Buzzgain » Authority

The 5 biggest challenges of social media and enterprise adoption

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:39:59 +0000

Yesterday we tracked SAP TechEd08 using BuzzGain and had a very interesting set of discussions on twitter that were spawned. I mentioned clearly that social media is more than Twitter and the main reason I did not discuss the other metrics was due to the length of the post. Still, there are a series of questions that our metrics did bring up that raised new questions about enterprise adoption of social media. Here are the biggest challenges that I foree in any social media monitoring solution.1. Tracking the right people: It is about the people not keywords (stating the obvious). Most social media solutions track “keywords” which are not ideal. Why? There were about 15 other people in the SAP conference who did not talk about SAP TechED, SAP, or any other keyword you’d normally associate with the conference. The ideal solution would track key individuals (pre determined) who are the “market makers” and can be counted on to influence opinion regardless of their use of key words and phrases. We missed a few (MonkChips or James Governor for one) who is a very key analyst, he was tweeting, but not on either the hashtags or keywords. I am sure we missed several others.

2. The firewall issue: Our (unofficial) metrics track 4-7% of enterprise employees blog. In the Fortune 1000 itself, there are only ~70 companies with external blogs. The rest are behind firewalls. To give you a magnitude of that number, the F1000, employs 935,000 employees. so there are about 50,000 bloggers at the minimum and over 100,000 behind the firewall, which we will never be able to track. I think this is a low estimate BTW.

3. Tracking the wrong keywords: We already talked about this, but if you choose the wrong keywords or ones that are too broad, or too narrow, you get limited, narrow and inconsistent results. The better approach is to follow thought leaders or influencers in the space, but the current approaches (white-listed blogs or heavy traffic blogs) fall way short in identifying up and comers or selective influencers.

4. Perception (and reality) of the time-sink: I heard from 3 folks via email that their company considers their participation in social media (twitter, delicious, etc.) as a massive distraction. They get no credit or brownie points for them. So many shy away from sharing their copious notes taken on their laptop.

5. Broadband or lack of it during events: The major constitent theme I have heard from the last 10 conferences we have tracked is – the bandwidth is limited. So people tend to use their iPhone or blackberry more. Which a) is limiting and b) makes it a pain to share in a social way quickly.

I know we are working on (1) and (3). Jeremiah points out that you need a GPS rather than a dashboard for social media. I am not sure I can give a better analogy right now, but something about the GPS makes it insufficient in describing what’s needed. I cant place my finger on it, but if you can please help me out.

Cartoon credit. Geek and Poke.

What else do you think I a missing? thanks to Lee, Mike and Marilyn for ideas about this post.

Who should you target as for PR efforts?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:26:29 +0000

If you are a Web 2.0 or a social software startup trying to either launch a product or your company, getting relevant Buzz or Press is absolutely important. Long known to be the most cost effective means to generate awareness among potential users, PR gives you the sense of “arrival”. Notice I said cost effective NOT least expensive.

If you have been in the market over the last 2-3 months you already know that the best Web 2.0 PR folks, like Jeremy Pepper or Brian Solis (Disclaimer: Brian’s a cofounder at BuzzGain) are either already taken, or they are very expensive (most charge $10,000 minimum per month, or freelancers who charge $5000 / month). So if you have read about Do It Yourself PR and think that might be the best way to save some cash, the question becomes who (all) do you target to get good coverage.

The usual answer I hear is TechCrunch. They are no doubt the best, but you cant put all your eggs in the TechCrunch basket. Make a good target list just like you would for potential investors or customers.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out these folks should be on your list (In no particular order).

1. ReadWriteWeb

2. Mashable

3. Chris Brogan

4. Scobleizer

5. Jake McKee

6. Jeremiah Owyang

7. Webware

8. Louis Gray (Disclaimer: Louis is associated with BuzzGain)

9. Giga Om

10. VentureBeat

The best case situation is to brief them all. But if you dont have time, (which is strange, but not out of the ordinary) then how would you select which ones to focus on? Also remember each of these folks likes exclusives, so it does not hurt to focus on a subset each time.

