Twitter: For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Posted in Social Media ROI, The Terametric Scorecard by Matt Carter on July 21st, 2010

 

At Scott Kirsner’s recent Momentum Summit, Trip Advisor CEO, Stephen Kaufer was asked to play a game.  Interviewer, Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners called the Game “College Money”.  Rodriguez explained that he would name a number of companies and Kaufer would say “yes” or “no” as to whether he’d bet his kids college money on that company’s success.

Yahoo – Yes
Microsoft – mmm, Yes
Facebook – Yes
Twitter – NO!

Rodriguez paused and asked again.

Twitter – Nope.
And again.
Twitter – No.

Each successive “No” seemed to be gonging death knell for everyone’s favorite microblogging site.  Kaufer seemed to cast doom on our rich, 140 character culture.   But why?  Kaufer simply smiled and shrugged and suggested that its utility would be short-lived.  Really?

It’s use among the social media set is practically ubiquitous.  Aside from its promotional value for brands (those brands which use it wisely), its capacity to empower knowledge-sharing is staggering.  The question it answers is no longer “What are you doing?” but “What do you know?”  Yet, Kaufer, a man who’s built a successful web company on the power of social engagement, suggests that he wouldn’t bet on its future.

Back in January of 2010, there were several charts and quite a bit of chatter pointing to the flatline of twitter’s growth.
It wasn’t until April 2010, however, that these charts were put in their proper perspective.  At Chirp, the annual Twitter Conference, there were some exciting revelations about the growth of twitter.  It seems that these harbingers of twitter doom hadn’t accounted for the number of people using third party apps to do their tweeting.  In fact, approximately 60% of all tweets originate in third party applications.  With that perspective, you can see that these charts don’t point to a flagging interest in twitter but rather an explosion of innovative usage.

If that weren’t answer enough, the Huffington Post published the following stats from Chirp:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.

• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.

• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.

• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)

• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.

• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.

• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.

• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.

In light of these usage statistics, we’ll have to very respectfully disagree with Mr. Kaufer on Twitter’s dim future.  It seems that our 140 character culture is here to stay, though it may evolve.  Viva la Twitter!

Photo by Pellaea

Tags: Social Media, twitter, usage stats
Posted in Social Media ROI, The Terametric Scorecard | View Comments

The Quest for Performance Measurement

Posted in Social Media ROI by Matt Carter on July 6th, 2010

 

The path that ultimately led me to Terametric began as a bit of a quest. Working for years in the marketing and advertising industry, I’d fielded client and executive questions of measurement and performance hundreds of times.

In the early days we talked in terms of reach and frequency, CPM and a bit later, impressions.  We’d proudly say things like, “this TV buy will reach 60% of your target with an average frequency of 3.6.”  Or, “Our PR outreach effort yielded 687,000 impressions.”  The client’s eyes would momentarily brighten at the size of the figures and then inevitably the questions would come.

• “What’s the average number of impressions?”
• “What’s a good frequency?”
• “Is that enough reach, too much?

Those shrewd clients and executives were really asking, “What does this mean in terms of performance?”  By performance, I’m talking about the degree to which something achieves a desired result.

Enter Web 2.0, the social environment.

A new frontier opened up.  Conversations were occurring, in real-time, across communities, networks and social outposts.  People were talking.  Even more importantly, people were talking about brand experiences. Quite suddenly, the world was awash in social monitoring and measurement purveyors.

We, marketing service providers, began to say things like, “You got 726 mentions around that topic.”  Or, “Your share of voice increased by 20%.” Or even better, “Positive sentiment around your product is trending up.”  Clients and executives would be pleased that counts of various things seemed to be on the increase but inevitably, those same questions rose.

• “How many mentions is a good number?”
• “What’s an average share of voice for our industry category?”
• “What should our sentiment target be?”

They were really asking, “What do these figures mean in terms performance?”  So the quest began.  I searched high and low, reviewing and trialing this tool or that solution, trying to answer those questions.  I dog paddled through a sea of data visualizations, swam upstream through rivers of news and plunged headlong into automated sentiment trackers to no avail.

And then, I met Wendy Troupe.  She had taken a algorithm used initially to predict mutual fund performance and altered its data inputs and scoring methodology to quantify marketing performance.  She could literally measure a company’s ability to attract, engage and retain customers.  I knew this was something different.  I jumped aboard and off we went.

Fast-forward seven months and we find ourselves in our pilot client’s conference room.  Our Benchmark Assessment dashboard remains projected on the wall and there’s a moment of silence.  We’ve just delivered our report on their comprehensive and channel specific marketing performance to date.  Each channel has been scored 1-100 according to its current ability to attract, engage and retain customers.  We’ve demonstrated how to drill down, through the tool, and get at the underlying factors driving that performance.  Our tool provided a detailed roadmap at both a strategic and tactical level for improving that performance.

I braced for the questions but shouldn’t have.  We’d already answered them.  Instead, our client began to talk about prioritizing channel initiatives to achieve performance goals.  My quest, and hopefully yours, had come to an end.

Photo by the talented Kaysse

Tags: marketing measurement, marketing performance
Posted in Social Media ROI | View Comments