Google Plus Looses Traction with Consumers

It is all the news today...Google+ lost Unique Users and Engagement on site went down. 

The funniest article is on tech crunch which now re-branded Google+ and Google-

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/google-minus/






So a couple observations from myself using Google+...

• The UI is a sad attempt at ripping off the facebook UI
• Circles might help me organize my circle but complicate my life when I already got myself setup on a ubiquitous social network that has achieved mass consumer adoption

So how does google save this?   They can leverage their own network to drive free traffic to Google+ but who cares?   I am on facebook already.  I don't get Google+ and I don't think many people will.  I praise Google for trying to fight off facebook but that battle was lost a few years ago.

Here is my bet.... Google+ fails...

So with social out of google's hands and noone using seach on mobile what's their future?   Times be a changing y0.   Times be a changing

Microsoft Deepens Partnership with Facebook - Google Watch Out!

I read an article this morning on PCMAG saying Microsoft BING (LOS LINKS!!!!) has added a facebook like button to its platform.   So let me make a prediction here.  +1 by google goes nowhere because they dont play nice and BING games some share of search in the next few months due to this enhancement.  Go Microsoft.   Nice move.    Microsoft now has search data on facebook, like data on content and other such goodies.   Something bigger is behind this relationship but time will tell the truth on that one.

Drudge Report Analysis on Who Drives Traffic For News

So the drudge report just released some interesting results talking about who is in fact driving eyeballs to news sites based on some of the data they were seeing.  

I am confused by these results though....

Specifically I am confused by the results for twitter.  Here is why....

Implicitly most of twitters traffic is coming through and from 3rd party apps and things like tweetdeck.   Was this analysis aware of that and did they understand how each of those apps reports HTTP_REFERRER?    I am confused by the report as it does not indicate that.

I am not even sure if the writer is asking the right question.   I mean in the last 9 days a twitter story broke and through it's inherently social platform it got mass distributed in a way that I do not think we have ever seen before causing mass, local, and social media impact as well as extreme word of mouth impact.

The question the writer asked was how much inbound traffic was driven in a direct attribution model to the site from another site.    Not where the story starts, receives velocity or critical mass.   Oy.... my digital brethren when will we realize the world is bigger than that which you achieve through direct attribution tactics on.    We take measures that are irresponsible to show and use them to justify a position without examining whether the methodology is sound.

And we wonder why marketers are confused and investment is held back.

Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media - Consumer Insights Generation Part II

My last post ended with talking about data slices that are relevant to the consumer segment you are trying to detail through some social media measurement. 

So lets talk about what you can do with social media data.   For starters we need to admit a couple of things:

• Profile data is flawed and out of date
• Content is how need states are addressed NOT profile

So what do I mean by those two statement.    Well profile data suffers from a time capsule issue.  Who I was when I filled it out is NOT who I am now.    Models like quantcast have proven over time that the information that is proxied to create inference models is also often flawed.   More so it is highly skewed by a census model of collection of data through standard behavioral information.  If we are gathering data on one site and not the other we are corrupting the profiles through an unbalanced census.   Blahblahblah I digress.

So what do we know?   Well someone who reads content surrounding buying a car and researching that car is highly likely to be interested in buying a car.   This is kind of implicit.   We also know that if we leverage the social media data that is out there to examine how people are referencing or liking that content we can bring it to a point of understanding which articles are in fact the bits of content that really resonate with the target and their need state to research a specific car model.   Ah...Now we are onto something.    However NONE of this is available in the standard social media measurement tools.   I have used them all when I was agency side and none of them can get this right.  

So the challenge in this becomes the following:

Find the right audience through basic demographic profile analysis.
Query them to determine the behavioral economic need states that occur during the purchase path
Query them to determine what about the brand/product is important

Now comes the role of social.  Find the speech acts in social media that represent a hand raiser for one of the behavioral economic need states or one of the brand/product value propositions or philosophies and you can begin from there.

