I look forward to seeing the film, "the social network" and I suppose it will be something to get clicky on Facebook about.
Not that I am a social network addict: okay I am a forum and blog addict which puts me in a minor league, with most likley just crawlers reading most of my hits. FB I can kind of take or leave and right now I am going through FB fatigue, although that is not as from any huge overdosing on it-. just boredom. I actually delete people from FB and keep my friends numbers to under 50. There are still a couple of people I would like to connect to, God excluded, and some I should maybe connect to, but I am pretty determined to keep to under 50, at least as my private profile goes. Maybe DF will develope his own profile, alter ego as he is.
(links to founders) The founders were, or have become, somewhat shy types who started the whole concept as a beauty rating project: very peri pubescent of them too. However, they soon saw the social value of a simple "face" on the internet with connections round Harvard and later of course, were lucky to ride the storm and catch the money wave.
As I wrote in my last ranting blogg, I am more interested in the beast than we fleas upon its' back. Or rather how we fleas feeding on the blood of the social network, organised to join up.
The beast itself holds some fascination for me, in its quintessential simplicity. It looks like any live content portal I would have worked on in y2000-2001: Conservative, text and thumbnail based. Simple, clear, familiar, and stable. The simplicity lies in "getting it" quickly,what it does for your wild social betworking imagination proposes to you, more on that soon. But the latter two are pretty important: it is familiar, like the php/cgi/cfm pages I'm thinking about. It has levels of permissions, like the extranets I designed a decade ago. You have to join to get in, and you have to be a good little boy once in.
So it is a familliar and therefore safe environment, and unlike many other predecessors, has no half-hidden agenda of fleecing you to make further progress in your sociableness. The stability is vital to this feeling of security. FB evolves very slowly and is currently no doubt have an internal security review after the spate of FB virus, spy-ware and spam "apps" which have plagued us like chain letters did in the 1970s.
Well, well. FB fatigue: I am a little bored, perhaps I got my personal branding wrong and don't have a little band of the cleveries with good reparte. I just find it a bit static, and fully expect a merger and take over YT-FB! Video with video replies, limited tweet wise to 4 Mb or the like.
So there it is, a totally unstructred, short rant for the evening. But what will become of FB, what is the next move? WIll there arise a new beast from the east or something else capture our imagination? What FB could do, in the mind of DF, will be the topic of a forthcoming rant.
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
A Short History of Consumer-Generated-Media
Definitions?
Social Media, aka Consumer Generated Media: the latter is preferable to the author in context of marketing.
Social - people being erm, sociable, erm.... people communicating in an unofficial atmosphere
Media - The king of Medes and his Persian enemies predate even the use of the word in latin to describe the written capture surface, the network and the nodes there upon. In his case the papyrus letters, the couriers and the writers and recipients of politcal information and commands.
Social Media is definable by to necessary conditions : distrubtion via a network and dialogue.
In other words, if a blogger bloggs and no one reads it, did they ever really write it?
A Brief History of Social Media
When was the first network available for dialogue? Depends what you see as a network: when was the first electronic network available to enable social media to happen?
According to some commentators, you can trace social media back to the early days of interlopers on the phone network and modem based systems: the phone phreaks and the hackers.
However, if you think about it the very first illicit social media e-comms go way back before then: to the first telegraph operators and Marconni's transatlantic preambles. The official version will be the press release and "only for serious communications" but you can bet these guys along the "railroads" tapped out " hey , how are the wife and kids doing?" in 1845.
There are of course some more alley ways and oddities, like ICQ and messenger, which relate to tweeting today and you can read more on great blogs like this link. Here I give a pretty personal account, your honour, of my honest experiences with Social Media and monitoring there of.
Growing Up WIth Social Media
I can actually say that I have matured alongside social media: back as far as doing a bit of phone phreaking myself in 1986, and seeing my first green-screen e-mail in 1988.
The first sign for me that social media had arrived was when I worked in an early University internet department, mainly dealing with the intranet as it was even called back then. Newsgroups by then were well established, and had predated the www and even internet protocol per se.
Newsgroups were a special area accessible by early e-mail clients like GOPHER and the early Netscape. Despite their unglamerous text based appearance, they were really the most interesting area available through the new browsers to many like me: they were REAL people expressing opinions from around the globe.
For me, these newsgroups encompass all that we would recognise as social media today: discussion, micro blog alerts ( the twitter "glue spots" as I call them), closed or open social contact networks and blogging.
Newsgroups quickly went http/www and became franchised into yahoo who maybe even dominated a while, some other independent http and POP mail providers and then google groups which is maybe the most active today with perhaps the longest living newsgroups surviving in this media.
