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Social Media Research & Measurement Woes
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on June 22nd, 2009

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
Zora Neale Hurston (American folklorist and Writer, 1903-1960)

Despite the rich data sets that now exist in the social web, marketers are confused and overwhelmed with the tools that are currently available to them to gain insights into this data. In order to get a comprehensive and accurate analysis, marketers are having to use many tools (as many as 10 – 30) and compare results to improve the accuracy.

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
Zora Neale Hurston (American folklorist and Writer, 1903-1960)

Despite the rich data sets that now exist in the social web, marketers are confused and overwhelmed with the tools that are currently available to them to gain insights into this data. In order to get a comprehensive and accurate analysis, marketers have to use many tools (as many as 10 – 30) and compare results to improve the accuracy.

None of the tools that are currently available (SM2, Radian6, etc.) accurately measure sentiment and opinion because they are based in keyword combinations. Marketers are still left with sifting through large amounts of data using multiple tools to understand the relevance to their product, brand, industry and competitive positioning.

More importantly, for greater insight, correlations should be made between existing customer and prospect data from CRM systems. Finally, if done correctly, an ROI calculation should be derived from key metrics in the data and analysis for ongoing monitoring and measurement.

An annual marketing survey released by Alterian in February found that a startling majority of marketers fail to implement analytics to measure the success of their efforts. Only 47% of the 1500 marketers, agencies, marketing services providers and systems integrators polled asserted the use of analytics in their campaigns.

Alterian’s study demonstrates this statistic that marketers found analytics “difficult.”

“Marketers are still using multiple applications to do their job, with around a quarter of respondents using more than seven applications on campaigns. With more than half of those surveyed (51 percent) using between three and six applications, it means that a vast majority of marketers are attempting to analyse data from disparate systems, with little or no integration.”

The Challenges of Measurement

Zora Neale captured the essence of research but marketers should approach it with a purpose that includes measurement on a regular basis. Measurement — with all of its success metrics— is the only way we can validate our strategy and justify the spend. Research provides the insight but it is measurement that continually drives the evolution and optimization of the strategy.

Tags: Social Media Measurement
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Who Owns Your Domain Name?
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on June 15th, 2009

Those of us in the peace and love generation entered the technology revolution and gold rush with a bit of the haze still surrounding us. Early adapters that we were, we trusted those more tech-savvy among us when they said they’d purchase our domain name for us, register it, and it would be ours forever.

Over time, of course, our eyes were opened, mostly because of the hours spent fixing something that was only broken because of the need of some scurrilous fellow travelers to control the kingdom. We came to understand we do not own our domain names, they are leased. Safety controls prevented domain hijacking. Those who thought they had the keys were thrown from the castle into the moat (they returned in other forms, but that is a later story).

Today, that question, “you mean, I don’t OWN my domain” is again being asked by those who trusted the honest gatekeepers to take care of them.

Those of us in the peace and love generation entered the technology revolution and gold rush with a bit of the haze still surrounding us. Early adapters that we were, we trusted those more tech-savvy among us when they said they’d purchase our domain name for us, register it, and it would be ours forever.

Over time, of course, our eyes were opened, mostly because of the hours spent fixing something that was only broken because of the need of some scurrilous fellow travelers to control the kingdom. We came to understand we do not own our domain names, they are leased. Safety controls prevented domain hijacking. Those who thought they had the keys were thrown from the castle into the moat (they returned in other forms, but that is a later story).

Today, that question, “you mean, I don’t OWN my domain” is again being asked by those who trusted the honest gatekeepers to take care of them.

I’ve spent two working days this week working with a client whose domain name is up for renewal (the client needs to re-register the domain if he wishes to keep it). A few years ago, this client wanted to go it alone. Not one to quibble, I tried to divorce myself from any access to their domain. The process, for various reasons, failed. Now, no longer being in the same business, I am trying again to separate my name, identifying Internet numbers (NIC handle) and personal data from this client account. It may or may not work, so it is time to revisit this simple question:

Who Owns Your Domain Name?

First, be aware that you do not own any of your domain names. You lease them. If you don’t protect your lease and these pieces of intellectual property, you could lose them. It’s not easy to lose them (it used to be), but it is possible.

The basic process is you think of a domain name to represent you and your business. You check in the Whois (who is) database of some domain registry such as Network Solutions. You discover your name is available and you pay the registry to provide you with that name. You probably pay for a year as you don’t see why you should pay more.

