Posted by Marshall Sponder on November 30, 2011 | Link It
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I’ll be at Cloudforce NYC Wednesday studying all of Salesforce’s offerings including anything new that Radian6 might be presenting. There are so many different offerings in the afternoon that it’s challenging to choose which sessions are the best to attend.
Did you know there are 5 types of “Social Proof”? I think of Social Proof as evidence that something is the right thing to do based on what others are doing. Examples of Social Proof include:
“….a restaurant increased sales of specific dishes by 13-20%just by highlighting them as “our most popular items”. SP also works on your subconscious – it’s the reason why comedy shows often use a laugh track or audience; people actually laugh more when they can hear other people laughing.”
“…. Klout identifies people who are topical experts on the social web. Klout invited 217 influencers with high Klout scores in design, luxury, tech and autos to test-drive the new Audi A8. These influencers sparked 3,500 tweets, reaching over 3.1 million people in less than 30 days – a multiplier effect of over 14,000x.”
But I didn’t see anything new to say about Social Proof, except it is a strong factor in decision-making.
“…. Thus, while the first generation of social media measurement allowed PR to gain more granular insight (and entry) into public conversations about the brand, it did so with what was typically a non-representative sample of a company’s overall market, without verifiable means of segmentation of the sample population, and with meta-data derived from qualitative tools like sentiment engines that were highly inaccurate.
Here’s a report on the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has mostly diagnostic information on tweets, Facebook posts and engaging content in both channels. But Museum Analytics includes other gems such as actual museum attendance (see below) for The Metropolitan (and other museums). I suppose one might be able to compare the growth of social media around a museum to the growth of attendance at the museum to observe the correlation.
“…We would like to instigate the use of open data and open standards. Do you know a museum with an open API or using microformats? Please let us know, we would be interesting in expanding Museum Analytics to include other type of information. ”
“…The information that is now being collected on a daily basis has been previously published in a scattered manner for several years. Some of the references that directly or indirectly have led to the development of Museum Analytics are listed here:
The Art Newspaper yearly publishes attendance numbers of the most visited museums.
Dutch Art Map lists infrastructures for contemporary visual arts in the Netherlands.”
There certainly is a lot of data to dig into here! Wow!!
I also really like the combination of several types of information, the Twitter followers for each museum, Facebook Likes, and Web Traffic (visitors), along with the aforementioned actual attendance numbers in person.
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I think many of these metrics aren’t that tightly correlated, such as MOMA’s leading number of Twitter followers and Facebook Likes yet the website visited the most wasn’t MOMA, but the Metropolitan. But what about actual attendance? The Met had close to double MOMA’s visits in 2010. It’s true the Met is much bigger than MOMA, but it’s also true MOMA is much more aggressive using Social Media, and yet, depending on what goals you are looking at, or how you want decide success, The Metropolitan Museum wins over MOMA, hands down, where it counts (again, if you want to look at it that way).
MOMA visits in 2010 = 3.13 Million Visitors
MET visits in 2010 = 5.2 Million Visitors
In fact, if you want to get right down to it – the Louvre, which isn’t leading in any of the social media indicators, had far more visitors than any other museum (8.5 million visitors in 2010), period.
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And while I was muttering to myself the words “…too bad they don’t have any information on shows and special exhibitions at the museums…” guess what I ran into? ….. …..
Of course, and speaking of courses, all of this becomes much more important just now, besides the fact of my background in the Arts, besides being an Analyst (which isn’t as weird a blend as it sounds) as I embark on teaching a course at Rutgers School of the Arts on the Intersection of Social Media and The Arts.
You know me as an Analyst – but in this context, my approach will be unique, yet build upon material in place and adapted for the intersection of the Arts (in the widest sense of disciplines that fall under the process of creative ideation, regardless of the medium).
Social Media doesn’t (as the Museum Analytics site clearly demonstrates) always provide immediate solutions to marketing and branding problems. ……
For all MOMA’s innovative moves towards Social Media adoption (there are many, btw), tthey aren’t the leaders in attendance, by far, though they had a few top exhibitions last year. Still, exposure to Social Media with the context of The Arts, offers a whole new set of questions that Artists and Art Institutions probably never asked themselves before (because they could not get the kind of information they have now – except the actual attendance numbers).
