Forget the debate for a moment on what Google Plus is right now. Let’s assume Google+ has the capacity to do anything, the question is what will it do, and how will users adapt it for their own purposes. [...]]]>

Forget the debate for a moment on what Google Plus is right now. Let’s assume Google+ has the capacity to do anything, the question is what will it do, and how will users adapt it for their own purposes. Remember when Facebook first launched? No newsfeed. No photos. No search. No finding people more than 3 degrees of separation away from you. No ads. No games. No pages or groups. No grown ups. Forced awkward sentence construction for status updates: “Devon is…going to murder Facebook if they don’t take the damn ‘is’ off of my status update.” And my most-missed feature: “your friend is currently using Facebook at McCarty Hall.” That was a total foursquare premonition. But Facebook, and social media more broadly, has changed dramatically in the intervening 7 years. So let’s play the future history books backwards; what are the likely end-states for Google+ and how did it get there?

1. Masses flee from Facebook to Google+, giving Justin Timberlake a new toy to play with. But it took Facebook 5 years to grow larger than MySpace. 5 years in which MySpace refused to innovate. Facebook has a pretty incredible history of rolling out new & innovative (most often, too innovative) features. In fact, two of their engineers came out with Circle Hack mere days after Google+ launched; there already exists Social Hangouts, a group video chat for 20 people. Feature wars will benefit users, but won’t be a legitimate competitive advantage for either company.
2. Users figure out they share different kinds of content on Google+ (in the way I don’t share Instagram photos on Facebook), or they want to have a different social graph on Google+ (in the way my Foursquare graph is 1/20th the size of my Facebook graph), and everyone lives happily ever after, checking  6 different streams every morning, tailoring every piece of content they create to one specific audience, on one specific network. Early adopters might be destroying this possibility already. My Google+ circles include more recent weak ties than Facebook (mostly grad school friends & current work colleagues, zilch random people I knew in high school), but the size of my Google+ network has already become nearly as large as Twitter, without Twitter’s 140 character limit. It’s hard to imagine the “team collaboration platform” option staying on the table for long with that kind of growth, but then again Facebook was able to transform itself from .edu to .world.
3. Google+ burns bright and fails fast when it comes out of beta next month. The early adopters will get stuck crossing the chasm with circle fatigue, and never bother to draw the early majority into the network. I think we’ll know by the end of the summer whether this is the case (it took the collective wisdom of the crowds less than 3 months to pan Google Buzz).
4. Google+ finds limited appeal, is adored by the tech elite, and provides just enough use cases to incrementally improve AdWords. In other words, it’s the Gmail of the 21st century. If Google knows you’re you, every time you use one of its many, many products and services, it could significantly improve and expand AdWords. You know, that thing that makes Google 97% of its billions. I’m not yet convinced Google Plus needs to “beat” Facebook, or any other social network, in order to survive. All it has to do is live up to expectations inside of Google to deserve continued resources. Look for AdWords coming to a stream near you.

I’m leaning towards future #4.  But I recently had to put a few additional thoughts together for an internal discussion at Threespot. Maybe you’ll “like” them?

Possibly related posts:

1. Will the Business People Please Stand Up

For months now I’ve been wanting to do an experiment on Facebook but haven’t had the time. The Daily Beast finally beat me to it with their Cracking Facebook’s Code article yesterday, which shows essentially:

Measuring social media is hard. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by minutia, there’s yet to be a measurement site that even comes close to adequately tracking people & content across social media platforms, and there are no standardized benchmarks to know [...]]]>

Measuring social media is hard. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by minutia, there’s yet to be a measurement site that even comes close to adequately tracking people & content across social media platforms, and there are no standardized benchmarks to know if 43 (fans, comments, @mentions, whatever) is good, bad, or average. And the truth is, social media is more art than science. Not to mention we’ve become obsessive about measuring this just because we can (or at least, we think we can). Besides, when’s the last time you checked the ROI of that poster you put up, the press release you sent out, or the postcard you mailed?

Let’s talk about a new way.

Putting people front and center in your measurement plan.

