Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype

Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.

For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.

But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.

At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.

You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 3)

by Matthew Lees

The first post in this series laid out the question and noted some important similarities between internally facing and externally facing communities. The second post discussed key differences between such communities.

This third piece looks at employee and customer communities from the perspective of the vendors that provide tools, technologies, and services to organizations that sponsor online communities.

The Vendor Perspective
In one of my semi-annual industry reports (“Online Community Platform Company and Product Update – 1H 2008”), I wrote the following:

“2. Blurring of External vs. Internal Communities. Our focus at the Patricia Seybold Group is on enabling those who engage with companies from the “outside,” so we tend to be more interested in systems that support external communities of customers and/or business partners. This is not a clear delineation, though, as Web 2.0—social networking in particular—hits the enterprise. But as advocates of customer-centric approaches to business, we are sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the “us vs. them” mentality (with employees as “us” and everyone else as “them”), and toward a more group- or stakeholder-based approach, with customers and partners simply being another group of stakeholders. It’s happening slowly, but internal systems are being opened up to allow appropriate access to customers and partners. And community platform vendors are leading this trend; half of the companies we cover have products specifically developed for combined internal and external collaboration.”

That was written in August 2008. Many of the vendors I cover still offer products to support both employee and customer communities. Here’s a breakdown of some of the companies:

Technology Solutions for External Communities
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies – Social CRM
•    LiveWorld – Community Center
•    Pluck
•    Powered – Social Marketing Platform
•    RightNow – RightNow Social Experience

Technology Solutions for Internal and External Communities
•    Blogtronix – Blogtronix Enterprise, Blogtronix Community
•    Ingeniux – Cartella
•    Jive Software – Social Business Software (SBS)
•    KickApps
•    Leverage Software
•    Mzinga – OmniSocial
•    Small World Labs
•    Telligent – Telligent Enterprise, Telligent Community

(There are a great many technology vendors that provide tools and services for supporting internal communities only. My fluency with these platforms is more limited, although some well known products are Atlassian Confluence, IBM/Lotus Connections, and Socialtext.)

One Foot in Both Camps
The vendors that provide solutions for internal and external communities have a foot in both camps. That gives them a larger potential customer base, but it also hampers their ability to excel in one area. So, while I am still “sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” I’m not convinced this is the best long-term approach. I see three main reasons as to why:

•    Corporate Bandwidth. None of these vendors is in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 range. They’re all relatively small companies doing cutting edge stuff, mind you, but they don’t have the deep pockets to be able to do everything they want to…and do them all well.
•    Marketing and Sales Strategies. In a nutshell, they’re selling to different people in different business units. Convincing the CIO and the head of HR to sign with you takes different materials, case studies, and ROI analysis than selling to the CMO, the head of customer service, or the chief of R&D.
•    Development Efforts. Developing software for different use cases is a challenge. These vendors no doubt receive feature requests from customers of their internal and external products; many of these requests likely overlap, but many likely don’t. Desired integrations have similarities and differences, too; integrating with social Web applications (e.g., Twitter and blogs) may be wanted by both camps, but those managing internal communities may ask for integrations with ERP, accounting, and scheduling systems, while those managing external communities may need integrations with CMS and CRM systems. Deciding on the direction of developmental efforts is a tough enough call when you’re serving just one market, let alone two.

To some degree, online communities are online communities. But vendors with one foot in the internal community camp and one foot in the external community camp have more challenging strategic decisions than those focusing in one area. Things are pretty good now for all vendors, as the world of social technology continues to blossom. Within the next year or two, though, I expect to see some changes, such as re-jiggering product lines, acquisitions, and consolidation.

Next
The final post in this series looks at Internal/Employee and External/Customer communities from the perspective of the people charged with managing and ensuring their success.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 2)

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 of this topic framed the question of whether internal/employee communities and external/customer communities can potentially converge, and be managed via one group of people using one (pretty darn robust) technology platform.

My “Idealistic Answer” to this question was “Yes.” In the ideal customer-centric organization, the walls separating inside and outside would be more permeable than rigid, with customers being involved (as appropriate and as warranted) with a great many aspects of what the organization is doing across business units.

