Introduction

The importance of having Jim turn his attention to how to measure and optimize social media should not be overlooked. Here’s someone who has charted, chronicled and challenged many of the online developments we now take for granted. Whilst social media has been around a lot longer than we think, the “Social Media” that has got both marketers and CEOs both excited and anxious is still in its infancy. It’s the same social media that has now become headline-making and time-consuming, so that we are forced to say ‘hold on, are we getting anything out of all of this?’. This is where Jim steps in.

What I like immediately about this book (and I like books as my way of digesting information) is that Jim is very clear about what this book is and is not about. Thankfully, it’s not another diatribe about how game-changing social media is and you need to get your hands dirty with this range of tools. This book is about how to measure your investment – and although social media may be free, your time is not – in social media.

Who’s this book for?

In my view, these groups of people will find this book especially useful:

• Organisations and individuals who have made some investments in social media and want to quantify the results they are getting
• Those who remain sceptical about the chaotic nature of social media, but are afraid that they are about to get left behind – and therefore want to bring some structure to their future endeavours.
• Practitioners and consultants who want to help their clients develop a system of measurement that will stand up to scrutiny, and can be discussed sensibly at board level, without hysteria or hyperbole

Sructure

I get a great deal of comfort from a book of this type that starts off each chapter with a verb. The author has understood that the reader wants to do something, learn a few things, take away a bit more and ultimately take some action. Jim’s favourite verb is “getting” – getting focused, getting attention, getting respect, getting emotional – see what I mean.

Chapter 1 starts as the book goes on – setting your objectives. No investment, social media or otherwise, can be justified unless it meets one of the three big goals, namely:-

• Increase revenue
• Lower costs
• Improve customer satisfaction

The rest of the chapters, read chronologically, form a pattern of a traditional sales funnel. Chapter 2 is concerned with Getting Attention and reaching your audience, most importantly, not just any audience – but your audience. Chapter 3 – looks at how to spread your message through your networks in Getting Respect. Getting Emotional, the next chapter, recognizes that your message is an empty vessel unless we ascribe a sentiment to it. Understanding and classifying sentiment – positive, negative, neutral, sarcastic, humourous, etc. whilst not straightforward is vital in measuring the impact your social media activities are having.

Chapter 5 and Getting Response looks at the question of how you can track back the interactions you having the social media space to some desired outcomes. Getting the Message, in the next chapter, takes a small diversion from the ‘sale funnel’ approach and concentrates on the skills and techniques social media practitioners require for being both a good communicator, and most importantly, a good listener. Chapter 7, Getting Results, ties back your efforts to the overall objectives you set in Chapter 1. Chapter 8 outlines the way in different ways to ‘sell’ social media to the various tribes of doubters and naysayers.

The final chapter looks to the future and what the metathemes of social media might signify for the relationship between buyers and sellers in a networked world.

It ain’t new

Despite the furore and headlines around Twitter, it’s worth remembering that many forms of social media, in relative forms, have long histories. Message boards, review and opinion sites, blogging, bookmarking sites as well as media sharing platforms are well-known and familiar. The phenomenal growth in Twitter usage and Facebook’s rivalling of Google has naturally brought attention to how these newer community tools can be used. Some of this attention is directly from businesses and marketers working out how this form of ‘free marketing’ can be exploited to their benefit.

But a networked view of markets and buyers is not new either. The Cluetrain Manifesto of 1999, with its 95 theses, already understood that ‘markets are conversations’, and that most companies were failing to be involved in those conversations out of ‘obsolete notions of command and control’. From an offline perspective, David Ford and the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group, 9 years before Cluetrain, wrote persuasively about a chaotic, non-hierarchical view of industrial relationships. The Internet, and its newer forms, has simply given (?) these type of ‘relationship’ tools to the marketers.

