Digital Disruption

As marketing and sociology continue to collide, we’re clearly witnessing the Cluetrain “markets are conversations” come to life.

Social networks have enabled ubiquitous two-way communication between individuals and brands alike. How do we make sense of all the cacophony?

(I’ve deliberately chosen to focus on brand conversations here but the majority of what I’ve written applies equally to individuals who are looking to build their own personal brands.)

Brands are grappling with understanding how:

• to better engage in meaningful and relevant conversations
• to add value to the multitude of online conversations going on across the globe

What are the metrics and metadata that are emerging to measure, manage and improve these conversations?

Although the ego effect exists and many still seem to be focused on how many followers they have, the true value of social networks goes way beyond the traditional reach measures of the (offline) broadcast model.

How much value you contribute to your social network on Twitter or how much value you contribute to the community on your blog (as an individual or as a brand) is more importantly about listening, reciprocating, networking, learning and giving.

One thing is self-evident – It is HARD work.

Chris Brogan recently wrote about this from the perspective of comments and David Armano wrote about the viral impact of retweeting and how it allows one to bridge different networks.

How do we take this further?

I recently came across Benedikt Koehler (profile here) who used the Twitter Search API to create Twitter Friends.

He provides a wealth of visualization tools and measures that bring us a lot closer to fully understanding the key metrics to value contribution within social networks. Let’s look at the list of metrics he uses to build his “Twitgraphs” and understand how it works:

• Size of relevant outgoing network (people you engage in conversation)
• Size of relevant incoming network (people who engage in conversation with you)
• Fans = people who replied to you at least once (NOT followers)
• Loyalty (“Stickiness”) = % of fans that replied at least twice
• Twitter Rank
• Overlap of outgoing and incoming net = indication of how much conversation is going on vs. one-way messaging / broadcasting
• Tweets sent / day
• Follow cost = annoyance factor measured as time in milliscobles
• Replies sent / day
• Conversation Quotient (CQ) = % of outbound tweets that are @replies to incoming tweets  (indicating what percentage of your outbound messaging is conversation vs one-way broadcast)
• Conversational Rank (rank of conversation quotient)
• Replies received / day
• Retweet Quotient (RQ) = % of tweets sent that are retweeted
• Links posted / day
• Link Quotient (LQ) = % of tweets sent that include a link
• Replies with Links from friends / day

This may seem overwhelming at first but it makes a lot more sense once you see it represented visually in the Twitgraph.

Zappos vs. Comcast

Let’s examine the above metrics for two of the most successful brands on Twitter: Zappos and Comcast.

@Zappos is the voice of Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s CEO.  He is one of 438 people at Zappos who actively converse on Twitter. He’s also an active blogger with a dedicated CEO & COO blog amongst 13 other blogs at Zappos.  Their social media strategy is discussed here and here.

What do the numbers say about Tony’s Twitter activity over the past 30 days?

• Despite having 43,000 followers, Tony has relatively little activity on Twitter.
• He sent only 4 tweets a day on average despite receiving 50 tweets a day
• Only 30% of his tweets were @replies (relatively low conversation quotient)
• 41% of his onbound tweets contain links, aimed at driving people to his blog where he promotes the people, products and culture of Zappos

@ComcastCares is the voice of Frank Eliason, Director of Digital Care at Comcast. Frank has become a celebrity and is frequently invited to talk at conferences about his customer service activities on Twitter. Frank’s mission is to bring a human voice to a company not known for its ability or desire to communicate with its customers.

Frank’s numbers show how successfully he is at using Twitter to engage in dialog and solve people’s cable problems. He’s a digital conversation machine!

• Frank has 8,400 followers and so you’d expect that he’d be your classic celebrity broadcaster but that is not his goal. His goal is to serve people, listen to them and solve their problems
• Frank has 755 fans who are very local (41% loyalty)
• 55% of his incoming and outgoing networks overlap (lots of one-to-one real conversation)
• 98% of his tweets are @replies (high conversation quotient)
• He receives and replies to 50 tweets a day (high follow cost)

What does the Twitgraph say about their respective approaches to conversation on Twitter?  Zappos appears to be more focused  on mass one-way broadcasting with links to drive people to Zappo’s various blogs. Comcastcares, however, is exclusively focused on solving individual customers’ problems and has a very high conversation quotient.

Despite the differences between the two, their respective conversations bring a great deal of authenticity and transparency to their brands.  They both communicate in a very human voice. This is a key take-away for those embarking on this journey.  Conversations occur between people and are filled with human emotion.  No-one will engage in a conversation with a faceless corporation.

Given my cursory analysis, the following five metrics appear to provide the greatest insights into underlying conversation strategy:

• Loyal fans (not number of followers)
• Conversation quotient
• Link quotient
• Retweet quotient
• Network overlap (between incoming and outgoing nets)

Before you go off and start to emulate these successful social networkers, remember to spend upfront time clearly establishing your social media goals. What are you trying to achieve? Are you ready to put in the hard work it takes to become a prolific and valuable conversationalist in the social space? Once you’ve articulated your goals you can look to build the appropriate Twitgraph to achieve them.

As always, I’d love to hear your perspectives, comments and feedback.  I invite you to comment below.

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