What if every day, or week, or whenever, there was a list of people delivered to your inbox. These are the people who commented on your blog, or your facebook comment, or began following you on twitter, or favorited your slideshare presentation. The list would include the actual text of their comment. In v2.0, you could give values to each of these activities. As in, 5 points for an RSS subscriber, 1 point for a facebook like, 2 points for a delicious tag, etc. And the measurement tool would know the network size of each of these people. Total score is a function of the weight of the user’s action, and the size of the user’s influence base. The list delivered to your email inbox would be ordered by descending total score. In v3.0 this is not only an email, but an entire database. Search by comment keyword, by “most influential/engaged facebook fan” or how a user’s score has changed over time. This is as much a customer relationship management tool as a social media measurement tool.

But wait, that’s not all.

How is your content doing online?

You want to care about this for a few reasons:

1. If a piece of content is suddenly doing well, maybe there’s something you could do (like responding to a tweet, taking a photo, adding tags to a YouTube video) to increase the momentum.
2. If you can discern a pattern to the characteristics of the content that is doing well (or for that matter, is doing poorly), maybe you could build on the thing that’s working, or fix the thing that seems to be broken.

This list of content items would be emailed to you. You’re probably going to want to segregate new content items (recently posted) from recurring content items that continue to get pageviews or comments long after you’ve first posted them. In v2.0, you’d be able to tie the size of your network to each content item, so a blog post that you also tweet about to your 10,000 followers would have a higher score than the comment on your flickr photo that gets 4 views a day. In v3.0, if a recurring content item jumps some x% over last week, month, etc, then an emergency email would be sent to you, with the assumption that there’s probably something urgent that needs your attention. Clearly, these emailed lists would also benefit from a database that was searchable, and showed trends over time.

But wait, there’s more.

How did people arrive at your content?

The two big categories here are links and search terms. Within links, you’ve got to consider referrals, direct links, and embedded content you’ve got elsewhere. Within search terms, you’re going to want to know the search terms people used to find your content, the search terms they’re asking for on your site, and the hashtag & list terms they’re associating with you on twitter.

So this is your 3rd email of the day, week, month, etc. At this point, you’re probably asking yourself not how people arrived at your content, but why you should care. For links: having the opportunity to thank, and more generally connect with, the folks that are sending traffic your way. For search terms: to both guide future content creation decisions, and refine any SEO/SEM that you might be doing. And again, with the descending scores, and the searchable database. In v2.0, it would be nice to group similar links, and similar search terms together. In other words, I know that search phrases including the word foursquare drive quite a bit of traffic to my site, as do many different links from Beth’s blog and Ian’s blog. There are some nifty tricks in Google Analytics to combine each of these sets of links & terms, but I want a simpler solution.

Finally we arrive at the place where most folks seem to start.

What’s the size of your  network?

You’ve got your people, your engagement, and your traffic. These are big aggregate numbers that are best tracked over time, and hopefully compared to your competitors.

It’s probably not the case that a subscriber to your slideshare account is ‘worth’ the same as a fan of your delicious tags. So again, it would be nice to be able to give a weight to each of these types of people, engagements, and traffic. And you’re probably going to want to see that “people” score as a total of all platforms, or by several platforms at a time. Like in Google Analytics, it would be nice to attach annotations to these aggregate trends.

It’s impossible to do all of this measurement though right? A total pipe dream. An analytics package that would be impossible to implement? A fools errand to try to connect so many platforms, so many third party tools, with so many divergent goals?

Probably.

But here’s the tools you would need to do it.

True, some of these cost money, and less than half the platforms have open APIs, but let’s at least take a quick gander at each of them. These are, of course, in addition to the many one-off possibilities I’ve mentioned previously.

WordPress Stats Plugin

*You’re going to need to install the plugin to get these stats.

Google Analytics

*GA has a TON of data to dig into. It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole. I’ve been promising a more in depth post on this for months. It’s still in the works.

Feedburner

*of particular note: check out the publicize tab to know who’s subscribed to your blog via email.

Facebook Page Insights

*Only page admins will get access to this data.

BackType

*of particular note: this is the only way I’ve been able to figure out the amount of Facebook buzz my content gets from folks who aren’t my friends/fans.

Twitter RSS Search Query

This one’s a bit of a hack. You can “subscribe” to an RSS feed for any search term on Twitter (like @yourname). This is a great record of all of the people who mention/retweet you. Google reader will then graph for you the number of “posts” by day of week, time of day, etc.