Equivalence

One of the interesting themes that Sterne explores, is that of equivalence in the chapter, Getting Respect – Identifying Influence. Whilst the goal of many retention campaigns is to create ‘raving fans’, Sterne looks at one company’s approach to measuring fans. Baekdal of Baekdal.com defined fans as “one who either follows everything you do, or actively points other people to you – or both”.  Based on his web stats, Baekdal was able to calculate that one fan was ‘equivalent’ to 445 regular online visitors. With an average fan having an average of 445 fans themselves, 15 fans commenting on a Facebook page broadcast this message to 6,675 others.

For those who have struggled to monetize ‘engagement’ activity, here was a clear-cut example. If you can put a value on a website visitor, and you can identify the equivalent number of visitors a fan is worth, you can monetize your social media marketing efforts. Added to that, if you can examine the success of fans in recruiting other fans, the ROI of social media just got a whole lot better.

Like every good book on web analytics there is the caveat about data purity, and Sterne makes the necessary right noises about the need for careful expectation setting. Data quality issues in the online space are well-known, and Sterne is right to make the case for correct presentation of the exactitude of the data, rather than sweeping the issue deftly aside.

Visualising and measuring networks

As well as putting a value on a fan, the book talks meaningfully about measuring ‘interconnectedness’ using a variety of tools. Companies like FMS Advanced Systems Group, Axiom, Rapleaf and Unbound Technologies have built tools that allow you to see, in visual form, how the form of these networks change over time and interact with one another.  Whilst some tools focus on following ‘conversations’, others look at the linkages, via blogrolls for example, between actors.  The goal of all this spidery network visualisation is to identify clusters, trending topics and important actors within your network. This could all be useful intelligence in targeting the right message to a significant group within your network.

Based on Pareto’s law, many of those in your network will be connected, but as Sterne asks, are they ‘respected’? Authority and impact are two measures for assessing the value of individual actors, whilst tools like Peterson’s Twitalyzer focus on generosity, signal velocity, clout and influence. However, like many activities in web analytics, you need to rely on more than one tool. Technorati may be great if many of your prospects and customers are blogging away; Twitalyzer is a powerful tool (and let’s not forget free) for those active on Twitter, but the real value, as well as hard work, will come when you come to aggregate these views into a single system. Until the technology catches up, it would appear you still need to do some pulling together of spreadsheets and Powerpoints for the exec team.

Sentiment

One of the reasons automation has struggled with social media metrics is that of recognizing sentiment. Whilst it is straightforward to capture mentions and retweets of items containing your brand name, what exactly were they saying about you? Think about emotions like sarcasm and irony, and see if you can work out ways for this type of emotions to be correctly classified. Not easy.

Although Sterne outlines frameworks for classifying sentiment – polarity and intensity – the text analysis tools necessary to automate and accurately classify millions of posts, tweets and reviews appears wanting, as Sterne opines

“Perhaps machines can eventually be taught. But who will teach them? Machines have a hard time with this because humans do, too”

Whilst we recognize that listening is just as important as participating in these ‘conversations’ their sheer quantity force us to look towards technology for the answer, when the real difficulty lies in codifying our own language. Layering on top of this semantic challenge is listening to those speaking in other languages, from different cultures and orthogonal perspectives.

One answer might be to look at what people do, rather than what they say – isn’t this after all the difference between market research and testing?

Measuring response

There are many ways to record actions of both prospects and customers, and Sterne has arranged this into a pyramidal “Engagement Food Chain”. The chain (why not a pyramid?) starts with Saw, advancing to Saved and Rated, and ends with Purchased and Recommended. Leaving aside some of the data challenges of identifying individuals, this model works well, particularly if you have an entirely online business model. This sales funnel view of the world makes the assumptions that the more people you have say, Commenting, ceteris paribus, the more you will have at the Purchasing stage. It’s classic stuff, and I am inclined to believe the underlying assumption.

