Wrote about Share of Voice , Audience Engagement and Conversation Reach Key Performance Indicators that foster dialog according to Altimeter Research and Web Analytics Demystified previously.  While the KPI’s sounded good, for the most part, the underlying standards for how to structure and apply the guidelines are missing and that makes the Social Marketing Analytics Framework difficult and unreliable to use – but that’s all about spreading the word, fostering dialog.

What about Advocacy?  Is figuring out how many active advocates you had this month for your brand compared to last month any better?  Well … not really, but there’s hope.

One way this could work is if your community manager who engages with their brands’ audience.

1. Community Manager engages with audience
2. While engaging, tracks which members express positive/negative statements and advocacy to the  Brand.
3. Community Manager tags audience members based on their stated online positions to the Brand withing the Social Media monitoring platform (or by hand, in Excel – whatever).
4. As time goes on, Community Manager is able to chart active advocates this month vs last month, etc.
5. You can also divide the number of active advocates by “total advocates” – except the formula to determine “total advocates” was left undefined by Altimeter and WAD.

So your not much better off here than with the other KPI’s I looked at so far – but at least this one, Active Advocates could be operational once the little detail of how to determine the total pool of advocates to your Brand is specified.

But, let’s forget about how Altimeter and Web Analytics Demystified are defining Advocacy for a minute, or the platforms they say can be useful to get Advocacy out of like Biz360, Filtrbox (Jive), Radian6 – I’m pretty sure Radian6 supports tagging, I think Biz360 does at well.

The fact of the matter is those platforms being suggested for Advocacy aren’t the right ones – I’d put in it’s place a platform like KeenKong.com which is a much more natural fit for Active Advocates, or perhaps Radian6′s new Engagement Console, when it becomes available.

So I fired up KeenKong and read in my Facebook and Twitter messaging – this is what it looks like, and I can tag my messaging as well, helped by KeenKong’s structured semantic underpinnings.

Here are some stats I can easily pick out of KeenKong.com for my conversations.

• February 2010 Total:   301 conversations from 177 people reaching 116,362 people
• February 2010 Adv:      30 conversations for 26 people reaching 15,283 people

I used KeenKong to easily select what I think to be advocates for me, focusing on the “Why” column.

• March 2010 Total:       289 conversations from 159 people reaching 95,414 people
• March 2010 Adv:         29 conversations from 26 people reaching 23,256 people

So far, it looks like February and March, I had the same number of “advocates”, 26.

• April 2010 Total:         373 conversations from 206 people reach 127,922 people
• April 2010 Adv:           28 conversations from 21 people reaching 17,016 people

If I assume the total advocates is the top number (ie: 206 people in April) while Active Advocates is 21 (see above) then we can attempt to do the formula for the Social Marketing Analytics Framework.

Online Advocates  February 2010 = 15%,  March 2010 = 10%, April 2010 = 8%

Judging from the above percentages – it would look like my online advocacy is deceasing rapidly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in real life.

Plus, even if the calculations are correct, the information provided does not appear to be very convincing.

However, Radian6 and Biz360 can also do this calculation providing your willing to categorize all your mentions and alerts for advocacy and divide the total mentions into it (for a certain time period).

On Reading Finally delivering the Social Media playbook at BrandBuilder, today,  I feel (felt) somewhat skeptical, but upon listening to Oliver’s video about RedChair (which I liked), I’m interested in seeing what he and his partners will actually deliver.

To be fair, no one really owns this space, today, but many people would like to (own it, or parts of it) and are staking a claim on it now, even a friend of mine, Gary Angel in his post on How do you Measure Social Media ROI? – whose webinar  I’ll try to attend, and Jim Sterne is now writing his next book on Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which will be out next May (I wrote a short blurb for it).

I have a lot of respect for Jim Sterne’s work and his first book on Web Metrics was largely responsible for getting me involved in Web Analytics – and he has good track record – I know him well – so I believe his book will be an excellent resource for Social Media when it’s published.

Last June, Steve Rubel spoke at Mediabistro Circus about Brand All Stars (I wrote about it and was in the audience – Using Social Media to promote your brand- Steve Rubel (Brand All Stars) on what I think, most of what Olivier Blanchard is aspiring to promote with his  RedChair, though Oliver’s vision is larger and involves the underpinning and surrounding parts that Steve Rubel didn’t specifically address.  Still, at the end of the day, I’m not sure about what is actually being delivered.

I think one of the main sticking points for me with Oliver’s premise, for me, – there’s only a few people in the world who can execute on a social media program and all it’s parts – and then suggests, his group is one of them -  ….. I have an open mind – or will try to.

I mean, he has an excellent team – and Jacob Morgan, seems to have a lot of good things he writes about – and just the other day came up with the real cost of implementing a social media program (see his presentation on Social Media ROI – see slide 18), which I read about while I was in London last week – and he gave prices and timelines in slide 18 – and I was very impressed- that he was willing to come out and publicly admit what the real time line is, and what the real prices for a social media program would be (200K+ and over a year to get results – measure them – not for the faint of heart).

