Over at Friendfeed, in the Start Up Success Room, I came across a post by Zee that pointed out a really interesting blog post entitled “Learn How This Blogger Averages 100+ Comments Per Post And Did It In Under a Year“. Now this seemed quite interesting. Comments are a true sign of user engagement and inspiring comments is a true art.

The post is an interview with MizFit Online who’s a fitness blogger. Reading the post however did not get me too far, other than MizFit’s avid blog reading and commenting herself and a key phrase “commentversation” which tried to capture her approach. Even MizFit seems unsure of what drives the comments saying “If only I knew. It varies wildly.”

I wanted to know more and decided to do some real analysis on MizFit’s blog. It seems like a great blog. True to her personality. Quite personal. And it seems she’s got a strong following. She also has a theme/category of the day: Monday Faceday, Tuesday Trends, View Mail Food, Glorious Food and Link Love.

I started by looking at every post she made in November. I looked at the title of the post, the theme, the length of the post, text vs. video, the number of outbound links in the post and the number of links to other pages on the blog.

The only thing that seemed to matter was whether the blog post was part of a theme. Uncategorized posts did very poorly incomparison. Post length, other than extremely short posts, had no impact. Number of links had no impact either. Video performed as well as text.

I decided to dig in further. I took the last 10 posts for each theme and for uncategorized posts (note: I screened out the uncategorized posts that were very short announcements).

Here are the results of the analysis of the last 10 posts by theme/catagory:

The results are facinating, at least to me.  If you factor out contests, four of the themes average about 100 comments per post.  Food Glorious Food does a little less well averaging 89.6 comments per post, which may be due to a heavier reliance on guest posts in this theme.

The pattern I saw with the uncategorized posts held true.  These types of posts only averaged 48.4 comments per post.

Contests also play a big role in making the numbers fluctuate.  They seem to add about 45 extra comments to a post on average.  More when the contest was enticing and less when it was not so enticing.

I dug further into the best performing and worst performing non-contest posts to see if I could find some other qualitative reasons for the variances. Indeed there seemed to be more going on qualitatitively.

When I looked deeper at the strongest performing posts based upon comments, I saw that these posts tended to stand out for one or more of the following reasons: Challenges, very personal stories, strenuous exercise video, or lots of questions (3-5) to audience at the end of the post.

In contrast the poorest performing posts were missing these elements.  The poorest performing posts where guest posts without questions to the readers. These posts dropped to 66-79 comments.  Guest posts with questions did a little better running in the mid 80s.  MizFit’s poorest performers in themed posts tended not to have as much passion and had no questions for the audience.

My take aways if you want to generate comments:

• Be personal
• Be passionate
• Post questions not answers
• Set up themes by day and be consistent
• Make sure guest posters have lots of questions for readers
• Use small contests to motivate your commentors

So what do you think?  What kind of posts get people to comment?  Is it this list or some other factors?  Who else gets lots of comments and what do they do?

Comment away:)

Update with ideas from comments about what drives comments:

• commentversation
• taking the time to personally respond to comments

I’m an Obama supporter who is fortunate enough to be in a high tax bracket, and I wanted to see just how much my vote will cost me. So I visited taxcut.barackobama.com, selected “$250,000 and up” for my income, filled in the other fields, and clicked on “CALCULATE NOW”. And clicked. And clicked. Nothing.

I thought the web page loaded incorrectly, so I reloaded. Still nothing. Then the light bulb went off. I tried “$200,000-$250,000″, clicked “CALCULATE NOW”, and instantly I was saving $800.

Yes, the site is called “Obama Taxcut”, but when my taxes are going up, is it honest to pretend to malfunction?

I know that my taxes will increase if Obama wins, but personally, I’d prefer to find out how much and receive a thank you for my prospective support than to be ignored.

What do you think? Is this a legitimate website design or a liability for the Obama campaign?

ADDENDUM:
Thanks for your comment, DM. I rechecked and sure enough, the Obama site is working and returns “You probably won’t receive a tax cut under Obama.” So perhaps the site wasn’t working when I checked, or perhaps I was not sufficiently observant. Either way, Barack still gets my vote.

Today, I received a email from someone I’ve never met who is involved with involved with International Medical Corp that asked me to post about their project at the American Express Members Project.

I was impressed by their use of social media. It’s good to see social media doing some good things for the world. She sent me a link to their social media news release that was chock full of ways to learn about the project.

In short the project goal is saving the lives of malnourished children.  And they need your vote to help them increase the amount of funding they can get for the project.

“Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” is now guaranteed a share of $2.5 million in prize money. The project with the most votes receives $1.5 million, 2nd receives $500,000, 3rd $300,000, and 4th and 5th $100,000. The funding – made possible by your votes – would bring a vital lifeline to hungry and malnourished children around the world.

But we need your help between now and October 13. Voting is easy and doesn’t cost a thing! In just a click, you can save the lives of thousands of malnourished children. Click here to vote:

For severely malnourished children, we offer a step-by-step treatment program that gives them what they need to recover, including nutrient-dense food supplements like the peanut-based product, Plumpy’Nut. Our comprehensive monitoring system saves more than 90 percent of children being treated in our feeding centers. Being one of the Top 5 would mean our nutrition could reach more children around the world who need our help.

Save Some Kids — Vote Now

Time is short – so Vote NOW!

This is a great example of how social media can be used to increase awareness and do good in the world. These kids need our help, so GO VOTE NOW.

 Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children [3:00m]: Download

Kobe Bryant recently released a video of himself jumping over a speeding car, or at least appearing to jump over a speeding car. While the video is likely some special effect, the stunt is incredibly stupid and irresponsible. He starts the video by showing off his new Nike’s which makes me believe that this is part of some kind of ad campaign.

The video has been shown on numerous news shows this morning and will undoubtedly get sent around until everyone has seen it.

The problem will come when the first stupid person decides to try it themselves to show off. The first broken neck, paralyzed or dead kid will make Kobe and Nike look incredibly irresponsible. I would not be surprised if they get sued and it becomes a big mess.

While I don’t want to sound like the grumpy parent that I am, I can’t help but point out that this is stupid and irresponsible behavior and the perhaps the dark side of social media marketing. Kobe has a huge following despite his problems off the court. Kobe’s jersey is the number one most popular jersey in the US and even in China. Kids who don’t know any better and adults who are stupid enough to try to emulate their heroes are going to see if they can do this too.

While a pair of Nike’s costs $130 bucks, a kid’s life priceless. Nike and Kobe should start thinking now about how they get themselves out of that mess. It’s coming soon.

[tags]Kobe Bryant, Nike, social responsibility,social media marketing[/tags]

I came up with a short starter list of why Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Communications Officers should make social media a priority.

You need to know what people are saying about you. There is a customer to customer and press to customer conversation going on throughout the internet. Any company that fails to understand and act on this puts themselves at risk for getting blindsided by the conversation. At a minimum, they should be tracking the conversation. The best practice is to go beyond monitoring to building a social media strategy to influence the conversation.

You need to know what your people are saying. If your customers are using social media, it’s also quite likely that your employees are using social media. They will be doing it no only for themselves, but also to fill gaps in the company’s social media strategy. Left un-managed, this presents numerous risks to the company’s reputation and customer/competitive relations. Inappropriate information may get disclosed and comments about policies by employees may confuse customers. Further, it is not uncommon for information published by employees with good intentions to be poorly maintained and out of date. Every company should have a Social Media Policy and a plan for cleaning up/maintaining information published about them across the internet.

You need to make your marketing/communications more efficient. Customer and stakeholder attention is now in shorter supply than ever. Traditional marketing and communications approaches are becoming increasingly less effective and consequently it’s becoming more expensive to realize communication goals. Social media and community are two mechanisms to radically improve efficiency. It will take an investment, but this investment has much greater leverage than investments in traditional media. Traditional media content scales up linearly with cost and have diminishing returns. Social media content scales up with the size of the community and can have compounding returns. Any cost conscious CMO or CCO should be figuring out how to use these tools to make their companies more cost effective.

Tell us why you think CMOs and CCOs should make social media like blogging, podcasting and networking a priority.

PS – Click here to learn more about how the University of Southern California’s CCO is using social media by listening to this Digital Podcast.

[tags]social media marketing, marketing priorities[/tags]

Social media can be a very effective mechanism for marketing as shown in this video case study produced by Shel Israel as part of FastCompany.tv. The campaign was put together by SeaWorld San Antonio and focused on a pre-launch campaign for a new ride at the park called Journey to Atlantis.

They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out.

This is an excellent example of a simple, highly focused campaign and a well orchestrated effort to measure the results.

This type of campaign shows that social media can be woven into your marketing efforts with practical and relatively straightforward methods. I’ve captured some screen shots below and a sample of a YouTube video to help provide some perspective on the project.

Here’s what the blog looked like:

And a video from YouTube.

And some of pictures from Flickr.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, FastCompany.tv, SeaWorld, Journey to Atlantis, Shel Israel[/tags]

Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management is a mini-ebook that focuses on how to use social media performance management and measurement to successfully manage growth.

It’s a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media.