We live, however, in the real world…

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Pragmatic Answer: No
While the walls that separate inside from outside may be coming down, the internal walls are seemingly as strong as ever. It’s hard to get those silos to tilt, let alone fall.

The unfulfilled promise of CRM is a good analogy here. Remember when “the 360-degree view of the customer” was all the rage? In theory, it was a great idea…have everyone in your organization working off the same system and the same data. Companies will benefit from the streamlined technologies and centralized resources (sound familiar?), while customers will benefit from more relevant marketing communications and offers, and from better-informed support reps who can provide improved service. This isn’t how things panned out, of course, largely because of the way that organizations are structured and operate.

So, in addition to the similarities discussed in the previous post, there are vast differences between internal and external communities, including:

1. Business Goals, Use Cases, and KPIs – While there is some overlap, the business goals are largely different (as are the Key Performance Indicators that measure them)…Employee communities are often looking to increase productivity, information sharing, knowledge retention (keep expertise within the organization), and employee satisfaction, while reducing, for example, the costs of system administration and training. Customer communities are often looking to positively impact the organization’s brand, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, generate awareness, get more people in the sales pipeline (especially for B2B communities), increase direct and indirect sales (upsell and cross-sell), reduce costs through deflected service and support incidents,  and leverage customer-led innovation throughout the organization. Whew.
2. Business Units and Business Owners – The differences in business goals stem from the fact that different business owners head up these communities. Employee communities tend to fall within HR, IT, or Administration/Operations, while customer communities tend to fall within Service & Support, Marketing, or Product Development/R&D. As was the case with CRM, it’s rare that these business units are aligned in terms of needs, process, and technology.
3. Social Dynamics – The social dynamics between employee communities and customer communities are more different than they are alike. Both types of communities do rely on a core set of enthusiasts/influencers who handle a lot of the heavy lifting, but the reasons and motivations for participating in each vary. People act and interact differently when they wear different hats; in an internal community you’re wearing an employee hat, with all the good stuff and all the baggage that goes with it. (Think organizational politics; how candid are you going to be if you know your boss – and HR – are listening.) You’re potentially more anonymous in an external community wearing a customer hat, where, for most of us, the stakes are lower.

So What?
In the upcoming Part 3 — yes, there’s a Part 3 — we’ll explore what this means for both technology vendors that provide social tools, and for those practitioners tasked with managing employee and/or customer communities.

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“Calling a Tail a Leg Doesn’t Make it So” – A Lesson in Roles and Responsibilities from Abraham Lincoln

by Matthew Lees

One of my favorite collections of anecdotes is called “That Brings to Mind.” Full of humorous and poignant quips, most a page or less in length, the book was compiled by R.L. Marquard way back in 1975. Many of the tales are likely apocryphal, but they are timeless. It contains a wealth of fodder, then, for presentations, speeches, toasts…and blog posts.

Here’s one that was brought to my mind based on recent briefings and conversations with companies I cover as an online community and social media analyst.

The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was asked by a congressman why he hadn’t freed the slaves earlier in his term of office.

Lincoln replied that the time had not been right; he wouldn’t have been able to enforce the proclamation.  The congressman was puzzles and didn’t understand what the president meant.

Lincoln explained with a question, “How many legs will a sheep have, if you call the tail a leg?”

“Five,” responded the congressman.

“Not so,” said Lincoln wisely.  “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.”

From Project Manager to Client Success Manager
Several vendors on my watch list have employees with the job title “Client Success Manager.” It has a hipper ring to it than “Account Manager,” and probably makes clients feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that someone on the vendor side is looking out for their interests.

Most of these technology and service providers train their CSMs to be effective at their core responsibility, which is to make sure that their clients’ communities meet with success (which means, therefore, from a purely business perspective, that the clients will continue to engage the services and systems provided by the vendor).

One company I follow, though, recently created the title and bestowed it upon two community project managers, without any supplemental training, access to relevant materials, or substantive change to their schedules and other commitments.

These two individuals are definitely good at what they do, but their experience has really been in getting to launch, not in what happens afterwards. They know their technology platforms inside and out (good tech chops), they know how to work with both clients and colleagues (good people and communication skills), and they know how to identify potential roadblocks and how to keep things on schedule (good organizational skills).

