I am starting to wonder if social media – blogs, bookmarks, profile pages, wikis – are getting a little too much press.
That sounds terribly backward, I know. I’ve been talking people’s ears off about how cool all of these things are for years now. While I won’t take personal credit for it, the attention of the world is slowly turning to this new revolution in publishing, in our lifetimes seconded only to the Internet itself. A study by Universal McCann recently showed how social media networks are increasing in use worldwide, which would on its own seem to indicate that we SEOs should just pack up our bags and move to Twitterland.
The problem is that there are still so many people who don’t use social media in their daily lives. (There are exceptions of course – YouTube is the favorite site of just about anyone with a high speed data line and time to kill.) If you ask family members where you can find their blog, or for their Twitter name, or even what their eBay rating is - a stretch, but still, technically social - they will give you a blank look. The majority of Internet users have only recently become aware of what blogs are. Their kids probably have Myspace accounts, sure. The rest just know what they hear about it on the news.
It is safe to say the majority of these applications are popular with… well, people like us: Marketers and computer professionals who know “neat” when we see it. I will go so far as to say that whatever responses are made to this very post, they will be made by a blogger or someone with a Twitter account – but probably not our spouses and almost surely not our parents.
For example, if one were to try and promote a company using only Twitter, and was wildly successful at it, that message would still only reach those of us who use Twitter. The rest of the world would never encounter it. Our spouses and parents might only become customers if the wave of Twitterers went out into the world espousing the company’s gospel. (Unless what you are selling is distinctly online product, like an e-mail list or visitors to your AdSense site.) It would seem a better use of time and money to optimize the company’s website for search.
For now, the best application of these social media programs is to get an idea of what the world – social media converts and not – is saying about you. It’s like an iceberg: The bit you see above water is a mere fraction of the rest of it that’s underwater. Similarly, if 70% of 100 blogs are bemoaning something your company did, chances are good 70% of everyone else is doing the same thing. Then you can go about the business of reshaping that opinion. While social media is still a few years away from being a place to generate sales, it is a Godsend for public relations.
Keep in mind, I still love this stuff. All of these social applications are a great new way to reach out to the world, and then to hear back from it. This is the promise of the Internet made when it first came onto the scene. And with the number of people worldwide with broadband connections at 300 million and growing, the day when a majority of the population can be convinced to buy something because of what they read on a blog or saw on Flickr is enormous.
Acting as though that day has already come though, I fear, makes us lose site of that goal. We should use these tools for what they are capable of doing now, not they have the potential for doing someday. Today, if you want to make a sale the best place to be seen is the first page of Google results.
Google PR Update
written at May 1st, 2008 | Posted by Ellen Stevens
There has been some controversy lately about the Google Toolbar update. Basically, it’s been updated and people are unhappy with their “new” PageRank. Google says that they use their own internal PageRank when ranking sites, so don’t worry. I say, who cares! Keep doing what you do! If there hasn’t really been a change to PageRank, then there is no need to change anything. (Read the article here.)
In today’s “Sign of the Apocalypse” watch, the Wall Street Journal reports that followers of Democratic Presidential pugilists Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are digitally duking it out on Second Life.
Indeed, the pixel-based groupies of each candidate are engaging in Rovian dirty tricks, including interrupting Second Life campaign rallies, and even SHOOTING THE FOLLOWERS OF THE OTHER CANDIDATE.
Clearly, the whole Second Life phenomenon is both fascinating and disconcerting. Does it imitate real life, replace real life, or presage real life? But the fact that seemingly peaceable supporters of the possible Leader of the Free World are resorting to digital murder to get their point across makes a potential convention floor nomination showdown an unsavory proposition.
Certainly, the fact that Americans can engage in vociferous political debate in both real and imagined coffee shops without fear of being rounded up, jailed and/or silenced is indeed the hallmark of our most flexible of democracies. But is this Second Life campaigning a symptom of a flowering democracy, or a warning sign heralding its unraveling?
Is it a good thing for democracy that people are so motivated by their love for a candidate that they will create an elaborate scheme to disrupt other persons’ computerized rally, but will not actually leave the house to participate in an actual rally? Maybe we should just do the whole election in Second Life. Digital voting across-the-board, with humorous avatars queuing up at tiny cartoon polls. It would certainly eliminate any “hanging chad” issues.
I foresee a new political consulting speciality: digital mobilizer (in charge of getting people following the candidate on Twitter, Second Life and elsewhere to show up on election day). Good gig. I’ll be working on a proposal template later today.
Meanwhile, my avatar is carrying an Obama sign in one hand, and a Glock in the other. Just in case.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has good coverage of the long-simmering debate between Comscore and Nielsen with regard to ranking large Web sites’ popularity and total unique visitors.
According to the article, Comscore shows ~20% higher unique visitor counts for many sites, apparently do to differences in panel composition. For example, Comscore shows 11.977 million visitors in March for AOL Body. Nielsen shows 9.962 for the same site and date range.
It’s a puzzlement that is almost as old as the Web itself. Jupiter/Media Metrix data used to conflict with other services, and today’s WSJ article didn’t even touch on data from Compete, Hitwise, and other services that today purport to actually be more accurate than Comscore/Nielsen due to their methodology.
I find this line of inquiry amusing. The only reason people fret about data discrepancies online is because there are multiple services. You don’t see widespread questioning of the accuracy of Nielsen TV ratings (other than DVR issues), and you don’t see much concern over the accuracy of Arbitron for radio. Why? Because they don’t have competitors trumpeting a better mousetrap.
I believe it to be true that there are 450 Nielsen TV households for Greater Phoenix, a metro area of 3+ million people. That’s inevitably going to result in statistical abnormality and fuzzy math. I would argue that while Comscore and Nielsen are indeed a ways off in their comparative numbers, the overall data certainty online is better than offline across-the-board.
Part of the problem with data discrepancies is what defines a “visit”. There are MASSIVE results differences when you take a given Web site and analyze it’s traffic using the leading Web analytics packages like Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, CoreMetrics et al. Each “counts” visits slightly differently, and this problem is getting worse, not better with the increased use of AJAX and other programming tactics that push data at visitors without a “page view”. The way I see it, if super-techy companies like Google and Omniture can’t get their numbers to align in the slightest using actual Web server data, to expect a sample based service like Comscore or Nielsen to align is unrealistic.