Bulletins and Jumpers
With http, and it's predecessors from dial up modem days ( one at a time user postings and readings), another type of media surface appeared; the bulletin board and a closely related species, the jump station. The subtle difference from newsgroups was maybe anonymity or lack of e-mail alerts : bulletins were organised like web pages or even forums of today, and gave useful updates or just chatter. Jump stations gave firstly address and telefon numbers to other "communities" and then later www. links. In a way they were like search engines and today you can compare jump stations to Twitter and people posting links in FaceBook.
Newsgroups evolved fully into the forum with threaded and embedded discussion, just as newsgroups had in 1992. Also they mostly still retain e-mail alerts which was ther back in 1995 at least.
The Birth of Social Media Monitoring
Certainly by the time I was working with web sites in all earnest, we had started to pay good attention to forums. I would have at a guess that the FBI were pretty interested in Phone Phreaks. Probably the CIA and KGB were looking into the quirky little communications programmers on the early military and governmental networks made: maybe even tolerating them in order to give themselves some more work to do, or even placing double agents in the loops.
In 1998 I was required to look into a forum and newsgroup the company I worked for had just taken over the DNS address for and advertising revenue. We took pretty good care to walk the legal line then; don't get caught interfering with social media as a host! As soon as you started policing the forums, you took a responsibility to continue doing this. Legal precedents were still in their early days, some lawyers would argue no doubt that this is still and inconclusive area steered by purely case law and libel. Forum rules were to be self policed as has been the standard means of keeping ISPs and hosting companies out of jail ever since.
Anyway, we monitored the forum and reported back to our clients, the advertisers and some other trad' media ones on what people were saying about them. This was done purely on a verbal basis as far as I was concerned.
We also had an internal use only, atomz search engine IIRC, and I guess we could well have started doing stats on brand name hits, certainly we did manual sentiment rating on threads and brands! By 2000 we were delivering crisis management reports and closing forums if anything went out of hand. Redevelopment or loss of original data were the publicised excuses for pulling contentious and libelous issues.
So really there is nothing all that new in social media or spying on SM, it by in large has been done before.
Social Media, aka Consumer Generated Media: the latter is preferable to the author in context of marketing.
Social - people being erm, sociable, erm.... people communicating in an unofficial atmosphere
Media - The king of Medes and his Persian enemies predate even the use of the word in latin to describe the written capture surface, the network and the nodes there upon. In his case the papyrus letters, the couriers and the writers and recipients of politcal information and commands.
Social Media is definable by to necessary conditions : distrubtion via a network and dialogue.
In other words, if a blogger bloggs and no one reads it, did they ever really write it?
A Brief History of Social Media
When was the first network available for dialogue? Depends what you see as a network: when was the first electronic network available to enable social media to happen?
According to some commentators, you can trace social media back to the early days of interlopers on the phone network and modem based systems: the phone phreaks and the hackers.
However, if you think about it the very first illicit social media e-comms go way back before then: to the first telegraph operators and Marconni's transatlantic preambles. The official version will be the press release and "only for serious communications" but you can bet these guys along the "railroads" tapped out " hey , how are the wife and kids doing?" in 1845.
There are of course some more alley ways and oddities, like ICQ and messenger, which relate to tweeting today and you can read more on great blogs like this link. Here I give a pretty personal account, your honour, of my honest experiences with Social Media and monitoring there of.
Growing Up WIth Social Media
I can actually say that I have matured alongside social media: back as far as doing a bit of phone phreaking myself in 1986, and seeing my first green-screen e-mail in 1988.
The first sign for me that social media had arrived was when I worked in an early University internet department, mainly dealing with the intranet as it was even called back then. Newsgroups by then were well established, and had predated the www and even internet protocol per se.
Newsgroups were a special area accessible by early e-mail clients like GOPHER and the early Netscape. Despite their unglamerous text based appearance, they were really the most interesting area available through the new browsers to many like me: they were REAL people expressing opinions from around the globe.
For me, these newsgroups encompass all that we would recognise as social media today: discussion, micro blog alerts ( the twitter "glue spots" as I call them), closed or open social contact networks and blogging.
Newsgroups quickly went http/www and became franchised into yahoo who maybe even dominated a while, some other independent http and POP mail providers and then google groups which is maybe the most active today with perhaps the longest living newsgroups surviving in this media.
Bulletins and Jumpers
With http, and it's predecessors from dial up modem days ( one at a time user postings and readings), another type of media surface appeared; the bulletin board and a closely related species, the jump station. The subtle difference from newsgroups was maybe anonymity or lack of e-mail alerts : bulletins were organised like web pages or even forums of today, and gave useful updates or just chatter. Jump stations gave firstly address and telefon numbers to other "communities" and then later www. links. In a way they were like search engines and today you can compare jump stations to Twitter and people posting links in FaceBook.
