IAB social media measurement lacks substance
The IAB UK, and more importantly the IAB Social Media Council (IAB SMC) have proudly announced their opinion on how all social media should be measured, ingeniously missing the point entirely, and demonstrating (to this author at least) their ever decreasing relevance to the wider industry.
In a show of complete lack of original thought, the framework adopts the acronym I.A.B. – Intent, Action/Awareness/Advocacy/Appreciation, Benchmark. So actually that’s IAAAAB, but then would have been somehow more ridiculous, right?
As an aside, imagine if everything an industry body issued borrowed it’s mnemonic from the organisation’s own acronym – the mnemonic itself becomes oxymoronic as a concept very quickly in this case.
So anyway, the announcement goes on to completely fail to deliver against it’s own declared mission to help advertisers and agencies better digest the complexities of social media measurement. Instead, the notion that anyone in an advertising or marketing capacity needs to be told how to do their job is patronising in the extreme. Their framework essentially reads thus:
- INTENT: it’s a good idea to know what you want to do before you start doing it. Set some KPI’s, kids!
- AAAA: It would be good if you think about what you expect to happen as a result, and how you might measure whether or not that has happened. For this foresight, IAB, we are eternally grateful.
- BENCHMARKING: Once you’ve observed the impact, try and find a direct competitor that didn’t do so well, so that you can show how much better than them you all did. (groundbreaking, huh?)
This framework is entirely bereft of any real value in it’s current form, and the IAB (and especially their social media council), must be somewhat embarrassed I would think. It is with no small degree of mirth I noted their expectation that they might receive feedback from the wider industry.
Richard Pentin, IAB SMC member and Group Planning Director at Tullow Marshall Warren: “The days of whimsical experimentation are over….to be taken seriously it’s imperative we start making it much more accountable, and the IAB social media measurement framework is designed to do just that”. I can assure you, Richard, it goes nowhere near doing that.
The IAB’s call for more case studies to be shared amongst the industry rings as a hollow cry of “we don’t know what to make of it either – has anyone else worked it out yet?”. Far from the days of experimentation being over, they have only just begun for social media, and it is a terrifying prospect to think that we stop innovating and creating from here on in – the way the IAB UK SMC evidently have.
I am personally troubled by the way in which the push to find the holy grail, the golden measurement by which all campaigns will be judged, gets in the way of the actual objective (the “i” in the framework, if you remember). And as Richard himself acknowledges here, social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms - no wonder we’ve struggled to find a common methodology which works across everything.
What the industry actually lacks is any opinion-leaders of any great value. Firstly, perhaps the IAB SMC should define social media. It sounds obvious, but conceptually “social media” transcends so many other traditional activities, that it might actually need defining so that we know what it is your referring to exactly. Is it viral? Is it word of mouth? Is it customer service? It is all of these things, and so much more.
Secondly, it needs to be acknowledged that social media is not a discreet, silo’d activity, and to treat it as such is any advertisers’ or agency’s first mistake – we’ve learnt this before with digital, let’s not repeat it, purrrlease. A strong industry body should be taking the lead on this. Integration is no longer confined to the marketing team and referring to the media mix but instead affects every aspect of a business. The very nature of social platforms needs to be understood from the lower echelons of the boardroom up to the decision makers in the post room. Your customer will tell you if you are getting right – by buying more things, or using your service more.
By definition, then, social media is much much more than advertising alone. It is more than “interactive”, and it is for these reasons we must all reject the myopic framework published by the SMC sub committee of the IAB UK, and it’s contributors.
Neurobrandengagingnetworksocial the new buzz
Even Malcolm Galdwell couldn’t make it up! It turns out that a “neuroeconomist” has found a way to prove that being on twitter makes you as happy as the day you get married. Apparently, the increased production of oxytocin in the brain, otherwise known as the cuddle chemical, is the big give away.
And in the process may have drawn a curious conclusion that suggests we value “social” interactions on Twitter and other networks as much as we value face to face activity with friends.
Now, I don’t know Paul Zak personally, the “neuroeconomist” or “Dr. Love” in question, but let me posit that what turns on him, or in fact anyone willing to be subjected to these tests, might be different to the things that turn me (and the other 7 billion of us) on – for lots of different reasons. I, for one, can barely spell “neuroeconomist”, let alone have the imagination to make that word up in the first place.
An extreme example might help: It is commonly recognised that it would take less pages of Sports Illustrated to turn on a pre-pubescent boy than it would a more worldly-wise Russell Brand, say, or self-confessed addict-of-love, Robert Palmer.
So could it be that the subject being studied in this case was merely responding to the thing in life that makes him happiest (twitter over girls?), and that far from drawing any conclusions that are worthy of publishing, the subject might have been well-advised to conceal this gritty revelation of his own relationship with real-world people?