The approach aligns management around success strategies and shared goals to provide your staff with the guide posts for making decisions consistent with the interest of the business. Done well, it will create or reinforce a culture of continuous improvement in new content, function, and initiative development.

If you would like to receive “Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management” please sign up to receive our white papers.

There is no cost or obligation. Just fill out and submit the form. To make sure you want this white paper, you will receive a confirmation email from us confirming you are making this request. We respect your privacy and will not share any information beyond our organization.

Subscribing is free and you can opt out of receiving further information at any time by going to the link at the bottom of our emails to you.

[tags]social media, social media performance management, ebook, whitepaper, report[/tags]

If you’re not watching what’s said at Twitter, you’re missing the real time news.

Twitter, self described as a “social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time”, has rapidly become a source of real time juicy material for reporters and bloggers straight from the crowd.

Twitter asks people just one question: What are you doing now? You get to answer with up to 140 characters.

The resulting Tweets can be monitored on a web browser or on your phone. The service has proven remarkable popular and become an interesting, real time new sources for news tips. Two very recent examples have the tech industry twittering away.

I witnessed one of these events on Twitter as it happened. At the SXSW conference, an interview of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy got out of control. The tweets started flying and the press and bloggers piled on here, here, here and a whole bunch more here. The Tweeting just made the event spin way out of control. Here’s Sarah’s response as posted on cNet:

And in an unrelated story, Techcrunch referenced some Tweets to point out a somewhat heated back and forth between the Six Apart and Wordpress guys.

Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took aim at Wordpress users in a blog post today. Instead of upgrading to the new version of Wordpress, he says, consider moving over to their platform.

Now, it’s generally fair game to target your competitors, and Dash’s blog post was so tame that I can’t even find a good quote to pull into this post. But that didn’t stop Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg from going for blood. In a Twitter message, Matt says “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.” Anil fires back almost immediately with “@photomatt desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

Not only has Twitter become a source for news, it has also become a broadcast channel for people who collect large followings, which results in a strange co-mingling of news with Tweets about everyday activities like “waking up, making coffee”. The phenomenon of Twitter as a source of real time news can only grow as bloggers like Jason Calaconis, CEO of Mahalo, observe the growing importance of Twitter to blog traffic.

While Twitter has some great potential as a source of buzz and news, the real time mob effect is scary. Sarah, of the “train wreck” interview fame, may be getting lots of advice about what she could have done differently, but with Twitter the crowd will be talking about every real time event and it may not be nice.

Anyone doing this kind of interview or a speech better be aware that the crowd is talking, and when disgruntled people realize they are not alone, they tend to speak up like they did at SXSW.

UPDATE: I saw this on Twitter from Tim Bourquin who runs the New Media Expo. It says it all. Anyone running a live event now runs the risk of being Twitterfied :

Click here to follow me on Twitter  at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

[tags]Twitter[/tags]

Sean Ammirati (mSpoke / ReadWriteWeb), Ian Kennedy (Yahoo!), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google),and David Recordon (Six Apart) spoke on a panel about feeds.

What’s social about feeds? Feeds help you keep track of what you friends/family are doing and can also be used a social filter for new content discovery.

The panel discussed what’s public and what should be private. A concern was raised about how the norm with a feed is sharing, unlike email where there is somewhat of an understanding that it is not something that should be public. In reaction, it was important that there should not be surprises. The user should have control over what information gets shared and with whom. Facebook doesn’t allow user activity to be shared via a feed and the panel felt it should be open.(applause)

The very public is easy, the very private is easy. It’s the middle ground that’s hard. The balance is where the focus needs to be.

The other factor is to be a good partner with the content providers. For aggregators of feeds, sending traffic back to the site that generated the content is really important. The challenge is to drive enough value back to the source to make sharing worthwhile for everyone.

When focused discussions happen within a friend based network the discussion can be much higher quality than a wide open public conversation like those on YouTube. It was observed that as more and more content flows onto the social networks and into feeds, we will see an increase in the need and value of filtering.

Clearly feeds are valuable, but there are some real business model issues to be resolved as more and more mashups integrate content from across the web.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, feeds, lifecasting[/tags]

I believe that a lot of money will be wasted on social media initiatives and to make sure we don’t waste too much I think we need to build a framework for managing performance on the social web. I hope this podcast can be the start of a conversation about online performance measures and management as it relates to social media.

The hype and growth surrounding the space means that everyone is rushing in to connect with the huge audiences that are possible with successful social networks. Budweiser, Coke, Fast Company and many other brands have been deploying big new social networking initiatives. Facebook applications are being built right and left. Open Social means that even more social applications will be built for the other big networks as well.

