I first saw this joke on Facebook a few minutes ago. Here’s a glimpse of how it’s been spreading over time.
I needed to create a post to check that my new RSS feed is working. Apparently (and thanks Charlie Southwell for pointing it out) they haven’t been working so well for a few months. Should be fixed now.
I’ve been interested by forums for a while. It often seems that the Social Media establishment overlooks them in favour of shinier platforms; unjustly, in my opinion. Forums require more time investment than other social platforms, grow more slowly, often cater to a slightly less attractive demographic, and (significantly) are more intrinsically hedged against commercial activity from marketers.
But that doesn’t stop them being interesting to marketers; if for no other reason than that they often perform better against common “problem searches” than brands’ own sites.
But I think there are many other reasons we should keep an eye on forums. Which is why I’ve been noodling around with a few recently. What follows are some notes on what I found on one such forum; MoneySavingExpert.com.
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Last Friday, all Facebook Pages automagically switched to the new Timeline format.
What will the impact of this be?
In anticipation of this change, Simply Measured (a web metrics company) recently published a pre and post study of brands that had been early adopters of the new Facebook Timeline format. In it they made the headline-grabbing claims that “new Facebook Pages drive higher engagement rates” and even put a number on it: brands, they promise,
get 46% more engagement per post with timeline.
This would make more sense if the majority of a brand’s audience engaged with their posts on the Page – but they don’t. The great majority of a Page Post’s impressions are served on the audience’s newsfeeds and news tickers (it’s a current source of irritation to me that we can’t distinguish between the two) and only a tiny fraction (and generally less than 1 percent) are served to Page visitors. So the great majority of fans won’t even have seen the new Timeline layout. How then could it have any impact on engagement?
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We may be able to replicate the strong user engagement enjoyed by games (and social games) by adding game elements to a non-gaming business.
This isn’t about companies creating advergames (of course that hasn’t prevented advergame developers from repackaging their services as sexy "gamification" products and muddying the waters.)
Instead, businesses are learning to engage with consumers through "game-like" behaviour.
Example: Foursquare turns "coffee-shop loyalty cards" into a game by publishing league tables based on your social graph.
Example: Facebook (inadvertently?) turns "acquiring fans" into a "strategic social media goal" for companies by publishing the number of fans on Facebook Pages.
Points, levels and collectables are becoming a tool for marketing and behaviour-change as real-world activity increasingly becomes game-like.
Here’s my top-line review of the situation as I understand it. Which isn’t much. It’s mostly told through links to other people’s presentations — and as such this is intended as a jumping-off point for people new to the concept.
Last January, fashion e-tailer Asos announced that they were opening Europe’s first Facebook store or F-Store. F-Stores were a hot pick for everyone’s 2011 trend predictions.
It’s a matter of time — within the next five or so years — before more business will be done on Facebook than Amazon(Sumeet Jain, Principal, CMEA Capital)
Now it looks like as though we’ll need to find a new trend for 2012: Bloomberg has posted a bearish story tracing the collapse of the Facebook store front. It comes as no surprise to us; that’s just not how people use Facebook.
It’s no secret that Twitter and TV are best friends. The company I work for has signed a deal with Bluefin Labs to take advantage of this, and in the UK, my (v. smart) colleague Scott Thompson has begun publishing selected results of our own research.
Anyway — thanks to SMG partners like Sysomos, PeopleBrowsr, and Twitter themselves, my hard drive is bursting with data and charts. Here’s a quick selection, presented with as little commentary as possible.
When it comes to planning Twitter media campaigns, it seems clear (for the present at least) that brands will have to find predictable trends to form the backbone of their activity. Nothing is more predictable than TV.
The Only Way Is Essex: Seasons 2 & 3 Twitter engagement
The chart above illustrates the emergence and resolution of a flame war[1] on Waitrose’s Facebook Page last November.
The horizontal axis represents sequential Posts on Waitrose’s Wall while the vertical axis represents the individual contributors to the "conversation" (really it was more of a barney than a conversation.) Each blue dot plotted on the chart represents at least one comment posted by a specific contributor on a specific post.)
So the more blue dots in a column mean the more unique users have commented on that post; the more blue dots in a row, the longer that unique user has continued engaging with the overall conversation (or to put it another way, the greater their appetite for the fight.)
The flame war in question more or less dominated Waitrose’s Facebook Page for more than a day and a half; accounting for 70% of all Posts and 72% of all Comments until it finally ran out of steam.
Much as I’d enjoy going into them, the ins and outs of the matter have little bearing. For the sake of this post, I’m only interested in what the numbers tell us about how Page Admins should deal with these emerging crises when they appear on their Facebook Walls.
Because, as it turns out, the accepted wisdom may be misleading.
9 days of activity on the ASOS Facebook Page
This chart (click for bigger) represents 9 days of activity on ASOS’s Facebook Page. Compare it to the Budweiser flow and you’ll see how focused ASOS is on Customer Service by comparison.
And yet their post frequency is high: an average of more than 3 posts per day. They promoted 11 individual links during the period which between them delivered over 120K clicks through to the ASOS site.
So Customer Service is only half the story; there’s a robust DR element here.
Here’s a brief summary:
Automated sentiment analysis uses a combination of two approaches to determine sentiment: lexical analysis (which looks for emotionally-weighted words) and machine-learning (which relies on a “training corpus” of manually scored documents to predict the emotional content of new documents that it processes.) Continued human intervention (“training”) in the machine learning process may improve results, but makes it more or less meaningless to compare the results over time.
No two sentiment analysis tools on the market agree closely; with most disagreements occurring and around “sentiment-neutral” comments. Since these form the bulk of the content, there is much room for disagreement.
Sentiment analysis on short content (e.g. Tweets) lacks sufficient context for accurate judgments, whereas analysis of longer content often lacks sufficient relevance (e.g. the search term may only be mentioned in passing, and the sentiment score refer to a different object)
Human-based/manual sentiment analysis also faces reliability challenges. There is often as much disagreement between two human analysts as there is between two automated systems. Worse still, research demonstrates that the same person – when presented with the same text on different occasions – may score it differently each time.
Conclusion: Sentiment Analysis may be used to guide customer service engagement, but should not be used as a KPI
Why was everyone expecting the iPhone 5? Was it because journalists and bloggers were picking up on Google search trends and writing the stories that people wanted to hear?
Have a glance at this chart showing three years of search traffic (click for a live version)
In previous years, search traffic has more or less followed the announcement – but for the (still mythical) iPhone 5, search traffic began to grow well ahead of time (a situation — as Scott Thompson has pointed out to me — probably only exacerbated by the delayed announcement.)
Bloggers and journalists are increasingly using social signals (search & twitter volume) to determine their editorial policy. After all, search and social are a good indicator of what interests your audience – and major traffic drivers.
In this case, however, the process created a vicious feedback loop. Even the more sensible commentators and analysts found that — when the conversation was about the iPhone 5, there was no virtue or value in writing about it in any other way.
I used Google to count the posts that mentioned “iPhone 5” in the title on some of the top tech blogs, MSM and online news sources — the numbers tell a story.
