Beyond - a digital engagement consultancy - london, new york, san francisco

The threat of the Internet’s balkanization by social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube was something people started predicting years ago; with the implication for PR and marketing that it meant we got cut off from our data sources for understanding online conversations. This division is indeed happening – for example, we frequently see 90%+ of all referral traffic generated in a Facebook campaign to be from within Facebook. But, as it turns out, these providers of “walled gardens” (to use the phrase coined back when AOL still seemed like a smart investment, many, many years ago) have had to modify their approach, making the walls far more porous in order to stay relevant and keep sticky. For one thing, Facebook has made the realization Google made way back, which is that without good content created by third party publishers (whether it’s the NYT or your dog’s blog), there’s no Internet and no audience. Google and Facebook have done everything they can do make content easy to find, consume, and share, and have gotten very good at monetizing that audience engagement. And in order to do that, platforms like Facebook have had to punch some holes in their walls.

As a result, these platforms have given us researchers a whole mountain of data sets to work with and integrate. We have been working with a myriad of new firms (often just a couple of guys in the proverbial garage) working on figuring out new ways of getting at this data and enriching it. This is all very exciting to us, as the opportunity to integrate data on what people do on these platforms and who they are, with data from social media conversations, media conversations, and customer behavior on company websites gives unprecedented opportunities for insight. (Shameless plug: our Earned Media Optimization methodology is designed to do exactly this). For example, the sharing of content is now just as likely to be done in a public way (through Likes and open wall posts), as via email, which means that we can now get insights into word of mouth in way that was previously prohibitively expensive. And while many people have their profile set to private, many do not. By some counts, as many as 50% of Facebook profiles contain public wall posts, which is more than adequate sample size for research purposes, provided there are relevant conversations, of course.

So much of social media measurement talk is about demonstrating its ROI, or just plain “how did my campaign do?” Which we believe is increasingly the wrong question to ask. Or at least, the less valuable one. Because it is the insights given from understanding what your customers and potential customers care about, who they are, and what makes them special, that really can allow you to optimize your marketing in a fundamental way rather than just fine-tuning details of what you already do. I firmly believe this is where social media measurement is heading, and it will become a massive industry in its own right. A company who understands what every single customer wants from them is one that will be formidably hard for a competitor to beat. While we are a very long way from that, we are still today in a place where we can understand a lot more about customers than we ever could.

(Quote by Lisa Myers )