If you follow the simple rule of thumb that you shoud focus on the ones with the most traffic to their site, I contend you will not have achieved your purpose – which is to get the MOST number of people to effectively have a chance to learn about your offering.

So what metrics do we apply? As we talked about blog authority and influence before, there are a whole host of other criteria, but here are the 3 that I would consider the most important.

1. Sentiment: Of the lot, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Chris are the most positive. Their article sentiment ratio is around 50-65% – very high and even with things that are not great, they accentuate the positive.

2. Outlinks: The number of links back to your site will give you a chance to convert awareness from PR into “potential leads” or prospects. The best link to post ratio (# of links per post) come from Louis, VentureBeat and GigaOm.

3. Engagement: Thanks to tagging, bookmarking, sharing Google feeds, tweeting, etc. you have the potential to reach a larger audience than visitors to your blog. So this extended audience should be counted into the overall metric for an individual’s reach. For extended reach Scobleizer, Chris and Louis are the best. Not only do they have a great number of followers on Twitter, friendfeed, delicious, etc., but their users are more engaged, clicking on links sent by these three than others.

So, if you had to make a call on exclusives, no doubt, focus on Rafe Needleman, Om Malik, Michael Arrington. Your best bang for the buck (for actual users) might come from some of these others.

Is Chris Brogan more influential than the potential Prime Minister of India?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:03:38 +0000

We all love the topic of influence and authority. Its the primary reason any top 10 list exists. There are inherently many pitfalls in measuring and ranking any person’s authority online or offline. The questions that come up:

1. What parameters do you take into measuring authority? – for e.g. a few include: #twitter followers, # of re tweets, # blog readers, # of saved items on delicious? All of the above in some combination?

2. What about influential people that dont have a significant online presence? E.g. I know the Chief Mentor of Infosys Narayan Murthy has not a very big online presence, but every time he says something over 2 million people listen to him. How do we track that?

3. How much weight to you give to the various sources of influence – main stream news vs. blogs vs. twitter vs. any other social network.

We ran an interesting experiment with BuzzGain over the last few weeks. Friend and all around nice guy Chris Brogan was tracked against Indian prime minister candidate L. K. Advani. Here are the results.

1. In overall mentions, Chris is holding fort and in many cases getting talked about a lot more online than L K Advani. This is awesome for Chris, since over a billion people in India know L K Advani, and a lot fewer know Chris. But online, Chris is King.

L K Advani and Chris Brogan mentions

2. Sentiment for Chris and L K Advani is mostly similar, mostly positive and some negative, but its trending in similar directions.

L K Advani, Chris Brogan Sentiment Analysis

3. Main stream media news is where L K Advani beats Chris in mentions. Which is expected since the # of news outlets covering the elections in India is far greater than the # of bloggers writing about Chris and social media.

News Mentions for L K Advani and Chris Brogan

4. In the blogosphere, the exact opposite metrics hold true obviously, since the # of bloggers in the US far outweighs the # in India.

Blog mentions l K Advani and Chris Brogan

5. Finally there’s a reason he’s called the Mayor of Twitterville. Chris just overwhelms L K Advani in terms of mentions and retweets on Twitter.

Twitter mentions L K Advani and Chris Brogan

This leads us to a new set of questions:

1. How much more influential is Chris than Mr. Advani online?

2. Should we start to leverage circulation numbers for main stream media (offline viewership) to account for their reach when fewer than 10% of users are on the Internet (as in the case with India)?

3. What would you like us to compare next?

Drop me a note or leave a comment and we’ll explore that next in a future post.