Newsgroups evolved fully into the forum with threaded and embedded discussion, just as newsgroups had in 1992. Also they mostly still retain e-mail alerts which was ther back in 1995 at least.
The Birth of Social Media Monitoring
Certainly by the time I was working with web sites in all earnest, we had started to pay good attention to forums. I would have at a guess that the FBI were pretty interested in Phone Phreaks. Probably the CIA and KGB were looking into the quirky little communications programmers on the early military and governmental networks made: maybe even tolerating them in order to give themselves some more work to do, or even placing double agents in the loops.
In 1998 I was required to look into a forum and newsgroup the company I worked for had just taken over the DNS address for and advertising revenue. We took pretty good care to walk the legal line then; don't get caught interfering with social media as a host! As soon as you started policing the forums, you took a responsibility to continue doing this. Legal precedents were still in their early days, some lawyers would argue no doubt that this is still and inconclusive area steered by purely case law and libel. Forum rules were to be self policed as has been the standard means of keeping ISPs and hosting companies out of jail ever since.
Anyway, we monitored the forum and reported back to our clients, the advertisers and some other trad' media ones on what people were saying about them. This was done purely on a verbal basis as far as I was concerned.
We also had an internal use only, atomz search engine IIRC, and I guess we could well have started doing stats on brand name hits, certainly we did manual sentiment rating on threads and brands! By 2000 we were delivering crisis management reports and closing forums if anything went out of hand. Redevelopment or loss of original data were the publicised excuses for pulling contentious and libelous issues.
So really there is nothing all that new in social media or spying on SM, it by in large has been done before.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Social Media Watchers
I was reminded on the danger of over-analytics when I visited a forum myself recently.
My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.
For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.
With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.
It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!
With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.
The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.
My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.
For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.
With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.
It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!
With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.
The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Social Media Monitoring Goes Bust
A Brief History
To start with a brief history of social media: from cloudy beginings in nerd talk and security services personal info boards, social media came to the public internet in the late eighties and early nineties as the newsgroup: a simple text based repository for messages and early blogs, with circulation by e-mail subscription or internet boards.....and these were indeed monitored then, mainly by police in connection with the pædo rings and other unsavoury comms.
Newsgroups quickly went HTML on the World Wide Web and evolved into the forum, which is still the best repository for accessible, high value and trackable information on the web. This is where most consumer involvement with products and brands takes place. Although the micro blogging / glue services like Twitter are rapidly becoming a larger, faster resource they are still less useful for examining consumer attittudes over months of time or in detail.
Little Brother is Watching You
Now there are a host of agencies offering "social media monitoring" and these currently run the risk of creating a bubble soft and venture capital will feel the implosion of. Currently the most advanced indexing tools are not much better than stringing together several specialist hot shop functions, a core data depository and crawler and monitor and "deck" resourcest which are free on the internet. The larger agencies, like Meltwater are able to attract the larger brands while the major players of Trad' market research are still testing the water and holding off on acquisitions.
Why is Social Media Monitoring Going Bust?
The whole market for social media analytics, is in peril of undervaluing it's core pricing. Put simply, the barriers to entry are rather low given that comp'sci' students are often given crawler-indexer or deck meta data projects in undergrad years. Most of the new emerging agencies are student shops: comp sci and MBAers slung together to play at business. Problem being that they want to set experience before value and are cutting each others throats by going into brand names on "loss leaders".
Another key issue is the propagation of free services: "amsterdam hooker windows" as one software engineer called them in another area. The problem here is that you can begin to string together enough free services to make a picture of your brands' position in SM and then just go into the key forums and twitter yourself with your short-suffering marketing interns. The initial "Brand X status in CGM" is devalued as are tha later tracker reports: the key value for agencies is in presenting the statistics and sentiment mapping, but this is so relative and subject to the media surface changing itself that you really have to question the value of it for brands with less than 2000 hits per month in SM.
Scalability ....lack of it.
Although a few of the new starts may have strong crawler-indexer technology, one major problem is that the technology has to monitor a diverse range of sources out there on the internet, and those sources are not always too keen on being crawled. Programmer time is used in not just attaining sources, but retaining them. Also indexing for relevance and speed takes programmer time,and unfortunetly a new arena for a new brand may not be as fast or inclusive/exhaustive as the last indexing which had been optmised.
Put on top of this the awful costs of account management and new business development in acquiring and maintaining brand name clients and the issue of scalability just in this one area, is the one which will kill off most of the new starts.
Lumpy Custard
This economics of SM monitor agencies is actually nothing new: most small 1970s-80s advertising agencies failed because they tried to scale and could not make the leap from the core owner-manager team to an expanding, system driven agency.
