I’ll have specific instructions in the webinar and possibly a case study – my main point is to ask the question … “Am I setup to capture activity around my business goals in every way/sense it needs to be tracked”?
I’m guessing the answer will be no.
How much of the activity around my business am I actually capturing (that’s what the chart above measures)? In the case of this business data is in silos and is often difficult to combine.
I know there’s probably a better way to represent this – but right now between all the data sources I have listed in the chart at the beginning of this post and all the campaigns running I count 180 cells – and of those 82% are not enabled (data isn’t being captured) – a lot of that is normal as the data is in silos, after all (for example you would not expect to see Restaurant.com data/transactions showing up in Google Analytics or SeamlessWeb – one could attempt to connect the data – but it would be a lot of extra work and custom programming to do it at this time – or if you had a data warehouse – maybe this could be done).
Of all the data there is “out there” to be capture on the business that I based this chart off of, only 9% of it is actually being captured – and most of it is in a silo.
On the other hand, can Social Media ROI be represented when so much of the data you’d need to measure it – is essentially “ultraviolet” – hidden from normal site? I don’t think so.
The webinar I’m giving with Compete.com will address how one deals with having so much data that still needs to be tracked and how it might be organized.
Another way to look at data is comparing data sources to each other
Think of it this way – say your business has a community manager – where is the activity of that community management in Social Media going to show up in this scenario above?
You probably won’t see activity around community management reflected in your Email Campaign data, probably not even in FourSquare data – since most check ins are happening on their own, by people who want to share their loaction. I suppose a business can run a campaign giving away stuff to the first people who show up and check in (The Gap did something like this last weekend). Overall, your not going to find a lot of the data you need to prove community management works from the data normally available – that is why it’s so frustrating to come up with realistic ROI numbers.
We can compare data sources and see how much of the data being collected is reflected in another source of data.
I know my viewpoint is biased by working in Web Analytics – the more I look at these charts, the more the best place to get the most data we need is Site Analytics, as incomplete as it is for this business, for example.
When looking at datasources such as GrubHub, for example, it’s almost impossible to see how you could tie Social Media activity to such a data set – it almost presupposes a data warehouse and a Social CRM system.
Where’s the “common key” that can be used to tie data together? A lot of work would need to be given to finding useful ways to combine data.
Having said that – the excellent session I attended yesterday on Pimp My Reports from Stratigent covered basic dashboard creation and it occurred to me that dashboards don’t solve the data collection problem this post uncovers and details.
Just because you can combine data from disparate sources such as email and twitter, and sometimes create additional metrics around them, you can’t create data you simply don’t have or never collected.
A lot of search related material came up during this period including an excellent article in Search Engine Land titled Even Lasik Surgeons Have To Pay Attention To Search Behavior that is one of the best articles on Search Engines I’ve read – plus I can figure out how to replicate it – but for other subjects. Point being – for Social Media Monitoring and Analytics – the Search Behavior approach integrates really, really well. Read the article but here’s the reasons why you might want to use an approach like this one for Search.
The process is data-driven, and helps you focus on user intent. There is no guessing involved.
A categorical behavior model describes your potential customer’s complete research and search experience—you understand everything that a consumer is going to do when searching for your products and services.
It provides an information architecture model for organizing a website based upon consumer expectations.
It provides a content model for developing content strategy around focused landing pages.
It provides a data-driven list of secondary terms that can be used effectively for navigational menus, content labels and page copy.
It provides a better opportunity to present users with they want because you have anticipated what they are looking for.
Also, JaTiN writes about Raven SEO Tools which I am somewhat familiar with but haven’t looked at for a while. It’s been on my mind to investigate who has the best SEO tools as there are times when those tools are needed – not everything you might want to do is well accomplished with free tools, even though those tools (mostly from Google or third parties) are extremely useful. JaTiN thin,s the Raven SEO tools are among the best he’s used – in fact the Raven SEO toolset now includes an sync up with Google Analytics and Facebook – that’s fantastic! Here’s the information about that intergration from JaTiN”
Here are some of the features offered within Raven’s Facebook Tool:
Deep Google Analytics integration
White label reporting of Facebook metrics
Automatic wall post scheduling
Fan tracking, customizable by date range
Monitor posts, comments, and likes
What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what’s working and not working over defined periods of time.