The reason I’m thinking back to Steve Rubel – at the time he talked about PR 2.0 and Brand All Stars – I thought about how nice it would be to go into companies and teach them how to do Social Media by identifying their “stars” or teach them how to create their own “luminaries” and then, inject them into relevant conversations and monitor the results – but it’s yet my thing to go around and actually train companies to do that – maybe I’d like to but just don’t know how.

Still – I’m seeing how much of what I’ve done, from a measurement, and, also, strategy part, become one of the next areas that is being “staked out” with a lot of people now wanting to “own” social media – who want a piece of the pie, along with the web analytics community, the PR community – well … just about everyone.

My only advice is to look at track record – see what people who want to teach social media have actually done ….. and judge them from there.

I know Gary Angel pretty well from the Analytics field – I’d trust whatever he comes up with on a measurement perspective – same thing with Eric T. Peterson; I’ve seen their work and know what they’re capable of – they have good track records, as far as I’m concerned. I know K. D. Paine pretty well – I trust what she says.      Oliver .. I just don’t know enough – I havent’ seen anything really, yet, besides the presentations – and I was underwhelmed by the delivery, outside the fluff – but that’s just me – maybe with a little more time …. I’d see more and could express my own opinion based on what I’ve actually touched.

The main “hook” with Red Chair – is that few people can deploy Enterprise programs from within large organizations – but (and I have worked in many of these “large organizations” myself, so I have an idea of what Oliver is talking about) is not so much they are frustrated – is that they are largely  SILOED – and could not execute a Successful, Authentic Social Media program, even if they wanted to!

Weather RedChair can go in and suddenly teach some enterprises to do it now – will depend largely on the corporate culture and will that current organizations have towards Social Media – when he goes in there – and that’s hard to predict.

I don’t blame anyone from wanting to “stake out” a piece of the pie of Social Media – that’s what’s business is all about – I just think results ought to stand on their own - and the best endorsement of your brand is other people praising your brand for you.

Anyway, last week I noted a post from Marketing Pilgrim Cup of Joe: How Not To Go Viral and Look Like an Idiot thought it was good as it pointed out that good social media for a large brand (if it’s not original – needs to be really, really, really GOOD) – and when RedChair goes into large organizations and teaches them Social Media – I wonder if he is going to deal with that Pink Elephant – the one that says – you better be really good if your not going to be authentic – but if you are authentic – you don’t have to worry overmuch on your presentation as your content will carry the rest of your message for you.

A lot was announced, and promised to us in the last 24 hours though the practical effects will take several months to play out.  I don’t want to repeat what everyone else said – though I do need to establish the main points before offering my own thoughts about it.

One of the more significant announcements came from Google yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where  Marissa Mayer Showed Off Social Search and Social Results From  Social Networks intergrated into Google (but, only those reachable via Google Profile) via Twitter, meanwhile Bing is pulling recent status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

For one thing, these developments are an indication of the  convergences of Search and Social Media  (noted that earlier this year, about 6 months ago) where I said:

” ….Just want to close out this post by observing how much “convergence” was taking place at Search Engine Strategies this week – Social Media, Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics have d e-facto, merged; while the conference is called “Search Engine Strategis” it’s really more the intersection between Social Media, Search and Analytics -and so, who can say that Art, Social Networks and Web Analytics are also, not converging.”

As information is coming to us in a combined form, skills to handle it and act on it will change, perhaps, with unintended results. One example of unintended results, and I’m pulling this from left field, literally, is the new FCC Blogger Disclosure rules – @andrewhazen spoke  about upcoming FTP rulings at a local meetup tonight. Hazen mentioned the FCC could not monitor what everyone was saying even if they wanted to.

But that’s not exactly true, and is less true, every day.

Take Google SideWiki – Google opened up commenting about any website (as long as you have the Google Toolbar installed and updated) and people questioned weather Google could police malicious or brand damaging comments, but you hardly hear a peep about anyone complaining yet about bad comments (Google appears to be suppressing the appearance of  most of the comments or not many people are leaving comments, period) but Google would not have released the SideWiki if it didn’t have the means to police it.  Same thing with the SearchWiki, a year ago.

With the recent investment of the CIA in Visible Technology Social Monitoring tool (and Visible Technology is sponsoring the conference I’m speaking at in London next month, Monitoring Social Media 09) AND the convergence of digital information into Google, it could be means to monitor not just FTC Blogger violations, but any activity deemed significant and worthy of study.  I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing – perhaps, it’s beyond good or bad, it’s probably an inevitable evolution – but still … do we realize the real web will be crawled for behavior trails, due to possible threats, and those threats will erase any privacy we still have left?

In another way, the merging of real time data into search results will make them richer, but also, more variable – which will both disrupt Search Optimization, and open up new opportunities to rank quickly, drive traffic to sites via waves of fabricated news.  Chances are, Google will quickly develop counter measures, though the inclusion of real time search will open up many new holes for spammers to exploit search engines.

