Engage in PR

Heading into work today I was thinking about all of the things that go into Social Media and I was wondering, if you had to, where would you rank these three items in terms of ultimate importance:

• Transparency
• Creativity
• Interactivity

I acknowledge that each of these are important and I realize they are not the only items of significance. What I want to know is where you rank them in overall importance.

(Utterz Video: RSS Readers Click Through)

To be fair, here is my numerical ranking:
1) Transparency
2) Interactivity
3) Creativity

I believe my ranking comes from my role on the agency side, whereas someone on the client side my pop creativity up to the top. Being transparent, almost to a fault, is critical and becoming even more important today. The reason it is becoming more important is the fact that many clients aren’t completely sold on social media but are willing to give it a try, which means the agency folks doing the legwork. This is fine of course, but it puts the onus on you to always be transparent in your dealings with the community.

Interactivity comes next for me because too many times we see programs that believe interactivity is the ability to social tag or comment. That is one form of interaction, sure, but does it truly allow you to engage in a conversation over time? You simply can not rely on only one medium for a social media program, you must have the conversation over several different ones to insure interactivity and community engagement.

Finally, creativity. Obviously I’m not saying creativity is last or not important (again, I’m only asking you to rank three items). However, I do think too much time is wasted on coming up with the next big idea or creative initiative when the actual important item here is content.

Go ahead, rank ‘em!

/kff

The past few months I’ve started a jogging training regiment. Nothing major, in fact it is very minor. In jogging you can easily measure your success by miles and time. This is critical to determine if your training is working. However, you can’t easily measure the influence your running is having on your body. Oh sure you feel better after a jog, but is that cholesterol going down, the weight moving away, the blood pressure decreasing? Because your miles are up and your time is down does not necessarily mean your jogging is having an influence on your health!

I was reminded of this by two events that arose. Firstly, reading
Peter Kim describe the importance of measuring blog success last year and realizing how a high authority ranking may not mean that you are actually influencing people. Peter’s post had a large influence on how I measure blogging success. Secondly, a colleague of mine asked me a great question the other day:

How can you judge the relevancy of a blog? How can you fully leverage Technorati and what weight to give their “authority”. I know the big names, but when a client says “What do you think of this Blog?” is there a valid way to judge how much traction they are getting?

I typically break this down into three simple sections, the first is the fun part to watch, “authority” and then moves into statistical analysis or influence. I could dive into each of these in it’s own post, which I might do, but just be cognizant that this is high level response meant to educate.

1) Authority “Providers”
–Technorati is a great place to start to watch how your authority can grow. They use an algorithm that measures the amount of times other blogs mention your blog, but it is a weighted structure based on the amount of blogs that have mentioned that blog that mentioned you. Confusing, I know. Put it this way. But here is the point, it truly should only be a starting point in measuring the importance of validity of a blog. One metric among a handful you should use.

–Google Page Rank is another way to measure the authority. Google uses a similar system as Technorati, including page links back and forth, keyword trend analysis and more. However, GPR can be “gamed” and again it is just one ranking system.

Authority is fun to measure, but measuring influence is key to a blog’s success…so let’s do some influence measurements!

2) Reviewing Your Content
–Every 2-3 months a blogger should go through and check out the amount of comment they and others have contributed to the blog. How many posts? How long are the posts? How many comments? How many trackbacks? etc. This is a baseline measurement that can help you determine why other success factors are not necessarily going in your direction.

Compare this to other sites that you respect or do have high “authority” rankings. Do those sites write more often, have a more interactive community, write shorter posts, or link more. Finally, you should be jotting this down and measuring it over time to see how you are evolving as a blogger and how your stats change at the same time.

3) Site Stats
–Finally here is the most important group of stats…how many people are actually reading the blog! I use Google analytics for my blogs and fortunately most of my clients have given me access to their Google analytics. Here is what I look for on a regular basis:

• Unique site visitors (month to month these should go up)
• Keywords used to find blog (use these for future posts, press releases, web copy, etc)
• Exit point for site visitors (are they going from the blog to the corporate site…aka are they becoming leads?)
• RSS Subscribers (a great way to measure the impact you are having since these folks are truly taking you seriously, burn through Feedburner and it’s easy)
• Geographic location (depending on your goals you might want to see a greater concentration in the Bay Area versus NY)

There are a ton of different measurement tools out there to use: SiteMeter, MeasureMap, Fireclick…check them out and figure what works best for your set-up.

OK, now you’ve measured your authority with a grain of salt, examined your site content and analyzed your blog stats. All of this together will help you better evaluate if you are having an influence in the blogosphere.

What am I missing?

/kff

I know, I know, everybody in Red Sox Nation is yelping and yelling about the amazing World Champions of 2007. I enjoyed this championship so much this year and after it ended last night, for the first time in my life, I got to run up the stairs and wake up my son to tell him that the Boston Red Sox were World Champs. His reaction was fitting, he just kept saying “wahwah, wahwah”, an obvious reference to the Standell’s famous battle cry, “Love that Dirty Water”, what a genius this kid is at only 19 months old…although now that I think about it perhaps he was looking at his cup of water at the time…oh well.

After phone calls with Dad and various friends I settled in for a long night of watching interviews, highlights, tears, laughs and a couple more pops.

Here is one video (nod to Bryan Person) that I enjoyed watching and I can’t wait to see more. I love that dirty watah…

The notion of “media snackers” has been traveling the Internets the past week or so (and I assume prior to that), started by Jeremiah Owyang’s post, who asked the question:

“Do you respect media snackers… folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where and how the want. If you want to be part of their lives you’ve got to respect them.”

Jeremiah tagged Connie Benson, who tagged Connie Reece, who tagged Geoff Livingston, who tagged moi.

As I wipe the sleep from my eyes after a Sox sweep in the series I posted my own media snack response below. But first, I’m tagging some of my new favorite bloggers/Twitter friends, David Westcott, Julia Roy, Joe Ciarallo, and Amanda Gravel. My apologies if you’ve been tagged, I tried to do a thorough check, but I’m exhausted after crawling into bed at 3:30am after watching all the post-game!

My media snack, or “Increasing your Information Metabolism” (RSS reader, you may need to click through to listen):