PAY MORE!

Pay for at least 5 years, if not 10. Time passes quickly, more quickly than you’d like, especially if you are growing a business. Who has time to fuss with renewal every year? Besides, it’s cheaper the more years you register.

What does it mean to register a domain name?

When a domain name is registered, it is checked against the Internet domain name system (DNS). This is a directory of all the Internet domain names and corresponding computers, each of which has a unique address called an IP (Internet Protocol) address and which is actually a number.

How do I register a domain name?

As I said above, domain names can be registered through many different competing companies (“registrars”), with whom you contract. The registrar sets the terms for accepting your registration (including pricing and levels of privacy), as well as maintaining same.

The registrar asks you to provide various contact and technical information needed to fulfill their licensing agreement with ICANN. The registrar keeps records of the contact information and submits the technical information to a central directory known as the “registry.” This registry provides other computers on the Internet the information necessary to send you e-mail or to find your web site.

ICANN and Accredited Registrars

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation, responsible for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions.

Originally, these services were carried out under U.S. Government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities. ICANN now performs the IANA function.

Currently, ICANN is the foremost example of collaboration (that is what this is all about, remember?) by the various constituents of the Internet community. These include businesses, organizations, governments and individuals, all of whom are involved in building and maintaining a stable, but growing, Internet.

ICANN is the organization accrediting registrars through an accreditation agreement.. This includes identifying and setting minimum registration standards. If you choose to use a non-accredited registrar, well, buyer beware.

Now What?

This may be a bit techy, but I’d guess you understood most or all of it. Now what to do with this information?

Check that you or your company are either the account owner or at least are listed as administrative or technical contacts. If you are not listed, get listed, immediately, now, today, This is a process, and requires some attention, but it is not difficult. Among other things, you’ll have to have a unique login and password for each contact. Don’t share the master login and password. As the account holder, you have total access. Everyone else has limited access.

Ensure you are the billing contact, not your web firm.

When changing contractors or employees, change contact information and passwords to the registry.

As with checking accounts, provide access to the domain registry with more than one reliable business partner or staff, just in case.

If your domain is registered one place and your web site hosted at another, look at consolidating these accounts. It will likely save you money.

Lock the domain to protect from unauthorized switching or hijacking by other domain registrars.

Consider the “make this information private” option, especially if you are concerned about privacy. If you are a business, this information is already out there. It probably is if you are just an individual also. Be aware that choosing privacy may result in some difficulty in claiming your domain if a registrar decides to be ornery. Private registry gives the registrar more control.

If you’d like to read more about all this, there are plenty of resources you’ll find by using your favorite search engine. The bottom line is that your domain name is a major business asset. Protect it.

Gayley Knight is a guest blogger for Terametric. She is Founder/Principal of Business Her Way (a social media management company). Delighting in opening the technology world for your company, Gayley draws on her extensive network and personal business experience to simplify your online world. Showing you best social business practices and simple tech tools designed to increase your business visibility brings social media into perspective, saving you time and money. You can contact her directly at http://www.businessherway.net or via email at gayley [at] mothergeek [dot] com.

Tags: General
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To Blog or not to Blog?
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on June 8th, 2009

A list member asks,

Since there are only 24 hours in the day, and blogging takes time, I’d like to ask a few questions:

Do you blog? What’s your blog like?

Do you get anything out of it (besides the satisfaction of writing)? Help for your business, a job, advertising revenue, publicity for your nonprofit organization, a paycheck, help getting your work published, etc.?

Are you positive or negative about the whole blogging experience?

The questioner is a writer and wonders specifically if blogging will help bring her work to the attention of publishers.

A list member asks,

Since there are only 24 hours in the day, and blogging takes time, I’d like to ask a few questions:

Do you blog? What’s your blog like?

Do you get anything out of it (besides the satisfaction of writing)? Help for your business, a job, advertising revenue, publicity for your nonprofit organization, a paycheck, help getting your work published, etc.?

Are you positive or negative about the whole blogging experience?

The questioner is a writer and wonders specifically if blogging will help bring her work to the attention of publishers.

If you go to marketing seminars on blogging, the presenters will tell you all the reasons you should be blogging, of course. There are specific reasons for different industries. For writers, it is the more subscribers you can show a publisher you have, the more potential success a published work has. For the HR or public relations or customer service departments, the company culture will show through, the potential for larger press (the story is written after all), and building good customer relationships are possible results if the blog is done well.