Any suggestion that brands engaging in the social space therefore have a better relationship with their customers should be dismissed immediately. The only conclusion to draw is that the most successful company to exploit this insight in Social CRM terms will be the one that starts selling oxytocin in pill or soft-drink form, surely.
Facebook’s “simple” pricing
Facebook recently appears to have introduced “simple” pricing options for it’s advertisers. If you’re familiar with the ads platform, you’ll find the change at the end of the setup page, where you would normally place your bid type and bid value.
Facebook Simple Pricing
Despite having until now always defaulted bidding to “CPC”, in favour of “CPM”, and always default-setting the bid price to the middle of the range suggested, apparently that’s not simple enough and we have this new presumably simpler option.
What appears to happen when selecting this option is that your bid type is set to CPC, and your bid value is set to the middle of the suggested range – in essence it simply accepts, but hides, the default values it had originally provided.
What is not clear is whether the bid will change with the estimate. As any long term advertisers will have found out by now, whilst CPC bidding can provide lower risk in terms of the cost of the traffic it generates, it can fluctuate wildly as far as volume is concerned – and this is certainly in part due to the optimisation of delivery based on effective-CPM rates, and in part due to quality scoring. Facebook’s own revenues increase substantially if they can increase the CPM rates of the inventory available, so anything that increases CPM rates makes great commercial sense
But I’m not convinced it will. I doubt that these “simple” bids will be automatically changed after setting – that would surely require a significant change in advertising terms, and something that a former advertiser would have to actively accept rather than by implication. If anything this makes the buying of advertising even less daunting to the first-time advertiser, and theoretically may lead to a drop in the quality of the ads being ordered – this based on the blunt assumption that the professionals will normally produce better “quality” ads.
In fact, it may lead to a high turnover of poorly-performing ads as advertisers continue to try out the platform for themselves. How many CPC ads, with bids set to the default setting are still running and receiving substantial volume of impressions, say, 7 days after starting.
Perhaps the belief is that with CPCs effectively being set by Facebook (or at least by their suggestions), they will self-perpetuate an increase. After all, if lots of advertisers start targeting the same audience with an auction-based CPC inventory, and start competing aggressively for each click, there will be an enormous rise in revenues, vis-a-vis Google. Which is true when you have single-vertical advertisers competing for a finite resource, but there is nothing scarce about inventory on Facebook.
It is possible that with a larger number of advertisers, and provided enough get their advertising and targeting right, then eCPMs start to climb rapidly. As long as enough advertisers are getting above average CTRs from their ads, this will begin to raise the foor-rate for CPMs as this will be determined by an average CPC bid (Facebook’s default), but factored by an above average CTR, leading to much higher inventory rates. But I am not sure that the link to “simple” pricing options is any more simple than the default settings provided.
There is undoubtedly more to come from this initial link, and given the potential impact on FB’s revenues, it will be interesting to see what measures it takes that in turn support the sites CPM rates in future.
LOVEFiLM iPhone App Launch
LOVEFiLM have released their much anticipated (by existing subscribers, that is) iPhone app – and it’s receiving great reviews so far, as well as requests for more features / flavours already.
Built by techlightenment (author works for them), it is free for anyone, and can be found at no. 51 in the Free Apps chart currently – and with a current rating of 4+ it ‘s proving popular too (after 98 reviews). A quick scan of the negative reviews reveals that those appear to be mostly concerned with technical glitches a small number of users have had, rather than the quality or features of the app itself.
Although not exclusively available to LOVEFiLM customers, it does have some great benefits if you are. List management on the mobile by linking to your LOVEFiLM account is a great opportunity to make the most of other downtime you might have, or to react to the impulse to add a film to your list for future viewing. This seems to be one of those rare occasions that the feature-set of the mobile app has genuine value to the consumer as far as their normal interaction with the brand concerned goes, rather than a mobile app for the sake of having a mobile app. (Note: despite working for the developer, I personally had no involvement in the concept itself).
For non-customers, it does provide some cool lists that might inspire the cinema-goer – search by genre, and compare by customer ratings, and you’ve got a neat way to find the film you’re going to watch at the weekend – whether you’re a LOVEFiLM user yet or not.
You can get the LOVEFiLM UK app here: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/lovefilm-uk/id353141812?mt=8
Putting the Buzz in YouTube?
I’ve been scratching my head a bit about Google Buzz. I have to admit I got as excited as the next overly-excitable social media dood about it’s launch and announcement, but really all it did is made me realise how few of my contacts / friends / nodes-in-my-network actually use google mail still.
Still, I’m sure (as I am sure about Wave) that it’s purpose or killer application will eventually emerge to finally hail the end of Bebo, MySpace and / or (dare I say it?) Orkut (what will become of Orkut these days?).
