(Photo from Thomas Hawk)
They say what you say online is there forever. But how trackable is it?
The ultimate allure of online marketing is accountability. You cannot count how many people saw a billboard on the 280 freeway, but you can count how many saw a banner ad on CNN. And even, if that click became a sale.
But just as tracking clicks online have limitation, so does tracking conversations, influence and word of mouth. How do you track conversations that occurs between different social media websites?
From Todd Defren:
You write a blog post. You tweet about it. It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile. You share it via Facebook. You save it to del.icio.us.
…
Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile. Or they comment on your Facebook post.
Social Media’s Broken Conversations & Broken Tools
Such “broken conversations” can have potential implications for the social media monitoring, as Todd Defren smartly points out:
Social Media Monitoring vendors like Radian6, Buzzmetrics, etc. who may judge a bloggers’ level of importance & engagement by evaluating the comment threads that follow each post. If those comment streams are happening in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., I doubt it’s being captured and evaluated by the measurement gurus – thus undervaluing many bloggers’ influence (and certainly discounting their level of “engagement”).
So, is it time to panic? Not quite.
Limitations for Online Analytics: From Visitors to Marketing Influence
Let’s go back to “clicking on banners and tracking to a sale” point earlier. While it is definitely trackable compared to a billboard in a highway, it is not absolutely trackable. That is - things happen: cookie blockers, problems with defining a “user” or a “visitor”, and more. WebTrends, Omniture, and Google Analytics will all track the same events differently, sometimes differing by as much as 20%.
Some let’s look at the limitations:
- Social Monitoring Tools are Limited
From BuzzLogic to Cymphony: All of these vendors need to improve, but they will all have their limitations. Brand managers, marketers and PR people must be very aware of the limitations. These tools all all literally crawl millions of pages of the web, but there are billions upon billions of total conversations going on in the web. - How common are Cross-Media Conversations?
Todd’s example of cross-media conversations (people responding to a blog via twitter, someone responding to a forum posting on a blog) are probably (at least for now) in the minority of conversations in the web. - Are we aiming for the “Forrest” or for the “Trees”
Even if these individual conversations are not being tracked. How much of the picture is missing? Yes a conversation will be missed here and there, but if a blogger really is influential - wouldnt we expect some (if not most) of conversations still happening via comments, trackbacks and links back to the post? - Customer Service Issue
But if customer service is the chief objective, should we worry about the missed conversations? Isn’t this that what a community manager is for (to add to what social monitoring tools cannot do)? Or is this asking too much? Can we reasonably have good customer service, if we can only follow 80% of the conversation? How about 65%?
Todd Defren has definitely asked a particularly interesting question and indeed that’s gonna be a question I’ll ask the social media monitoring guys over at ad:tech San Francisco next week.
You’re point about the forest not the trees is dead on. The point for all measurement is to figure out what the program is doing for the business or the organizational mission (if its a non-profit). Until people stop worrying about capturing every blog mention, and look instead at what impact its having on the business, we’re all wasting our time.
I have found that the actual numbers do not mean as much by themselves. But when you compare the rate of change over time against the change of the competition, or other issue, or advertiser, then you can measure the change in behavior. But the underlying need to measure the effectivness of PR campaigns remains. How well are you doing, and by how much.
Daniel,
Social Media is now much broader than blogs, even as blogs continue to grow in importance. As I commented on Todd’s post, the conversation is very fragmented and it is getting more diverse as the number of mediums or “channels” increase.
It is a great question, “How do you track conversations that occurs between different social media websites?” It depends if you are asking this question as a participant in the conversation or from the perspective of a marketer/PR pro.
As a participant in the conversation, you will miss parts of the conversation unless you are active on all the mediums where it is taking place. This is a challenge since you might be looking at the conversation on a blog and perhaps you are following it on twitter, but you miss some of it on Friendfeed because you are not following the person there.
As a Marketer or PR/pro, it is important to take a broad multi-channel approach. Of course, Katie is right in her comment – what you measure must be tied to your business goals.
