Tag: Connie Bensen

Analysis, Presentation, Reporting

Techrigy — New Kid on the Social Media Measurement Block

Posted on by Eric Peterson

When Connie Bensen posted that she had formalized a relationship with Techrigy to work on their community, I had to take a look! She gave me a demo of their SM2 product today, and it is very cool. SM2 is pretty clearly competing with radian6, in that their tool is geared around measuring and monitoring a brand/person/company/product’s presence in the world of Web 2.0. I’m not an expert on this space by any means, although I have caught myself describing these sorts of tools as “clip services” for social media. But, hey, I’m not a PR person, either, so I barely know what clip services do!

I started out by stating how little I know about this area for a reason. It’s because this post is my take on the tool from something of a business intelligence purist perspective. Take it for what it’s worth.

What I Liked

The things that impressed me about SM2 — either enough to stick in my head through the rest of the day or because I jotted them down:

  • They brought a community expert (Connie) on board early; on the one hand, Connie is there to help them “build their community,” which, in and of itself, is a pretty brilliant move. But, what they’ve gotten at the same time is someone who is going to use their product heavily to support herself in the role, which means they’ll be eating their own dogfood and getting a lot of great feedback about what does/does not work from a true thought leader in the space. More on what I expect on that on the “Opportunities for Maturity” below…
  • The tool keeps data for all time — it doesn’t truncate after 30 days or, as I understand it, aggregate data over a certain age so that there is less granularity. I’m not entirely sure, but it sort of sounds like the tool is sitting on a Teradata warehouse. If that’s the case, then they’re starting off with some real data storage and retrieval horsepower — it’s likely to scale well
    UPDATE: I got clarification from Techrigy, and it’s not Teradata (too expensive) as the data store. It’s “a massively parallel array of commodity databases/hardware.” That sounds like fun!
  • Users can actually add data and notes in various ways to the tool; a major hurdle for many BI tools is that they are built to allow users to query, report, slice, dice, and, generally pull data…but don’t provide users with a way to annotate the data; I would claim this is one of the reasons that Excel remains so popular — users need to make notes on the data as they’re evaluating it. Some of the ways SM2 allows this sort of thing:
    • On some of there core trending charts, the user can enter “events” — providing color around a spike or dip by noting a particular promotion, related news event, a crisis of some sort, etc. That is cool:
    • The tool allows drilling down all the way to specific blog authors — there is a “Notes” section where the user can actually comment about the author: “tried to contact three times and never heard back,” “is very interested in what we’re doing,” etc. This is by no means a robust workflow, but is seemed like it would have some useful applications
    • The user could override some of the assessments that the tool made — if it included references from “high authority” sources that really weren’t…the user could change the rating of the reference
  • Integration at some level with Technorati, Alexa, and compete.com — it’s great to see third-party data sources included out of the box (although it’s not entirely clear how deep that integration goes); all three of these have their own shortcomings, but they all also have a wealth of data and are good at what they do; SM2 actually has an “SM2 Popularity” calculation that is analogous to Technorati Authority (or Google PageRank, to extend it a bit farther)
  • The overall interface is very clean — much more Google Analytics‘y than WebTrends-y (sorry, WebTrends)

Overall, the tool looks very promising! But, it’s still got a little growing up to do, from what I could see.

Opportunities for Maturity

I need to put in another disclaimer: I got an hour long demo of the tool. I saw it, but haven’t used it.

With that said, there were a few things that jumped out at me as, “Whoa there, Nellie!” issues. All are fixable and, I suspect, fixable rather easily:

  • I said the interface overall was really clean, and the screen capture above is a good example — Stephen Few would be proud, for the most part. Unfortunately, there are some pretty big no-no’s buried in the application as well from a data visualization perspective:
    • The 3D effect on a bar chart is pointless and evil
    • The tool uses pie charts periodically, which are generally a bad idea; worse, though, is that they frequently represent data where there is a significant “Unknown” percentage — the tool consistently seems to put “Unknown: <number>” under the graph. The problem is that pie charts are deeply rooted in our brains to represent “the whole” — not “the whole…except for the 90% that we’re excluding”

