I like to keep a keen eye on Razorfish to see what they are up to. I have always been impressed with their work and with the thought leadership the company exudes.
Today Shiv Singh and Garrick Schmitt announced that Razorfish filed a patent to measure social media distribution. The patent, which is marketed as a way to measure social influence, is really more about providing metrics for how social media content/widgets/applications virally distribute.
So what problem is this patent trying to solve?
How do marketers identify the key influencers within a social network, and how do you really track and understand how social behavior works?
Let's use a widget as an example (that has an embed code in it so that a viewer can embed the widget again without visiting the source website). You've seen widgets like this before.
Your typical video widget
The problem is current systems and tracking methods usually only measure breath of widget influence I.e. How many people are out their using the widget. Currently measurement methods do not account for the viral distribution path that a widget takes (which is essentially a graph).
I am going to present a use case to make this easy to understand.
Person A places a widget (a video in this case) on their website "example1.com". Person B visits "example1.com" and views the video. Person B would like to feature it on their own website. They snag the embed code and drop it on "example2.com" (Thus making this the second 'skip' or 'generation' from the domain "example1.com"). The chart below illustrates how this continues to flow throughout a social network ad nauseum. I assume, that this data will be collected and analyzed in some central location.
You can see above that the Action Tag Solution records a generation history for EACH source of a widget. Doing so allows Razorfish (and by extension, their clients) to identify key influencers within a social network AND how viral a widget is for a particular generation from a given source. In the diagram above, Person B and Person D have the most influence. In the future, targeting these influential websites with marketing spend will increase the probability that a widget will go viral and the effectiveness of that spend.
I have chosen to use a widget as an example, but the Action Tag Solution could be used for any media type, widget, application, etc. E.g. For a facebook application, replace 'widget' with 'application' and 'website' with 'user' in the illustration above.
I am very excited to see what type of measurement dashboards and reporting tools Razorfish (or others) will create to visualize this information.
Read more about the Action Tag Solution on Shiv's goingsocialnow.com or on Razorfish's Digital Design blog
Jordan Willms on Web Strategy, Social Media, Business and Technology
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