Posts from — April 2008

What happens when good data is used the wrong way? The data gets all the blame, as seen in the latest round of finger pointing about ComScore and their reporting of Google click growth.

In February, when ComScore, a market research firm that tracks online marketing and advertising, published findings that found growth in Google’s paid click traffic was down significantly versus the prior year, Google’s stock fell into a steady decline, retreating almost 45% from its 52 week high.

However, when Google announced recently that its 1st quarter profits were up 31% versus the prior year, Google’s stock shot up, while ComScore’s own stock was pummeled. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt even made a veiled reference to “third party” data missing the boat when it came to predicting Google’s performance.

The problem was that what ComScore was measuring (Google’s paid click growth in the US) wasn’t matching what Google was reporting (global and third party paid click growth). According to Andrew Lipsman at Comscore:

“The main difference between the paid clicks trends reported by Google and comScore can be traced to the fact that the comScore paid click data cited in financial analysts’ reports (and subsequently reported by the media) are U.S. data only.”

Additionally, when you do an apple to apples comparison, the trends between ComScore and what Google reports itself are directionally the same:

Not surprisingly, the nuance of research data can generally be lost on the investment community.

However, just because data is used in a wrong way, doesn’t make the data wrong itself.

Social Knowledge Networks, as seen in something like Yahoo! Answers, are one of the fastest growing forms of Social Media on the web.

According to Hitwise Intelligence, these type of sites have seen visits growth of 889% since February of 2006. In their most basic form, these are community sites were users post questions and other users provide answers.

The reason for their success, according to Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, is because:

“Online users are increasingly seeking advice from question and answer websites that leverage shared knowledge contributed across a community of experts and enthusiasts. The popularity of user generated media has helped to establish a category for social knowledge where consumers can obtain answers from a single aggregated source developed through others asking similar questions.”

Social Knowledge Networks are all about Reciprocation, which is one of the core principles of Persuasive Social Media Marketing. And levering Social Knowledge as a form of engagement isn’t just being practiced by big portals such as Yahoo!. Other content sites, such as blogs, are also benefiting as well.

Jeff Lash, whose blog provides tips on best practices for product management at Good Product Manager, has recently launched a Q&A site at ask.goodproductmanager.com. He was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about why he launched his new site and how he feels about the initial reaction.

What were your reasons behind launching the Ask page for Good Product Manager?

Many readers of my blog How To Be A Good Product Manager would send emails asking for advice on product management questions and challenges. Ask A Good Product Manager was created as a way to answer more of these questions and share the answers with other product managers who have the same questions.

How has the feedback been on the new site? Is it doing what you planned?

Feedback has been very positive. It is designed to be a resource for the community, and people seem to appreciate that. We’ve been getting a good set of questions, and those who ask the questions appreciate that there is a way to get their problems answered. Those who have answered questions help promote the site, and they’re willing to contribute because they get something by “giving back” … and by getting some traffic to their blogs.

What advice would you give to someone who was considering developing a Q&A page for their own niche?

Leverage others to get the word out and to help contribute answers. Don’t try to make it too commercial. Position it as a genuine service to the community and you’ll reap the benefits. “Seed” the site with some answers before you launch it… don’t launch it if you don’t have any content — and make sure to have some content planned for after you launch, in case the submissions aren’t coming in as quickly (or as good) as you expected. Also have some people queued up to answer questions — don’t expect them to answer themselves!

By giving visitors something of value by providing a forum to answer their specific questions, the host site not only gains the strong engagement benefits of reciprocity, it can also help to establish the site as a strong authority site in its niche by becoming a resource that visitors will come back to again and again.

While Social Media Marketing has seen explosive growth, the tools and metrics necessary to measure the effectiveness of this new medium haven’t seen quite as much innovation.

In fact, the tools I’ve seen discussed are a lot of the same tools that marketers in Search have had success with.

Unfortunately, these tools generally lack the ability to capture the viral nature of programs and campaigns in Social Media.

The chart below is from a study by the Society for New Communications, entitled “New Media, New Influencers, and Implications for the Public Relations Profession” which asked a couple hundred industry professionals a series of questions about Social Media.

This is in response to a question about what Social Media metrics they found most important:

What struck me is that things like search rankings and visitor tracking are the only tools that are seen as being very effective. And I don’t think it is because they truly reflect the nuances of Social Media, it’s just that they are what people are used to measuring when it comes to digital media.

Jeremiah Owyang pointed out a potential measure on his blog that may be more appropriate, something he calls Velocity.

“Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget, or other like media spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy.”

He also gives the following example of Velocity in use:

• Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.
• Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.
• You can then look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

While the measure itself is very interesting, the challenge for most market researchers trying to work with this new measure will be capturing all the data necessary for analysis in an automated way.

However, at least it is a step towards measuring the concept of relevancy with a measure that is itself relevant.

William S. Burroughs once wrote “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts”. However, in today’s world of social media, networking, and blogging, tracking the facts behind what is being said about you, your company, or your website is not just about being a little paranoid, it can also make good business and personal sense as well.

Using two free services, Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists, you can develop an automated system to easily manage what’s being said about you, your blog, or your company site with minimal effort.

1.) If you haven’t registered yet with Technorati or claimed a blog, simply navigate to the main page and click on the word “Join” and fill out the brief form.

2.) Once you have an account, navigate to the Watchlist feature on Technorati (it’s hard to find if you don’t search for it) and add the following items to the “Add to Your Watchlist” box.

• The URL of your website
• The name of your website in quotes (e.g., “Insight Buzz”)
• Your name or online nickname in quotes. Add any derivation of your name that you may use online.
• Any company or brand name you want to track as well

3.) Once you have Watchlists that are tracking what you want them to, subscribe to them by clicking the orange RSS buttons.

4.) If you manage your feeds with Google Reader, put all your Watchlist feeds into a single folder. For more tips on managing feeds with Google Reader, you can check out my previous post on 10 Steps To Mastering Google Reader.

5.) Since Technorati is mostly focused on blogs, you will also want to set up some Google Alerts to cover mentions that happen in the broader Internet universe in areas like news or videos. The first step is to access the Google Alerts site.

6.) The nice thing about Google Alerts is that you don’t have to have a Google account. Having an account is useful, though, in managing a large number of alerts.

7.) You can then add the same info as you did for the Technorati Watchlists. If you’re worried about spam blogs scraping your website content, you can even add the following combinations, as suggested by RT Cunningham at Untwisted Vortex.

• link:http://yourwebsite.com
• link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
• Your Website
• YourWebsite
• yourwebsite.com
• www.yourwebsite.com

8.) I’d generally use the comprehensive setting with Google Alerts and set the alert timing to once a day.

9.) Oddly, Google Alerts only sends your alerts to an e-mail address, without an RSS option like Technorati (maybe that’s why it’s still called Beta). You can have all your alerts filtered into a e-mail folder, however, much like you can with Google Reader.

10.) With your online reputation now being automatically monitored, make sure you make adjustments as necessary to ensure you have the right search terms, especially if your terms are bringing in a lot of non-relevant hits.

For those who want to explore an even broader range of available reputation tracking services, Social Media Trader recently provided a wide list of applications that can track everything from keyword trends and comments, as well as conversations that take place on forums that Google doesn’t index.