Most of all in marketing services, it is horrible risky business with huge over reliance on a small number of customers ( clients in agency land) . "lumpy custard" as I used to describe it. In the 1980s the expression "lose a client, lose your job" was the mantra of account directors, while today it is more likely to be "lose a client, lose your VC funding".
To give some detail on this, when a new project is taken on then it inevitably comes with new sources or indexing demands. Also it comes with a new set of expectatons and because Market Research is still cinderella to the communications side of on line marketing, then new demands of the clients are usually out of line with charging the baseline 85€ per man hour to even break even in business services.
Winners and Losers
The largest, most comprehensive indexers will probably win over and then get the third level funding or even IPO / alternative exchange floatations. I'd expect these technology and brand become acquisition hungry and buy up the hot shops with key expertise in delivering more from fewer man hours. They in turn will want to either exit from VC or the stock exchange, by being eaten by the MB/TNC or Frosts of the world.
This would be the current exit model for the numerous university spawned start ups in SMM.
However, another huge issue they have is in defending their IPR: outside the US very litte will be patentable and a copyright can either be worked around or be somewhat irrelevant in a David-Goliath situation. So rounds of acquisition will come down to " can we get there cheaper ourselves? Do we head hunt out the key techies? What value do they really add ? How will they integrate technically and cutlurally to us?" for the potential bigger fish.
Acquisitions rounds will become window shopping with all the above questions firmly in mind once they get a look behind the scenes. Small companies would be wise to limit their exposure in terms of their "black box" code and indeed the identities of their staff.
These days you are open to headhunting through facebook and linked-in, so Social Media monitors may be eaten up by their own poison.
To start with a brief history of social media: from cloudy beginings in nerd talk and security services personal info boards, social media came to the public internet in the late eighties and early nineties as the newsgroup: a simple text based repository for messages and early blogs, with circulation by e-mail subscription or internet boards.....and these were indeed monitored then, mainly by police in connection with the pædo rings and other unsavoury comms.
Newsgroups quickly went HTML on the World Wide Web and evolved into the forum, which is still the best repository for accessible, high value and trackable information on the web. This is where most consumer involvement with products and brands takes place. Although the micro blogging / glue services like Twitter are rapidly becoming a larger, faster resource they are still less useful for examining consumer attittudes over months of time or in detail.
Little Brother is Watching You
Now there are a host of agencies offering "social media monitoring" and these currently run the risk of creating a bubble soft and venture capital will feel the implosion of. Currently the most advanced indexing tools are not much better than stringing together several specialist hot shop functions, a core data depository and crawler and monitor and "deck" resourcest which are free on the internet. The larger agencies, like Meltwater are able to attract the larger brands while the major players of Trad' market research are still testing the water and holding off on acquisitions.
Why is Social Media Monitoring Going Bust?
The whole market for social media analytics, is in peril of undervaluing it's core pricing. Put simply, the barriers to entry are rather low given that comp'sci' students are often given crawler-indexer or deck meta data projects in undergrad years. Most of the new emerging agencies are student shops: comp sci and MBAers slung together to play at business. Problem being that they want to set experience before value and are cutting each others throats by going into brand names on "loss leaders".
Another key issue is the propagation of free services: "amsterdam hooker windows" as one software engineer called them in another area. The problem here is that you can begin to string together enough free services to make a picture of your brands' position in SM and then just go into the key forums and twitter yourself with your short-suffering marketing interns. The initial "Brand X status in CGM" is devalued as are tha later tracker reports: the key value for agencies is in presenting the statistics and sentiment mapping, but this is so relative and subject to the media surface changing itself that you really have to question the value of it for brands with less than 2000 hits per month in SM.
Scalability ....lack of it.
Although a few of the new starts may have strong crawler-indexer technology, one major problem is that the technology has to monitor a diverse range of sources out there on the internet, and those sources are not always too keen on being crawled. Programmer time is used in not just attaining sources, but retaining them. Also indexing for relevance and speed takes programmer time,and unfortunetly a new arena for a new brand may not be as fast or inclusive/exhaustive as the last indexing which had been optmised.
Put on top of this the awful costs of account management and new business development in acquiring and maintaining brand name clients and the issue of scalability just in this one area, is the one which will kill off most of the new starts.
Lumpy Custard
This economics of SM monitor agencies is actually nothing new: most small 1970s-80s advertising agencies failed because they tried to scale and could not make the leap from the core owner-manager team to an expanding, system driven agency.
Most of all in marketing services, it is horrible risky business with huge over reliance on a small number of customers ( clients in agency land) . "lumpy custard" as I used to describe it. In the 1980s the expression "lose a client, lose your job" was the mantra of account directors, while today it is more likely to be "lose a client, lose your VC funding".
