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Marketer's Guide to Semantic Web: Solving Social Media Measurement

| posted by Marta Strickland http://threeminds.organic.com/2008/10/solving_social_media_measurement.h... It's one of the toughest marketing challenges of recent times... how do we measure the success of social media? I see countless posts everyday where someone says they have it figured out, or that it will never be figured out, but nothing quite measures up to the need. How do you measure the success of a human conversation? Well, we start with what we CAN measure. We can measure reach. How many people are viewing, clicking, watching, downloading, etc? We can also measure exposure or buzz. Are people talking about us in the blogosphere? What are they saying about our brand? But it's inside those walled gardens, that everything interesting is happening... how strong is the community? Are they active? Are we changing their minds? Changing their actions? How do they feel? It's the tough nut of the new marketing conversation, but what if there was a way to crack it? MEASURING THE MESSAGE You have an important message that you want to get out about your brand. You've been trying to filter it into the conversation, build media elements around it, but you wonder if it is really resonating? Are people talking in the community and are they spreading that message out the web? In that situation, how useful is a tag cloud of user conversation? It gives us a spattering of words. It's impressionistic art when what we really need is a photo-realistic rendering. Semantic technology is able to pull together connections between words and phrases. How often is keyword "x" said in the same breath as keyword "y"? Measurement tools should be moving away from the tag cloud, and be giving us something more in like a concept map meets tag tree. We will be able to immerse ourselves in the trends of the real conversation, not just the keyword of the day. Next, there is the dilemma of message velocity, how far is my message traveling and how fast. Sure, that's an easy thing to do when you are measuring a viral video or widget, but what about a conversation? Just look at Powerset... "what movies is Johnny Depp in" and "films starring Johnny Depp" will give you the exact same results. Semantic technology builds on meaning, not keywords. And so it doesn't matter if your followers say "the new Challenger is going to be awesome" or "Dodge's new muscle car looks rad", semantic buzz tools will track how far your message extends. MEASURING THE TONE Sentiment analysis is a increasingly popular tool in the marketer toolbox. It's often used for general web buzz monitoring and what isn't clear is how much of it is based on semantic technology. Keywords have a limit to their usefulness, and often in campaigns we find ourselves trying to guess how consumers will describe our products in order to set up these buzz tools. Semantic technology will change that. We shouldn't be searching for words, we should be searching for meaning. The next generation of sentiment analysis will look at the entirety of a comment or an article, it will look at the person it came from and the person it was directed to, and it will use natural language processing and analysis of meaningful relationships to determine "good" from "bad". Likely we will have whole new categories created as the software becomes smarter... "constructive criticism", "general trolling", and "disappointed enthusiast". It won't be perfect, but it will be a whole lot more useful. MEASURING THE CONNECTIONS So we've measured the influence of your message on your consumers and how they've spread it. We've measured the way they feel, the tone of the conversation. And that's a great success measure for the campaign, for the goals of that quarter. But what about the long-term goal of social media? What about building a community of loyal enthusiasts? What about creating a relationship with your customers? That is where companies like Chat Mine are starting to come into play. The measure the connections between members of the community AND between people and concepts. Then, they analyze the strength of those relationships. It's important to measure both of those angles. While some social applications will generate a lot of "friending" and thus person to person relationships, others will encourage ongoing conversation. Two people might never have officially become "friends", they may talk every single day online about off-roading and Jeep. They are connected by a concept, a shared interest, a shared love. And that perhaps is the strong social measurement of all... has your brand united a community together in passionate conversation? WHAT WILL THE FUTURE HOLD? I hope you have enjoyed the series as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please revisit at any time to comment. Tell me what you think about how the semantic web is going to effect social networking, search and discovery, and online privacy. Marketers... I would love to hear from you as you start to implement these new technologies that will make online ads more relevant and make social media easier to measure. With the push for Data Portability, we are moving towards a more open social world. I've said it before, but I really believe this to be true... in the future, the only social network will be the social graph. We are opening the floodgates. And for online marketing, it will be the difference in row boating from lake to lake to navigating the uncharted seas. It's finally time to go exploring and the semantic web will be our compass. Marta Strickland Editor, ThreeMinds http://threeminds.organic.com