What Are Online Communities?

Let’s start with what Wiki has to say:

“A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.”

Howard Rheingold has a slightly different take on it:

“Social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”

The key difference is that Rheingold focuses on the internet, whereas the definition from Wikipedia takes a broader approach to the term ‘virtual community’.

Either way, online communities involve social interaction and take place on the internet. These interactions can be about anything, which Kozinets has put in the neat list as shown below:

• Geographic
• Religious/Ethnic
• Health
• Interest
• Hobbies
• - Products

Kozinets further argues that the latter three are all a virtual community of consumption, ie the interactions on the community are based around some form of consumption. Moleworth argues that all communities tend to have an element of consumption (a health based discussion could include mentions of a certain type of treatment or medication and a religious community could discuss shops catering towards their specific needs).

Here’s another list of ways communities can be devided:

• Community of Transaction
• Community of Interest
• Community of Fantasy
• Community of Relationship

However, there can be overlap between these types. For example, Word of Warcraft is both a community of Fantasy and Transaction and MySpace combines a community of Interest and Relationship.

Online communities can be formed around various types of technology such as blogs, wikis, message boards, e-mail lists and chat rooms, among others.

Most online communities also tend to be very cynical towards advertising or commercially based messages. Whilst many online communities provide the perfect place for a highly targeted ad campaign, it is important to keep an eye on the interest of the community. Communities only work when there is a balance of giving and taking. If most people only take, eventually the minority of givers will think twice about what they are doing. So advertising cannot purely be based on the interest of the company.

What Happens On Communities

Online communities generally tend to be a place for people to get together and discuss whatever interests them.

Kozinets argues that these discussions can be grouped into 4 types

• Individualistic
• Social
• Autotelic
• Instrumental

The four stages are displayed in the image above and also give an indication of where the 4 types of community member would fit in. These types of user will be discussed a bit further on.

A community generally tends to develop and go through various stages, which Kozinets lists as:

• Topical (consumption) information exchange
• Identity information exchange
• Cultural norm information (language, practices) exchange
• Conflicts and clarification of power and status relationships
• Cultural norms adopted and enforced
• Interpersonal impression formation
• Cultural cohesion
• Communal relationships (community)

Online communities are also used as a place to discuss products and services. People will turn to forums to ask for help when they have problems with their new PC, they’ll complain about poor customer service and in some cases they will even try and get a mob together to flame that brand. Whilst the critisism may not always be fair, it is out there and it affects brands. That means that these communities can build the brand image as it is seen by it’s members. The old line that a brand as whatever it is in the consumer’s head has never rung so true.

An advertising campaign can try and tell a lot of things to people, but if a credible source on a large community says otherwise your money has been wasted.

Users of Online Communities

Online communities also tend to harbour various type of member, which have been mentioned in the image below:

• The Tourist
• The Mingler
• The Devotee
• and The Insider

Which one of these a member is depends on two factors:

Whether or not their social ties to the community are strong and the level of self centrality of the consumption activity. In other words, are they there to make new friends or to talk about the subject to which the community is related.

It is further argued that web users go through a number of stages: Browser -> Lurker -> Questioner -> Participant.

Kim has tweeked the list to suit the membership life cycle of an online community:

Visitor -> Novice -> Regular -> Leader -> Elder

The problem with these lief cycles is that they suggest that the life cycle is a linear process. Often members never move from one stage to the other and in other cases members simply surpass one of the stages. Some people start getting involved straight away, or they may carry a reputation across from another website instantly promoting them to the ‘position’ of Leader/Elder.

Another flaw in the argument is the fact that the numbers simply show this does not happen (or has not happened yet). The Participation Inequality indicates that most communities have a following make up of users: 90% visitors, 9% occasional contributors and 1% of loyal contributors. Whilst these numbers are arbitrary, the sentiment remains the same. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia has indicated that over 50% of the edits on Wikipedia are carried out by just over 500 people, or 0.7%.

Most communities will show a Pareto, or similar distribution, ie a small minority is responsible for the majority of content.

Why Are Online Communities Important

This will be looked at from a purely marketing perspective. As mentioned, communities have the power to shape the perception of a brand with a lot of people. In that sense, it is important for marketers to a) be aware of what that perception is and b) how they can influence it.