    The good news on this is that, whatever tool SM2 is running under the hood to do the visualization clearly has the flexibility to present the data just about any way they want (see the screen capture earlier in this post; it should be an easy fix

  • The “flexibility” of the tool is currently taken to a bit of an extreme. This is really a bit of an add-on to the prior point — it doesn’t look like any capabilities of the underlying visual display tool have been turned off. There are charting and graphing options that make the data completely nonsensical. This is actually fairly common in technology-driven companies (especially software companies): make the tool infinitely flexible so that the user “can” do anything he wants. The problem? Most of the users are going to simply stick with the defaults…and even more so if clicking on any of the buttons to tweak the defaults brings on a tidal wave of flexibility. Can you say…Microsoft Word?
  • There is some language/labeling inconsistency in the tool, which they’re clearly working to clean up. But, the tool has the concept of “Categories,” which, as far as I could tell, was a flat list of taggability. That meant that a “category” could be “Blogs.” Another category could be “Blogger,” which is a subset of Blogs…presumably. Another category could be “mobile healthcare,” which is really more of a keyword. In some places, these different types of tags/categories were split out, but the “Categories” area, which can be used for filtering and slicing the data, seemed to invite apples-and-oranges comparison. This one, definitely, may just be me not fully understanding the tool

Overall, Though, I’d Give It a “Strong Buy”

The company and the product seem to have a really solid foundation — strategy, approach, infrastructure, and so on. There are some little things that jumped out at me as clear areas for improvement…but they’re small and agile, so I suspect they’ll take feedback and incorporate it quickly. And, most of the things I noticed are the same traps that the enterprise BI vendors stumble into release after release after release.

Mostly, I’m interested to see what Connie comes up with as she gets in and actually road tests the tool for herself and for Techrigy. In one sense, SM2 is “just” an efficiency tool — it’s pulling together and reporting data that is available already through Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Twemes, Technorati, and so on. And, with many of these tools providing information through customized RSS feeds, a little work with Yahoo! Pipes can aggregate that information nicely. The problem is that it takes a lot of digging to get that set up, and the end result is still going to be clunky. SM2 is set up to do a really nice job of knocking out that legwork and presenting the information in a way that is useful and actionable.

Fun stuff!

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Reporting, Social Media

A Great Starting Point for Social Media ROI

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Yesterday, I wrote about my beef with the popular cliché that “ROI for social media is Return on Influence.” This latest take was prompted by Connie Bensen’s ROI of a Community Manager post that has some great thoughts when it comes to measuring the value of social media.

As I put in my last post, quantifying the results of your social media investment is a worthwhile endeavor. Mapping those results to business value can be tricky, but it’s important to make the effort. As I implied yesterday, a Darwinian Take on Business says that the key decisionmakers are probably pretty sharp about the business they’re helping to run. They’re probably not sitting back and making every decision based on a simplistic ROI calculation. Talk to them about the business when you’re talking about social media.

Connie’s post has a pretty great point to start with this exercise. And, at the risk of exhibiting excruciatingly poor form blogging-wise, I’m just going to repeat it here. This is Connie’s list of the ways that investing in social media can provide value to the company. The investment can:

  • Humanize the company by providing a voice
  • Nurture the community & encourage growth
  • Communicate directly with the customers
  • Connect customers to appropriate internal departments
  • Ensure that messaging will connect
  • Build brand awareness through word of mouth
  • Lower market research costs
  • Add more points in the purchase cycle
  • Provide support to customers that have fallen thru the cracks
  • More satisfied customers because they’ve been involved with product development
  • Shorten length of product development cycle
  • Build public relations for brand with influentials in the industry
  • Identify strengths & weaknesses of competitors
  • Collaborate & partner with related organizations
  • Provide industry trends to the executive level

Which of these resonate the most with you as something that your company values highly or that your company is struggling to do effectively? How do you know that? Are there anecdotes that are widely circulated? Are there metrics that get shared regularly to either illustrate how important the area is to the company…or how much of an uphill battle the company is facing?

