Now that the social media tsunami has washed over the world everyone is trying to measure it and profile those who participate in it. Business, nonprofits, governments and any organization that communicates and cares about its reputation is trying to measure the value of social media marketing. But the majority of the measurement today is all about reputation management and sentiment analysis. This is what I call the "analysis paralysis period," and this occurs in the evolution of almost anything new in marketing. Some important aspects of marketing and communication programs are not measureable, nor are they predictable. Some in marketing would say if you can't measure it, you shouldn't do it. Those of who have been in marketing and communications roles long enough know that everything is not directly measureable, especially word of mouth, relationships and influence. In reality you can't measure me without knowing me, and there aren't many tools out there today that can do that.
Many organizations are still not participating in modern social media marketing; they are the laggards and will be left far behind by the competition. Some of them don't want to know about their customers and many governments around the world just don't care, they still live in the era of "knowledge is power." Savvy social media organizations and some of their media arms are now questioning the value of social media. Rather than continuing to innovate and execute on strategies that have been effective in leveraging this new platform for launching new products, customer service, word of mouth marketing, brand awareness and sales. My view, forge ahead and stop trying to measure everything, outflank the competition and get closer to your customers, citizens, partners and stakeholders.
The Old Social Media
Social media is not new. The Internet was originally conceived to provide a nuclear war resistant communications platform and evolved to provide a collaborative platform for physicists at CERN. Engineers in the technology industry have been using social media for over two decades to share information and collaborate in various forums, chat groups and news servers. In 1994 I helped set up network news servers inside NASA so that 5000 engineers could post their project initiatives. This was social media in its earliest form and it was measureable and drove innovation across engineering teams. The most difficult parameters to measure included: overall organizational cost savings and the value of innovation driven through human to human and group to group interactions. What made this work wasn't technology, it was culture.
The New Social Media
Just Two years ago I could not solve a customer service issue with Twitter. I just did, see my last post on how UPS gets Social Media. You could not find me on Facebook, I wasn't reviewing your restaurant on Yelp and hundreds of people weren't reading my reviews of hotels on Tripadvisor.com. So how are you going to measure me and my influence? This time last year I had 1000-2000 readers of my blog a month, last month I had 5000 on two blogs, Everyone is a Journalist and UPS Gets Social Media. How do you measure this? More importantly where am I am going and how do you measure and prepare for that?
What device will I engage my social world with next year or even next month, a PC, notebook, IPhone, or IPad? This is important to understand if you are trying to measure me and my influence. This is the next step for many organizations, understanding who the influencers are and the social ecosystem that surrounds them. Will this be how you measure me? According to this month's Esquire, there are now more fifty year old men in the US than any other age group. Where will we go? How many social networks will we engage with and what will we do on them? This was the focus of last year's SNCR research on the New Symbiosis of Professional networks which we will revisit shortly. This is where the analysis paralysis really sets in and the profiling of social media influencers starts. Some thoughts on profiling of influencers:
- How do you find me?
- Or how do I find you?
- What is the sphere of my social ecosystem?
- How do I influence in my social media ecosystem?
- Do I blog and can you predict my blog and its influence?
- Am I authentic and is my view valued?
- How will you measure my content?
The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks SCNR Study 2009
After completing this study last year we concluded that the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG) had arrived and content and guess what it is happening! Let's revisit some other insightful findings from this study:
- Content sharing and distribution in the social network peer group environment is king and can't be controlled.
o This is a major change in peer group communications and their interaction which facilitates easier and faster information exchange and faster information exchange and access to information that will impact purchasing decision making in B2P, B2B and B2C markets.
o This represents an inflection point and disrupter in the communications and interactions of the most powerful of all influencing environments, the Social Media Peer groups (SMPG).
o Information flow in SMPG will operate at Internet business velocity and become almost instantly global the only factor that will slow information exchange and interaction in the SMPG will be time zones.
- Challenges facing marketing communications
o Managing and influencing independent content will be the major challenge.
o Control of corporate placed content will be another challenge facing marketing communications
o Managing consistent messaging and content across the social network and traditional corporate communications pathways will also be difficult.
o Understanding and measuring the tonality and effect of social media content will not be easy.
INC. 500s Adoption of Social Media Growing
Last year I also presented some key findings from research presented by Nora Barnes of UMASS to augment our SNCR findings and it showed a huge jump in the use of social media, blogging, and video since 2007-2009, particularly by fast growing small businesses in the US. But many Fortune 500 companies were still measuring success through hits and page views. Does this make sense? I think it is interesting to take a step back and look at this.
Top ten takeaways from her excellent presentation and I will elaborate on some actions for small business and startups.
1. Company websites were losing value.
2. Social networks were increasing in usage.
3. Social sites were the primary tools of journalists.
4. Journalists were monitoring sentiment and voice in Twitter and in social network networks especially in blogs.
5. Twitter's ranking increased significantly over last year.
6. Only 16% of the Fortune 500 had a corporate blog.
7. Charities, nonprofits and higher education were way ahead of the Fortune 500.
8. Video was the fastest growing content in 2008 & 2009.
9. Social networking was growing faster on LinkedIn and also MySpace.
10. 51% of INC 500 had Twitter accounts
Net/Net:
Algorithms and other sophisticated technologies are and will undoubtedly emerge and attempt to profile me, but will they be able to predict my behavior. As Andreas Weigend would say there is a lot of digital exhaust out there to gather and analyze today, but organizations are challenged globally to manage and analyze the data. After reading data now for more than thirty years in two professions I can tell you that the findings are not always that obvious. What is more important is the actions, strategy and vision that your derive from it.. This will not come in the form of a power point presentation from a freshly minted MBA.
Please take ten minutes to participate in this year's New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study and I promise to give you my insights and vaticinations, we have just announced the launch of the 2nd annual New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research study @ http://www.newsymbiosis.com/. Thank you again for your help and great selling and marketing in the millennium.