4 posts
More Slideshare goodness. This week's lot has presentations from various people and companies that span all our areas of interest as a company: software development, gaming, digital projects, next generation devices and consumer engagement. Read on for more.
Remember when the Web was new and every brand had to have a 'home page'?
Back then - in the 90s - the term was used inter-changeably with 'website'. No-one knew what they were actually for, but everyone had to have one. Every brand, even breakfast cereals, shoe polish, toothpaste and cat food, had to have one. Even the most boring brands had to have them. They eventually became known as microsites. No-one knew why they existed or what they did, but everyone assumed that it was massively important to have one and if you didn't you'd be missing out on a potential global audience of billions.
I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.
Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.
I went to a talk on measuring social media earlier this week, and was thoroughly disappointed. One of the things mentioned was that measurement should be built into the strategy of a social media campaign, to which my immediate thought was: you can have success metrics, but will people come to your site once it’s built? And then what happens to your forecast? I’m reading Groundswell at the moment so it may be a sort of ‘Groundswell hangover’, but the truth is that a project or campaign that is built for the client and not the people is looking at failure even before it launches. It may be the most beautiful Flash application ever created, but unless it brings value to the user, will they come the second time around, after looking at it once and murmuring ‘Oh, beautiful site’? So considering the metrics and having them as a guideline is good, but it is best not to have that as a benchmark of success.
