Wiredset / Blogs / Mark Ghuneim

Politics Goes Viral Online

2008-06-16T15:42:44Z

A Report from Pew Internet & American Life Project looks at politics and the online space.

Some really neat findings around information consumption and awareness and ultimately mixed views from
wired Americans around overall impact.

40% of all Americans (internet users and non-users alike) have gotten news and information about this year's campaign via the internet.
19% of Americans go online once a week or more to do something related to the campaign, and 6% go online to engage politically on a daily basis.
23% of Americans say they receive emails urging them to support a candidate or discuss the campaign once a week or more.
10% of Americans use email to contribute to the political debate with a similar frequency.

The report can be found online at
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/869/politics-goes-viral-online

Social Media Marketing And Brands

2008-05-16T12:33:22Z

Social Media Marketing and Brands
Be Sophisticated and Show Up To Play Or FAIL

The blend of social networks and social behavior and business has been a joy to watch and participate in.

The best part of the equation is the value exchange. When there's no value there is no currency so it fails.
This works because both the consumer and the brand develop best practices around behavior.

It is like digital natural selection if you will. The weak marketing practices will not survive. This requires
a level of sophistication by the brands and those messaging on their behalf.

An understanding way past, the still not obvious to some, permission based marketing. Have mine first or do irreparable harm to you brand. Social media marketing requires a far clear view of the culture and community as well as the communities values and behavior. If you can enable or increase the value of these things you can enter the room. Which is just the first step the next is sustaining value another (not so simple) rung in the latter to brand
reputation and identity in the social media universe.

The below graph represents the number of people following a variety of brands on the socialmedia micro
blogging site Twitter.

Zappos, H R Block, Baskin Robbins, Jet Blue and Comcast shown by their Twitter screen name below.
These are examples of active brands on Twitter.

This first graph shows the number of people following the brand on Twitter. While the numbers are but a small fraction of the brands consumer base. I can assure you that they are a vocal and active group of influencers that no brand should fuck with.

This is a good example of the first step mentioned above. The customer is following you. Their option and hence permission to communicate. The next step is managing the communication. Which is the definition of CRM to the core.

The data in the following two graphs are where most loose the plot. Both of the below graphs address the signal strength and understanding of the nature of social media. They illustrate the number of people the brand is following and the number of conversations and or tweets they are putting forth.

This is important because this is you listening to your customers and also goes to your brand identity
and reputation.

The identity and personality of each brand on any social network should be and different. Each may have its own level of chatter, signal to noise ratio, brand goals, and results. This should be determined by business and brand logic.

You have jumped into a complex channel and relationships fading out and going away is not an option. Sustaining your value in the community taking into mind the afore mentioned goals is the new full time (and I mean full time) order of the day.

This is why the frequency graph is included, it helps you see your communication over time. I included a couple
of brands to compare their usage. Again there is no clear amount of times a day rule. This is about signal, not
frequency. Also as mentioned each brand will use the channel in its on way with it's own logic.. The one rule
on frequency; it has to be measurable.

Brands should not lurk on social networks they are the equivalent of corporate virtual artifacts that go unvisited in Second Life.

I linked to each brands page on Twitter to show that their are design layers and many other aspects to the brands identity. I found it quite candid and touching to read Baskin Robbins Twitter around the loss of Irv Robbins. You do not get more real than that.

The below series of graphs shows the differential over time between followers and following. Each graph shows the brands trend for number of people following on Twitter and the number of people the brand is following on twitter.

How are you participating and tracking your participation online as brand, as an agency, as an individual? Are you measuring performance and using tools/resources to increase your value in the space.?

Spending time with both creating and then viewing results around campaigns in the social media space (both ours and others) continues to be an amazing learning experience.

Transparency Legislation UK Word Of Mouth Marketing

2008-04-28T16:36:32Z

Good coverage of new UK legislation that cracks down on word of mouth marketing being done sans transparency.

U.K. Cracks Down on Word-of-Mouth With Tough Restrictions Coming Legislation Makes It a Criminal Offense for Brands to Falsely Represent Themselves as Consumers (By Emma Hall)

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

This is just the start of many conversations that will take place around identity and reputation online.