Customer service and crowdsourcing

If you are still having difficulty convincing the Exec team after showing them how many visitors each fan is worth and how your volume of recommendations is positively correlated to your recent boost sales, try the Customer Service pitch. Many organisations have seen quick wins from listening to complaints from customers, and going on to help them out. For those, worried about getting involved in the ‘naked conversation’, using social media to resolve customer issues feels manageable, and can bring some personality. Virgin America, for example, has met those tweeting in-flight about poor service at the landing gate with “customer recovery coupons”. My sense is that, over time, customers will come to expect this type of interaction and woe betide the large corporations who have the wherewithal to do this, but sadly don’t.

One of the most interesting developments of social media is that of crowdsourcing – using the power of the many to develop innovative ideas as to how products and services can be improved. Asking your customer what could be done better, is not terribly new, but the volume of responses that can be garnered and the feedback loop as to what changes have been implemented make this a powerful tool.  So when Dell.com gets 2,000 appeals for Linux to be pre-loaded on their laptops and PCs, it can respond, and did within three months of the first request. Measuring the number of ideas submitted, votes on each idea as well as further comments is a great way of understanding the power of your customer community. But of course, this is a big-brand exemplar, and you have to ask yourself: what would you think of Dell if it wasn’t doing something like this?

Return on investment

Overall, though, can we tie back our efforts to meeting business objectives? Jeremiah Owyang thinks so. He cites three critical measures to monitor in order to justify investment in social media:

1. Improvement in marketing efficiency (through greater amplification of your message);
2. Reduction in support costs (avoiding the costly call centre or a visit to the store);
3. Improvement to sales (subject to a robust tracking capability, of course).

With determination and thought, I am certain that most organisations will be able to use these three measures above to compare the investment they are making in social media with business outcomes

The future

Sterne at the beginning of the book promises not to be an evangelist for social media, and for the most part he keeps his word. But at the end of the book, the inevitable crystal ball-gazing chapter, John McKean of the Centre for Information Based Competition points out our central false assumptions. Our current thinking is based on the belief that innovation is occurring within the organisation.

In fact, McKean argues, “..the vast proportion of innovation is happening on the “buy side” of consumer interactions. The “sell” side innovations are progressively less and less.”. Organisations have failed to address their audiences in anything measuring like a success, when fail-to-respond rates are between 95%-98%. Instead of organisations continuing to try and ‘guess’ what the consumer wants, the efficient response is that consumers communicate their needs through a “consumer initiated dance (C2B) of Search, Find (engage) and Negotiate.”  Like many codas to technology marketing books, only time will tell, but suffice to say when visits to Google are now being rivalled by those to Facebook, searchability is being replaced by socialability.

Evaluation

Jim Sterne has done an excellent job in pulling together many important strands from the body of, often self-inflated, research and practice of social media. He has stripped out much of the puffery in the debate, and concentrated on the fundamentals. Sterne has constructed a stirring narrative, whilst tying technology, techniques and tools back to their impact on the business.  The shape of the book, like an old-fashioned sales funnel, gives us confidence that what has been included is useful and important to business outcomes. He has charted some difficult territory – data quality, sentiment analysis as well as old and the new of social media.

However, there are a few gaps which could have done with plugging. The book title includes the term ‘optimisation’, and for my money, there were few examples of this. I would like to have seen a few case studies where businesses had ‘measured’ their social media efforts, understood that they were sailing off course, and taken corrective action to ‘optimise’ and get better results. By concentrating only on the ‘measurement’ side of the equation, the book feels slightly lopsided.

Secondly, a good number of the examples were B2C and featured the global brands. I know there is some value in featuring case studies from household names with household products, but I fear this is somewhat short-sighted. Many of the people reading this book will be responsible for business-to-business marketing programs, and will want to be inspired by these stories, no matter whether the brand name is global or not. In fact, some small business owners will see social media as an opportunity to compete on a more level playing field with their more well-resourced competitors, and would be interested to hear more about businesses who have taken on the goliaths in their sector.

Finally, I would have liked to see a greater exploration of Owyang’s maturity model. The model presented lacked depth and does not bear comparison with Stephane Hamel’s Web Analytics Maturity Model. Allied with this shortcoming, would have been a more detailed consideration of how to resource social media marketing – what type of people make great community managers, where to find them, how to define their responsibilities, what organisational  guidelines should exist for using social media  – all of these would have been important questions to answer.