And when I say influence I don’t mean that a 30 second ad is the remedy to a bad reputation on the internet. It is using the information to improve either the way you communicate or the quality of your product/service.

Online communities provide a great way to engage with consumers, it helps companies understand their brand and its importance to consumers better, it provides market research, it provides a platform for customer service and they can help with product testing/innovation.

Consumers are no longer passive recipients of consumption information, they actively create this information themselves in form of blog posts, Twitter mentions and user reviews on Amazon. More importantly, this information tends to carry more weight then advertising messages.

Consumer-company relationships no linger live in a vacuum. Consumers often share the experience they had with a company. This used to happen face-to-face, but when it happens on the internet its out there for all to see. And Google will make sure it’s easy to be found. Dell Hell is a great example, Jeff Jarvis blogged about his faulty Dell, the post is still very well indexed in Google and it led to Dell completely changing its business to suit the demands of a world with the internet.

And lastly, combining sales and demographic data with more motivational data derived from the sentiment of comments online can provide valuable insight for companies.

How Can Marketers Use Them

Use is a dirty word as it implies a one-way relationship with only one beneficiary, however this is not the way it is intended. By now it should have become clear that the only way to benefit from an online community is to make sure they benefit as well.

So, as mentioned there are various aspects of a business that can benefit from an online community. But how?

Provide Value

• Understand who the insiders and devotees are. Monitor their activities. Use this qualitative attitudinal data to enhance the qualitative sales data collected from database marketing activities
• Make ‘privileged’ information available. Link your site to the communities
• Consider affiliate programmes. Offer Devotees benefits for their devotion (eg Amazon affiliate programme
• Treat all consumers as members of a community. This may mean abandoning one-to-one marketing activities.
• Avoid attempts at infiltration or opportunistic behaviour. Communities may respond with aggression.

The Good

Amazon’s Affiliate program

The Bad

Wallmart’s astroturfing

The Ugly

Merck and Elsevier setting up fake, peer reviewed journal

Avoid Conflict

• Devotees may reproduce material in breach of copyright. Taking action against these individuals brings organisations into direct conflict with their best customers
• Better to legitimise their activities. Offer them specific content, talk to them, negotiation use of material
• When ‘attacked’ consider appropriate response (dialogue normally better than legal action)
• Consider factions. Not everyone in the community may agree with the ‘attack’. Consider overall influence of community. Not all communities are large or influential

The Good

The release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows

The Bad

Ryanair calling all bloggers idiots

The Ugly

Sueing 12 year old for illegal download

Encourage And Develop the Community

• Use community as resource for customers
• Offer to discuss activities openly in the communal space
• Ask community what they want
• Provide community with material with which it can build identity around a brand
• Recognise that communities may offer consumers ‘real’ relationship benefits. Organisations may do better to co-opt these values rather than trying to forge one-to-one relationships with consumers

The Good

Google Labs

The Really Good

Direct2Dell

The Awesome

Doritos UGC TV ad

Conclusion

Online communities are awesome and provide both an enormous opportunity as well as a massive challenge to marketers. It is extremely important to understand how online communities work and what makes them tick in order to be able to derive any sort of value from them for a brand. The most important thing is to simply become part of the community. If you genuinely make an attempt to get involved and help to foster the community you’re brand will be forgiven if you make a mistake once or twice.

These are some of the issues relating to online communities, but I’m sure there is a lot more out there so please leave any additions or comments in the comments and I’ll update the post.

What is the long tail?

The image below is a basic graphical representation of the theory.

In the old days of the brick ‘n mortar stores an often used rule of thumb is that 20% of the products acount for 80% of the sales. Our economy is (was?) ruled by hits. Economies of scale rule, so the more you can sell of the same thing, the cheaper off you will be and the higher your profits.

As Henry Ford once said: “You can have any colour car you want, as long as it is black”

The 20% which account for 80% of the sales is called the ‘head’, the rest of the 80% is called the tail. In the pre internet economics it simply made no sense to store the 80%. Shelf space is scarce and so companies had to assign it wisely. In this scenario it is obvious that stores opt for the best sellers. And this makes it logic that producers try and make their products appeal to a wide audience. The lowest common denominator dictates. Or in Anderson’s words:

“For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.”

