Today there’s a big push to make Internet Access a basic human right. In the US, the majority of us take freedom of speech (online and offline) for granted and we tune out the debates on heavy censorship that is commonplace in other countries. If you’re not aware of the kind of control and manipulation that’s happening in other places in the world, these two video interviews (back to back in the same video) will help bring you up to speed quickly. The first interview is with Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. Before leaving television to become a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center and lives in Hong Kong. The second interview is with Evgeny Morozov, who is currently a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York. Previously, he was Director of New Media at the Prague-based NGO Transitions Online (TOL) and a columnist for the Russian newspaper Akzia (2003-2008).
Here’s a summary of the content that’s covered in the interviews. Enjoy.
- Internal Web Censorship In China & The Great Firewall of China
- Blogging In China
- Chinese Internet Police
- How Humor Slips Through The Cracks of Censorship
- Russian Internet Censorship
- Russian New Media and Government Manipulation
- In Depth on Hidden Censorship in Russia
- Economic Crisis’ Impact on China and Russia
- The Global Network Initiative
- Moving to Other Blogging Platforms, How Informed Citizens Are
- Humor can lead to Meaningful Action
- Web Questions
- Knowing Fake Commenters
- The Use of Anonymizers
- Web Use and the Secret Service on Web in Russia
- Penalty for Companies Not Censoring Content
- Mobile Trends
- Data Integration, Search Capacity In China
One of the hardest questions to answer definitively when it comes to social media is “How do we measure ROI when it comes to conversation?” Starting a blog and getting on Twitter and Facebook is a good start, but, even if you’re producing great content at a good clip, it’s hard to measure the value of the conversations that you generating. This is especially true in the beginning when you’re building a new community from scratch. Common questions I’ve heard are…
- What’s relevant and what kinds of interaction should I be focusing on?
- Which kinds of people should I be focusing my attention on?
- What types of people are important to recruit to sustain interaction and keep my community vibrant?
- How do we focus on the signals and block out the noise?
- What are the most useful social metrics?
Measuring conversation is tough, but it’s not impossible and there are a few people out there who are thinking about it deeply and coming up with useful solutions. This 45 minute talk I recorded on my Flip at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo given by Katie Niederhoffer and Marc Smith is, to date, the best resource I’ve found for getting a deeper understanding of interaction patterns that matter and what types of people make communities tick. To my knowledge, it’s the only video taken of the event, so please forgive the ahem…less than HD quality of the recording. Katie and Marc share rich data on what the interaction patterns look like for the types of people that you want to recruit for your community. Hint: It’s always a very special few that produce the majority of the interactions that sustain communities – being able to recognize them when you see them so that you can focus on building relationships with them and keep them around is a key success factor.
Thanks again to Katie and Marc for allowing me to record their talk. I hope that those of you who love this stuff as much as I do get a lot out of this. These guys did a great job in such a short period of time. The talk is a great primer for understanding the social science and dynamics behind what makes communities tick.
Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation (Web 2.0 Expo 2009 – Katie Niederhoffer & Marc Smith) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.
What is the most meaningful way to understand and measure a dialogue? As marketing transforms from a broadcast model to a conversational one, which constructs should be captured and how do you measure them? Is it necessary to make a distinction between the metrics used to tap into the value of a conversation per se and the ROI of a social media marketing campaign?
This presentation offers new strategies to think about and tap into the depth of interactions and emotional connections people have online. Beyond buzz levels, sentiment, and other core metrics typically provided by brand monitoring solutions, the presentation will offer methods to understand a conversation: how emotional is it, how in sync are the constituents, how intimately do they relate to the brand or product? How much trust do the constituents reveal?
Marketing efforts that take advantage of technology to enable community and collaboration render traditional metrics limiting, at best. Traditional metrics have been optimized for more passive exposure to a specific message, frequency of exposure is considered a proxy for relevance; and, the premium is on reach over quality.
Primarily due to its more participative dynamic, a conversation engages constituents unlike static messaging. As many in the industry have noted, a natural development is to measure engagement. However, there is little consensus on what engagement means and how it can be measured. Often it is calculated by merely adding traditional metrics, assuming more is better.
The presentation will introduce new constructs and present case studies with empirical research demonstrating more valuable, still measurable constructs than the core metrics currently in use.
