Social Media for Publishers – Globalocal – Part 1

By Amita on November 29, 2011

We conducted a workshop last week with an interesting set of stakeholders – publishers.

We were at Globalocal, a conference organised by German Book Office to discuss the current trends in the publishing industry. As my colleague Rajesh was interacting with the group on their experiences and learnings with social media, I was quite intrigued by the inputs and reactions. He had started his deck with the ‘Why this Kolaveri Di’ song which elicited smiles across the room, but I also saw some wince in discomfort and heave a sigh of relief when the song was over.

On being asked if they started their day with Facebook, there were negligible responses in affirmative and on the whole the group did not seem to have embraced social in a big way.

It set me thinking on how the emergence of social media has given one basic fundamental access to all – to be an author and a publisher at the same time. And who should this change impact the most? One would imagine the traditional publishers. The analogy I shared with the audience was equating the emergence of social media to abolition of a caste system where the traditional publishers akin to the Brahmins have lost out on their traditional power. In the SMS slang, 140 character economy of language of the day, puritanism is fast becoming extinct. All rules that they played by (that of ‘proper’ language being the basic) are fast losing relevance. The discomfort appears to be almost a resistance to change.

My colleague Vishesh had taken a quick look at how the publishing houses in India are engaging audience using Facebook. He covered the mainstream publishers and some of the niche publishing houses to see if there were any specific trends.

Social media for publishers_india

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Globolocal 2011 Social Media Cases publishing

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Here is the brief deck that I presented around some interesting work being done by authors and publishers using social media.
Globolocal 2011 Social Media Cases publishing

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There was an interesting activity that we shared with the group in the final segment. There were some incredibly funny but some very good ideas shared by the groups. More about that in the next post :)

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Story in Afaqs Reporter – Are Online Tools the best way to measure Digital Influence

By Amita on September 20, 2011

Afaqs recently did a story on – “Are online tools the best way to measure Digital Influence” for their magazine – Afaqs Reporter.

My experience as part of the Insights & Analytics practice at Blogworks has been that technology has not reached the point where 100% automation can be relied upon. Here is my original comment on the story:

Social is a new industry and like any new industry it will go through a churn before best practices and standard metrics are put in place. At this point of time, there are several tools which give an automated influence score but accuracy of these is still a question mark for several reasons. First, most of these tools at this point are limited to specific channels and don’t take into account the entire online presence. Therefore their score tends to be limited to say the person’s influence on Twitter and not credit for say their blog or participation on LinkedIn. Second, there is research to prove that “high popularity does not imply high influence and vice-versa”, while many of these tools are trying to delve beyond populist metrics such as the number of followers, they are quite vulnerable at this point to manipulation. Third, while standardisation is important, a one size fits all approach does not work well. Different businesses may find different metrics of value and an effective tool should work on a series of metrics (some may find Topic Posts or comment count to be of equal or more value than say just number of visitors and inbound link count) which is still to happen.

Therefore, these tools can’t be blindly relied on.The answer lies in finding the balance between automation and human intervention. Automation can help scale up influencer identification process, human intelligence on the other hand can keep a tab on the accuracy and relevance of results to the subject/domain under consideration.

You can read the complete story in the recent edition of Afaqs Reporter.

What have your experiences been in influencer measurement? Do share your learnings and experiences.

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Story in IAMAI’s magazine – Leveraging Social Listening Strategically

By Amita on September 20, 2011

 

In the past few months, I have been closely involved with the Analytics & Insights practice at Blogworks. When the team from Thinking Aloud, a magazine from IAMAI reached out, I shared some of my thoughts and learnings on how the social listening space is evolving and how brands can leverage it strategically.

Read the complete post below:

One of the notable trends of 2011 in context of social media adoption by brands and corporates in India has been the growing need for Social Listening. While listening is the natural first step in the social media journey, Indian marketers have so far been heavily focused on a) creating a presence b) gaining critical mass and c) engagement. With these three in place, there has been a need felt to make sense of these conversations. What are consumers saying? What’s the overall mood? Why are they engaged with us/motives? Which part of our promise/communication resonates with them? Which are the most common pain points? There is a need to listen-in and analyse.

Social Listening can be used at a very basic level to slice and dice data to understand the health of a corporate/brand on social media. But its real power lies in being able to assess the overall health of a corporate/brand. Tactical views such as volume, influencers, key associations, media type etc are useful but give only a surface view. A deeper dive can enable companies gain strategic views that can help assess the impact at a business level. I will be touching upon one such view that we developed over past few months and find valuable.