Bit.ly

*If you haven’t already, please give TweetDeck (or HootSuite, or CoTweet) your bit.ly API, and it will shorten and track all of your links automatically. For added bonus, connect bit.ly > TweetDeck > Packratius > Delicious. More on this soon. It’s magical. You can also stalk other people’s bit.ly link stats by adding a “+” sign to the end of the link.

TweetMeme

*Especially useful to track twitter links that might not mention your name, or anything specific to your brand.

YouTube Insights

*These stats get pretty confusing. Referrals go missing, the numbers don’t add up, totally unpredictable when or how videos will go viral. But work with what you’ve got.

Flickr Stats

*Sadly, only available to (paid) pro account users.

LinkedIn

*Just learned this one last week. If you upgrade to a (paid) pro account, you can see the actual names of the folks viewing your profile.

SlideShare

*Pro (paid) accounts get additional analytics. But I couldn’t find any examples online, so it’s unclear how much more detailed the stats get.

Foursquare Venue Analytics

*You’ll have to claim your venue to get access to this data. Do it now.

Alright, quick review

Measurement is hard. Don’t get distracted by the numbers, and lose sight of the people, content, links, and search terms; in other words, text > numbers.

1. WHO: Focus on active relationships: people engaging direclty with your brand by commenting, liking, joining, etc.
2. WHAT: Keep track of content: especially new items, and recurring items that spike in traffic; search for patterns
3. WHY: Pay attention to passive relationships: people engaging more indirectly with your brand via linking to your content, or searching for your keyword terms.
4. HOW MUCH: Spend the least amount of time on the size of your network: but don’t ignore it completely. Compare your stats over time, and to your competitors.

There’s a plethora of tools. One day someone will integrate them all. Until then..if you’re interested in getting a copy of this prototype document, just send me an email (Google Docs didn’t handle the images & formatting very well, or I would just post online).

Possibly related posts:

1. Theatre & Social Media: TCG 2010
2. Theatre & Social Media in 2009

The Theatre Communications Group 2010 National Conference wrapped up last night. I heard word it was the largest in the conference’s history, clocking in at just under 1,000 attendees. A sizable chunk of those folks live tweeted several breakout sessions, mostly [...]]]>

The Theatre Communications Group 2010 National Conference wrapped up last night. I heard word it was the largest in the conference’s history, clocking in at just under 1,000 attendees. A sizable chunk of those folks live tweeted several breakout sessions, mostly under the #TCG2010 moniker.  My presentation, Social Media Strategy: Why ROI Isn’t Enough went quite well. I’ve received so much great input from folks over the past four months about what I should talk about, and was overwhelmed with gratitude from the many good luck emails in the days leading up to my presentation. So without further ado, for those of you who couldn’t be with us in person, and may not have caught the original tweeted link, here goes nothing:

You can also check out the live tweeting commentary. A few folks requested my notes, since I rattled off a bunch more stats.

Shortly after my presentation, my interview podcast with Technology in the Arts also went live! It in, I discuss the most significant findings of my social media research for theatres.

Speaking of, now I’m off to gather my thoughts on speaking at Americans for the Arts next weekend in Baltimore about Branding Yourself Through Social Media with the estimable Ian David Moss.

Possibly related posts:

1. Theatre & Social Media in 2009
2. A Social Media Measurement Plan
3. Social Media Strategy Recommendations for 2010
4. What do YOU want to know about Theatre and Social Media?

Ok, not Facebook per se, but a rant about theatres using social media inauthentically. I get it, you’re busy, there are a lot of social media platforms, and you’re not exactly sure which one(s) are worth your time. So, [...]]]>

Ok, not Facebook per se, but a rant about theatres using social media inauthentically. I get it, you’re busy, there are a lot of social media platforms, and you’re not exactly sure which one(s) are worth your time. So, you decide to link your Facebook account to your Twitter feed and not bother checking in on your Twitter community. A full 25% of TCG theatres on Twitter have committed this tragedy (see autosync below).