This is a good move and will help bring to light snake oil marketing and black-op operations done under the guise of marketing.

In the mid 90s when I was working with artists and music online, one artist management team thought it a good idea to go over to other peoples' bulletin boards and post about their band as fans.

I warned them at the time that nine year olds can see clearly through these type of marketing charades.

It turns out one noticed right away and said, "if you and the band you love so much are so cool, then what are you doing on my bulletin board telling me so?"

A long way to say that operating without transparency and weighing in with alleged authority on something requires reputation which comes from a strong online identity and that is in turn based on being clear with who you are. Transparency.

We have many accounts online we use to track assets around projects or accounts on social media sites to post around projects. All are clearly marked as such.

Legislation is always the last phase in something that meteorically rises and then morphs and grows though various phases until it needs to be roped back in.

If anyone in the legitimate digital agency business is even playing in such a sandbox it would be surprising as these were lessons learned long ago. But seeing such legislation in the UK makes you wonder why common-sense needs to be legislated. You would think ROI alone would have killed such behavior.

Amazon Sales Rank of Grand Theft Auto IV Xbox360 and PS3

2008-04-24T14:50:51Z

Hits the shelves April 29th and should set entertainment sales records. Here is a look at Amazon sales of both the XBox and PS3 Titles. The title got a M rating which is equal to a MPAA R rating.

A Look At Facebook Lexicon

2008-04-15T22:25:38Z

Facebook launched "Lexicon" today, if your logged into Facebook you can find it here. http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/

It trends on forums across Facebook so you can see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases. "Lexicon pulls from the wealth of data on Facebook without collecting any personal information in order to respect everyone's privacy."

This is a Facebook zeitgeist tool and allows you to trend several phrases together. Nice inclusion of historical data so you get a nice plot. As far as I can tell you can not export data. Making the PII a non issue by making the data anonymous was a no-brainier and the following paragraph gives a good look at the basic logic behind it.

"How are these numbers calculated? We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications."

It is really nice to see companies put this data online this way we would love to see more of it. It is exactly what we are feeling with Trendrr the fun of identifying and tracking trends and buzz around content not the individual, expect a lexicon plug-in for trendrr soon.

Social Media Digest

2008-04-04T08:28:14Z

CWSM 2008 - Papers

A number of authors have started to put their papers and posters online from The international Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Check out...

Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television.
Noor Ali-Hasaan

A Social Network Based Approach to Personalized Recommendation of Participatory Media Content
A. Seth and J. Zhang

On Monetizing

MySpace joining the music retail fray is the closest thing to contextually monetizing a social network. If you cannot sell music services and music related materials to a site built on music they you can forget all other 'traditional' monetization approaches to social networks.

Last Links..

More good social network reading - Social Media Research Blog
Radiohead ning based social network surfaces - http://www.waste-central.com/

Published Schema For Graph Syndication

2008-04-02T22:38:39Z

Syndication, Schema's and Digital Agencies

We published today a XML schema for syndicating graphs, Simple Graph Syndication - SGS as a part of Trendrr.

We are publishing it under creative commons. It provides all the data necessary to reproduce the exported graph.

This a second in series of open releases we are producing as a digital agency.

There has been some recent chatter of what digital agency "2.0" websites and behavior looks like online.

I think one part this, more parts as they are realized.

NY Tech Meetup April 1st - Trendrr Presentation Goal - API Adoption

2008-03-31T12:50:18Z

I will be introducing Trendrr at tomorrow's April 2008 Meeting of the NY Tech Meetup. Its exciting as we are in good company with the other presenters including Muxtape and Bricabox to name two. Plus my desktop will be like a block long on the wicked cool IAC lobby screen.

There are several reasons we wanted to introduce our service here first. One - is that we love that we are a technology driven company from New York City. Representing the east coast and downtown NYC.

Two, this is where the developer community hangs and Trendrr is a service with an open API that allows users not only to use what data we are populating it with but to create their own graphs with their own custom data.

We hope this will:

- Drive API adoption
- Enable and encourage third party applications that use our API to provide unique web services and middleware.

Social Behavior: Following, Friending, and the Establishment of Credible and Trusted Sources

2008-03-26T13:06:45Z

How following and tracking social behavior allow for more trusted sources to emerge...