Before that, I want to briefly touch upon the social media scenario in India over the past 2 years. 2010 was coming of age of social media usage in terms of customer engagement. In a matter of nine months, Facebook grew from 20.87 million in June 2010 to 23.02 million users by March 2011. These consumers started speak and share more and more about their lives, a part of which was around brand related experiences. This led to an increase in the volume of organic conversations (users speaking on their own about a brand without any prompt). Brands saw an opportunity to engage these users and also co-opt new users and therefore set out to create their social media presence. They extensively used inorganic (paid) routes such as applications and ads which helped scale-up their engagement rapidly.

Suddenly, from ‘no. of fans’, ‘page stats’, the buzz words also started including ‘social media tracking’, ‘social media analysis’, ‘ORM’ and similar variants. While some companies continued to rely on good old Google Alerts, others realised the need for more detailed reports on the social landscape. While there are new tracking and measurement tools launched very day and more sophisticated forms of visual data become accessible, there are no short-cuts to automate insights. Technology can be leveraged effectively to pull data we seek but human intelligence helps define what data we need to pull and what we make of that data.

Participation is at the heart of social media and therefore one of the most powerful views to track is of level of participation of a social media programme. In 2010, Forrester had shared a framework called ‘Social Technographics’ to classify people according to their “usage” of social media technologies –

This gives a sense of profile of people basis activities undertaken by them – Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics and finally Creators. This can be a useful view for understanding the profiles of people in your community and customising your brand’s engagement to target each segment differently/relevant segments.

While the Social Technographics Ladder gives a hierarchy basis how they are engaging using social media, we felt it would be interesting to have a hierarchy basis how the users are engaging specifically with a brand or a corporate. A matrix that measures influence not by activities on social media in general, but actions undertaken in context of the brand or the corporate. We call this view, the Participation Hierarchy –

This framework helps us evaluate the ‘level of involvement’ of a user with a specific programme basis action taken.  From bottom to top, it shows the evolution of a social media programme basis the depth of engagement with its stakeholders. If a majority of users are involved in curation (sharing links, organising information) the programme is fairly reactive. However, as it moves up, from opinions to feedback & questions to ideas and further user driven content and initiatives, it reflects a growing degree of proactiveness by the users.

Hence, a bottom-heavy programme would indicate a nascent programme where users are not deeply engaged in terms of their participation. On the other hand, a top-heavy programme driven by user-generated content and user-driven initiatives signal maturity.

The interesting paradox of social media is that while it was supposed to remove hierarchies, it actually has created more hierarchies than ever.  ‘Influence’ decides how people get classified and companies want to invest into those users who are ‘influential’ or ‘relevant’ to their specific needs.

We are working at developing this and similar frameworks further but the larger point is about how deep we investigate defines the depth of answers that we get. It’s time to move beyond scratching the surface and look for trends that have an impact at a strategic level.

It is time to look beyond just engagement and tap social media for its real value – Insights.

You can also read the story here

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What great speakers do differently; learnings from #adtechin and #nasscom_sms

By Amita on May 7, 2011

One of my all time favourite films is ‘The Prestige’. I especially love the opening sequence where the voice-over shares how every magic trick has three parts – ‘the pledge’, ‘the turn’ and finally ‘the prestige’ -

I recently attended a couple of conferences and did find some of the great speakers unravel their talk like a magic act. They started with ‘an obvious/known fact’ (pledge), metamorphosed that fact into a deep insight (“the turn”) and brought it alive through hard evidence – success story/case study (the prestige).

So while some speaker sessions were blockbusters, some turned out to be duds.

I had put out some tweets on my learnings on who makes for an engaging speaker. Thought some of you may enjoy and like to extrapolate -

amritochates Amita

  1. 3rd day running in a social media conference, have some learnings on works with an audience and what doesn’t #nasscom_sms #adtechin
  2. Good speakers always deliver more in less. They are economic in their words but liberal in depth of thoughts #1 #adtechin #nasscom_sms
  3. Good speakers follow simple rule – briefly state + elaborately illustrate. They establish point to make & back with evidence #3 #nasscom_sms
  4. ‘Show & tell’ more authentic than ‘believe coz I tell’.To command respect speakers prove mettle & not rely on credentials #nasscom_sms #4
  5. Attention span of human beings is v short. Till you are Steve Jobs, use AV cues(even Jobs uses them!). More hardwork but pays #nassom_sms #5
  6. One final best practice for speakers. Simple rule of physics. Motion creates energy. Don’t sit/be static. #5 #adtechin #nasscom_sms

The single biggest quality common is – they catch the pulse of their audience. That they value the time and respect the intelligence of the audience, is reflected in their preparation.

