2011 was a whirlwind here at Converseon. After more than doubling in size in 2010, our mission in 2011 was to focus on stabilizing and evolving new “socially-intelligent” solutions — products and services — that will come to market in 2012. In fact, we nearly doubled our technology spend in 2011 purposefully to build the robust infrastructure and technologies needed to help brands leverage social media to meet business objectives. Some of these are now in beta and others will be coming soon. On the services side, we doubled down on our talent and solutions — and expanded our offerings especially in the area of creative and social CRM consulting. In short, it was a time of great metamorphosis as we again challenged ourselves to evolve ahead of the marketplace and meet the needs of market as we move into 2012.

In fact, while we celebrated our ten year anniversary — and was cited by Shel Israel as the industry’s first pure play social media agency — we believe 2011 represented some of our most significant evolution internally. We did so because we see 2012 as the year of “social rigor” and have evolved our technologies and solutions in a manner to uniquely meet these market demands.

What is “social rigor?” In our experience, 2007-2011 represented a time significant experimentation at brands in social. The approach was often to seed the garden, see what took root, and let it grow, pilot, evolve and do so again. The result for some is messy gardens and far too unclear, in many cases, impact on business outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as it mirrors very much the earlier days of digital. But those days are coming to an end, quickly.

As we move into 2012 though, we predict brands will adopt an approach that applies social with much more rigor. This approach will be characterized by:

• Weeding the Garden: According to Jeremiah Owang at Altimeter Group study, large brands have an average of 178 social media accounts. While some of those accounts are effective, many are not. In fact, in our experience, many large brands simply don’t know what accounts exist, where they are, whose managing them or how effective they are. This is what we call Social Sprawl. We predict brands will necessarily need to map their social footprint, clearly understand what’s working and what’s not, prune and weed the garden of the deadwood and nurture those that are. This is a significant project and an area we are focusing on at Converseon through some proprietary tools and solutions. You simply need to know what you have before you know where and how to get there.
• Nurture the Performing: As the garden is weeded, attention and nurturing will be applied to those that are working or have promise. This includes new ways to best manage company overall social footprints and help align social engagers at brands with appropriate content and better measure their performance — and in some cases align bonuses to that performance. This also includes organizing and managing a company’s social presence more effectively to better understand what’s working, and what’s not.
• Measuring the Impact: Social media will become more data-driven. Social analytics will take ascendency to truly understand ROI. We developed a Social Scorecarding product in 2011 that is clearly answering the ROI question and allowing near real time optimization of programs, initiatives and campaigns. Currently, research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns. The fact is, we’re almost surprised it’s only 2 and 5. But 2012 will help change that through some new approaches and technologies.
• Moving from Monitoring to Insight: Along with this, we are seeing a clear movement from “social monitoring” to “social insights.” The former worked fine to answer the question: “What are people saying about me now?” but is ineffectual at answering more core business questions — I.e. “What is it about my product that makes moms angry?” We see social insights on the ascendency as brands using social monitoring tools hit the end of their capabilities and are looking to “get serious” about finding social insights. This requires deeper levels of intelligence in the meta-data — better sentiment (including sarcasm, implicit, etc.), emotion, custom influence and more. Of course, brands then need the agility to move rapidly enough to engage in these real time insights and real time conversation ecosystem. And that’s where we are able to help.

To help our clients apply this Social Rigor and to expand our offerings, we invested significantly in 2011. Below are some of the highlights:

