MetzMash

Guest Post: Instant Crowded Room - Just Add Social Media

[The following is a guest post from SF BETA organizer and Zaptix CEO Christian Perry.]

One of the fascinating parts of Silicon Valley -- and an aspect that most people outside the culture miss -- is that the center of the digital world still does plenty of meeting and mingling in the meatspace.

I've been putting together tech events for more than a year -- some of them, including SF Beta and geekSessions, are among the most popular in the Bay Area. While I like to think that the quality of the events has a lot to do with their success, we owe a huge amount to the way we've used social media to spread the word and boost attendance.

For other enterprising event organizers, I present to you seven ways of using social media to build successful events.

1. Create Facebook Events: Every time someone says they're attending an event on Facebook, all their friends hear about it in the news feed. One of our recent events, a small chat on OpenSocial, got 131 RSVPs for a 50-person room, and we used NOTHING but a Facebook Event page to promote it.

2. Use Facebook Groups: A Facebook group gives you an installed base of fans who are eager to hear about your events. Unlike Events, your membership keeps growing; you don't need to start over each time.

3. Post on Upcoming.org: With the rising prominence of Facebook, Upcoming isn't the force that it used to be. Still, it's a great way to share your event with more people.

4. Build a web presence, preferably as a blog: We've  seen consistent traffic to all three of our major sites. I suggest using a blog format for your site -- it makes it easier to add updates and keep people engaged.

5. Incorporate social media: Did someone make a video of your event? Embed it! What about all those photos on Flickr? How about a Twitter stream? It's pretty easy to integrate all these things into your site, and it makes your events seem a lot more vibrant than just a static page with text.

6. Reach out to other social media creators: All those bloggers, photographers, and videographers need material to write about, photograph, and shoot. By reaching out to the social media community, you're almost guaranteed to start a conversation and raise awareness of your events.

7. Create events that don't suck:[ed. My fave!] Perhaps this goes without saying, but the better the event, the more likely all those blog posts and RSVPs will translate into warm bodies. Good weather doesn't hurt, either.

7 Types of Social Media For Your Wall

I was reading the introduction to Now Is Gone yesterday and decided to make a little diagram (using Skitch) diagramming Kami Watson Huyse's "7 Categories of Social Media." After looking it over, though, one of LaunchSquad's partners, Jason Mandell, suggested that it was really more like the "7 Categories of Consumer-Facing Social Media." I noticed that the list did omit social media application platforms (SNAPs) like Awareness, as well as their competitors like Ning. There are probably even 15 more SNAPs that I'm not mentioning here.

So, without further ado, here's the graphic. This is something that's totally iterative, and, in fact, I'm unsure  how many people know about sites like Todd And's Power 150 (sort of a marketing blog Techmeme), but here goes nothing.

If nothing else, this is something to laminate and put up on the wall when you want to think about social media, from the top down. To download it, just right-click and save the graphic. It looks cut-off here, but this is the best way to share it such that all of the text is large enough to be legible.

Back In The Saddle With Now Is Gone

Well, I just got back from Baja del Sur with Alie. We stayed at an amazing little place called Marina Sol. It's definitely worth a look if you're down that way. I came back to two cool packages on my desk: my new noise-canceling headphones and a copy of Geoff Livingston (and Brian Solis's) Now Is Gone.

Even though I have plenty of emails and client work to catch up on, I'm looking forward to tearing my way through Kami Watson Huyse's introduction, "Seven Categories of Social Media." The rest of my team at LaunchSquad would probably love to see a little graphical representation of this on our wall. Maybe your office could use one?

I'll post a full review of the book once I get through the whole thing over the next week or so. Congratulations to Brian and Geoff!

We Built This City On Bullshit Assessment Metrics

I remember it clearly, even though it was 22 years ago. It was Hannukah, 1985. There was one album I wanted more than anything: Starship's Knee Deep In The Hoopla. Lucky for me, my mom trekked down to Cal-dor and bought it for me.

Less than a year later, by late '86, I considered this album to be among the worst rock albums of all time (at the tender age of 9, no less!). How quickly my tastes changed, huh? I asked for Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet for Hannukah '86, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It just goes to show you that what may be accepted as totally rad one minute can often be seen as totally bullshit and useless about six months later. I think we're at that point in analytics and assessment metrics, when it comes to social media.

There's been so much talk lately in the blogs about "What are reliable assessment metrics?", especially when your brand is combining web strategy with social media strategy. I saw a pretty solid web analystics talk on Owyang's blog last week and it really got me thinking. People are trying to measure social media in this crazy 2002 mindset. Well, that'll work all right, assuming the last new album you bought was All That You Can't Leave Behind.

