Measures of engagement - convincing the disconnected

Ever been asked for the ROI on social media by someone who actually uses it?

Just a thought, but I'm making a wild guess that those that use it understand its value in spades - and don't require the numbers. It's those that don't, who fret over each micro response - failing to see the bigger picture.

So your best strategy for getting someone to buy social media is to get them to buy-in to social media with a little DIY. I often recommend that everyone should blog, join a social network and build their own widget, for precisely that reason. Don't just witness the network. Be part of it. (image by burnblue via flickr)

Traditional media people and investors, for example, are happy to spend cash on TV ads, or interruptive online ads, or print ads. Because they get them. They understand that they are to be broadcast and consumed by audiences. And they are part of the audiences that do the consuming.

The other stuff - the clever, engaging (and we'll come back to that word in a bit) stuff is co-created within communities. And those that you want to part with their cash are not part of those communities.

Is it any surprise that Fred Wilson's outfit (Union Square Ventures) invests in socially engaging projects from twitter to disqus, del.icio.us, etsy, feedburner, tumblr and beyond. He lives in the social digital realm. He is therefore at an advantaged position to see the value. And Fred is famous for his hit rate. Maybe others could learn?

If you can't actually convince your would-be meal-ticket that they should blog, widgetise and generally get themselves connected before you pitch them, you face a tough gig. You'll have to play by their rules.

Luckily, we're finding a way to meet them halfway.

I tweeted yesterday: "Consumers value brands. Engaged people are valuable to brands".

ROI can't come down to increased traffic. Traffic is just eyeballs - it's just the page impression number. ROI has to get closer to and be more comfortable with the smaller, but more important numbers, of engagement.

For me, engagement with a community means you contribute something to it. Youtube's audience is valuable in a page impresssion sense. Youtube's contributors (particularly those forming groups, commenting and uploading video) have a much higher per capita value for youtube. (Total communities are ones in which to take part you must create part).

Enagagement should be measured by actions. All the rest is passive consumption.

Both have value of course. But what is the relative value? We feel engagement has higher value. Fred Wilson feels it well enough.

But where are the spreadsheets to convince the disconnected? SociallyMinded.co.uk colleague Matthew Brazil is working on exactly this with Radion6. I'm hoping to help him along the journey as is Dan and the organisers of Measurement Camp are striving for similar.

Matt is carefully testing the impact of using social media on actual business done for his consultancy.

That's exactly the kind of clincher the disconnected needs. And filling this hole may be just the blue touch paper required for more companies to get and use social media.

And as they do, they will become better - more fit for the networked world. More human. And that will be great for all of us - and for them..

So, if you have thoughts, any methodologies... post away!

And to try to get this rolling along and even more brains set workign on it, let's try it as a meme: Measures of Engagement.

John Carson has added his take.

I'll tag a first five to join in please: Alan, Dan, Joseph, Matt and Will

P2PR theory into practice

Bauer Media (the company I work for) has a neat social media play called ditto.net (I would say that, wouldn't I? I've had a light-touch advice-and-support role throughout).

It's a human sorting engine, enabling crowd-sourced entertainment ranking through the simplicity of voting on lists. For the full story, listen to Colin Kennedy.

Anyways, a couple of months back Community Marketing Manager Dan Thornton and myself got our heads together to think of ways we might spread the word about ditto.net (image by Thomas Hawk via flickr)

What we came up with was a list to rank 'The RockStars of Web2.0'.
(You can read Dan's take on all this here).

We figured the inhabitants of this list would be people equipped to discover it and either be sufficiently intrigued/excited/embarrassed by it to perhaps point it out to the many people in their own networks of trust.

They, like all of us, will only pass on what they think their network will think is cool. That's a basic principle for me for how brands can adapt to the networked world.

Rather than bung them all a basic press release, we stood out of the way so they could (at least in some cases) make the discovery themselves.

And in a recent meme (emerging after we started this) that discover-it-yourself approach to PR seems to ring the right bells with the likes of Scoble, Arrington and, most explicitly, Steve Rubel (Does the thrill of the chase make PR obsolete).

We hoped they might even investigate beyond the list they appeared on - more discovery of their own. We trusted they were bright enough to make their own decisions about this - they certainly didn't need us to either lead them by the hand or tell them what to do.

