TheWayoftheWeb

And it’s all for charity.

Social media type Jennifer Leggio is not only running the Nike Women’s Marathon for charity - she’s also persuaded some top social media figures to auction their skills to raise money for Team in Training, the fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

And you could get some real value by bidding for yourself or your company. Names on the block include Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, Geoff Livingston, Aaron Strout, and Greg Verdino.

If you don’t recognise their names, there is a short bio on the link above. I’ll add in the appropriate blog links in detail when I’m not sat on a train…

I’ve been involved in a lot of discussion about measuring social media and social networks, particularly around readership, influence, and social media and community marketing. And I quite often hear the quote that such measurement is like ‘figuring out if you have a good marriage’, which comes from Ian Schafer of Deep Focus. The Adweek article in which is appears goes on to say: “Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. “You can’t assign a number to that,” he said.”

I’m no analytics or statistics expert, but when I thought about, it occurred to me that there’s actually quite a lot of quantitative measurement of marriages that does go on. And judging whether you’re in a good marriage certainly requires benchmarking in some quantitative or qualitative way. Just the same as social media measurement can go pretty far in indicating whether your audience sees you as their one true love:

Anniversaries: Wedding anniversaries have rules (Paper for the 1st year? Gold for 50) to indicate the length of time to all interested parties - because a general trend would be that longevity equals a good marriage. By the same token, longterm, loyal, returning readers indicate you’re doing something right!

Divorce rates: By the same token, you can watch trends on divorces to see if a group is happy in marriage. And you can watch single visit users, and definitely unsubscribers and users deleting their accounts to gauge the same thing for your site. And unlike general figures for splitting up, you’re able to easily isolate individuals to explore the reasons in more detail.

Holidays and presents: Whether it’s a dowry, or the amount your partner spent on the wedding/honeymoon/Valentine’s Day/Birthday presents etc, at some point even the most romantic soul has probably looked at how much is being spent as a guide to how much their partner cares. That’s why engagement rings are supposed to cost 3 month’s wages, for example. And a key metric in the website/user relationship is definitely click-throughs and sales conversions.

Romantic dinners: One of the big tips about marriages is to make time to go out and spend quality time romancing each other. You could see that couples in a good marriage enjoy this time, chat all night, gaze longingly at each other across the table, etc. By the same token, you can monitor the bounce rate and time on site of your visitors to see if they’re visiting several pages and enjoying your company - or splitting at the earliest opportunity.

Doing the housework: Does your partner invest time and effort in doing their share around the house? Do they help to make it a home? And do your users invest time and effort in submitting User Generated Content? Do they customise their profiles? Do they comment on stories and forums?

Are they faithful?: In the modern digital world, it’s highly unlikely a visitor will use just one site in any area of interest. But rather than sulking about their polygamous ways, it’s about following them and looking at who their affair is with. Figure out what is so attractive about the other websites they visit, and look at whether you can beat it, or use it in some way. Rather than seeing them continue to stray, inject some romance by dressing up your website in the RSS feeds of the other destinations, for example.

Talking about your partner: One of the big qualitative and quantitative benchmarks is seeing how often your friends talk about their partners, and whether it’s normally in a good or bad way. That can be with friends over a coffee or a beer - or in a survey by a magazine. Whatever the source, it’s what prompts you to go home and ask why your partner doesn’t treat you as well, or tell them how badly someone else is doing. And it’s the big one for social media measurement, because it’s all about the referrals and the recommendations. Recommendations and links are the equivalent of public displays of affection.

Now, if you combine all that information about two individuals in a relationship, you start seeing that actually, there’s quite a lot of ways you could build up a reasonable idea of whether a relationship is being enjoyed by the people within it, and then be able to compare it to other marriages. It’s not 100% accurate, and maybe they’re staying together for the children, but metrics never cover ever 100%

And by the same token, there’s a huge wealth of information already available on social media marketing, especially if you’re already tracking the normal metrics via a standard analytics package.

The trick is working out what to add to what is already available (influence of prominent couples/recommendations for example), and how to bring it all together into something that is understandable. That’s the alchemy.

Funnily enough, I’d just finished reading a piece about social shopping by David Cushman when I checked the top five viral videos for last week (from viralvideochart). In at number five, behind Barack Obama’s ‘A more perfect union‘, and Boston Dynamics very cool Big Dog, was the flipside of the social shopping concept - this promotional video for product sourcing company SaleHoo.

I’m not going to go into whether or not it’s a good company etc, but I do think it’s interesting anyone is increasingly becoming able to go to product suppliers, and essentially become a reseller of a product, giving it a human element. It’s another revenue stream, alongside affiliate deals, or the traditional reselling of ISPs and Domains that many net geeks have been doing for years.

It also reveals how reputation and ratings will become increasingly important throughout the web. In a formal shopping setting like Ebay, you can see a formal rating (reliability is always an issue), but on a forum, or an unfamiliar blog it’s a bit harder - unless you’ve got the time and energy to research anyone making a recommendation.

So is the answer an open, consistent ID across the net which allows for some type of commerce rating? Or joining a dedicated shopping network, like Ebay? Or what about Stylehive or This Next, which aim to provide the tools for social shopping?

Or how about all the people that you’ve already connected with and trust?

Hence the power of a social network. If I’m able to ask the good friends that I’ve hung out with, got drunk with, and shared my life with already - then I won’t be relying solely on ratings or guesswork…

I’ve been playing around with a few sites recently. Here’s some quick off-the-cuff thoughts.

www.mahalo.com : Human powered search engine. It’s a nice concept, to get search results filtered by someone that actually knows the subject. But at the same time it’s just too limited for the things I want to search for. I like going and seeing what’s been logged so far, but when I’m looking for something for work and pleasure, I need to know I’ll get a result quickly. And that won’t happen with most of the search terms I need, as they’re always too niche to have been covered early on.

http://www.pownce.com/ : Social network file sharing. Seems like a good idea, if you have an allergy to ftp sites, or file upload sites. But the real problem is that I now have to get everyone I’d want to share a file with to sign up and download the application. How many people are going to do that? And how many times more likely is it that I want to share files with a general audience, or people who aren’t a connection?

http://www.iminlikewithyou.com : It’s a new take on old fashioned dating sites. Not sure I see the point in dating becoming even more hard work!