Posts Tagged ‘Joseph Thornley’

Feedburner, You Cut Me Deep

08.08.29

Joe Thornley wrote earlier this week about his disappointment with Technorati, the once-market-leading tool that has fallen out of favour. He also reached out and nudged a few of us to give our thoughts on "social media tools with which they once had a warm and deep relationship with that has now lapsed."

A bunch of other people have contributed their thoughts on Technorati and on other tools that have disappointed.

I could jump on the anti-Technorati bandwagon and point out all the flaws there. I agree with them — Technorati doesn’t just fail to offer the functionality of Google Blog Search; its own functionality doesn’t even work.

When I sort posts linking to my site by freshness, the one was:

Technorati screen capture - last comment 14120 days ago

That’s roughly 38 years ago, whereas Google Blog Search says it was this morning. Enough said.

Feedburner, We Need To Talk

If we’re on the subject of tools that need a little TLC, I could easily talk about Jaiku, Plurk, Pownce, SocialThing! (although I harbour hopes that that one will re-surface after its acquisition). However, I’m going to talk about Feedburner.

In case you’re new to Feedburner, it’s essentially a service that takes the RSS feed from your website and lets you analyze subscriber stats, make your site easy to subscribe to, monetize it through ads and generally do lots of cool things. It’s a great service in principle, and it’s pretty ubiquitous on blogs. Bloggers rely on it to the point that many integrate it into their site to show how many subscribers they have:

Unfortunately, like Technorati, the service frequently breaks.

Whereas I used to look to my Feedburner stats with excitement (I’m a big numbers geek) to see whether my posts resonated with people (hence my subscriber count would go up), nowadays I look more with trepidation, wondering whether the stats will work each day. 

Why?

Because Feedburner seems to randomly mis-count subscriber numbers, as this 50% drop on one Thursday this month shows:

Feedburner screen capture - nearly 50% drop in one day

What’s more, Feedburner’s numbers are virtually indecipherable. I still haven’t worked out why its "view" stats never matches the ones I get from my Wordpress Stats plugin or from Google Analytics. Its "reach" figure, while a neat idea, makes no sense to me either. Why, when Google Analytics says I have hundreds of daily unique visitors and even more subscribers, do I have a "reach" of 70?

Joe asked us to describe tools with which we once had a warm relationship that has now lapsed. I would say moving from a relationship based on trust to one founded on apprehension, opacity and trepidation fits the bill.

Feedburner has a virtual monopoly right now – I know of no other tools that serve its funtion. As with Technorati, its failure to develop (after its purchase by Google) leaves an opportunity for another company to come forward and take its place. I know I’m ready to move on.

Do you know of any contenders?

Posted in: social media, tools

Tags: , ,

10Comments

Social Media Breakfasts Coming To Toronto

08.08.17

Joseph Thornley and the Third Tuesday Toronto organizers are bringing Social Media Breakfasts to Toronto.

Bryan Person founded the concept of Social Media Breakfasts in August 2007 as an event where social media experts and newbies alike come together to eat, meet, share, and learn. Marketers, PR pros, entrepreneurs, bloggers, podcasters, new-media fanatics, and online social networkers are all welcome to attend.

Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, brought the Social Media Breakfast to Canada for the first time earlier this year and the event is now also moving down the 401 to the big smoke.

Given the never-ending array of social media groups we already have in Toronto, I wasn’t sure about the idea of bringing Social Media Breakfasts to the city when I first thought of it, but I’ve come around. We’ll know when we reach a saturation point for events in Toronto, and we don’t seem to be there yet. Until that time, the more people we can reach, help and educate at these events the better.

Can you help?

I’m helping out with the organizing group – can you?

Joe has put out a call for hosts and sponsors for the Social Media Breakfast:

We need help finding a location in Toronto where we can hold the Social Media Breakfast. Do you have a meeting room or open concept office that could accommodate up to 100 people for a 7:30AM to 9AM meetup? If so, would you consider hosting the first breakfast?

Even if you can’t host the event, would you be able to help us by sponsoring the breakfast or sound system?

What can we give you in return for hosting or sponsoring the Social Media Breakfast? Recognition in blog posts, on the Social Media Breakfast Website and at the event itself. And the sincere gratitude of a large and growing social media community.

If you would like to help get Toronto’s Social Media Breakfasts up and running, leave a comment here or head over to ProPR.ca and raise your hand there.

Posted in: events, socialmediabreakfast, third tuesday

Tags: , , , , ,

0Comments

How To Write A Good Communications Plan – Part 13 – Evaluation

08.07.28

Measuring This is it – the last stage of preparing your communications plan – evaluation.

As with several parts of this communications planning series, the stage at which you write this part of your plan is fairly arbitrary. I recommend you turn your mind to it after, not before, you finish considering your analysis, objectives, strategy and tactics (you do need to know what you’re measuring, after all), but beyond that point it’s largely up to you.

Evaluation is a tough area to tackle, and one that’s often neglected in public relations. There are plenty reasons for this:

  • The challenge of trying to find a measurement system that accounts for the wide variety of tactics possible in a public relations campaign
  • The reluctance of clients, be they internal or external, to dedicate budget to evaluation
  • The lack of well-established criteria for measuring social media success
  • The fast-moving pace of communications that moves us on to the next announcement as soon as the last one is finished.

