“Hello. Social Media Marketplace, how can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like a bushel of blogs, four cartons of community, and does that come with the comments?”
If Social Media could be purchased in that fashion, you would not want it.
This issue comes to mind, because of a nice lunch conversation I had with a friend. He’s a successful attorney – and by successful, I mean the sort who has personally won the appeal (and freedom) of three innocent men who were on death row. He doesn’t have a household name, but is very well-known in certain circles, and is asked to lecture on capital punishment around the U.S.
My friend has three-and-a-half manuscripts sitting around, unpublished. He’s had discussions with literary agents and book editors that haven’t gone much of anywhere. In past days, you had good material, and the agents came to you to help promote it. But now the tables have turned, and you have to have some type of promotable platform before the agent will take up your cause. “Platform?” My friend was told he needed some type of online presence, like a blog, that had at least 1,000 visitors a day.
Metric Myopia
1,000 visitors a day. Now, that’s a completely arbitrary number, and it is completely disconnected from reality. I could register his name as a website, and load it with spam-links and search-engine keywords and build up that kind of traffic. (I could also do it in a real stealthy way, so it wouldn’t look like a spam-blog.) But that’s not the measurement that matters. In fact, we really aren’t yet sure what measurement ought to matter.
Web measurement has changed radically in the last few years. People used to talk about “hits”, but that hit on the server might be a request for an image. Put 10 pictures on a web page, and earn 11 hits. So then we started looking at “page views,” which gets skewed by bad site design. A well-structured site makes it easy for you to find what you want, where a bad one can boost traffic by making you click around. (Or, just add a “splash page”, and watch the page-view count go up.)
Then we migrated to “unique visitors.” We can record all of the other stats, but keep them bundled together by visitor. This requires dropping a little “cookie”, or a bit of code in the browser that will help us identify this unique visitor if they come back later. Uniques aren’t perfect, because they don’t track people who use different computers, and many people are blocking the use of cookies for security reasons. But at least we’re narrowing the information to some useful numbers.
Ghosts in the Machine
Let’s get back to my friend’s dilemma. He’s been told he needs a blog with 1,000 hits per day. What if he had one person who visited, printed out his page, and then made 1,000 copies he distributed to everyone in his office? That would have the same influence, but my friend doesn’t get credit for it. This isn’t a new issue – print publications have tried for decades to determine how much pass-around certain magazines get before hitting the trash heap. How do we account for those “ghosts,” those users who are influenced by the content without leaving a trace on the website?
That’s what happens with RSS subscriptions. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) takes the information out of the browser, and frees it up to travel through a number of different paths. It can come directly to a special reader. Outlook and other e-mail programs can subscribe to RSS feeds as well. You can subscribe to the updates directly through e-mail. Those who subscribe get the newly updated information pushed straight to them, in a format of their own choosing, for consumption at the time and place of their convenience.
If you’re trying to connect with other people, catching them at the time and place of their choosing puts you in a wonderful position. You are never interrupting, and odds are, you will likely not be interrupted.
Measuring the Measures
Now, riddle me this: would you rather have 100 people visit your website, or have 20 subscribe? If you want a quick snapshot that sounds good, 100 visitors looks more impressive. But over time, those 20 subscribers will have way more impressions, and are more likely to be influenced by what you have to share. Those 20 subscribers are more likely to share what you have to say with others of like mind, and even convert a few to subscriber status as well.
If your interest is in selling a general product, or getting the attention of as many eyeballs as possible, page views and hits may be the best measure of your success. If you’re trying to promote something like a book – something that requires a little more financial and emotional investment from the buyer – you’re more likely to track your influence by the number of subscribers. Those are the people who’ve already indicated they don’t want to miss what you have to say… and they will be the people who might just pay for a few of those words.
Conversion Issues
I wish there was an easy way to convert between the currency, and say that a site with X number of visitors will have Y number of subscribers. It doesn’t work like that. I write regularly over at Occam’s RazR. On a typical day, I have 40-50 people who actually visit the website. Occasionally, I break 100. Sometimes I don’t break double-figures. But that’s been the pattern for more than a year now. What has changed is my subscriber count. According to Feedburner, I had just 45 subscribers last July. Eight months later, I am in the low 200’s with a steady pattern of growth (225 as of today.)
My audience (communicators of various stripes) might be considered a little more tech-savvy than most, and more inclined to subscribe. Given a choice between subscription audiences, a less tech-friendly group would lean more on familiar options like e-mail subscriptions. (Out of my 225, only 15 or so are e-mail. Very much an anomaly.) Your mileage may vary. And it will.
