Defining social media metrics

As I noted in my previous post i have a new role as a social media strategist for Vignette. I wanted to share our approach, goals and metrics we will track against each goal. There are certainly area's I have missed, which is where all of you fine people come in.

If you have any ideas or suggestions of things to add, modify or can I would love the feedback. My next step after sourcing ideas from all you smart people is to roll this up into a set of reports I can share with our CFO for his point of view. I see a blog post coming on that conversation.

Social Media Strategy: External

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My new role, the accidental spokeperson

Rohit Bhargava's Letter To The CEO: 6 Ways To Help Your Brand Survive In 2009 does a great job summing up our plans for 2009. The first step is to "Embrace the accidental spokesperson”. Vignette sees this role (and others like it) core to transforming the way it learns, interacts and shares with customers.

As of today I am moving into my new role as a Social Media Strategist for Vignette. For those of you not familiar with us, we are an enterprise software provider of personalization, social media and web content management solutions. Visit our site http://www.vignette.com/.

My job will be to blog on Vignette.com, engage in dialog online to shape perception of company and activate our developers’ community. I will also share lessons learned as we make this transformation with our customers, especially those who target other businesses.

You can find us on twitter @vignettecorp and friendfeed with other tools coming soon.

SocialNetwork API’s + Video = A virtual couch

In a recent blogpost I wrote “Give your content wings”I described the opportunity that exists to connect web content management system with open API’s from Google and Facebook.

CNN took this a step farther by connecting a visitors social graph to a live video feed. 18.8 million people tuned into the ignauration of President Obama with the Facebook live inauguration stream.

I was one of them and was amazed at how the conversation i had during the coverage connected people from so many phases of my life. It was as if we were all sitting around the TV together.

Online games have been a social experience for quite some time. Television however, has been slower to connect community with programming in real time. I believe this was a preview of a next generation television/video experience and I expect others to follow suit in the way they cover live events.

What do you think will prevent more companies from creating experiences like this?

Is transparency in location a threat or a way of life?

In a recent post HyperLocal, that’s where I’m at, I talked about ways to use location based services for making new connections. Today I started thinking about possible risk of to much transparency in location.

This weekend I saw a tweet by @micah on an iPhone twitter app called Tweetie. This is hands down the best I have used for many reasons, thanks for sharing. Micah pointed out a feature that by my terms would be hyper local, it is called “Near by” and it will do a look up of recent tweets that are near by.

So of course after the recommendation to check it out, I did. Immediately I found value by connecting with a neighbor whom I typically only see at our block parties in the summer.

I totally see the value in location based discovery and am a fan of the possibilities like making new connections and ability to target real time offers. A rash of break in’s in and around my neighborhood got me thinking about the possible dangers of being overly transparent. Basically there are times i raise my hand and say I am gone, my house is empty.

We have most likely seen or heard about the overly played to catch a predator, what if another version of thief stalked people’s homes thru services that update status and location.

Do any of you see being so transparent in location and status as a threat?

Hyper local. That’s where I’m at!

There are as many of reasons why people should adopt social networking as there are tools. Outside of the amazing connections made, one of the most useful features for me is the ability get location based alerts. For the sake of scope, I will narrow down how I get location based alerts using twitter and BrightKite.

Many people don’t like the idea of others knowing where they are, but imagine you’re at a conference and there are thousands of people. Your goal is to leave this event with some new connections. Many conference’s these days are using a hashtag that attendees can append to their tweets to make it easier to track all conversations in the twitter timeline via search. The image from in this post was from #adtechnyc and was prominently placed for attendees to see what was happening in real time.

Brightkite takes location to the next step, Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they're up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.

While at this conference you are at the pub having a beer, BrightKite allows you to “check in” to this location. Once you “check in” to that location you can opt to be notified when other users on Brightkite check in to this same location or nearby ones. I was recently at IgniteBoulder and during the happy hour they had the BrightKite place stream projected on the wall showing all the sidebar chatter, photos and who was checked in. This added a whole new dimension to the experience.

If you are looking to connect with others in real time these are great tools for making serendipitous connections.

