Well, I hate to just post just about webinars and things like that (a lot of things to write about – been so busy lately (you have NO IDEA) – it’s been hard to put it all down here, but I will catch up this week, for sure).

However, before we get there – there are two Webinars I’m giving this week and I hope you join me at one or both of them.

VenueLabs & WebMetricsGuru,com Tuesday January 31, 2012 at 2pm EST / 11am PST

On January 31st – this Tuesday, I’m giving a webinar with Venuelabs.com on How to Interpret Social Media for Retailers which is going to be, I feel, revolutionary.   People just don’t know, in this space, what is going on with Location Based Services and Analytics  (for the most part)- they think Social Media Measurement is Radian6 and Sysomos, with sprinkling of Nielsen and NetBase, but it’s much more than that.    Join me, find out what your missing – esp if your a brick and mortar business.   Many of the problems of Social Media Analytics are somewhat solved, when location is added.  I’ll say no more, but if you come, you’ll be presently surprised.

I’ve been working with Venuelabs for a few months and have a really good, constructive dialog with them – as well as a instance of Venuelabs focusing on the New York Art Scene that I’ll be writing about shortly – just to show you what the platform is capable of, and ideas I have as to what they could develop.

The Recorded Future & WebMetricsGuru.com -Looking into the Future with Web Media Analytics - Thursday, February 2, 2011 at 11AM Eastern

I did a webinar with the Recorded Future that went really, really well, on December 21st, 2011 – the details and recording (from the Recorded Future – ha!!!)  were posted about by each of us last month - here’s what Chris Holden from The Recorded Future wrote about the webinar.   The Recorded Future webinar went so well, the founder, Dr. Chris Ahlberg of RF asked me to do the webinar again, so more people would hear it and attend (we had a good audience just before Christmas, but felt that it we could have had 3 or 4 times as many attendees after the holidays – so here we go again).

Except … Except that we changed it up a bit and wrote about different stuff – in this case the Focus of the Future will be on the Android and iPhone wars and the future of Tablets will be reveled (and perhaps, reviled by some people – ha!).

Semphonic XChange Germany and Semphonic’s new Germany office

Finally; there is the news that my good friends at Semphonic.com have opened up a office in Germany, and are having a German X-Change conference around Memorial Day – I’ll will try to find a way to be there – and bring the European Social Media Analytics firms (at least the one’s I work closely with) into the fold.  Here’s the inside scoop – Semphonic Creates a New EU Office and Digital Measurement Program: We are all Berliner’s Now!

Yes, I want to be there.  One question – when is Semphonic opening up the London office?  Ha!

A new webinar with the Three Amigos (but one may be hailing from the distance) on Feb 14th is being planned – details forthcoming soon. We had a webinar two weeks ago with the Three Amigos sponsored by Semphonic – here’s the link to that – more is planned, so join us there.

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.

Been wanting to write this post for a couple of days – there’s been so much thought, back and forth, on projects, there was no energy left to write (and that’s unusual for me – often, I’ll stay up and post here, instead of sleeping, as a measure of just how important it is, to me).

But sometimes, we just can’t (post).  Anyway – this is rectified, today – here’s a thought out post on the new Altimeter White Paper (really, it’s a position paper) which I promised to write about, last week.  I also embedded the White Paper, below.

Jason Falls calls the Altimeter paper on Social Media Proliferation, a buyers guide – I agree, and there hasn’t been enough attention paid to the Social Media Management Systems (SMMS), which are really hard to tell apart for the average person.

Here’s what I liked about the paper (the ideas in it, that is):

• Jeremiah Owyang / or whomever, at Altimeter, who did/does most of the actual work, managed to show that organizations who are mature in their understandings of social technologies, get much more value (and return on investment) out of these platforms than those that are early on or mid-stage.  I felt that was a significant, though hardly, surprising finding, and falls right in line with Collective Intellect’s Social Maturity Curve (Continuum).  After all, if you know what you want, it’s much easier to get it (amazing how findings in white papers often end up saying stuff that is really common sense -

• What would have been surprising were if companies totally inexperienced in social technologies were getting more out of SMMS systems than those that do know themselves better – something like fish swimming upstream, or flying – but not in a surrealist painting – ha!)

• Coming up with the 5 use cases and the RADAR map (and telling organization to be introspective and figure out what their use case(s) are, before buying anything, was smart – though, again, isn’t that common sense?

• On the other hand, why should I  expect people to have common sense when they look at a bunch of SMMS systems, and are unable to tell them apart.
• The visualizations on the RADAR map help companies figure out which SMMS systems to look at first.

• The bios on the vendors, while short, provided more information about the vendor’s platform and USP than the vendors seem to be able to provide for themselves – showing just how unclear the very insiders are, on their own real differences.
• Since the vendors have done a inconsistent and sloppy job of describing what they offer, and why we need “their solution” to handle the “179 social accounts Altimeter says, larger companies, on average, have“, is it any wonder, why the rest of us can’t figure out what the meaningful differences are?  And we thought Social Media Monitoring platforms were hard to disambiguate – this “SMMS” space is even worse!
• Altimeter gets points for pointing out the API integrations that make these systems work in the first place, is also part of the reason we have such a hard time telling them apart!
• The paper also points out that API integration the platforms almost all use, may also make them run somewhat unreliably and with delays, which you, as the business owner, might not be aware of.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the paper:

• Well, it’s an Altimeter paper – I expect that, more or less, I’m going to get the same information I already know, for the most part, repackaged in such a way as I think I’m being given a bar of Gold!   I think that might be the case here, though I have to admit, I wish I came up with papers that got that much attention, that quickly.
• But this paper was highly pimped (nothing wrong with that, by the way), and Jason Falls clearly acknowledged he was interviewed as part of it, as well as some of the other familiar names.  To be somewhat hypercritical – if they had somehow gotten my name in there, I’d being singing praises!  Nah.
• Are there really 5 use cases?  I see a lot more people citing 3 basic use cases – but OK, if they want to call “hybrid” or custom white labeling, a use case, go ahead (maybe they needed an extra column in the RADAR chart).
• Some of my friends who have read the paper have felt the treatment of the companies profiled was superficial
• …and that’s kinda interesting – since even Altimeter has managed to make these SMMS companies look and sound better than they are to make themselves sound.

I’ll have more to post later – this is all I have time for right now – but certainly, The Altimeter Social Media Proliferation White Paper is well worth reading.