Anyone that tells ya otherwise is selling corrupt research I tell you!  And let me tell you there are a ton of tech suppliers selling "insights" that are no more then corrupt insights that can skew decisions based on invalid censuses of the target audience.   Rawr.  Not good.

I will continue in my next post with how to analyze this content.

Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media - Consumer Insights Generation

One of the promises of social media measurement is your ability to potentially better understand your consumer and what is important to them.  So lets take a step back and start asking ourselves a few key questions:

How are the consumer segmented by the advertiser
What are we using to help them better understand their consumer
Why would social media even apply here

So generally speaking segmentation that is applied by agencies is a set of proxied entities that are diluted every time that they are proxied.   Allow me to explain this a bit better....

The client generally starts with sales data or some proxy for sales data such as Homescan data or Scanner data (these are generally cpg oriented but you get the idea).    They then crosstab this information with behavioral or attiudinal (sp) so they can cluster together different attributes and land on a segment that they feel represents their consumer or a potential consumer.  

So when proxying these FURTHER into social media what you are attempting to do is leverage the publicly available NPII data from social profiles in conjunction with the "conversations" they are spawning to attempt to find the match.

Now the biggest issue with profile data is the time capsule issue that occurs with profile data.   The time capsule issue infers that the person I was when I last updated my profile is NOT the person that I am now.  There is a massive decay in the value of some of the "interest" data that appears on social media profiles.   Now the way around that I have found is to use a semantic later to identify "interest" based entitities that are being spoken about with a high emotional appeal and use that to solve the profile issue.  

Ok.  Let's assume we found the "set" of people and content that we feel matches to our consumer segment (non trivial) we can now focus our energy on identifying high value analysis' that help us decompose this consumer so we can leverage the information for social media insights.   I will begin talking about all these information slices in the following posts.

Check out my next post on this subject 

Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media - Setting Your Scope of Work

So you are beginning your first Social Media Measurement project and you want to make sure you are going to do deliver information and insights that ultimately your client will view as successful.   You have sold your client on the broad "capabilities" but now need to quickly shift into getting scope around the engagement and more so being precisely clear on what their expectations should be...managed expectations == a managed project.   

The first step to achieving scope in the project is by clearly segmenting your work into a discreet set of potential work products.   The broad scope should align to broad marketing functions so you have a clear client or set of clients that you are serving.   I have found that this is really the first moment of truth for your client as in understanding that social media measurement is a really broad horizontal capability that is verticalized for the different marketing functions through sets of different products and services.  Do not EVER forget the fact that broad horizontal product offerings POWER things but DO NOT SERVICE things.  So basically what I am saying is that if you are broad technology company trying to sell direct to a marketing organization then you better be ready to service this business.  I digress....

Now the 3 main marketing functions that are serviced through social media measurement are in my opinion the following:

Market Research - Consumer Insights
Advertising - Paid Media Comapaign Efficacy & Earned Media Equity Analysis
PR - Campaign Efficacy
PR - 1to1 Outreach

Now one must acknowledge at this point that the Consumer Insights component is something that is also a horizontal asset as it can be applied to different verticals in marketing.    ALL of marketing can benefit from a robust insights product.   Therefore allow me to stop here and focus my next post on development on a consumer insights product through social media measurement :)

Delivering Insights That Matter Through Social Media

Outside of my brief one paragraph rant that correlated the process of leveraging and looking at multiple audience measurement technologies user attribution on an impression level to seeing a bunch of ManBearPigs, this would be my first proper post about my professional love in life…media.    So given the importance of social media to my current position (Shameless BuzzLogic Plug) I figured my first real post would be something about capitalizing on the user generated or consumer generated content to deliver packaged information and insights that can power media solutions.
 So lets start by defining "Social Media Measurement / Monitoring" for those who are not familiar with the notion of what this is.  So almighty wiki what is social media measurement defined as:

"Social media measurement refers to the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media"

Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_measurement

The monitoring services are generally services that provide either a technology or people or hydrid based solutions to the regular monitoring of the results of a social media measurement program.