• Raised Social IQ: We doubled down on “social data intelligence” through increased investment in a system that doesn’t just try to replace humans in the conversation analysis; but scales their intelligence via technology. Our lead scientist, Dr. Philip Resnik, keynoted the Sentiment Symposium in San Francisco on November 9 and outlined our “semi-supervised” approach to this. We made deep investments into a scaled solution that works across languages that gets to more effective meta-data, much deeper intelligence leading to better and more rapid insights that answer key business questions. A white paper on this approach is on our website. Even Gartner Group weighed in on this in its Magic Quadrant on Social CRM by saying, “Converseon puts a greater emphasis on human resources, as opposed to technology, for analysis for error correction, and machine learning to improve its analytics. This gives superior quality of insight for customers…” What you can expect: the industry’s deepest social media intelligence that delves deeply into emotion, intensity and other key meta data that will be offered both as a data product (via API) in the Spring as well through our future Conversation Miner release (date tbd).
• Focused on Global Citizentry: We continued to expand our offerings internationally. In April, we launched Converseon Nordics through an office in Copenhagen and have continued to grow our footprint there. The market is rapidly maturing there and looking for more sophisticated solutions that have been historically offered in that market. Our Conversation Mining data is also being expanded into multiple languages (with 9 on dock for integration). We also have been conducting more social media research for large brands across geographies, including China, Russia, India, Brazil and more. BRIC is big. What you can expect: More expansion in the EU, as well as Asia and Brazil. The social media adoption in Indonesia and Brazil is quite profound and we are actively looking to scale in these regions.
• Evolved From Product to Products: With Conversation Mining “intelligent” data as a core platform, we have launched several new products in beta with key clients and will soon push those out more broadly. The mission is to provide a complete layer of technology along with our services that helps brands Listen, Operationalize, Engage and Measure. These include:
  • Open Graph Management – Converseon acquired a technology in September called Social Graphiti, it is used to both measure and activate (through retargeting) consumer’s “like” behavior on a brand’s eCommerce sites. We are marrying social conversations with social commerce. The product is going through rebuild and will relaunched in Q2 (and selectively in beta in Q1).
  • Social Scorecard – Measures the business impact that social media has on the brand. The scorecard combines public metrics (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) along with internal brand metrics (web analytics, sales conversion data, media spend) to show a complete picture of the actions taken by the brand and the business impact and outcomes achieved. Scorecard is both a measurement tool and facilitates process and program changes.
  • Conversation Manager – This solution enables large brands to manage and track performance of their multiple social media accounts in a single location. Currently in beta with expected Q2 broader rollout.

  What you can expect: These products will be made available and rolled out more broadly in 2012.

• Merged our Social Business Consulting and Engagement Services: We recognized that social business consulting — which focuses largely on the business process redesigns required for brands to have “social agility” and fully leverage the value of social across the organization — and our social engagement services were two faces of the same coin. The former focused largely on internal transformation while the latter focused on transforming the conversation. We now have a holistic approach that can address both dimensions as needed and otherwise helped ensure that our services solutions remain industry best. We also grew our social media optimization/SEO, creative and mobile applications. In fact, we were named digital AOR for several brands who recognized that social is indeed at the heart of all digital marketing. We expect that trend to continue in 2012. What you can expect: New and innovative service solutions that can be effectively scaled out across large brands and geographies. We recognize that many effective solutions for brands — such as Social CRM — are all about people, processes and technologies (with an emphasis on the first two).
• Added Senior Talent: We have continued to attract and bring on some of the industry’s best leaders. This included the addition of Neil Beam who led social CRM at AT&T. Our consulting services continue to grow and evolve and are providing deep and sophisticated solutions for a range of leading brands. We also added Vidar Brekke as our first Chief Product Officer. We have also staffed up in analytics, market research, community management, mobile, creative and more. What you can expect: We will continue to invest in more talent in 2012, especially with individuals who have made social work in the trenches of large complex organizations. We understand how important it is to have first hand experience making social work at large brands so that we just don’t talk theoretically but can do the hard work of implementation.
• Grew Client Relationships (and Added a Few More): We are proud to continue to work with our very first client — Hilton Hotels — (now in its tenth year) and to partner more deeply with all our clients. We continue to believe in a hands on senior level approach to clients and our product of our work with Walmart, Kohler, Integramed and others (some of whom can’t be named due to confidentiality). We have built true partnerships with our key clients, which is critical given the need to “co-innovate” with clients in an industry that moves so rapidly. What you can expect: After all the internal investments, we will scale our services rapidly across verticals and regions. This includes CPG, Pharma, Automotive, B2B, technology, financial services and more.
• New Recognitions: It was flattering — and satisfying — that our work continued to get noticed by key analysts and others. We were finalist for Social Media Agency of the Year at iMedia, our work with Walmart won the SAMMY Award for Best Social Listening Strategy, our client Integramed won the SAMMY for Best Social Business (mid-sized), and our CEO was named to the board of directors at WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) beginning in 2012, as well as being named a Social Media Allstar by the Social Media Society. Gartner Group and Gleanster (another industry analyst) also recognized our industry leadership with Gartner including us in the Magic Quadrant and saying, “Converseon has a broad understanding of how to use social media monitoring and analysis to effect change across marketing, customer service and sales departments. The company knows how to measure success and impact the key KPIs in those departments and how to tie into more traditional CRM transformation approaches. This is due to the CRM consulting and academic backgrounds of Converseon’s executives and consultants, and their consulting-driven delivery model.” What you can expect: our success is hinged to our client success. We will simply focus on doing great work and let the industry speak for itself. We do expect more full service digital agency recognition though as more and more brands move towards a social-centric approach to their digital efforts.
• Independence: We did all of this while remaining independent. After the Radian6 acquisition by Salesforce earlier this year, we were recognized as the last independent category “Leader” in social listening, per the Forrester Wave Q3 2010. This, as you might imagine, had our phones ringing with potential investors and partners. We are treading quite carefully here as we are dedicated to our mission and strategy of providing the highest level of social intelligence through a true social insights platform. We believe that space is much in demand and we have invested in the components to clearly capture that position. The results of these investments will be rolling out over 2012. We of course are always evaluating the best way to scale effectively and globally, but are pleased that we’re the position that we can thoughtfully choose how best to proceed. What you can expect: We will scale more rapidly either through select strategic investment, partnerships or more. For the first time, we have been talking this way with potential partners. We continue to push towards a 50/50 services/technology approach as we think that is the optimal approach to drive value to clients and rapidly evolve technologies based on real client feedback. We truly remain a consulting/technology/services hybrid and believe this approach truly is the model for agency of the future.

