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social media

Blogging in the dark: The vital data no one has (or talks about)

by Ian Greenleigh on August 31, 2010 · 10 comments

Blindly searching for the data we don't have. (Flickr photo credit: Pranav Singh)

There’s something that’s been bugging me lately, big time. It’s not your average annoyance, or mild setback. It’s a huge problem for all of us in social media marketing, but no one seems to say much of anything about it.

Let me illustrate the issue with a real-life scenario, though there are countless others:

You’re hired as a social media manager or consultant to a company that sells something, B2B or B2C—whichever. Dreaming up a social strategy to generate conversions from qualified prospects (email subscriptions, webinar registrations, contact form submits, etc.) to fill the pipeline for your company’s overall sales and marketing efforts is central to your job description.

Because you’re smart, you know that simply creating and distributing content on your own blog is only half the story when it comes to blogs. Outreach in the form of blogger relationship building, commenting and guest posting form the other half. Of course there’s more, but let’s keep it simple and continue…

So, which bloggers do you engage with, and where do you comment? You can find blogs that other bloggers say are the best in your industry. You can look at lists like The Power 150 that are informed by a mix of data, including traffic and external links. You can piece together which others think are the most important in just about any niche you’re trying to market to, but you’ll be comparing apples and oranges.

The truth is, no matter what numbers you look at, the numbers that should really matter to you simply aren’t there. Anywhere. Because you want to be on the blogs your prospects are on.

Who reads these blogs?

I don’t mean how many people. I don’t mean from where their IP addresses originate. I mean:

What industries do they work in?
What are their job titles and/or roles?
How often to they read this blog?
How influential is this blog to them, and how much do they trust what’s on it?
What other blogs do they read?

Try finding that information. It’s simply not there. So how do I back my decisions, as relate to external blogs, with data? I don’t.

If you were a media buyer for television campaigns, you would know where to place your ads. All the data would be there—who watches what programs at what times on what channels. It’s why you see ads for for-profit colleges on daytime TV.

Lots of other web marketing strategies can be backed by data. Search ads can be informed by myriad useful numbers. The decision to purchase banner or interactive ads on 3^rd party websites is usually based on data provided by the site owner on audience.

So why not blogs?

We need a Nielsen of blog audiences.

I’ve tried in vain for months to locate a single useful source for blog readership demographics.Yes, it would be difficult to create. But it would also be insanely lucrative, and incredibly helpful to those of us in the industry (and the DIYers).

Until then, we’re just blogging in the dark.

Why don’t you think we have this tool and/or service? Am I missing something? Or is this data far less important than I believe it to be?

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The past, present and future of content curation

by Ian Greenleigh on August 13, 2010 · 2 comments

A lot of us were curating before we knew what to call it. The word still doesn’t appear in most dictionaries, so myself and others have been chiseling out a definition post-by-post. Etymology is one thing, but to fully understand curation we need to look at its evolution.

The Weblog: From diaries to news

Justin Hall: The first blogger (Flickr photo credit: Joi Ito)

From Wikipedia:

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer’s Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs.

While blogs began as a way to chronicle the lives of the authors, they soon became popular ways to share news updates, opinions and discussions about myriad topics of interest. In this latter form, they involved curation; at its most basic, the selection and sharing of content with others.

The blogroll: Betting on past content

I won’t get into the “is the blogroll still advantageous” debate (today, at least). This blog doesn’t have one; the Bazaarvoice Blog does.

Wikipedia’s definition:

A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).

Here was the next step in curation, in the sense that links to blogs were selected based on some criteria, theme or goal. Blogrolls are often just a set of permalinks to whatever the blogger reads. The links will be there on the homepage, at least, until the blogger changes them on the backend—so blogrolls are static, or maybe semi-static.

They’re also pretty lame. As a form of endorsement, they get the job done, especially from an SEO perspective, as they pass on “authority” that search engines consider in rankings. But are we endorsing every post published on every blog we’re linking to? No. We’re saying, “go there and poke around, because I like to do that.” We’re not featuring any of the content we like to poke around in on our site, at least not through the blogroll. We’re passing along our recommendations for sources of content, not pieces of content.

In general, we’re failing to remove blogs from our rolls if their quality begins to suffer: We’re betting on past content. True content curation is as granular and selective as we’d like it to be. Blogrolls just don’t cut it.

“Best of” and “Top X” lists: The incomplete standard

Lists aren't very sexy. (Flickr photo credit: Fanboy30)

Posts that highlight a number of other content pieces from external sources are relatively easy to compile, publish and distribute. One-off posts on breaking news and updates are popular and arguably valuable as well. They don’t take too long to create, and they add value through curation by informing readers of things they may have missed, passing along link juice and social cred, and maintaining a varied content mix in general.