A Free Market
And that is precisely why you should be wary of those who want to sell you Social Media like it is a commodity. There is no baseline for exchange rates. There is no common currency. You have to decide what sort of measurement matters to you, and cultivate in that direction. The market is totally free – free for you to define, free for you to dissect, free for you to develop. Just beware those who have already put a price tag on what they offer you, particularly if you haven’t yet decided your goal.
(Ike Pigott frequently writes at Occam’s RazR.)
Nice article.
Suggesting that social media may not be the liquid asset that the marketing world wants it to be may seems like an ingenious statement to some, but to average users its just plain common sense. What is going on is that these social networks are being valued in such a way that the potential reaction of the users to the ‘monetization’ of these networks is being overlooked. Facebook’s valuation in past years to me is utterly absurd. People can migrate off the network just as easily as they came- and someone else could just as easily wriggle some new technology onto the scene and steal away all of Mark Zuckerberg’s users. The point is that understanding, managing and fostering the value behind things like Myspace or Facebook is much more difficult than the dominant voices in the marketing world make it out to be.
Remember, most people on Facebook are really just fooling around and having fun. If they get a whiff of greed or exploitation, they’ll just do something else to pass the time. Running into some creepy marketing program is enough to scare away a large portion of Facebook’s user base.
Brilliant post Ike. I just finished a paper on “Measuring Engagement” and it addresses alot of these issues. I go nuts when they say that user “engagement” can be measures by time on site or frequency of return. Unless you know how those visitors feel about you, what they do with your information and whether they are more or less likely to do business with you, you don’t really know squat.
This is a very timely topic for me because I’ve been thinking about this issue myself.
The angle that I’ve been coming at this is that social media is creating commodities out of some things that used to be valuable. Both on the side of the audience and the producer.
First is that the Internet provides so many ways to interrupt people that Attention is easily captured — in bulk. You’re example of creating a splog sums up well what I’ve been trying to articulate for myself. Getting traffic, even traffic by real people, is not difficult to do. Through some money into AdWords, display advertising, buying links, etc. etc. etc. and you can get people to land on your site.
Maybe I should re-cast that as Interruption instead of Attention because you can’t make someone stay if you aren’t offering them something worthwhile.
Which brings me to the second piece I’ve been pondering. To the eyes of the consumer, content is becoming a commodity. I just posted on my blog about social media’s potential to emphasize content over people when the ‘social graph’ grows large enough. While truly exceptional content will stand out, for most people reading one blog rather than another isn’t about ~what~ they write.
Sneaking another thought into the above idea, are the channels for distributing content are also becoming less meaningful? Does it matter if you pick up an idea from a blog, podcast, video, microblog, etc?
In this context, what differentiates both audience and publisher is the ability to create relationships. It’s the connections that people can build through social media that matter. This is the aspect of social media that cannot be sold as a commodity. It’s the value proposition of using social media but it’s a long-term investment. I could veer off into talking about current marketing/PR practices in social media that seem to focus on short-term gains but I won’t.
I liked this quote in your post:
“Those are the people who’ve already indicated they don’t want to miss what you have to say… and they will be the people who might just pay for a few of those words.”
But I’d be very interested to hear thoughts on the idea that social media is creating commodities out of some things. Am I missing a piece of the puzzle that’s skewing my perception?
John –
In this instance, with my friend and his unpublished book – the blog (or ‘platform’ as it was euphemistically called) was meant to be nothing more than evidence of a following. A ready-made audience to guarantee a base to begin promoting the book.
In fact, it was strongly suggested that he start harvesting email addresses from such a ‘platform’, with the idea of getting as many as three-to-five-thousand!
This sounds to me like book promoters and literary agents are getting a touch lazy, and are wanting ready-made communities before starting the process they used to own.
Your last question speaks to a more generalized notion. Yes, I believe that giving away content and insight can build a community that will eventually be willing to pay for additional access and support. It may not be within the original medium. In my friend’s case, an online community isn’t there to sell online content, but a book. In my personal case, I’m not hawking anything, except maybe a personal brand that might one day provide value in a now-undetermined direction.
Well said Ike. I don’t think the rank, traffic, etc. measures mean much. Subscribers can even dilute those numbers because they can read your content without visiting the site.
For businesses, the best measures tend to be outcomes, even if that outcome is related to developing a personal brand. One of the better posts I’ve read on the subject, truly.
Rich
Ike,
On measurement…thoughts…
Perhaps we might consider the application of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
Might it also be worthwhile to look at the social capital or potential energy our visitors wield?
e.g. could we look at a visitor’s keyword query to find one’s resource in context of network location (hyper local implications) or network location (enterprise client)?
Perhaps a mention or “hit” on another property is actually worth ten times (depending on intent) that of a hit or visit that is measured because it recurses back to a log.
regards,
Wayne