The ultimate social network mapping software?

It could have been predicted…The most sophisticated network mapping tool of social networks has been developed for espionage…

“A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.”

Read more>>

Best Social Media Metrics?

Further to my post of last week, here is an interesting take on the issue of social media metrics from Avinash Kaushik,  a leading expert in web metrics.

Avinash sets out metrics for the following areas:

• Conversation
• Amplification
• Applause
• Economic Value

View his concept here, it’s interesting reading…

 

Measuring reach to engagement on social media

The #SMMStandards Initiative is a cross-industry effort to simplify and unify the measurement of social media that I’ve written about before.

Digging deeper into their proposed standards, I found interesting their preliminary guidance on how to “standardise” the following terms, as I summarise here:

Reach & impressions:  how to compare visits/viewers/circulation?
They caution against using any type of “multipliers” given that it is probably overestimated the number of people actually “viewing” content, e.g. an estimated 10% of your “friends” see your average Facebook post.

Opinion/advocacy:  this needs to be broken down into types: e.g. “opinions” (it’s good), “recommendations” (try it), “feeling” (makes me feel good) intended action (going to do it).

Influence: it is multi level and multi-dimensional – difficult to rely on an automated measure alone.

Engagement: occurs after reach, consider it at different levels:
Low: Facebook “like”, Twitter “follows”
Medium: Blog/video comments, Twitter “retweets”
High: Facebook “shares”, original content/video posts created by users.

The #SMMStandards Initiative have also proposed a Sources and Methods Transparency Table for use when analysing/collecting social media data which is now open for comments.

Read more about #SMMStandards Initiative here>>

Standards for social media measurement?

At the recent AMEC Measurement Summit there was an interesting discussion on setting standards for social media – a group of specialists have been working on this for the past years – as more and more companies use social media and wonder how to measure the outcomes- and it would be useful if some common standards were set…View the presentation below for an update on the latest developments:

When is a social media “visitor” not a visitor?

I’ve been looking into recently what constitutes a ” visit” or “action” on social media platforms. This may seem straightforward as on websites it’s well established what constitutes a “visitor“. However, in social media there is a lot of variation in what constitutes a “visitor” or “action”.  Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in the Dealbook blog about what Facebook considers as a “visit”. He notes that Facebook says it has 483 million “daily active users”. Within this it counts visits to its web and mobile websites – which seems legitimate. But it also includes those who visit third party websites and click on a Facebook “Like” button; those who share a Twitter post on their Facebook page; and those who leave a comment on such a website that then gets fed into Facebook. Rightly so, Sorkin is astounded by including such “visits” (which largely inflates visitor numbers of course).

For me, Facebook should count these so called “active users” as “actions” – they are more so actions using Facebook features/tools but not actual visits to the website.

Measuring activity on Twitter also throws up some interesting questions. There are many services that measure activity on Twitter, mostly based on the use of the Twitter #hastags. You can find out all sorts of interesting statistics such as how many people used a hashtag, how many people and how many times they received a Tweet containing a hashtag, etc.  For example, you can see that a hashtag generated by a campaign was used by 1000s of people that then reached millions. But what does that actually mean? In reality it means that millions have received a Tweet containing a hashtag that they may or may not have looked at – and the hashtag may or may not have been used in a Tweet in a way compatible or not with the original intention of the campaign that created it. So there is more work to be done as to what is the impact of message exposure through Twitter and other social media.

For those interested in this subject, here is an interesting post from Metrics Man on three fundamentals of social media measurement>>

Progress on Setting Social Media Measurement Standards

There is an ongoing debate about setting standards for social media measurement. Here is an interesting contribution from the Measurement Standard that reports on a recent meeting of specialists in the US organised by PR measurement guru K.D Payne.

One conclusion which I agree with is the need for the so-called  “Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP)”  for social media reporting, particularly in defining the following areas:

• Content
• Reach /Engagement
• Influence/Relevancy
• Sentiment/Advocacy
• Impact and Value

Read more on the Measurement Standard >>

Global standards for social media measurement?

Three leading leading communications associations have formed a new coalition to define, develop and promote industry-leading standards for social media measurement. The coalition is comprised of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), Council of PR Firms and the Institute for Public Relations.

Coalition chair, Tim  Marklein commented:

“Too many of the social media measurement options available today are based on proprietary tools and methods that can’t be easily replicated across brands, campaigns and organizations. As a coalition, we intend to break down those barriers and map out a path to standards that address key social media measurement challenges, including content sourcing, influence, sentiment, engagement and ROI among others.”

We couldn’t agree more.  It will be interesting to see what the coalition comes up with as they move now into the consulting phase.

Read more on the AMEC website>>

Social media measurement – standards or ritual measurement

I am currently at AMEC’s 3rd European Summit on Measurement in Lisbon where a major discussion about social media measurement was held today -  the Dummy Spit blog by Tom Watson provides a good summary of the debate.

Measuring success in online communities – part 2

Further to my earlier post on measuring online communities, I had the opportunity last weekend to present a module on this subject to a group of students following the SAWI diploma on “Spécialiste en management de communautés & médias sociaux”.

The slides used for this presentation are found below – they are in French – English translation will come….soon!

Measuring success in online communities

At the Lift conference this week in Geneva, I heard a lot of speakers mention the need to measure and evaluate how online tools are being used, for what purpose and with what impact (about time!).

One speaker, Tiffany St James spoke on  “How to encourage involvement in online communities”.  The above illustration shows the main aspects of her presentation, where she suggested some key performance indicators for measuring online communities, notably:

Outputs: how many visits, referrals, subscribers, loyalty, web analytics,  bounce rates

Outtakes: messages and experience for user satisfaction, measuring change of attitude

Outcomes: action-what do you want the user to do?

You can view a video of Tiffany’s presentation here>>

(illustration fabulously done by Sabine Soeder of Alchemy).