These posts, however, have two major drawbacks. First, the content management systems they rely upon (like WordPress) aren’t made for rich media. They’re made for vertically-linear, mostly-text updates. Workarounds abound in the form of plugins and code, but piecing together a seamless curation experience takes far too much effort and behind the scenes tinkering. Second, gathering and sharing the content still relies on 3^rd party tools. We need to leave the system to find content before we share it through the system. Bookmarklets remove a step, but don’t deliver a completely fluid experience.

Social media streams: Better than fire hoses, but…

Platforms like TweetDeck have come a long way. Things like native URL shortening and picture upload and viewing make it less necessary to go elsewhere in order to find and share information. However, the amount of content we can experience before needing to click on a link to see the original source is limited. Most filtering still relies on manual friend selection and Boolean strings, and is tedious and complicated to implement. The big advantage of these social networks is near-perfect control of shared content. The stream we share was created by us.

The future of content curation: In and out in a single experience.

The idea is pretty simple and intuitive, but far from achieved. Curators need the best way to both find and share content.

In:

A backend through which streams of every popular content type can be digested easily, natively and in full. Part reader, part viewer, part gallery.

Out:

Aesthetically-customizable, rich output to a public frontend. Modular. Shareable across popular social networks. Full control over publishing—as wide or narrow of a stream as the curator cares to share with the world.

We’ve arrived when I don’t need to leave.

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Curation, attention deficit and the exaflood

by Ian Greenleigh on August 8, 2010 · 6 comments

Overwhelmed by a conversation about being overwhelmed.

I have a column in Tweetdeck devoted to all mentions of “curation”. Added shortly before I started searching for a working definition of curation, it was the perfect solution to the problem of keeping up with all the latest murmurings on a topic that continues to fascinate me. Content on the subject was being published at a digestible pace, and it seemed we all had time to reflect, analyze and, if we cared to do so, publish our own thoughts, either in comments or on our blogs. Of course, there has always been noise—automated, RSS-fed or query-driven bots aren’t easy to filter out, and this is the path that many feel will lead to success in social media. Nor are the digital brown-nosers, retweeting verbatim the words of their chosen gurus, without adding anything at all of value. But even with these annoyances, the curation conversation stream, it seems in retrospect, was relatively clear, lively and exciting.

This week, I realized that I’m no longer able to follow and participate as easily as just a few months ago. Indeed, since my first curation-related post on June 11^th of this year, 3,996 additional posts, whose titles contain the phrase “curation”, have been published on blogs across the social web.

From this Neil Perkin piece, we get a quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

“Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, five exabytes of information were created. In the last two days, five exabytes of information have been created, and that rate is accelerating”.

“Exaflood” is a term coined by Brett Swanson, and it’s an interesting way to imagine what we’re up against, from both the infrastructural and intellectual perspectives.

A familiar feeling sets in—that of being overwhelmed by possibilities.

Ask anyone that truly knows me: I have too many ideas for my own good. These ideas are just as often great as they are a distraction from other ideas, more worthy of my devotion. But singular devotion has never been fully possible for me, the way that you’ll meet someone every so often that tells you they knew they wanted to be a firefighter since they were 6 years old—and followed through with this dream to its fruition. Maybe this condition is merely symptomatic of my lifelong struggle with Attention Deficit Disorder, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’m probably just more predisposed to being overwhelmed in this way, and my ADD exacerbates it to the point that I spread myself far too thin, putting in a little work here, a little development there, some planning for this and that, while ultimately getting nowhere with anything. My two biggest achievements thus far in life (degree from UT and Social Media Manager job at Bazaarvoice) came through a willing, conscious effort to maintain a sustained focus that is uncomfortably contrary to my nature.

That itch feels familiar... (A panel from "Calliope", written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Kelley Jones & Malcolm Jones III)

In Neil Gaiman’s story, “Calliope”, his Sandman character casts a deeply-debilitating spell on a human villain: that of an unyielding, constant barrage of good ideas. Without the ability to execute on them, our villain feels bludgeoned by them. To a far lesser extent, I can identify. Before seeing a thought through to its resolution or transformation into something of value, I tend to encounter another “shiny” thought and pursue it with the intellectual excitement I once had for the thought I now abandon. People without ADD encounter this, too. In a sense, social media has led us here, to a place where we all feel overwhelmed to various degrees. Perhaps others don’t become quite as overwhelmed, but none of us possess the mental resources to categorize and process the swirling mix of ideas that spins around us nearly every time we interact via social media. It’s impossible.

