As General Manager of the smaller-market Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane didn’t have the financial resources to pick from the top of that list. So, rather than following the herd, he created his own. Rather than agonizing over RBIs and batting averages, he looked at a player’s ability to get on base. He theorized that a team stacked with such players would statistically score more runs and as a result, they’d likely win more games than their competition. And the best part of Beane’s ranking system? Since the players that he desired were ranked so low by the herd, he could sign them at bargain basement prices.

When Beane fielded his team of “misfits” for $40 million, the herd laughed at him. But at the end of the regular season, he had the last laugh. You see, the New York Yankees had spent $125 million to win their 103 games. The Oakland Athletics spent less than one-third as much to do the very same thing.

While watching the movie, Moneyball, this past weekend, I was struck by the similarities between the baseball herd and the social media herd. When it comes to evaluating the value of social media investments, companies rely on the same herd-like tendencies.

• Those from the advertising side of the herd see the value of social media as measured in impressions and click-through rates.
• Those from the marketing side of the herd see the value in terms of “brand messaging/awareness.”
• Those from the public relations side of the herd see the value in terms of influence.

A slew of analytics companies have stepped up to feed the herd. Their pretty little dashboards serve tasty, herd-favorite morsels such as impressions, click-through rates, fans, and page views. They’ve even invented new measurements such as “klout” and “engagement.”

But here’s the problem. Generic measurements mean nothing without considering the reason for them in the first place. The goal of a MLB General Manager is to field a team that wins more games than the competition. The role of corporate communications is to support a customer’s entire journey to, through, and beyond their purchasing decisions. If the metrics that your company measures don’t support that goal, then why measure them at all?

It’s time to bust away from the social media herd. If your company has been investing in social media this past year, you have a responsibility to analyze it. All of it! Look underneath the pretty dashboard data. Start at January 1st and look at every tweet, every Facebook update, and every blog post. Study every retweet, comment, and “like” that a specific piece of digital content sparked. Look for patterns. What content resonated most with customers? What content did they ignore? What was the single most valuable piece of content that helped the most customers in their moment of truth? The answers to such questions will reveal two things: the value of your efforts and a digital program road map for next year.

But let’s face it. Most companies won’t do this. Analysis is hard work, which is why so few do it. Add the fact that running with the herd is less risky, and most communicators will continue throwing more money at meaningless things.

Billy Beane could have accepted his fate as a small market GM. Instead, he changed the rules. Are you willing to change the rules? Are you willing to dig deep into YOUR data and find out what YOUR CUSTOMERS need to support their journeys to, through, and beyond their purchasing decisions? Or will you acquiesce and continue to run with the herd?

The MLB herd scoffed at Billy Beane…well…that’s right up until he won all those games.

Photo Credit: freefotouk

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Google Docs to help illustrate how Social Media activities can be measured, tracked, and analyzed. By combining Google Spreadsheets, Google Gadgets, and a little HTML, my Social Media Dashboard offers an at-a-glance view of my client’s social media efforts. Here’ s a screen-shot of what my dashboard should look like:

Unfortunately, it hasn’t looked that way since last Tuesday morning, when I noticed that Google Gadgets stopped working. Today, my dashboard now looks like this:

I first noticed the problem while calling it up live in front of a business prospect. Having just talked-up the use of these great tools, I felt a bit red-faced, but shrugged it off as a minor hiccup in technology. Software breaks and I figured that Google would have my dashboard back up and running within a few hours. Unfortunately, 96 hours 120 hours six-days one-week ten-days later and the problem still persists.

I’m not the only person affected by outage. The following thread on the Google Docs Help Forum shows four examples–just from last Tuesday:

“I was going to do a training which included motion charts tomorrow morning.”
(newbopke)

A part form the disruptions this problem is creating to my website, what I find amazing is that after 24 hours Google doesn’t come out with a solution, and none even says “well, we will find a solution in 48 hours, and we will do this and that” or so.
(Jorge from Burgos)

I’ve been using “Gantt Chart” to follow projects progress of an ONG I’m working with. Gadget stopped working yesterday! Please! Jules: Help me, Help US!
(sosa.0991)

Is google working on this? I too have a presentation tomorrow using motion gadgets. Very stressed! Any alternative motion chart options out there for the computer illiterate?
(wmkay87)

I believe in cloud computing. I also understand the risks involved with new technologies. But if cloud computing is going to be a viable option for companies, downtime will need to be measured in hours not days.

