Open The Dialogue

Well ladies and gents, we’re already up to Volume 2 of the How Not To Be Annoying On The Internet series, and this time I’m addressing the issue of the search box clearing itself out after you click “Search” on Technorati, versus not clearing itself out on any other Search Engine out there.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have always found it useful having the contents of the search box still there and it strikes me as odd that it isn’t on Technorati. Just my $.02. As for the “annoying,” that’s just a simple way to round up the myriad frustrations, oddities, and other sorts of things that strike us all on the Web every day, so please don’t take it personally, anyone who we might happen to feature here!

I’m sure everyone who has devised and executed a social media campaign, particularly one involving outreach to writers of blogs and other sites, has been asked to provide some sort of metric to justify such efforts. Often what’s asked for are pageviews or visitors or (gulp) impressions.

But here’s the story I tell all the time when people ask about my personal site’s reach: I get, on MMM, about 800 hits to the site a day. But a good amount of those come in, via searches, to posts I wrote months, if not years ago. So if you’re including MMM in your blog outreach plans and you’re basing its inclusion on that 800 +/- daily visits, you need to know that not all those 800 people are coming in through the front door.

That means some portion of that overall number of people are not seeing whatever you’ve just pitched me – yet – though some of them are. Unlike overall visitor numbers we can tell who’s hitting the front page. That is one advantage of the web versus traditional metrics like overall circulation – we can see how people move around on a site.

The 1,000+ people who subscribe to my RSS feed, though, definitely are. That’s because via the feed they’re always seeing the most recent content and updates, and they’re seeing them at a time of their choosing, whatever time they’ve blocked off to catch up on their reading. But I don’t think RSS subscriber numbers is something that’s often asked for or included when measuring success. This despite the fact that, based on my experience, far more publishers make their RSS subscriber numbers visible on their sites – largely through a FeedBurner chicklet – than make their site visit stats publicly viewable.

The same rings true here on OTD, where the number of people snagging the RSS feed vastly outstrip the number of hits to the site.

Considering there’s such a demand for numbers as a means to justify online public relations efforts; and considering there seem to be more publishers who use that FeedBurner number on their sites; and considering that number translates into a higher percentage of the audience that’s going to see the successful results of your outreach, I think it’s past time to start factoring RSS numbers into the numbers agencies provide to clients.

Now I’ll be the first to state that swapping one number for another does little or nothing to address the fact that influence in a particular vertical niche or community held by one person does not always correlate to certain numbers. But aside from anecdotal impressions given by those familiar with the online space there isn’t much we can do to back that up. Numbers are always more reassuring since that’s how traditional media has always been measured and that’s what people are looking for.

So as long as it’s numbers being asked for it’s incumbent on those of us navigating the online space on behalf of our clients to provide the best ones available. Considering all the factors above it seems to me RSS subscribers is probably one of the better numbers we can provide.

Accompanied by the level of detail you’d expect from two Forrester analysts, Groundswell lays out case after case of strategies, rationales and insight that show either the groundswell in action or how a yet to be tapped community can be moved to create that groundswell.

The authors begin by laying out why it’s important to know what the groundswell is capable of. After all it’s often made up of customers or employees, two groups that are infinitely more valuable to a business’ success than whomever is occupying the CMO chair this week. These groups have the tools – in the form of message boards, blogs, social networks and more – to influence others either positively or negatively based on their experiences with your brand, product or staff.

From there Bernoff and Li go into tactics to turn existing groundswells to the advantage of the company, and that’s the central tenet of the rest of the book. After explaining what the groundswell can do for or to your business they then provide strategies, advice and tactics on how to know what’s being said, contribute to the conversation in a meaningful manner and energize the people who live in the groundswell.

Each chapter takes a slightly different tack on this, which makes it easy for brand marketers or others to find the section of the most relevance to what they need to accomplish and see what others have done by way of case studies and benefit from the authors’ thinking along these specific lines.

While much of the research that goes into the thinking that drives Groundswell is only alluded to or conveyed via quotes from others at Forrester, Bernoff and Li (and the firm as a whole) also use their Social Technographics Profile as a central – and publicly available – resource. That tool allows you to see, based on Forrester research, whether a particular demographic is filled more with Creators, Critics, Collectors or any of the other distinct groups the firm has identified. This tool informs the vast majority of the book so it’s good to familiarize yourself with the labels it uses and the data behind it in order to get the most out of the book itself.

Groundswell is one of those books that should be included in every corporate communications professional’s Christmas stocking. There may be marketing people out there who still think online engagement with consumers or other groups isn’t worth it but they won’t feel that way after reading the book. Instead they’ll likely be scared into some sort of action.

And that’s why Groundswell also needs to be read by the people lower down the ladder. When someone comes to them saying the company needs to create a Facebook application “NOW!” they need to be able to keep the analytical mindset exemplified by Li and Bernoff and ask simple but hard questions like “But is that where are customers are?” Doing so – and having the data to back up their questions – will save a lot of wasted time and money.

Groundswell is recommended without qualification.

Okay, here’s the first installment of what I hope to make a regular occurrence here at Open the Dialogue, and I’m officially calling it “How Not To Be Annoying On The Internet.” [Thanks, Chris!] Of course, HNTBAOTI as an acronym doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue, but whatever. We’ll be using Flickr Video to offer up sub-90 second videos / screencasts (and yes, that’s a GOOD limit to have), and the first volume is one of my personal favorites, turning off the nifty autoplay feature. It’s like turning off the keytones on your cellphone 30 seconds after purchasing a new phone, except…well, it’s just not on a cellphone.

In any case, without further ado, here we go.

Hope you enjoyed this installment, and we’ll hope to bring you more soon!

[ed: and before you ask, I did the screencast using SnapzProX on my iMac, and converted the file down to Web-ready using Apple's QuickTime Pro. The original file version wasn't working on upload but the converted, m4v file, did, so give that a whirl if you're unable to get .mov files working at first.]

• Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk helpfully reminds us that digital and interactive are not necessarily the same thing, with the latter promising some point of actual engagement and interactivity.
• Also from Forrester comes Josh Bernoff reminding corporate bloggers that it’s actually more disingenuous to refuse to even acknowledge you have competitors than it is dangerous to ignore that reality.
• A “Facebook strategy” might not be the best thing for every company – that’s just a fact – but that doesn’t mean proposals along those lines should be dismissed out of hand since there’s still good information to be gleamed from the users there.
• Steve Hall has some informal feedback on new media trust and other related issues based on a panel he attended.
• Between the New York Times confirming my belief that blogging is going to kill me and Time’s release of its very first Top 25 Blog Index (translation: a bunch of sites that will now appear on a lot of lists built after someone issues a “let’s get this on the blogs” list) I’m losing a lot of my belief that mainstream media can cover the online world effectively and respectfully.
• Get this – the smaller scale and better opportunities for niche audiences to find the content makes online the perfect venue for small scale video series that have niche audience appeal. I’m not poking at Mark Glaser on this but instead that this keeps being forgotten as series are drawn over to TV that have no chance of survival on TV.