So as someone who has spent the last 12 years in the business of media and marketing services I was fortunate enough to be part of the generation that got to watch this disruptive new media measurement solution and service disrupt the market. 

The marketing community all of a sudden was given access to solutions that delivered on the value proposition "a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media."  The marketing community of course applauded these solutions as suddenly they were able to capture everything their consumers were saying online about their brand or topics that are relevant to consumer.    I think a fair summary of the marketing communities reaction was "OMG! I can measure what my consumers are saying :)"....YAY

Well then came reality.  The first social media measurement solution I sunk my teeth into was in 2007 during my tenure at OmnicomMediaGroup.    Previously I had also worked at BusinessObjects who had also endeavored through acquisition in some of the fundamental technologies used to analyze unstructured text...the basic technology required to play in the social media measurement space.   I disgress.

So of course being in a global position at a major agency holding company representing the analytics role I was one of the first people on line to get access to these tools.   The tools did what they said would and I was able to see all the posts (within the individual tool's universe) about my individual query about a brand or topic.

Unfortunately what became absolutely evident when I analyzed the results of these tools in my first few queries is that I can describe in one word the "conversation" that exists on the web about the topic or brand I was researching....

CHAOS

So to put it nicely after using any social media monitoring solution my reaction changed a bit...

"OMG! I can measure what my consumers are saying :/"....ACK

The problem that really needed to be focused on was not the aggregation of all of this consumer content but rather bringing order to the chaos for a brand so that they can react in a way that is not achieved by reading every post to determine whether it is relevant against the desired topic and more so something that represents an opportunity for a brand.   

So the need for the solutions were to help identify the right posts and help the brand make sense of it.

Tag Clouds, Influencers and Sentiment OH MY!

TRUMPETS PLAYING  "SILICON VALLEY TO THE RESCUE!!!" 

Technology companies came out of the woodwork offering varieties of solutions to help package the information and make sense of it.   

Good 'ol Valley.    Have VC will Build now BUY

At Omnicom I had the privilege of seeing most of the Social Media Monitoring companies come through my office to chat.  I also had the privilege or task of figuring how to implement these solutions in a way that pluses up the ability of the agency to gather insights and leverage those insights to build effective marketing and communication solutions.

So to be quite frank I had the fun task of putting all the social media measurement solutions' tires to the track and seeing how well it helped "us" as an agency develop thoughtful insights that power our solutions for our client roster.  JOY JOY   

During this process I learned exactly what it took use the tools to find the relevant "conversations" and turn the information I could extract from the tool into insights that survived the "agency" pedigree test.   I worked to setup social media solutions for a wide range of industry categories across 70+ global markets and using different agency planning processes (holding company joy).   

The one thing that this process did was show the need and value of a proper analyst who understood social and cultural anthropology well enough to understand how to find insights but also build search queries that really identify the exact right style of conversation.  If that wasn't enough the person had to understand how to use the individual social media monitoring tools as well as the fundamentals of the natural language processing which is a comp-sci and linguistics function!

Ok..ok..ok...No big whoop right....There have to be an OVER supply of strategic tea leaf reading, social and cultural anthropologists who also can whip up a killer boolean NLP queries that power a robust set of analytical products and applications.    NO SHWEAT!


BTW this would be the time that I say "Thank You" to Andrew Shapiro who is literally what I describe above and runs my social media strategy function at BuzzLogic and previously helped me develop and design the solution we brought to life at OmnicomMediaGroup.   Yay Andrew.   


So what I would like to transition this post to a call to action for myself to follow


Define potential approaches that leverages the available data within social media to power an insights factory that are important enough that brand strategists can turn those insights into engaging activations that drive results for the brand.   

This is my first true post that dives into Social Media Measurement and I will be continuing this thought process by detailing some of the ways one could begin to build the right mouse trap within social media measurement to power a truly robust insights factory that is scalable without armies of Andrew Shapiros being needed.