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.

Doing vanity searches is probably one of the things most bloggers do. There’s a reason for that – the top 3 drivers of traffic to any blog are organic search, links from other websites (and blogs) and direct URL (i.e. No referrer).

What’s different about search relevance in the blogosphere (and the comments-sphere)?

a) If there’s a blog that’s higher ranked than yours (by that I mean PageRank) and if you are mentioned in a post on that blog, it tends to appear higher in organic search results than your blog.

b) Recent (time sensitive) is more relevant in blog search. This is different than search results since the longer the page has been around, the more are the chances of getting more incoming links, which makes your blog post appear higher (though not always). Hence if you dont post frequently enough, your chances of appearing first on blog search engine results pages are minimal.

c) Comments: If you comment on a blog you input your blog URL and name details on that site. If that blog site is higher ranked for the search term then that blog appears higher than your own blog.

Lets do this by means of an example. I chose my friend Chris Brogan since I expected (thanks to his PageRank, posting frequency and # of people that link to him) his posts and blog to be up there in terms of organic results.

I took 5 blog search engines Ask, Technorati, Twingly, Google BlogSearch and IceRocket. I entered the term Chris Brogan. Click on the links to see the results.

Results:

1. Except Google Blogsearch the rest dont even show Chris’s website on the first page!

2. The other blog search engines show other bloggers who link to Chris’ content rank higher than Chris’s blog.

3. If you do a blog search by relevance on certain search engines do you even get to Chris Brogan’s blog.

The bottom line and some interesting questions:

1. If you are searching for blogs (by name of individual) then Google Blogsearch (about 50% of the time) will get your the best result. Are the rest of the blog search engines are a waste of time?

2. To make the list of related blogs (see it above the fold) on Google BlogSearch you need to have a PageRank of X. Where we are not sure what X is yet, but we’ll find out.

3. Is searching blogs different than websites at all? After all most blogs now have a sitemap similar to most large websites.

If you are like 43% of Americans who decided that “losing weight” was one of your New Year’s resolutions, then you’re probably also like 31% of them who have already given up on it. Yes its only the 12th January, but most people’s resolve drops after 1-2 weeks.

Several magazines and Web sites ran polls, but most rated the top three resolutions as “resolving debt,” “losing weight” or “managing money better.” Cosmopolitan did a guide on resolutions a person should never make. These ranged from “changing your man” to “tripling the number of friends one has on Facebook.”

The simple equation to reducing weight is eat less and work out more. Lets assume you are in a startup and really dont have time to work out “more”. You can afford the 15-20 min of cardio but that’s it.

The only remaining option is to reduce your eating (eat more healthy, reduce portion sizes, etc).

The amazing part that I personally found out is that if you so busy and overworked, you’ll probably not feel all that hungry anyway.  In simple terms the more occupied you are with something the less likely you are to put on weight.

That’s step #1. Do more work towards the goal which dramatically cuts down on “free” hence unproductive time.

So what does this have to do with social media?

The chances of doing something are 55% higher if you have someone egging you along or helping you do it. For some reason if you have someone to celebrate the “end goal”, you are more motivated to do it. That’s where social media helps. Using your twitter or facebook friends to help you along the goal dramatically improves the chances of keeping that resolution.

That’s step #2: Let your friends help you towards that goal.

The #1 reason people dont keep resolutions is because they set themselves up for failure by attempting something in 1 step. The gradual “small steps” towards a goal is a much better and preferred way to get to your goal is what’s been scientifically proven. There are many “cold turkey” examples, but they are exceptions not the rule.

Step #3: Use reminders, setup smaller objectives and goal posts to your resolution.

What are your resolutions? Are you keeping them? Remember Santa’s going to be back in a blink and before you know it its December.

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

The 2nd most vexing topic after “How do I measure social media ROI” is “How much do I pay for social media?“.

Friend and social media consultant, Chris has started a new company. His website display’s their pricing. B L Ochman has had a similar practice for years, displaying her pricing upfront. Its a pretty open and upfront policy which I think is very different from the many consultants who will answer the question with a standard “It depends”. Regardless of whether you think the pricing is too high, or its just right, its a starting point.

I know many consultants are loathe to price by the hour, since it means you have to work “that many hours” regardless of if you are efficient or not. Also pricing by the hour opens you up to competitive pricing – because clients want to compare prices between service providers. This is the vexing problem for most. If a consultant is highly efficient, they get more work done in quicker time, they expect to charge more. But since differentiation is so difficult for most consultants in social media, they have to bid “competitively” – thereby reducing their “rates”.

I have contracted with 3 different agencies for Social Media services before and paid very different rates for their services.

Here’s the myth of social media consultant pricing:

You get what you pay for.

Not at all.

The reality is

You get what you set the objectives for.

If you are clear about what you need to get done, great! You’ll get exactly what you asked for. The objective could be to come up with a strategy, execute some campaign or just get your folks trained and ready. Any of these comes at a price. So how about some examples:

Granted these projects were all different, but to give you a quick sense of pricing:

1. Introduction of blogging hands on class: We did this in 2006 to 15 people at our company. Most knew about blogs, but were not sure how to go about getting started with blogging. The trainer was a social media practitioner and was a pretty good blogger in his own right. We paid  $4800 for two days of training. This included a “get to know the team dinner (the previous night of the training). We also reimbursed expenses (airfare, 3 days of hotel and dinner). The objective was to get people comfortable with blogging and get them to actually start to post.

2. Blogger relations: This was included as a part of our PR agency’s monthly retainer. Our monthly retainer was $9600 and they added another $3500 per month for this project. The objective was to engage with the top 15 influencers in our space. This project included identification of the blogger, engaging with them and building a relationship between them and our product teams . We identified this to be a 3 month effort at the minimum.

3. SEO optimizing our blog content. One of our objectives for the blog was to provide content that would appear higher up in the organic search rankings. Now there are folks that wont call this social media, but our objectives were to drive traffic to our site by all means and our own blog was one of them. Our SEO consultant charged us $50 per post to a maximum of 20 posts per month or about $1000 per month. This was just for SEO and cleanup NOT writing the posts in the first place.

I’ll explore which of these gave us the biggest bang for the buck in a later post, but this should give you some ball park estimates.

What have you paid for social media consultants? Did you get what you paid for? What would you do better / differently?

Image credit: David DMuir