Contextual Search will grow richer, and be able to be targeted against waves of new information, with ad targeting capability  quickly developed – providing new ad inventory and new ways to get flooded with information we don’t want, along with nuggets of what we do want and need.

At the same time, Social Media (in that real time data from Twitter and Facebook updates) being merged into organic search results means many more search results, playing into Google Caffeine, which was just released a few months ago, to handle real time data, and display it along with more static search results in a faster way – all this pointing to the ability to quickly display and monitor results in real time.

You can even see another piece of Google’s thinking and evolution in the latest update to Google Analytics that was just released on Tuesday at the Emetrics Summit DC with  Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent including Email Alerts on changes in your analytics data.

But Web Analytics data is just one form of data that email alerts can be made from, and the current form of Google Alerts could easily be updated to include not just mentions of a selected keyword or keyword phrase, but of pattern – any pattern – including patterns that would be interesting to the CIA or to FCC and FTC.    I’m not even saying this is a good thing or a bad thing – but it is the logical implication of where this is all going.

On the positive side, due to the melding of all the various streams of information (and Google Wave shows promise, from what I understand of it – of inter-operating on several streams of data in one operating environment – even if those streams of data were never designed to inter-operate with each other) marketing, public relations, social media and search jobs and disciplines are about to get super charged.

Social Media, which has been looked at, for the last 2-3 years, as and interesting and experimental approach to marketing and public relations – will suddenly become a cash cow – how can anyone in their right mind ignore Social Media,  now when all this new Social Media inventory is suddenly dumped into Google, along with all the new possibilities to run targeted ads against it – and Google evolves into a real time social search engine?

Steve Rubel wrote that  The Age of Social Search Dawns today, in his personal lifestream (another sign that everything is converging) – here’s what he said/wrote:

During the first fifteen of years of the Internet’s gestation, we searched the web unassisted. In the second era, we’ll do so with the curated assistance of our social networks – and be able to spot trends from friends. As we wrote in our search white paper earlier this year…

“However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that’s meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google.”

Well, Google made it clear they’re not waiting around to get beaten. This is the opening salvo of what will be an all out social search war in in the next few years. Watch this space.

Another implication of “Social Search” is that you’ll want choose your friends more carefully – or, at least, some of us will, because, to a large extent, you’ll be able to see their search results in yours, and vice versa – not exactly what your expected from search.

To some extent, that’s good for people who can produce or uncover valuable information to a community – you’ll want to be the friend to such an individual, and such individuals will be sought after, much as influential blogger are today, and rightfully so.    And as a result, blogging software will evolve to accommodate those changes, as will online newspapers, the first being the Huffington Post Social News – that is just now reinventing online news around social networks.

Finally, with everything going into the Search Engines – Search will finally eclipse, but not entirely replace, other forms of marketing, online and off, but … with the caveat that Social Search and Social Networking will have converged – and with it, comes the death of the current understanding of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization, as it is currently understood,and has been practiced, for the last 12 years, dies – as, shortly, within a year or so, no one will see the same results – personalization of search results will become the de-facto result – and Search and Social Media will merge into one discipline – where reputation management and online social monitoring will be it’s main components.

Instead of going after rankings – you’ll be going after reputations – stuff you can write about urls and segments, in locations who’ll see your listings – predicting what they will see, and how to write copy and generate new real time data to show up in Search Results becomes the new SEO.    Meanwhile, new tools will need to be developed to cataglog and rank reputation in Search.

And that’s good news for Social Media Monitoring platforms – who will naturally want to evolve to cover search.  Meanwhile, the competition will come from Google, itself, with it’s own reputation monitoring – and that reputation monitoring capability will be integrated into Google Analytics – which will, inturn, cause a shakeout  in the Social Media Monitoring platforms on one hand, and the merging of what was called Web Analytics with Social Media and Search – much as Web Analytics has now become absorbed into Data Intelligence functions, according to Eric T. Peterson

If you pay close attention to the marketing you see from Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, and the other “for fee” vendors you’ve surely noticed a dramatic change recently. Nobody is talking about web analytics anymore; the entire focus has become one of systems integration, multichannel data analysis, and cross-channel analytics.

All the sudden web analytics is starting to sound like, gasp, business and customer intelligence.

Eek.

Since it’s late and since this post will be over-shadowed by the hype around Google Analytics releasing more “stuff” on Tuesday I’ll cut right to the chase: I believe that we are (finally) on the cusp of a profound revolution in web analytics and that the availability of third-generation web analytics technologies will finally get digital measurement the seat at the table we’ve been fighting to get for years.

Yes, Web Analytics will get the respect from CMO’s, finally, that we deserved all along – except, we’re not longer going to be called Web Analysts, as Web Analytics and SEO, as they were currently understood, are becoming obsolete.

And that’s what is being worked out right now, as I’m writing this.   A lot of change, a lot of convergence – some of it good, some of it, not.

But, like anything in life, the value is in what you make of it – nothing I said here, even the government’s inevitable monitoring of all the information we put out for them – is necessarily, bad.   But, then, our view of what we consider to be “freedom” and “privacy” are being transformed – almost, in real time.