Being present online these days is standard for any company whose customers can be found in this medium, be it with a website, or taking it further to the social media space. One aspect that remains mandatory, no matter how big or how small you are participating is understanding and being actionable with your website analytics data. Your site data is different from conversational data which comes into play and is layered on when you get involved in the social web.

Setting up your analytics and determining what and how to measure is a key first step in managing your focus and presence in the digital space. Having a strategy in place for reviewing and incorporating the insights gleaned is a must. Doing so up-front will save money and effort in the long-term.

What are some of the things your data can teach you?

• What content are people the most focused on or drawn to? Does it align with your preconceptions of what was important? If not, what are you missing? How can you adapt? What can you do to increase engagement with the content you think should be a higher priority?

• Are there frequently specific areas of abandonment on your website? Why? Is it as simple as a 404 error, or more complex – heavy load time, unclear navigation, mis-labled content, etc.

• What content drives traffic but isn’t sticky? Review it with an open mind. Take off your marketing glasses and put on your consumer hat.

• Where is your traffic coming from? Links? Do you know who the people are who are advocating your content? Are you present where your content is being shared? Are you optimized to encourage sharing?

• What type of search engine traffic are you getting? Is it quality? Do you rank well for some terms and not for others? Are the engines indexing the pages the way you would want them to?

• What are some of the keywords that are driving the most traffic from search engines as well as from social networks? Are they what you anticipated? Do they align with your content and focus? What can you do to adjust?

Taking the time to set a strategy in place can provide a goldmine of actionable data and, if included in review cycles, can continue to be a road map to how your digital presence is managed, and can help refine and focus your marketing initiatives. It’s a must.

[photo credit: jef_safi via Flickr]

As the social space begins to mature and more attention is paid by marketers on how you can provide some type of measurement on your outreach efforts through social media channels, efforts are being made to define benchmarks for metrics. To that end, Joe Thornley, of Thornley Fallis Communications, has organized a Social Media Measurement Roundtable for May 20th, 2008 in Toronto. There are some very smart and accomplished people coming (yours truly included), and we will be spending the day debating and trying to establish “dashboards” for measurement and assembling the results in a white paper for social distribution. The participants hail from Communications, PR, Marketing, Analytics, and the social media space. Kudos to Joe & team for doing the heavy lifting and organizing this session.

As those who know me, or read my blog, are aware, I’m a wee bit of an oddity in the social media space because while recognizing the power (and necessity) of community, communications and honest engagement, I also come at the space from an integrated marketing standpoint and recognize the need for brands to continue to “brand”, that awareness still matters at a certain point in the interaction/funnel, that there will always be a “next” but history and context still matter, businesses need to sell stuff, and that the digital tools (and creative) used can impact the nature of the interaction… among other things! To that end, a few of the issues I’m very interested in talking about is interaction and engagement from the “time spent engaged”, “long-tail” & “opt-in” aspects. I’d also love to hear from the community on any questions or points you would like raised during the day-long session!

Leave a comment, drop me a line, or tweet @ me with your thoughts or insight… I’ll share results as we go, and plan on attending Third Tuesday Toronto (on yes, wait for it, a Tuesday this time! :)) and will be happy to chat further!

[photo credit: chrisjohnbeckett via flickr]

Via Mashable comes the latest Nielsen/ NetRatings report on web traffic in August for social networking, video and blog sites. Of particular interest is that while FaceBook leads in growth amongst social networking sites at 117% growth to 19mm uniques from August 2006, MySpace continues to dominate traffic and usage with 60mm unique visitors in August and 23% growth. For marketers, as much as we have come to view MySpace as “so last year” it is important to note that the public in general continue to find it useful.

[photo credit: maddog on Flickr]

Tags: Nielsen; FaceBook; MySpace

The Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes has been scraping around YouTube and comes up with some fascinating numbers:

• In one month the number of videos posted on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million
• Number of video views reached 1.73 billion
• 70% of YouTube’s registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20 according to self-reported profile data [this point is especially relevant to marketers considering using YouTube as a media channel]
• The total amount of time people spent watching videos on YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

These metrics are impressive, but there are a few points which I feel need further exploration (hint, hint Hitwise folks…)

1. How many of those videos are related to brands or products? Of those, how many were UGC vs. brand promo content?
2. Of the user-base how many are active participants vs. passive users?
3. Of the videos posted how many reside in the long-tail and how many are at the head? What is the percentage of overall videos with less than 2% traffic?

Gomes also makes note of the types of terminology used within the video titles to infer popularity of subject matter, and finds that the standbuys of “love”, “music”, “dance”, and “girl” are at the top of the list (as to be expected from the majority youth demo). However, he then completely over-reaches with this interpretation of his findings:

Also, nearly 2,000 videos have “Zidane” in the title. Who at a desk anywhere on the planet didn’t watch at least one head-butt video in the days after French soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s meltdown in the World Cup final? For all the talk of the Internet fragmenting tastes and interests, YouTube is an example of the Web homogenizing experiences.

