posts and a specific blogger .   I challenged this in the comments:

I can’t help wondering how traffic can be used objectively as a measure of success in this contest when this post is now promoting some posts and not others. I say this more out of curiosity than anything else – given my nod to other deserving posts. – Laurie

and it sparked a very good debate with Conrad and Sam, one of the winning bloggers, on blogging metrics – which I’d recommend people to read the comments.

At heavy risk of sounding like a sore loser here and god, who wants to pick a fight with someone as eloquent and sharp witted as Conrad, the professional writer – I don’t really get the promotion of blog posts during the contest by a judge of the contest, during the contest.  More importantly, I think it very important to debate metrics – to make sure what measured truly matters.

6. There is wonderful community found in competition

I’ve made some wonderful contacts and blogging among some greats who do, in all their deserved colours of the win, get traffic that shames a website.  I enjoyed the contest and look forward to seeing Andrew Ballenthin and his Community Marketing Blog release a third contest.

Incidentily – my third and fourth posts were

Six visualization sources you should know about

Using twitter? Then you’d better understand the twitter list.

Laurie Dillon-Schalk is the Chief Marketing Strategist and founder of Social Wisdom - a Toronto based digital marketing agency that helps firms and individuals use social media and the web wisely.

You can find Laurie on Twitter at twitter.com/Ldillonschalk or on her blog at Socialwisdom.ca

Text ‘HAITI’ to #’90999′ to donate $10 to the Red Cross relief fund and/or text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to Yele Haiti earthquake fund

3 Comments | Blogging, metrics, roi, social networks | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk

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