Some of us, a great many in fact, think blogging is for the vain, self-serving and “bored, nothing to do” among us. Others of us are concerned about privacy and how we will look — our public face.

Should you be blogging? Of course.

Should it just be out there free standing and independent of your business goals, business and marketing plans, your mission and branding? Of course not.

A blog is a business tool - and can be an excellent one. A blog is software that makes content management easier. It can simplify internal communications and knowledge sharing. Internal blogs can be private and never published on the Internet or listed in any blog rolls.

Share industry news. Comment on your competitors’ news. Comment on their blogs, adding a link back to your blog or web site. Build your reputation as a resource and knowledgeable person or company. This is Gimbels meets Macy’s in instant time and around the world. It is not magic. It still requires work, discipline and time to get known.

About the 24 hours in the day.

With the advent of microblogging tools such as twitter, it is ever and ever simpler and less time consuming to blog. I use posterous.com (another microblog, but not restricted to a particular number of characters) to post, which are then automatically posted to other social web sites. You can email your blog post to posterous so no login even! There are a lot of other such microblogging tools and even the original blogging companies offer this type of service.

The rule of thumb is to blog consistently: once a day, once a month, every hour. Your readers will learn your schedule and look forward to your next entry — sort of like waiting each month for the next issue of your favorite magazine. I know a CEO who writes her blog entry every Wednesday. She sets time in her calendar for this. She is not a writer but finds the discipline and return worth the time.

There is one final part: the reading time. RSS is a good filter for this. I find even that is overwhelming. I take a day a month to scan and read what others are saying and then respond/comment. Putting a link in your comment will help drive traffic to your blog. The viral marketing potential is real — and that is a plus, don’t you think?

Gayley Knight is a guest blogger for Terametric. She is Founder/Principal of Business Her Way (a social media management company). Delighting in opening the technology world for your company, Gayley draws on her extensive network and personal business experience to simplify your online world. Showing you best social business practices and simple tech tools designed to increase your business visibility brings social media into perspective, saving you time and money. You can contact her directly at http://www.businessherway.net or via email at gayley@mothergeek.com.

Tags: General
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Helpful Tip: Email Spam – Still Out There!
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives by Wendy Troupe on June 2nd, 2009

I was recently asked by a small town client how to prevent spam in the email. There are lots of ways to prevent spam – and if you have a good email company, you should have a lot of what you’ll read here in place already. If you are running your own server, some of these may be ideas for you to institute if you have not done so.

Spam is generated very simply by distributing your email address. The most common ways to distribute your email are:

in the signature at the bottom of an email address,

in the From:, To: and Cc: lines of email messages,

on business cards,

in online forums, message boards, and lists (which is often against the policies of the forum/board/listserv),

at tradeshows, conferences and networking events.

There are several solutions, some more effective than others, some more burdensome on the sender, and some that require you to do a bit of thinking before distributing your email address. Bots (robots or spiders) recognize email address two ways: using the “@” symbol and through use of widely used email domains, such as hotmail and gmail (and dozens others).

I was recently asked by a small town client how to prevent spam in the email. There are lots of ways to prevent spam – and if you have a good email company, you should have a lot of what you’ll read here in place already. If you are running your own server, some of these may be ideas for you to institute if you have not done so.

Spam is generated very simply by distributing your email address. The most common ways to distribute your email are:

in the signature at the bottom of an email address,

in the From:, To: and Cc: lines of email messages,

on business cards,

in online forums, message boards, and lists (which is often against the policies of the forum/board/listserv),

at tradeshows, conferences and networking events.

There are several solutions, some more effective than others, some more burdensome on the sender, and some that require you to do a bit of thinking before distributing your email address. Bots (robots or spiders) recognize email address two ways: using the “@” symbol and through use of widely used email domains, such as hotmail and gmail (and dozens others). Two of the more common preventative steps are:

Instead of writing your email address in a proper way like example@gmail.com, convert it to example|a|gmail [dot] com. Then explain it to others so they understand what you mean, like “Please convert |a| to @ and [dot] to “.”. Email addresses can be converted to anything you think is readable by humans, but not bots.

