Monitoring Social MediaEmmet Kelly

About me...

Classicist, Internet Sociologist, Business man and Internet Researcher

Net use since 1991 Research since 1996 Nua Internet Surveys, Local Ireland1998 Monitrack Internet Research 2000. Ireland’s longest established digital research

specialist. Joint National Internet Research in 2003 and Net Behaviour Report for

net behaviour - established in 2005 to provide a range of communications services across the digital media spectrum

Inquisite Online Market Research software Attentio Blog Monitoring: UK and Ireland New digital research ventures

Overall digital research and Internet enthusiast... Show of hands???

About this presentation... ‘Measuring Social Media’

What’s happening with Social Media on the Net and what does it mean?

Growth of Social Networks: What Stats are Available?

What is twitter? Why is it making such an impact?

Monitoring Social Media with Attentio

Media Measurement: Strengths and Weaknesses

An experiment I did

To Infinity and Beyond

Conclusion. People in a digital world. Tips for spotting the next big thing!

How did we get here? Internet has always been a Social Space.

Context. The Growth toward ever more Socialized Media. Technology got in the way!

Email, Webpages HTML, Java. Drive to communicate with friends and family.

Search The growth of search to find pages... Yahoo! and Google dealing win information overload. Google goes into mapping and documents

Chat overtakes email for person to person communication

Web 2.0 . Content escapes format. Blogs wizards, feeds, widgets...

Smartphones and cheap video cameras move take communication away from the desk.

Social Media MySpace, Bebo, Facebook . User friendly blogging Twitter –

Twitters’ bridges all the killer apps that have gone before

Big events change the way we learn about the world

Boxing Day tSunami 2003

Barriers to News: Boxing Day tSunami

No mainstream news No reporters Took days for mainstream news pictures... And then it was over. Film is rare, and

amateur

BUT luckily...there were... Video cameras Amateur journalists Bloggers Blog pictures Blog news

Amateur blogger news was the MAINSTREAM news...

And then...

The Iraq War

Bagdad Burning (Riverbend)

War Creates Barriers but Bloggers win out...

Young Iraqi woman: Mixed Shia / Sunni Background.

Identity a close secret.

Diary about conditions before / during and after the war

But... What are social networks? Are they like blogs...?

Yes! Social Networks are all just blog pages... with links to similar ones

Geocities and Tripod. Personal pages for those with HTML skills

Blogger (Odeo) and Wordpress: free webpage generators and wizards

Bebo: Blog Early Blog Often. Same thing

MySpace, Facebook, Hi5... Personal Homepages

Linked in: CV homepages and networking tools

Twitter: Micro-blogging. No CV... Just status updates... (more later)

The Big Winners: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and of course twitter.

Facebook is leaving the desktop, to become a very popular iPhone app.

How big is Facebook

150M: Bigger than population of Russia, Japan and Nigeria

67% of online population

35 Languages

Women over 55 fastest growing segment

10% of all Internet time

How big is Twitter

Twitter is the new killer app. With iPhone it takes social networking away from the desk, and onto the streets!

1,382% growth per year. 7M in 2009

11% of Online Adults

More educated, more female young adults

8M unique visitors in March

twitter

What is has taken things a step further..

Not for everyone. Not the intended product of developers Odeo, who invented blogger

Allows users to give ‘status updates’

Permits anyone to follow users, unless ‘blocked’

Asynchronous.. Unlike Facebook. Anyone can follow the famous and read their updates. (FB have followed suit with their ‘fan’ functionality’.)

This means it can grow naturally with human interest in ‘fame’ – unhindered by need to connect back.

What is Updates can included: Important news updates, banal witterings, links to news and humour and opinion pieces

Can be self marketers marketing at other marketers, and vice versa Twitterers can be people, companies, causes, ideas... (more later)

But tweets are short, so don’t fall into the giant post problem of blogs, or slow motion rants.

Users and molding the development twitter... more than twitter. That was the idea: @, RT and # tags.. All user driven conventions NOT designed by Odeo Open API... Almost 100 twitter tools

Twitter news can be much quicker, more relevant and local than mainstream news. 6 Degrees of separation...

for news updates

Now to get Context. Big Picture: Enter Attentio: Demo Time

Format

Product

Topic

Country

MDS

Buzz Average

Buzz %

Strengths of Social Media Measurement

Averages of online word of mouth. Pure. Unprompted.

Not too much ‘weight’ given to any one discussion... No matter how verbose.

Immediate data-capture. Realtime results.

Reveals conversations ‘bubbling underneath’.

