Twitter is still something of a mystery to those of us in advertising and marketing. Everyone thinks they need to be on top of it, but no one is completely sure now to use it. Even fewer people have an idea of how to measure whether or not they’re using it effectively. Most of the time brands think about Twitter like this: Create an account, start tweeting, and then measure success by looking at how many followers we have. But that doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, that tells you almost nothing.
This was something I spent quite a bit of time on. You may have seen pieces of it here. It’s [now] a little book called Thresher. It’s the first in a series of thought leadership and innovation workshops for Freesytle Interactive.
Summary:
“Thresher is a quarterly publication by Freestyle Interactive. It’s an experiment in what we are calling ‘reverse aggregation.’ Instead of a standard newsletter that gets lost in your inbox, with a dozen disconnected links, Thresher is a collection of articles that take a deeper look at a single topic, trend, or technology.”
UPDATE: Thresher was just chosen as a “Staff Pick” by Blurb! Check it out.
Note: Due to contractual obligations, I have decided to remove any brand-identifying information.
The image above is a complete mapping of a major brand’s social media presence on the web. This was an exercise I started doing for all the brands I’ve worked with in order to better understand how the consumer uses social media. Everyone likes to talk about how social media is going to save their business, but I don’t see a lot of examples of people going out there and actually finding out how people interact with the content that brands are seeding out to them.
The colors indicate the specific property in question. Everything having to do with Facebook, for example, is in red. Simply mapping out properties and getting an idea of their size is a good start, but it doesn’t really tell you how the consumer ends up there… or where they go after. The consumer journey remains a mystery. That’s where the madness of arrows comes into play.
The arrows indicate trafficking information. They show where people end up going given any particular starting point. This is the kind of information that can be invaluable when developing strategies for content distribution, and having them actually mapped out on a 2D-plane can make that process much easier. This can also help lead to more optimal linking structures for large brands that have a distributed presence over a number of different sites and networks.
You may notice that the missing piece here is traffic coming from search. It was too difficult to map on a 2D-plane with everything else going on, but is something that was considered as part of the content distribution strategy for this brand.
It’s all in the numbers
About a year ago I was hired by a word-of-mouth marketing agency to work on a social media pilot project for a client. This agency had typically done event marketing, and this project was quite different. It was, in effect, a social media research project. This was about using social media in a fundamentally different way. It wasn’t about “brand monitoring” or using social media as some kind of new broadcast medium. This was about using social media to develop real, accurate insights and have an affect on how a company thinks about their industry, their consumer, and their marketing. This was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever worked on.
The client asked us how they should be allocating brand resources and budgets to create the most effective word-of-moth campaigns. They wanted us to find new opportunities for them. Today, almost any effective word of mouth campaign will reach the Internet, and so it stands to make sense that one could make recommendations based on learning about the larger marketplace, where the brand fits within it, and how the consumer interacts with both the brand and the market.
A few years ago I tried to start a company. The name of the startup was Anatomy Ads. You can see the remnants of a functional prototype at anatomyads.com, if you wish. The purpose of this company was to find a new way to monetize new media.
The idea was to create a truly social advertising network around the idea of “variable CPM.” You would pay ‘x’ dollars for an ad, and the number of ‘y’ impressions you would receive would vary based on how many other people were buying into that space, and at what price. If people could enter an ad unit, at whatever price they wanted, what would happen? Would you have hundreds of people offering small increments for hot properties, or a few big players trying to dominate the pool? How would people act if they didn’t know how many impressions they’d end up getting? Would you ever reach the equilibrium price? These were the kinds of questions I wanted to answer.
Hi, I'm Aaron Richard. You might remember me as that guy from some website who goes by the name "Ralph The Magician."
I'm a digital strategist who lives and works in New York City.
This is one of my blogs. I use this to showcase some of the things I've worked on that I think others might find particularly interesting. I maintain two other blogs: Blogs by Magic & Random Bits of Magic.
You can learn more about me, follow me on Twitter, or send me an email.