But they don’t have much understanding of the community arc; how things should ideally function after the community goes live. They know what the key metrics are, but only in theory, not in practice. They don’t really know how to advise clients if, say, the registration rate of a new community starts to drop, or if important influencers drop off the radar.

Without some training or resources to help them help their clients, it’s going to be a rough road ahead, particularly in the crucial first six months after new communities launch. Because they’re sharp cookies, they’ll eventually become solid CSMs. (They also work well together, so they’ll help each other learn the ropes.)

What Client Success Managers Need to Be Successful
They’re in for some challenges, though, largely because the company gave them new titles without giving them two other essential ingredients:

1. Understanding of community best practices, particularly around moderating and managing communities, the social dynamics within communities (super users, reputation systems), organizational issues such as internal communication, how to connect community success to business success, and more.
2. Time to be proactive. Built into CSM’s job descriptions and schedules should be the regular assessment of client communities they’re responsible for. They can’t just wait for their client contact to raise issues. They should be reading reports, watching the metrics, and keeping an eye on things, ready to provide guidance when it’s needed.

Their company could suffer as a consequence, because if the community doesn’t gain traction, the chances for a license renewal (or further professional services) are unlikely.

Takeaways
If you’re a technology or service provider, make sure you do more than give someone a new title. If you’re committed to the success of your clients, make sure your CSMs have the training, tools, and time they’ll need to do great work…for your clients and for you.

And if you’re evaluating technology vendors, consulting groups, or agencies to help with your online community, ask about the people who will be working with you to ensure the project’s success. They should have not only good technology, communication, and project management skills, but also experience in helping you successfully navigate the development, launch, and growth of the community.

To paraphrase Lincoln, calling a project manager a client success manager doesn’t make it so.

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Social Business Summit 2010- Looking at the Big Picture

Image by Worldle.net

The Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin has come to an end. Like many conferences, it featured a variety of dynamic speakers providing their view on the topic at hand whether it was macro trends or the specifics of their experiences. But what comes from this conference is a little bit more interesting than most…

Taken as a whole, the Social Business Summit 2010 presented a compelling case of how doing business has changedand how successful organizations like Intuit, Citibank, Comcast, Yum Brands (KFC), and many others are dealing with the change in a way that creates value for their organizations. But where the summit differs is in the organizational aspect of that change. Having taught Organizational Design & Behavior during my MBA program, this is always an area of business that I believe is overlooked when a disruptive event or technology occurs. My eleven years and counting in the online community/social media/interactive industry have provided numerous examples of how organizations embrace the change or ignore it.

For example, in Charlene Li’s session on “Making the Case for Open Leadership” I could identify with my own experiences in the Property & Casualty Insurance industry where closed, top down leadership is practiced with vigor. At Safeco Insurance Company, we sat on huge volumes of customer data that were stored untouched in company databases. In 1998, working with several agencies, brokerages, and employees, I put together a business plan for using the data as a means to drive down the combined ratio (the main metric for insurance companies) and generate new revenues. The plan was shot down immediately with the statement “we’ve been doing it our way for over 100 years and it works, why change?” Management at Safeco was unable to be open to ideas that came from its sales team (agencies) and employees in the field. Instead of listening and treating them as partners, and adapting to the market’s direction, Safeco was stuck in its past where control dictated that you told your sales team and employees what to do and didn’t want feedback. This idea was so culturally enmeshed at Safeco that as business practices changed with the adoption of the Internet in the late 1990’s, it could not and would not adapt. By believing that only one way communication worked, Safeco missed opportunity after opportunity in its business to stay successful. Instead it slowly died with consistent management turnover and poor financial results until finally Liberty Mutual purchased them. It’s not that Safeco senior management missed one opportunity, it’s that their management style and lack of vision missed so many that their organization became less relevant over time. 

But don’t think this type of thinking is relegated to heavily regulated industries. Citibank’s Jaime Punishill relayed to me at lunch that it takes time and a lot of pushing to move your organization, but it can be done if there are senior managers willing to listen. Citibank whether it wanted to or not is moving towards open leadership and working with its stakeholders to drive change (and hopefully value) to its shareholders.

