Social Media Metrics: It's Not Impossible

     Social media metrics is a realistic and pragmatic topic for organizations. Although social media has rapidly matured over the last decade-plus, the topic social media metrics remains indifferent for many. It should be realized that just like any marketing medium, measurement is a critical component of success for social media. While the unawareness of social media metrics is due to the difficulties in measurement: social media metrics is immature and hard to achieve. For many companies, to measure social media with regard to its effects seems to be very challenging, and even impossible, At its core, digital measurement is contingent on controlling the customer experience and laying tracking hooks along the way to understand response and subsequent behavior. However, social media's foundation challenges this very tenet: The consumer is not in control after all.

    With the unexpected rapid development of social media, a lots of social media metrics tools came into being, which not only indicated the increasing awareness of the importance of measuring social media effects, but also provided tools and approaches for companies’ utilization. I believe social media metrics will evolve quickly as marketers attempt different approaches to help make sense of all the activity data generated by social media interactions—social media metrics is something that’s very possible. If we regard social media exerting power on people as a whole, then social media metrics works as the evaluation link, helping better establish and revise objectives as well as work out social media strategy and tactic. To this extent, social media metrics is not only possible not also essential.

    According to our class discussion, social media effect can be measured in four ways: Exposure—how many people have reached with your message; Engagement—how many people actually did something with your message; Influence—are engagement metrics positive, negative or neutral and Action—did your conversions lead into another, more valuable entity. To measure these four areas, various kinds of metrics tools are available such as googletrends, Klout.com, tweetreach, etc. Although these social media metrics tools can help to measure social media effects on a larger scale, but as for me, I think what online tools can achieve are superficial. If a company really wants to gain deep understanding of audience’s feedbacks, depending on online metrics tools is insufficient.

    For example, if an organization want to measure the effects of their Twitter account, by using tweetreach, they can get lots of data including number of accounts they reached, number of contributors, number of retweets/replies they gain in a unit interval, even a list of top contributors and a list of most retweeted tweets. The tweetreach.com provide us a comprehensive and detailed analysis for companies to measure the effectiveness of their Twitter account, from which they can get information about the “Exposure” and “Engagement”. But I think, a company shouldn’t stop here. If they want to get access to the feedback of their customers— the information of “Influence” and “Action”, other resource method such as content analysis and survey should be utilized.

    Overall, social media metrics is aiming at changing the relationship between an organization and its customers. Since social media is getting it this far, it is a great time to be a digital marketing measurement practitioner. 

Live-Tweeting Assignment

Here is the Link to my Live-Tweeting of the second presidential debate on Oct.16. It is interesting to review the debate again after the result was announced. I created over fifty tweets for this event and storify this experience with my reflection. Enjoy!

Content Curation

    Today, People and organizations are making and sharing media and content all over the social media. We are living in an era of content abundance. In this era of information exploration and knowledge updating, what matters is not the amount of information you can get, but the quality of information you gain in limited time. To this extent, content curation offers high value to anyone who is looking for quality content because finding information and making sense of it require more and more time, attention, and focus.

    Content curation is the process of filtering, sorting and organizing information on a niche topic through the vast amounts of content on the web to come up with the best articles, videos, photos, or social discussions going on at a given time and present them in a meaningful and organized way. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. People love this idea because they don’t need to search different sources in order to find a piece of information. That’s why content curation sites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify become increasing popular. Just take Pinterest as an example: Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard. Pinterest encourage people to organize and share the things they love, and this is a great way to discover content visually. I recently joined Pinterest and found it really a wonderful place for picture exchange and collecting for personal reference.

   For individual, content curation is incredibly powerful: people get access to various forms of information related to the topic they interested in. Words, pictures, videos, lists, summaries, collections, and timelines can all be incredibly valuable resources. I think content curation is especially of great significance for online collectors because those content curation sites are ideal for them to search and organize information in a more efficient way. For those content curation sites, they can keep readers engaged and loyal to their source of information because they have filtered and organized information for them by creating more valuable content in less time and focus on more keywords. People can easily share the content through social media sites and this helps them build more traffic to their sites through social sharing.

    I would like to focus on how companies utilize content curation to their advantages. For organizations and brands, content curation can help establish the organization’s thought leadership and capture attention in today’s information cluttered world. Content curation helps to build brand authority, brand trust and brand power by sharing quality content as a resource. I think the most urgent task for a company interested in building brand through content curation is to train their staff to be good curators. Content curators continually seek, make sense of, and share the best and most relevant content on a particular topic online. They can curate on what’s trending for the moment, switching or updating the curated contents tone, and build company brand. So, for staff members of a company, content curation can be a profession of learning.

Also, taking Pinterest as an example, for curators working for a company, the first and most important thing they should do to curate content on Pinterest is pin regularly, which means signing up for an account and uploading their images on a regular basis. By pinning regularly, a company will generate a large following interested in them. In turn, those curators will be able to learn the most important needs and demands of these followers in order to curate content successfully. Another tip for curators is that they should develop as many boards as possible in Pinerest for their companies. Developing boards will significantly help curating content through organizing images into different categories. The repining feature allows people to repost images of other people to their own boards. This repining feature will help to gather all the necessary information and attract more followers. I think this is also the way content curation encourages interaction. Content curation is not only for information searching; sharing and interaction are also essential factors.

    Overall, since we all realize that we are increasingly living in a world of information overload, how to separate signal from noise and get what we are really looking for is important for both individuals and companies. Content curation provides a clear, contextually relevant voice and I believe this is the new trend for social media.