*** Note: This was recorded by Steffan Antonas (@steffanantonas on Twitter) at the Web 2.0 Expo On 04/01/2009. Special Thanks to Katie and Marc who allowed me to record this session. The slide deck for this presentation can be found here: http://bit.ly/gNwC1
Some fresh Hitwise data posted by Bill Tancer just a few weeks ago indicates that Twitter might have hit a wall and is now on the decline. Just as Twitter secured an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company’s valuation in the $1 billion range, Bill dug into the data to take a quick look at Twitter’s market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic. I’ve included 2 of the key graphs here – Marketshare of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com and search volume for “Twitter”. In both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009, which validates the feeling expressed by many heavy users that engagement seems to be falling off of late.
It should be noted that the chart immediately below indicates visits to Twitter’s website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption. If this interests you, please head over to Bill’s post and start a discussion – perhaps he’ll be nice enough to run the reports again as of this week so that we can get a better idea of whether this is just a temporary setback Twitter is experiencing, or not. My guess is that with the addition of Twitter lists, you’ll see a spike this week back to Twitter.com, but that it’ll be a spike, not necessarily the start of an upward trend.
Marketshare Of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com
Search Volume (U.S.) for “Twitter”
The Facebook team put this visualization together with their internal data and posted it today. Watch how Facebook has grown to 250 million users around the world starting starting in Boston, MA. If you’re read “Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook – A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”, the visualization of the growth to 50 million puts the second half of the book in pretty sharp perspective.
Along with the shocking number of Mafia Wars invites I get on Facebook, I continue to get daily friend requests from people I have never met or had any contact with. Almost all of these invites have a similar personalized message attached…
“We’re already friends on [some other social network]“… so let’s be Facebook Friends!”
If you’ve sent me a connection request in the past and you’ve never gotten that “Steffan has accepted your friend request” notification back, please don’t take it personally. If I don’t know you well, you’ll have to settle for Twitter, FriendFeed, my Youtube or Vimeo account, my blog or (gasp!) email…I’m keeping Facebook a friends-only affair. Here’s the logic behind my “True Friends Only” rule for Facebook…
Keeping Interaction Meaningful and Personal
I’ll admit that I’m a promiscuous linker on most public social networks. I auto-follow back anyone who wants to follow me on Twitter (so I can DM) and follow large targeted groups of people on FriendFeed to listen to industry news etc, but Facebook is the only place where every single person I’m connected to, I know well. The fact that I have a personal connection to every face I see when I log on to Facebook makes the experience much more interesting and meaningful. I’ve got around 700 people from my life I’m connected to on Facebook – all my family members, hundreds of people I went to school or worked with, friends I’ve had experiences with, people whose blogs I’ve been following and commenting on for years – these are deep relationships I’ve developed over time, and so news, photos and thoughts I read from these people have personal significance to me. Having a place where I can maintain those relationships and keep the interaction meaningful keeps my time in Facebook fun, personal and interesting – and that’s what separates it from all the other platforms out there for me.
Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Safe Space Changes What We Share And How We Behave
I wrote a lengthy post back in March called Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters where I go into detail about the differences between how relationships are structured on Twitter vs. Facebook and how it changes interaction patterns and norms. If you’re interested in the technical aspects of community building and interaction you may enjoy the post – it’s one of the most popular articles on this blog. For the rest of you – here are the main arguments from the post that relate to this discussion -
Having (the perception of) private space changes the game, no question. Creating “trusted space” is not just about you, it’s about the perception your entire community has about the shared space (your wall, tagged photos etc). Having a place where my family and friends feel ok to be themselves and share personal elements of their lives is important. They don’t want random people I met on the internet being able to join in their discussions on my wall, or see photos I’ve tagged of them at a private event etc. Many of them wouldn’t dare use Twitter for it’s public-ness for that very reason, but they’re hyperactive Facebook users. The point is, when everyone assumes you’re actively controlling who sees what, the perception of what’s acceptable changes for your community, and with that shift in perception, who interacts and how often the do etc. changes in significant ways. By limiting my connections to just people I know, I create a space where the people I care about can share themselves without fear of the unwanted gaze of unfamiliar third parties.
Lest Ye Not Forget The Spam Problem
This one’s a no brainer. Most of the unknowns who solicit you for connections on Facebook (or any other social platform for that matter) care more about pushing their content on you than getting to know you better. Getting you to accept their friend request is just another way for them to promote themselves. Don’t let em’ in, and you’ll never have to roll your eyes when you start getting spammy messages from Johnny Life Coach.