Why the long tail works

So hits were selling well, everyone has seen Titanic and heard Britney Spears do her best impression of a strangled cat. Then came along the internet and everything changed.

Shelf space moved from being scarce to being abundant. The marginal cost of adding a product to the range has become virtually zero. As such it makes sense to add as many products as you can. If it doesn’t sell, you don’t lose anything and if it does - BONUS!

Anderson: “With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit.”

Selling 1 product that costs £1m gives you a total of £1 million in sales. Alternatively, if you sell 1 million products that cost £1 once each your sales figure is also £1 million.

Selling these products individually is not a viable business model, but the aggregation of the long tail can result in a viable economic model.

One problem with the tail in the old model was that niches were often geographically dispersed. Bournemouth may only have 3 manga fans, so setting up a shop selling anything related to manga makes no sense. However, there may be a whole lot more manga fans in the whole of the UK, and even the rest of the world. The internet does not discrimate based on location, so it enables companies to read a world wide audience.

So there are two main drivers behind the long tail

1) The internet has enabled companies to aggregate geographically dispersed markets, turning niches into a viable business model (Anderson: “In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.”)

2) The fact that shelf space is now abundant, rather than scarce (Anderson: “Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.”)

The internet aggregates demand through distribution systems that are geographically independent and it has made it easier to find things within the tail.

What makes the long tail work?

So instead of being able to pick from the 100,000 books at Barnes and Nobles we can now take our pick from the several million that Amazon offer. The long tail only works when it helps consumers nagivate them through the vast amounts of products in the tail.

If Amazon simply listed all products they offered on the homepage visitors would be overwhelmed and unlikely to buy anything. So they have invented mechanisms which ensure the visitor is not scared away and can happily surf his way down the tail. So how have they done that?

1) Categories & tags

2) Algorhitmic recommendations

3 ) Consumer recommendations

4) Consumer reviews & votes

5 ) Search

Anderson prescribes 3 new rules in the economics of the Long Tail:

1) Make everything available

Shelf space is limitless and the marginal cost are zero. You may not sell many, but the aggregate of all those tiny sales adds up to a big number.

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.

2) Cut the price in half. Now lower it

Digital products such as CDs are far cheaper to produce then their physical cousins. No more distribution costs, no more packaging, no more physical CD’s, no more…well you get the point. Or from another point of view, there is no longer a need for a physical store, thus costs are reduced. With costs decreasing, prices should follow. Whilst the record labels refuse this in order to avoid ‘channel conflict’, they forget that basic economics dictate that a lower price will result in a higher number of sales.

3) Help me find it

With the long tail it’s not a case of either/or - you need both. Simply offereing a large number of products is not enough. People will expect the hits to be there, and they will also need help in finding the more obscure titles. Too much choice without help is overwhelming and will put people off.

Critisism of the long tail

We’ve gone from a lot of choice to a humongous amount of choice. And according to Barry Schwartz too much choice can even affect our happiness!

“As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

Barry Schwartz: Too much choice is oppresive

Chris Anderson: Too much choice without help is oppresive

Too much choice can cause ‘consumer vertigo‘ (Karrie Jacobs)

“Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.”

So, while choice can be overwhelming, with the right tools it can actually be very liberating.

The second critisism is the Anderson has overstated the importance of the long tail. Anita Elberse quetions the thinking behind the long tail:

“Is most of the business in the long tail being generated by a bunch of iconoclasts determined to march to different drummers? The answer is a definite no.

. . . Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail.”

“No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.”

In my opinion she is arguing semantics, rather than disproving the long tail. Yes, the long tail may not always have a profound an effect as it has had on Google and Amazon, but the fact remains that the marginal cost of adding products to the range are effectively zero thus making it economically viable. Whilst I agree that the long tail is unlikely to overtake the head it will continue to grow and have an impact.

Schonfeld argues that there will always be a demand for the hits as they are socially driven:

“We tend to like a song or movie, in part, because other people like them too. Taste doesn’t form in a vacuum. It is socially reinforced.”

