I like nice pictures and I’m starting this post with one of them (you’ll need to read to the bottom of the post to find out a little more).

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Just stop, and think about this diagram for a minute.  6Degree.

Today (1/11/12) is the Semphonic Social Media Measurement Tools Webinar with Gary Angel, Scott Wilder and me  at  1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST – hope you can join us, and there’s still time to sign up (it’s free) and well worth attending – here’s what we’ll talk about:

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As three very hands-on consultants, we love to use new tools (we’ve tried a bunch) and we live and breathe social analytics.

In this webinar, we’ll cover a wide range of tools for Social Media – not just the core listening tools. We’ll explain how each class of tool fits into an enterprise social media program or fits into an enterprise social media environment. Then we’ll deep-dive into our experiences using these tools. What features turn out to matter…and which don’t; the things that drove us crazy and the things we fell in love with.

We’ll expose you to a range of tools you may never have considered or heard about and we’ll give you the straight word on the tools you may be considering. Three independent, unbiased voices with both client and agency experience. True hands-on experience. Deep expertise in social media measurement. It all adds up to a unique opportunity to advance your own understanding of Social Media Measurement Tools.

As you may know, I read Gary Angel’s blog frequently – and his ideas have been formative on my own – particularly in terms of what is the best way to measure things; liberally, I take what I feel are the best elements of the people and ideas around me, and craft them into my own message (because I’m an artist at heart).   I think, the last two posts Gary has written at SemAngel (his blog) are noteworthy because of what he’s taken on to explore and point out about surveying site visitors.

In particular -the post on  Site-wide Customer Satisfaction: It Isn’t Interesting and it Isn’t Comparable Across Sites brought up measurement issues that are particularly challenging in sampling site visitors with online questionnaires because visitation is driven (most of the time) by marketing and advertising, and whatever promotions are running draws visitors who will skew the survey results.  If I were to run a survey of visitors randomly to WebMetricsGuru.com in order to ask how satisfied they were with my blog, that might not be the case, since I’m not actively advertising or promoting my website.

Still, what I write about will tend to draw readers who are interested in those subjects, so … from a purist perspective, it’s never been all that clear how a “valid sample” is created from which to analyze site satisfaction, or for that matter, anything else. But when we compare several sites to each other (ie: in a category) the results are more problematic because each may be driven with different marketing/advertising goals – and so, Gary has argued what we’re really measuring is the audience generated by the advertising, which is biased.   While reading his post, seeking to push the envelope, I thought about Net Promoter Score, because the NPS is gathered using an online site survey, might be biased as well, by the same factors as all the other online surveys being run, and left a comment on his site, stating such.

And that generated this post on NetPromoter Scores vs. Site Satisfaction – that clears up an issue – NPS doesn’t suffer as much from the skew in advertising and marketing that other types of surveys have because the questions are the same ones for everyone – which means – Standards – that there is a standard set of questions all sites being compared for Net Promoter that is the same, and that makes the comparisons between disparate sites in various categories and industry verticals easier to make.  Here’s the beginning of that post…

….. Another great post! Question – how does NetPromoter scores figure into the points? They are, after all, Survey based. (my question)

It’s a really interesting question, because I believe there are both similarities and differences relevant to my discussion. A quick recap – in my last post I argued that overall Site Satisfaction suffered the same issues as almost any other site-wide metric. Site-wide metrics – be they Conversion Rate or Revenue or Site Satisfaction – all confuse multiple factors together in a way that makes them almost useless and un-interpretable.

This is contrary, of course, to the broad industry view of KPIs, but it’s a topic I’ve canvassed thoroughly in previous posts and I have yet to hear a convincing argument to the contrary. In addition to this problem common to nearly any site-wide variable, Survey data – when collected by traditional site intercept means – also suffers from a sampling problem. Because your site population varies with your marketing efforts, you’re mostly measuring shifts in the underlying population you’re attracting when you measure (or compare or trend) site-wide Satisfaction scores.

So what about NetPromoter?

On the whole, NetPromoter scores will suffer from pretty much the same problems. When you measure NetPromoter scores using site-intercept surveys, your likely measuring changes in your sample population not changes to your actual customer likelihood to recommend. So a trend or benchmark of NetPromoter scores is no better, in this respect, than Site Satisfaction.

Gary Angel brings up two fundamental points that carry through in many of his posts

• Fundamental misunderstandings in the nature of web data has left many people confused on the right way to measure it, as well as the actual meaning of what they’re measuring.   As a result, people are often not measuring what they think they are, and drawing faulty conclusions, faulty metrics and KPI’s from it.   This is somewhat unavoidable as there are few if any standards on how to do this right – but he’s made convincing arguments that more often than not, the measurements we think we’re making – aren’t actually representative in the way we think they are.

• We need to fundamentally understand what we’re measuring – before we go ahead and build KPI’s around the efforts, and this may relate more to what appears to be a logical approach, that takes into consideration all factors (that can be known).

Today’s Webinar should be spirited, not doubt – and it’s packed with a lot of information that Gary, Scott and I have been collecting about tools and platforms and our own points of view about them.

6DEGREE

But I also want to write about something else today – and I mean to treat it with much more detail that I’m doing here.

I’m fortunate that many vendors reach out to me, some known, and several are relatively unknown, at least in the United States.  One of them, 6Degree, has built a persona platform around Social Media that is pretty interesting, in fact, intriguing.  I suppose it helps that the founders read my book and based the persona part on my ideas.  I’m not going to explain the diagram at the beginning of this post ….yet.  I will, however, counter by showing you a few more pictures.

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I’m not going to explain any of this today – but I will soon.  And yes, these charts represent populations in Rhode Island.

See you all, hopefully at the Semphonic Webinar today.