To give some detail on this, when a new project is taken on then it inevitably comes with new sources or indexing demands. Also it comes with a new set of expectatons and because Market Research is still cinderella to the communications side of on line marketing, then new demands of the clients are usually out of line with charging the baseline 85€ per man hour to even break even in business services.
Winners and Losers
The largest, most comprehensive indexers will probably win over and then get the third level funding or even IPO / alternative exchange floatations. I'd expect these technology and brand become acquisition hungry and buy up the hot shops with key expertise in delivering more from fewer man hours. They in turn will want to either exit from VC or the stock exchange, by being eaten by the MB/TNC or Frosts of the world.
This would be the current exit model for the numerous university spawned start ups in SMM.
However, another huge issue they have is in defending their IPR: outside the US very litte will be patentable and a copyright can either be worked around or be somewhat irrelevant in a David-Goliath situation. So rounds of acquisition will come down to " can we get there cheaper ourselves? Do we head hunt out the key techies? What value do they really add ? How will they integrate technically and cutlurally to us?" for the potential bigger fish.
Acquisitions rounds will become window shopping with all the above questions firmly in mind once they get a look behind the scenes. Small companies would be wise to limit their exposure in terms of their "black box" code and indeed the identities of their staff.
These days you are open to headhunting through facebook and linked-in, so Social Media monitors may be eaten up by their own poison.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Mointoring Consumer Generated Media- The new King
The other day there was a programme on the idiot box about measuring IQ: Kalahari bushmen have been measured as the lowest IQ of any homosapien. 61 or the like. POS that IQ tests are for measuring actual ability to learn, perfect crafts, hunt and so on. THis was driven by a fairly racist appearing "researcher" who had done some "convenience samples" and some meta analyses to draw up these intelligence quotients for different ethnic groups.
Another researcher pointed out the validity of IQ tests as they stand: to get by in the modern world and use your brain to forward your well being and reproduce, you need to be able to relate to the westernised IQ test! There is little point in being a hunter gatherer in the 21st century, you are on to a loser.
Now this may seem a bit removed from doing social media monitoring: but in future will consumer opinions and groups who DO NOT make CGM about brands not become largely irrelevant?
I think that market research will become completely web and IP telephony based. And we will use anonymsed IP MPEG streaming to sample into street level consumer behaviour, and into those social strata who don't do CGM yet are important enough to some brands of sports clothing .....yeah the underclass buying their bling rags....
Another researcher pointed out the validity of IQ tests as they stand: to get by in the modern world and use your brain to forward your well being and reproduce, you need to be able to relate to the westernised IQ test! There is little point in being a hunter gatherer in the 21st century, you are on to a loser.
Now this may seem a bit removed from doing social media monitoring: but in future will consumer opinions and groups who DO NOT make CGM about brands not become largely irrelevant?
I think that market research will become completely web and IP telephony based. And we will use anonymsed IP MPEG streaming to sample into street level consumer behaviour, and into those social strata who don't do CGM yet are important enough to some brands of sports clothing .....yeah the underclass buying their bling rags....
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Why Monitor Social Media ?
Perhaps you are new to the world of social media monitoring at work, or are embarking on your studies at university in this area, and you are wondering just exactly "what is in it for me ?"
Maybe your background is in traditional marketing or perhaps you work in a technical or customer services function and have heard that this new area is indeed something worth looking into further . How can monitoring social media help you make decisions and deal with problems and opportunities?
Well it is of course e-Marketing and web masters are the most interested and are sitting glued to the analytics and consumer opinions. Of course it is not just for the geeks: communications and customer services who are aslo getting engaged with SM. The benefits reach wider and deeper into the organisation though. Everything from new-product-introduction & tracking, or competitor pricing, to issue containment is amenable in almost real time : the feedback loop from action-consumer reaction is drastically shorter.
Statistically Speaking
One burning question is how can information in SM be used to make conclusions about the wider consumer population? Well speaking mathematically, usually we cannot make inferences to the general population or produce actual statistics - yet.
The day may come in the near future though, when the numbers of consumers engaging in discussion will be so high that we can draw inferences to the wider population, such as intent-to-purchase or brand awareness, and put some hard numbers behind this with SM a quantitative source for extrapolation to consumer behaviour in the market as a whole.
Even then it will most likely be from a definable cross section of different geographical- or network-societies: age and education related. It would be dangerous to draw inferences on anything but the first three standard deviations from one of those sub populations who are engaged with the internet and SM. However we will be able to utilise statistical probability based sample methods within any accessable or stored data set to produce smaller data sets which are make analysis more efficient within given parameters of accuracy and inferential significance.