Where does Open Leadership work? Our client Cisco was mentioned by Charlene. We helped Cisco launch its first online community in 2000, the Cisco Network Professionals Community. Over the years, we’ve helped launch and manage numerous communities for Cisco around the globe. There is one constant. While Cisco may have many of the same issues as any other large organization, it recognizes that command and control model of management doesn’t work. It lives and breathes the strategic and tactical oxygen of change, adaptation, and listening to the customer. While macroeconomic forces certainly helped Cisco in the 1990’s, it culture has helped it succeed where others like 3Com, Lucent, and Nortel have failed. Other successful organizations with this approach include our clients NetApp and SAP.

The second most important theme of the summit to me was the network. Not just a social network, but the network of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and competitors. Too often conferences confuse strategy with tactics. Taken together, the summit’s sessions provided a strategic look at how business is moving quickly to a social business model and presented the tactical results to back that assertion up.

While I don’t agree with some of the comments about how corporations have ruined networks, trade, commercial transactions, etc. or how we’re moving back to a peer-to-peer economy,  I do agree that the network has always been in place. First it was local, then regional, then super-regional (think Europe), and more recently global. Large multinationals have made the economic process more efficient than it has ever been. Yet, it is still rife with inefficiencies. The understanding that building relationships with your network can make you more efficient is just catching on. For all the talk of rapid adoption of social media, we see far too many disjointed efforts where marketing, support, sales, and internal efforts are all operating independently (and inefficiently).

One great example of using the network properly is that of Intuit’s TurboTax team. Christine Morrison gave a wonderful talk on how it is about making money with the network while also meeting the network’s needs. The overall takeaway was that it is more profitable to pay attention to the network and become part of it than to try and dictate to it or worse, ignore it.

While there are differing opinions on how to utilize the network, several key features of successful networks are:

1. An executive who believes in the power of interacting with stakeholders and has the power to implement a plan, hire staff (in-house or outsourced), and measure the results objectively
2. An organizational culture that truly wants to listen to its stakeholders (lip service doesn’t work) and take action based upon what it learns
3. A focus on results that matter to the audience (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, etc.) which in turn translate into value for the organization in the long run

Corporate culture leads the way to long term success or failure (the Safeco example above shows what can happen when you believe that your organization can dictate to the network rather than work with it). And that’s what social business is all about to us. It’s not the technology, it’s about understanding how your targeted audience wants to interact with you and if your culture can withstand the change or not. In our consulting and management projects with Global organizations such as Cisco, SAP, NetApp, Intel, and others we’ve seen how this idea is so much a part of the firm’s success.  

So what was missing? Well from our standpoint, there were a couple of items that were either untouched or glossed over which are incredibly important to the success of any social business project. First is the issue of trust. Until the last session of the day by Lee Bryant, trust wasn’t even mentioned. Social business runs on trust. If you are unable to trust your audience, peers, employees, and other stakeholders you will be unable to act upon their input.

Second, the idea of globalization and culture was not discussed despite its implications on social business. There is a very large difference in how people do business because of their cultures. Social businesses must account for this. The culture in Japan is different than Poland which is different than Germany which is different than the U.S. Online activities reflect that difference. We’ve seen it in action in our work with Cisco’s NetPro Poland as well as SAP’s local communities around the globe. The one comment about global efforts was from KFC’s Rick Maynard who said ”We don’t have a global strategy, we have a strategy that we localize for differences.” While the network is global, local tactics that meet your audience’s needs demonstrate that you understand the local culture and how it impacts your communications.

Overall, the Social Business Summit was a success.If you take a strategic view of the content presented, you hopefully came away with a better way of looking at social business. There are several other folks who attended who have shared their comments and the tweetstream from the event as well:

• Steve Ellis
• iMediaWorks
• @CarrieBugbee (Tweetstream of #SBS2010 tweets)
• @adamcohen (Tweetstream)

We’re looking forward to next year’s event, you should too….

Mike Rowland, President

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Goodbye Call Center, Hello People Power – The giffgaff Experiment

By Matthew Lees

giffgaff is a UK-based mobile telephone service provider that runs off the O2 (Telefónica Europe) network. Basically, what it offers is a pre-paid SIM card that you pop into your (unlocked) mobile phone. (European wireless phone service operates on the GSM standard. In the US, many mobile carriers provide “locked” phones which only accept one type – their type — of SIM card. There’s much more flexibility and compatibility across Europe and, indeed, through the rest of the mobile-phone-using world.)