Start there. Don’t jump from what you come up with on that front to “…and here’s what we’re going to measure.” Start there and then develop a social media strategy (read more of Connie’s blog…and Jeremiah Owyang’s…and Chris Brogan’s…and others for tips on that). From that strategy, you can then develop your measures — the way you’re going to assess the value of your social media efforts.

Photo courtesy of cambodia4kidsorg

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Analytics Strategy, Reporting, Social Media

Measuring ROI Around Web 2.0…and More Webinars (geesh!)

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Awareness (the company) has a Measuring ROI Around Web 2.0 webinar this Thursday, May 22, at 2:00 PM EDT. That’s heavy on the buzzwords, but it sounds like it might have some interesting information. And, I found out about it thanks to a mention on Twitter from Connie Bensen, who will be leaving her new kayak behind and heading to London and Paris for some R&R, so will be missing the live event herself.

Unfortunately, it partially conflicts with Kalido’s What’s Behind Your BI? webinar, which starts at 2:30 PM EDT, and it conflicts with Fusing Field Marketing and Sales, which Hoover’s and Bulldog Solutions are putting on at 2:00 PM EDT on Thursday as well.

It looks like I’ll be doing some on-demand catch-up after the fact.

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Reporting, Social Media

Social Media Measurement: A Practitioner's Practical Guide

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Connie Bensen has a Social Media Measurement post that is worth a read. While the post is focussed on measuring social media specifically, she hits on some areas that, all too often, are overlooked when it comes to developing metrics and then reporting on them over time.

The post includes a lot of resources for measuring social media — going well beyond simply web analytics data — as well as a list of examples of things that can be measured. What really struck me, though, was the list at the end of the post of what a community manager’s monthly report should include. First, the fact that it is a monthly report is somewhat refreshing — real-time on-demand reports are way overrated, and really are not practical when it comes to providing the sort of context that Connie describes.

On to Connie’s list of report elements — the bold text is from her list, and the non-bold description is my own take on the item:

  • Ongoing definition of objectives — the framework of any recurring report should be the objectives that it is attempting to measure, so I love that this is the first bullet on the list. I would qualify it just a bit — it does not seem right to be making the defining of objectives an ongoing exercise; rather, objectives should be established, reiterated on an ongoing basis (so that everyone remembers why we’re tackling this initiative in the first place), and revisited periodically (objectives can and should change).
  • Web analytics — this is the “easy” data to provide on a recurring basis, it’s data that most people are getting comfortable with, and, even though there is a lot of noise in the data, it is still reasonably objective; the key here is to focus on the web analytics data that actually matters, rather than including everything.
  • Interaction – Trends in members, topics, discovery of new communities — this is a somewhat community-specific component, but it’s a good one; the “discovery of new communities” actually implies an objective regarding the role of a community manager; what a great metric, though, to drive behavior within the role.
  • Qualitative Quotes – helpful for feedback & marketing — to broaden this list to beyond reporting for social media, let’s change “Quotes” to “Data;” make the report real by providing tangible, but qualitative, examples of what is going well (or not); reporting on lead generation activity, for instance, can include selected comments that were made by attendees at a webinar — highlighting what resonated with the audience (and what did not).
  • Recommendations – Based on interactions with the customers — recommendations, recommendations, recommendations! What is the point of pulling all of this information together if nothing gets done with it? I sometimes like to include recommendations at the beginning of a report — they’re a great way to engage the report consumer by making statements about a course of action right up front.
  • Benchmark based on previous report — my preference is to use stated targets (where it makes sense) as the benchmark, rather than simply looking for the delta of the data over a prior reporting period. But, sometimes, that is simply not feasible. Including “here’s the measurement…and here’s the direction it is heading” is definitely a good thing. But, it’s also important to not look at a 2-month span and jump to “we have a trend!”

Having recently relaunched the Bulldog Solutions blog, I’ve got a good opportunity to put Connie’s post into practice. Oh, dear…that’s going to require re-opening the, “What are our objectives for this thing…clearly stated, please?!” Stay tuned…


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