So … there’s more than one way to skin the Facebook Cat, or should I say, Raven. And, Raven does Twitter – too (see below)
Monitor Twitter Activity and Engagement
If you are allocating resources to Twitter, or being paid by a company to run their Twitter account, then you’ll want the ability to see some pretty juicy stats related to your Twitter campaign. With Raven’s new Twitter tool you’ll be able to see the following:
Posts
Followers
Friends
Friend to Follower Ratio
Mentions
Google Analytics referral data
Reply and Retweet reach (a great way to see how many readers are seeing the message
Here’s a screenshot of the statistical overlay:
What’s really nice about this is the date range comparisons. It’s a huge time-saver to manage this data mostly in one place, you can truly get a handle on what’s working and what’s not working, as well as why it’s not working or working. The level of detail and integration is really unique to Raven’s suite of tools.
Monitor Tweets Related to Your Account
In addition to viewing tweets from your public timeline you can also see all mentions associated with your account, as well as tweets posted from your account:
Anyway, if I had enough SEO work to justify it – Raven SEO tools is well worth the money – in fact I signed up for the $19.00 per month account with the first month free (no CC required) just to see the up to date Raven Tools for myself.
Also, Google has been doing a bunch of experiments (they regularly run up to 120 search experiments at a time) including one on Google Suggest (see below).
Since I haven’t been able to access this experiment yet and the only thing I have to go on is the video above – which doesn’t look all that exciting.
A reader of my blog also let me know about a Social Media Monitoring Platform for Restaurants called InfoGlutten but I haven’t yet had a chance to evaluate it – though it sounds promising and inexpensive. Considering Restaurants aren’t doing well, the prices are attractive. Once I have reviewed InfoGlutten I’ll let my readers know what I think of it.
Also thinking of the visit to Edelman PR for an Art Technology meetup earlier this week and seeing a 3D printer that sells for $995.00 (but, you have to assemble the printer yourself, still, you can’t beat the price when the nearest competitor/commercial printer costs ~25K – the 995.00 3D printer is all open sourced – see picture below). I found the rest of the art/technology meetup not engaging (but that’s just my point of view – sometimes the idea of something is more interesting that the reality of it – and vice versa).
In other news, It’s not been formally announced yet but I’ll informally I’m doing a Webinar and White Paper with Compete.com on September 27th focusing on the Web Enablement steps we need to take to achieve a Social Media ROI measurement.
My talk and paper will build off the “ultralight” social media activity, including WOM and even foot traffic Geo-located, and how that all can roll up to dashboard (provided the data is captured – I’ll tell you how it could be done).
Look for official word of the Webinar and co-branded Compete.com white paper in a few weeks.
Some observations leading to what i want to focus on today – two years ago, I first touched Radian6 and observed the platform ought to be aimed to Web Analytics (it was then directed to marketing, communications & PR at the time) – 9 months later WebTrends was integrated at the API level to Radian6. Salesforce soon followed and SocialCRM is alive and well in 2009 & 2010 and be sure thrive in the coming months and years.
I’ve put forward similar suggestions to Alterian with the emotions report in SM2 and monitoring ideas for tracking foot traffic using Social Media Platforms (as talked about with The Havana Central Case Study I presented at Columbia University Business School Alumni Club, Read Write Web Real Time Web Summit and Social Media Camp Long Island recently – you can find USTREAMs of the latter on this blog, in the writings/ presentations page.
Today, I want focus on how Social Media platforms ought to include Search Traffic & Review Sites in their monitoring and usually don’t (ie: Revinate for Hotels does include review sites but most monitoring platforms do not have Yelp, Citisearch, Trip Advisor, etc … they should. You can manually add sites to Radian6 but review sites are tricky & hard to integrate – needing special programming to pull content desired).
None of the platforms monitor search rankings or estimated traffic from social media listings in Google’s search results, either. Also, the platforms don’t integrate with Google Webmaster Tools – they should try to take that on.
There is one main reason – Convergence – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc, they’re all showing up in search results beginning with Universal Search and lately with Twitter Firehose and Facebook public feeds, Facebook Places and Share buttons. And what about Google Places? Sure.
Also, uses of Real Time Search Engines such as Collecta and OneRiet, etc, ought to be added.
By the way – I should have a landing page URL from Compete for the webinar in a week or so.
