In Category: Measurement & Governance

People are wrong in their criticisms of the Apple social media policy that was allegedly leaked recently, and here is why:

A company’s social media policy should support the unique qualities that make the company successful. In fact, the elements of a successful social media policy must exist in concert with the unique culture and business context of any organization.

In Apple’s case, secrecy has been a critical key to success. While many social media pundits claim that Apple should be more open, very few of those people are running billion-dollar corporations, and the notion that all companies should apply the same level of “open-ness” is, at best, over-simplified.

Comparisons to other technology companies abound, but that just makes no sense. Those companies and Apple take completely different approaches to differentiation, which has led them to create very different cultures. They also rely on different business processes to create growth and value. Many are well-run and highly successful, but for very different reasons.

And those differences are the keys to understanding why they use different social media policies.

The chart above shows the business factors that companies should consider when developing an effective social media policy (which I published in The Social Media Management Handbook earlier this year).

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Chris Boudreaux leads the Strategy and Measurement practice at Converseon and created SocialMediaGovernance.com to help companies govern social media, including the largest online database of social media policies. You can Contact Chris on his web site, or by email: cboudreaux [at] converseon-dot-com.

Google announced today that searches by logged-in users will be securely sent over SSL encryption. Therefore, Google will no longer send the query terms in the referrer data to analytics tools that analysts use to understand the keywords sending traffic to their site. If you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, you will no longer know all of the keywords bringing people to your website from searchers who are logged into Google when they search. This is potentially a big problem for folks relying solely on enterprise analytics solutions.

While Google says they are focused on protecting user privacy, the change clearly forces everyone to use Webmaster Tools and decreases the value of paid analytics solutions because they will no longer be able to collect as much data as they did before.

If you have not verified your website through Webmaster Tools, do it now.

It is only a matter of time before Google incorporates Webmaster Tools directly into Analytics. Until then, marketers will have to pull a portion of their search performance reports from Webmaster Tools.

Now that Google, Twitter and Facebook implemented SSL this year, privacy advocates will likely expect the same from Bing and Yahoo.

View the original blog post from Google.

Bit.ly recently published data indicating that links shortened in bit.ly and shared on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube receive the vast majority of their clicks within 3 hours of being shared. While clicks can be a critical call-to-action on social media, and the bit.ly data help us to understand the dynamics of viral sharing, viral distribution is only one important goal of content that is created or distributed through social media. Specifically, a balanced social media marketing plan must also include provisions for evergreen content: feature articles that deliver significant long-term impact — especially in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Evergreen Versus Real-Time Content

Evergreen content sticks around and continues to provide value after the 3-6 hours of initial sharing. For example, think about search engine results. In general, we see blog posts, wikis, reviews, forum threads, and videos with the longest staying power in search results. Perishable media such as Facebook and Twitter updates are important in search results, but evergreen content is equally as important.

According to Lijit, 20% of referrals are driven by social media, and search still delivers twice the amount of traffic versus social. Ignoring the role of search in your social strategy will simply lead to all of your hard work being lost to time.

As marketers increase their focus on real-time marketing, the concept of a timeless article is increasingly derided by some in journalism and public relations because its very definition denotes something that is not immediately newsworthy. Rather than appreciate the long-term benefits of evergreen content, they treat it as filler for a slow news day.

However, marketers must resist the urge to chase sharing statistics at the cost of search engine performance. Yes, social media affect search engine results, but they are not the primary determinant of search engine performance, so don’t let the spirit of real-time take your long-term marketing performance off track.

Michael Maoz recently wrote that CIOs these days shake their heads at the fact that marketing, sales and services leaders are able to obtain funding for social media projects without a business case, instead of being held accountable for the same level of quantitative rigor as other IT-enabled investments. While it is true that most social media investments still travel with no business case, anyone who wants to change that fact needs to undertand a bit of history:

One challenge is that most communications professionals and social media consultants don’t have much experience in organizational change. They’ve never led cross-functional change programs. They’ve never built a business case that had to stand up to the CFO’s rigor. So they just don’t know how to do those things.

And, in the corporate communications arena, they never had to measure business impact from their efforts. Clippings were all they ever counted.

But that is all changing as marketing, sales and customer service leaders begin to ask for real dollars for social media.

However, the one critical factor that is changing the slowest is that CIOs are simply not getting in the game. CIOs and their teams are simply not at the table when cross-functional social media efforts are launched. And, ultimately, the CIO has to change that. CIOs need to start reaching out to their VPs of Communications and Marketing, and start figuring out how enterprise IT will enable the business goals that social media supports.

