LSQHA Blog Reviews

A Collaborative Effort Between Two Firms:  Web Analytics Demystified and Altimeter Group It’s just been over a month since we published the Social CRM Research paper (over 36k views on slideshare) and we’re continuing our cadence here at Altimeter Group of publishing widely available reports under the spirit of Open Research.  This time, it’s different, we’ve aligned with who I feel are the smartest team of web analytics minds in the space, John Lovett (ex-Forrester analyst) and Eric Peterson (ex-Jupiter analyst) both of the Web Analytics Demystified firm.  Stemming from Altimeter founder Charlene Li’s (ex-Forrester Analyst) framework, we co-developed this framework, and put our collective minds to work on measuring the rapidly changing social media marketing space.   This self-funded research effort resulted in a thorough methodology as we interviewed over 40 ecosystem influencers. Interested in learning more?   Attend the no-cost webinar by registering. Industry Challenge:  ”I can’t measure social media ROI” Marketers around the globe are ranging from toe dipping to jumping all the way into the social marketing space –yet most lack a measurement yardstick.  While experiments can fly under the radar for a short term, without having a measurement strategy, you run the risk of not improving what you’re doing, justifying investments, and the appearance of being aloof to upper management.  To be successful, all programs (even new media) must have a measurement strategy, and we’ve done just that. Finally, A Measurement Framework Based on Business Objectives If you’re familiar with the Altimeter frameworks of developing a social strategy based on business objectives, then you’re in good shape, as this research report is the natural extension of the business objectives we put forth: Dialog : involves starting a conversation and offering your audience something to talk about while allowing that conversation to take on a life of its own Advocacy : activation of evangelism, word of mouth, and the spread of information through social technologies Supporting : customers may self support each other, or companies may directly assist them using social technologies. Innovation : The business objective of innovation is an extraordinary byproduct of engaging in social marketing activity. Our framework is a common denominator, yet if you’re already measuring converted leads, or actual sales from social media, great!     Yet   In this meaty report, which we hope you share with your marketing and analytics team, has actual KPI formulas which you should start to use as the start of your own cookbook. Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang . A Nod To the Community Spirit We’re putting a big stake out there, in order to further the industry to come together around a common set of KPIs and metrics, but we realize we don’t know all the answers.  In the spirit of Open Research , we want this to be an open framework (we’ve even licensed this under Creative Commons) to customize it and make your own for non-commercial reasons with attribution.  If you’ve ideas on how to improve it such as new KPIs, vendors, or approaches, we’re listening, and will incorporate and improve this community body of knowledge for all to benefit. Related Links I’ll link to others that extend the conversation, feel free to embed the slideshare on your own site. John Lovett, my co-author, on the Web Analytics Demystified Blog . Note, they used their branded report template, but the content is the same. The Altimeter Blog (cross posting) Christine Tran is the lead researcher on this report, she writes a smart blog Lithium’s Phil Soffer, VP of Product Marketing, has shared it from the Lithium Blog

Read the original:
Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics (Altimeter Group & Web Analytics Demystified)

One of the many announcements at Facebook's f8 conference today included an expansion of the Facebook Credits program, the social network's official virtual currency. Expansion of the Credits program could have a huge impact on how and how much revenue Facebook applications will generate. Already in beta testing with over 100 applications, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Credits would soon role out to the whole network. Credits allows users to purchase virtual currency through Facebook that can be used to purchase virtual goods across multiple applications. Sponsor Credits are meant to simplify online transactions by allowing users to use just one source of currency, rather than having to enter separate bank or credit card information for every purchase. According to Deb Liu, product marketing manager for Credits, users can currently purchase credits for use in Facebook applications with credit cards, special offers, mobile phones and Paypal, and Facebook plans to add "100 or 200" local payment options worldwide. Liu also introduced the App2user Credits program, promotions that will allow users to earn Facebook credit without paying with their credit cards. The App2user program is designed to enable merchants ways to convert reward points into Facebook Credits. Facebook may seed new and inactive users with credits in order to incentivize their use, and they hope that this will "grease the system," introducing more users with more Credits into the system. While some developers have grumbled at the 30% cut that Facebook takes from Credits, they soon may have little choice. However, the move to a single virtual currency for the entire Facebook network will mean more revenue overall as users find transactions easier to make. When Facebook released their revenue figures in February , the Credits program accounted less than 2% of revenue - only $10 million out of $700 million. The consolidation of virtual transactions on Facebook into one currency means that these figures are likely to change substantially. Liu said today that there were around 800 million unique social gaming experiences on Facebook each month. Clearly there is potential for phenomenal growth in virtual currency - for developers and for Facebook - lies with users who are willing to pay for virtual goods to help them in their social gaming. But according to Zuckerberg, Facebook is not doing this to generate revenue, but "for the developers." Discuss