I’ll be going more in depth about each of these segments at the TCG conference next week, but for now, let’s focus in on this Facebook issue (MailChimp, TwitterTools, and TwitterFeed are also culprits, but far less popular than the Facebook method). If you’re a theatre on Twitter, you probably care a lot about the volume of buzz: the number of tweets mentioning your brand. I call this @mentions. The graph below shows the difference in this metric between “Real” tweeters (any theatres that posted specifically to Twitter, via any method they want, anytime in the last month) and “AutoSync” tweeters (those theatres who blindly and shamelessly fill their tweet stream with solely Facebook posts.

On average, if you’re tweeting daily for real, you’re seeing 5x the volume of buzz each week about your brand. Now of course, there are also those special theatres that get nearly 100 @mentions each week. I’ll be talking about them too next week. Next, check out the weekly blue line compared to the daily red line (still on the above graph). Even if you have time to update Twitter just once a week, you’ll get higher buzz on average than simply autosyncing your Facebook profile.

And what about the fan base?

Say you can only update Twitter once a month (!); you’re still likely to have a higher fan base than those theatres who “tweet” daily Facebook updates. And just who are these culprits? n00b’s who don’t know any better?

It turns out, sort of. It looks like once theatres hit their one year anniversary on Twitter, they tend to start really paying attention to How to Tweet. And the longer they’ve been around, they more frequently they’re tweeting. That’s real good news.

So maybe I’m being a little too harsh? Let’s see what the fans have to say. But first, let me say, the theatres I’m calling out here are by no means the only bad guys–I just happened to notice these tweets while finishing up my research. I also have no way of knowing if the theatres may have reached out to these tweeps in some non-public way (via DMs or on another platform). But let’s get real here folks.

So you offer a give away, an eager fan reaches out, but nobody ever responds. A disenchanted fan? Oops.

You’re promoting a show, an eager fan wants to ask a question about said show, but nobody ever responds. A potential lost sale? Oops.

Don’t forget it’s not only your audience members who are tweeting about you. Also your sponsors. Those folks that give you free stuff. Bet they would have appreciated a thank you & a you’re welcome. Oops.

Here’s another fan, a subscriber it seems. For now at least. No response to her. I wonder if she would have invited friends along the next time she attended a show. Oops.

You’re always wondering if social media sells tickets. Here’s a potential sale. But no response. Oops.

What a great compliment from an awesome colleague. Too bad there was no response. Oops.

A student, excited about a play, willing & able to recommend it to all her friends. What a missed opportunity for audience engagement. Oops.

Other times, it’s potential artistic collaborators you’re missing out on. What a bummer. She could have been a great playwright to bring on board. Or at least, chat with for a moment online. Oops.

The sad thing is, most of these theatres will never know I was calling them out. I’m not their Facebook fan, I haven’t liked their page, I won’t be commenting on their blog, and I won’t be bothered to call their box office. But I will be talking about them on Twitter. Do you want to guide the conversation about your brand online, or do you want to leave it in my very capable hands?

Possibly related posts:

1. The Epic Facebook Experiment

We’ve all lamented how difficult it is to tie social media engagement directly to ticket sales. Then, in walks Facebook Connect! Ok, so FBC has been around for about a year, but I think at least [...]]]>

We’ve all lamented how difficult it is to tie social media engagement directly to ticket sales. Then, in walks Facebook Connect! Ok, so FBC has been around for about a year, but I think at least a few theatres (and online ticketing companies) should be ready to take the plunge. More than 80,000 businesses and 60 million users are using Facebook Connect to register and sign in to sites around the web–everywhere from EventBrite to Lallapalooza to Netflix, and we can learn something from each of them.

First, a user signs in to your website via a button:

Then, FB Connect pre-fills registration details (like name, email, location, etc) which the user can change or accept with a single click.

Finally, your site can now access* a Facebook user’s:

• Identity: name, photos, events, and more.
• Social Graph: friends and connections.
• Stream: activity, distribution, and integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and Publishers.

In Facebook’s own words, Facebook Connect delivers a number of benefits, including:

Traffic
Enable over 400 million Facebook users to share your content with their friends on Facebook. Let users publish a story, invite their friends, or send an event. Their friends then click back to your site, increasing both unique visitors and pageviews.

Engagement
Users can immediately find their friends and engage. More friends leads to more activity and more pageviews. Connected users create 15-60% more content than users who have not connected with Facebook Connect.

