Funny as this is, it’s almost analogous to how lost some companies are in approaching social media. I love it when Ben Stiller is whispering to his cousin “let me in, what is it makes you tick”. Brilliant.
Mashable asked last week if Social Media Jobs Here To Stay? That in many ways is like saying in 1999 are these web jobs here to stay, there is no doubt that social media in the broader sense is here to stay, some tools and social networks will disappear, but IMHO pandoras box is open, and no one will be able to close it. Anyway, the point being is that big companies are “getting” in, and even if they don’t have “social media” in the title more and more job descriptions are going to include “must be familiar with blogging” “facebook experience a plus” etc. Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s long list of Social Media Strategists. Anyway, case in point is this executive search that Wert & co. is doing:
Wert & Company, Inc
an international recruitment and consulting firm, conducting executive, senior searches for dynamic companies and organizations across a range of disciplines and industries, specializing in marketing, brand strategy, design and innovation.Wert & Company is seeking Digital Marketing Manager on behalf of one of the most celebrated, global design centric brands—to plan, develop and implement the effective (next stage) use of web-based technologies in support of their global business and marketing requirements. As the primary director, creator and evaluator of public-facing web channels, this person will bring new energy and perspectives to an already well established brand—to broaden the consultancy’s online presence, and foster more meaningful digital connections worldwide. As a member of the marketing communications team, this individual will collaborate with a small team of content generators to build a cohesive future-facing plan for the firm’s corporate websites as well as commerce sites and content portals.
Candidates must be champions of great design!
Lots of people have been talking about the right metrics for blogs and other kinds of social media for a couple of years now. It is in fact a desperate need in the blogging community because apart from the obvious ego-surfing, feedback and benchmarkeing is absolutely critical to managing and growing a blog. Also for anyone running a corporate blog, how do you show ROI and how do you show growth, progress, results? More to the point if you are managing a blog how do you provide the right metrics in place to drive the right behavior on the blog. The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure holds true, as does the idea that you only get what you measure, so you’d better be measuring the right thing 
Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.
Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.
Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.
Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.
Here’s how they calculated engagement:
(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)
I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?
Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.
Where is Chris Cocker when you need him, anyway, next time you are on the verge of another jibe at Twitters expense you should bare this in mind. We are the early adopters and some of us are also some of the heaviest users of twitter, some people have literally 10’s of thousands of followers. Some, who are weblebreties, post tweets that attract 30 to 40 responses to every 140 character gem of wisdom is dropped. From what I understand it is the number of @ messages that are makes Twitter a difficult technology to scale. When I see the Fail Whale I just come back later, like others i’ve become rather fond of it.
Being a mega early adopter means having to accept that sometimes things won’t run right. The guys at Twitter are building a technology that has never existed before, and they are doing it while everyone is using it. Talk about building a plane while flying it and transporting passengers, I wish them the best of luck.
Love the fail whale, check out the t-shirts.
Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.
I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”
Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:
I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.
So one of the things I genuinely love and couldn’t live without now on my N95 is the podcasting application (it’s actually a podcatcher, but lets not go there). What I love is that it aggregates the podcasts i like and can update them over wifi, this means I always have the latest episodes and always have something new and interesting to listed to on my phone. Now one of the biggest challenges I have is getting the podcast RSS feed in my phone, once you’ve manually typed out one RSS feed url like http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=13 you will be desperate for another way to get podcasts on your phone. Well here’s my workflow (this is dependent on you having the very useful google toolbar installed on your browser).
first get the podcasting application www.nokia.co.uk/podcasting
Sound arduous but it’s really fast with some practice and certainly quicker than trying to type out an RSS url
Some things I’d love to see in future podcasting applications:
These are the podcasts on my phone right now:
Oh, another feature for the podcasting app, the ability to publish my podcast list to the web, or email it to myself
What are you listening to?
Oh and if you didn’t know I do work for Nokia, but that’s not why I wrote this and I have no association with the group responsible for the Podcasting Application.
Here’s the location of the Edit key that unlocks the copy and paste function, but i’m sure you knew that
Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.
bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.
Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.
Oh, you can find me on Plurk here
UPDATE: Looks like Plurk is the new twitter… it’s down
This is a beautifully put together description of Social Media.
Interestingly Common Craft have also added a store so you can buy a higher quality version of the video that is licensed for use in the workplace.
Dealmaker Media have an upcoming Under The Radar event that aims to connect emerging innovative companies with VC’s and larger companies. You can register here and get $100 off. I went to the last one of these and met some really great people like Pete Cashmore from Mashable, Ted Rheingold founder of Dogster, some folks from Betaworks, Deborah Schultz and a lot of VC’s.
Social Media and Entertainment
June 3, 2008 | 8:00am – 6:00pm
Microsoft Campus | Mountain View, CA
Just Announced! The Fireside Chat…
Breaking Down the Door to Madison Avenue - Hear from R/GA, JWT, AKQA and GLAM MEDIA
PRESENTING COMPANIES:
33Across - Identifies influential online users
Animoto - Create personalized, professional-quality videos from images and music, offering a new alternative to traditional online photo slideshows
AudioMicro - Stock music and sound effects licensing platform
Aviary -Suite of web-based applications for people who create and a marketplace to sell that content
BigStage - Animate yourself with cutting-edge virtualization technology
Comedy.com - aggregated comedy entertainment site
CrowdSPRING - crowdsourcing of creative talent.
Curse - MMO gamer community.
Dizzywood - A virtual world that allows kids to dress up 3D avatars, play games, explore worlds and meet new friends in a safe environment
ffwd - Organized, multi-platform, video content delivered via a browser, with social network awareness, and predictive recommendations.
GumGum - A licensing and distribution platform for online content
Hollywood Interactive Group - A mass casual mmo based on reality TV concepts and Hollywood stardom.
Jacked - Browser-based “second screen” for TV viewers, which provides synchronized content and a real-time interactive experience that complements what they’re watching on TV
Jygy - Mobile social networking with SMS
Keibi - Moderation and classification of user generated content (UGC)
Kontagent - Next gen social analytics
Kosmix - Categorization engine that crawls billions of Web pages in a unique manner to create algo-generated home pages
Lil’Grams - Tracking your babies memories in real time.
Loomia - Social recommendations bridging established social networking sites with media websites
Loud3r - Aggregating and publishing semantically searched content
MediaForge - We’ve got widgets comin’ out our ads
Mochi Media - Provides independent game developers with analytics, distribution, tools and monetization while providing advertisers with turnkey opportunities to reach the one in three Internet users who play online games.
MovieSet - Platform that brings behind-the-scenes filmmaking online, giving fans authentic access through its proprietary toolkit for Producers.
Mytopia -Social gaming community for Web, Mobile, Smartphone and TV
Nesting - Organizing family activities; scheduling, networking and more
Overlay.tv - video commerce platform that overlays contextual information directly onto online video content
Pikum - A new kind of betting game
PluggedIn - Enjoy stunning, broadcast-quality music videos from your browser
PutPlace - Media storage all the way from Ireland
SocialMedia Networks - enables developers of social media applications to monetize their traffic
Sometrics - Social Analytics and Social Ad Platform
Verismo Networks – High quality video over broadband without a pc.
Vivaty - Brings together your friends, photos and videos into a personal virtual scene, in your browser
Vusion - HD Quality Video over the internet
Wetpaint - Wiki powered websites
Xumii - Take all your contacts from your social networks with you — on your phone!
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