One of the reasons we create, more than in any other time in history, is because we have been given access through technology to millions upon millions of others—a potential audience that didn’t and couldn’t exist before the Web and social media. So now that our creative endeavors don’t have to remain our little secret; now that we can almost guarantee that our work will be seen, we are driven to create it at a feverish tempo, and driven to share it with as many people as we’re able. Similarly, now that we have access to this fire hose of information that contains, somewhere in the stream, the stuff we’re really after, we become fixated. After awhile, we become overwhelmed.

Curation maximizes cognitive efficiency.

Our typical style of consumption:

We turn on the fire hose (Twitter, Alltop, whatever)
We adjust the signal (try to create streams more suited to our tastes, make columns in our Twitter clients)
We simultaneously absorb and refine—but it’s still too much

The ultimate promise of curation:

We are delivered only the content that meets our predefined criteria (and it’s enough to digest without being overwhelmed)

We’re not there yet.

That much is obvious. But I’m seeing some promising, if scattered, developments that indicate we’re well on our way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I see something shiny I simply must attend to.

Bonus! Ian’s latest recommended reading on content curation:

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5 causes just as likely as the one @danzarrella seemingly picked out of a hat

by Ian Greenleigh on April 10, 2010 · 6 comments

What are we really seeing?

I’m not going to explain the scientific method to someone that describes himself as “The Social Media Scientist.” In fact, I have enormous respect for Dan Zarrella and Hubspot, and I know he understands it. So why he writes an article like Twitter Accounts with a Profile Picture Have 10 Times More Followers Than Those Without beats the hell out of me.

Bottom line is, you can’t notice a correlation between two things and then assert one is the cause of the other without eliminating other possibilities.

Here is where he asserts causation: Effect of Profile Picture on Followers [emphasis mine].

Oh, and here, too: “…if you want to get followers on Twitter, it’s a good idea to upload a picture of yourself.”

And here are 5 likely alternative explanations for the correlation Dan noticed.

Number of tweets. Maybe those without pictures tend to tweet less, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
Spammy content. Maybe those without pictures tend to tweet spam more often, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
Age: Maybe those without pictures tend to be newer accounts, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
Location: Maybe those without pictures tend to live in locations where Twitter use is less common, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
Lack of effort: Maybe those without pictures tend to put less effort into acquiring followers, and it is this latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.

I could go on and on. But that’s where you come in! Extra points for funny hypotheses left in comments.

As I’ve said before, Dan noticed something interesting here just by sharing the correlation he found. That alone was worthy of a blog post and perhaps a larger conversation. I don’t understand why he had to then jump to a conclusion and taint the larger effort. I really don’t. Based on our conversation (click “show conversation” after jump), he doesn’t seem to think there’s a problem with what he did. Cognitive dissonance? Who knows?

Remember, I’m writing this because I’m a fan, and posts like this might help influencers like Dan get better—and by extension, our study of the social media universe can improve. But I won’t say posts like this will do much of anything. That, after all, would be assuming causation .

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Social Media: Our Sleazy, Scheming, Sexy Society

by Ian Greenleigh on March 3, 2010 · 2 comments

Have you seen the social media underbelly? It’s not too hard to find. Type in one or two of the words that most appall you here and you’re bound to find some shadowy figures tossing them out without reservation. Gangs are now using Twitter and Facebook for recruitment. Talking heads are horrified–horrified!–that teenagers are using Chatroulette for virtual hanky-panky.

photo credit: jonny2love

And what about the spammers? The auto-DM’s from shiny-toothed circuit speakers selling e-books , the incessant requests to become “fans” of boring businesses we’ve never heard of, the phishing scams, the millions of zombie-like broadcast accounts that constantly speak but never listen–what about them?

“Yikes”, says the business owner, “Why on earth would I want to dive into that cesspool?”

“No thanks”, says the pure-intentioned soul, who simply wants to make friends online.

Is the water a bit muddy? Without a doubt. But if all we see is the filth, we miss the bigger picture:

Social media is simply a reflection of our society.

How muddy? ( photo credit: Newsbie Pix)

The same imperfect, complex, corrupt, exciting, beautiful society in which we do business every day. The same one, in fact, inhabited by our dearest friends, crooks, liars and everyone in between.

Sex and violence sells, so the media reports on these dark corners of the social media experience and leave some of us with a bleak, yet entirely inaccurate, understanding of this online world.

Stretching the truth in an entirely different direction, we find the schemers. If they can convince us that social media is a utopia of easy money and happiness to which they hold the key, we are one step closer to attending their pricey feel-good seminars or buying their surefire profit system.

Social media is neither den of iniquity nor Shangri-La.

This is social media. ( photo credit: helenadagmar)

400 million people use Facebook, for an average of an hour per day. To the surprise of many, who we say we are on Facebook is a remarkably accurate portrait. We are fast approaching 50 million tweets per day. These numbers can’t be ignored because they represent people.

The world is using social media. If the world is filled with your prospective customers and friends, you should be, too.

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