The bottom line is that CIOs can not sit back and wait for other functional leaders to bring them a business case or a well-defined social application architecture. CIOs need to get out of their foxholes, and go be the smartest person in the room about how the organization should use technology to solve challenges in marketing, communications, sales and service.

Dr. Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne recently published findings indicating that web users tend to trust web sites 20% more today versus 2007, but are 30% less loyal to ecommerce sites versus 2007.

1. Why He Believes Trust Increased

Dr. Coker said the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites. “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.”

Anyone interested in web credibility should also visit the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University.

2. Why He Believes Loyalty Decreased

“The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.”

The research found that if a website has poor navigation or access to information, or is slow (i.e. more than two seconds to download), web surfers are more likely to opt against purchasing and navigate to an alternate website. (No surprises there.)

However, it is interesting that, in the last five years, the frequency of referring others to websites has increased by 32%. Largely due to social utilities, such as Facebook and Twitter.

I just finished participating in a Digiday panel on big data management in beautiful Deer Valley, UT where I warned about an over-infatuation with technology, to the exclusions of people.  Indeed, many conversations today make it seem as if humans are simply a tangental voyeur to the vast processing intelligence of our evolving algorithms.

That is far from the truth.

Machines and technology do some things wonderfully well.  They churn through vast amounts of data — searching for anomalies and patterns — and machines help to filter the signals from the noise. But the signals have to be interpreted by humans to spark the insights that can change a business. No machine has yet developed much of a creative streak.

We see this every day in our Conversation Mining technology.  Instead of using algorithms to interpret the meaning of human conversation on the web, we use machines for what they do best: to find and identify the obvious conversations, and look for patterns of meaning that go beyond what humans can generally perceive.

While studies have shown that positive online ratings correlate with higher sales, a study at the University of Maryland using data from BazaarVoice found that brands maximize their long-term benefits from online ratings when they attract a balance of positive and negative ratings from customers.

If you want to increase sales in the long run, you need to attract a balance of negative reviews, in addition to lots of positive reviews.

Here’s why:

Research Findings

In The Value of Social Dynamics in Online Ratings Forums, Wendy Moe and Michael Trusov of the University of Maryland found the following:

Anyone running affiliate marketing or influencer outreach programs requires a mixture of automated and human analyses to design and operate their program.  Automated algorithms are great when you need a quick decision in real-time, but when you are choosing 5, 10 or 50 influencers for long-term relationship development, you need to be sure that they are the true influencers in your category.  That requires human analysis.

While Klout can now include LinkedIn connections and activities into the calculation of Klout scores, brands should be very careful about using Klout scores for affiliate marketing or influencer outreach, for the following reasons:

1. The only way to identify influencers within a category is through a combination of automated and human analyses.
2. Klout can not measure influence within a category.  For example, Ariana Huffington has a high Klout score, but she is not relevant to most brands.  For example, if you sell baby diapers or desktop virtualization products, Ariana is not an influencer.  And Klout is not capable of telling you who influences the conversation around baby diapers or desktop virtualization products.

In recognition of the need for category-specific influence scoring, Klout recently launched a +K button, which lets Klout users tell Klout when someone else influences them, but the method has two weaknesses:

• +K is subject to significant self-selection bias. The inputs come only from Klout users who choose to contribute, and
• +K does not capture the extent to which one person passes along another person’s messages. Therefore, the scoring does not adequately allow a brand to choose influencers based upon the extent to which the influencer will drive messaging into the market.
• +K does not associate the influence with a category. For example, I might say that Seth Godin influences me, but does he influence my decisions about car purchases, laptop purchases or the foods that I consume? No.

Converseon recently launched a collaborative research project with comScore, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), Communispace, and Firefly Millward Brown to explore the roles of social media in the purchase process.  The project brings together a range of research techniques to understand how and when people turn to social media as they make purchase decisions.

Converseon will provide insights based on social intelligence for the project, helping the ARF to establish an expanded understanding of online conversations around purchase decisions for items in the CPG and other categories.  Converseon analysis will uncover where in the purchase process social media conversation is taking place, who is taking part in that discussion and where it’s happening.

Our research will include psychographic and demographic analysis, in addition to a range of other metrics based on Converseon’ unique technology + human methodology, giving the ARF the opportunity to cross-tab the analysis and extract the most meaningful information to support its research goals.

We all look forward to the results of the joint project.

This afternoon at the WOMMA School of WOM in Chicago, I had the privilege of sharing lessons from enabling the social workforce at IBM with my clients, Susan Emerick and Bill Chamberlain of IBM. You can view our slides here, including a few transcript notes at the bottom of the page.

If you’d like to know more, all of our contact information is listed in the slides, or feel free to contact me:
@cboudreaux
cboudreaux [at] converseon [dot] com