Give your content wings

After reading the post, FTW 2009: APIs by Michael Leis (@mleis) I got to thinking about other ways to “monetize” digital assets. Most companies I work with have made significant investments in tools for managing digital assets, online communities and user generated content to deliver an online experience. Not only is there a cost for the tools to manage the experience, millions are spent every year to drive traffic to these sites.

This stat illustrates how social networking sites are becoming the proverbial start page, “last year 2,600,000,000 - number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily”.

Tying your content management and community solutions into Facebook Connect or Google Open social will allow you to leverage existing content and connections while tapping the power of word of mouth. The question companies need to now ask is: “How do I extend the reach of digital assets and the vibrancy of your community to social networks that already exist?”

Here are few examples of what I mean. Let’s say a customer adds a comment or rating about an experience using your product at your website, why not allow them to share this with friends on FaceBook, MYspace or Linkedin. Or, you have a vault of videos and photography on your hotels; why not create a application where users can watch, download and discus.

Now, let’s move beyond just pushing content out. The beauty of Facebook Connect or Google Opensocial is that all conversations, user generated content and connections can be re-deployed if you will.

SocialEyes, a startup out of Boulder is doing just that. They are re-deploying all the interactions taking place within their application, these interactions range from wall post, discussions and uploaded content. SocialEyes makes it easy to take these interactions and create a branded experience on your site. Check out the Microsoft Microphone Facebook application on to see it in action.

Another example of a branded social experience is connect.redbullusa.com. Redbull uses Facebook Connect and post comments on Red Bull websites. Once a visitor makes a comment on an article their it gets posted on their news feed in FaceBook, which is likely to be seen by at least 100 friends. 100 friends being average number of friends the average user has according to FaceBook.

One word of caution before dumping all your content out in social networks is to think about the context’s in which it may get used. This will help deicde what to make available that might have the highest relevance.

Technology investments should be measurable, not just in down times.

All of the conversation recently on how to measure and justify investments in social computing feels like ground hog day.

During the heyday of the dot com companies were making all sorts of investments in new technologies. Very few took into consideration how to quantify the investment; the sales pitches must have been that good.

The market slowed and these companies began to rationalize the choices they made and a wave of consolidation across these vendors took place. But still the customer was left with a huge capital investment that most likely did not deliver anywhere near what they had been promised.

Over the last few years with the explosion in social networking it seems as if we made some of the same mistakes. Many new “web 2.0” popped up with amazing applications that drove high levels of participation from its user base.

You can guess what happens next. Everyone wants the bright shiny object whether it is a blog, community or a facebook application. Many did not understand the medium well enough to communicate its value in terms that will get funding approval. Bravo to the companies who have a budget for emerging technologies, most are not that lucky.

A down market does not make social media tools any less relevant, I would argue just the opposite. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that social media cannot be measured and monetized. Currently, I am knee deep designing a measurement plan to align metrics from user generated content and other forms social media to show positive returns across a number of business goals. I plan on posting this for everyone’s feedback soon.

The challenge companies will face this year when making investments in social computing technology, is how do they quantify how these solutions in terms that will secure budget.

As a person working for software vendor it is our role to understand more than just features we can deliver and how they differentiate against the competition. We need to truly understand our customer’s goals, develop and take responsibility for a measurable plan that demonstrates how our solutions will drive positive returns.

A Twitterer’s view on using Yammer.

Having posted nearly 4,000 updates and meetings hundreds of new friends, Twitter has become an essential communication tool in my daily quest to stay connected.

We’ve just begun to build our internal Vignette Yammer community. The value of being able to share and get feedback from across the organization in real time is huge. But like every community, growing it and realizing the potential will take some time. Since we are just getting started the conversation flow is more of a dribble than the fire hose I am used to on twitter.

Let’s start with the good, the relevance to my internal project work is off the charts and connecting with people who I don’t work with on a daily basis helps strengthen the internal social networks. So far my favorite feature is the ability to post an image and have a discussion thread on it, more than 140 characters is nice for this.

Now for the bad, it is a closed network. Getting outside perspective can help companies avoid group think. Twitter has allowed me to connect, gain insight and share ideas with people across industries which has forced me to sharpen thoughts even more. Companies should so the same.

When deploying Yammer internally identify some cross functional voices to stimulate conversation, don’t discourage social conversation and invite partners into the network from some fresh perspective.