This conclusion warrants further thought from a few angles as it’s quite broad with little context. Yes, there are 2,000 videos with Zidane in the title, but are they all the same? Or are they each a reflection of an individual’s perspective on the incident? Some are funny, some are nothing more than the clip itself, some are shorter, some are longer, etc. Is that homogenization or is it embracing a shared experience, making it your own and expressing it back to the community? Metrics alone, as marketers know, rarely provide a full picture, but rather a directional basis for analysis and interpretation.

Additionally, the Zidane example actually proves the point of fragmented interests – out of over 6 million videos on the site ONLY 2,000 have Zidane in the title. Is that not the definition of niche interests? Finally, user-generated videos are not “The Internet”, but rather one part of a much larger and more complex whole.

[H/T - Micropersuasion]

[photo credit: Al-Fassam on Flickr]

Tags: YouTube

Looks like the agency’s are starting to explore social networking and community relations. Tara points us to a new online review site developed by Blast Radius (a Canadian agency) called Sutori. It’s a good concept and one that I’m sure I’m not the only one who has talked about ways to implement in recent months… community reviews and feedback on companies.

What’s really interesting about this, aside from the idea of direct and meaningful feedback to begin with, is that an ad agency is building it. Good on Blast for taking this chance. I get how, from their perspective, this can provide a wealth of information on what consumers think about a particular company, or product, which Blast can monetize and use in their client campaigns (sorry, I’m never one to think anyone does anything for altruistic reasons… not in the agency world at least…)…(I could see it as two levels of packages: free summary and aggregate data which the brand can then try and disseminate and manage themselves and the “premium” package, available free of charge to current Blast customers, and for a fee to non-Blast customers… the premium package will most likely provide metrics and analysis of the data for the company). But it’s still taking a chance nonetheless; you never know what people will tell you if you give them an easy way to do so.

I like that the “three j’s” are thinking in terms of how to maintain civility in the reviews, and the plea to “contain a certain level of goodwill towards the brand, product or company you‚Äôre writing about” is a noble one, but, like I said, people are people and if they’re pissed off they’ll say so… and that could make a Blast client cranky. So it’s a chance, but a good one.

Of course, as with anything social networking related that is initiated by a company, it will need to remain authentic and transparent. Consumers are getting wise to PR, marketing and ad agency folk jumping into message boards and saying positive things about a brand without disclosure… I hope Blast has a strategy for combating this inevitable trend.

[Update] John from Blast clarifies the issue surrounding their intent to monetize in the comments. And, I apologize for the muddy title… the “are you ready” refers to brands hearing from consumers, not Sutori from me ;)

Technorati Tags: Sutori, consumer feedback, reviews

The final days focus on marketing was an interesting mix of ‘traditional’ and ‘rogue’, with a healthy dose of entreprenuers and old fashioned business sense thrown in. I have been a bit worried about the ‘bubblet’ aspects to 2.0, but it sounds like if we keep the channels of communication open and are willing to share ideas and missteps we can make an impact in the long run.

A few key take-aways from two of the final sessions (Building a brand online & Engaging the blogosphere):

• It’s still a conversation. Only now the customer isn’t mute. It’s a two-way one.
• If you are a corporation, sooner or later you’ll hit the blog radar. It’s up to you if you choose to engage as the conversation will take place with or without you.
• It’s no longer enough to have a ‘brand identity’ each of your products needs an identity as well. The message should be built into the design (i.e. the first 2 “i’s” – innovation and integration)
• It is all about the experience. But not in the traditional sense anymore. It’s not enough to throw up a flash piece that showcases your product: you need to make the product and the interaction come to life and be relevant and engaging.
• Corporate blogs, if done in an authentic voice, with sincerity and humility can be a huge brand builder. But the company has to be prepared to take its lumps if necessary… and participate in the ensuing conversation.
• New metrics systems are needed to track the power of the medium in all its facets. Click-throughs, immediate conversions and impressions won’t cut it anymore to judge the success or failure of a campaign. Tracking conversations started, trackbacks, comments, site traffic and referrals must start to be measured.
• The companies who will succeed in this new age will be the ones with a clear mission (ala Google, Apple, etc.) vs. the ones whose mission is to make The Street happy each quarter. Innovation will happen there first.

Lots of food for thought and great ideas flowed out of those panels. They really felt like conversations vs. lectures. The success of the “unconference conference”.

I do have a couple of suggestions for the next go round… one of the things I found a bit disappointing was the lack of leveraging the power of web 2.0 within the conference itself. Why not have the participants submit questions for the panels and enable a voting system to determine which ones get asked? I know the audience was just chomping at the bit to get involved, why not take it to the next level and involve them right from the beginning?

I also would have liked to see dedicated channels for each panel (i.e. the IRC in the final panel of the day). Unfortunately, the way it was implemented, with the board being open for regular chats, as well as the live blogging became too confusing to keep track of while the session was happening… there’s a place for free form and a place for info presented in a somewhat linear fashion ;)

Great job to the Five Amigos who organized the event: Stuart, Mark, Mathew, Mike & Rob. Looking forward to next year!