Tags: Google Spreadsheets Gadgets Cloud Computing Broken Ron Ploof Orange County Social Media Social Media Dashboard

The difficulty with this question is manifested in the sheer magnitude of the problem. How does a company monitor mass communications channels, save the data, analyze it, and act upon what it finds? That’s when I ran into a simple and very understandable example.

For the past few months, I’ve observed how one company uses the real-time information of a competitor to set pricing. The company is Amazon.com, the competitor is Barnes and Noble, and the product is my book Read This First: The Executive’s Guide to New Media–From Blogs to Social Networks. The chart below demonstrates what I mean.

My book was released in November 2009. Since Amazon was the first bookstore to carry it, and thus had no competition, it chose the retail price of $17.95. That price held for a few weeks until it dropped suddenly to a seemingly arbitrary $12.21. It didn’t take me too long to figure out what had happened. Read This First had just debuted on Barnes and Noble’s site at that price.

Three months after the book was released, Barnes and Noble decided to increase its price to $15.34, triggering a corresponding and almost instantaneous increase on the Amazon side. But this time, instead of matching the price increase as it had earlier, Amazon only increased it by 10%, to $13.46.

Finally, about a week later, Amazon returned its price to $12.21 while Barnes and Noble has held its at $15.34 — where both prices remain today.

To me, this chart represents a simple example of how future businesses will use real time mass communication. Computer programs will watch for specific information, events, triggers, social graphs, etc… They’ll run that information through algorithms, perform pre-programmed actions, and closely monitor the results of those actions. Over time, the algorithms will be adjusted to optimize the results.

Perhaps companies will be able to better predict mass demand for a product. Perhaps they’ll be able to automate the purchase and sale of goods and services at an optimal price. Perhaps they’ll be able to predict large earthquakes, based on disparate and seemingly inconsequential data that on a whole paints an accurate picture.

I can’t predict what they’ll do with the information, but I can predict one thing with certainty: Technology is not the limiting factor…our imaginations are.

Photo Credit: Tolomea

Whenever I get the keys to a client’s Web analytics, I feel like Indiana Jones, exploring cobweb-laced catacombs that contain hidden treasures which are just waiting to be discovered–treasures that frequently result in meaningful business intelligence. Unfortunately, though, I’ve learned that traditional business communicators don’t share my enthusiasm for online data analysis. Many view such activity as meaningless busywork, so, instead of rolling up their sleeves and wading deeply into the raw data, they cast fleeting glances at their automatically generated Web reports.

It’s understandable. Most marketing and PR folks still don’t understand the impact of a dynamic online marketplace. In the past, these professional business communicators reported on static measurements such as banner ad impressions or media mentions. Such metrics were good-enough when companies were the only initiators of online content, yet fall short of the task as 3rd parties (customers, prospects, competitors, and investors) have joined the online content party.

The amount of online content created about your company is increasing every day, and the effects of that content are becoming more significant. The question remains, “Does your company have a finger on the pulse of these effects?” If not, it’s like running into a dark forest without a helmet.

Most companies do nothing with the data that their analytics packages collect every day, and of those that do, even fewer perform analysis, preferring cursory looks at first-order results (unique visitors, page views, referrals, popular pages). First-order results work well in a traditional controlled content environment, but reveal their inadequacies in a dynamic online world. The real juicy business stories are found in the second-order calculations. Remember that old High School algebra and y=mx+b? Remember how to calculate the slope of a line?

Business stories are found in the second-order affects of Web analytics data. Rather than glancing at static numbers collected independently on a week-to-week basis, savvy communicators plot them over time. Enlightened business communicators study these graphs and ask questions such as:

• What is the slope of the data?
• Are the unique visitors rising or falling over time?
• Did the visits to a specific Web page spike and then return to its baseline level in a short amount of time? What could be the cause of that?
• Why did a number of people recently come to our Web site through someone else’s YouTube channel?
• Why did our company see a significant spike in Facebook fans over the past few weeks?
• Why is the fastest growing Web referral from Google tied to the keyword bad customer service?

Keep a close watch on these second-order effects. Find the trends. Once you do, you’ll be able to make smart executive-level decisions based on what you find.

Of course, if you’d like to hire a very smart consultant to show you how, I’m always available:-)

Photo Credit: vrkerbs

Tags: data y=mx+b algebra social media second-order effects ronploof measurements ronamok

Technologies in and of themselves are not very interesting. What people do with them, however, is. I’m fascinated with how people USE new technologies in their day-to-day lives.

