Welcome back to #pubcon. It’s been a long night playing blackjack (and an even longer night playing craps after that) but we’re back and semi-conscious enough to jump back into it. Up next is the Convergence of analytics and SEO featuring Alan K’necht, Tom Critchlow, and Mark Knowles.
@lisabarone is in here liveblogging this too (or just furiously typing away about something else) so I’m feeling a little bit out of my league, but I’m going to try this anyway.
First up is Alan K’necht. He wants to talk about the convergence of social media analytics and traditional measurement.
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Alan hates the term social “Media” How is using the device different than socializing how we used to? Alan prefers “Social media Marketing”
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The goal of our social media marketing campaigns is to be a fire and draw in the moths (people) to our brand.
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so how do you measure your fire? is it circumference? how many people stand around it? how high the flames go? What’s the most actionable metric there?
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Your fire requires 3 things: Kindling/fuel soource, heat, and oxygen. The same goes for measurement. You need all 3 and you need to measure all 3.
Early measurement tools
The cubit.
Hands
Heads. Heads? yes – it’s how kings measured battles! What’s the goal of measuring heads? Victory and success of battle – but what did kings miss out on by measuring heads? Their losses! They had no idea how many soliders they were losing.
In social media, we’re still measuring heads! Followers, friends, fans, etc. These are the same as heads.
Paces – Posts, tweets, etc. It’s great to set milestones but what do they actually mean?
So how do we measure victory? We can look at ROI / Retweets / engagement.
Alan’s showing a list of great tools now, but I couldn’t keep up fast enough.
Measuring Fuel – These are your fans, followers, etc. You can measure the quantity, but you can also measure the quality.
We also have scoring tools like klout or twitalzyer that can tell you how big of a fish you are in a pond – but sometimes they can’t tell you how big your pond is. Justin Bieber is a giant fish (among other choice words I could come up with) but his pond is full of 12 year olds. That’s a completely different pond than you may be interested in.
Comparing fish in different ponds doesn’t make sense – so don’t waste your time comparing your klout score to Justin Bieber. It’d be more effective to compare it to mine.
So that’s how you measure the fuel. Now how do you measure the heat?
The heat is your content. Don’t measure it by quality, frequency, or freshness – measure it by quality!
Impressive: about 70% of the room here actually works in analytics and not just SEO. That’s awesome. #Measure
Find out which type of content your fuel likes to spread. Look at ratios. Measure likes or shares per post. Measure RTs per tweet.
Big mistake people use: not using link shorteners with analytics. Not only that, tag them with your google analytics tracking code. But don’t just track your links – track links you tweet to other sites as well. That way you can find out if your followers liked it or not and you can stop tweeting out crap.
Now let’s bring it all together and measure our fire. How do we do that?
– look at increase in references
– correlate changes in traffic to sales / conversions / whatever it is you’re measuring. Is there a change? is it sustainable?
Tangent: Alan just gave a great example of a food company who is re-writing public domain recipes to include their brand name instead of the generic food and pushing them out on the web. That’s a very interesting long term strategy there.
In summary, you want to measure the attraction of your flame, NOT the BTUs. Be more like bug light or a camp fire than a blow torch or a forest fire. Draw people in, don’t send them fleeing for their lives.
Up next is Tom Critchlow of Distilled
Tom is talking about the OK trends blog by OKcupid. If you haven’t read it yet, working for OKCupid should be any analyst’s dream job. They get to look at things like sexual activity broken down by type of smartphone. Let’s just say I feel sorry for all your android users.
Next up is businessinsider.com who actually publishes their analytics on their site for anybody to see. That’s an awesome idea!
I love this idea: Date Visualization > Infographics It’s not really news or groundbreaking or useful if you’re just taking data everybody else has access to and putting it into an image. Side note, android phones don’t donate much to charity either. I wonder if that’s related to the OKCupid data?
If you want your infographic to succeed – include private info that nobody else has access to.
When it comes to measuring, measure things that you can actually control. Don’t just measure the results, measure what you’re doing directly to achieve them – then you can change those things if they’re not having a good effect.
How do we measure page quality? Tom’s showing an awesome _gaq.push to help track the number of reviews at the page level. Interestingly he says that the pages doing well for SEO are the ones with more reviews. Personally I wonder if that’s correlation or causation and which way it goes.
Here’s another tip: Measure the % of Facebook users to your site.
somebody’s throwing something metal around in the next room. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but it sounds like it would be an extremely interesting presentation (or an extremely inappropriate way to deal with a rude question)
User feedback is data too – and the good news is you don’t have to threaten them by throwing large pieces of metal around at your presentation either, you can simply farm out your survey on mechanical turk. Questions like “would you recognize this site as an authority? Would you give this site your credit card?”
And that’s it for Tom. Up next is the Q&A.
The first two questions are about tools. Speaking of tools though, there’s a session going on next door where Raven is announcing their brand new research central SEO mashup dashboard. It looks pretty awesome.
