There has been a flurry of activity amongst web analytics companies and in the marketing world to devise complex ways of measuring social media activity. As much of this interest in devising a way of measuring and comparing social media ‘success’ comes down to monetising social media activity through the sale of advertising, these measures don’t easily translate to the cultural sector. Advertisers are after a ‘ratings’ system to compare the different ‘value’ of websites but as we know from old media (TV and radio), ratings don’t work well for public and community broadcasters who don’t sell advertising and have other charters and social obligations to meet.
We know that visits, page views and time spent aren’t the best ways of understanding our audiences or their levels of engagement with our content, and with social media it is all about engagement. If we aren’t selling advertising space to all those eyeballs focussing their attention on our rich and engaging content, then what are we trying to do?
I’d argue that it is about brand awareness. Not just brand awareness in terms of being top of mind when geographically close audiences are thinking of a cultural activity to do in their leisure time, but about linking the perceived authenticity of the information contained on your website to your brand. More and more there is ongoing research into how museums are perceived as ‘trusted’ information sources, and importantly politically impartial sources. But this perception relies upon an awareness on the part of the online visitor that they are indeed on a museum website.
This user awareness is, I argue, not a given, especially now that such a large proportion of our online traffic comes via search. Looking into the future, search will be an even greater determinant of traffic, even if your real-world marketing prominently displays your URL (as it should be doing by now!). Looking at your real world marketing campaigns around your URL you will probably find a spike in direct traffic but a similarly sized spike in brand name searches – we are finding this with the Sydney Design festival at the moment. The whole of Sydney is covered with street advertising from bus shelter posters to street banners, all promoting the URL. The resulting traffic is a mix of direct and brand name search based.
The problem is, now, the brand no longer is just represented in the online environment on our own websites.
One of the first things I talk about in my workshops and presentations is that even if your organisation is not producing social media about yourself, then your audiences almost certainly are. If you aren’t aware of what your audiences are saying about you, what they are taking photos of, or recording on their camera phones, then you are missing a unique opportunity to understand this generally highly engaged tip of your audience.
It is possible those who blog about their experience in your organisation, upload their photos and videos, are going to be those who are potentially your most (commercially) ‘valuable’ customers – high disposable income, high levels of interest and a desire to participate and communicate/advocate to others about your organisation.
They are probably the most likely to climb the ‘ladder of engagement’ from potential visitors through regular visitors to members and finally donors/sponsors. They may not always have positive things to say, but by hearing their gripes and grizzles, you are able to understand and address issues that impact how your organisation is going to be promoted through word-of-mouth. And word-of-mouth is going to almost always be the most ‘trusted’ type of marketing recommendation.
So how do we track these conversations that occur publicly but not on your organisation’s website?
Mia Ridge recently pointed to a great summary of the easiest to use ‘ego search’ tools and methods by which you can easily keep track of your audience conversations. Another favourite of mine for small scale tracking is EgoSurf.
Sixty Second View has compiled an ‘index’ of how these kinds of ego search results might be compiled to generate a figure to compare with competitors and other organisations. Their methodology, whilst very complex, focusses on assessing how connected the people who are talking about you actually are – this allows for a determination of effective reach, and the trust that may be accreted to those in the conversation.
(top level summary mine only)
a) Blogs that are talking about you – what are their Technorati rankings, how high are their Google PageRanks, how many BlogLines subscribers do they have etc
b) Multi-Format conversations – how popular/connected are the Facebook and MySpace people who are talking about your organisation
c) Mini-Updates – frequency and reach of Twitters
d) Business Cards – LinkedIn connectedness
e) Visual – Flickr influence and popularity can be used to determine how connected and visible posters images of your organisation are. This can be applied to YouTube as well.
f) Favourites – Digg, Del.icio.us connectedness
This approach is useful as it provides a detailed analysis of the spectrum of social media that your organisation is probably already represented in. It can reveal areas where your users are’nt talking about you, and it can illuminate areas of your own site that receive unexpected user attention. Not only that it focuses on who is talking about you. On the downside, it is a lot of work – but in undertaking even a cut down version of this methodology it will force you to examine the different impacts of types of social media.
For example, are all blog posts about your organisation equal? When you check the Technorati rankings of the commenting blogs you will find that some have greater reach and authority than others. The real world equivalent here is the different weightings your marketing team probably already gives to print media mentions in national broadsheets versus local weeklies; or the difference between a TV editorial and a local radio mention.
Is this really the job of the web team?
Unless your organisation has a marketing team that is expert in online marketing then the answer must be yes. Web analytics in five years time will be all about measuring offsite activity.