Web Strategy by Jeremiah

This series of posts tagged On The Move (see archives) is to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions in the social media industry.

Congrats to those on the Move in the Social Media Industry:

Kris Smith is now at BlogTalkRaio as the VP of Product Development, you can read his announcement post

Eric Weaver is now the VP/Managing Director for Edelman Digital, heading up the digital and social marketing work in Seattle and Portland offices, and recently left Brand Dialogue, his own marketing consultancy. He announces from his blog

Joel Burslem, Social Media Manager at Inman News and founder of the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog was promoted to Director of Marketing, congrats

Peter Fasano joins the Reprise Media team leading the growing SF office as Group Account Director and contributing to the Social Media Marketing team. He also says that he is hiring account folks at all levels.

Sheryl Sandberg leaves Google to be COO of Facebook. I don’t think she has a blog, nor is on twitter, but she does have a Facebook profile (that lists she’s still at Google)

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

Also see my Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

See my community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

I would love to do some formal research on this on the day job, the following is just highlighting a probabble definition and formula, it certainly doesn’t include any formal methodology or practiced process.

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There’s been a great deal of talk about ‘virality’ or ‘word of mouth’ but when it comes to measurement, we need something just a bit more substantial.

When I was on the vendor side at PodTech as Director of Corporate Social Media Strategy (client facing), I worked closely with Darold Masaro, VP of Sales. We frequently bantered over new ways to improve measurement as this is important improving existing programs and increasing budgets.

For many of those in the social media space, the goal is to ‘let go’ of your message and let it fly all around the web, getting folks to come to your irrelevant corporate website isn’t the goal –fish where the fish are.

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Defining Social Media Velocity: Distance over Time
But how do you measure a distributed web strategy? We looked to one of many attributes called “Velocity”. This is not a new term, in fact, Physicists define this as distance traveled per unit time. As I described to Darold what we should be measuring, he quickly pegged I was seeking the term ‘velocity’, it’s stuck with me ever sense, the credit should go to him. The same applies to the web, and here’s how:

[Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget or other like unit spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy]

Distance: As units (text, audio embeds, video embeds, widgets, memes) spread from one website to another you can track the URLs where they spread to.

over

Time: Depending on how fast a unit moves, it can vary from day to week, or less effective, perhaps a month.

Example:

Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.

Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.

Also, you could look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

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Now here’s how Darold further explains velocity:

“Velocity is the speed, direction, and size of conversations traveling the Internet around our brands. When I talk about velocity it’s from the perspective of a wave. So in that case we need to answer this question…What do markteers and sailors have in common? They should both be concerned about waves. Marketers should think in terms of conversational waves. Conversations are more effective for building brands than buzz, but this requires keeping the conversation alive.”

I asked Darold for just a definition but I see he couldn’t help but share more, I guess his days of getting an MBA just compelled him to think this through further. What’s interesting is Darold is a sailor, no not the cursing, one-eyed patch sailors with a parrot named jenkins, but pilots sailboats in Santa Cruz bay over wine and cheese.

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He extends the sailing metaphor further, here’s just a portion of his thesis:

“It’s helpful to understand the four key aspects of a wave in order to gain insight into conversations around our brands. Hey I am a sailor and I see the world as a series of nautical metaphors.

Velocity represents both speed AND direction. This is important to point out as most use the common term of velocity which is just speed. I associate speed with what I hear a lot these days … “I want my campaign to go viral.” Where viral represents speed (how quickly, by how many), but we should also look at who is consuming our messages (direction) and sustaining the momentum. So there is more to velocity than speed and direction, and is important to understand if we are to build sustainable conversations around our brands.

We need to understand amplitude which is the size of the wave (this is equivalent to buzz), and frequency. The IceRocket graph below is an example of amplitude and frequency. The size of the wave is easy to understand, but frequency is less clear. In sailing we replace the word frequency with period. That is how long (in seconds) between the crest of one wave to the next. In the world of sailing the amplitude and period of a wave is very important for understanding the sea state. In marketing we have a sea state around our brand. To often the sea is calm, choppy or pounding with large unsustainable waves that come crashing down.”

If you want to reach Darold he can be emailed at darold@podtech.net

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an analyst.

I’ve created a new category called Digest (peruse archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my analysis, and click link to dive in for more.

You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

Need to make decisions about your web strategy? I’m here to help: subscribe to my blog, sign up for emails (right nav), or follow me on Twitter, (I’ll follow you in return).

Web Strategy Summary
We’re starting to see more consolidation of the White Label Social Networking space, and it’s probably a good thing for the overall market. Mzinga acquires Prospero, and I think this will be the first of other companies coming together.

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M&A: Mzinga Acquire Prospero
Mark at Techcrunch gets the story about Mzinga increasing it’s stature by this recent acquisition of Prospero, my thoughts are on the TC site.

Executive: New COO for Facebook
Facebook continues to attract top talent, Kara Swisher breaks the news that Facebook’s new COO is Google’s Sheryl Sandberg.

Content: MySpace launches Hidden Camera Reality Show
This non-scripted reality hidden camera show called Special Delivery (in association with Avalon TV) was launched on MySpace TV.

Global: Facebook translated to German by Users
Facebook recently translated it’s site to Spanish (with mixed reviews) and is now letting it’s user and member base translate to German, in fact over 2000 members will crowdsource this site.

Widgets: How brands are getting in on the action
BusinessWeek shows how A&E gets in on the widget craze by creating an interactive game.

Segmentation: Social Network for Infants “TotSpot”
Niche coverage for nearly every interest, demographic, or focus continues as “TotSpot” gets coverage. This social network, aimed at infants gives them a way to network (well their parents at least) before they can even type.

Community: Fanista launches a media based community
Fanista, self-described as “a community-powered marketplace for entertainment enthusiasts that offers a whole new way to discover and shop for music, movies, games and books” we see yet another online community launched. Expect this to be in similar market area as MySpace and Bebo.

NewsFeed: Facebook opens Newsfeed to 3rd parties
Facebook has allowed third party web sites to signal changes to member news pages, (of course in opt in) but Sean from RWW does some analysis and suggests they didn’t’ allow for enough access to the those developers.

Usage: Bill Gates ditches Facebook, joins LinkedIn
This probably makes a lot of sense for what Bill’s trying to accomplish as he’s now joined LinkedIn, where he can connect with other business and political figures.

Community: How to build one
Francine Hardaway gives some examples of companies and organizations that have built some communities, see this extensive list.

Analytics: The team at ‘Developer Analytics’ brings new measurement
Measurement is key, it drives marketing and advertising spend. The Developer Analytics team launches new features to help developers measure their widget growth and campaigns.

Limitations: Clamps on invites for Facebook Developers
I’m conflicted on this one, but the less invites may drag down growth for Facebook developers, but I’m sure it could increase the user experience.

Normalization: Social Network feature spread to Wikis
Jimmy Wales new project, Wikia launches social networking suite that invades the white label social networking space.

If it’s not apparent to you yet, I cover this space as an Analyst, this really helps me (and everyone else) stay on top of what’s important.

Let me know if I’ve missed anything, leave a comment, or submit to me over email, see my contact page.