Registration
Every website wants registration to be easy. Facebook has 400 million users, simple registration, and robust data. By increasing traffic, user engagement, and registrations, you can grow your revenue and increase opportunities for monetezation.

And here’s where things get fun. Say I’ve registered for your website through Facebook Connect, and I decide to buy a ticket to your  next show. When I click that final “Confirm Purchase” button on your eTicket site, I’m given the option of publishing this ticket purchase to my Facebook page. And tomorrow, when one of my friends happens to log on to your website, they’ll see that I’ve just bought tickets to your next show. Can you imagine what the Facebook newsfeed would look like during the high point of your season subscription campaign?

Or how about a recommendations model built like Netflix. Sometimes I run across a theatre who’s producing a show I have no interest in, but I’m sure it’s right up the alley of one of my friends. Other times, I come home in love with a production I just saw but don’t have the time or energy (or frankly, inclination) to write a full on review. What if your theatre made it a little easier for me to give a digital thumbs up? And made sure that my thumbs up showed up not only on Facebook, but also in the ticketing check out cart of all of my Facebook friends.

Imagine I’m an online box office like BrownPaperTickets or Chroma: I have an opportunity to easily link Facebook Events to online ticket sales. Theatres benefit by saving time; ticket buyers benefit by finding out who’s doing what in their social circle. By aggregating data across various theatres in a city, we would also start to get a much better idea of the true size of the arts marketplace. Build up enough data, and we may start to notice demographic and psychographic trends for certain plays: the holy grail of predictive revenue models.

Facebook Connect has been out of beta for nearly a year and a half now and has received largely rave reviews. It’s free, though it does take some IT muscle to implement. But it’s made some impressive success stories with user engagement and increasing page views to connected sites. When Marc Schiller, CEO of Elecric Artists spoke to my social media marketing class last week, he mentioned one client whose acquisition of email addresses increased five fold following their implementation of Facebook Connect for website registration. Who doesn’t need more email addresses?

Have any other ideas about how theatres (or the industry at large) could be using Facebook Connect? Skeptical about user privacy? Know of any theatres already using Connect?

*The technical details are slightly more complicated than this. There are many privacy levels both you and the user can select.

Bonus: Marc’s very cool presentation on Social Media Trends for 2010:

A look at where non profit regional theatres stand in the world of social media in 2009. The final research report to accompany my Social Media Strategy Recommendations for Yale Repertory Theatre. The good (hello, Facebook!), the [...]]]>

A look at where non profit regional theatres stand in the world of social media in 2009. The final research report to accompany my Social Media Strategy Recommendations for Yale Repertory Theatre. The good (hello, Facebook!), the bad (why are we still writing terrible blogs?), and a wakeup call to all those who’ve yet to even dip their toes in the social media waters. And next week I start my Social Media Marketing class over at the School of Management! Stay tuned for a glimpse of the latest social media research *outside* the world of theatre.

Possibly related posts:

1. Theatre & Social Media: TCG 2010
2. A Social Media Measurement Plan
3. What do YOU want to know about Theatre and Social Media?

Kansas City Repertory Theatre made the #2 spot on my list of Facebook Pages of highest average returns relative to their LORT peers. So I thought I would take a closer look at what they’re doing, how their fans are responding, [...]]]>

Kansas City Repertory Theatre made the #2 spot on my list of Facebook Pages of highest average returns relative to their LORT peers. So I thought I would take a closer look at what they’re doing, how their fans are responding, who their engaged fans are, and what general conclusions I might draw about the state of the field at large. More here.

Is your theatre using Facebook Insights? Does what I’ve found track with what you’ve already learned? Do you have target goals set for user engagement? How are you using Facebook Insights to guide your Facebook strategy?

Trying to measure an individual theatre’s impact (user engagement) versus effort (theatre’s own actions) relative to the field at large to see who’s getting the most bang for their buck on Facebook. To my delight, some unexpected names showed up at [...]]]>

Trying to measure an individual theatre’s impact (user engagement) versus effort (theatre’s own actions) relative to the field at large to see who’s getting the most bang for their buck on Facebook. To my delight, some unexpected names showed up at the top of the list. Excited to do more digging to find out why. More here. NOTE: First Draft.

Possibly related posts:

1. LORT Twitter Index