If your brand strategy has changed since '02, then we have to do a little breakdown right now. I wrote a post on Return On Participation the other day; that's one social media assessment metric. That post was a jumping-off point, but not even the be-all-end-all. The idea of this post is to separate out the metrics that aren't really meaningful in social media, versus the ones that are.

So, here's the 2002 toolset - these were the five types of assessment questions that were rockin' the house alongside QOTSA's Songs For The Deaf and Beck's Sea Change.  What I'm saying is, these were classics in their time, but things have evolved a bit since then.

• What are the most common paths to the most important pages on our brand's website?
• What keywords bring the most traffic to our brand's website from search engines?
• How many new users visit our site every month?
• How long are people spending on our website?
• How many visitors do we get from New York every month?

So, these old web metric questions (taken from a data mining book that actually came out this year) strive to confine the web experience by a few really narrow parameters:

• Time on site - How long do people stay?
  
• Common paths - How do they usually get here?
  
• Total traffic - How many people are here?
  
• New users per month - Are we still getting a lot of new people?
  
• Geographic distribution of Visitors - Where are people from?
  

Nowhere in these parameters is it even alluded to that the content on this site will be (1) delivering value to users (2) allowing them to react with the content on-site or (3) allowing them to engage with the content and do things with it - remix it, mash it, whatever they want to do with it. Oh, and here's the rub: most of this engagement isn't taking place on companies' websites - it's taking place on content websites, blogs, shopping websites, social networks and places that brands have little direct control and a high signal-to-noise ratio to bear.

An aside: you know, one of the reasons that I became such a huge fan of the Clash (about three and a half years after I got that crappy Starship record) is because they went from being an amazing punk band to being an amazing alt rock/funk band. And the reason that they did stuff like this is because they were brave enough to take things they loved, like hip-hop records, and turn them into things that no one would have imagined otherwise. Where do you think "The Magnificent Seven" came from? So here's the deal:

If your brand is making content that users can't engage with, then assess that interaction with the 2002 metrics.

If your brand is even trying to engage in social media, then you've got to change your assessment metrics, now.

Before we dive into the discrete metrics, let's talk about a new assessment philosophy. Every social media initiative involves working in a few different tools. Whether your brand is using wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, widgets or social networks, you've got to think of social media assessment metrics as a mesh or a grid. You're evaluating based on these questions, which are intertwined with one another:

1. How engaged are people with each of these tools? Do they come back a second time to use any of these tools?
2. Do people agree that the content that our brand is delivering is content that delivers utility to them?
3. Are conversations started as a result of these tools? Do we have proof that these conversations are started? Can we follow them?
   

If you're expecting a 2002-style "conversion" based on a user using one of these tools (e.g. joining the WalMart Facebook Group), you're dead wrong. No one is going to run out and buy a six-pack of Busch Lite because they saw that your brand started a social network. Even most Busch Lite drinkers aren't that stupid.

But, the next time they're at the liquor store, deciding between Busch Lite and the beer that doesn't let them engage with their product, they might just pick Busch Lite. Maybe. It depends on how well you engaged them.

Tomorrow, we get into the discrete metrics on a per-tool basis, that will allow you to answer these three critical questions, so you can connect social media assessment to goals that create business value for your brand.

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Part two of this post will go up on Tuesday or Wednesday and then we'll be having some guest authors while I'm down in Mexico for the week. Any videos mentioned on MetzMash, from here on out, will be archived on the MetzMash YouTube widget, down there on the right-hand side of the blog. Also, big thanks to the Oakland Public Library's Terrence Egan and the Netlibrary in the creation of this post. While it's cool to get the first chapter of a book from Amazon, it's a helluva lot cooler to get the whole damn thing with your tax dollars from the Netlibrary.

Weekend Reading For Brand Managers, Pt.II

Here are a few posts to bring you up to speed in SMB social media. I've also tagged these as "metzmash" and "linklove" in Diigo. Everything should be cross-posted to my del.icio.us too, because Diigo exports all bookmarks (if you allow it to).

1. Enterprise Guide To Microblogging - I picked this one up from Jeremiah Owyang's rad blog. He may just call it a web strategy blog, but this guy knows social media really, really well.

2. Cleaning up your del.icio.us - Take a moment today to login to your del.icio.us account and look at the stuff that you've bookmarked publicly. I know a lot of people that have accidentally bookmarked stuff as public that they didn't intend to (Basecamp pages, etc.). Take 10 minutes and clean your stuff up. You may find that your browser has bookmarked some stuff that you're not so fond of sharing.

3. Utterz - It's a company that my buddy Chris Heuer is working with. They allow you to mobile-blog from your phone, and once you hook it up to your blog, it makes really quick, easy audio-blogging possible. So far, so good.