Most companies and PR agencies I talk to want to track more than blogs whether they are measuring the conversation around a campaign, identifying and engaging with influencers, or tracking issues or suggestions for customer service. They don’t want to miss any content, and they want to spend their time diving into the conversation instead of trolling, cutting/pasting, searching, collating, etc.
That is why it is important for monitoring tools to have a broad coverage of the conversation, from multiple sources, multiple media (text, image, video, etc.) and to track it as-it-happens. Thanks for linking to Radian6.
Great post Daniel – and thanks for your mention. I agree that no one provider has successfully handled the aggregation, analysis and/or correlation of every social media platform – how much that matters really depends on your agenda. Katie’s got it right–one should definitely be asking, “to what business end am I measuring social media”? Is it the success of a particular PR campaign with a cadre of specific bloggers? Is it quantifying brand awareness within a specific social community? Or is it measuring the ROI of a social media ad campaign? These are unique tasks which require unique tools.
As an industry, we need think more about building applications which can power the business tasks that leverage social media, otherwise we’ll continue to get lost in hopeless rhetoric.
Todd Parsons
Co-Founder BuzzLogic
While I think there will continue to be value in aggregate statistics (the forest), the further that individual conversations can be tracked the more sophisticated the potential insights will be. A simple comparison might be descriptive statistics (”72% of all lobbyists….”) versus social network analysis (”consistent indirect connections are shown between lobbyists and key legislators…”. A very recent post by my colleage Valdis Krebs can show the importance of what can be learned when the missing pieces are put back together:
http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/2008/04/other-pentagon.html
Perhaps Google OpenSocial will be the first step in “reconnecting” broken social media conversations.
Great post and nice to see some heavy hitting commenters, too!
I agree that the use of conversation tools and social media needs to follow from a clear definition of goals and objectives.
I’m reminded of a distinction made by linguists between strategic action and communicative action. In a nutshell, the former occurs when a speaker seeks to influence the listener but doesnt seek mutual understanding. In the latter, reaching understanding (even if it’s not agreement) is important.
Put simply, most media are a form of strategic action insofar as they’re not in conversation with their audiences. Daily conversation and especially that among friends is communicative — it’s a means of maintaining a relationship.
This came to mind last wk at the New Comm forum. For ROI and related goals, metrics for reach, influence, etc would indicate campaign success; deeper topical analysis would then add content and context.
But if the goal is engagement and organizational transformation (openness) — which we heard a lot about last wk — then the model would shift from speaking to conversing, from strategic communication to relational conversation. Which is where recent case studies in use of social media for customer service have been cited of late.
Of course a mutual and reciprocal relationship between organiz/customer would look pretty overwhelming. I could see a path to engagement tho if tools could be used to identify the best points of entry and access to conversations. E.g. finding the person in a social graph with domain expertise, credibility (influence), and activity. Then engaging with that person — and standing back to allow his/her own words propagate in a natural and organic fashion. That could be tracked for effectiveness. But just tracked, not led or directed.
Social media marketing is going to head in this direction, with use of social gaming apps in which messages are turned into experiences. But I think at this point in time that users wont take direct marketing or PR through tools like twitter very favorably. That’s an un-researched impression, however!
cheers,
adrian
Social Web Analytics remains nascent, although 2008 is shaping up to be the pivotal year. As such, “the forest” is an appropriate concept this year. However, to try and extend the metaphor, that forest is getting cut up into smaller woods by the day. Tracking the distributed conversation, and doing so with semantic assessment of sentiment / tonality, will be the differentiator in the ensuing couple of years.
I’ve put some of my thoughts on the matter, and a review of the major Social Web Analytics vendors in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, available at http://www.socialwebanalytics.com.
The media today are really pretty approachable, unlike the old days where it was hard to get a meeting with a writer for the Wall Street Journal, today you can follow the key media players on Twitter, be friends on Facebook, comment on their blog, etc. So, if the relationships are easier to formulate today, what’s the value of a PR firm.
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Jenila
california dui