Take Twitter for example. Standalone, the technology is new and interesting. But it wasn’t until I began using a desktop Twitter client called Tweetdeck that I noticed some self-behavioral changes.

I’ve found that the TwitScoop column in Tweetdeck is where I get all of my breaking news. Consisting of a tag cloud, the column represents Twitter’s trending topics. The larger the word, the more frequently it’s being used in Twitter-based conversations.

Last Tuesday, I returned to my computer after a few hours of client meetings to find the image above waiting for me. It didn’t take much imagination to see that the California Supreme Court had issued its ruling on “Prop 8,” the measure that banned same sex marriages in last November’s elections. The ruling caused such an emotional response that the Twitterverse lit-up with every conceivable opinion.

Tweetdeck was where I first heard about the plane that splash-landed in the Hudson. Tweetdeck is where I first heard saw the words “Mumbai” and “terrorists” — both examples arriving in Tweetdeck long before the mainstream press had a reporter on the scene. It has become the defacto place for your New Media Evangelist to get his breaking news.

How are New Media technologies influencing your day-to-day habits?

Tags:Twitter Tweetdeck Twitscoop Breaking-news New Media Evangelist

Below is my first chart created using Widgenie. Data entry is as simple as uploading an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file — the short training video is all I needed to get started.

I had a problem importing the data from an Excel 97-2004 formatted XLS file (created from three different sources (Open Office, Google Docs, and Excel 2008), but the native Excel 2008 and CSV files worked as advertised. Since the service is still beta (and free!), I’m willing to give ‘em a pass on this little annoyance. I used a CSV file exported from Open Office 2.4 to create this chart.

Embedding the chart into my blog was as simple as cutting and pasting some javascript — which opens up some interesting possibilities for content creators.

For example, lets say that you want to publish data that changes from week-to-week. Instead of creating a new chart every week, you simply update your spreadsheet and upload it to Widgenie, overwriting the old one. Since the widget is tied directly to the file on the Widgenie server, the data will always be up-to-date, rippling through to wherever the widget is embedded. I see this as an advantage for companies wanting to maintain live customized dashboards of all sorts of data.

Lastly, Widgenie also gathers stats. Since the widget is both embeddable and sharable, these stats will help you monitor where your data is traveling to and what sorts of traffic it generates. I’ll let you know how this is working for me over the next few months.

So far I like what I see, and this New Media Evangelist plans on using Widgenie to share and analyze data.

Update: I just noticed that the chart is not displayed in Google Reader. This is a little disappointing but hopefully Widgenie will figure out a way to make this happen.

Tags: New Media Evangelist Ron Ploof Widgenie widget widgets review data charts

Curiously, she didn’t mention the blog-subscription numbers. So, with the same level of enthusiasm that she described the thousands of hits, I explained that our RSS subscription-rates were steadily rising and that one of our bloggers had just broken into triple digits. The silence in the room was deafening. It was clear that my triple digits were being pooh-poohed compared with the quadruple digits that the marketing manager presented.

Marketing folks have a paradoxical view of numbers. On one hand, they love really large numbers. If you say, “We got a million new unique hits on our corporate website yesterday,” the news will be greeted with enthusiasm. Marketing folks also love small numbers. If you say that “We had a 6% hit-rate on our latest advertising campaign,” you’ll receive enough back-slapping to collapse a lung.

The paradox is a holdover from the Golden Age of Mass Media, where corporations shot messages pell-mell through mass media outlets to see what sticks. Because the response rate for these mass communications is so dismal, marketeers were forced to play “Probability Marketing,” where large numbers were required on the front end of a campaign in order for a small number of conversions to precipitate out the back-end.

I attempted to explain why my triple-digit “subscription” numbers trumped the quadruple-digit “hits” numbers. “Think about it this way,” I said. “The people who take the time to subscribe are so fascinated with our bloggers opinions on these super-niche topics, that they demand notification whenever we write something new!”

Now that’s influence — the currency of New Media.

Successful New Media isn’t about “Probability Marketing.” It’s about a unique group of people who are interested in your products and services. In these New Media Times, it is much more important to focus on a small number of engaged customers and prospects than to use the shotgun method and blast your message through all of the noise.

Tags: New Media Evangelist RonAmok! ronamok corporate blog influence metrics