Imagine my surprise then when I recently viewed some clips on (5yrs old today) YouTube, which I liked so much I wanted to share them, only to find the distinct lack of a “Buzz” share option. With recent announcements of live-streaming and long-form content being available on the worlds favourite video platform, I would have expected a more immediate integration. I start to “get” Buzz if I’m sat in front of the World Cup, buzzing away at disastrous refereeing decisions, the need for technology and attractive female Scandinavian supporters with painted-on football jerseys. But if I can’t do that then isn’t it just a bit like everything else I barely find time to contribute to, let alone read.
Perhaps the people at Google are merely human afterall – and that integration, even for them, is still something you’ll get round to after you’ve tidied your room, and called your mum, wife and sister.
Facebook campaign end dates
It appears that Facebook have changed the end dates / times for campaigns running, and at the moment this could cause a problem for existing campaigns.
If your campaigns have an end date set, check what time the campaign is scheduled to end on that date. It appears as though the default has shifted from midnight on that date (i.e. end of that day) to 00:00 (or the beginning of that day).
It bit me in the backside this morning, although I managed to catch it in time, but unless I missed this change when setting the campaign up some weeks ago, then you may lose a day of your campaign – and if that is the build up to a product launch, or movie release, or similarly orgasmic crescendo to a piece of activity, then it could be the one day you absolutely MUST have your campaign live that you miss.
Are we safe in the hands of the IAB, UK chapter?
I noted today, if you will excuse the pun, the manner in which the IAB UK are posting stories from their fan page on Facebook.
Rather than posting articles with links back to their website to read the full story (the sort of thing most people manage with the “share” function), they prefer to post “notes”, which link through to nothing more than a list of notes, inside Facebook, which provide nothing more on the story in question unless you hit the “link to original” footer link in the note.
IAB "note" without linking to the actual story
Confused? I certainly am.
It should be of grave concern that the IAB, the (alleged) guardians of best practice for all things interactive, should be so apparently inept.
I say apparently only because there is a chance that it is a facebook bork, or other such quirk causing it, but in the meantime I shall remain disappointed with them all.
Or have I missed something?
Facebook ‘Like’ Ads
So facebook have removed the thumbs up, thumbs down vote on ads that appear on the right-hand-side (ASUs) – I thinkn they removed that function a few weeks ago – and have replaced them with single, thumbs up “Like” call to action. (see below)
So pushing the “like” button then displays that I like this, and I can only imagine the same ad will appear on my friends’ pages as “Richard likes this”, in a similar way that fan page ads declare the number of friends who are also fans.
What’s intriguing is how many users do we think will legitimately use this function, and what impact does it have on me as a user?
Click-through rates on sites like Facebook have been well-documented to be low, or at least it takes work to get them anything above 0.02%, so theoretically you would think that adding distractions would only serve to reduce this further.
There is of course a risk here too, insofar as larger advertisers could benefit from paid-for gaming of this particular system. Find a couple of hundred unrelated users to “like” your ad, even if you have to pay them, and the returns could be huge if higher CTRs are the result of friend recommendations of this type.
Of course, the initial reaction of user will be interesting as it is not clear how I stadn to benefit by “liking” certain ads, and if anything I was always more inclined to give a thumbs down to ads I didn’t want to see again, but it is not clear that this will influence the type of ad I might see again in the future. I for one would not have “liked” the first ad in the example here: it is poorly targeted in the first place, and breaches Facebook’s own guidelines. But equally I don’t want my ad space to be inundated with ads for just a small selection of products either, based on the few things I might want to see more of.
It seems it is another attempt to introduce some subjective quality scoring to the ad serving algorithm (if there is one), but I for one struggle to understand what is wrong with CTR as a measure of the quality of the ad – surely if people “like” the ads they see, then they might click on them, and that seems like a fairly robust measure for whether the ad itself has been effective in soliciting a response. For sure CTR can never be the only measure used, but for these purposes it would seem like a fairly useful one.
Royal Navy Pilot campaign
Havign just watched the Navy Pilot advert during a break in the Ashes coverage, we collectively decided to see if we “had what it takes”. Bizarrely it seemed, the TV ad gave not a URL to take the test, but instead invited us to search for “NAVY PILOT”.
So either Google has gone bad, or the (no doubt expensive) planning and buying agency concerned with this “integrated, media neutral” campaign have messed up. A search for Navy Pilot from the UK gives a list of natural results, none of which direct me to the test in question, and not a single paid-for placement to be seen.
No doubt there will be a few red faced agency people as a result – but then again they’ll probably post-rationalise it. The real test here appears to be whether you can find the test in the first place, rather than your ability in the game itself.
