I’ll also stay in the same room for the last session of the day on expanding your Online Community. I know Laura Lee Dooley, who joined the Social Media Committee I started at the WAA and read Beth Kanter’s blog which is an excellent resource for Non-Profits who wish to leverage Social Media (and honestly, a lot of what Beth Kanter writes about could be applied to for profit businesses just as well as non-profits).

“..S04 Tuesday, 5:10 – 6:00

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community

Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy
Laura Lee Dooley, World Resources Institute
Beth Kanter, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

If you aren’t on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

Laura Lee on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Anyway, here’s my notes on Beth Kantor’s presentation. She looks at AideRss and the statistics and see’s what posts do best.

Also Beth looks at Technorati and noted her ranking goes up and down and says she says she’s noted when her rankings go up or down and what triggers it.

Btw, Beth raised 215k for Cambodian refugees as non profit. Beth goes and friends a lot of people who follow alerts on her name, or “Cambodia”.

Laura Ann – she uses Twitter a lot and suggests we all create Twitter accounts.

But….But… Most companies are not prepared to handle interactive feedback. That’s a major roadblock.

Ambient Awareness – Listening Post Exhibition. Post Ratio: 1 : 12 (once about yourself and 12 times about others)

Laura handles two Twitter accounts
She used several metrics including twitter clickthrough and posts.

Xefer and Twitter Grader.

Is twitter multiple relationships or a single one to Twitter?

A lot of concerns about Twitter downtime but the service continues to grow.

laura points out the person who has the Twitter account for your company needs to be a senior person who knows the Brand well. No Interns, that’s not a good idea for several reason.

Nature Conservatory Case study using DIGG

One thing to note was the Digg traffic wasn’t worth much though they got a lot of that traffic.

Digg is good if you want to reach new people but it can lead to other things that are valuable.

Results of Social News Campaign on Digg. Normally they get 20,000 visits a day but 76,000 visits for the day when a Digg story ran on Digg homepage.

But ….. Our goal was to spur conversations about the enviornment plus tons of links, which in turn drove new visits of higher quality plus SEO juice.

How much time required? A few years to become a crediable source on Digg, or whatever large Social Networks.

The ad itself, took a few hours to set up. But Digg helped reach people we normally would not be able to contact.

Nature Conservatory also uses Radian6 to listen to the conversation.

My take is that social media is a lot of work, learning to leverage relationships.

Many organizations are too stoggy to adopt Social Media but once they see the results you usually get but it’s a culture change.

Digg changes make it harder to get a story on the first page but many top Diggers have interests in causes.

Fact is that Digg has been gamed so much the top keyword in Google for a search on Digg is “gamed”.

I’m covering yet another session on Social Media Metrics by Jason Burby and Ryan Turner, both of ZAAZ.

Social Media Metrics

Jason Burby, ZAAZ
Ryan Turner, ZAAZ

I captured the tail end of Jason’s session.

Monitoring response and creating policies to respond. Plugging in ratings and reviews, intergrated social tools and internal communications.

How to handle authentication and user identities. Targeting popularity engines with your content.

Jason cited the case of a Sony camera with a review on CNET, and the feedback is mixed, you can respond in a fair way.

ZAAZ Web Analytics and ZAAZ Social Media approach are the same, defining what success is.

To be honest, so far, I am not hearing anything different on this talk then what I already know.

But here’s what I make at of this perception – Social Media Marketing is essentially web analytics, but with different inputs and outputs.

ZAAZ has a Social Media Conversion Calculator which is available on it’s site
-not a big deal, but you can fill in your own actions and related prices.

Both brand perception and shopping have always had a social context. Three years ago we accessed the opinions of 5 friends in the consideration process, today we can access the opinions of 5 million fellow customers. Measurement on the social web presents analysts with new challenges: How do you measure word of mouth? Can you model the relationships between online research and offline purchase? What is the value of a comment on a blog post? A connection in a social network? A question in a support forum? A tag on YouTube? How does engagement affect lifetime customer value? Jason Burby and Ryan Turner of ZAAZ will present some insights from their experiences grappling with these issues, and they’ll put forward some ideas about where businesses need to focus as the social web grows in importance over the coming years.

On my way to the keynote, which Jim Sterne said was about using Web Data to run the business, i ran into Katie Paine.

I asked Katie how her recent European travels had been (because I read her blog via my RSS reader and see her updates on Twitter and FaceBook).

I quickly realized Katie had not told me anything yet. I got that information asyncronously, just by subscribing to her.

So, here’s a value of Social Media, how we stay in touch, having conversations that never really end (continunous conversations), like the one I have with Katie Paine.

Anyway, onto the keynote.

Jim thinks we need a calender function in Web Analytics, think Timelines on steroids.

Things to measure
1. Measure what is happening online (Hitwise, Compete) including Competitive Analysis
2. Site Analytics
3. MVT
4. Measure what you can’t control, Social Media, and how they feel when they are on your site.

So, the interesting point here is …. If you get the information above on your site and competitiors how does it affect your marketing and more importantly, the Business Outcome.

What is the value of a page; you need it for each page of your site.

Jim told everyone to look at their budget now and assured us they will be different next year (due to the economy).

Jim Sterne ended the keynote by asking us to note at least one thing new at this conference we haven’t seen beforecand put videos up from the conference on a new YouTube channel which will help someone win a free pass to the next Emetrics Summit in San Jose and a year from now, here in DC.

I want to commend the WAA Marketing Committee for coming up with the YouTube video idea. It did not orginate in my Social Media Committee … In a way, the functions of Social Media aren’t really seporate from marketing, sales, membership, research, standards, Social Media is part of all of them.

So, I see the social media committee work we started at the WAA as something that has migrated to other committees. That gives me a clue on how Social Media will evolve in many organizations.

My belief is the issue with social media has been where it belongs, where does it sit on an organization, who are it’s stakeholders.

With Search and Web Analytics, we generally know where these things sit, but not with Social Media. But that situation has started to change and what is happening at the Web Analytics Association is a clue on how it will go.

All we need to do now is figure out where Social Media sits in an organization, and allot a budget for tools, training and headcount.

The keynote was followed with presentations by ForeSee and Optimost.

Optimost announced “Adaptive Targeting” with a new offering; Optimost is now owned by Interwoven.

The Optimost new module for Adaptive Targeting goes beyond measuring average lift; persona based variables along with demographics and locational data is merged with MVT.

A guy named Kris from America’s Test Kitchen shared interesting results from using Adaptive Targeting.

Price sensitivity was determined for all groups at 30 Dollars. Also, the Optimost data ended up feeding into basic site usability improvements and it resulted in several hundred thousand dollars of savings or profit.

Note: I had a post with marketing notes prepared ahead of time but, one of the snags of working with posts that did not orginate on the IPhone, I can’t edit a such a post without a network connection. Bummer! Anyway, I started from scratch and wrote a new post.