What I believe this course I teach will do, perhaps for the first time (judging from what I have heard) is lead to an awareness and leveraging of new solutions for my students.
Posted by Marshall Sponder on November 27, 2011 | Link It
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In his latest post Gary Angel focused on how the platforms we use to measure with also constrain us , I suggest reading his Semphonic blog post in full. The main point of his post is the constructed metric of “online social mentions” doesn’t make sense and social platforms provided metrics like this one, only because it made sense to them (but turns out to be utterly misleading and ultimately meaningless to most users).
We need to understand that the measurement of consumer sentiment and PR effectiveness (and Influencer sentiment) are two fundamentally different tasks that need almost completely differentiated samples. The fact that our tools give us counts across these things (and across other categories that we don’t care about), shouldn’t lure us into believing those counts mean something.
I’ve often remarked how similar is the current experience of Social Media Measurement with the early days of Web analytics that I remember. We are all making so many of the same mistakes – Semphonic included. But here’s where our deep experience in digital measurement is actually bearing some fruit and proving to be a real advantage. Because this time around, we are learning much faster. In Web analytics, it took us years to learn the metrics to ignore and the metrics with real meaning. It’s taken even longer to understand many (if not all) of the ways our tools both help and hinder us in our task. But we’ve learned that just because a tool reports a metric, that doesn’t make it meaningful.
One of the points I want to add, while most of the social listening platforms evolved out of glorified news clipping services (as Gary points out in his post), to fit mostly MARCOM needs, those needs have morphed towards something more hybrid and misleading, a form of pseudo market research and opinion analysis for unwitting clients that is fundamentally flawed and unsound, delivered using listening platforms that can not support the analysis, in order to support a market need (but perhaps in a poorly adapted manner).
Perhaps this Social Media Analytics in the Marcom space is just one more bubble waiting to pop (and I’ll have more to say about that in my Predictions for 2012 that I will release later in December); and that has been my suspicion for some time. But it also tells me that platform vendors have been busy trying to give audiences and markets what they thought it wanted, without ever truly understanding what it needed and truly wanted, and “social mentions” is just one example of it.
Web Journal
Mike White, a UK PR professional wrote a nice review of my book which tells me my ideas are spreading to people who might, in other circumstances, not have seen or been as receptive to them, had the book not appeared. While Mike is not the first to point out parts of the book that are platform and vendor specific may need to be rewritten in a few years (which I’m totally up for), I think most of the book will still be fully applicable for a long time, and the parts that really are vendor and technology specific, as late as 2014. By that time, a second edition, I’m sure, will be out.
Read a good post on how to track complaints using Google Analytics - the approach was fairly straight forward and it works because the form being used lends itself to being captured (using a script), but it also reminds me that to capture business processes digitally, they need to be encoded (arranged) in a way that lends to that capture – and too often, that’s not done. So, if you want to capture a business process, sometimes you need to change the process so it can be captured (by the analytics tools and platforms at your disposal).
“…. Automation and streamlining processes help to deliver analytics more efficiently saving man hours and money. Automation also assists in the elimination of human errors which can be critical in business intelligence reporting.”
But not everything is scalable, or capable of being automated, and a lot of thought needs to be put into thinking about what parts of a process can be streamlined, and what can’t – and how much effort or cost it takes to do so (and if it’s worth it). Earlier this month I gave a webinar on this very subject for Internet Evolution, an IBM sponsored community, focusing specifically on the Costs and Benefits of Business Analytics (that outlined when it was profitable to invest in streamlining business processes via Analytics, and when it wasn’t, and my presentation was well received.
Deploying the technology necessary in order to communicate with customers is only one step toward becoming a social business. The bigger piece is being able to analyze those communications, unlock the insights of your customers, and turn their signals into applicable information. Our expert will discuss the importance of social analytics and what pitfalls to avoid when investing in enterprise analytics tools.
Happy with the presentation and look forward to sharing it with the Internet Evolution community on Friday (your free to join, just sign up to be a member at Internetevolution.com).
Read an interesting post in Scientific American that says people are often fooled by evidence but that people can often absorb a truth more forcefully, if they can arrive at it one step at a time than if they get it thrown at them all at once. That would seem like common sense – but it’s interesting how the finding is demonstrated.