As you can see, 2011 truly was evolutionary here. But we’re not done. We are primed and ready to assist our clients adopt to Social Rigor across the organization heading into 2012. The good news too is that we are not — as is sometimes thought — an “all or nothing solution.” Our consulting can work with any third party tools or solutions to make data more intelligent and actionable. In fact, we see our technologies as a layer on top of traditional social monitoring to make it more insightful and useful. And brands can work with us either just from a technology perspective, or from a services side, or both. We have a “best alone, better together” philosophy. We believe we have competitive advantage in each of the areas we compete, but the solution works even better if used together. But that does not mean we can’t adapt to client needs and requirements.

We wish everyone a healthy, happy and “rigorous” 2012 and look forward to hopefully seeing you in the new year.

Santa’s bag is going to be full of iPhones and iPads this year, judging from the products people mention in tweets with the #DearSanta hashtag. Converseon pulled all of the tweets between 12/5 and 12/12 for a total of 10,680 messages. In these tweets, 25% mention a specific product by name in a positive manner for a total of 2,670 free consumer endorsements. Electronics was the most frequently mentioned product category, and Apple was the most frequently mentioned brand.

• Microsoft Xbox was the most frequently mentioned video game system, and Microsoft the second most frequently mentioned brand.
• Samsung’s Galaxy tab also had a strong showing, appearing in around 4% of #DearSanta tweets — this is the same number of tweets that mention the iPad.
• 40% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned electronics products.
• Around 20% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned apparel products.
• Shoes were the most frequently mentioned product type in the apparel category.

n = 800, confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of +/- 4%

Customers are normally the best sources of product and marketing ideas*, and social media are perfect for harvesting those ideas, every day. In fact, one Converseon client recently used our social media research to dramatically improve campaign performance, simply by understanding how customers wished they could use the product.

Simply stated, they recognized a trend in real — and imagined — product usage, then tailored their marketing messages to fit customer beliefs and needs, in real time.

For example, see the following chart, which summarizes disguised conversation data pertaining to a technology server product shortly after its release to market:

At product launch, the server’s manufacturer promoted the server’s superior performance in business applications, such as retail analytics and cloud computing. During the campaign, our research found that customers were attracted to the server’s role in cloud computing, but expressed less interest in retail analytical applications. Instead, many conversations focused on the server’s reliability in data protection.

Recognizing the conversational trend, the brand adapted its marketing messages with significant improvement in the performance of the campaign.

In addition to improving campaign performance, social media research has helped brands understand how product applications evolve over time, as input into product development.

Learn how to use social media research to improve campaign performance or generate new insights for product development.

People are wrong in their criticisms of the Apple social media policy that was allegedly leaked recently, and here is why:

A company’s social media policy should support the unique qualities that make the company successful. In fact, the elements of a successful social media policy must exist in concert with the unique culture and business context of any organization.