These gaps notwithstanding, Sterne has written an important book about how we will measure social media and evaluate the results of our efforts. It deserves to be on the bookshelf of every serious marketer.

Any book that has a foreword by Steve Krug, author of my all-time favourite website usability book, Don’t Make Me Think, has got my attention.

Added to that if you just flip through the pages of Forms That Work, you just know Jarrett and Gaffney have emulated Krug’s folksy style and lots of before-and-after visuals – and that’s a good thing. Why ? Because let’s be honest, very few people get excited about online forms, so anything an author can do to make the topic accessible and even winsome deserves praise

Forms That Work

My summary

Let me start with my conclusion first – if you like waiting to the end of anything to know what someone thinks, I’m sorry I am not that kind of book reviewer – this book is better than you think it is.

Primarily because after reading several sections of the book, you end up saying to yourself ‘Of course, everyone knows that. Doh!’ and that leads you to think that perhaps Jarrett and Gaffney have pulled some kind of con trick. Have they really written a book about online forms that just states the obvious? Initially, I thought they had, and was all ready to give this book the thumbs down. The reality is this, we often complete forms online that are tortuous, long-winded and ill-conceived. So, if the book’s contents are just plain commonsense, a good many people (and the websites they manage) have still a lot to learn.

‘Forms That Work’ begins with naming the three layers of an online form;

• the relationship – that between the individual completing the form and the organisation
• the conversation – the questions asked, its instructions and structure
• the appearance – the way it looks, input areas, use of graphics and text

Book structure

These three layers form the structure for the book, as chapters proceed to illustrate the dos and donts in the creation of a successful online form. What I particularly liked was how Jarrett and Gaffney segment users of online forms into three types:

• Readers
• Rushers
• Refusers

The interesting point is how online forms have to cater for all type of users, and presumably for those who simply refuse to complete the form, there has to be other ways in which the organisation can garner the same information. In most situations this is likely to result in a telephone call or a visit to an office – this is an expense. So, given the known costs of someone taking a telephone call or spending time with a customer who feasibly could have completed the online form without further help, there is a business case for investing improving your online forms. Well-conceived online forms will save you money and give the user a good experience, and add to your standing as an organisation that’s ‘easy to do business with’. It’s a point that the book could have made strongly – the ROI of great online forms. A title for my next book, perhaps?

Relationship

A crucial element in the form’s ‘relationship’ between the user and the organisation is the need to reduce social costs. For many, filling in an online form can feel like hard work, and if the form ‘punishes’ you for getting it wrong, or makes you feel stupid or inadequate, then no surprises when users either abandon the form altogether or pick up the phone . Three pieces of advice really stand out:

• Ask for answers: don’t demand them
• Use error messages that respect the effort the user is making
• If the user does make a mistake, preserve as much of that user’s work as possible

Plain commonsense when you think about it, but remind yourself how many times you’ve become frustrated when trying to fill in a form, and for some reason all your work has been lost and you have to start again.

Conversation

Onto the Conversation layer of an online form, and once again my initial response to a section titled “The four steps in answering a question” is ‘oh, for goodness sakes, surely people know how to answer a question’. But actually some people in charge of websites do have a particular knack for making the answering of a question far more difficult than it needs to be. Ask yourself these questions:

• How many times have you seen online forms with acronyms, abbreviations or industry jargon that you didn’t understand?
• How often have you tried to work out the meaning of a sentence with one too many double negatives?
• How frustrated do you get when a form asks whether you want ‘Standard Delivery’ or ‘Express Delivery’ but with no information on the difference between the two options?

Sometimes, part of the difficulty as Jarrett and Gaffney explain is that instructions are wordy, and or use unfamiliar words when a common one will suffice. The book mentions a great tool called ‘Vocab Profile’ which tells you how many of your words are outside the 2,000 most commonly used. Steve Krug’s maxim of ‘Don’t Make Me Think is super appropriate when choosing words to include on your online form.