Saturday Afternoon: Week Round-Up

Mobile post sent by adammetz using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Pour Some Social Media Crisis Plan On Me

Most of the brands that read this blog will never experience anything even remotely on the level of 1982 Tylenol Cyanide tampering scandal  or even the recent Mattel Chinese toy recall of the past summer. That said, crises exist on different levels for different brands. For example, I use the Basecamp software service to help my clients manage the workflow of their blog comments. Since it's a SAAS (software as a service) offering, when it stops working, that's bad.

This past Monday, Basecamp went down for a couple of hours due to a traffic accident (a truck drove into a transformer, causing a "power event" at their main provider's data center in Dallas.)  37Signals copious and immediate response to this incident was totally textbook because they:

• Were totally transparent about what was causing a problem for their customers;
• Responded immediately to the problem;
• Allowed customers to talk back and exchange information and stories with one another, allowing the situation to be personalized, and
• Made sure every single customer knew about this incident by putting it front-and-center in their product and on their website the very next day.

Messages like this one from Dylan, a British Basecamp customer, were typical of the customer responses:

          "Shit happens but its the way you deal with it that makes the difference.

I really respect the way you guys provided a clear, concise reason why it happened without any blame-mongering or excuses but a commitment to move forward and get even better,

This is in start [sic.] contrast to several big corporates who have f*ed up my services lately but tried to pass the buck, not apologise and generally develop very slopey shoulders when it comes to accountability.

You’ve turned a potentially damaging incident into something that once again makes me smile at your level of professionalism compared to the big guys who are in the stone age when it comes to good service. Well done.

Hope no-one was seriously hurt. Dylan"

Well, this sounds great and all, but you need to have a toolset in place to do this when shit really does hit the fan. Outlined below are the social media tools that you'll want have in place in order to take your conventional crisis plan and execute in a social media toolset.

If you can answer the five questions below, then you've got a solid way to do social media outreach in a crisis situation. Stick to the four core plan objectives listed above, once you get these tools in place. They're listed in order of execution. Should a crisis occur, execute in this order.

1. Your blog and existing videoblog platforms- Do you have a blog? Do you have a $1000-2000 HD video camera? If not, make one and get one, respectively. Have a blog, if only to give monthly news updates and to save for the crisis that might occur every hundred years or so. I know that certain brands (financial consulting, etc.) may say they have no reason to blog. Well, this is the only reason that holds up against that statement. Twenty-five years ago, Tylenol CEO James Burke had to go on television and news conferences explaining the situation for why his company's product killed seven people and what they were doing about it, but his reach and coverage were at the mercy of the television networks. Today, your brand needn't play by those rules, as long as you're prepared. If you need to, get on YouTube, and explain exactly what is going on, immediately.
2. Micro-blogs - Numerous brands have reached out over their established microblog infrastructure to tell people what was going on during a crisis. Do you have a Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce platform to do this on?
3. Blogger relations - Do you have the phone numbers and emails of all of the bloggers that are currently writing about your brand? They won't mind if you wake them up in the middle of the night if they're your only pipeline to reach out to customers affected by a crisis. However, this is not an ideal strategy, and should only be used if the first two are  unavailable. Do all of your communications people know how to search within blogs for mentions of your brand's name? You can't make blog comments if you don't know where the conversation is. Get your team trained.
4. Social networks - Are your customers connected to you in the social graph? If you are touching them in social networks, you can message them there, en masse. Only use this kind of in-network email blast in a crisis situation. If you have discreet customer groups within the networks (like Facebook groups), reach out to them, and let them ask questions and answer them publicly.
5. Customer email - This is a last resort, but it's still a helluva lot better than saying nothing. Do you have an email list that will allow you to reach all customers, fast?

Tomorrow, we get back to social media assessment metrics and how to sell this stuff to the rest of the company.

Continuing the Social Media ROP Conversation

Some days, it makes more sense to talk on somebody else's blog.

Maggie K. Fox over at Social Media Group wrote a really interesting post on ROI/ROP, so I replied to her post over there.

Utterz: Useful in Some Situations

Assessing ROP (Return on Participation) and the DemoGOM

Every social proposal that I write is tied to, usually, just one business metric. When you walk into a CMO or a PR Manager's office at a large brand, the first thing that they're going to tell you is, "A lot of our people have serious doubts about the business value of social media."

If they're speaking about the cultural values of their organization, they're right, no matter what you think. That's their reality. And if you want to sell them on social media, you've got to live in that reality.

What they're looking for, to justify any social media spend in the C-suite, is ROI. And you've got to tell them, right up front, that you can't show ROI, yet. Social media, for better or for worse, is likely in the second year of a ten year growth curve that should probably shake itself into a more standardized business practice model (a la direct marketing in the '60s or public relations in the '70s). But these businesses need help now. The way that they're communicating with their network of stakeholders (prospects, customers, media) is not working.