And finally, a study discovered that  of the millions of songs available on the web 80% did not sell at all and 80% of the money spend on the other 20% went to 52,000 songs. But isn’t that what Anderson said as well? So the numbers of hits selling in regular stores and online are very similar. But there is a big difference, regular stores cannot sell the songs that account for the other 20% of sales, whereas online shops can.

Another arugment they use is that the top100 on Last.fm typically only includes bands such as Radiohead and Coldplay. But once again, how does this agree with the Long Tail? Doesn’t top100 indicate you are talking about the hits, the head of the curve? The fact that more obscure songs are not listed on the top 100 (Which to me seems entirely plausible) does not mean they do not get listened to.

In short, the long tail is here to stay. In some markets it will have a more profound impact than others, but it is likely to grow in importance as companies figures out ways to go down the tail and make money out of it.

More reading:

Original article

Poking Holes in the Long Tail Theory

Behind the music: Is the long tail a myth?

Consumer Vertigo

Evaluation Of Online Campaigns

1) What is evaluation

Wiki is our friend:

“Evaluation is systematic determination of merit, worth, and significance of something or someone using criteria against a set of standards.”

Essentially, it is looking at what you have done and finding out if you have achieved what you set out to do.

A key element here is ‘what you set out to do’ - in order to evaluate you need to have objectives. And in order to be able to evaluate based on objecives, your objectives need to be measurable.

2) Why Should Copanies Evaluate

Evaluation helps companies determine whether or not a campaign has been successful. And more importantly, it will provide them with the information needed to improve future campaigns.

By evaluating a campaign companies will get an insight into what they did well and where they sucked. Not only can evaluation give an indication of how well a campaign performed overall, it can also give insight into which tools/channels/media worked and which ones didn’t. Again, this information can help when planning the next campaign.

Furthermore, a lot of money is invested in these campaigns so it’s sensible to figure out ways to determine if the money was spent wisely.

As the recent recession as shown, marketing budgets get cut when finances are tight - better evaluation will help marketers create a stronger position to retain their budgets or even increase them.

3) How Traditional campaigns are eveluated

In order to determine ways in which digital campaigns can be evaluated it is useful to look at how traditional campaigns are evaluated. This provides us with a starting point from which we can build evaluation measures for online campaigns.

Traditional measurement is focused around exposure metrics such as reach, frequency, CPM, GRPs and ratings. Whilst these numbers have a use, they provide limited information. They give no insight into actual behaviour of the individual, nor are they 100% reliable.

Digital evaluation has more in common with direct marketing and certain PR measures. Direct marketing is far more goal oriented in that it measures direct sales and direct response. And PR tends to looked at where content gets published (earned media), which is a large part of evaluating online campaigns.

4) Why Digital is different from traditional

Traditional campaigns are based on a one-to-many communications model, whereas the internet is a many-to-many communications model. Content producers have less control over content and content can be created and shared by anyone.

Digital campaigns are also much easier to monitor. By use of cookies, analytical tools, log file information and search engines among other things  marketers can gain far more insight into consumer behaviour than is possible with print and TV advertising, for example.

A media owner only has sales figures to determine the success of a magazine - once the magazine hits the shelf the publisher can only guess as to what happens to it and who sees it. However, a web site owner can see exactly what people who visit his website do and where they came from.

Also, digital measurements are far less vague than their traditional counter part. Digital measures are far more transparent and can often provide you with an ROI, whereas traditional measures are far less precise and are implied to have an impact, rather than showing one directly. Instead of having to make assumptions about people’s behaviour, the data actually shows how people have behaved,

5) Type of digital campaign

It is important to develop different metrics and evaluation methods for various types of online campaign. Banner ads are mainly used for branding purposes, whereas search and affiliates are more sales oriented. As such, it would be unfair to evaluate them in the exact same manner. As mentioned earlier, evaluation should be based on objectives and each type of online campaign will have different objectives.

We’ll start with a list of various types of online campaign

- Banners / Online advertising

- Affiliate marketing

- Search Engine Marketing (both paid and organic)

- Viral Marketing

- Social Media Marketing

Of course there are other types of campaign and there is overlap between the above mentioned, but to keep things straight forward we will only focus on the ones mentioned above.