At giffgaff’s Web site (http://www.giffgaff.com), you can order a giffgaff SIM card and add money to (a.k.a. “top-up”) your existing card.

What you can’t do at the site, though, is contact a customer service representative. Not by phone and not by online chat.

giffgaff does provide a single email address for inquiries; automated acknowledgments promise a response within 24 hours. So somebody is handing email support, which is an asynchronous communications channel. But giffgaff does not have agents who provide synchronous support. (I suppose, though, that if you were to show up at giffgaff’s HQ in Slough, England, there’s a pretty good chance they’d help you out in real time. Based on the tone of the language used on the site, they seem an amiable, if borderline mischievous, bunch.)

No Operators Are Standing By
By not having customer support reps awaiting your calls, giffgaff can keep its prices low and its operation streamlined.

Instead, the company provides support nearly exclusively via Web-based self-service and its customer community. giffgaff’s FAQs, question and answer area, and discussion forums are its primary customer service mechanisms.

Within the community, which is running on Lithium Technologies’ Social CRM platform, giffgaff customers answer each others’ questions. Hence giffgaff’s taglines: “Mobile network with a difference” and “We’re people powered.”

It’s Payback Time
All online communities rely on the contributions of a small but essential numbers of dedicated members who answer a large and disproportionate number of questions. These “active contributors” or “super users” are the lifeblood of their communities and an essential part of their communities’ cultures. They typically participate for the personal and professional connections they make, the inside information they may get, the opportunity to learn, the ability to enhance their reputation and “strut their stuff,” and the sheer fun of it.

giffgaff adds another motivation to this list: making money. The more questions you answer, the more “Payback Points” you receive. Payback points (100 points = £1) can either go toward topping up your giffgaff account or be deposited into your bank account as cash.

In fact, there’s more to Payback points than just answering more and more questions. The better your answers are, the more points you receive, too (this is done via Lithium’s “accepted solution” feature). And you can also earn Payback points by acting as a giffgaff evangelist, getting friends to join and promoting the service (e.g., through social sites and networks such as YouTube and Twitter).

A Sustainable Support Model?
It’s a relatively new business and a relatively new community, having only launched in Q3 2009. And it’s still in beta (although this doesn’t mean what it used to; Gmail was ostensibly in beta for about five years). The site is certainly focused and playful. Is it effective, though? It’s too soon to tell. But here are the questions percolating in my mind:

•  How are giffgaff’s group andsocial dynamics different from those communities that don’t have financial incentives? I’d expect that that the giffgaff community wouldn’t put up with much nonsense, as that would get in the way of earning points. But would this lead to a more or less tolerant community and enjoyable community experience?
•  Can giffgaff provide satisfactory support on a long-term basis without a contact center?
•  If so, can this model work in other industries, or are there aspects of giffgaff’s business (e.g., the telecommunications industry, its particular demographics, etc.) that may make it work for them, but not elsewhere?

A quick Web search shows that “giffgaff” is a Scottish word referring to mutual accommodation or mutual giving. Seems like an appropriate name for an ostensibly people-powered network. Kind of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” thing. If things at giffgaff go according to plan, the UK could see an awful lot of scratching…

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Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

In December of 2009, I wrote about Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends after seeing a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. In that post, I explained why follower or friend counts do not represent a metric of influence nor should they be utilized as a relevant metric of importance. After several good comments as well as several emails to Impact Interactions giving me grief for disputing one of social media’s closely held beliefs, I decided to run an experiment on gaming the system.

My basic premise was that these counts are a false statistic which like placing value on “hits” in web metrics analysis leads you to focus on the wrong metric of your activities. Want to increase “hits”? Add more photos, widgets, content blocks, etc. to each of your pages. Each one adds a hit each time the page is opened. You can make the hit count be anything you want simply by adding more items to each page. In 2000, most people didn’t understand that aspect of the measurement so they used “hits” as a proxy for visits or even for influence of their content and site. We still have companies that talk about “hits” when they approach us about measurement. It’s a lasting issue that has thrown a lot of folks away from the important issues in measurement.

