Category: Social Media Measurement

Who do you trust to manage your attention?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Who do you trust to manage your attention? Because now that the news cycle has surfaced Cambridge Analytica issue – that’s the real thesis question. Let me explain. How the Newsfeed manages your attention I really can’t understate just how powerful amplified engagement really is. When you overlay the like/share verbs on top of a network of individuals who all have something in common, or who procure people who have something in common, you get some pretty strong effects. Don’t believe me? Just check out the clothing in your drawers and the items in your fridge. You, my friend, are an outcome of considerable social contagion effects. Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm shelters you from a power law distribution of content that the[…]

Eulogies trickle in for Facebook

Posted on by Christopher Berry

“The End of Facebook” trumpeted the headline. 46 points in 46 minutes on Hacker News. “Facebook Screws Social Media Marketers!” trumpets Business Insider. “Facebook is losing teens” states Global Web Index. Here we go with the bandwagon. Hop on! Only that this time isn’t going to be quite like the last time(s). Teens have fled to their smartphones They’re computers they can control. They’re computers that aren’t tied to the family room, where parents can seen them. Small screens offer a degree of privacy and intimacy that larger screens, even the tablet, just can’t replicate. Facebook saw that a long time ago and snapped up a few cool startups. Ditto Twitter. Ditto Google. And the rest of us are behind[…]

Reddit, Eternal September, and Climate Change

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Kleinbl00 wrote an excellent synthesis of the phenomenon gripping Reddit right now. (Explanation of what Reddit here.) Here’s the link. Here’s the quote for posterity: “It isn’t a brain drain, it’s climate change. Early Reddit was an environment friendly towards tech geeks who wanted something more indepth than slashdot or HN. As such, it attracted erudite geeks. Middle Reddit was an environment friendly towards thinkers and seekers who were looking for discussion beyond what was available on the archetypal PHPBBs, news outlet comment sections and, notably, Digg. As such, it attracted thinkers and seekers. Late Reddit is an environment friendly towards image macros and memes. As such, it attracts ineloquent teenagers. Something Reddit did early on, under Alexis and Steve,[…]

Testing Three Themes

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Post frequency on the analytics focused blog, Eyes on Analytics has increased to daily. In part, this is to solidify the understanding of the frequency-reach curve in blogging, and in part, it’s an attempt to understand where the broader market is at. I’m testing three themes: How to fight nature’s pesky way of inhibiting our ability to make clean causal statements. The importance of imagination in identifying independent variables. The role of evidence in decision making. Simplification of a message is not pandering. However, many pandering statements are deliberate simplifications. If your optimization objective is to gain followers: Post often. Post simply. Post what people want to hear. I’m choosing simplification while avoiding pandering. Let’s see how that unfolds over[…]

Why don’t the campaign components add up?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Sometimes the components of a marketing channel will not add up to equal the total performance of the marketing channel. This is caused by any number of realities and limitations imposed in part by nature, and, in part, by you, the marketer. Consider the following deliberately simple scenario: March 2012 Impressions: Total Digital Impressions Delivered: 100,000,000 Total Impressions with Chicken Creative: 25,000,000 Total Impressions with Beef Creative: 50,000,000 Total Impressions with Pork Creative: 75,000,000 Something doesn’t make sense. I’m telling you that 100,000,000 impressions were delivered in total, but each component of that figure: 25 million, 50 million, and 75 million, don’t actually add up. That’s because creative can have multiple attributes. An ad may feature Chicken alone, Beef alone,[…]

Who’s Downvoting You On Reddit?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

So who keeps on downvoting you on Reddit? We’ll find out. But first – three notes: You may be familiar with Reddit. If you’re not – you can read this explanation about what Reddit is. To answer that question, I downloaded a dataset that was built in early 2011 or very late 2010. The dataset is a 29MB gzip compressed and contains 7,405,561 votes from 31,927 users over 2,046,401 links. You can read about the methodology here. The file contains three columns – a vote, a userid, and a link. Only people who had their privacy settings set to open had that data read by an API. There is no meta-data about who these people are in real life (IRL)[…]

Web Analytics Wednesday – October 26 – Wellington

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Web Analytics Wednesday is tonight at The Wellington, in downtown Toronto’s analytics alley. It’s generously supported by AT Internet. There are some 40 people – representing among the best of the best, who will be in attendance. It’s a great opportunity for web analysts, social analysts, marketing scientists, data scientists, hackers, developers, and usability professionals to come out and talk about the great ideas and opportunities we have going on in Toronto. It’s also the first get together after eMetrics New York, which was a major, and had big time Canadian attendance. These tend to be among the more interesting evenings. It has also been some three months since the last WAWTO event, so there should be quite a few[…]

Relevancy in Facebook Brand Posts

Posted on by Christopher Berry

ExactTarget reported in their paper, “Subscribers, Fans, and Followers: The Social Break-Up”, Feb 1, 2011, that a top reason (44% of respondants) for unliking a Facebook Brand was “The Company posted too frequently”. Among other reasons: 43% said “My wall was becoming way too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them”. 38% said “The content became repetitive or boring over time”. 19% said “The content wasn’t relevant to me from the start”, 17% “The company’s posts were too chit-chatty – not focused on real value”. All of these reasons cited go directly to the concept of relevancy. When does content become too much? When it ceases to be relevant. When do you want[…]

The Top Nine Things About Lists that Marketing Scientists don’t want you to know about

Posted on by Christopher Berry

9. They know that any mention of a list is total baiting. People love lists. You’re here now, aren’t you? 8. They deliberately use an odd sounding number for the length of a list. Round numbers like 10 sound engineered. 7. They know that there’s a high reading completion rate on such a list. That is to say, the probability of a person clicking through to another page, right below the list, is high, thereby increasing overall ad impressions on a single visit. 6. They know that some of the most effective list titles contain a promise of insider information. 5. They know that a small percentage of the population creates lists, but a large percentage of the population cares[…]

A Few Words about ICE and Increasing Campaign Effectiveness

Posted on by Christopher Berry

The paper “Increasing Campaign Effectiveness”, abbreviated ICE, is out. You can find the paper here. ICE is not the successor to Value of a Fan, abbreviated VOAF. We asked different questions. Last year, in response to VOAF, many of my cohorts came forward with brilliant follow up questions, and the dialogue that ensued contributed to the subsequent study and model design. Work continues. I welcome, in the spirit laid out by Tsang, engagement on the topic. What do you think about Increasing Campaign Effectiveness using social media? What would you consider and explore?