Encoding your email address into special values called character entities, which represent each character, is one method. Programs exist that will convert an email address to its encoded value, for use on a web site or anywhere you use the mailto HTML coding. For example, this is an encoded link for a webmaster email account (extra line breaks have been placed in the code so the width of the page is not broken – make sure the encoded parts you use are all on one line in your web page):

a href=”mailto:webmast
er@ohlone
.cc.ca.us”>
webmaster@
ohlone.cc.
ca.us

There is no guarantee that encoding your email address will prevent spam. Robots are created that are smart enough to decode the encoded address. It’s a game, of sorts, to spammers and coders.

Often, communities who maintain their own servers need to invest in these practices to save time for those running the server and email systems.

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?

Don’t forward an email from someone you don’t know to a list of people. Those”forward this email to 20 of your friends” messages are perfect for harvesting email addresses. These types of sign-and-forward emails often appear in the form of a petition.

Avoid CC (carbon copy) for group emails you send out. If you send an email that might be forwarded on and on, it can easily be found by bots, who you can be sure will add the nice collection addresses to their spam address database. Instead use BCC (blind carbon copy). This means the recipients do not see the list of email addresses that your message has gone to – and prevents that “reply all” from getting to everyone, which is also good for email reading sanity. Encourage others to use BCC for groups instead of CC. Or ask to be removed from their email lists and announcements if they won’t do that.

Don’t use your home or business email address when you register on a Web site or in a group. If you must sign up for services, want to receive more info, register for newspapers or domains; use a free email address from a site like Yahoo or Hotmail to create an address especially for that purpose. This also goes for posting to the Web, on a list, newsgroup, on a contact page for a Web site, or on a resume that is posted on the Web. If you begin to get spam from that source, you can delete that account and open another.

Make sure your profile privacy settings are set so you don’t receive marketing from other sites.

Never use your email address as your screen name in chat rooms.

Create alias email addresses. Certain services allow you to generate multiple, anonymous email addresses that forward to your real email account. You can even reply to forwarded messages through your email account and have it appear as though you are replying through the generated one. This puts a level of anonymity between you and potential spammers. A good idea is to create a new email address for every website that you disclose your address to. If you start to get spam through that address, you know where the spam is coming from and you can delete the address and eliminate the spam.

WHAT MORE COULD BE DONE?

Disguise email addresses on your web site.
As mentioned above, we could strip out periods and “@” symbols. For example, “YOURNAME AT YAHOO DOT COM.” We can also make the “@” an image, which will prevent crawlers from identifying it. You can do this in your signature file as well, in case your recipients forward your email.

Use a complicated email address.
The more complicated the email address is, the less likely it is to be generated for targeting by a spammer’s software. Bots will look for the easy and obvious addresses first, such as those with identifiable names “alan@hotmail.com” as opposed to m0g33k@townofsomerset.

Use methodology that requires the sender to do a bit of work to manually correct the email address before their message can be sent. Examples of this include:

username @ yourdomain.com (before the message is sent, ” @ ” must be changed to “@”; i.e., no spaces surrounding @)

username AT yourdomain.com (before the message is sent, ” AT ” must be changed to “@”)

username AT yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” AT ” and ” dot ” must be changed to “@” and “.”)

username @ yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” @ ” and ” dot ” must be changed to “@” and “.”)

username@yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” dot ” must be changed to “.”)

username@NOSPAMyourdomain.com (before the message is sent, “NOSPAM” must be removed)

Use images to represent email address
Instead of using text, you can also use images to represent your email address.

Use forms to prevent spam on your website
Forms can be used on your website for visitors to contact you. You can hide your email within the form code so email harvesting software cannot grab it from your web pages. Many companies do this now to keep control of their inboxes.

Create one “Contact Us” page and link to that page from all your other pages. This often frustrates users.

Change email servers periodically.
This can be expensive and time consuming, but is similar to changing auditors.

Change emails annually. This, too, can be expensive and time consuming.

Use email as it is meant to be used, where there are less forwarders, and email is read and responded to from the server.

Gayley Knight is a guest blogger fo Terametric. She is Founder/Principal of Business Her Way (a social media management company). Delighting in opening the technology world for your company, Gayley draws on her extensive network and personal business experience to simplify your online world. Showing you best social business practices and simple tech tools designed to increase your business visibility brings social media into perspective, saving you time and money. You can contact her directly at http://www.businessherway.net or via email at gayley@mothergeek.com.

Tags: General
Posted in Wendy Troupe's Perspectives | View Comments