Here’s an extensive list of the various types of campaign and how to set objectives and measure them appropriatly.

6) How To evaluate online

Novak and Hoffman (1996) suggest there are three types of digital campaign evaluation

1) Exposure

2) Interactivity

3) Outcomes

It has to be noted their research stems from 1996, meaning that Google were still located in a family basement and the term social media was yet to be invented.

Exposure is very much like and traditional measurement, it focusses on the number of people who have seen something. So impressions is a key metric and pricing models are based around CPMs and flat fees. Tricks such as automatically refreshing the page are used to artificially inflate the number of impressions. Often, websites spread one single article over several pages to increase the number of impressions too.

CTR is sometimes used as a metric as well, although often ad networks argue this is unfair as they have no control over creative. Plus, by judging the success of a campaign on CTR (which is not necessarily an indication of quality traffic) cheating can ben encouraged. The use of moving X buttons, banners that resemble an inbox ensures higher CTRs, but does nothing to improve a campaign.

Interactivity based models mean that payment is based on the level of interaction the driven traffic shows. So the time spent on the site, the number of page views per visitor and repeat visits are all important metrics. Whilst these metrics are more interesting than the number of impressions, they still don’t help with the caulculation of the ROI.

Outcomes based models pay for results. It’s basically the online version of profit sharing. If an affiliate drives traffic to a site that purchases something from the site, the traffic driver will get a share of that sale. Affiliates often work with metrics such as Cost Per Sale and Cost Per Lead. A big problem with affiliates is that often companies end up competing with the people who are supposed to help them. They will compete with the company for key terms in search engine rankings, can drive up click prices in CPC campaigns through competition. It can also be very tricky to determine who the actual sale belongs to and thus who to reward, if anyone at all.

Whichever means is used to measure the success of a campaign, it is important to know all the tricks in the book to ensure the company is getting value for money. It is also to have clearly defined objectives for each type of digital campaign in order to ensure the campaigns are evaluated using the right metrics.

There is another way of looking at campaign evalution:

1) Onsite evaluation

2) Offsite evaluation

Onsite evaluation looks at how a campaign has affected how people use your website. Has the new traffic that your campaign has driven increased the number of page views, time spend on site, number of downloads, etc. Tools such as Google Analytics will help give you an insight into how people behave on your site. But more importantly, you can segment that information into the various channels you use to drive traffic. This will help you determine which campaigns and type of media drive quality traffic and which ones don’t.

Offsite evaluation involves looking at how your campaign has affected things on a wider scale, the entire internet! Has your brand been mentioned on blogs, Twitter, communities more often as a result of your campaign? Is the sentiment of those comments positive or negative? This is similar to the way PR measure their share of earned media - you find the places where your stories has been mentioned and note the sentiment of it.

This is not only important for branding purposes, but also for search engine rankings. Search engines love links, so the more links you gather the more likely it is you will rank highly. And high search engine rankings result in more traffic (and possibly sales).

Asi Sharabi has created a great 4 step guideline for this:

———————————————————————————————————————–

1. Reach: Simply put, we are talking - is anyone listening?

* Unique visitors,
* Returns,
* pages views
* A deeper level of performance under reach is conversion to friends and/or RSS subscribers. These are your loyal people.

2. Engagement: Are we interesting? Are we doing something people want to interact with?

* Dwell time - do people stay long enough or are they shooting off quickly?
* Conversation rate (comments per post or posts on wall etc.)
* Clicks/UV’s if there are deeper areas
* Uploads / downloads
* Other things you wish people to do - plays, interactions (e.g poll participation, votes etc)

3. Influence: What is the impact we make on the wider web?

* Trackbacks - a behaviour in decline but still a good indicator
* Sharing (through Twitter, Social Networks, blogs, forums)
* Mentions on mainstream media (earned, not paid for)
* Social bookmarking (delicious, digg, reddit etc)
* Better visibility on search

4. Sentiment: Are we making people happy? Do they like us?

On-site: (usually fits with the metrics for engagement)
* comments,
* email they sent you

Off-site:
All conversations about you and mentions of you (fits nicely with the metrics for influence -blogosphere, twitterverse, forums etc)

———————————————————————————————————————–

7) Issues with online evaluation

There are three main issues with online evaluation

1) Privacy

2) Difficulty in obtaining relevant information

3) Defining metrcs

Privacy is a huge issue. In order to be able to evaluate a campaign we have to measure what people are doing. Measuring aggregated, non personal data is OK but in order to be able to target more specifically marketers want more data than that. And at some point a line has to be drawn to protect people’s privacy. Google has to decrease the amount of time they stored a cookie on someone’s computer due to privacy concerns.