Some I did contact directly, using networks of trust I have built up over time. That's the more traditional side of PR in a networked context. But others discovered ditto through P2PR - friend-adapted-pass-on.

Dan and I both blogged and tweeted about the intitial gathering of the list. We hosted posts where our own networks could contribute suggestions before the list for ranking got created on ditto itself. That stirred a little initial buzz.

And when the list went live, he and I posted and tweeted again. We didn't take it, or ourselves too seriously. Neither did those we contacted directly in the good old fashioned way.

And one way or another the list, and ditto.net, got pointed to by and on Stowe Boyd's /Message (that one really was down to my personal network - I also blog at /message!), by Joseph Jaffe, Euan Semple, Jonathan Macdonald, Richard Millington and, today, by the legend that is Doc Searls.

(Dan's list is way more complete than my own).

And that's without tracking the twitter retweeting (of which there has been plenty) or other social sentiment measures.

Even Jason Calacanis has involved himself in a discussion about it - after discovering (there's that magic word again) that he's languishing at the bottom end of the list!

On each occasion, the conversation continued. And continues. This isn't a boom-bang flash-in-the-pan firework display, it's the release of a (spin-free, upfront) message to be spread in the way the adhoc communities of purpose who discover it choose to adopt and adapt it. It's up to them if they find it useful and how they find it useful.

P2PR is working right here, right now. We haven't done the marketing to them, they choose to do it to themselves.

From broadcast PR to P2PR

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: new networks)

What's next in media? The Dead Fish bounce...

Neil Perkin, who writes the very excellent Only Dead Fish and also does something at IPC, has been kind enough to credit this blog as one of the sources of inspiration for the presentation you can share below. Frankly to be placed alongside the likes of Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Joseph Jaffe, Jeff Jarvis, Mark Earls, Don Tapscott et al is the highest flattery I can think of. Consider me duly flattered... and not a little humbled.
Neil says: "...the story here is broader than just media and a lot of what I talk about applies to marketing and advertising as well. Unsurprising I suppose. After all, advertising is but a form of content, no? I hope you enjoy it."
Absolutely Neil: Ad as content, content as ad. And where they converge, you get a service.
Share this:

| View | Upload your own

Jaffe in person: Turning social networks into social reality

Who's that man? Joseph Jaffe who I had the pleasure of spending much of yesterday with. Joe was the keynote at the Digital Marketing Briefing, and I was there to present a couple of sessions, too (Power of the Network and why we should be more than witnesses to it).
Joe and I twittered and emailed beforehand - I'm one of the marketing team for his latest book (in that I've reviewed it).
And thanks to twitter we organised a tweet-up for other followers immediately after the DMB finished at 6pm.
I'm using twitter more and more. It's not only a fabulous multi-dimensional means of microblogging, it's also proving itself to be the most effective way of turning digital social media into social reality.
For example, none of the parties who came together for the tweet-up had met before. This kind of gathering is easy to organise on the fly with twitter (particularly if you're a mobile twitter user, too). Somehow twitter manages this more effectively than facebook.

During the morning I presented one session. In the afternoon I had another. In between I followed David Armano's mostly micky-taking tweets from the Adage conference in New York. And I took one of the examples he witnessed into my afternoon presentation. All of this achieved without a pc.

ie: I got relevant news to me filtered by a source I trust, faster than any other way I know.

The example that amused me, by the way, was of kiosks in Bloomingdales in which you can try on new clothes and send images of you in them to friends to get their view on which you should buy - kind of a changing room with cameras I guess...
Of course, that could just be a mobile app. Who needs a kiosk when you have a mobile phone... except perhaps you need someone to take the snap for you, but that really shouldn't be so tough. Social shopping is the big buzz at AdAge, apparently. Makes sense: social networks plus intent to buy - the missing link!

And talking of mobile. If you're interested in why it's going to be THE hot ad medium, Tomi Ahonen does a great job of pulling together the themes of permission, segmentation, co-created advertising, the whole ad-as-content thing. Enjoy it.

Anyone going to Digital Marketing Briefing?

I'm speaking at the Digital Marketing Briefing at Savoy Place in London tomorrow (March 19).
Joseph Jaffe is doing the keynote and I'm hoping we'll get some time to chew the cud.
If you're coming along, please seek me out to say hi.