What you can show them is ROP. (That link from Brian Solis's PR 2.0 gives a pretty healthy rundown of the minute differences between ROP and ROI.) I'm going to try to delineate the big picture differences between the two here, and give a concrete example.

ROP (return on participation) is what your brand gets in exchange for participating in social media. To put this in a more realistic setting, let's examine a brand whose social media approach goes beyond blogging alone. Let's look at  my second-favorite home-products vendor, Target. (Sorry, but Costco takes first prize. You know, living wages and all...)

Revolutionary, Target is not.  I remember reading something  a couple of years ago about Target where they said that blogging was not in line with their company's values. Whatever. They seem to have picked up the ball since then, beginning with a Facebook initiative (led by AKQA). Their first steps into social media looked like this:

• A marketing campaign that existed in-network only (within Facebook) that leveraged the  existing platform
• The campaign allowed students to tell a story and personalize the content
• There was no pre-existing entity within the network (Facebook) that boasted the same premise for social interaction (a dorm survival guide) AND delivered utilitarian content (recipes based on dorm-fridge food, furniture-preference-based personality quizzes and other seriously engaging stuff for 18-year-olds)

I don't have the figures on what the AKQA engagement cost Target, but if I had to guess, I'd ballpark it at $100k-500k. For the sake of argument, let's call that number  $300,000.

According to AdWeek,  the micro-site attracted "7176 members, 409 photos, 483 posts  and 37 discussion groups." To reduce that data in a "ROI" way, you could say that for every $41 spent on this campaign, Target acquired one "touch," and that "touch" had about a 1-in-20 chance of really interacting with the campaign, based on the amount of photos and posts. But this type of analysis is freakin' wrong. And here's why:

• You can't boil a social media engagement down to a one-time, one-touch interaction. This is part of an ongoing conversation.
• It's totally nuts for a brand to pay $41 to engage with a prospective customer that is likely already a customer. These aren't customers. These are real people, and at this stage in the game, they're influencers to you, buddy.

To really calculate the ROP in this situation, you've got to figure out a few things:

1. Does the fact that these people are engaging with Target report out to their social graph in any way? Are they telling their friends? Does the network allow for this kind of reporting out? (Myspace doesn't.)
   
2. If so, how many people are in the aggregate social graph of these influencers, collectively? (BTW, that's where your $300k plus the opportunity cost of this initiative  went.) I'd guess that number  is somewhere around 538,200 people. This is based on the stat that the average Facebook user has 150 friends. And yes you've got to dilute this number to account for social graph overlap. We'll do that below - that's called the DemoGOM.
    
3. Of the people in this person's social graph, how many will be influenced and will engage with your brand as a result of seeing the influencers' activity? (Is your application viral?)
4. If you're going to say that because your application is viral that it engages more people, then  you must simultaneously account for the people in the social graph that you alienate with your brand-related intrusion. For example, the shitty McDonalds campaign in my newsfeed made me not only avoid McDonalds like I always do, but I also emailed a few dozen people to tell them how much McDonalds sucked because they targeted me with their "chatter". Let's call this figure the SGAM, the social graph alienation multiplier. As in,"The creative was good, but the SGAM killed the WalMart engagement." Better luck next time, Bentonville.

Well, if you can answer those three questions, and you know the total number of man-hours (opportunity cost) and dollars that go into this kind of engagement, then you can calculate ROP.

And you can't calculate that without knowing the DemoGOM. 

The DemoGOM is a demographically stratified Graph Overlap Multiplier. (You're thinking - WTF - just stay with me here, okay?)

My wife Alie has about 100 friends on Facebook, and so do I. The odds that one of her friends is one of my friends is about .5 (50%). However, people in different age groups(14-18, 18-22, 22-25, 25-30, etc.) who live in different environments (small rural high school, large urban dorm, etc.) will have different DemoGOMs.

For example, two high school freshmen in the same class in Northampton, Massachusetts will likely have a DemoGOM of close to 1.0. Two social media hyperconnectors like Chris Heuer and Shel Israel will likely have a DemoGOM of something more like 0.1 (10%), because they're both connected to a lot of people, and there's a slight disparity in their ages.

If you can't calculate the DemoGOM for the network in which your social media engagement takes place in, then you're going to have a lot of trouble accounting for how many people are engaged.

So, to sum things up, here are the critical differences between ROI and ROP:

1. ROP accounts for opportunity cost of using social media versus other methods of outreach. ROI simply measures outreach spend against sales.
2. ROP attempts to account for the SGAM (social graph alienation multiplier) to figure out the cost of your targeting (or lack thereof, since it's a cost).
3. The end goal in monitoring ROP is (1) awareness and the (2) creation of new conversational streams and viral memes. If those two things don't lead to the sales that the C-suite desires, then your brand may have a problem that social media just can't solve.