Privacy issues arise when the consumer has a lack of control, knowledge and or transparancy of the techniques used. Often users are willing to give up a bit of their privacy (ability for brands to monitor their online behaviour, for example) in order to receive more targeted advertising.

Cookies, the amount of time they are allowed to track behaviour and the combination with adware pose an ethical dillema. Whilst users may accept them in order to get more targeted advertising, they may not be fully aware of the consequeneses of their decision.

Difficulty in obtaining relevant information is another obstacle. Privacy concerns, as mentioned, and ethical dilemma’s can contrain marketers in collecting the data they really want. But it is also proving to be very challenging to aqcuire all the necessary information from offsite mentions of campaigns. The internet is made up of billions of webpages and whilst Google and various other tools are great in helping to categorize all this information, it is tricky to search everything. And even if that were possible, the sheer amount of feedback returned could prove to be very tricky to analyse.

Sentiment was mentioned earlier. There are tools that look into semantics and can draw some links, overall computers are still stupid. Without any form of tagging or other information provided by a human, a PC struggles to make sense out of anything. This means sentiment can only be measured through algorhitms. And whilst this may provide interesting insight, it is far from infallable.

Novak and Hoffman propose a few guidelines as to how a company can make more sense of information

- Companies can record IP address, so they can track the behaviour of that one user. Problem here is that many people use dynamic IP addresses. It may also be that many users use the same IP address (people browsing at work or uni for example). It also gives no information about the person behind the IP address. And caching means that not all browsing may be recorded

- User registration can help companies get more insight into the person behind the IP address, especially when they tie in IP information with registration information. However, many people may be reluctant to register which increases the barrier to entry.

- Cookies can also help companies in garnering more information. Problem here is that many people often delete their cookies or have switched them off entirely.

Defining metrics is also proving to be tricky. As discussed earlier, there are various means of tracking the success of a campaign. Traditional means from advertising and PR can be used, but that would be overlooking the fact that the internet is nothing like traditional media. Impressions, click throughs or sales could be measured, but that fails to take into account any branding value that may be assigned to a campaign.

For example, a customer service rep notices that a customer is complaining about the brand on Twitter. Not only does the rep manage to difuse the situation, the company also gets a lot of good PR because of the way they handled the situation. How do you define the success of this campaign in numbers? Should you?

The good PR will be mainly written on industry related blogs, meaning that many consumers will not see it. It’s great that fellow practicioners like your approach, but does that have an impact on the bottom line?

Here are some other interesting resources on the topic

http://econsultancy.com/blog/3407-10-ways-to-measure-social-media-success

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/measuring-social-media-efforts/

http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-for-business/

http://kdpaine.blogs.com/

Agency Spy has been kind enough to list some of the key points from the research:

The Client Perspective
In addition to the lack of metrics, client-side marketers identified existing internal issues, which, listed in descending order from greatest to smallest challenge, are:

— Key people at company (including senior management) lack understanding of digital media
— Reluctance to move funds from “tried-and-true” practices of the past.
— Internal organizational silos impede a focused enterprise-wide approach

The Agency Perspective
The top two agency challenges for integrating digital media into larger scale marketing programs were client-related and are:
— A lack of client awareness about the benefits of developing a more integrated approach
— A lack of client cooperation across their operating/divisional channels

The Suggested Solutions
Both advertisers and agencies had similar advice for integrating traditional and digital media:

— Become as educated as possible on new/digital media
— Set clear goals and understand business objectives up front
— Understand your consumer
— Be willing to test and learn
— Integrate digital and traditional media
— Commit to metrics and analytics
— Put down the bong for a second and realize that the second you become “satisfied” with your company’s progress in the digital field that you’re already way behind the curve.

