'Net Features : socia media analytics

The Social Media Impression Crisis

Administrator — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:45:00 GMT

:: By Ana Raynes, Didit ::

The social media industry is on the brink of a crisis because of widespread confusion over the definition of the industry term “impression.”

Here’s the problem: nearly every social media toolset uses the word “impression” as a metric in reporting the success of failure of a campaign, initiative or in general regarding a specific message and its reach and penetration. But the definition of the term appears to be much looser than its narrow definition in the worlds of online advertising – so loose as to approach meaningless and perhaps even deceptive. The fact is that a social media “impression” is a different animal because it is only a probability, not a fact or event.

What Exactly Is An Impression?

The term “impression” is narrowly defined in the worlds of traditional online advertising. In fact, the IAB even put together a working group in 2003 and issued a global standard for counting ad impressions in November of 2004. In 2006 the group did the same for Digital Video Ad Measurement by defining a video ad impression. Many would argue that even the current digital advertising definitions for an impression are too lax and that impressions for digital paid media should exclusively count times when a message was within the line of sight of the advertiser.

But the social media “impressions” reported in the social media toolsets are not defined in this narrow way, nor do they represent true impressions. At best, a social media “impression” is a potential impression because it is impossible to know whether a given message – sent across thousands of busy Twitter or Facebook streams – is actually perceived by the observer. In the old days, it was thought that in order for that “impression” to actually impress upon the consumer a message it must be seen by the consumer or at least scroll past their field of vision. Social media impressions are not facts or events; only probabilities and potentialities. Effectively, advertisers are buying “chances” for exposure, not the exposure itself, which makes the game more like Lotto than traditional media buying.

What The Tool Sets Say

Those of us who live and breathe social media know that social media message impressions are more akin to those in the world of public relations than the impressions of traditional advertising. In the world of PR, impressions can be inferred by counting the subscribers of a given magazine as a PR hit, regardless of whether the subscriber actually noticed the coverage or not.

We surveyed 12 different social media toolsets. The majority of them claim to be treating impressions in exactly this fashion, using data from Facebook, Twitter, and Web analytics firms, to construct a model of influence. Two toolsets, TwitterReach and SimplyMeasured, appear to calculate impressions using Twitter as a proxy. “Exposure is the number of overall impressions generated by tweets in this report (the total number of times tweets were delivered to timelines, including repeats).” (TwitterReach). “Total number of times a tweet from your account or a tweet mentioning your account has appeared in someone's Twitter feed during the report period (does not imply that a user viewed his or her twitter during that time).”

None of the vendors of these toolsets go so far as to say what the value of such an “impression” actually is (this data is either reported to the client without any inference about what its value is or not given a dollar value at all). So it cannot fairly be said that they are overselling the value of social media “impressions.” But when it comes down to defining what a social media impression is, the toolsets’ definitions aren’t very helpful and lead to more questions then they can answer.

What Is a Social Media Impression Worth?

It’s easy to understand why both the agency community and the social media publishers would like clients to be wowed by astronomical “impression” numbers in their reports, but marketers need clarity as to exactly what such a social media “impression” is and what it is worth. If there’s any clarity to be found, it might come from the PR industry, which has come up with some new concepts for valuing media exposure through what it calls the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) metric. AVE attempts to calculate what editorial coverage would cost were it paid media.

It is less clear, however, whether measuring social media influence can be achieved with such a metric. Social media is altogether different from other forms of media and measuring influence – whether through an impression, a page view, like, follow, or tweet – requires a different slide rule from that used in traditional media. We as an industry need to be thinking about developing such a tool, but in the meantime it is crucial that battle the perception that a social media “impression” is even remotely equivalent to a traditional one. If we don’t, we face a crisis, a backlash, and a wave of disappointment from advertisers who believed what they were buying had real value.

About the Author:

Ana Raynes currently leads the social media efforts at Didit as a social media manager. Her role includes strategic planning for clients’ social media campaigns, developing blogger relationships and identifying news, trends and best practices within social media.

Pinfluencer Launches Image Recognition Engine

Allison Howen — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Merchants that actively maintain a Pinterest profile have the potential to gain a lot of traffic from the visually driven social network.

However, just like any other social network, merchants must monitor the analytics of the content they post in order to optimize their production strategies to drive the best results. Luckily, tools like Pinfluencer, which is an enterprise marketing and analytics platform for Pinterest, can help brands do just that.

In fact, Pinfluencer just launched a new image recognition engine that helps brands identify which image on a particular page is driving the most traffic from Pinterest. The technology also breaks down data based on URL patterns and SEO tags, which can help marketers discover which images and products from a website are generating engagement on Pinterest and driving traffic back to the website. Moreover, Pinfluencer’s image recognition technology combined with URL and SEO parsing allows marketers to conduct analytics at an image, product and website level.

Pinfluencer also allows merchants and marketers to measure metrics such as overall followers, pins per day, repins per day and clicks per pin. Additionally, the platform’s Top Products report displays a brand’s most popular products on Pinterest, while the Top Images report shows which images are most popular and drive the most traffic.

“A website is composed of product pages and product pages are comprised of individual images. These images distribute the products on Pinterest via pins and repins serving as the digital mannequins that help drive traffic back to a retailer’s website,” said Sharad Verma, CEO, Pinfluencer. “We see every pin on Pinterest as a distribution opportunity for our customer brands and we have spent the last year helping these brands see how to identify their top and most influential pinners and learn which pins actually drive the most sales. We are unveiling our new image technology to allow brands to understand which images on a webpage drives the most traffic relative to other images. These insights are extremely powerful.”

Adapting to Social Media Analytics

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 18:10:00 GMT

As businesses – both small and large – adapt to the increasing demands of social media, the way these companies analyze its return on investment on these networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, must adapt too.

Visible Technologies, a social media monitoring company, launches new features each quarter, rapidly enabling organizations to do just that. The company recently announced multiple enhancements to its Visible Intelligence platform.

“Brand leaders, marketers, and customer support teams need a fast and efficient way to analyze, assess and adjust to real-time consumer feedback,” said Richard Pasewark, CEO of Visible. “Social strategy is becoming a focal point for corporations of every size; they demand solutions to access, understand, and act on the fresh consumer conversation happening on the social web. The Visible Intelligence platform - and these important new updates - provides a powerful competitive edge by making social data easy to access, simple to comprehend and relevant to the marketer.”

The new features include Klout influence scoring, upgraded search functionality, expanded widgets, streamlined post actions and more.

The company expects these new enterprise-class features to increase the efficiency and speed of managing social media and analysis. Additionally, the integration with Klout helps marketers react to social media influencers.

“In the content realm, as content is flowing in, we are often looking at people was saying, but another is the influence score people assign” said Pasewark. “Klout scores are way to get direct measurements.”

Measurements can also come in the form of sentiment, which marketers using this Visible Intelligence platform, can sort by positive or negative sentiment. For example, if a company launches a new product and announces it on its social networks, marketers can quickly see what is trending and turn that impactful info into action like emphasizing a feature that received positive feedback or even, in extreme cases, offering refunds or recalls.

Also in this launch, are improved data graphics, such as a ‘sentiment pie.’ As not all marketers are deep analytic users, these graphs help them view insightful info, quickly.