Social Media Marketing

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c h a p t e r

3 :

BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS

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At the most basic level, as with any online interaction, the activity itself can be

tracked. Accessing a page, submitting a form, downloading a fi le and similar content

measures provide a well-understood framework for measurement. However, given the

existence of profi les (explored more in the next section) and the behaviors associated

with curation—rating, ranking, etc.—much more interesting and useful metrics can be

established and used to create very robust measures of participation.

As another aspect of participation and its direct measurement, consider “point-

based” social community reputation systems. Participants in a support community

are very often rewarded through increasing social rank based on contribution to the

community. Upon joining, you may be assigned the rank of “newbie” and then over

time earn your way to “expert” status as you contribute and gain the votes of others in

the community as they curate your contributions. At some level, there is a basic point

system that is translating individual actions within the community into personal repu-

tations: it may be visible, or it may be buried in the inner working of the community’s

reputation management system. Either way, it’s there and can tapped as a source of

metrics. When participants do something benefi cial, they earn a point. When they do

something that offends the community they might lose a point. Track both and you’ve

got a solid assessment of participation.

In a thoughtful analysis using tested techniques applied in a novel manner,

social media strategist Bud Caddell points out a very straightforward method for cal-

culating the relative distribution for participation and thereby gaining quantitative

insight into the role of community infl uencers. Bud’s method—simplifi ed—is based on

a statistical approach to tracking the spread in variance based on ratings points over

time. Communities that have high variance are being infl uenced by a relatively small

number of people compared with those with lesser variance. This is important because

over time what is generally desirable is a more equitable distribution of participative

effort—lower variance—across the community.

Measure Relative Participation

Bud Caddell’s insightful measurement technique for assessing the degree to which a commu-

nity is influenced versus peer led is not only useful, but also shows the ways in which existing,

well-understood statistical techniques can be applied to behavioral analysis when setting

up measures of participation for your online community. You can follow Bud on Twitter:

@Bud_Caddell.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/measuring-participation-inequality-in-social-

networks

Measure Relative Participation

Bud Caddell’s insightful measurement technique for assessing the degree to which a commu-

nity is influenced versus peer led is not only useful, but also shows the ways in which existing,

well-understood statistical techniques can be applied to behavioral analysis when setting

up measures of participation for your online community. You can follow Bud on Twitter:

@Bud_Caddell.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/measuring-participation-inequality-in-social-

networks