The key issue is a lack of understanding at the top. So as an agency, why don’t you try and find the digital enthousiasts at your client’s company and provide them with the ammo to convince their bosses of the importance of a) a digital strategy and b) the importance of integrating digital and traditional campaigns.

Ducan Watts and a few of his colleagues have done a study which has shown that combining a traditional ad with viral techniques on the internet has delivered some very encouraging results. You can find the research paper here - It’s only 9 pages, so well worth to have a quick read.

Too often a very promising campaign fails to reach its true heights simply due to a lack of integration of tools and media. A great TV advert which is no where to be found on a company’s website,  for example. Or even worse, a none shareable and embedable version. We wouldn’t want our customers and fans helping to spread the word for us, now would we?

In digital advertising is content and content is king. So here’s a few things I think are important and very easy to implement, yet often overlooked:

a) Treat your ad as content. The internet loves content and rewards it. If your ad is great people will talk about it and share it, resulting in a lot of earned (read FREE, as I know people love free) media.

b) Make your content easily available and shareable. Again, people love sharing good stuff so make it easy for them. Remember, they are doing you a favour!

c) If you run a TV ad or any traditional campaign  in which you refer to your website make sure you create a separate landing page. One of the key obstacles in digital is metrics - a separate landing page will help overcome this obstacle.

Techcrunch provides some more statistical information:

“This morning comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone.”

It should be noted that these figures relate to the number of people actually visiting the actual Twitter website. With a large proportion of Twitter users using the service via third party aps such as Twhirl and Tweetdeck the actual number of individuals having interacted with Twitter in the last month could be substantially higher.

Having said that, as most active users are more likely to use 3rd party aps and most of these visitors have been driven through the mainstream media coverage of recent events it could be likely this is a temporary spike in traffic. It will be interesting how much of this traffic sticks long term and turns visitors into active participants.

Twitter to Kill off the Auto-Follow

A none publically available feature which allowed users to automatically reciprocate a follow has now been disabled. Whilst I’m no fan of auto follow, to me it indicates someone uses Twitter to broadcast rather than listen, the reasoning provided by Twitter seems a bit paternalistic. This is an excerpt from the e-mail send to users of the auto-follow feature:

“We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior
sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can
actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes
this activity disingenuous.”

In my opinion Twitter is simply a platform which can provide all kinds of different uses. For example, some companies (such as Sky and the BBC) use their Twitter acount to stream their RSS feed. Many would argue this goes against the conversational nature of Twitter. And whilst I agree it might be a cased of a missed opportunity, it does provide value to some users.

Where will Twitter draw the line in determining how their service should be used?

Twitter Tweats Title Tags for Better Google Juice

Recently Google were rumoured to be in talks to aqcuire Twitter. The rumours were denied by the founders, although they did admit they ‘engage in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects’.

Kara Swisher quickly moved to quash the rumour, although she did confirm that Google and Twitter had been having discussions.

“In fact, Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.”

These discussions seem to have led to Twitter changing their title-tags. Where it used to read “Twitter / Daan83″ it now shows “Daan Jansonius (daan83) on Twitter”

As Robin Wauters points out, this will have a big impact on the search engine rankings for Twitter profiles. It will help push Twitter to the top when people are ego-searching, but it will also help with people who believe in personal branding. It’s also an easy way to manage your company’s online reputation. Setting up a Twitter profile using your company name as your Twitter ID is almost certainly gonna get you some page 1 search result real estate.

Analysts Size Up Potential Google/Twitter Deal - And Don’t Agree

As with any potential aqcuisition, the analysts chime in with their 2 cents.

Analyst 1:

“it would be a positive for Google for the following reasons: it needs to generate a return on the cash it currently holds (about $16 billion); it has had limited success with theacquisition of Twitter competitor Jaiku (it essentially closed the service earlier this year); Twitter searches offer an additional revenue stream to Google; and Google’s experience and expertise with search could improve Twitter’s products in ways the current management team may not have conceived.”

Twitter has no revenue stream as of yet, so I’m not sure why this person thinks Twitter (as is currently) would help Google by providing an additional revenue stream.