Word order is also crucial to understanding the question. ‘Forms That Work’ demonstrates the point with the use of “title”. Think about this.

• If you ask for “title” before name, it means “salutation” (Mr, Mrs, Ms, etc)
• If you ask for “title” after name, if often means “job title”
• If you ask for “title” without any names, it often means book or film title

Appearance

Lastly, the section on Appearance of forms is really useful, with lots of hints and tips on how to improve online forms based on eye-tracking studies. Particularly revealing was what users see around an input box.

ldeal label position for input fields

A few improvements

I have already told you what I think about this book – on first skim it appears to state the obvious, but the science and rational applied to careful dissection of the common mistake website owners make, show the value of a book like this.

There are some irritations, though. The redaction or blocking out of hardly sensitive information like postcodes and company names seemed pointless, and spoiled the flow of the text. Secondly, the emphasis on analysing online forms appearing on government websites somewhat pigeonholed the book. Online forms appear on all sorts of websites, albeit that government ones unfortunately are those that we struggle with the most.

Finally, the authors could have spent some time explaining that although much of what they say is borne out of their experience and although it may appear as commonsense, the number of poorly constructed forms is evidence enough that further work is required. As more processes, from renewing your car insurance to booking a meal can be completed online, the greater the importance of making online form work, and work well.

The costs of users refusing to use your online forms are very real.

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Book Review: Advanced Web Metric with Google Analytics (2^nd Ed.) by Brian Clifton

Gus: Vlad. .. Vlad, what are you doing asleep? Have you been here all night?

Vlad: Huh?

Gus: I said have you been here all night?

Vlad: Gus, could you make me a cup of coffee.

Gus: Sure. But tell me what you’ve been doing.

Vlad: I got an email just before I was leaving from Brian Clifton wanting me to review parts of his new book.

Gus: You got an email from The Grok ? O M G. I love his books, especially, what’s it called, Teaching Your Dog to Bark.

Vlad: No, Clifton not Eisenberg, and it’s Your Cat, not Your Dog.

Gus: Oh right. You mean Brian Clifton, the wrestler?

Vlad: Weightlifter.

Look, I don’t think I can’t take much more of this conversation. I am going to head home.

Gus: Well, aren’t you going to show me the book review?

Vlad: Here, you can read it yourself.

Front cover

In Brain Clifton’s second edition of his highly respected book, Clifton has much ground to make up since the first edition was published in April 2008, not least the explosion in social media, the dominance of a new generation of internet-ready mobile devices as well as Google Analytics’ range of new features and customizations.

So, what’s the book like?

With only a couple of chapters, an introduction and a table of contents to go by, I’m wary of making criticisms that are addressed elsewhere in the book. Perhaps that’s why I have only been given two chapters (cynical, moi?).

But let’s start with some facts. This book, unlike many Web analytics publications, is not tool agnostic. It is a book about how to *do* Web analytics with Google Analytics. To Clifton’s credit he does not come over as a GA evangelist or as a publicist of the tools of his former employer. There is an acceptance that Google Analytics sits within a range of tools that are required for web analytics proper – including voice-of-customer, usability testing and other qualitative tools. However, Clifton neatly sidesteps the tension between wishing to ‘join’ your web analytics data and your customer database and Google’s no-messing policy on privacy and identifying website visitors using GA.

The book has been sectioned in a very similar way to the first edition. This is evolution rather than revolution, and for owners of the first edition you will feel a need to gallop through some oft-repeated historical preambles – unless you get your kicks from reading about web sniffers and packet beacons, or is it the other way around ? Whatever..

But there has been a clear effort to cram more of the good stuff in. The first three sections in the Second Edition, covering the nuts and bolts of Google Analytics, have increased from 211 to 299 pages – an inflation-busting 41%. The last section – using Visitor Data to Drive Website Improvement, for me the real ‘meat’ of the book, has grown by 30%. The book now weighs in at just shy of 500 pages.

