MANAGING COMMUNICATIONS IN A SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Transcription

1 White Paper MANAGING COMMUNICATIONS IN A SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herbert Simon, 1971

2 Even before the arrival of the Internet, a surfeit of media products newspapers, magazines, television and radio were in fierce competition. But the Internet, or more specifically the spread of broadband globally over the past five years, has greatly compounded this overabundance of information, both accelerating and initiating shifts in the media landscape as a result. Chris Anderson eloquently describes the consequences for media content in his book The Long Tail. With the cost of production and distribution of content falling to near-zero, an abundance of content emerges and the audience for most of it will also be near-zero. Technorati is a blog search engine. The chart below shows the distribution of blogs Technorati indexes ranked by the number of inbound links a strong measure of popularity in the blogosphere. The chart stops at the 225,000th blog, which has around 30 unique inbound links. But many of the blogs indexed by Technorati have fewer links than that indeed, many have none at all. At the time of writing, Technorati indexes around 112 million blogs. The long tail of blogosphere content, therefore, continues for several metres to the right of this page. Blogs by Authority (as measured by links from unique sources) Unique Links 20,000 20,000 Unique Links 15,000 Top blogs: May have millions of readers; mostly one-way communication; must-sees 10,000 5,000 1,000 Unique Links 100 Unique Links 30 Unique Links Blogs 500 1,000 15,000 75, ,000 2

3 And that is just blogs consider all the other online content, from online news outlets to pages hosted by photo- and video-sharing sites, from social networks to chatrooms. Google is thought to include some ten billion pages in its main index, a figure said to represent less than half of the web. The sheer scale of the web presents a number of reputation management challenges, not least of which is the inability of anyone including Google to monitor everything. When deciding what to monitor, the reputation manager must make decisions about what s worth paying attention to and what isn t. Measuring to monitor Whatever anyone might tell you about a flat web, there are undoubtedly hierarchies on the Internet. Major sites such as the New York Times, Guardian Unlimited, BBC News online and Yahoo! News constitute an online mainstream, known as the short head (as opposed to the long tail). Clearly such sites, along with major online trade publications, should be monitored as a default. Many Internet monitoring services, including the basic service offered by Cision, focus on the short head. Most brands online environment can be described according to the following scheme, in which the light blue arrows show the directions in which content moves across the Internet. The chatter area of the diagram represents the majority of online communications taking place in chatrooms, social networks or the blogosphere. This is the long tail, the constituent sites all but invisible outside their extremely limited communities, having few, if any, readers. For the most part, the chatter refers to content distributed by the mainstream media (MSM). MSM s influential status is to some extent self-perpetuating, thanks to a combination of widespread availability, recognisable branding, resources for original research and high production values. Mainstream Media gatekeepers chatter 3

4 Between the chatterers and MSM sits the most important area of the scheme from our perspective: gatekeeper sites, which have, through superior timing, organisation, technical ability, talent or luck, developed a larger readership and/or influence than the vast majority of websites. They are often individuals, though they can be groups of likeminded individuals, especially on social networks such as Facebook. They are typically, though by no means always, wholly devoted to a particular sector or field of interest their niche. Most potently, they are increasingly used as source material by resource-starved mainstream media. The gatekeepers not only address issues promoted by the mainstream media, but they also shine a light into some of the darker corners of social media. On discovering sufficiently compelling long-tail content, the gatekeepers link to and comment on it, in much the same way that both gatekeepers and chatterers link to and comment on mainstream media content. But there is one important difference: content elevated from the chatter becomes visible in ways it had not been before through search alone and more profoundly through a combination of gatekeepers and search. Content deemed compelling by the mainstream providers subsequently emerges on MSM news sites, and possibly also in offline media sources. In this way, niche content can become influential. Internet Evaluation 1.0: search-based criteria Back in the 90s, search engines such as Alta-Vista ranked content solely according to its relevance to the user s query. At the end of the decade, a university start-up pioneered a new approach that ranked content according to off-the-page elements as much if not more than what appeared on the page itself. Google s algorithm, in which these elements were weighted in order to rank the web, changed search forever. Google says its algorithm contains more than 200 individual elements used to determine rank. While no one outside Google knows the exact formula (with the same going for other search engines and their algorithms), an entire Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry has grown up attempting to second-guess it. Ranking factors in search engine algorithms can be categorised as either query dependent factors or queryindependent factors. Query-dependent criteria are used to assess content according to its relevance to the original search request. This is not simply a matter of seeing how frequently the keywords occur on the page; it is also assessing where and how they appear. Monitoring the gatekeepers, that magic middle dividing the short head from the long tail, is therefore crucial to online reputation management. 4