See the original post here:
Facebook Consolidates Its Virtual Currency with Facebook Credits

At its annual F8 conference today, Facebook announced its new Facebook for Web Sites platform. Besides the new Graph API and all the plugins and new features Facebook developed on top of this, the company will also offer a new version of its Facebook Insights analytics service. Currently, Insights provides users data about their Facebook fan pages and social ads. Now, however, Facebook is taking this a step further and will also give users who implement Facebook's new features on their sites data about the people who share content from these sites, "no matter where those shares originated." Sponsor Note : Facebook will share more information about these new analytics features during an F8 breakout session at 3:30pm PT and we will update this post once we learn more. The new Insights page is already live and getting it to work involves nothing more than adding a short meta tag to your site. Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level This new service, according to Facebook , will give developers "detailed analytics about the demographics of [their] users." Today's web analytics systems like Google Analytics can give publishers detailed information about how many people come to a given site and where they came from. A developer who uses Facebook for Web Sites will be able to gather more detailed demographic information about these users. With this update, Facebook Insights isn't just about Fan pages and Social Ads anymore (where Facebook already gives publishers very detailed demographic data), but it also allows publishers to track what happens to a link once it is shared. Partly, this also connects to Facebook's new caching policy , which now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. Until today, developers who used Facebook Connect had to delete this data after 24 hours. Now, however, when users grant an application permission to store their profile data, they give these developers their age, location, gender, number of friends and a number of other data points about them. Privacy Implications? This update will surely have some interesting privacy implications. Thanks to the new permissions dialog, however, it should now be easier for users to see which information they will share with a third-party application. Discuss

Read more:
Facebook Insights: Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level

Salesforce.com is acquiring Jigsaw for $142 million in a deal that exemplifies how crowdsourcing has entered the the business world. Sugar CRM also uses Jigsaw for business directory information. The deal should cast a shadow on that relationship. Sugar CRM and Salesfore.com compete in the social CRM market. Salesforce.coms says the Jigsaw service will continue to be available on other platforms besides its own. Sponsor Jigsaw uses a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to deliver up-to-date business contact data. Salesforce.com see the company's crowdsourcing methods as a leap in improvement over traditional enterprise data management models that require expensive integration and dedicated maintenance to keep the records updated. Jigsaw's crowdsourcing model leverages contact data from its community. The data is usually what is found on a business card, including name, title, company, mailing address, business telephone number and email address. Jigsaw.com community members can access the database and accumulate points by helping maintain the quality of the information. The points may be used to access additional information. Companies may purchase contact data from the service. Jigsaw also provides a subscription service that automates data cleansing services to update and improve the quality of the information for the end user. Salesforce.com recently launched Salesforce Chatter. The company says Jigsaw will be integrated to allow for updates in contact information through real-time feeds. But isn't data becoming a commodity? Crowdsourcing techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated and there are lots of options out there. And then there is the veracity of the updated contact information. Sales contacts are a company's crown jewels. It may work for the small company seeking to beef up its lead pool but for the larger organization it may be just fine to use those enterprise technologies that Salesforce.com loves to kick. On the flip side, it's a different economic reality that we all face and low cost pools of data can be invaluable to companies. Additionally, crowdsourcing helps companies use the information of the crowd to build its business. That's the force Salesforce.com hopes will come with the Jigsaw purchase. Discuss

Read the original post:
Salesforce.com Buys a Crowdsourcing Company

Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data , geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site "like" button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages. Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00). Sponsor Watch it Live You can also find live video of the keynote here . We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates. 9:45: Audience is getting seated. 10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST. 10:07: Rumor : Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership. Image credit: Devin Reams . 10:11: Zuckerberg on stage. 10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done." Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections." 10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect. "A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog. Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours. 10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already. 10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics. 10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections. 10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better." 10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard. New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized. 10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are. On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity. 10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage. 10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends? Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends. 10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML. Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe. 10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site. 10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized. Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service. Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features. 10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from. New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked. 10:36: Launching with 30 partners today. You can also subscribe by topics. These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web." 10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind. 10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API. 10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook. Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update. 10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs. 10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage. Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today. 10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social." 10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users? Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents. All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience. Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora. 10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend. Discuss

Read more from the original source:
Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg's F8 Keynote