There have been several blog posts written about how to game Twitter to gain followers in order to look more important than your competition.  One of my absolute favorites is from Chris Cree of Success Creeations. His blog entry “How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day” should be mandatory reading for all social media marketing professionals. It spells out how you can game Twitter, but also why that is such a bad idea. So with that advice in hand, we set up a little experiment using free tools to game the system.

The Experiment Begins

Using a tool we won’t name here, we were able to almost double our number of followers for our @impactinteract twitter account in five days. Granted we were working from a small base, but the results show how easy it was to pull off. So let’s go to our experiment.

We started last week with 143 followers who found us either from our website, our efforts on LinkedIn, our speaking engagements, or organically from our tweets. We were following 43 members who were mostly our competitors. On Monday, I signed up for a free demo of one of the many tools which advertise that they can add followers quickly. By using the key words of “Social Media” and “Online Community” the tool returned over 700 accounts on Twitter that had potential for us as followers. These accounts had either tweeted the key words “Social Media” or “Online Community” in the past ten days. Sounds good so far right?

The tool then allowed us to follow the accounts in order to grow our followers by getting their auto-follower to reciprocate.  The demo of the tool we choose allowed us to generate up to 250 new followers before we would have to buy a license. So we started the process using the tool of following 250 accounts. It was fast and painless. In the fifteen minutes it took to follow these accounts, we were able to work on other activities. Once the 250 follows had been accomplished, we waited about a day and then unfollowed any account that didn’t auto-follow us. Over the next several days, we repeated the steps. Here is the table of our activities:

 

To keep everyone who autofollowed us aware of what we were doing, we tweeted a message several times during the experiment that stated:

We are testing a few of the tools that advertise that they can build your follower base for an upcoming blog #socialmedia #Twittermarketing. 

The idea was that if the new followers actually read our tweets they would also know what we were doing. That way they could unfollow us as quickly as they auto-followed us. Incredibly only 9 new followers over the course of the week unfollowed us. None sent a direct message about what we were doing. So in a little over a business week, we came close to doubling our followers. Total time including the time to download and set up the tool was about 2 hours total.

“Ah ha, the tool worked!” you might be saying to yourself. But did it really add followers for our corporate Twitter account who might spread our message and help us grow? Let’s take a look and find out if our tweets on social media and online community news and trends, as well as our company news is really relevant to our new found followers.

Of the 136 new followers, 14 (10%) sent the same auto-messages to me about making money on my tweets:

MAKING MONEY for your Tweets? I am. Making 20 daily on autopilot. Make money too – TODAY! http://bit.ly/xxxxxx Thanks for following

Another 9 (6.7%) sent an auto-message inviting us to join their multi-level marketing scheme or affiliate marketing network:

Thank your for following me at http://bit.ly/xxxxxx. We’re looking for affiliate marketers to help us. Do you know any?

Welcome to AffilBits! Want to know how to get thousands of targeted Twitter followers and earn a 50% affiliate commission at the same time?

Two follows were from famous and semi-famous people: Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame and a porn star.

12 (9%) new followers were from two unique members who used multiple accounts, but the same photo.

So out of the 136 new followers, we found 37 (27%) were not, nor would they ever be interested in Impact Interactions.

Influence scoring of our new followers shows the truth in the fallacy of follower counts. We used a scale of 1 to 5 to rank our new followers in regards to our ability to be influential with them or in their networks. A score of 1 means Impact Interactions is not potentially influential at all, 2 means probably not potentially influential, 3 means neither potentially influential nor not influential , 4 means somewhat potentially influential, and 5 means Impact Interaction is potentially influential. (And yes, we understand that this is not scientific because we are making the judgement. But how many people on Twitter really analyze their follower base on an individual level?)

Our influence score would be 1 with the group of 37 detailed above.

But what of the other 99?

We reviewed their tweets over the past ten days to see if these would really be good followers for us or not. What we found was 65 were simply folks who had retweeted someone else’s message about a social media topic. They were neither working for companies involved in social media or online communities nor were they particularly interested in the topics based upon analysis of their tweets. In fact several of the members were serial retweeters. We went back through several weeks of tweets and never found a single tweet that they created. So our influence score for these twitterers would be a 2.

There were 7 new followers who are in the search engine optimization industry, another 20 who are potential competitors or individual consultants trying to find work in the social media industry. The influence score for these followers would be 3.

