At the end of last year, I worked very hard alongside some colleagues at Factiva (Dow Jones) to coordinate a roundtable event to discuss Social Media with thought leaders in the Bay Area. The thought to have the roundtable came to me after speaking with Jeremiah Owyang and sharing my frustrations with the fact that every time i met up with people who were talking about Social Media, I always wanted my Factiva Insight product folks in the room- to listen and participate in those conversations. So what i managed to do was bring them West using a combination of social media itself (i blogged, reached out to other bloggers via comments etc) and good old fashion networking (i went from pub to pub in San Francisco- seriously i am not kidding) to engage members of the community that i knew would make great participants. We also reached out to a handful of local clients that we knew where dealing with these issues internally.

The location was a wonderful place called Zibibbo's in Palo Alto, CA where the food was incredible and the wine nicely poured...and what a great crowd we managed to get.


What were some of the questions we were/are trying to answer during this roundtable ?

- Do you believe Consumer Generated Media is important and should be measured?
- Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
- If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
- Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
- So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?


One of the agreed outcomes of the roundtable was that we would produce a white paper of the information that we gathered along with our co-author Jeremiah Owyang. Well for months and months i have been bugging (read harassing) Marketing about this white paper and when it would be finalized. Well as you know, Factiva has gone through a lot of corporate changes- we officially became Dow Jones in January and then five months later the news about the News Corp acquisition- well i guess they have all been busy. I am sure i have made more then one enemy being a pestering little bug- oh well i hope we can make up soon.

So the final outcome is this report authored by Matt Toll of our Marketing group and Jeremiah Owyang. You can Download the Report here: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF).

Since the event- many of the participants have continued to talk and address issues of social media measurement- some of the companies that participated have implemented strategies that they continue to refine. The white paper has some good thoughts and ideas by the participants and we hope that their voices are heard. As Jeremiah describes it, the white paper serves as a good primer for those that are new to the concept, or for those who need to start deploying a program but also provides a good insight into what was going through on minds on that day in December of 2006.

Additional information about the roundtable is available on the Factiva Roundtable wiki that was used to coordinate the event and provide a place for reflection afterwards. More pictures from the event here and shortly if i ever get to re-re-encode my video files i will post video clips of the participants.

and some final words?

Just came across this site tweetVOLUME that allows you to quickly create a comparison chart graph of word/phrase occurrences in Twitter. The sample i have included in this post present a graph of the amount of times some major newspapers are mentioned in Twitter. I am guessing that 'new york times' is popular because there are various new york times twitters, which although i believe were not created by NYTs are a great branding exercised.

Back in April, i blogged about another 'monitoring' service Twitterment that i thought was interesting and as services like Twitter among other continue to get traction companies/individuals are going to definitely be more interested in tracking what people are twittering about.

tweetVOLUME is quite simple and lacks some key features for real usability; like for example being able to drill down on the charts to see the underlying data, being able to join multiple terms (e.g. Wall Street Journal or WSJ) and it doesn't tell me what the time frames of the data is that i am looking at (last day, last month, forever?)- but overall a fun little tool.

Aside from just being fun, i do like the fact that it is a destination site that doesn't require logins or plugins and you can easily share your chart with a simple e-mail this chart feature which send out a contextual URL link.

At the Blogher conference two weeks ago i spoke on a panel on How To Measure Social Media ROI with Katie Paine and Lena West. One of the things that we discussed was the growing importance of monitoring Blog comments and using them as one of the aspects of measuring the success of your blogs. During the panel, i commented that you also have to understand your audience, will they leave comments, it is easy for them to do so (or do they need to sign-up like for example HP blogs), are they afraid to engage in public because they are afraid to speak on behalf of their company, etc. From my own experience, I still get a lot of e-mailed comments especially from clients on blog posts.

The Net-Savvy Executive has a recent post on Measuring blog comments that hits on that same subject and mentions some companies that allow you to search comments and others that allow tracking of comments that can then be incorporated into measurement techniques companies put together as part of their Social Media strategy. I agree with Nathan that vendors in this space are aware that tracking and measuring comments is important. This topic also came up back in December when Factiva hosted a Social Media Roundtable event in Palo Alto to gather feedback on what should be measured.