Talk at ITP Summer Camp for Makers:
Secret tricks for learning about how stuff is made. Be a responsible maker: know where your stuff comes from, who makes it, how it affects the earth and the people that make and use it, how to use it best, and where it should go when it’s time for it to no longer be usable stuff. You’ll never look at making the same way again.
This is my third installment in a series I’m titling “The Measurement of Us” - measuring the impact of the time and attention we pay to social media in our lives, companies, and communities. In this post I dissect what is meant by “earned media.”
The social media sector is at a crossroads. Two competing mental models for what social networks can do for companies, brands and advertisers will shape how the social networks evolve, and how they will serve as a customers, socializers, and citizens.
The ClueTrainers - Building Social Selves
On the one hand is all of the social media gurus new and wizened who like to espouse the tenets of ClueTrain Manifesto (even if they weren’t born yet when the first edition was published 10 years ago) - markets are conversations. The ClueTrain philosophy for companies once corporate, monotone, and deadening - “1. Relax 2. Have a Sense of Humor 3. Find a Voice and Use It …” and the list goes on, sounding human, real, authentic. Social Media marketing and PR people talk about the ClueTrain strategy, which is to allow open access to everyone in your company who wants to use social media to do so, as long as they represent who they are and follow the policy. ClueTrain adopters are big believers in delivering excellent products and services, responsive customer service, and delightful customer experiences as a way to earn attention and respect.
Even though the original authors of ClueTrain have admitted that they were wrong about thesis number 74, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it,” today’s ClueTrain adopters tend to be much more critical of advertising-led social media marketing, and suspicious of efforts organized around short term campaigns, rather than longer term relationships. They are more excited about the potential for social media channels to plug into customer experience, to inform a crowdsourced method of innovation, to serve as a model for service delivery, or to change the way the whole company is organized.
The Advertising 2.0 Evangelists - Building Social Hooks
On the other hand is an emerging set of newcomers to the social sphere - marketers from traditional and digital advertising and PR who see a huge opportunity in gaining traction for their paid media campaigns. Ad 2.0 people include agency types in traditional media, client side on brand teams, and even in what is now traditional-digital media. Their intention is often genuine - to connect authentically with consumers - but the difference is that the Ad 2.0 crowd sees their purpose as spreading messages (primarily). For these marketers, social is exciting because of the potential to launch campaigns, and have people talk about them in their own social networks. I’m lumping in some of the PR social people into this camp who orchestrate buzz campaigns around product launches and company stories - in the form of tweets, youtube video views and followers. It’s the campaign that defines the efforts of the Ad 2.0 Evangelists.
It is called getting “social traction” and success is measured in the ability of a paid ad to go viral, be seeded successfully with influencers, get talked about in social media, and have a life of its own beyond paid media insertion orders. Case in point - the Whoopi Goldberg ad from Kimberly Clark, which “earned” an SNL skit and over 200 MM PR impressions for a talkative take on female incontinence. While ClueTrainers may laugh at this kind of commercial-generated buzz, the ad 2.0 crowd often succeeds where the ClueTrainers fail - in reaching a critical mass-sized audience needed to promote and sustain big brands. The less than 1% of marketing dollars siphoned off for social media are not likely to grow if the audience sizes remain too small (3k twitter followers, 8k Facebook likers) to be considered credible.
Earned Media is a Messy Metrics Problem
You start to see these two worlds collide in the messy space of earned media metrics if you spend time on the popular listening platforms like ScoutLabs or Radian6 The graphs look clean, but look closer and you will see one blip caused by a twitter contest, another from a successful PR-led product seeding effort, and yet another from a company product recall scandal, and this is all in the same month. Scale your view to a full year, and you’ll notice that people that talk about brands are not always customers, are not always positive, and are not easily classifiable as prospects or potential leads.
Some brands have started to employ their web analytics tools to the challenge of tracking earned media - tagging links and social ads with code to understand the click attribution model. Facebook has launched the beta version of their Conversion Tracking system which connects on-Facebook behavior like viewing ads, and forwarding to friends, to e-commerce shopping cart results. This method works for the ad 2.0 view of the world, but you will miss all of the company trust and reputation conversations if you only track messages and shopping cart orders (per my last post).
