Measuring Social Media

David Berkowitz, one of the Social Media industry’s foremost thought leaders and bloggers, wrote a very interesting and useful blog post yesterday: 100 Ways to Measure Social Media. This is obviously a hot topic for every brand today.

It can be quite challenging to apply performance measurements against social media and it’s something that I think marketers and others will struggle with for sometime. Personally, I think there will be a lot of different approaches to measurement depending on your company’s business objectives. Also, these parameters and points that you’ll measure will change over time.

David’s list has some great starting points. The best way to look at this is to decide what your business objectives are and begin testing and analyzing the metrics. I’d recommend going back to these over time and making sure that you’re adapting based on what you learn. Ideally, the measurement will inject insight into your strategies and tactics.

Meanwhile, check out David’s blog, it’s always a good read.

KickApps Takes NBC Local to New Heights

NBC Local Media is proving that social media is a vital piece to the success of today’s media puzzle and is key to audience growth and engagement. In a recent article in Media Week, NBC Local Media talks about the relaunch of their ‘hyper-local’ websites this year and the success they’re experiencing on the new properties.

Take a look at these numbers:

• Visitors to the 10 Web sites doubled from 6 million in Nov. 2008 to 12 million in Oct. 2009.
• Page views are up 296 percent from 29 million to 113 million

From the Media Week article:

NBC Local Media attributes the growth of sites such as nbcchicago.com (WMAQ-TV) and nbcphiladelphia.com (WCAU-TV) to the inclusion of more social-media tools, allowing visitors to interact with one another and the content on the site. For example on average, visitors cast 10,000 votes to indicate their “mood rating,” as “thrilled,” “furious,” “intrigued” or “sad.”

Launched a year ago, the 10 Web sites moved away from the style and approach of the traditional TV station Web site, evolving into a local portal offering more local services, news and information, along with user-generated content. The sites are also available via an iPhone application introduced a month ago.

I’ve always thought that the Mood Ratings feature on the NBC websites is one of the coolest ways to get an audience engaged with an otherwise static piece of content. Using our Polling API, we were able to customize how audiences rate an article. It certainly beats the 1 to 5 stars rating system that seems to be conventional on most website doesn’t it?

I personally think all the hot air about the death of the mainstream media (MSM) is just that, hot air, and some gloating from the cynics. That said, the MSM HAS to evolve in some pretty big ways to make it through the tough times they’re facing and NBC Local Media is a terrific example of this. If you bring together content and some interesting ways to interact with it and other audience members, you’ll get people to engage on your website.

It takes vision, courage and an ability to execute. 296 percent. That’s a very real number. Congratulations, NBC Local Media!

NBC Local Media websites in your city: New York, Los Angeles, Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, San Diego, Washington DC, Connecticut and Miami.

New Features Released Today on KickApps

We released a new set of features this morning across the KickApps Platform! For a detailed list of features that we released, please have a look at the release notes on KickDeveloper.

Innovation and continued advancement of what Social Software offers our increasingly broad range of customers is at the very heart of everything we do. So, we’re very excited about this morning’s release and want to make sure that we shared it with everyone.

Here are some of the highlights of what went out this morning:

• Media Privacy. This gives your website members even more control of their experience and is an optional feature that you can enable in the Affiliate Center. If you enable this feature, when members upload media into your community they will be able to specify that it can only be seen by their friends in the community.
• Full Member Export. Your members are yours. The relationships that you have with your audience, fans, customers and employees are central to your social media strategy. This has been our guiding principle from day one and this feature is a big part of that. You can now export your member data to an Excel spreadsheet with a single click.
• SPAM Defenses. There are few things on the web that I hate more than Spammers (it was VERY nice to read about the ruling on Facebook’s case in California). We’ve released an ever growing series of measures that address this issue. Yes, we have something called ‘Global Nuke!’
• Preview of the new App Studio. We’ve released a Beta version of the new App Studio that includes the first ever integration of Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework for building video players.

There’s much more, so be sure to check out KickDeveloper for all the details.

Next Frontier for Online Video Publishing

KickApps is taking on a big initiative to reinvent online video publishing for the social world. Online video today is an inherently social experience and it’s shocking to me that there’s been relatively little innovation in this sector over the last few years from the ‘big’ player(s).

Our solutions for the online video publishing are based on the following:

1. Video publishing that is integrated with social functionality and a social platform.

2. Complete customization of the video experience with flexibility and extensibility of features and functionality.

3. Advanced management features for both editorial/premium and user generated content.

Today, the KickApps App Studio is already the industry’s most advanced way of creating customizable online video players. Customizing the look and feel of a player using the App Studio takes just a few clicks of the mouse. More importantly, we’ve integrated several plug-in applications that enable you to add features like advertising (Google Video AdSense, 24/7, ScanScout to name a few) and analytics (Omniture) with a few clicks. No more costly coding and no more lengthly development cycles.

The plug-in piece is where things will start to get really interesting in the next few months. As I wrote about last week, we’re the first platform to bring Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) to life. The goals of OSMF are to create an open standard and eco-system that will further the development of Flash video players.

What does this mean to KickApps customers?

While we’ve already been creating our own plug-in architecture for creating applications in the App Studio (everything from advertising to Meebo Chat), our support of OSMF will accelerate this for video players. Through OSMF we’ll be able to offer an virtually unlimited set of features to video publishers. For developers, we offer a distribution channel for reaching the largest video publishers around the world.

We’re going to be issuing an open invitation to developers to submit their OSMF plug-in to be integrated into the App Studio soon, in the meantime, if you’re interested in being part of the program, drop us an email at OSMF@kickapps.com. Here’s more information on KickDeveloper.

For more information about this, have a look at Derek Wishusen’s presentation at Adobe MAX last week:

KickApps Brings Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework to Life

If you’re an Open Source Media Framework (www.opensourcemediaframework.com) developer, you need to join the KickApps OSMF developer program. We are integrating the OSMF into the KickApps App Studio, making it possible for the first time for developers to easily distribute their OSMF plug-ins to over 100,000 publishers and Flash video player developers at some of the largest brands and media companies around the world. For more information about OSMF, read this post by Elad Elrom.

The KickApps App Studio is a graphical user interface which allows anyone with a web browser to quickly and easily assemble highly customized, interactive, trackable and monetizable video players based on the Open Source Media Framework and the ecosystem of plug-ins that have been built on the framework. No technical experience is required to drag and drop the various video player components and publish an unlimited number of video players based on the OSMF. We have a short screencast of how it will work in the App Studio here.

Apply to join the program by emailing your contact information and a brief description of your OSMF plug-in to: OSMF@kickapps.com.

To use the App Studio, simply sign up for a KickApps account by clicking on the big red button at the top of this page.

Will you be at Adobe MAX 2009?

The KickApps team will be presenting at the FITC Unconference on Wednesday, October 7, 4PM.

This session is for developers of OSMF plug-ins, and anyone interested in leveraging the KickApps App Studio to distribute your online video technology to the thousands of publishers currently using the KickApps platform. In this session you will get an overview of the KickApps App Studio, and learn how to build your OSMF plug-ins for integration with it. We will review the OSMF architecture and drill down into specifics about plug-in implementation.

Come by booth #335 at Adobe MAX for more information.