Archive for the 'Co-Creation' Category

Engagement vs. Popularity Metrics in Blogs

Published
by
Karl
on July 9, 2008
in Co-Creation and Social-Media
. 4 Comments

Lots of people have been talking about the right metrics for blogs and other kinds of social media for a couple of years now. It is in fact a desperate need in the blogging community because apart from the obvious ego-surfing, feedback and benchmarkeing is absolutely critical to managing and growing a blog. Also for anyone running a corporate blog, how do you show ROI and how do you show growth, progress, results? More to the point if you are managing a blog how do you provide the right metrics in place to drive the right behavior on the blog. The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure holds true, as does the idea that you only get what you measure, so you’d better be measuring the right thing :-)

Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.

Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.

Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.

Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.

Here’s how they calculated engagement:

So how did I go about it? With our custom-designed API — sorry, hasn’t been publicly released yet — I analyzed each feed, which accomplished the following:

  1. counted number of posts published in each of the last two months (so essentially for May and June)
  2. counted numbers of each type of engagement we analyze, e.g. 200 clicks, 5 comments, 12 trackbacks, etc.
  3. weighted each engagement type for level of engagement
  4. added up the engagement scores for all engagement types for all blog posts for each month to calculate an overall engagement score for each month
  5. calculated an average engagement score based on dividing total engagement score by number of posts per month
  6. calculated the percentage increase or decrease in engagement for the blog’s content month over month.





  Popularity Technorati Score   Engagement    
1 Seth’s Blog 9,223   Chris Brogan 47028 +3
2 CopyBlogger 6,270   Seth’s blog 39535 -1
3 Chris Brogan 1,935   CopyBlogger 33696 -1
4 Search Engine Guide 1,471   Daily Fix 9933 +4
5 Logic + Emotion 1,288   Search Engine Guide 7670 -1
6 Duct Tape Marketing 946   Duct Tape Marketing 7037 0
7 Influential Marketing 834   Logic + Emotion 4362 -2
8 Daily Fix 761   Social Media Explorer 4254 +14
9 Brand Autopsy 717   Six Pixels Of Separation 3901 +3
10 Church of the Customer 661   Conversation Agent 3869 +1
12 Conversation Agent 625   Drew’s marketing Minute 3150 +2
13 Six Pixels of Separation 619   The Viral Garden 3086 +5
14 Drew’s Marketing Minute 605   What’s Next 2770 +2
15 Jaffe Juice 603   Influencial Marketing 2387 -7
16 What’s Next 475   Damn, I Wish I’d Thought Of That 2289 +6
17 Diva Marketing 439   Techno Marketer 2104 +7
18 The Viral Garden 438   Brand Autopsy 1864 -8
19 Greg Verdino’s Marketing Blog 427   Church Of The Customer 1809 -8
20 CK’s Blog 418   Greg Verdino’s Marketing Blog 1712 -1
21 Damn! I Wish I’d Thought of That! 415   The Social Media Marketing Blog 1481 +5
22 Converstations 402   Jaffe Juice 775 -7
23 Social Media Explorer 389   Diva Marketing 772 -6
24 Techno Marketer 385   Converstations 612 -2
25 Every Dot Connects 378   Every Dot Connects 464 0
26 The Social Media Marketing Blog 376   CK’s Blog 320 -6

(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)

I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?

Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.

Users Improving Products - Attaching an external mic to Nokia N95

Published
by
Karl
on July 8, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 2 Comments

I’ve often wondered how to add an external mic to my N95, as i think it would make a killer podcast recording device. Anyway, looks like someone figured it out and put an instructional video on Qik.

I had a blog post brainstorm a while ago on what a “social media phone” would look like, check it out and feel free to continue adding ideas.

Creative Commons Case Study Database

Published
by
Karl
on June 25, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

I think many of us intuitively know how important Creative Commons is in supporting the co-creativity, like mashups and many kinds of consumer generated content. Now we don’t have to rely on our intuition and Creative Commons have created a database of case studies of it’s use around the world.

Creative Commons projects are found across the globe, with licenses used by private individuals to large corporations. The stories on this site tell of some of the thousands of individuals and organisations who use CC on a daily basis for a multitude of purposes across a variety of content. This site aims to highlight the fantastic work being done by creators and content aggregators in the CC community. It details some of the available tools for creation and collaboration which employ Creative Commons licenses.