Social Media Monitor Should Be Qualitative
For the moment though, reporting is focuses rather on the valuable qualitative insights to be found, "straight from the horses mouth". These are the root causes of issues, the actual verbatim opinions, the dissatisfactions, the real point-of-touch customer experiences : I could go on! These help illustrate findings from a company's quantitative reports and data-sources, as well as pointing to new insights which uncover consumer opinion hidden or distorted by the very interactive nature of surveys, depth interviews or focus groups. Also they can uncover uncomfortable truths which are hidden by line managers, front line operators or re-sellers.
Everything is Relative
Despite the qualitative output of reporting, descriptive statistics can be used within the domain of social media to illustrate the relative prominence these qualitative observations This includes the relative prevalence (or you could say "share-of-voice" ) of brand names, consumer opinions and for instance problems with newly launched products.
In combination with ever-more-accurate sentiment algortyms running with AI (artificial intelligent) systems, this area of descriptive statistics will be used more and more to give a picture of the cross-section of society using SM to discuss your brands and customer support. The value will increase if it can be shown that the "listen-learn-decide-react" loop on the web connecting to SM, is functioning.
Then our little world of SM becomes a market in it's own right, and this is already happening with companies engaging in different campaigns and communications which are built around information from social-media-reportage. Some companies in future may only interact with consumers through this interface and connections form SM to their web-services.
Numbers and graphs are all very fine and nice to present and talk about, even with the provisio that this is a little and twisted version of the world at large. But even a very low number of "hits" within the latter, for example, can reveal invaluable insight into potential challenges in production lines or further back in the supply chain which are creating problems not detected earlier in the testing and launch programme.
Tracking New Product Introduction
This qualitative approach has been of particular value in tracking new devices launched on the market, which have a plethora of features and most likely diverse internal software. However, this is equally valuable in tracking a new service, or immaterial product from a financial institution or a mobile network operator. Or in defining an unmet need or latent demand out there in the market place.
Within the world of gadgets- consumer electronics like mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or digital cameras - it is in fact often the lead consumers who are the real experts: they can be tracked individually, from maybe a sample of 10, as they try and buy diverse gadgets and report their experiences on the web. Often they seem very informed on how the technical features, like processor, touch screen, GUI, actually deliver benefits in use and how much better this performance is to earlier products or competitors offerings.
In fact these lead consumers seem to have a more wholistic view of the product's perfromance than the head of R&D and most likely the CEO at the manufacturer! Worth listening to SM?
Maybe your background is in traditional marketing or perhaps you work in a technical or customer services function and have heard that this new area is indeed something worth looking into further . How can monitoring social media help you make decisions and deal with problems and opportunities?
Well it is of course e-Marketing and web masters are the most interested and are sitting glued to the analytics and consumer opinions. Of course it is not just for the geeks: communications and customer services who are aslo getting engaged with SM. The benefits reach wider and deeper into the organisation though. Everything from new-product-introduction & tracking, or competitor pricing, to issue containment is amenable in almost real time : the feedback loop from action-consumer reaction is drastically shorter.
Statistically Speaking
One burning question is how can information in SM be used to make conclusions about the wider consumer population? Well speaking mathematically, usually we cannot make inferences to the general population or produce actual statistics - yet.
The day may come in the near future though, when the numbers of consumers engaging in discussion will be so high that we can draw inferences to the wider population, such as intent-to-purchase or brand awareness, and put some hard numbers behind this with SM a quantitative source for extrapolation to consumer behaviour in the market as a whole.
Even then it will most likely be from a definable cross section of different geographical- or network-societies: age and education related. It would be dangerous to draw inferences on anything but the first three standard deviations from one of those sub populations who are engaged with the internet and SM. However we will be able to utilise statistical probability based sample methods within any accessable or stored data set to produce smaller data sets which are make analysis more efficient within given parameters of accuracy and inferential significance.
Social Media Monitor Should Be Qualitative
For the moment though, reporting is focuses rather on the valuable qualitative insights to be found, "straight from the horses mouth". These are the root causes of issues, the actual verbatim opinions, the dissatisfactions, the real point-of-touch customer experiences : I could go on! These help illustrate findings from a company's quantitative reports and data-sources, as well as pointing to new insights which uncover consumer opinion hidden or distorted by the very interactive nature of surveys, depth interviews or focus groups. Also they can uncover uncomfortable truths which are hidden by line managers, front line operators or re-sellers.
Everything is Relative
Despite the qualitative output of reporting, descriptive statistics can be used within the domain of social media to illustrate the relative prominence these qualitative observations This includes the relative prevalence (or you could say "share-of-voice" ) of brand names, consumer opinions and for instance problems with newly launched products.
In combination with ever-more-accurate sentiment algortyms running with AI (artificial intelligent) systems, this area of descriptive statistics will be used more and more to give a picture of the cross-section of society using SM to discuss your brands and customer support. The value will increase if it can be shown that the "listen-learn-decide-react" loop on the web connecting to SM, is functioning.