Top 3 tips to be a guest on the Jon Stewart show if you are a book author

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:56:16 +0000

Its no secret that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is an extremely popular show with over 2.1 Million viewers (primetime), over 50,000 Internet only viewers and an extended audience of over 35,000 per episode. The favorable audience demographics (with over 60% younger than 35 years of age, over $67,000 in annual income, pre-disposed Democratic and very aware of pop culture, news and politics) has seen advertisers flock to the segment with over 67% repeat advertisers.

We analyzed the guests for 136 shows (there were fewer shows, thanks to the writers strike) in 2007 and 144 shows in 2008 (Oct 30th 2008). The show no doubt has a very current affairs and politics bent and is fairly liberal in its bias but we were more looking for 3 things:

1. What topics/themes or categories were important for The Daily Show viewers?

2. What was the “effect” on book sales from a slot at The Daily show?

3. What the net (online) PR effect of the exposure that The Daily Show brings you?

So what are the top 3 tips to be a guest on The Daily Show?

1. A overwhelming number of guests were from Politics (2008 – 47% and 2007 – 38%) or related fields (Thanks in big part to the elections). Celebrities and media personalities were second. Science and technology were relative blips. Except Bill Gates in 2007, no other technology personalities were in the lineup.

Tip #1: If you want to get on The Daily Show your best bets are writing about the effects of anything on Politics (both current and historical). So if you can talk about the effect of technology on fund raising for the elections, or the effect of Youtube on campaign ads, you’re probably a shoe-in.

2. Delayed Gratification: Only 17 times (out of 144 in 2008) did the authors make the top searches on Google Trends. That too a day after the show. We estimate this was due the fact that most of the guests were already “well known” but that would not explain the lack of searches for “the promotion” to appear on Google Trends. Meaning, what they were promoting – either a book, a movie, etc. should have appeared on the top searches, but that was not the case in a majority of the cases. The delay on Google trends also indicates the “Tivo effect” or the fact that over 35% of the people watching the daily show either tape it and watch later than its live broadcast or view it on the Internet.

Tip #2: We dont have Amazon book trends or Movie trends, to know the full effect but we can confidently say that appearance on The Daily Show should be part of your PR / book promotion strategy not the cornerstone.

3. The Net PR effect: Since 2007, The Daily Show has been posting entire episodes of the show online on their website, which has limited the ability to view the sharing trends on YouTube. But if you analyze the Digg, Discussions threads, Twitter and Social Bookmarking effect of the show, it ranks among the top on social media. The only shows that rank better are Two and a Half Men and Dancing with the Stars. For more on the details we cross-checked with our friends at Social Sights.

Tip #3: To measure the net effect of your PR with The Daily Show you have to take into account the “virality” of its spread, not just the viewers on TV or the 30-40K viewers per episode online.

What other metrics would you analyze to see the effect of The Daily Show?

How to define “authority” on the web – 21 metrics from BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:55:02 +0000

Chris had a very interesting post on how does the web define authority.

In that he questions “It would be easy to bog ourselves down in definitions of the word “authority” itself. In this case, let’s agree that the working definition as it pertains to this topic is: a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web. Is this close enough? How would you change this?”

How do we define authority though? BuzzGain does it with 21 metrics.

1. Blog content and tags for a vertical – in this case social media. Its an exhaustive list of about 25 to tags ranging from facebook to personal branding and from social news to blogging & blogs. The more you write about these topics the more likely you are an authority on some or all of them. You are more likely passionate about them, which is a start for being an authority.

2. Location of posts on SERP (Search engine results page) related to tags on Google Search. The higher you appear, (i.e. if you come on the first page of the SERP, you are higher than on the second page and so on) the more authority you have.

3. Frequency of posting. More frequent the better obviously.

4. Traffic & Visitors: Both website visitors and # of RSS subscribers define traffic for a blog. We track them both to assign a metric number between 1 and 5. More traffic = higher the authority.

5. Engagement of readers: How many comments do you have per article. How many overall? What is the time to comment – i.e. How quickly does someone comment as soon as you post an article? More engaging readers define a more social experience and a higher authority.

