The answer to the question I asked in my last blog post is 3 hours and 48 minutes.
Tuesday’s blog post was an interesting experience/experiment in watching
Social Media at work.
After posting the blog at 10:12 am and ending the post with this challenge; “
Now, let’s see if they are as good as I think they are…how long before they pick this up and respond?” Richard Hammer (the author of the
blogpost on
Allstate & Twitter) posted a comment at 2:04 pm.
The question is how did they find out so fast? I asked our Director of Marketing the same question; “If someone wrote a story on
MarketBridge how long would it take for us to pick it up?” He mentioned about a day, which sounded reasonable, but now it makes you think...is that too long?
After working with clients for years on improving their tracking, measuring and overall campaign and program effectiveness, Social Media suggests a whole new set of questions about how to track marketing efforts. We used to live in a world where we tracked programs over months/years, and campaigns over weeks/months. Now we’re dealing with hours or less …from “analog hours to digital minutes” as my colleague,
Andy Hasselwander likes to say.
I still remember the impact of telling a client a few years ago that the effectiveness of an email campaign lasted less than 72 hours. Now we could be dealing with 72 minutes. It’s fascinating to watch and holds great potential, if understood. And if the social media platform providers can figure out how to monetize their models…e.g. right now
Facebook is growing faster than their revenue model can support and how will Twitter make money?
This potential evolution/revolution poses some very interesting questions for marketers, such as:
- How long will “freeness” last?
- What platforms will be left and who will own them? Really, how many Microblogs do we need?
- How do I measure the impact of a “flash?"
- How do I control the “reach and direction” of my communication?
- Do I have to worry about privacy issues if everything is in the public domain?
So how did Modea find out that I blogged about them so fast? Google Alerts (free) as David mentions in his comment, most likely it was set to alert once a day, probably the reason why Michael thought it took them 8 hours to respond. How did I get comments from Modea bloggers, who I mentioned in the post, but not by name? Because the blog post was posted on Modea’s Facebook (free) page.
How did they know about the story so fast? Twitter (free) most likely from their Facebook posting. At least 6 people “tweeted” about story and linked to the post. How did I know? I searched Twitter (in the public domain) and Google Analytics (free).
How do I know they came from Facebook? The same way I know that there were 34 visits from 32 people from Blacksburg, VA to the post within the first 8 hours, Google Analytics (free).
Hope this helps answer the question about tracking Social Media. The bigger question is who will receive the value/benefit from “freeness” for now? My bet is Social Media/Digital agencies like Modea, who have grown incredibly fast over the last three years, because they understand how to use the “free platforms.”
How do I know…it’s in the public domain...just like all the information above. How long will it last...now that's a good question.
Nice follow up post Scott. You are really on to something here. The ability for individuals to own information and intellectual property has become increasingly difficult in the digital age.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of "freeness" extends well beyond what you've mentioned to book, music, movies, tv shows, newspaper articles, industry research. In the past useful or entertaining "information" was copyrighted or patented--controled by the owner. There isn't much respect from many countries outside of the US for these legal manifestations.
How many industries are suffering because of digital? The world is moving to free access of information--be it the stream of collective consciousness (the social web) or even the copyrighted works that we have paid for in the past.
New models will emerge and in my opinion our role as digital agencies is to articulate to our clients where things are going so that they can adjust their organizational structure and business models accordingly. That's a significantly bigger role than an advertising agency has played in the past.