I was playing around with social network icons the other day, pairing ones that I liked to form word phrases. The one I liked best was the Hype Machine´s heart (for when you heart a song) and Tumblrr´s follow (the plus sign followed by the word "follow"). Combined they become "follow your heart."

When I first started social bookmarking on Delicious I realized that if you subscribed to someone´s feed you could in some ways follow their train of thought - viewing their fluctuating interest levels through what they were viewing and reading over time.

Users can build a loyal set of followers by establishing themselves as a credible and trusted source of information. These "alpha users" have strong, well-established profiles on various social networking platforms, micro-blogging, and bookmarking sites, with loyal followers that subscribe to their feeds across these outlets.

These followings create networks that are not based on inviting, but more so a reciprocal relationship between the user and the follower, based on the user being a trusted source and innovator either online or off and establishing themselves as someone others are interested in.

Online one's innovator status can be exhibited through their social network behaviors; what they are bookmarking, how it is being tagged, how early they identify new information, sites, and trends. With tags, one's skills are further refined, and in the case of Delicious, the more thorough a user is at parsing the single most relevant line in a story, the more quickly that user can evolve into a trusted source and establish themselves as someone other users look to for the latest news and innovations.

This following process has enabled a natural selection-like structure of networked intelligence to emerge that is vastly different from the friending process of social networks and the associated social relevancy and importance of users with high friend counts. It is amazing how much one can see and learn by following the social networks and the related web-tools utilized by their peers.

A good way for users to gain credibility and increase awareness of their existence would be for these social networks to free up more meta-data around the behavior of users. This would allow for qualification and rankings around which users might be deemed worthy of following. For example, if I want to follow the top ten users who were the first to identify and properly tag a certain trend or topic, I should be able to easily access that information through one aggregate feed or application.

Unfortunately, at the present moment each bookmarking, micro-blogging, and social networking site has its own ranking and tagging system, making it nearly impossible for someone to easily migrate their tags or networks (of followers or alpha users - the users they are following) from one site to another.

This is a difficult process as each social network has completely different tools and associated metrics. For example:

-    On Flickr, my contacts are those that I follow and their image-specific skills (how good of a photographer they are) is what determines my following, and I have ascribed a level of trust to their image feeds on Tumblr as well.

-    On Twitter, much like Delicious there is a natural selection of signal to noise that determines the follow. The more signal, the better the follow. The more noise, the less likely I am to follow

-    Each of these follows have their own hierarchy of adoption. In my experience the hardest follow is Delicious, followed by Twitter, then Flickr, than Tumblr, I could go on.

-    Delicious is the hardest because it has taken me over two years and 11,000 +
bookmarks to amass 200 people in my network/follows to my daily bookmarking. Over the same period at Flickr, where I have published 2,620 photos and received 173,115 views, I have 417 people that call me a contact or follow my photos.

As we have been building out social features around Trendrr, I am pleased that we will be generating cool exportable data and tags around social behavior and impressions that have not been generated before; essentially allowing new aggregate values to emerge so actionable intelligence can be properly followed.

I am excited to be following, followed, and creating new tools in this exciting space. We are just on the tip of understanding the importance of this movement and I look forward to following the progress and development of these new metrics and associated values.

Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer

2008-03-26T13:04:38Z

Mark Ghuneim, with contributions from Seth Salomon and Mari Katsunuma I. Introduction II. What Engagement Means III. How We Measure Engagement IV. The Value of Understanding Engagement V. Conclusion VI. Next Steps I. Introduction For more than a decade, web users have actively bookmarked their favorite websites and forwarded interesting articles to their friends. These actions are a form of consumer engagement that has changed rapidly in scope, degree, and importance during the onset of Web 2.0. In the world of YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, and blogs, users are now more active and in-control than ever. Consumers can not only interact with brands, but also influence marketing strategies and performance. Users have been responsible for changing movies during production (Snakes on a Plane) as well as getting bands signed through MySpace engagement (Shiny Toy Guns). Marketers and advertisers have struggled to define this behavior of engagement as well as assign a value to the various user actions associated with it. The desire for clarity and understanding has created the need for a methodology that can measure connected engagement and the varying levels of associated attention and interaction. II. What Engagement Means In the traditional sense, engagement is the period between proposal and marriage. This definition can also apply to engagement in terms of marketing and advertising. In an initiative conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation, the need for a measurement of engagement is described as the "search for the 21st Century gross rating points." The ARF later refined their definition. "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context." I am more inclined to define engagement as, "a consumer based measurement that regards interaction with an aspect of a brand or media property." Web 2.0 Engagement could include, but is not limited to: * Publishing * Creating and Publishing to a Group * Posting * Subscribing * Favoriting * Adding Friends * Bookmarking * Emailing * Distributing * Streaming * Networking * Creating Mash-up Content When measuring engagement, the level of user interaction (i.e. 200 vs. 2,000,000 streams) is an obvious and important component. Yet engagement is complex in that it is not comprised solely by clicks, but also a range of involved user actions. The true measurement of this principle must factor in the saliency of each application in relation to other forms of engagement. For example, what is the importance of MySpace friend adds as opposed to YouTube views? Additionally, it must be noted that these metrics are goal-based in the sense that they will be of varying strengths and importance across different sectors (music, television, consumer products, etc.). This implies that in order to accurately derive a useful measure of engagement, one must not only possess the necessary Web 2.0 data, but also a unique understanding and perspective of each surveyed application by industry. III. How We Measure Engagement As we evolve our methodology and explore the determinants and ultimate value of Web2.0 engagement, we must look closer at the activities that help define engagement. We must also determine the level of attention and actionable experiences for each application once a user is engaged. These levels of engagement can be measured by the complexity and ultimate depth of user actions and the related amount of attention associated with each. This measurement also allows for the understanding of the time spent with the message or the causal action stemming from the attention. For example, a user might be engaged enough to read an article as well as related user comments following the text. But how is this situation different from a user that does the same, but also leaves a new comment of their own? The action of regarding content, followed by an action of engagement is the causal agent that defines this principal. Also worth noting is that each user action can provide different levels of attention as well as influence further interactions. While the viewing of a video online is considered an impression, there are different and unique tiers of attention and engagement in each play such as the length of active viewing as well as subsequent sharing, rating, favoriting, forwarding, and adding which are all secondary interactions that form the engagement layer of behavior. These actions are also important as they involve users recommending and approving products which ultimately affects both their own reputations and levels of trust amongst peers. This idea falls naturally into a formula of engagement being action over attention. Measuring the levels of interaction surrounding the communication is one way to quantify this relationship. Engagement = Interaction/Attention This equation illustrates the combined activity of regarding; or paying attention to, and then acting on. While this is an important relationship to understand, one must remember the inherent limitation it presents in that each interaction is not as valuable as others. IV. The Value of Understanding Engagement Engagement is important as it can lead to web traffic, CRM, sales, and brand loyalty. These outcomes can be directly attributed to time spent and subsequent actions with a product's message, related media, and the Web 2.0 applications in which they are communicated. The ability of marketing to engage and endear consumers will ultimately determine whether a user digs deeper and/or engages friends. In order to measure these factors, it might be beneficial to begin to with Web 2.0 services such as social networks and media sites. The functionality of these applications is ideal for generating data surrounding engagement activity. We can use benchmarking to create weights for each attention and interaction type. This is the trickiest piece of the equation as it requires both a strong understanding of Web 2.0 applications as well as all the industries in which a product lives. Yet when performed with precision, this method should allow for the understanding of online engagement value. Engagement must be understood by type, and the value associated with each in terms of ultimate adoption, sales, and brand loyalty: V. Conclusion Once product owners understand the value of each type of engagement in their industries of play, they will know how to best market their products. By creating milestones and targets of user involvement in each application, performance can be measured actively and strategies can be altered during a campaign to meet ultimate goals. This creates the need for an owner to understand their marketplace and related Web 2.0 applications. Additionally, they must possess the capabilities to measure presence across related applications over time and the ability to enact marketing that will achieve desired results. VI. Next Steps * Top-20 engagement activities * Further definition of engagement types * Produce algorithm (compose related activity weights) * Incorporate feedback/comments Comments are welcomed and appreciated