7. Quality of posts: Thanks to our partnership with AideRSS, we can tell which posts of yours are of high quality. This usually means which ones got “Dugg” or “Bookmarked” and how many comments exist on that post. Posts that have the highest quality are the ones we consider towards your authority.

7. Twitter: Of the 126 “socially aware” applications, this is the King Kong of social connections. We track # of followers, your “tweet frequency”, and the # of @ replies to your tweets. The assigned number for your Twitter authority comes as a combination of these characteristics.

8. Social Bookmarking: Currently we support Stumbleupon and delicious although we have been looking at diigo, Magnolia and Furl. More bookmarks and more followers indicate a sense of higher authority.

9. Social News: How many followers you have on Digg and the velocity of your digg posts to their overall appearance on the top of the digg homepage.

10. Social Network presence: This is obvious but the more “in the field” links to other folks you have on LinkedIn and Facebook the higher you rank in our authority list. We are looking to support other social networks, but these are the primary ones in our belief.

There are 11 other metrics that define authority, which I will mention briefly since this post is very long already. They include presence in blog directories, blog search engines (IceRocket, for e.g.), # of your incoming links, Google Pagerank, presence on photo sites and other microblogs, frequency of sharing items on Google reader, whether you podcast and videocast, # of times you guest blog on other “authority blog” and frequency of your interviews on other relevant / related blogs in your field.

image credit: Allposters

How many twitter followers does it take make an impact?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:19:59 +0000

This post primarily discusses corporate uses and engagement with Twitter, unlike how most people use it to keep up with friends and discuss “What are you doing”? The # of companies on twitter is growing dramatically from fewer than 5 in 2007 to over 500 in 2008.

Given that twitter has about 1.3 million registered accounts, the question we get asked frequently is:

: Jason asks where we got the 1.3 Million number vs. 3.1 reported by TwitDir. Two items: 1) We only track accounts that have more than 5 friends and at least 10 tweets. We think these are real users vs. bots. If we did all accounts, we track about 3.27 Million. Bottom line there are a TON of fake accounts on twitter.

2) We also did this initial run in July. We’ll update for September, but we doubt There were 1.5+M accounts added in 2 months.

“So if I get on twitter and make a lot of “friends” will our messages get propagated faster?”.

This is usually by a corporate client, who does not have a basic understanding of twitter or has just heard that twitter helps you get “Buzz”.

Usually we have to go over basics of twitter and community with them before they ask the next question:

“So how can we can get the key influencers to follow us and tweet about?”.

Another discussion ensues and topics such as engaging users and not spamming them comes up. They usually look a little lost at this point, but are able to somewhat relate to email spam so they eventually get it.

The next question comes up within the 30 minutes of discussion:

“So how many people have to follow us for our message to be heard?”.

We’re not sure if you really want to answer this question, but its a worthwhile exercise. There are varying degrees of influence on twitter. We define 3 types of twitter engagement. Each of these types of engagement is an increasing amount of influence obviously:

1. Another twitter user follows you (and based on her tweet history) tweets at about the same time as you do. Else if you are in different timezones, your influence on that person is lesser.

2. A twitter follower replies to your tweets (@replies) with a certain frequency. Or the # of @ replies you get as a twitter user.

3. A twitter follower retweets your tweets with some frequency.

There are 3 things that stand out when you analyze twitter statistics.

1. The top 250 twitter users (with the most number of followers, the most number of friends (people they follow) and the # of tweets) carry an inordinate amount of “influence”.

2. The average number of followers for the top 100 twitters is 9304, with the top at about 93,000 followers and #100 at about 6300 followers.

3. If you have less than 100 followers (with some exceptions), which over 500,000 users on twitter do, your influence rank drops to less than 8 (give time zone considerations). Meaning less than 18 people are really viewing your tweets, which indicates 4 of them are likely to @ reply and 1 is most likely to retweet.