Imagine, for example, that you are in a library (assuming people still do such things), and you’ve become lost. Are you in the Science Fiction or the Fantasy section? Of course, you could wander the shelves until you find a helpful sign, but it’s faster to simply look at the books on the shelf next to you. You see:
Book 1: Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept: The Apprentice Adept
Book 2: J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
Book 3: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
You’re not sure how to categorize Book 1, so it’s not good evidence for either Science Fiction or Fantasy. Books 2 and 3, however, have wizards or elves on their covers, and you might firmly classify them as Fantasy. By now, you’ve weighed the evidence and concluded you’re in the Fantasy section.
Here’s where things get interesting. If someone had simply handed all three books to you at the same time, you might feel that it’s somewhat likely you are in the Fantasy section. But if someone handed the books to you one at a time, you might conclude very strongly that you’re in the Fantasy section. Even though the books are the same, you would weigh the strength of the evidence more heavily when you processed them in turn, rather than all at once.
This finding seems to demonstrative of a general principle – that it is best to chunk out information, and give it out gradually, allowing people to gain more confidence (over repeated exposures), though if readers have additional ideas of what it means, feel free to share them here.
Finally, one of my friends shared a post with me on Facebook on Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company from Fast Company that totally supports my point of view that many companies, despite the lip service are not able to provide them the right opportunities.
That’s about it for this post – Thanksgiving was enjoyable and spent with friends, and I shut down for a change, and found I could not write much, decided to give into it, and just go with it.
As some of my readers know, I have a section on measuring Viral Videos in chapter 2 of Social Media Analytics, and some of that information came from a 4 year old TechCrunch post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg on The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos along with a follow up post the next day (November 24, 2007!) that did damage control created by the original post, which was quite provocative and controversial.
And, as it has now fallen in my lap to teach a course at Rutgers School of the Arts on “Social Media and The Arts” (don’t have a link yet to the course), which a session on “viral videos” it naturally peaked my interest when I read the Jeff Bullas article on the work of Dr. Brent Coker, a marketing professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
“… According to an algorithm, the four ingredients required are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and something called “paired meme synergy“
Perhaps, this diagram, above, got the strongest response from me, and the most interest from the internet public; these are termed “memes” and, when combined together in certain combinations, along with three other aspects of video creation, explain why some videos go viral, but most don’t.
However, the “memes” as described here also remind me of another example in Art, something from 400 years or more in the past, the painter Nicolas Poussin (who I have studied quite a bit, several years back) who had a theory of his own related to the various “modes” of a painting.
Nicolas Poussin – Massacre of the Innocents – 1629 – Musée Condé de Chantilly
An essential part of Poussin’s style is the artist’s ”theory of the modes,” which held that each and every element of a painting (line, color, form) had a significant psychological impact on the viewer.
According to art historian Yona Pinson, in Massacre of the Innocents, even the architecture is intended to have an emotional effect. The heavy, dark, foreboding column which dominates the left-hand side of the picture plane is intended to express the obdurate forces of evil, as represented by the grimacing soldier who is about to chop off the head of the wailing baby he crushes beneath his foot.
The Greek temple in the background of the picture, on the other hand, represents the opposite. This temple is decorated with the Corinthian order which, according to ancient Greek architect Vitruvius, represented the feminine principle. In this painting, Poussin intends this Corinthian temple to represent the feminine frailty and helplessness of the bereaved mothers.
According to Dr. Coker, there will be a book published next year explaining much more about how this all works and I’ll be buying one of the first copies (though I wish I could get my hands on the manuscript beforehand).
Example of a Viral Video =
Example of a successful combination of three memes:
Voyeur – which is when a video appears to be someone’s mobile phone footage
Eyes Surprise — unexpectedness
Simulation Trigger – which is when the viewer imagines themselves being friends [with the people in the video] and sharing the same ideals
One viral video that used all three of those memes was a 2007 ad by Quiksilver which is a global surf and beach apparel brand.
Obviously, there is a lot to understand here, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but what Dr. Coker came up with, is what I call, interesting and original thinking, whereas, what I read so often these days are recycled ideas, recycled content, people hyping themselves, hyping companies and services they have invested in, and so on.
Glad some people “out there” and “down under” actually have interesting ideas and original content.