Huge range of topics

Twitter search more timely than news. Great recruiting tool!

Track things like:

Do they like an ad? Are you having a problem with a product? Care about an issue? What are you politics? Interest in a topic? What’s cool? What’s not!

As progressively all human communication goes through some sort of digital gloop...

tracking and monitoring becomes inevitable, and critical for maintaining competitive advantage.

Another thought: For the First Time Human’s can… measure ideas spread

Like a pebble in a pond... Gauge the Idea Wave!

Measure and gauge the Human communication mathematically using ideas from physics.

Birth, weight, mass, speed, velocity, wave dynamics...

Watch and measure the intensity (weight) of idea

Watch it spread out from the source and measure it’s speed (velocity)

Gauge the overall size of a message spread (mass)

See what happens when it hits a barrier (China/North Korea)... Like a wave

Watch it peter out...

This has been done with networks before, and data... But never with ideas. The pervasiveness of mobiles, twitter and social networks, together with monitoring software makes this possible for the first time in human history. It could be very important.

Weaknesses of Social Media Measurement

‘Pile up’, swine flu messaging...

Influential say: ‘check out this site’, or ‘sign this petition’, or ‘this is ridiculous’, other’s pile on. It spreads quickly... But this doesn’t mean its valuable. (You can check the nature of the messages though to find out).

Agenda setting. Moulding social discourse.

Influential posters direct whats important. What should be debated... What’s of interest. (Like newspaper editors but sometimes much more influential in key groups)

Many more, and more important strengths than weakness IMHO.

Twitter experiment: HappyTweetDay – May 20th

The Idea:

A Tweet has 140 Characters

The 140th day of the year is May 20th

With the country feeling miserable, why not send a positive happy uplifting tweet on May 20th including #HappyTweetDay, including the website URL: www.HappyTweetDay.com.

We had the idea at 1.30 on 13th of May and set the site by 2.30. It cost €8

With only 7 Days till Tweet Day... what would happen?

All positive tweets from twittter were auto-harvested and put on the site

Site had 2,587+ visits to the site. 130 relevant tweets (avg 60 followers = 7800)

Marketed by word-of-mouth on twitter only.

Tweets spread from Germany, Greece, UK and Ireland, US, Australia....

Picked up by Metro

Proved that with little effort, you can create something out of nothing on twitter

HappyTweetDay could catch on and become an annual free event.

Some Results: Happy Tweet Day

Some Results: Happy Tweet Day

Success of HappyTweetDay (if you call it successful), not necessarily a success for twitter, but for a simple idea. Could be better of course.

It does prove though that ideas can be communicated very quickly and effectively through twitter and social networks with very little cost.

Remains to be seen if it works next year. At least twitterers will know the date.. The 140th day, May 20th. For twitters should be more memorable than other days, like religious festivals. If you know its 140 characters, you know the date!

Considerations

Astro-Mike: Following 2, Followers 328,355...

In time... Almost all long and short term chatter will go through a digital medium, on a digital platform.. Somewhere.

Great ad targetting. Reach people because of their conversations. What they are interested in goes beyond demographics and site visitor statistics

Social media communications should be more relevant, effective and less annoying

Great for mainstream news item dissemination.

Popularity and utility that drives communications technology. Simplicity too.

Twitter seems to combine all the killer apps that have gone before.

These change human communication forever and help us view it for the spread of ideas for the first time.

What’s the next big thing? Simple social network software is the next big thing..

And best of all. Its Free!

Conclusions

Research ServicesWebsite audience, niche group, online depth interview, twitter/social media user identification and tracking

AdvertisingServicesWith Net Behaviour.com: planning, buying, tracking, reporting,

creatives, insight, buzz marketing, general advertising consulting

Social Media ServicesWhat are they? What do we do with them? What’s my strategy?

General ConsultingAnything digital or Internet related e.g., reality checks for new digital business models, digital strategies for existing businesses.

Social Media Monitoring SoftwareAttentio: The best social media monitoring service there is!Industry sector monitoring by main players, topics, country using

blogs, forums, youtube, twitter and newspapers/news sites.

Market Research SoftwareInquisite: Excellent, affordable user friendly online MR software.

Excellent reporting, mailing list management, CRM. Free Trials

Contact Emmet for things like...:

(Contact Details)+353 86 8256825emmet@monitrack.comemmet@netbehaviour.comblogs: www.TheTannoy.com, www.TheDigitalbrief.comtwittered: emmetkelly (also Facebook / Linkedin)

That’s it!

I hope it was informative, thought provoking and I hope you enjoyed it.