The Case Study Wiki chronicles past, present and future success stories of CC. The goal is to create a community-powered system for qualitatively measuring the impact of Creative Commons around the world. All are encouraged to add interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons licenses.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons check out this video here:

The Power Point That Made Me Cry (because I was happy)

Published
by
Karl
on June 24, 2008
in Co-Creation, Customer-Experience, New-Strategy and Social-Media
. 5 Comments

Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:
The Hierarchy of Customer Experience

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Ripping Marketing A New One and New Marketing Blog

Published
by
Karl
on June 5, 2008
in Co-Creation and Marketing
. 3 Comments

Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.

I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?

In the shiny world of Marketing 2.0, we’d see the back of all that advertising and direct mail - the 99% of noisy clutter that interrupts our viewing and travelling pleasure with its crude efforts to flog us stuff we don’t need.

But maybe we’re just kidding ourselves. Us marketing types have always had a real talent for that, haven’t we?

I wonder if we’re just repeating that tired old solution for any other substandard product with a dodgy customer image - the rebrand! Hey folks this isn’t nasty old Marketing, this is New Improved Marketing NOW with Added Authenticity…

Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World

There are professions more harmful than industrial desing, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care.

Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.

That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.

Twitter Influence, or so much for inbox zero

Published
by
Karl
on May 22, 2008
in Co-Creation, Marketing and Viral-Persuasion
. 5 Comments

So Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester and author of the Web Strategist blog just said this on twitter:

And then this happened:

Damn, there goes inbox zero

When twitter is actually working i’m here

Social Media and Gutenberg - Hyperbole?

Published
by
Karl
on April 25, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 5 Comments

I just got quoted in the Marin Independent Journal from a panel I was on this week. The quote they chose to use was:

“The move toward social media is as big a change as Gutenberg and the printing press,” said Karl Long, a product manager at Nokia. “Social media is the ability for anyone to publish anything without any cost.”

and of course to potentially reach anyone online.

So what do you think? Hyperbole?

Interestingly Steven Fry and the BBC recently put online a 60 minute show called The Machine That Made Us that is all about the Gutenberg press and how it changed the world.

see part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six here.

So in 50 or 100 years will there be a documentary about how the internet changed us? I wonder what it will be called? The Machine That Distracted Us? The Machine That Got Us Laid? The Machine That Got Us Jobs? The Machine That Connected Us? The Machine That Democratized Everything? The Machine That Made Culture Global?

Thanks as always Kottke

Lawrence Lessig for Congress

Published
by
Karl
on February 20, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

Political? Maybe, but I think if Lawrence Lessig does run for congress it will be one of the most significant political moves marketed and enabled through the internet and social media, a truly grass roots effort. He may be running for the 12th district in California but he would be IMHO the Congressman for the district of the internet, as founder of the creative commons, and being on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In many ways the amount of support I think Lessig will get from the web this may well turn into first global campaign to get a congressman elected :-)

Go to lessig08.org to show your support, and read about his mission further at change-congress.org, you can also join his 3,300 strong group on facebook

Draftlessig.org has just noted they have raised $20,000 in the first 48 hours

Political Advertising 2.0

Published
by
Karl
on February 19, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
A. J. Liebling
(1904 - 1963)

The Black Eyed Peas recently did a music video which was a mashup with Barak Obama’s “Yes we can speech” and has been watched by over 4 million people. This parody called “No we can’t” mashes up John McCain sound bites in a similar fashion.

For more on interweb presidential politics check out Techpresident.com

Death Of The Influencials - Debunking The Tipping Point

Published
by
Karl
on January 28, 2008
in Co-Creation and Viral-Persuasion
. 6 Comments

When I first saw the link on twitterFimoculous with the title “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I thought someone was going to debunk the whole idea behind it. But what was being debunked was just the concept of roles of people involved in making a trend “tip”, and most importantly the influencer’s. Sounds terrifying to most marketers because the whole idea of finding and cultivating influencers is often the cornerstone of “seeding” viral/WOM campaigns, and as they say in the article marketers spend millions on this process.

The article is on fast company and key point of the article though is to point out that it is not the people spreading an idea that matter as much as the idea itself, and societies readiness for the idea. I think this is one of the reasons that ideas that are laser focused on a niche often succeed, it’s because the idea can be much more finely tuned to appeal the people who will initially receive it. Once it is successful in that very small niche it’s likely you will have the critical mass to get out to the broader audience you seek. It’s kind of like starting a fire, the niche is the kindling

Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

It reminds me of what Jonnie Moore was saying on his blog recently about social objects:

So don’t let all the talk about social objects make you think that marketing is all about the props. The props are great if they spark relationships, and they may look important as markers of relationships… but they’re not the real magic.

And Guy Kawasaki agrees :-)