In Apple’s case, secrecy has been a critical key to success. While many social media pundits claim that Apple should be more open, very few of those people are running billion-dollar corporations, and the notion that all companies should apply the same level of “open-ness” is, at best, over-simplified.

Comparisons to other technology companies abound, but that just makes no sense. Those companies and Apple take completely different approaches to differentiation, which has led them to create very different cultures. They also rely on different business processes to create growth and value. Many are well-run and highly successful, but for very different reasons.

And those differences are the keys to understanding why they use different social media policies.

The chart above shows the business factors that companies should consider when developing an effective social media policy (which I published in The Social Media Management Handbook earlier this year).

On November 9, Converseon’s lead scientist keynoted the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco. It was my first Symposium event organized by Seth Grimes, and I was impressed with the quality of speakers and content. It was one of those that effectively bridged academia with practical business applications.

While we talk a lot about how to make social media drive business results in our communications and white papers, we have not often dwelled deeply into the science behind our social intelligence technology, Conversation Miner. Behind the scenes we have had a team of PHDs, including Dr Resnik, when he’s not attending to his professorial duties at the University of Maryland working hard on these problems.

As a wide range of academics, researchers and forward leaning brands discussed at the conference, the challenge of how to understand this vast unstructured social conversation to finding meaning and insight is one of the great technical challenges of our time. It is also perhaps one of the most profound. The implications of not just capturing — but understanding — this conversation for brand management, advertising, customer service, R&D and more is only now starting to become realized.

There are different philosophical approaches to this. One tries to solve it all though a purely algorithmic approach leveraging natural language processing technology, some try to have analysts find nuggets in the massive haystack of conversation, others use statistical analysis to try to find some indicative trends.

The reality is that human communication is complex and every changing. Slang, implicit sentiment, sarcasm and more are pervasive in social media. New words emerge daily. Some words change meaning. “Sticky” for example, probably wasn’t a hot keyword for a certain auto company before a crisis emerged. “Small” may be positive for a smartphone, but not so great for a hotel room. Keyword matching itself can be complicated and lead to false conclusions. Dr. Resnik referred in his talk that there has been reported by some that Berkshire Hathaway’s stock price is positively impacted by Anne Hathaway. It appears that the positive sentiment attributed towards anne also has a halo impact on the company in automated trading systems.

The complexities are immense, and challenging.

Converseon has made significant behind-the-scenes investments into our science and technology this past year that truly fuses the best of human intelligence and machine through a “semi-supervised” approach that is able to capture the nuances and insights that only humans can see and understand, with the massive scaling power of technology. Our heart is machine learning that bridges that human/machine divide. The results are powerful and only now being fully rolled out.

Central to our philosophy is this: the role of technology today is not to leave humans out of the equation, but to support human insight in ways not previously possible.

Or as a New Scientist article that quoted Dr. Resnik aptly stated, “Computers just don’t have the brains to solve some problems, unless we lend them ours.”

To that end, we released a new white paper coauthored by Dr. Resnik and our chief strategist, Mike Moran, entitled, “Social Media Insight Requires End-to-End Language Technology Capabilities,” that lays out clearly the various approaches taken towards sentiment analysis of social media; and why we believe, in the end, our semi supervised techniques are the best approach for brands looking for true insight.

A courtesy copy is available here.

We think you’ll find it good reading for anyone interested in sentiment analysis of social media and how to make sense of the vast conversations that are occurring. It is a good primer too on language technology for marketers at all levels.

And of course really understanding these social conversations may indeed soon become the difference between success and failure for many brands. We will be sharing on an ongoing basis some results of our approach as examples and hopefully a guide forward for others looking to find those profound insights in an ever proliferating haystack of conversations.

Happy reading and we hope you share your feedback.

In a webcast yesterday with Bulldog Reporter’s PR University, my fellow presenters and I discussed interesting ways that brands should consider using Google+ today. It was an engaging and educational session with social media practitioners of different backgrounds giving their two cents on Google+, including the following five tactics I suggest brands consider today:

1. Reach new audiences
2. Create content experiences
3. Position yourself as thought leader or trusted advisor
4. Improve your SEO
5. Listen

1. Reach New Audiences

Users don’t need to bring their friends to enjoy Google+. On Google+, users can seek out topics and then discover interesting conversations among strangers with similar interests. In that respect, it is more like Twitter than Facebook: Facebook has no value without your friends. Therefore, Google+ should be a good place to find and engage new audiences who may not know about you today.