5 Cision s Impact Score methodology assessing the impact of a keyword within the content therefore serves an approximation of this query-dependent rank. 1 Query-independent factors are pieces of information a search engine knows about a given site or page before a query is executed. The most famous example is Google s PageRank, which measures the global popularity of a web document based on the links that point to it. 2 Viewing links as recommendations was Google s major breakthrough, and the assessment of links is now the most important component of most search engine technologies. 1 Numerous query-dependent factors have nothing to do with the content that appears on any given page, and instead represent, say, keywords in the metadata used to describe the content by its authors (or in the case of some Web 2.0 sites, the users), or whether and how they appear in other pages linking to the content in question. 2 Other factors might include TrustRank (a trust-based link metric), domain association (the website a piece of content is hosted on), keyword frequency and freshness. An assessment of inbound links to webpages and the sites on which they appear is therefore a good proxy for search engine visibility. In the example below, a campaign that appeared successful when measured by the volume of online coverage generally was adjudged less successful following a link assessment: most of the campaign material appeared on sites less visible through search. Favourability of online coverage No. inbound links Volume of coverage 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% % coverage Neutral Positive Cision

6 Internet Evaluation 2.0: social media criteria Search has been the dominant technology for online information retrieval since the web reached critical mass. Yet the advent of Web 2.0 essentially the broadband-enabled Internet, which encourages users to upload content rather than remain passive consumers has brought about significant change in the way people spend time online. Social networks such as MySpace, Facebook or Linked-In have established major claims to people s online attention. Community-powered news portals, of which Digg is the best known, are currently more of a niche interest, but are nonetheless considered key sources of information by significant numbers of dedicated users. Furthermore, these Web 2.0 methods are rapidly being assimilated by the web operations of the traditional media. Web 2.0 platforms are usually indexed to some extent by search engines. But more important, certainly among the better-known platforms, are their own internal algorithms. Again, only those working with the algorithms know the details, but some of the metadata offered on the platform interface provides clues as to how they work. In addition, the interpretation of this metadata indicates possible strategic approaches to these platforms. Consider, for example, Nike s recent Supersonic campaign. This campaign focused on MySpace, but, in line with Internet comms best practice, involved portable content that is, content that users could download from the original host page and upload to other web platforms. As such, footage from the Supersonic event could be found on video-hosting network YouTube. Evaluation of this content begins with an examination of which users have posted videos, and what proportion of the videos they have uploaded relate to Nike. In this way, potential brand advocates can be identified. To determine the best brand advocates, however, it is advisable to go further: obviously the YouTube users whose videos receive the most views have potential; using metrics to assess how engaged this audience is allows even greater understanding of the channel. Nike s Supersonic campaign: YouTube videos zoomelite candib999 rteaglass ABC90Supersonic Nike Videos Total videos YouTube user Cision

7 Engagements for Nike s Supersonic Campaign zoomelite candib999 rteaglass ABC90Supersonic links comments subscribers YouTube user Cision 2007 While the metrics to measure such engagement change from platform to platform, they are, at least with some qualitative re-alignment, comparable: subscribers to a YouTube channel has an obvious relationship with members of a Facebook group, for example. The tone of these engagements indicates possibilities for outreach. What online reputation management must consider is the potential visibility of online material for its stakeholders. Visibility in search is clearly one measure of this; sites likely to engage stakeholders in other ways must be factored in accordingly. While it may mean developing a unique (though in many cases broadly similar) set of metrics for each possible platform, as well as assigning weightings to individual stakeholder types, a rigorous, measurable approach to online reputation management is possible. Your long tail is unique to you. Cision s Social Media Audit is designed to identify and prioritise the Magic Middle relevant to your organisation, ranking key non-mainstream news sites, blogs and messageboards alongside key areas of social networks (such as YouTube channels or Facebook groups) and other Web 2.0 platforms. Using the metrics outlined in this paper, the Social Media Audit will make recommendations about what to monitor, where and whom to reach out to - and how to do it. I M P O R T A N C E T O Y O U SHORT HEAD (mainstream media, key trades, etc.) MAGIC MIDDLE (key blogs, messageboards, social network spaces...) LONG TAIL (the rest of the web) CHANNEL Cision

8 Media Intelligence. Communication Insights. CISION UK Cision House Baltic Street West London EC1Y 0UL Phone: Fax: +44 (0)