New Measures of Success in Social Media

Here's the video of my presentation at the Brando Social event a couple of weeks back. The point I made about "if it's measurable, you can ascribe value to it" seems to have struck a chord. I genuinely believe that we're entering a phase of blended marketing, customer services and product management in which the primary activity will be monitoring and engaging in conversations about your brand and services. The old split-disciplines just won't cut it in the 21st century.


Luke Brynley-Jones "New measures of success" from Brando Social on Vimeo.

Scoutlabs: The Google of Social Media Monitoring?

Continuing my theme of test driving social media monitoring tools, Jenny Zeszut, CEO of Scoutlabs, took time out on Thursday to show me around their service. Much like Radian6 (see my earlier post on them), Scoutlabs gives companies the ability for companies to track and monitor keywords relating to their brand/industry through various social media formats (blogs, photos, videos, Twitter).

Jenny was at pains to explain that it’s not just about PR people “finding and fighting fires”, it’s more about adopting a Product Management-style approach to customer services. Whereas in the past brands spent small fortunes struggling to extract feedback from reluctant customers, the advent of Web 2.0 has reversed this state of affairs: now everyone’s telling them what they want! All brands have to do is listen, learn and respond.

To give an example, Netflix uses Scoutlabs for customer services. They monitor around 60k posts each week and, when they find a negative comment – someone thinking of cancelling their subscription, for example - they act quickly, offering periods of free membership or other incentives to stay with them. A particularly useful feature of Scoutlabs is the ability to see, at a glance, words that people are associating with your brand. Any new words or expressions are clearly highlighted, so, for example, while Dell might expect to see “computer” and “offers” associated with them, if the word “explosion” occurred, they might want to investigate the full story pretty quickly ;)

One key difference between Scoutlabs and Radian6 is the method they use to gauge the sentiment of posts. While Radian6 invites the people monitoring the service to gauge the sentiment of each post, thereby building up a picture over time, Scoutlabs offers an automated service that gauges the sentiment immediately by assessing words in the post. Like any system, it’s prone to error, but they claim an 85% success rate, which equates pretty well to human error.

Scoutlabs doesn’t oversell itself by claiming to cover social networks, forums and review sites – though in point of fact many of these services are covered within the “blog” section. Additionally, users can add sources manually, so if you’re desperate to monitor mentions about you in the West Shropshire Debating Society Forum - you’re in luck!

One area Scoutlabs needs to improve on is in monitoring and identifying “social influencers”. Scoutlabs rates content by importance (relevance), but doesn’t do the same for the people writing the content. They are acutely aware of how important this is to companies (see my previous post), but also say its difficult achieve with any degree of accuracy. After all “92% of the blogosphere is spam”. Radian6 pitches this as one of its primary features, so there’s a definite disconnect here.

Scoutlabs online launched a few months back and they already have around 500 customers. I can see why. The system is impressively casy to use. It does everything it promises and, actually, quite a bit more. At $250/month it’s also within the budget of any company that people are talking about online, so I can only see their customer-base growing. The beauty of their system is it's clarity and simplicity - and this could, in time, make them the Google of social media monitoring. And I mean that as a compliment.

Trends in Social Influence Marketing

An interesting report published today shows "Trends in Social Influence Marketing" (I doff my hat to David Cushman for the heads-up).

1. Social media usage will result in more influence.
2. The focus will shift to influencers.
3. Top-down branding will experience growing impotence.
4. Social advertising will grow up.
5. The portable social graph will fuel marketing innovation.
6. Not just friends, but friendsters, will start to matter.
7. Social influence research will become more important than social measurement.
8. Marketers will organize around Social Influence Marketing.
9. The intranet will join the Web.
10.Your CEO will join Facebook.

It's pretty clear to me that most companies haven't yet got their heads around "measuring" social media! Yet Shiv Singh (the author) is right; there's little point in measuring social media without an appreciation of the fact that "social influence" is the most important aspect of this new medium. You can have an army of followers, but spice it up with some influencers and the power of your network multiplies dramatically.

Hilarious to see point 10. At the recent Brando Social event I mentioned a report I blogged some time ago which claimed that, when asked, none of the top CEOs even had LinkedIn accounts. They've got a long, hard game of catchup to play ;)

The Etiquette of Social Media

Interesting to read the spat between the NUJ and a blogger over whether journalistic standards should apply to blogs and other social media in the same way they do to other media. The point made, rightly I think, by Karl Schneider of Reed Business, is that social media is fundamentally different from traditional media. Traditional media is fixed and cannot be altered once it's printed or broadcast. As a result, it really must be produced within tightly regulated standards. Social media, however, is an open, interactive and evolutionary process. The blogger might start the conversation - but it's up to the readers to elaborate on it and explore the truth or error as they find it. People don't expect the gospel truth from social media - they just want to talk about it.