Click here to see and also listen to my presentation of how Rightmove are using in this particular case tealeaf to understand their customer experience better and replay exactly what their visitors did and see it in their eyes (I’ve saved the presentation using Jing Project which is absolutely fab).

The presentation is just under 5 minutes long, includes all my slides, my voice (audio) and also a video of where a visitor’s journey went wrong using tealeaf’s session replay. It opens up in a new window, press play and you can listen to all 5 minutes (if you have the time that is). http://screencast.com/t/SadLainUI3

It was really great (not trying to be cheesy I promise) to meet and see everyone yesterday. You may be able me make out in the photo.

Consumer Generated Media (“CGM”) is the term that encompasses all social media content on the Internet authored by consumers. This content ranges from blogs, to social networks, consumer review sites, message boards, and videos.

Social networking and connecting with customers is all the buzz, for example yesterday Forrester Research did a webcast on “Know your Customers’ Social Technographics and Craft the Right Social Marketing Strategy” with Charlene Li from Forrester. She shared her insights on understanding ones target audience attitudes and behaviors towards social technologies in order to craft the right social marketing strategy. These are great calls for marketers to learn more about getting their arms around social media, listening to the voice of the customer and engagement with consumers in social media.

Jeremiah, a fellow web analytics association social media committee member, is a social media stategist and gives us outlines of how to approach positioning one’s company in the wider social media ecosystem. From a web analytics perspective, how does one even begin to gauge the influence of these conversations on one’s brand?

Social media technographics report by Forrester research. 

Some other stats, from Pew Internet and Jupiter research:

One blog is created every minute
27% (32M) read blogs
22% (27M) post reviews/ comments
44% (53m) are content creators(running own blogs/sites, posting messages).

There are more than 1.5 billion comments per day, the collective voice of the consumer to influence brands and buying strategy has never been stronger and will continue to be strong.

There have recently appeared in the market, applications, such as Visible Technologies TruCast that enable companies to monitor social media conversations, gain valuable insights, and even engage with consumers in order to better allow companies to manage their brands online on social media sites. For companies, these online conversations represent a new opportunity and challenge for brand monitoring, reputation management, word-of-mouth marketing, and consumer engagement.

This is pretty powerful stuff, the ability to segment one’s potential customers by feeling and tone and message from the enormous pool of social media sites.

I wonder how scalable this tool or any tool is, because eventually with the increase of the blogosphere appearing to be exponential how much data will their databases be able to handle?
But assuming all social media data on the Internet, posts and comments are collected in a database with multi-tiered querying – there would be some pretty powerful information.

Influence engagement metrics and advanced analytics:
Identifies the most influential consumers for a particular topic or issue
Determines the sub-topics of conversations
Interactive dashboard allows clients to determine specific sites and authors wielding the most influence in conversations.

What are they talking about (sentiment) scores:
For example, their intelligent sentiment technology evaluates the positive and negative sentiment and tone of conversations. Users establish sentiment criteria by scoring a sample of data, and TruCast automatically scores the rest. I’d like to put this to the test.

There are others such as Pythia which give trended social media data for free, so even for SMEs there are tools which can help.

I personally think the idea of engagement metrics within the context of the broader social media ecosystem and putting it to use to be able to positively impact on managing one’s company’s brand, social media reputation management, is something that we will all be doing in the not too distant future.

Any thoughts or questions or disagreements, please let the web analytics princess know.

Last weekend I went to the inaugural Podcamp UK and co-presented a session with Lucie Follett on the monetisation of podcasting and podcasting measurement using engagement metrics, in the auspicious surrounding of Birmingham’s NTI (new technology institute). It was fast paced and innovative. You may be able to spot us in one of the photos? There were a whole bunch of people there including all the top UK podcasters, Twitter guys (I twitter, do you?), bloggers, journalists and new media folk in general.

In the social media ecosystem, in which I would include podcasting, there is so much potential for businesses to use podcasting to generate brand awareness and interest in their product or service from a niche audience. At the same time, there is an increased awareness of the potential monetisation of podcasting, if it is done effectively. I am still a big believer in “Content is King” - ie create podcasts that genuinely interest and compel your target audience. And have seen examples where “view movie” (ie watch podcast) with the right kind of engaging content has resulted in a tripling of lead generation on a particular car company’s website, such as brochure requests. So podcasting can and does work for business when done in the right way - you need a good story, and definitely not my boss told me to do a podcast!

However, how do you begin to measure a podcast’s effectiveness?

Due to the nature of downloadable media, there are a number of difficulties when it comes to getting accurate metrics from podcasting and issues to consider which impede the efficient implementation of big marketing or advertising campaigns across multiple website.

-How many podcast downloads are there – if the podcast is embedded in the website, is it still considered to e a podcast?
-How many viewers actually watch or listen to the podcast once it is downloaded?
-What degree of the podcast is listened to, for example if you have ad in the podcast towards the end, how many people actually listen to it?
-What true influence or buzz is actually generated by the podcast, because link content (popularity) does not equate to influence.

The key things is to look at podcasting in the same way one does other social media.

Engagement metrics are key. Things to consider include (and please feel free to add any more via comments):
1. Visitor reviews of your podcast (for example on itunes).
2. Visitor comments – where a podcast:comment ratio is the most helpful one as it strips it down to pure engagement on a podcast, by podcast basis.
3. Social capital/Visitor influence – if an established reviewer ie top podcaster or specialist within the industry writes a review/comment etc, this will have a lot more influence than if Sam from Dunkirk did (sorry Sam).
4. Ranking on established podcasting platforms, such as podcasting news top 25 or podcast alley top 10.
5. Wisdom from the rest of the web, such as the reaction on the blogosphere, twitter-sphere, facebook-sphere, general search engine results etc.

The monetisation of podcasting, is not about corporates trying to strangle the life out of a vibrant, independent podcasting community – which will definitely continue to thrive, but a marketing journey where businesses who understand social media will use it to their advantage. Businesses that podcast will be able to measure those tangible or intangible (hence engagement metrics) benefits to their business, and where eventually marketers and advertisers will be able to efficiently implement advertising across multiple podcasts, similar principle (but very different at the same time) to the way google adwords has their content network advertising – where you can run campaigns on a keyword/sector basis, having illustrated the value of advertising on podcasts or websites running podcasts.

Thanks so much for reading and do let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, or if you completely disagree.