MetzMash

Social Application Best Practices Study: Loladex

I don't typically look at discrete social network applications from an end-user point of view, but after watching Joshua Porter's excellent presentation on social application design yesterday at the SNAP 2.0 Summit, I feel compelled to illustrate some best practices (and not so great ones too).

When I found out that AOL veteran Laurence Hooper was coming out with Loladex, I decided to check it out. (How many ex-AOLers are involved in some new type of vertical search?!) Loladex strives to one-up Yelp, within social network application platforms (e.g. Facebook), offering local search and socialized recommendations for restaurants, nightclubs, veterinarians and other consumer services.

So, here's what they're doing right (best practices):

• They're blogging from the get-go. And tweeting. That helps. As long as they keep it up.
• The application tells people where they rank within all Loladex raters; this sense of friendly competition encourages application use.
• Staying local; they're striving to achieve kick-ass competency in their local market (Washington D.C.) before trying to take over the rest of the nation. If other social network platform apps tried to geo-target their user base, they might have better luck achieving sustainable early membership.
• Variable trust feature: apps that leverage the social graph don't always account for varying levels of trust. Let's face it: you don't value all of your friends' opinions equally, right?
• Solid map mash-ups and Netflix-style solicitations (e.g. "Do you know a good storage company?") to encourage users to contribute content.

Here's what they need to work on:

• Blogging with a generic Wordpress template? C'mon, guys. Take an extra hour to customize a CSS stylesheet.
• Viral coefficient: How do they expect this application to become viral? Aside from asking people to invite their friends in order to improve results, they need to find another way to leverage the content to encourage sharing. If they're not accounting for attrition and there's no virality plan here, the app won't be sustainable.
  
• Opentable reviews: Why? No one goes to that property for reviews. I barely even go there for dinner reservations.
• Personal value does not yet precede network value: The current library of content will not draw users to the site for a few more weeks, unless  they live in the D.C. area; possibly it would have been better to wait a few months before doing national outreach. Why not, instead brief every social media writer/blogger within 50 miles of Washington D.C.?

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Coming tomorrow: My wrap-up of actionable news from the SNAP 2.0 Summit and my colleague Tessa Greenwood's notes on the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives Social Networking conference.

Yahoo Buzz: Bigger Than Digg In A Week? Geez

Normally, I'd pooh-pooh any service that claims to be bigger than Digg after only a couple weeks of use, but that appears to be the deal with Yahoo Buzz. And it's such a bummer to me, too, because I finally got the chance to chat a bit with Kevin Rose at the Digg Party at SXSW last week. Just when I feel like the big Digger himself is listening to my suggestions (live bands on Diggnation, live shows from Vancouver, etc.), I feel like Yahoo's trying to pull the rug out from under him, with none of Digg's culture or sense of humor.

A lot of people have heard of a Diggstorm -  when a torrent of traffic is suddenly unleashed upon a site due to its inclusion on Digg - and a Buzzstorm, the effects of Yahoo's 200-400M+ users landing on a single site with little advance warning, seems to have devastating effects as well. For a little perspective,  check out the graphic above (courtesy of Compete). On a given day, it's possible that a Buzzstorm could be 5-6x as strong as a Diggstorm, not accounting for day-to-day variances.

Yahoo's Buzz algorithm seems to be a bit more varied in its sources than Digg's, and it includes:

• User votes
• Search result tallies
• Number of times a story is emailed out from Buzz
• Some other weird hocus-pocus that will doubtlessly be debated ad nauseum in the blogosphere

Don't get me wrong, I plan on checking out the Buzz, to periodically assess it's value, but if you see me walking down the street looking into my iPhone, I'm on Digg, where people know me better as DryCleaningRulz.

The Evolution of Consumer Communities = 24 Years of My Record Shopping

Here's a 10-minute journal-style entry of how I've shopped for music, roughly every six years, since I started buying albums, in relation to the social graph and different media. Here's how the media breaks down:

• The Cassette Years (1984-1996)
• The CD Years (1988-2008)
• Mp3 Downloads (2002-2008)
• Mp3 Streaming (2007-      )

1984: I ask my mom if she can purchase me cassette tapes at the local Cal-dor that I have read about in magazines like Hit Parader.

1990: My cool 30-year-old cousin Rich clues me into cool bands, and I read Tower Records' Pulse magazine to learn about new ones. Nearly all of my shopping takes place at the local Tower Records.

1996: I read about bands in CMJ Magazine and  hear about them from friends in my dorm. I buy the CDs and records at local record stores like the Exclusive Company in Madison, Wisconsin. Sometimes, I'll go on SPIN Magazine's nascent web site to check out bands.

2002: I check out bands on sites like mp3.com and in magazines like Rolling Stone and purchase CDs and records at my local Chicagoland record stores. I make my first iTunes purchase this year, noting that other users are making iMixes (playlists).

2008: I go to music stores and write down interesting album titles on my iPhone. I discuss them with friends on email, chat and Facebook. I stream the albums from Rhapsody, and pay $13/month for the service. I have not paid money for any CDs or discrete downloads in 2008, so far.

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.