What worked well?

What I liked throughout the sections I read was the real-life examples, in fact, some of them could have been expanded a bit further. Overall though, Clifton’s approach to rooting some of his explanations in the real world process of website optimisation will be beneficial to most readers.  Likewise, the section on developing intermediate goals (white paper downloads, add to baskets, email newsletter subscriptions, etc) reminds us that to obsess purely about the website’s overall conversion rate is to miss the point – a transaction is made up of several mini-conversions. This is not a new point by any means but Clifton expresses the point well and again ties the concept back to real-world examples.

The interplay between what you see in your website data (‘observations’) and what you could do about them (‘actions’) again serves the reader well, by explaining how important it is to always align insight with action.

It is no easy task to talk about how to interpret numbers in prose, but emphasis on when to rely on percentages and when to bring in the raw numbers allows the casual reader to grasp some of the basics of data interpretation.  More of this type of hints and tips would not have gone amiss – certainly in the sections I read.

Finally, I have always liked the section on KPI’s by job role, showing what KPI’s a Webmaster should have versus a Marketing Manager versus an Ecommerce Manager.  Clifton shows himself attuned to both the different sectors in which web analytics has to plough its furrow, as well as the different obsessions that different people will have in the organization. Again, not a new idea, but well expressed and succinctly phrased.

Optimisation opportunities (you know, not-very-good bits)

Just like the sub-head above, Web analytics is awash with words and phrases that almost mean nothing. I would like to join people like Tim Ash in a campaign to rid Web analytics of bland, meaningless terms. When Tim opines “Your website is ugly, face it” I know exactly what he means.

Unfortunately, if there is a bad strain of using vanilla words when good ol’ fashioned bare facts could be used, Clifton sometimes suffers quite badly. Words like “nonzero”, “aggregate level”, “nonhierarchical” and “normalized” only serve to drive a wedge between the reader and his/her grasp of the text.  Add this to a hard layer of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) and the text sometimes becomes a bit Arctic – impervious to penetration.

For a book about improving your online marketing, some of the language was cumbersome. Short, snappier sentences would have helped with pace and digestibility. I don’t think Clifton likes phrasal verbs and colloquialisms, but given the subject matter I am convinced they’re essential to lighten the writing style. I would have liked to have seen a few more call outs from the text. When they did happen, they started with the rather ominous “Note: …“

If the editor should take a voluntary paycut, the art director of this particular book should be on a ledge somewhere. Perhaps it’s just a preview copy, but the only colour appears on the front cover.  There are some truly awful drawings – check out the drawing of a horizontal (!) funnel on page 331.

But I don’t want to leave you with the notion that the choice of words and artwork are my only criticisms.

I would have liked to have seen more about exploring how to divine what is different between the different ‘visitor types’ – PPC, natural, with transactions, with conversions, direct, etc. in the same way that marketers develop ‘pen profiles’. I think this approach, backed up with a few examples, could have brought to life the point that visitors are different in a number of ways, and this is one way to conceptualise these difference.

Secondly, I would have liked to see more content dedicated to analysing social media. I felt myself not agreeing with Clifton when he asserted that KPI’s for Web 1.0 are the same as 2.0. I think there is a discussion to be had here about that statement. However, I do accept that a book that is predominantly a ‘how-to-use-a-tool’ book may not easily make this leap into a more esoteric discussion.

Finally, looking at the table of contents, it would have been refreshing to have seen Clifton deal with some real-world queries and issues commonly raised by users of Google Analytics. This could have been usefully done in a Question-Answer format that Jim Novo successfully uses in his book ‘Drilling Down’.

And would you buy it?

Yes, I would, but I know I am going to skip a chunk of it, because I know the first edition so well. I am interested to see how Google Analytics can continue to be extended both by new features, hacks and API calls, but I am also interested in the brief examples through which Clifton brings the analysis of website data to life.

Gus: Vlad? Vlad? Are you still here?

[Sound of door closing]