One of the strongest social media KPI that I feel is often underrated is the power of sharing.

Simply put: social media is word of mouth of crack.

The power of social media is providing a voice that can rival with mass media corporations to any organizations. Broadcasting a message to an audience of millions is now possible with a Twitter or YouTube. The main reason behind it isn’t because we can collect million of subscribers, “likers” or followers. Rather, it is because everybody in our audience also have an audience of their own and once we reach them properly, they will broadcast your message to a second audience.

Social media has shifted the thinking of communications from

How many people will talk about my brand message

To

How many people will share my brand message

Marketing has traditionally been very focused on satisfying customers because they will share their great experience with their friends and we all know how hard it is to get people to talk about our brands. The customer experience has to be at a very high level in order to reap such a feat.

Less than 5 years ago, if satisfied customers wanted to share their experience with their friends, they were bounded by space and time, literally. It might take them a few days or even weeks before they can meet their friends at a restaurant, coffee shop or even at their place so that they can talk about their great experience. This means that not only they couldn’t share their experience at the moment of their highest emotions, the instant of the experience (time), they had to be in a different location to share their great story (space).

Today, the NBA can reach over 2 million people in a single tweet. That is more than the population of Montreal.

However, the interesting numbers are not in the 2 million people. It is in the sum of their audience because every consumer is an influencer in their own right. Accordingly, they can broadcast the NBA’s message to their own audience and the same applies to the audience of their audience, etc…

Although it can be hard to measure the sum of the audiences of our own audience (did your head hurt yet? ) it is important to measure the amount of time our messages has been shared or even better, measure the number of generations our messages was shared.

If volume is quantity then the number of share generations is quality.

The number of share generations not only shows a high level of engagement, it also shows the level of “brand ambassadorship”. The more a person share our brand messages the more he becomes a brand ambassador. What I like about this way of thinking is that it forces us to focus our messages more around our audience. Our messages have to become user centric because we have to think a step further:

Does my brand message matter enough to my target user so that he will share it with his own audience?

What do you think?

Photo by BikePortland.org

w.illi.am/_at_Google_Lobby

The second day at the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants yearly summit is the first of two days fully dedicated to Google Analytics.  The day definitely started on a high note with a keynote from Avinash Kaushik who talked to us about everything but web analytics tools. Let me explain.

It was both interesting and reassuring to hear that a lot of actionable information does not come from your web analytics solution, no matter what solution you have (Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc.). Why is it interesting? Because we shared tools some of us use for measuring mobile activity and for measuring social media activity.  Why reassuring? Because it confirmed that I wasn’t crazy by using KPIs that are nowhere to be found on our client’s web analytics solution.

Most of the time, we focus way too much on data that is available on Google Analytics (or whatever other tool), on how to interpret it, on how to measure it, how to segment it and so on and so forth.  But there is one very significant detail that is not being taken into consideration: all of these tools work when the user is on your website.  Now think about this, where do users read your content? Where do they interact with your content? Is it only on your website? Most likely not! A significant part of how users interact with your content takes places out of your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds or whatever other medium.  Now how do you track this in your web analytics solution?  Omniture made an attempt to integrate Twitter in their reports (specifically, how many followers you have) but it still does not provide actionable information which actually means something.  It’s like saying, “I have x amount of visitors.”  Yes, you always want more visitors, but how does it tell you if you are doing well or not?

We as marketers must be creative and define the KPIs that apply to us and to our marketing efforts. These KPIs are most likely not in your web analytics solution.  Is your KPI engagement? Is it conversations generated from your news? There are ways to measure this and tools available to do so.  The fun part is, this is where we get to be creative.

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