Great speakers only acknowledge and don’t dissect ‘the obvious’. Instead they logically and craftily  build upon the ‘little known or little understood’.

As the magician asks in the opening sequence of the movie, “Are you looking closely?”

taskmaster#
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Can Social Media Engagement be meaningfully measured?

By Amita on May 4, 2011

I had the most interesting and insightful two days at the first edition of ad:tech held in New Delhi last week. While most industry events and workshops manage to pull a variety of industry veterans and experts, what was refreshingly different was the quality of audience. Some very pertinent questions were asked, stimulating debates and discussions sparked and this post is to take forward thoughts around one such point of discussion.

One of the sessions that became a source of an interesting debate was a Marketing Master session by Wasim Bashir, Director – Integrated Marketing Communication, Coca-Cola India on the theme – “Digital Should Be Used Strategically, And Be Measurable”.  Bashir asked the audience why strategists/agencies/experts have yet not managed a new world formula for measuring ‘engagement’. Why are the old metrics being used to measure the impact of engagement? Through his presentation, he showcased some examples of campaigns by Coke, but highlighted how he as a marketer felt constrained by the old world digital metrics of impressions/views etc.

Many in the audience felt that there are relevant ways of measuring engagement, some one spoke about how time spent by the consumer is a fair indicator of his/her engagement level. I also believe there are ways of measuring engagement in a meaningful (but more about that a bit later).

As Bashir spoke about lack of metrics, I wondered about the paradox behind the situation. Marketers are busy people and to capture their attention you have got to show ‘impact’. ‘Impact’ traditionally has been always understood ‘how many’ than ‘who’ or ‘what’. So a marketer would probably say, ‘Look this is not worth my time, if this medium/concept does not deliver on a certain scale. Show me some hard numbers. Particularly how this deliver value as against television?’ And this is the beginning of the problem. With scale being the basic premise, the deliverable or the measure moves to critical mass and the discussion shifts to how many fans or followers. For good or for worse, social media for business has been understood as ‘yet another channel’ or a ‘direct channel’ for engaging with customers than a ‘fundamentally different way of engaging with your customers’. As a ‘channel’, it will continue to be measured by the old world metrics of views/eyeballs/impressions.

On the other hand, if social media was to be interpreted beyond just a media/channel, there will emerge some very interesting ways of measuring engagement. Measurement will always be a function of objectives identified, but roughly speaking here are ways how the quality of engagement can be measured in a meaningful way -

Level of Involvement – KD Paine, leading  social media research and  measurement specialist talks about 5 levels of engagement basis the level of involvement (See image). Brands could look at this at a simple level by understanding – active versus passive fans

Volume of user generated content – my colleague Rajesh had earlier done a post on how ‘Like’ or ‘Retweet’ buttons lead to dumbing down of engagement but enable social to gain scale. Having acknowledged that, it requires fair amount of ‘active’ participation by the community to generate original content. Hence the content generated by the community as against the content seeded by the brand can be a good measure of how closely engaged former are with the brand.

Sentiment – positive tone of comments, feedbacks, links etc – according to the findings of the Blogworks India Social Media Report Edition 1, feedback received from the community was among the top 5 measures used by marketers in India to measure success of their social media programme

Insights from the community – companies often use polls, surveys to generate insights from the community on topics/issues of interest (some of course also use to just show some ‘surface’ engagement on their page!). These can be very valuable in the co-creation process and is ofcourse a great indicator of how ‘engaged’ the community is with the brand.

These are just some measures that I could think of intuitively. What are the engagement measures that you use in the programmes for your brands and companies? Please do share your insights.

Finally, I want to reiterate that I am not contesting the importance of building a critical mass/certain scale. It in fact is a vital aspect of a social media programme. However, it needs to be understood as the starting point and not the final milestone in the journey of engagement.

Even Sholay starts with ‘Kitne Aadmi the, but does not end with it (remains memorable for a long part for that, but that’s a separate debate :) )

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