Why I love twitter right now...

Another genius illustration from David Armano (via JaffeJuice)

Where does your personal facebook curve intersect your twitter one?

Perhaps the 'what was I thinking' timeline can be extended the more you enable the conversation.

I drew a picture of that. Not pretty, but a picture all the same...

Join the Conversation: Speaking as I find

I'm one of a number of bloggers Joseph Jaffe has sent his latest book, Join The Conversation, for review purposes. I've posted about the wisdom of this strategy previously, here. And I enjoy Jaffe's blog enormously.

I've just got back from hols - and I've read no-one else's review so far (which I feared could cloud or sway my own judgement) so this is entirely and deliberately my own response.

Let's start with the basics. Jaffe obviously thinks deeply about the notion of human voice and its multiplied effect when the power of the network is applied. And on the vast majority of themes, on the whole big picture thing, Jaffe and I will agree whole-heartedly (after all the tagline 'Join the Conversation' has always been applied to my blog from the off!). He is one of us, he is riding the Cluetrain, he understands the power of the network etc etc.

So, all that said, it's the details that I might get picky about. And as a former sub-editor, even poor use of metaphor or lazy english ("pretty unique", for example) can set my pen a-twitching.
As a European reader, the many illustrative examples of good and bad practice from US mainstream media are often lost on me. That can grate a little. I read my copy on a beach in St Lucia - so checking the references on the web as I went along was out of the question.

But these are just details.

Provocative or patronising?
Jaffe seems deliberately provocative at times - and this can result in a patronising tone... (depending, naturally, on your point of view). It was a tone that often got me riled.
For example on page 172 he refers to the Worst Chase Scenario in which a union advertised in a New York paper asking for consumers' worst experiences at a particular bank. Jaffe writes that he was disappointed that it wasn't the bank itself asking the question (me too!). And he says:
"I don't expect you to understand this idea - nor do I expect any company to implement this form of corporate nakedness anytime soon."
My response is that the argument that finding out the worst people think of you, engaging in conversation about it and trying to fix it is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto, Communities Dominate Brands, Wikinomics et al.
On page 216 he writes "I introduced the concept that you are the community you keep." I'm sure many of us have toyed with similar notions ( I know I have - I am part of a community therefore I am). Jaffe does a lot of this "I did this", "I introduced that". And that's bound to grate with less-than-pushy Brits.

I'll be honest. I haven't read a book that wound me up more regularly in a long time.

But perhaps this was the intention? Perhaps the tone will aid the conversation - a strong point of view will always inspire a hotter conversation, and isn't that Jaffe's whole point? So I'll grant him that. As a strategy for inspiring conversation, it is brilliant.

And when I analyse the regularity with which I get snarky about his writing there's more criticism scrawled over the pages in the first half of the book and more whoops of praise and shared view towards the end. He's building a case, winding you up and drawing you in, ready to end up on a high of mutual agreement and goading to action.

But I do have some substantive criticisms.

Conversation as science: The risk of codifying art.
Jaffe refers, quite correctly in my view, to conversation being an art (as in not a science). Yet he deploys elaborate and complex codifications of 'how to do' conversation in a measurable, transferrable way. I was reading The Origin of Wealth alongside Join The Conversation which served as an interesting mash-up in its own right. TOoW refers to art as knowledge which cannot be captured (in a schema) in any way.
Jaffe is trying to create some rules which anyone can apply - a schema if you like - and he's trying to find new measures of success. And our traditional company structures and budgets require these so I'll say a big thank you for trying but reserve judgement on their usefulness. Applying the wrong scientific thinking to a complex adaptive system can often lead us to incorrect and damaging conclusions (and I will recommend The Origin of Wealth to anyone who wants to explore that argument a little more thoroughly, where it is applied to classical economics).

On the money... almost
Some of Jaffe's examples are just shy of the mark. He wonders why MasterCard doesn't create a 'museum' (his word) for all the MasterCard "Priceless" spoof ads which circulate free and unbounded around the web. I fear a corporation doing that would be in danger of mummifying the idea. There's something of taxidermy about it. I guess my objection is summed up in this post which suggests brands should sit down around other people's campfires, rather than march in and light one in your backyard.