However, while social networks like Flickr and cool Facebook apps are fun and social they may not generate significant commercial returns. Leading media and brand marketers know they need to be embracing social media, but risk falling into the same trap if they don’t focus on success and doing it in a way that makes sense for the social web.

My conversations with digital media executives lead me to believe that forward thinkers know they need to be managing distributed media across the social web and that they need more than just embeddable video players. They tell me they need guidance about what works beyond the BS they hear from vendors, how to measure performance and how to embed that into development processes so that future projects benefit from what’s already been learned.

There is lots of good thinking going on about how to measure performance on the web and some are even thinking about measurement in the social web. However, many are still stuck using traditional broadcasting or Web 1.0 models to define success and those measurement models are not going to be adequate for defining success and driving performance on the social web.

We need to rethink performance measures and the way we collect data from the social web.

 

 Digital Podcast 40 [12:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I thought it would be useful to provide some opening thoughts about how measures for the social web might be different and appreciate any feedback. To start, we need to identify what’s different about the social web.

From a long list of things that are different a few stand out to me as really important.

• User Contributions – On the social web, we have users producing content right and left. In addition, they are providing insight. Insight into themselves and insight into what is popular. This means that content with potential can, with some skill, be filtered and identified much more effectively.
• Distributed social media – The paradigm has changed from users seeking content to content seeking users. We see this new paradigm everywhere with downloadable media, embeddable videos and widgets that deliver content, services and more to users in a highly distributed way.
• Expectations that everything is free – The huge surge of low cost content supply means that users are willing to pay less and expect more to be free.
• Shifting business models – We are seeing the beginning of a major shift in business models from those that are based upon the economics of impressions to ones based upon the economics of community.

I believe that these changes shift performance measurement from being rather linear in nature to something that is more recursive in nature. By recursive, I mean that we are measuring a repetitious cycle where a change in one measure drives changes in other measures and is thus much more difficult to pin down. If we are not careful and discrete about measuring this kind of process the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies as well – the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.

Below is a simple illustration of what I’m talking about (note this is just illustrative and not all inclusive). In the impression based business model of broadcast, revenue was driven by linear function of reach multiplied by frequency and by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). That same business model was largely the model that drove Web 1.0 business models which were based upon uniques, page views and CPM models. This same model can be extended to commerce based businesses as well by adding click through rates, conversion rates and price per purchase.

In the social web, I think there is a recursive process of users, engagement, user contribution, viral impact, visitors, and conversion spawning more users as the cycle continues over and over again in a recursive manner. In addition, I think that the units of revenue measurement will shift from CPM to RPU (revenue per user) because we are now not just getting paid for advertising, but also for lead generation, potential direct sales and other ways of monetizing users.

Some of these measures are new so here’s the short argument for each measure:

• Visitors – Without new visitors there is no growth. Separating visitors into new and returning and identifying where they come from is still important.
• Conversion – if we are shifting from impression based business models to community based business models then we need people to become users or members. This can be a simple measure and extended to capture how much information the new user provides.
• Users – Users do more than visitors. They consume and they produce – which is essential for scaling on the social web. Tracking users usage by signup cohort to understand how sticky the user experience is can provide insight into the durability and scalability of the site. You want to know if people will return and increase their usage over time.
• Engagement – The experience needs to be compelling enough for users to produce good stuff and to return to do it again. Simple measures like time on site, page views and loyalty still matter, but getting deeper into understanding how much of the capability you are providing (both on and offsite) get used and which parts drive engagement becomes important as well.
• User Contribution – The more users contribute, the more the content scales and that drives the potential for viral impact and if they provide insight into themselves or into attractive content that can be leveraged into RPU. There are lots of interesting measures that could be developed her fro both measuring the content the produce and the insight users provide.
• Viral Impact – Who can doubt the ability of viral content to drive trial and traffic. Measures for this are probably different depending up on the nature of the business and include bookmarks, email forwards, trackbacks and the spread of embedded widgets
• RPU – Revenue per User is what matters in a community. We want to look at total revenue whether it comes from impressions, clicks, actions, leads or any other source and the how much we can drive per user will determine how much cost we can absorb to attract and convert visitors into users and realize an attractive ROI.

The list could go on to look at cost drivers and how they are different on the social web, but that will be another discussion.

I believe that once we embrace these kinds of measures and embed them into our management processes we will see social media marketing shift from being a stream of fun (and maybe expensive) experiments into a community based business model that will result in more deeply committed fans, increased brand strength, better sell through, new revenue sources and higher ROI.

If you see good posts about measuring performance, have suggestions or feedback please leave a comment.

[tags]social media, social web, online performance measurement, measures, measurement, online measures, social media measures[/tags]