The graph below shows Twitter influence. The top 100 users carry 65% of the influence on twitter and they have a minimum of 6300+ followers to a maximum of ~90,000 followers. Users from 100-5000 have 22% of twitter influence and so on.

Some questions:

1. Corporate clients still believe the best use of twitter is to leverage it as “yet another channel” for their message amplification. What are the best techniques you have used to convince them about the value of engaging their customers on twitter?

2. How are you recommending your clients engage with twitter users?

3. What’s the best example of large companies engaging on twitter?

The blogging platform of choice for Main Stream Media

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:24:05 +0000

Most people compare blog sites and bloggers to main stream media. I am not sure I agree 100%, but lets go with that assumption. The top 20 US newspapers, or main stream media newspapers with the largest circulation currently (and also mostly by website statistics) are listed below and their blogs.

Side note: In the top 20 newspapers worldwide, USA Today does not appear in the top 15, so keep that in mind. But on the flip side, these are print circulation numbers NOT web traffic.

1	USA Today	http://www.usatoday.com/blog-index.htm
2	Wall Street Journal	*blogs.wsj.com/*
3	New York Times	http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html
4	Los Angeles Times	http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-blogsplashpage-sg,0,843001.special
5	Washington Post	http://blog.washingtonpost.com/
6	New York Daily News	http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/
7	Chicago Tribune	http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-g3blogpage-htmlstory,0,6170046.htmlstory
8	New York Post	http://blogs.nypost.com/
9	Long Island Newsday	http://www.newsday.com/ny-blogs,0,4143928.htmlstory
10	Houston Chronicle	http://www.chron.com/news/blogs/
11	San Francisco Chronicle	http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/
12	New York Newsday	http://weblogs.newsday.com/
13	Arizona Republic	http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/new/
14	Chicago Sun times	http://blogs.suntimes.com/
15	Boston Globe	http://www.boston.com/news/blogs/
16	Atlanta Journal Constitution	http://www.ajc.com/blogs/
17	New Jersey Star Ledger	http://www.nj.com/blogs/
18	Minneapolis Star Tribune	http://www.startribune.com/blogs/
19	Detriot Free Press	http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=BLOG
20	Philadephia Inquirer	http://www.philly.com/inquirer/blogs/

Movable Type and Wordpress rule the roost at 30% and 25%. Typepad (Also owned by Six Apart) if included will clearly put Six Apart at #1 for the top 20 blogs.

In the top 100 newspapers in the US, Six Apart is still #1 at 37% marketshare to 28% for Wordpress.

First some interesting numbers on newspapers and blogs.

1. We currently track about 12,393 world wide main stream news sources of which 8848 are newspapers. Of our newspaper sources, 81% have blogs written by their staff or columnists.

2. The average number of bloggers in the top 20 newspapers is 17and the average number of blogs is 29.

3. Outside the US, the % of blogs with newspapers drops a from a dramatic 81% to 37%. (Note: this is English language newspapers only).

What do I take away from this:

1. If 81% of newspapers worldwide have blogs, you have a huge target rich set of folks who are looking for new content, interesting ideas and new companies. You can go beyond Walt Mossberg and Sarah Lacy folks. It will yield you good results.

2. Take a look at Movable type 4.2 release notes from my friend Anil. Read it carefully and you’ll see community capability and social networks. I was especially impressed with the small feature ranking and rating. Why? We have to evolve from a Alexa site visits and pageviews set of metrics to engagement as a measure for measuring media (all media, social and otherwise).

3. If you are targeting newspapers outside the US, as part of your PR launch, realize most editors & journalists will still prefer the email and phone followed by a personal pitch (as in face to face). Schedule your time for those appropriately.

Questions:

1. Anyone has experience with Pluck which is used by USA Today? What’s your impression?

2. As part of your effort do you still “segregate” main stream media and social media targets? Why?

P.S. If you are further interested in reading about the topic of main stream media in general, I’d highly recommend Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 Blog.