Another belittles Pontiac's suggestion that consumers "Don't take our word for it. Google "Pontiac" and discover for yourself."

Jaffe points out that those consumers who followed the instruction were confronted with ads for unrelated restaurants and rivals, rather than the positive PR the brand may have anticipated. He suggests that with a little more precision (read control) Pontiac could have been so much smarter.

Patronising? Perhaps Pontiac trusted consumers to be wise enough to know how google works and perhaps Pontiac also feared trying to control the search terms used would be against the spirit of the idea.

Isn't Pontiac saying, 'look we know loads of stuff is written about us. We figure we're good enough for there to be more positives than negatives - go take a look for yourself and use whatever terms you like.' ?

Am I crediting Pontiac with too much wisdom - or is Jaffe being too hard on them? Maybe we're both half right?

It's not just about selling stuff
My final critique is that despite an uplifting and over-arching final message "everything is at stake and everything is on the table" Jaffe consistently fixates on selling stuff to people.
This is quite a personal criticism. Jaffe's remit is of course to serve the world of marketing and to persuade traditional marketers of the error of their ways. And part of that is persuading them that life will be better for them should they see the light. And he achieves this in spades.
There is much value in this in the world as it is and as it may be for a couple of years more.
But for me the impact of the network, its power to disrupt what ever it touches, suggests that the message of engagement goes beyond joining 'consumers' (Jaffe's very deliberate term) in the co-creation of content/advertising, or even brand equity. It means that a new community-powered ecology emerges in which converged individuals are doing the co-creation of the very products and services. This very act is all the marketing a product ever needs. That which we create, we embrace... (Alan Moore, et al). I make this argument in rather more detail here.

In summary? (whaddya mean you stopped reading ages ago...)
Join The Conversation is a deliberately provocative, example-rich examination of the changing landscape of marketing being wrought by the high richter earthquakes of community dominance. It serves as a fine primer for marketing and media professionals and makes a good fist of offering some 'How To' advice on actually joining the conversation.
Those who've read The Cluetrain Manifesto and/or Communities Dominate Brands won't find too many new truths. But Jaffe's central themes are clearly presented and make a compelling case for change.

The blog of the book is available here.

I'm speaking at The Digital Marketing Briefing in London on March 18. Joseph is doing the keynote so I'm hoping he and I can continue the conversation his book has started and this review has contributed to, there.

You are very welcome to join in right now.

UPDATE; I note some bloggers are offering up their copy to the next blogger to share in the new marketing experiment. I've passed mine on to a colleague who writes a blog - but I haven't applied the Jaffe 'Thou Shalt Review' rule. I'll let you know should it inspire her enough to comment on it...

The proof of the new marketing is in the conversation

I'm a bit of a sucker for conversation (I even draw graphs). That, combined with the fact that I'm speaking alongside Joseph Jaffe at Digital Marketing Briefing in March has proved enough for me to join in an experiment Joseph is running to promote his latest book: Join the Conversation.
His idea is to try to prove his particular pudding by giving bloggers a taste (or Using New Marketing To Prove New Marketing... UNM2PNM if you must).

The idea is that bloggers tell Joseph they'd like a free copy and they get sent one. Deal is you write a review, good bad or indifferent.

The powerful play of course is that you only discover the offer if you already happen to be part of the community of purpose/interest. What I mean is, if I didn't read Joseph's blog - or got introduced to the idea via someone else I trust (or someone else's blog I trust) it's unlikely I'd know about the offer.

It's therefore likely Joseph's message will fall on receptive ears.

But that's not to say everything HAS to be rosey - after all bloggers can be an egotistical bunch and if they think they have better ideas and know where Joseph has it all wrong, they're going to say so. Hold me to that when I write my review!

What Joseph clearly appreciates is that informed debate of his ideas can do nothing but good for both his reputation and sales of his book. Upside - fawning advocates selling the book as hard as they can, worst case, savvy people granting Joseph the level of respect required to give serious consideration to his ideas. Even if they do end up rejecting them they introduce them to their own network of trust.

Is there anyone in new marketing who doesn't market their work this way?

I see just one potential fly in the ointment. The amazon affiliate link Joseph has asked reviewers to include points to the US Amazon site - which can put off many buying in other parts of the world or in other currencies. Pity, because Joseph is donating revenues earned in this way to charity.