Then our little world of SM becomes a market in it's own right, and this is already happening with companies engaging in different campaigns and communications which are built around information from social-media-reportage. Some companies in future may only interact with consumers through this interface and connections form SM to their web-services.
Numbers and graphs are all very fine and nice to present and talk about, even with the provisio that this is a little and twisted version of the world at large. But even a very low number of "hits" within the latter, for example, can reveal invaluable insight into potential challenges in production lines or further back in the supply chain which are creating problems not detected earlier in the testing and launch programme.
Tracking New Product Introduction
This qualitative approach has been of particular value in tracking new devices launched on the market, which have a plethora of features and most likely diverse internal software. However, this is equally valuable in tracking a new service, or immaterial product from a financial institution or a mobile network operator. Or in defining an unmet need or latent demand out there in the market place.
Within the world of gadgets- consumer electronics like mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or digital cameras - it is in fact often the lead consumers who are the real experts: they can be tracked individually, from maybe a sample of 10, as they try and buy diverse gadgets and report their experiences on the web. Often they seem very informed on how the technical features, like processor, touch screen, GUI, actually deliver benefits in use and how much better this performance is to earlier products or competitors offerings.
In fact these lead consumers seem to have a more wholistic view of the product's perfromance than the head of R&D and most likely the CEO at the manufacturer! Worth listening to SM?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Sticky, Syrupy Threads
Discussion forums continue to be the most useful social media space to gain consumer insight from, for now at least.
Within these forums you can follow consumer's problems, desires, experiences etc and see how discussions evolve around out clients products, services and brand values. One species of thread which has always very been prominent on forums is the mega-thread. Why are they so "sticky"?
These threads are way longer than average in number of posts. Some run to many thousand entries. It seems they break down into both serious, often heated discussion, diverse postings around a topic - like a new mobile telephone - , or pure trivia like jokes or chain stories.
One reason that they are sticky (ie attract users and keep them coming back) is that they often have prominent placings when forum threads are ranked in order of date on topic listings page, or on the more recent "hot topics" side bars on home pages and top level forum category indexes. It would be interesting to see statistically when such threads attract a critical mass, and how they develop from there. This could be a useful metric and watch alarm-trigger. Rate of growth, number of lead influencers, ranking: some algorythm could be made to work and fish them up to a dashboard panel of "Hot stuff"
Consumers coming to a forum see these mega-threads as the " tall oaks" amongst the grasslands of granular postings. By their stature, they demand respect and people will often come on board a product topic and post their " 2 cents" before they would consider creating a new thread, even if their "2 cents" is a little off topic or outside the current line of arguement. In this way they appeal to the conformist consumer.
These threads then, are not purely a result of some natural magnetic force , or social diffusion through the ethers of the internet. Most are nurtured, and some are not only fertilised with fresh content, but have their space cut clear for weeds, these being small competing threads. Users who can be identified as opinion -leaders, early adopters, expert-insiders or collectively lead influencers, will steer a thread they like and by carefully timed posting and replies to users comments, they will keep the thread up there in the top 5.
Lead influencers vary in how often they initiate threads, but they turn up like clockwork on the hot news threads or major theme threads relating to the forum's raison d'etre. They are in fact instrumental in coaxing the threads to gain critical mass.
Nurture also happens unfortunately perhaps, from forum owners and appointed "moderators". Some forum owners will post on new, related threads, stating rather rudely that the users should refer to the long running topic and "this is closed". They even delete competing threads apparently. Scornful lead influencers will also pounce on unsuspecting thread-starting-newbies, and stamp their forum authority by refering the user to an old worn arguement they should join the gang on the proper big thread, or just have used the "search" function to find the info' on old threads.
Some lead influencers like to demonstrate their boundless knowledge and articulate debating skills, while others can appear very helpful and down-to-earth, sometimes though outright patronising to those with lower post number seeking advice. In fact some lead influencers post almost exclusively in big threads and never start their own.
Usually as rule-of-thumb, one can consider those users with over 1000 posts as a start point to identify lead influencers within a topic of interest.
After this start point, you can delve further into their posts and behaviour, to assert if they are leading discussion and influening others to change opinion, be informed or of course buy something.
Mega-threads have another type of gravity: Often they attract a disproportionate number of "reads" to their actual post number, relative to smaller threads in the same forums. In effect they become the headline pages, or new-channels within the forums. People go there first, they grab attention for read-only "lurkers".
This read-count makes them even more important for companies to gain insight and summary of which direction the group of big threads on say, a product launch or a service problem are going.