2. Create Content Experiences

People who use Google+ are not looking for an alternative to Facebook. They want a better experience on Google properties. Create more content that engages and facilitate conversations around your content.

3. Position Yourself as a Thought Leader or Trusted Advisor

Ning tried to create smaller, niche social networks, and largely failed, but Google may actually succeed. The combination of Circles and Search makes it easy to discover and engage a conversation around a topic. That is not easily achieved on Facebook because most conversations are private, and it is difficult on Twitter because there are no discussion threads to follow.

For example, try these Google+ searches to see what’s on people’s minds within some hot topics, as well as fringe culture:

• HPV
• Lego
• diy analog synthesizers

4. Improve Your SEO

Its fair to expect that conversations and engagement around branded content and branded terms on Google+ will yield SEO benefits, just like signals from other social networks are already influencing search results.

5. Listen

Rules of engagement on Google+ are mostly similar to other social venues. Have your employees engage and listen to figure out what works for your brand.

Finally, consider that the gateway to Google+ will be Google search, Google Reader, Google “Flipboard” (Google is allegedly developing a Flipboard-killer), Picasa, YouTube, Google Music and other Google services that drive content discovery and consumption. While these services are poorly integrated today, they will likely improve over time, and will become important traffic sources into Google+.

For this year’s Video Music Awards and Emmys, online conversation volumes predicted the winners for 4 of 7 VMAs and 6 of 14 Emmys. Converseon monitored online mentions of each nominee from the time nominations were announced to the day of the award ceremonies, then looked for correlations between conversation mentions and awards.

MTV Video Music Awards

Social media volume correctly predicted (1) Video of the Year, (2) Best Male Video, (3) Best Female Video and (4) Best Pop Video.

Emmys

Of the top fourteen awards, social media volume correctly predicted (1) Outstanding Drama Series, (2) Outstanding Comedy Series, (3) Outstanding Reality Program, (4) Best Actress in a Comedy, (5) Best Actress in a Miniseries or Movie, and (6) Best Director of a Drama.

Other research has revealed that Twitter conversations can predict box office revenues and that overall social media volume can predict electoral outcomes.

In addition, Converseon researchers have also developed a methodology for measuring customer satisfaction through online conversation mining.

Google announced today that searches by logged-in users will be securely sent over SSL encryption. Therefore, Google will no longer send the query terms in the referrer data to analytics tools that analysts use to understand the keywords sending traffic to their site. If you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, you will no longer know all of the keywords bringing people to your website from searchers who are logged into Google when they search. This is potentially a big problem for folks relying solely on enterprise analytics solutions.

While Google says they are focused on protecting user privacy, the change clearly forces everyone to use Webmaster Tools and decreases the value of paid analytics solutions because they will no longer be able to collect as much data as they did before.

If you have not verified your website through Webmaster Tools, do it now.

It is only a matter of time before Google incorporates Webmaster Tools directly into Analytics. Until then, marketers will have to pull a portion of their search performance reports from Webmaster Tools.

Now that Google, Twitter and Facebook implemented SSL this year, privacy advocates will likely expect the same from Bing and Yahoo.

View the original blog post from Google.

While the changes that Facebook announced at F8 created more ways to connect with consumers, reaching those consumers may be more difficult, in three important ways, which we explain below.

To summarize the recent announcements, two major changes occurred on Facebook.

First, Facebook announced the Timeline. This is a chronological, user-curated view of every activity the user has taken or announced via Facebook that he or she deems meaningful. It’s a personal scrapbook annotated with photos, status updates, music, location check-ins, etc. This may become the most valuable real estate for users and for brands. Marketers may create applications that interact with the Timeline.

The second big change is the expansion of a piece of an underlying technology called the Open Graph. Previously the Open Graph allowed brands to include owned web properties into the Facebook ecosystem via the Like button. Now brands may go beyond the Like and embed custom verbs and actions into their applications — on Facebook or on their own sites.

This may result in more brand-relevant and viral newsfeed updates. Instead of simply Like-ing content on a brand site, consumer can send the following types of messages into their streams, from branded properties: “Joan is redecorating with the bold look of Kohler” or “Ron is grilling an Applegate Organic Hot Dog with Laurie.” Users can choose to include these branded stories or experiences into their Timeline, thereby elevating them to updates likely to be seen by friends.