The Accessibility and Portability Of Your True Social Graph Will Become Increasingly Important
This is a biggie. It’s crucial to realize where the social web is heading and how your social experiences are going to be stitched together in the future. Being choosy about your relationships doesn’t matter as much now as it will. Social networking is still in its infancy and many analysts believe that in just a few years, we’ll be carrying our social graphs with us wherever we go on the web (your graph, your data, everything). Social colonization (the next phase of the social web) is already starting to surface with technologies like open ID, and Facebook is priming itself to be a hub with Facebook Connect. There will likely be a day when you’ll be glad you were discerning about the way you created your relationships on social platforms like Facebook because they will define you and shape your experience more and more as the technology evolves.
Discussion Time…
Now that I’ve provided my thoughts, I’d like to hear yours. I know a lot of my friends and many successful bloggers do exactly the opposite to what I’m doing, and they have their reasons. I’m curious to hear other points of view on any of this. How important is protecting your true social graph to you?
Knowing how to use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you or your company online is a fundamental skill for managing reputation on the web. Setting up a host of keyword alerts for your name or company brand is a great start, but here’s the rub…what if you have a common name like “John Smith”, or someone writes about you and uses just your first name, or worse yet, something more…ahem..creative? You’re hosed. Not anymore. Here are a few expert tips to help you get more mileage out of your alerts…
Your Best Friends And Worst Enemies Rarely Use Your Full Name
Familiarity and creativity tend to come from one of two extremes – people who you have strong relationships with, or those that want want to talk about you but distance themselves from you. The funny thing is, these are the people you want to monitor most. A good friend might write “I was chatting with John about this” in a blog post and be talking about you, but unless that friend shot you a note and told you that she “mentioned” you in the post, you’d never know – and that’s probably a conversation you’d be interested in joining! Then there’s the guy who wants to sing from the hills just how hard they think you and your company sucks. If that guy knows how Google alerts work, he might try and get creative or vague with your name, or just leave it out entirely and link to your site (there are thousands of examples of this on the web). In both cases, you want to know about what’s going on and be able to engage the friend or enemy quickly.
People Use Links To Indicate Identity And Show Relationships On The Social Web
People often don’t use full names on the web because they don’t need to. Linking to someone’s site, social media profile or blog article is much more effective for clearly showing who or what you’re talking about. I could just say “I had a great chat with Robert on FriendFeed” and you know that I’m talking about Robert Scoble. People use linking like this to talk positively and negatively about people, brands and products every single day, and monitoring this with basic keyword alerts is impossible. But you can monitor it…
Use Google Alerts To Know Whenever Someone Links to Your Blog or One of Your Social Profiles.
If you monitor links as well as keywords, you’ll adapt to the blogosphere’s writing culture and catch a LOT more of the instances discussed above. Here’s the ninja skill. With a small change of syntax in a Google Alert, you can monitor when anyone links to any web page, including your blog, social profiles etc. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Go to www.google.com/alerts (you’ll need a Google account, so set one up if you haven’t already)
2. Instead of entering keywords into the “Search Terms” box, cut and paste the link to the site, page or profile you want to get inbound link alerts for like this…. “link:[putyourURLhere]”
3. You can configure the alert to get sent to you as it happens (the moment Google knows, you know), or you can get it to send you a summary at the end of the day or week. For this type of monitoring, I’d recommend as-it-happens, but if you’re heavily into social media and interact a lot, you may want to go for just a daily summary.
Note: This strategy works GREAT for finding out when people write about you and link to your blog or a static social media profile like LinkedIn or Facebook, but you’ll get mixed results with links to more dynamic profiles like Twitter (you’ll get an alert every time someone adds you and you show up in their “following” box on their profile).
Know of any other neat tricks? Please let us know in the comments!
When Sysomos published its initial “Inside Twitter” report last month that looked at the people on Twitter and how it was being used, we discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This finding was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets. Now they’ve taken it a step further and done an in-depth analysis of that top 5%. Here are some of the highlights of the findings…
- BOTS Tweet The Most: Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.
- 4 Of The Top 5 People That Tweet The Most Are Celebrities: Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).
- The Most Active Users Live In the U.S. - 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.
- The Top Men Tweet More Than The Top Women: The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced, but the men post more – 54% male, 46% female.
- They Rarely Miss A Day – 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.
- Only Half Of Them Have More Than 100 Followers: 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.
- They Follow More People Than The Average User: 44% have more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.
- Most Of Them Are Veterans: 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year
- A Higher Percentage Of Their Tweets Get Retweeted: In examining more than 80 million updates made since July 23, ReTweets among the most active users accounted for 5.06% of their activity – about 20% higher than overall users which is 4.02%. Given that some of these people are Tweeting as much as 30-50 times a day, this is quite surprising. It gives some indication that for all the noise they’re adding to the ecosystem, they’re adding more (perceived) value than most.