But Earned Media is Where We Can Move the Needle
Both ClueTrainers and Ad 2.0 social media practitioners will likely stick with their messy listening platforms. They will sift through all of the noise in order to find the signals. Because the most interesting part of social media is how the adoption of technology is shaping our culture, shifting our patterns of consumption, and changing our mindsets. We can only get to move the needle ideas if we’re quiet enough to hear what’s really going on.
Am I am Just a Shopping Cart to You?
This is my second installment in a series I’m titling “The Measurement of Us” - measuring the impact of the time and attention we pay to social media in our lives, companies, and communities. First I’ll take a look at the easiest things to measure - financial ROI.
Of course you can measure the ROI of any relationship. And you don’t have to change the acronym to stand for some weak sounding thing like “return on influence” or morph it into “return on relationships.” You simply measure the costs in, the return out, and do some algebra 101 with a discount factor to know if you’re winning or losing on your social media marketing investment, or if you should marry your future spouse.
Which gets to my main point – measuring ROI in transactional costs is possible, but does not tell you the whole story of value that you get from a relationship.
Relationships Measured in Cost Per Order
In starting this investigation, I have the luxury of looking at the many ways the 60+ clients at my company Drillteam and our parent and sister companies Powered, crayon, and StepChange. Most new clients show up with no measurement plans in place, and no effective way to track ROI. A few, however, have shared with us a metric that is popular in web 1.0 digital media marketing – using a last click method, or attribution model, to determine the cost per order.
What it is: A familiar metric for search engine and digital marketers, cost per order determines the cost of ads that lead to a completed sale.
There are two basic forms – last click, and cost per attribution.
Last click looks at the last site clicked that led to a sale, and assumes that the cost of the ad placed is the cost per order. Last click is worth looking at, however, because your customer may not have clicked an ad on a social net, they may have seen something in the friend’s or followers info stream, or may have been on a web 2.0 site that has no ad placement, like a user-generated community forum.
Cost per attribution was invented to overcome the inherent flaw in measuring the last ad clicked, whether that ad was a display ad, a social ad, or a keyword buy. Cost attribution technology has been developed to track beyond the last ad clicked in order to assign a percentage to the “team of ads” that results in a conversion. Innovative ad tracking providers have been testing methods that track not just ads, but potentially URLs and other forms of social media. ROI data then can show up as a cost per attribution (what did each ad cost, in relationship to the final action) and therefore a cost per order for each conversion.
Note you can use both of these methods to track cost per lead, or cost per action, not just what goes in the shopping cart, but I have only seen it used in companies with a major ecommerce offer.
Who uses it: Digitally-strong marketers, particularly those that invest heavily in SEO, digital agencies, SEO agencies, SEO-focused social media marketers.
Benefits: I’ve seen the cost per order model lately used as a way to start measuring social media ads in side-by-side comparison with other forms of digital marketing – particularly display and search. Essentially, they are measuring the efforts of 1.0 web marketing vs. 2.0. It also quickly gives more credibility to social marketing, which appears to be able to be tracked and measured with the same rigor as the rest of digital.
Challenges: Cost per order sees people as online shopping carts, and not much else. What’s missing? Everything outside the commerce path – people who promote the company in their own social networks, both prompted and unprompted by the company, customers who are loyal in offline purchase paths, and the overall sentiment in content that shows up in search queries that positively or negatively impacts the brand.
When to Recommend: Use this method for companies that have a strong ecommerce is a primary business driver, and to compare ads placed on social networks like Facebook to ads on web 1.0 sites. But make sure you have more holistic measurement plan in place so that you can understand why cost per order numbers are increasing or decreasing. Stay tuned for more ways to measure in future posts.
I’m starting a project I’m calling “The Measurement of Us” which tackles the problem of analytics, insights and measurement of organizations in the social media sphere. I’ll be looking at these basic questions:
What is the Social Impact of Social - specifically, is all of the time and attention we are increasingly devoting to social media efforts a force for good? Or not so good? Are they good for us as selfish individuals, promoting our personal brands? Or is there a larger collective good we are creating as we spend more time crafting and weaving our network of relationships online?