Three Implications for Social Activation

First, Facebook wants brands and their customers to engage without forcing the experience to be optimized around Likes or Fans. Instead, marketers should use verbs that describe actions that make sense with their brand, and make it easier for these social experiences to live outside of Facebook.com.

Second, Facebook applications, which can be Facebook-enabled experiences on Facebook or branded websites, will become an essential part of the marketer’s toolkit. Facebook is a content distribution network that happens to come with a social graph. Therefore, the most viral experiences will be content experiences. This further increases the requirement that brands act more like publishers, and seek to create content that is engaging and shareable.

Finally, making it into the Timeline via Open Graph-enabled experiences will become key to marketers looking to create long-lasting relationships with their audiences.

Three Implications for Social Measurement

1. Benchmarking becomes more complex

As brands increasingly spread their Facebook investments beyond Facebook.com with unique experiences and action metrics, benchmarking one brand against another will be more challenging. Tracking competitors’ Facebook activities beyond the Page will be required to assess the merits of their tactics, and perhaps decode their strategy.

2. Measure what matters to you

The most valuable metrics for any brand to track are metrics that align with your strategy. With the freedom to create unique experiences and your own social “verbs”, you should focus on your specific Key Performance Indicators (which may be other than “Likes”) and track whether you are improving effectiveness around those. For example, if you are an online media company, you may want people to “read”, “watch” and “listen” more. If you are selling products you want people to share that they are “trying”, “buying” or ”drooling over” your products.

3. Measure. Iterate. Repeat.

Something that isn’t new, but worth repeating: Measurement is of no value unless it helps you improve your marketing. Metrics need to be at the core of all your marketing programs, and all your marketing programs and applications must be designed to be adjustable during their lifetime.

Social Beyond Facebook

Marketers must come to think of social as a behavior — rather than a channel — and look for ways to engage audiences in a brand-relevant way, regardless of which network enables the behavior. With the Open Graph, Facebook wants to be an enabler that doesn’t get between a brand and their customers. Marketers no longer need to use Facebook vernacular and metrics such as Likes or Fans in order to create viral and measureable experiences for Facebook members.

But Facebook isn’t the only game in town, especially when you start treating social as a behavior.

How will Facebook’s changes affect your marketing?

Bit.ly recently published data indicating that links shortened in bit.ly and shared on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube receive the vast majority of their clicks within 3 hours of being shared. While clicks can be a critical call-to-action on social media, and the bit.ly data help us to understand the dynamics of viral sharing, viral distribution is only one important goal of content that is created or distributed through social media. Specifically, a balanced social media marketing plan must also include provisions for evergreen content: feature articles that deliver significant long-term impact — especially in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Evergreen Versus Real-Time Content

Evergreen content sticks around and continues to provide value after the 3-6 hours of initial sharing. For example, think about search engine results. In general, we see blog posts, wikis, reviews, forum threads, and videos with the longest staying power in search results. Perishable media such as Facebook and Twitter updates are important in search results, but evergreen content is equally as important.

According to Lijit, 20% of referrals are driven by social media, and search still delivers twice the amount of traffic versus social. Ignoring the role of search in your social strategy will simply lead to all of your hard work being lost to time.

As marketers increase their focus on real-time marketing, the concept of a timeless article is increasingly derided by some in journalism and public relations because its very definition denotes something that is not immediately newsworthy. Rather than appreciate the long-term benefits of evergreen content, they treat it as filler for a slow news day.

However, marketers must resist the urge to chase sharing statistics at the cost of search engine performance. Yes, social media affect search engine results, but they are not the primary determinant of search engine performance, so don’t let the spirit of real-time take your long-term marketing performance off track.

Caveat on the Bit.ly Data

While bit.ly offers nice analytics for link sharing, their raîson d’être is to shorten URLs for use where space and attention are limited. Few people use bit.ly in longer-form social media because companies typically own those properties and are able to use their own more robust analytics platform to track internal links.

The previously referenced Lijit study also showed that StumbleUpon drives as much inbound traffic as Facebook, yet this major social media player is not included in the bit.ly analysis. That is because the toolbar design of StumbleUpon makes sharing shortened links difficult due to bit.ly’s inherent URL redirection.

Therefore, while insightful, the bit.ly data does not adequately represent all social media sharing and clicking that occurs on the web so consider the source when citing the report.