The Jaiku aqcuisition was pointless because it’s not about the technology, it’s about the community. Jaiku did what Twitter did, but it had nowhere near as many users and is thus ultimately rather pointless. Additionally, Twitter is so valuable to Google because it offers something their spiders can’t - real time search. Withouth the users, and this content, Jaiku never offered much value to Google.

Analyst 2:

“while acknowledging the potential of real-time search to reach a large audience, countered that the lack of a clear monetization strategy for Twitter’s shorter, less commercial searches and blogs combined with a distaste for social networks among advertisers in general would make an acquisition of Twitter by Google a poor decision that could hurt the Google stock.”

As pointed out above, Twitter’s value to Google does not stem from any potential monetisation. It’s the real time search element, which could further enhance Google’s relevance to its users. Whilst, eventually, Twitter will find a business model - I don’t believe that would be the main motive for Google to buy Twitter. If that would ever happen, that is.

The discussion is great because the two views couldn’t be more contrasting, although you can see them both trying to add some water to the wine. The only shame is neither of them comes up with an actionable solution. Arianna keeps harping on about how we live in the link economy and that companies can monetise those links (without offering any suggestions as to how to actually do that). She also offers, somewhat ironically, Facebook and Youtube as the prime examples.

However, in contrast with Curley Huffington has already proven herself to be very  web savvy. Her website is one of the succes stories of the internet and has seen herself become a very influential person. Although her argument may have lacked some proper argumentation and rigour, her record speaks for itself.

In contrast, Curley wishfully keeps suggesting his company should be paid for their hard work. As I understand his proposal he seems to be willing to allow people to link to his content (how very kind!) as long as they pay for it.  It is evident from his answers that AP only see one possible solution to their problem and that’s building a walled garden and charge for their content, with snippets being available to be spread around the internet freely.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not easy for old skool media outlets, as we can see from the numerous newspapers crumbling in the current climate. They face the daunting task of having to turn their business model upside down and having to find completely new, and to them counter intuitive, business models. The thought of giving your hard work away for free must keep many a CEO up at night.

But your stuff is out there, whether you like it or not. Google has made sure of that. And if you’re not on Google, people will look elsewhere.

However, there is one thing I do agree with that Curley said and that’s the fact that the free business model, relient on advertising is no long term business model.

Watch the 20 minute segment below

One of the companies getting involved in the shenanigans was Slideshare. They decided to add two zero’s to the end of each and every slideshow hosted on their website. Not only that, they went a step further in sending all their members the following e-mail:

Hi ___,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

The graph below gives an indication of the amount of chatter it amounted to on Twitter

Via Twist

But guess what? After the initinal celebratory tweets things went sour. People felled duped and conned and rightly so. And the reasons are obvious.

Firstly, Slideshare seemed to have completely forgotten who their users were. Most people use Slideshare to host professional presentations, either to share with readers of their websites or with their clients. It’s not like some of the other web 2.0 companies such as Facebook and Youtube. This is largely a professional environment. And who likes to be made to look a fool in a professional environment? Exactly, no one.

And as pointed out by Adam Ostrow over at Mashable, many of the people who had been fooled did exactly what Slideshare asked them to do; they tweeted about it. Again, an environment which, by many, is largely used in  business context.

The whole thing smacks of Slideshare wanting to be part of the cool kids in Silicon Valley, they wanted to be seen as one of the quirky new kids on the block. Unfortunately that only works with a certain group of users, which they quite clearly don’t have.

I definitely believe there is room for businesses to get involved with April Fools, but the prank has to suit the brand and more importantly, the audience and on that account Slideshare failed miserably.

To their defence, they notified the negative response quickly and publically apologised on their company blog.

I’m not sure when or why it happened, but after a fresh install of Wordpress everything seems to be fine again.

Hopefully no one has been affected by this, but if you did end of with some crazy malware because of my site I do apologise.

This is also the reason why my site is currently shown in the standard Wordpress template. I was looking to re-brand this summer, but this little episode has made sure this process has been brought forward. I hope to have a brand spanking new design within a few weeks.

From now on normal order should be resumed.

Again, apologies for any problems that may have been caused.