Kandace Hudspeth

In a recent tweet, I asked, the question why is there so much confusion about how to measure social media? Social media is trackable, it requires some action to be taken. Actions or interactions like posting, reviewing, rating, commenting, sharing, connecting, etc.

Engagement is the big picture, the summary of all trackable actions. Engagement = Time spent+ action taken+ brand takeaway? Web analytics professionals feel that  engagement is a metric is a function of a visitors lifetime of visits and actions taken on a particular site. There seems to me much confusion about how exactly to standardize the actual  engagement equation. This is probably because it will need to be customized to comprehend brand objectives. The equation may look different for depending on business and brand objectives. The following link http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19896.asp includes a video of industry representatives as they discuss “engagement” and how best to measure it.

Forrester Research has written a lot about this topic. Back in 2007 a Forrester analyst proposed what he calls the four components of engagement. They include involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. These components are measured both online (web analytics, log files, brand monitoring services) and offline (surveys, focus groups, etc). The goal is to try to provide a 360 view of customers actions. According to Forrester the four components of engagement  can be measured in several ways. The involvement component will paint the picture of how often a visitor comes to your site, how long they stay, and the amount of content they consume. The interaction component uncovers many of the social actions a visitor can take,  conversions, and possible purchases. The third component may take some human interaction to interpret and is not as easily captured by raw numbers. Intimacy can be understood by monitoring and analyzing the things people say about a brand or the tonality (positive, negative, neutral) of a blog post. The fourth component is influence. I am sure you are aware of the overwhelming affect of word of mouth. Influence is a loyalty metric, it will uncover how likely someone is to recommend your brand, product, or service.  To read more on the Forrester components of engagement check out the Forrester blog http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2007/08/new-research-on.html

What do you think about measuring engagement? Do you feel it is am online metric or does it stretch beyond and capture the holistic picture of customer interactions? A 360 view sure would be nice! Any thoughts?

Another wonderful day in the groundswell!!! If you didn’t attend the Twebinar, you missed  on a fine example of how the participatory culture operates.

Today I attended the CrossTech Media / Radian6 twebinar  Game Changing Moves - Doing Business with Social Media. This is part one of  a three part series, part two titled “Who really owns your brand” (Thursday, July 22) and part three “The importance of listening” (Tuesday, Aug 19).

The event was hosted by Chris Brogan and included interviews with over 30 of today’s big players in social media. The interviewees discussed how they are currently using tools like social communities, blogs, wikis, and podcasts to start conversations and engage audiences in ways.  Of course the key point in regards to how to enter the social space are… LISTEN to you customers!  This point is critical to successful entry into doing business with social media and is highlighted in Groundswell, a book by two Forrester Research analysts (I recommend you read it!)

Earlier this week MediaPost reported on Ogilvy’s big three social media strategies for 2008. Guess what number one was? Give up?

• Number 1- listening
• Number 2-  working with partners who enable marketers to engage in a series of conversations about their brands
• Number 3-  unlocking and unleashing of content

Ok back to the twebinar, over 1000 people registered for the first session. If you are following @twebinars you can see comments from other social media activist and even do a little networking.  According to @chrisbrogran companies like Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, Weber Shandwick, Fleischman Hillard registered for the Twebinar. This is great news!

Go to www.summize.com and search twebinar  or #tweb to get a plus on the conversation.

Check out-  http://twebinar.com

Follow on Twiter- @twebinars, @chrisbrogan, @davidalston and speakers from our twebinar (you can find the speakers Twitter addresses on the site)

What does it really take to win in today’s search landscape? SEO is much bigger than just onsite optimization. But what does the search landscape look like today? In a recent search illustrated release, Elliance depicts the many components of today’s search landscape. The infographic shows the almost 50/50 split of the importance placed on components of websites (i.e. site content, articles, blogs, news, images, video, RSS) and the workings of social communities (i.e. social bookmarking, networking, shopping, social sites) to achieve top rankings on the SERPS.

Social communities have created an powerful distribution channel. Today’s social communities are full of people like you and me. We rely on a participatory culture to find, sort , and share information. We share text, images, audio, and video by passing along links to friends within our social network. Links within the content that is being shared within communities are crawled by search engines to drive valuable traffic to your site. Now, it is important to mention that this concept is reliant upon the creation of useful and interesting content. Boring or non-engaging content does not have a viral effect. The important thing about social media is that it provides the arena to for sharing and creates an opportunity for building link popularity. This does not mean that it is ok to forget about onsite optimization! So make sure you remember the more traditional elements of search engine optimization when building your site and developing your useful and engaging content to be shared via social communities.