What is the ROI of Social Media - of course we can measure the ROI of social media, and I will outline this in my next post. We can measure the ROI of anything, even putting your pants on in the morning, because both the time a company spends on social media, and the decision of a person to wear or not wear pants, has a financial impact on the financial well being of the parties involved.
The underlying dynamic I’m investigating here is how large media-spending brands will start to value social media, and how this will impact, shape, and change the experiences of humans on mainstream and niche social networks, and how the second question affects the first.
This is a rare occasion in business to watch the funding and ongoing growth of “pre business model” services. The last time was Web 1.0, but having lived in the eye of the storm for both 1.0 and now 2.0, social seems to have more legs, because social tends to deliver on the 1.0 promise - sticky sticky eyeballs, fixed on a screen.
Think that mobile social apps are a waste of time and energy? What if you could use them to make the world a better place? Inhabitat took a look at mobile-based applications and systems designed to promote positive social good. Here are five rising social impact apps to watch.
The Extraordinaries Unable to fit volunteering into your jam-packed schedule, but you still want to contribute towards a cause? The Extraordinaries launched an app that breaks large scale volunteering efforts down into micro-tasks that you can complete, right on your smart phone, and now online. The app has a huge breadth of micro-volunteering opportunities. Anything from Big Cat Rescue – helping to catalogue animal rights abuses to The Sierra Club – helping to map trails in California. As one user expressed, “I love this app! When I feel like fiddling with my iPod I can make my playtime helpful to someone. No more wasted time! It’s a stellar example of using technology for social good.”
5 minute video involving several leaps of faith for the future of the internet of things. To be fair, one of the narrators at the end admits these are the baby step years for the internet of things.
Internet of Things defined as the point when data about things is greater than data about people.
You might be sending text messages, but the sidewalk you’re walking on has sensors, and the water mane and the bus and the trains - all of these independent systems have the potential to one day talk to each other, and autonomic-ly self-organize.
The smarter planet potential:
We try to get hopeful in this class, on the way to final presentations.
It’s not every day that we get to see a Federally-funded hack:
More of the story here if you want to make one yourself.
Op-Chart in the NYTimes on the weekend of the iPad launch - a lifecycle analysis of the iPad, timely for discussing the core element of analysis in LCA - the functional unit.
Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence and Gregory Norris, LCA software expert at Harvard authored the “chart” comparing e-readers. The authors compared the Kindle, the iPad and a book by determine the functional unit as the reading of 1 book, and measured the “payback” of how many books one would have to read on an e-reader to = the ecological impact of a regular non electronic book.
With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.
All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.
As an avid library user, even I find this conclusion smug. It makes me want to stop going to the library, and buy an iPad. The students also felt that this statement encouraged people even further to make the jump and buy an eReader, because 40-50 books seemed like a reasonable goal for someone buying such a device.
In class however we determined several other “functional units” of the iPad that were not analyzed in the LCA:
_Use of a bazillion non e-book apps.
_Listening to music.
_Watching hulu. Nope can’t do that because of the flash problem.
_Making art with digital fingerpainting apps.
And then we also identified more emotional/cultural uses that we would never be able to measure in an LCA:
_Showing off/bling status/class status.
_Give us ideas future world-saving (or at least world-distracting) apps we will build.
_Provide ideas for making SPIMES that would be materialized only on the iPad screen.
_Acquiring something to put in our Gucci bag designed specifically for the iPad.
And all of this points right to the limits of LCA. If you believe the device has the potential to change the culture for the better in the future (only 1/3 of students believed so), how do you account for the ecological impacts today?
Stakeholder management is an alternative to shareholder-based management, but shareholders are still at the table. In this class we look at the impact of shareholders on how things are made. Review of sources of competitive advantage, limits to growth theories, and emerging alternatives to the current organizational structures available. Social entrepreneurship, Coops, Conscious Capitalism discussed and debated.
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