Tag Archives: social media metrics

John Trader

2013: The Year that Social Media Will Run out of Kool-Aid

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Social media strategies must be based on the unique structure of your own community.
Will this be the year that social media marketers stop "drinking the Kool-Aid?" (Photo courtesy of zombieite on Flickr)

Anyone who operates within the social media space knows all too well “the bandwagon effect” that new platforms and pundits’ prognostications can have on the entire ecosystem.  A new tool is released, a different approach to a standard procedure is introduced, predictions abound of what direction the industry is headed in, and advice on how to maximize your social media efforts are as common as spilled popcorn on a movie theatre floor. Those that blindly follow advice without critical examination or thinking of the nuances of their own communities are often referred to as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Searchmetrics: A Tale of Two Visibilities

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Last month I wrote about a demo of Searchmetrics Essentials, and this weekend I had the chance to get a first-hand look at the dashboard.

Essentials looks at the connection between social and search data, particularly SEO. Take the chart below, for example. This shows Social Visibility for individual blog posts from PRBreakfastClub.com. Social Visibility is defined as follows:

With a Facebook share or a Google plus-one users can vote on the quality of a site. Therefore, the aim is to motivate users to perform as many of these actions as possible. Social Visibility presents these results and prioritizes them according to the network and type of action. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

There’s an Easier Way to Create Standards: Conform

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The latest focal point of measurement fanatics has been standardization. Most recently public relations professionals convened in Lisbon for AMEC (The International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) to set standards for measuring PR and social media.

While I applaud their efforts, and they were able to make some important steps toward standardization, it seems the whole industry is going at this problem from the completely wrong direction.

The approach seems to be to try to find standard, but unique methods to measure PR and its value. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Measuring Your Consumers’ Worth

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The Economist Intelligence Unit recently released a report about how the value of customers is being measured. There are some important implications for businesses, and you can download the full report if you want to dig a bit deeper.

One of my favorite quotes from the report was the following:

…measures of customer value that focus solely on transaction activity capture only a fraction of an individual’s behaviour and potential value.

It’s so true. While we always need to tie metrics and measures of social media back to our business goals (and often the bottom line), there is so much more value to the new social customer than the $29.99 they just spent on your website. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Klout Adds Context to Automated Influence?

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Klout recently announced its latest feature: +K. Similar to Google’s +1, Klout asks that you give users a +K for each topic for which they have influenced you. In theory, Klout scores will now include context and topical relevance.

For example, if you look at my profile topics, you could give me a +K if I have influenced you on social media measurement or public relations. Each user gets five +K’s each day, which means you have to be registered to give others feedback and cannot give unlimited feedback. You can also give a +K to each topic for a person once each week. So if I give you a +K for social media on Monday, then I cannot give you another +K for social media until the following Monday. And +K’s will not last forever, they have an expiration date.

Klout explains that influence can change over time. While there are plenty of people who are influential about SXSW in the first few months of the year, there is hardly anyone talking about it right now. So I may give you a +K for SXSW in March, but a +K for summer beers in June. Influence can be fleeting, and it can grow and shift over time, and Klout is trying to account for that. Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Can mPACT Measure Your Online Impact?

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mBLAST recently launched a free version of its tool mPACT which claims to find influencers based on topics or keywords. mPACT looks through, “a database of over 25 million articles, 8 million blog posts, and 753 million social media entries.”

So there’s no doubt that there is plenty of data to be had. But does their algorithm work? mPACT assigns an influence score as well if you sign up for the Pro account, but it’s unclear what metrics factor into this score.

I ran a couple of tests to see how well the tool works for finding influencers. Continue reading →