Check out search illustrated info-graphic from SearchEngineLand: Search World 2007- http://searchengineland.com/080610-082238.php

A new social bookmarking site that aggregates URLs being shared on Twitter. It is similar to Digg except there is no voting up or down. The URLs are displayed in order of how many tweets they have received. Twitturly displays active tweets referencing the popular URL and provides a quick way for you to join the conversation by submitting your own tweet about the topic.

The Twitturly blog welcome post on May 9, 2008 says “…in the last 24 hours, over 46,000 unique URLs were posted on Twitter and that for those 46,000 URLs there were over 60,000 tweets.”

At the time of this blog post the top two URLs were “iPower 2012: The year the Internet Ends” a video update on net neutrality http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality (33 tweets in the last 24 hours) and “Your life on the line- Plurk.com” a micro-blogging site http://www.plurk.com (23 tweets in the last 24 hours)

It is a fairly simple site but a good tool to monitor what people are saying on Twitter. Check out Twitturly and let me know what you think www.twitturly.com

Ice Cream could possibly be my biggest weakness. It is the downfall of any diet, the treat you hate to love or love to hate? If you follow my tweets you would know how hard I have been working out lately. I am on a mission to get back into shape. Maybe even back into competition shape (we will see)? Anyway, I have been staying far away from ice cream but not social media!! Social media and ice cream- who would have guessed they had so much in common? Have you ever had to explain what you do to your mom or maybe your grandparents? If you need to keep it simple- Common Craft- in Plain English videos are an excellent tool! So watch the video and see what social media has in common with ice cream- you know you love ice cream!!!

Watch Social Media in Plain English- http://www.commoncraft.com/socialmedia

PS- If you don’t know what tweets are, you may want to watch the Twitter in Plain English video also lol. Here is the link- http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Check out Common Craft- http://www.commoncraft.com

Do you consider yourself an intelligent business traveler? I thought you would say yes. Are you a Dopplr? I am and you should be. Dopplr is an online service that links to your online calendars and social networks to let you share you travel plans with friends or colleagues. Key features include the “fellow travelers list” and “my journal”. The “fellow travelers list” lets me see any of my contacts travel schedules and keeps me up to date on who will be where when. “My journal” keeps a record of what I have been doing and what my friends are up to. For example Dopplr knows I am going to be in NYC June 10th - 13th, it also knows my friend Greg will be there and reminds me to ping him for coffee. Doppler also has tips for every city. So when you are traveling to a new city or are looking for something great to eat for dinner in a city you visit often, if you peak at the “tips for this city” page you will find tips and recommendations on any topic from your trusted network. Ok, one more cool thing and then I will let you check it out for yourself. Do you wonder about the carbon impact from all of the traveling you do? Dopplr and AMEE offer a carbon calculator that graphs your travel carbon impact.

Check it out!

Dopplr-www.dopplr.com

AMEE- www.amee.cc

A few days ago I came across the BusinessWeek-Rapleaf study on the social media gender gap, no surprises here- girls rule and boys drool. The study found that although both men and women are active on social sites, the women dominate. Key findings include….

• Behavioral trends stating that women’s online social interactions are relationship driven and men’s are transaction oriented
• Married men stay away for social sites (with the exception of LinkedIn) and married women are flocking to them
• Women are casual gamers and spend a lot of time beautifying their profiles and sharing family photos
• Men spend more time playing first person action games and are likely to leave social sites after getting married

The Rapleaf study recommends the next big web2.0 sites should target women and it looks like Forbes agrees. Forbs.com will be launching a new social networking site for women, called the Executive Women’s Network. The site will enable women to connect, share knowledge, create profiles, and take in targeted content. This is the second social initiative in recent months, early this year Forbes launched a social site for C level executives called the AnswerNetwork.
The coolest thing about this study and Forbes new social site is that is recognizes the need for more women leaders in advertising and social media. The web is social and women are social creatures, seems like a no brainier to me!!!

Check out the BusinessWeek-Rapleaf study http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2008/tc20080516_580743_page_2.htm

I heart LinkedIn! The site turned five this month, I have been a member for two and a half years and find the site to be an extremely powerful networking, contact management, and career tool. As of April, LinkedIn is the fastest growing social networking site. According to ComScore LinkedIn received 8.7 million unique visits, a 361% increase over last year. This is no surprise with 22,000,000 plus users, over 7,000,000 introductions sent, and over 1,000,000 questions answered in 2008.

So are you in? if not, you should be http://www.linkedin.com/