Your goal for this section

Your goal in your evaluation section is to lay out how you will measure your communications success. In a high-profile initiative this may be through the various stages of your announcement (we identified three – pre-announcement, announcement and post-announcement, when we looked at tactics earlier); in others, it may have a smaller scope.

Staged Measurement

If you’re planning a staged rollout of your communications program, try to measure your results over time. Alongside providing more credible results, this has the added benefit of allowing you to take corrective action if you sense your activities aren’t getting the desired results. Take a look at the different milestones you’ve identified for the project and consider which are suitable points to measure at.

Of course, you should also measure at the end of the initiative to see whether you’ve accomplished your objectives. Ideally, you’ll be able to compare that to the results showing whether the business objectives were accomplished too.

Potential Metrics

I’m certainly not an expert in measurement tactics, but here are a few measurements you may want to consider, depending on your objectives:

  • Media coverage
    • How much coverage did you receive?
    • What was the tone of that coverage (positive/negative)?
    • Which media outlets was the coverage in? Where in those outlets? What’s the audience of those placements?
    • Did you achieve the desired visuals?
    • Did they pick up your key messages?
    • Were your spokespeople quoted?
    • Were the mentions of your initiative the focus of the coverage, or a side note?
    • Methods for achieving these metrics vary. While I haven’t used it personally, the Media Relations Rating Points system has achieved some traction (see Ben Boudreau’s One Degree post for a case study).
  • Interactive
    • How many visitors saw your content?
    • How long did they spend on the site?
    • What pages did they visit?
    • Did they hit specific landing pages?
    • What was their bounce rate?
    • What was their conversion rate (identify a goal for visitors – purchase/registration/download, etc.)?
    • Social media measurement is even more debatable than regular PR. Comments, inbound links, etc are lovely, but at best they’re just proxies for more meaningful measurements.
  • Stakeholders
    • How did your stakeholders react?
  • Public inquiries
    • How many letters/emails/calls did you receive on this topic? Is that higher or lower than usual?
    • What was the tone of the incoming correspondence?
    • What did the correspondents say/ask?
  • Benchmarking
    • Conduct market research/polling before and after (perhaps also during) your communications to show improvement in metrics over time, for example in public attitudes
    • Focus groups

These are just a few metrics. What others can you suggest?

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is the final post in my series of 13 posts on DaveFleet.com exploring how to create a good strategic communications plan. To read the rest of the series, check out the other posts here.

(Photo credit: verzerk)

Posted in: 101, communications planning

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

0Comments

Why Social Media Is Like Distance Running

08.07.04

Dave Fleet running the 2008 Boston Marathon Believe it or not, social media has a lot in common with distance running. I should know; I’m a little obsessive about both of them.

As I’m currently between old (Ontario government) and new (Thornley Fallis) jobs, I was fortunate enough to be able to head up to Georgian Bay recently for a bit of rest and relaxation. Of course, I’m a fanatical runner so when I say “rest” I naturally mean unnecessarily long, blissful trail runs.

During one of those long runs I started thinking about how, in many ways, participation in social media is a lot like distance running.

Wait… come back… let me explain…

It’s an endurance sport

Marathon runners know that a marathon doesn’t really start until after the 30km mark. The first 30km is all about getting to that point while feeling relatively fresh. You can’t just leap in and run a marathon without training. It takes months of preparation for that one race – you need to create the conditions you need for success.

Social media is similar – you need to put in a lot of work up-front – making connections, getting involved in the online communities and helping others, with what can sometimes feel like very little reward. Sure, you may enjoy the scenery along the way (personally, I did) but the real rewards come later once you’ve done that initial work.

You improve with practice

A friend of mine suggested to me the other day that to run a marathon at your best you need to run several races over a year or two first. Why?

  • You make your mistakes and learn from them
  • You learn from observing others
  • You get used to the competitive conditions

You can apply all of these to social media. You’re going to make mistakes – hopefully minor – when you start out. It’s going to happen – it’s part of the learning process. I certainly made my mistakes, but I’m stronger from having made them.

This applies if you’re just using social media tools for yourself, but it’s all the more important if you work professionally in this field. As Joe Thornley wrote recently, “you need to be a creator of social media to truly understand it.” To consult on social media tools without having used them yourself would be akin to consulting on communications strategies without having written one.

You get your best results with the help of others

For my first marathon, I trained solo. It was hell. I finished the race but that’s really the best thing I can say about it all. After that experience, I decided to start running with a group. Guess what? I made new friends, I learned from people with more experience than me and I actually enjoyed my running.

You can ‘participate’ in social media by writing a blog, posting messages to Twitter, setting up a Facebook account or whatever catches your fancy. However, you get the most out of those tools when you use them to communicate with other people – by commenting on other sites, replying to other people or writing on their Facebook walls, for example.

You benefit from variety

Distance runners don’t just head out and run 20km every day. We could, but we’d get bored pretty quickly and we wouldn’t get the best results. My current training program, for example, includes basic runs alongside interval training, tempo runs, hill workouts, long runs, recovery runs and more. I even run twice some days.

While I don’t suffer from the “shiny object syndrome” that many social media types do, I would argue that if you want to get the most out of your social media efforts, it’s a good idea to find a few sites that you like. For example, you might contribute your thoughts via a blog, share pictures through Flickr, build your business network through LinkedIn and network socially through Facebook.

What do you think? Am I way off the mark here? Did I miss other similarities?

Posted in: social media

Tags: ,

8Comments