The remaining seven new followers were blog publishers creating newsletter style blogs of others’ content around social media and online communities. They were linked to content aggregation sites rather than competitors. As these sites could potentially help us to influence their readers, we gave them an influence score of 4.

There were no members of our target audience of corporate social media or online community management staff amongst our new followers.

The weighted influence score for our new members was better than we expected at 2.02 (meaning Impact Interactions is probably not potentially influential to this new group of followers).

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either. With the set of tools available today, you too can gain thousands of new followers in days. But those followers won’t buy into your view of the world or your brand. In many cases those counts have been culled from the Twitter Borg, not from an audience that cares.

Organic growth of your audience builds an audience that actually is interested in your message or company. Use your content, flair for creativity, and on-target messaging to grow your followers. Include your Twitter account information (@ImpactInteract) in your email and other outgoing communications. Your influence will be stronger, even if your follower counts are smaller. Bigger isn’t always better, but don’t buy into the myth that more followers equals more influence. If we don’t put an end to this measurement idea, we will be having the same discussion in five years that we do with “hit counts” today, more than ten years after it first came up. 

To all of you who began following us during the experiment, thank you for taking part. If you wish to unfollow us, we’ll understand.

Mike Rowland, President

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There’s No Place Like (the) Home (Page)

by Matthew Lees

They say, in politics, you can tell an administration’s priorities by its budget. Office holders can talk all they want about the importance of education, services to seniors, and having the latest and greatest fire-fighting equipment, but are they putting their money where their mouths are? It’s the how they allocate the dollars that tells you what they’re serious about.

Similarly, you can tell a company’s priorities by what’s on its home page.

Sure, home page real estate is precious, and what does or doesn’t appear there (and where it appears) can be a contentious issue. I don’t know of any fist fights that have broken out over what links appear on the home page (and where they appear), but I’ve been around some pretty heated discussions.

The debates are understandable, as your home page can be the gateway to your organization (and your products and services) as well as the first impression it makes. It also cuts across organizational lines, as just about all departments are impacted to one degree or another and should, therefore, have at least some say in the matter. Many voices makes for difficult decision making.

Of course, it’s not all about the home page. There are many ways besides your home page that customers, prospective customers, business partners, and others can discover the content within your site, including community content. In many ways, Google is your home-away-from-home page, as that’s often the entryway to your site’s content. So what’s on your internal pages, and your overall SEO efforts, will also have a sizable impact on how people get to your content.

But there’s no getting around the visibility, cachet, and effectiveness of being on the home page.

So the question comes down to: Is there a link to your customer or partner community on your home page?

If your customers (or partners or readers or users, etc.) are important enough to your organization, there will be. Linking to your community on your home page not only makes it easier for people to find your community, it also makes it easier for people to find each other. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes the symbolic statement that you highly value your customers and their perspectives – the good, the bad, and the ugly – by supporting their candid discussions, collaboration, and networking, and by being part of the conversation yourself.

(I’m not talking about displaying links to your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages. That’s all well and good, but that’s done more for marketing purposes than customer engagement.)

Here’s a selection of a dozen organizations that feature their communities via prominent links on their home pages. (There are certainly many others. If I handed out Customer Community Seals of Approval, all these sites would get them for their home page placement alone.)

•   AARP

•  Adobe

•  American Diabetes Association

•  Caterpillar

•  EMC

•  LeapFrog Enterprises

•  The MathWorks

•  NetApp

•  RIDGID

•  Sage Software (ACT!)

•  Unilever (Slim-Fast)

•  VMware

Many other organizations link to their communities from their home pages, but in less prominent locations. While not ideal, that’s still good. But many companies, even ones with vibrant communities, don’t put them on their home pages at all. Often this is despite the best efforts of the community team. The community manager in one such company has been trying to get a home page link for over a year.

How do you make the home page thing happen? Here are some things to try:

1. Begging and pleading.
2. Looking for examples of competitors that feature their communities on their home pages. Nothing spurs action like showing what the competition is doing.
3. Asking to include a home page link for a trial period of, say, one month. Measure the impact this placement has on the community metrics you track. Can you show a compelling correlation between a home page link and an increase in page views, membership, and return visits? Can you translate these numbers to positive business results?
4. What else works? Perhaps those of you who have fought this battle can share your experience and insights below…

While I haven’t formally tracked home page links to communities, it does appear that this practice is increasing. And that’s a good sign. When it comes to showing your customers how you value them, there’s no place like home.