Reflection on Personal Branding

When it comes to personal brand, in the past, I only connected this concept with celebrities and entrepreneurs, who are well known and enjoy a high reputation. Thanks to the development of communication technology, today, everyone can get a “superstar” treatment on the Internet by establishing his or her own personal brand through social media network. This is a tremendous transformation for it not only shows the charming of social media platforms, but also makes personal brand a topic concerns everyone.

Personal branding is the process by which individuals differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leveraging it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specific goal. In this way, individuals can enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence. To put it simply, personal branding is basically the way we market ourselves to the world. Personal brand is what other people think of us.

When marveling are the significant power of personal brand, some negative critiques and argument of this concept also raised, which made personal brand a controversial topic. Some people, including Seth Godin turned a negative perspective towards this term just because of the world “brand”, since this word regards people as products, which make personal branding a tactic of product-promotion. Other critiques lie in that in those online platforms, everyone can contribute to establish your personal brand, even if you don’t agree on other people’s description of you.

Facing with these two challenges, I think that firstly, the word doesn’t matter. Brand is just a vivid description of personal image and characteristic. Actually, personal branding is unavoidable. When we interact with other, people will automatically form mental associations that connect us with certain labels, often within the first few seconds. I can’t avoid being labeled, and other people can’t avoid labeling me. Secondly, it is true that everyone can participate in establishing our personal brand whether we like it or not, so it is important to hold the initiative in our own hands. Although on the Internet, personal branding is sometimes outside our control, we obviously have some influence over it. Always keeping an eye on how others talking about us on social media platforms, and on how we are tagged in other individual or organization’s profile can help us improve and correct some negative information immediately. I “Baidu” (Chinese Google) myself every month to see any update of myself. Fortunately, all the information is just about me (because I have a really special Chinese name and I believe this is the only one in China), among them, some information is edited by myself, others are posted by my formal schools, companies, and the event I have been involved in.

Since all the challenges and negative factors of personal brand can be appropriately explained and solved, I absolutely embrace personal brand and will spare no effort to build a unique brand for myself. As Brogan proposed, “A personal brand gives you the ability to stand out in a sea of similar products. In essence, you’re marketing yourself as something different than the rest of the pack”. Although just like “there are no two identical leaves in the world”, every individual is unique and irreplaceable in the world, to figure out what exactly differentiate me from others is not an easy thing. But this is the essence of personal branding. So, knowing myself, discovering myself and exploring myself is what personal branding urges me to reflect on. To this extent, personal branding is not only a strategy of self-promotion, but also valuable spiritual experience.

Social Photography, A New Trend

    Social photography is a fascinating topic for me. Although I am not a professional photographer and I don’t have an advanced SLR, I still exert tremendous enthusiasm towards photography, which is an ideal way to record our lives and detain the recollection.

    This week, I had a one-day-refreshment in Point Reyes National Seashore on Friday to refresh myself and I took some really wonderful photos for this one-day trip. Point Reyes is absolutely a natural sanctuary, a human haven. From its thunderous ocean breakers crashing against rocky headlands and expansive sand beaches to its open grasslands, brushy hillsides, and forested ridges, Point Reyes satisfied my desire of coming back to nature.

 On our way to the Point Reyes. I love the Windmills!

We saw a lot of elephant seal here！

This is my favorite shoot! Imagine you sitting on this lonely chair, facing the ocean and enjoying the beautiful scenery.

I was exhausted when I covered all these steps. But the scenery from the beacon is so wonderful!

My friend took this picture.

    With the prosperity of social media, photography is not only a way for individual recording, but also an efficient way for corporation to promote and brand. Thanks to social media, individuals and companies are conspicuously sharing stories and imageries about themselves every day. Among various functions, photo posting and photo sharing dominate the social media activities. Even on Facebook, the king of networks, people spend 17 percent of their time perusing photos according to a recent study. 

    So a lot of image hosting and video hosting online community  were created such as Flickr, Instagram and Pinterest. We cannot deny the role social photography played on social network sites. For individual, this is one of the most efficient, vivid and attractive way to share stories and catch eyes. For companies and brands, photos are the perfect social media marketing tool for them to stand out.

    I started a Flickr account these days and I found this is a great platform for me to post my own photos and share wonderful pictures from others. I particularly love the “explore” function, through which I can find some really awesome pictures according to my own interest and need. Under some featured “Sets”, stories are told, themes are developed, and junk is collected. There are also loads of groups on Flickr, full to the brim with wonderful things. Also I discovered that many companies are using Flicker to post photos and interact with their customers. Obviously, companies didn’t overlook the visual component of social media.

    Companies can use Flickr for listening: It’s possible to use Flickr as a monitoring tool to see what people are saying about your company. Search for a company or product name to find photos uploaded, you may find people praising it or you may find people uploading images of that company. This is a good way for a company to listening. Also, they should be sure to act appropriately on Flickr because people are talking about you!
    Companies can also use Flickr for talking: Flickr is an ideal tool to extend business brand. Tagging and geolocating images will help people find that company more easily and there are many groups a company can join to share their best shoots and discuss the theme of the group. In Flickr, branding business by itself doesn’t add extra costs; it requires consistent presentation.

     Companies can also use Flickr for energizing: Images provide a high percentage of incoming traffic to many sites, so if a company can energize their most enthusiastic costumers to post photos for them regularly, that will help increase the chances of attracting more visitors to their photos and their homepage. Give photos titles, descriptions and tags is a good way to energize enthusiastic costumers.

    




In a word, social photography is changing the way brands tell stories. Social photography networks featuring photo sharing, interactive forums, personalized profiles, and free endless photo storage are new places where individuals and companies can share their knowledge and learn from others and this will become a new trend for social media!