One explanation for their disproportionate is their prominence on the forum as mentioned. But also these are the threads which the Google/Yahoo type spiders actually come upon and index. The threads live longer and are earlier on the index-crawl. They have bigger clusters of keywords and have by pure virtue of size, more links out and eventually IN to. Hence they are search engine friendly and score high on relevance and hits. In conjucntion with good web site SEO, the forums get quite high index listings on the SE's depending on the search terms. Also consumers set a bigger price on their own generated opinion! They would rather read 100 different user opinions than one PR story regurgitated, neigh, re-tweeted 100 times.
SE listings then helps the threads gain extra critical mass and keeps them "bumping" back with new posts even some time after they seem to have bruned out.
As we know though, yahoo and google only index an estimated 15% of the web, so it is pretty much hit or miss for actually finding these threads. Choose a good SM monitor company with either full indexing on main sector forums and general consumer forums, or those who can sample effectively from these for the big issues.
Within these forums you can follow consumer's problems, desires, experiences etc and see how discussions evolve around out clients products, services and brand values. One species of thread which has always very been prominent on forums is the mega-thread. Why are they so "sticky"?
These threads are way longer than average in number of posts. Some run to many thousand entries. It seems they break down into both serious, often heated discussion, diverse postings around a topic - like a new mobile telephone - , or pure trivia like jokes or chain stories.
One reason that they are sticky (ie attract users and keep them coming back) is that they often have prominent placings when forum threads are ranked in order of date on topic listings page, or on the more recent "hot topics" side bars on home pages and top level forum category indexes. It would be interesting to see statistically when such threads attract a critical mass, and how they develop from there. This could be a useful metric and watch alarm-trigger. Rate of growth, number of lead influencers, ranking: some algorythm could be made to work and fish them up to a dashboard panel of "Hot stuff"
Consumers coming to a forum see these mega-threads as the " tall oaks" amongst the grasslands of granular postings. By their stature, they demand respect and people will often come on board a product topic and post their " 2 cents" before they would consider creating a new thread, even if their "2 cents" is a little off topic or outside the current line of arguement. In this way they appeal to the conformist consumer.
These threads then, are not purely a result of some natural magnetic force , or social diffusion through the ethers of the internet. Most are nurtured, and some are not only fertilised with fresh content, but have their space cut clear for weeds, these being small competing threads. Users who can be identified as opinion -leaders, early adopters, expert-insiders or collectively lead influencers, will steer a thread they like and by carefully timed posting and replies to users comments, they will keep the thread up there in the top 5.
Lead influencers vary in how often they initiate threads, but they turn up like clockwork on the hot news threads or major theme threads relating to the forum's raison d'etre. They are in fact instrumental in coaxing the threads to gain critical mass.
Nurture also happens unfortunately perhaps, from forum owners and appointed "moderators". Some forum owners will post on new, related threads, stating rather rudely that the users should refer to the long running topic and "this is closed". They even delete competing threads apparently. Scornful lead influencers will also pounce on unsuspecting thread-starting-newbies, and stamp their forum authority by refering the user to an old worn arguement they should join the gang on the proper big thread, or just have used the "search" function to find the info' on old threads.
Some lead influencers like to demonstrate their boundless knowledge and articulate debating skills, while others can appear very helpful and down-to-earth, sometimes though outright patronising to those with lower post number seeking advice. In fact some lead influencers post almost exclusively in big threads and never start their own.
Usually as rule-of-thumb, one can consider those users with over 1000 posts as a start point to identify lead influencers within a topic of interest.
After this start point, you can delve further into their posts and behaviour, to assert if they are leading discussion and influening others to change opinion, be informed or of course buy something.
Mega-threads have another type of gravity: Often they attract a disproportionate number of "reads" to their actual post number, relative to smaller threads in the same forums. In effect they become the headline pages, or new-channels within the forums. People go there first, they grab attention for read-only "lurkers".
This read-count makes them even more important for companies to gain insight and summary of which direction the group of big threads on say, a product launch or a service problem are going.
One explanation for their disproportionate is their prominence on the forum as mentioned. But also these are the threads which the Google/Yahoo type spiders actually come upon and index. The threads live longer and are earlier on the index-crawl. They have bigger clusters of keywords and have by pure virtue of size, more links out and eventually IN to. Hence they are search engine friendly and score high on relevance and hits. In conjucntion with good web site SEO, the forums get quite high index listings on the SE's depending on the search terms. Also consumers set a bigger price on their own generated opinion! They would rather read 100 different user opinions than one PR story regurgitated, neigh, re-tweeted 100 times.
SE listings then helps the threads gain extra critical mass and keeps them "bumping" back with new posts even some time after they seem to have bruned out.
As we know though, yahoo and google only index an estimated 15% of the web, so it is pretty much hit or miss for actually finding these threads. Choose a good SM monitor company with either full indexing on main sector forums and general consumer forums, or those who can sample effectively from these for the big issues.
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