Completing a competitive landscape analysis is valuable when
exploring the social media environment – personally or professionally. I completed a similar exercise for clients in
multiple environments. Social media’s
dynamic, infancy provides a unique challenge and opportunity, though. So, besides applying my learning to date, I also
leveraged insights from the blogosphere.
Here are my insights on assessing
social media sites through a high-level framework, some details included. Paying clients and close friends get to see
under the hood ;-)
To begin, identify objectives for the analysis and what
stakeholders are involved. Be sure to
always keep these in mind; they will ground thinking and scope the work. Once identified, we can build an initial list
of relevant sites and a site element inventory to assess each with. These two parameters, the scope of the
project, may change as we execute the assessment work. 80/20 suggests we’ll have a good ballpark.
The initial site list should be quick to build: known platforms, search engine results,
generic category competition, and comparables in investment or industry
reports.
The site element inventory is the primary focus of this post. Just how do we assess a social media site? Optimally, I want to provide a quantitative
assessment, size and relativity, to ensure the information ‘means’ something
and is ultimately actionable.
I must also recognize the [obvious] qualitative elements of
social media, though. A high quantity of
blog posts and readership engagement mean nothing if the blog tone is negative
and the readers are (1) not the target segment or (2) not any more enticed to
act in a way that fulfills the blogger’s/site’s objectives. This is the key conundrum of this exercise,
and the primary reason why a “Social Media Site Assessment Framework” Google
search doesn’t give you the same type of results as “Porter’s five forces.” The unknown causes 39% of respondents to PR
Week’s 2009 social media survey to cite “Not convinced about the value/ROI” as
a primary barrier to using social media.
One relevant framework is Avinash Kaushik’s Trinity
model from his Web
Analytics: An Hour a Day, a must read.
The framework builds on Actionable
Insights and Metrics, broken down into three components; I postulate social
media-esque twists to each:
-
Behavior analysis: Click stream analysis for him
o
Think engagement for this (i.e., who’s
interacting where at what frequency)
-
Outcomes analysis: Orders/Leads for him
o
Orders/leads tied to social media elements is
important, but also think. . .
o
Expansion
of the social media environment – creation of new/additional UGC
-
Experience:
Customer research for him
o
Similarly, think community opinion or voice of
the crowd
I have not completely distilled the Trinity model as it
pertains to assessing a social media site; that’s this weekend’s assignment and
a future post. I did use it as a reality
check for the more granular Social Media Site Assessment Framework I lay out below.
The framework starts with 5 element categories that contain
4 to 46 elements for a total of 77 site elements. This is a long list and could be considered
boiling the ocean. That’s where the
identified objective and stakeholders come in - to help filter the list and
appropriately scope the work required.
I’ve provided a few example elements in each category to communicate my
perspective. Here’s the framework:
-
Strategic: Qualitative elements communicating the site’s
market positioning, economics, and business operations related to site
management and integration with other business activities, including:
o
Target
market / Stakeholder: Whom the
site's benefits are most specifically directed, examples include: general public, customers, vendors, industry regulators
o
Ad
Placement: Presence by volume,
placement relative to site layout, and personalization based on user profile or
behavior
-
Usability: Qualitative elements on ease of use when
accessing the site, including:
o
Responsiveness: Judgment on user ability to navigate across
site features (define a range)
o
Browser
Compatibility: Support of multiple
browsers (e.g., IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
-
Web
Metric: Quantitative elements to
measure the sites prevalence on popularity, often requiring comparisons for
relevancy, including:
o
Critical
Cass: Site traffic measured in
amount of and frequency of interactions (leverage Kaushik’s principles)
o
Mentions: Site chatter measured through
platforms/technology like TrackUR
with and assessment of their polarity (positive v negative)
-
Feature
and Function: User capabilities for
personalizing experiences, engaging with the community, and expanding the
experience beyond the URL
o
Community
Contests: Presence of engaging
promotional contests that build community stickiness
o
Personalized
Dashboard: Robustness of personal
dashboard development (i.e., flexibility in aggregating general and
personalized social site content)
-
Extensions: Qualitative and quantitative elements related
to a sites extension beyond the URL through stakeholders' social media and
complimentary activities on and off the web
o
Facebook
Connect: Integration of Facebook
Connect
o
Twitter
Presence: Twitter handle and tweet
interaction
With the framework in place, the process becomes
standard: (1) identify initial site list
and (2) applicable elements in prioritized tiers, (3) research. . . (4) refine
list and iterate on element research. In
the end you should have a solid layout of an environment with data you can use
to inform competitive strategy, internal development, or even purchase/partner
decisions. This type of assessment is
key for informing any social
relationship management work I do. It is also the type of work that just might define
someone as an expert in the space ;-).
I’d be interested in knowing if someone else has put
together a similar framework. If so, how
do they compare? Or, have I simply not
mastered my use of The Google, and there are a plethora of standard social
media site assessment frameworks out there already? You’ll have to let me know ;-)
Cheers - easiegmann
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