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Notes from the Online Community Unconference East 2010

By Matthew Lees

This week’s snow storm in New York City only marginally hampered this week’s Online Community Unconference East 2010 (OCUE10), a one-day event run by Forum One Communications. With a nod to local commuters, the program ended an hour early, although quite a few attendees were stuck in New York for the night due to rail and air cancellations. The snow kept some people at home, particularly those coming from more distant locations — it was disappointing, though understandable and, in hindsight, wise — that the Impact Interactions team didn’t venture north — but attendance overall was good. Not quite the 200 online community strategists, practitioners, vendors, and consultants that were originally expected that, but not too far off that number.

It was a good event, though not as strong as previous ones, despite the improved facilitation. Unconferences follow an Open Space-like methodology more frequently used, it seems, on the West coast than on the East. Attendees run the sessions themselves, selecting topics based something of interest, whether they’re expert in that subject or just want to talk about it and think others will, too. It’s a bit of organized chaos in which one of the underlying philosophical tenets is that you’re responsible for your own experience.

The Unconference’s theme was “Moving Forward, Together.” That’s a worthy and appropriate objective. Forum One did set the stage for us to think about our personal and professional goals, the direction of the industry, and ways of taking action and moving things forward, well, together. This is easier said than done, though, even for a group of inherently collaborative-minded souls. While I admittedly sucked the air out of a planning session intent on industry-wide adoption of social business metrics, the efforts are well intentioned. Making things happen will be a challenge, but with some sustained work and outreach to other concerned organizations, such initiatives could potentially gain some traction.

But my main frustration was that the sessions, which sometimes stay on topic and sometimes don’t, largely didn’t. Perhaps that’s part of the point of the format, to go wherever the discussions take you. But if I attend a session on, say, B2B revenue streams, I’d like to really dig into that topic. Tangents can be the norm, however. It also can take a while, sometimes 20 to 30 minutes of a one-hour session, for people to get on the same page regarding terminology. It’s not that the digressions are irrelevant or that the conversations are uninteresting; they’re usually not. It’s just that, more often than not, we didn’t get into the real substance I’m really looking for.

That said, it’s always good to see old friends, make new ones, and discuss things we’re all passionate about. Here are some observations:

• Job Changes and Hiring. In recent months I’ve seen more than a few community and social media professionals change jobs, sometimes due to layoffs, sometimes due to taking advantage of a new opportunity. At the OCUE 2010 I learned of even more. And a few people mentioned that their organizations were hiring. This is good news for the industry (although perhaps small solace for the many who are still looking for jobs).

• Business Value. It’s pretty clear that the exploratory phase is over for online communities. More and more organizations are all but requiring bottom line results, or at least a solid plan to get there. If you’re a vendor, agency, or consulting group that can speak to helping an organization achieve quantifiable, attributable ROI success, you’ll have a leg (or two) up the competition.

• Community Strategy: Beyond Your Site. Bill Johnston, Forum One’s Chief Community Officer and the Unconference’s host, summed this up nicely, saying “Most companies are trying to pull together a more holistic strategy.” A lot of attendees talked to this point, and how they’re trying to consolidate and streamline their community and social media strategies. If your organization is running one or more online communities, that’s one or more customer-facing touchpoints. But you’re likely involved with Twitter, LinkedIn, other social sites, and perhaps some independent communities as well. Fractured strategy translates into a poor customer experience, diminished brand identity, and limited business results.

• Organizational Issues. This one will be with us for a long time. Organizational dynamics play a major role in the success (or not) of community and social initiatives. They’re also a contributor to the many tales of woe that attendees talked about. People were looking for ways of breaking down silos, clarifying ownership, ending turf wars, undoing inappropriate and/or ineffective structure, and getting more buy-in from colleagues and the executive suite. (One of my favorite quotes was from a Microsoft community manager who said, referencing collaboration among his company’s business units, “Any coordination between these groups happens accidentally.” That’s too bad, but, sad to say, not uncommon.)

Look for the next Forum One Unconference in Mountain View, CA on June 9, 2010. It’s doubtful they’ll have to worry about snow…

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