A useful post about Social Media Metrics/Return on Investment with some thoughts on "how to provide useful metrics and measurements on the effects of social media for a nonprofit organization" and lots of useful links. It suggests "audience, engagement, loyalty, influence, and action" can put metrics in the "more holistic" context of outcomes, measures, strategy.
Category: Uncategorised
New models for measuring the effectiveness of websites
From an article called Evidence-based website management, some thoughts from Gerry McGovern on measuring the effectiveness of websites:
We can, with increasing precision, know what content gets people to act and what content doesn't. The length of time people spend on the page is just a basic measure. Here are some others:
- How many links have there been to the content. This is the ultimate measure as the link is the gold standard of the Web.
- Where did the customer go once they read the content? Did they have a positive or negative reaction?
- How has the content been rated by customers?
- Has the content been blogged about? Did it get a conversation going?
Where should social networking 'live'?
Chris Anderson says social networking is a feature, not a destination:
Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination.
So far, so good – but Chris Anderson's day job is at Wired, which is definitely a destination site with a huge audience. Cultural heritage sites are useful for a range of people, but I suspect most people stumble across our content incidentally, through search engines and external links – they don't think "I'll spend my lunch break browsing the Museum of Whatever's website".
But another of his projects is much smaller so the issues are more relevant to the cultural heritage sector:
So we've been debating internally whether we want to shift to a distributed functionality strategy (AKA "go where the people are"), where most users interact with us via a widget on third party sites, clicking through to our site only when they want to go deeper. We're embarking on some experiments with a few partners we like to see how that goes. Hopefully a distributed strategy will help us reach critical mass as a destination, too, but right now we're simply experimenting to see what works.
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I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.
So how would this work for us? Would our visitors gather around specific institutions, around institutional collections, around meta-collections that span several institutions, or around the sector as a whole? Would they, for example, gather around a site like Exploring 20th Century London, which has a very specific temporal and regional focus? Or are these potential users already on sites that meet their needs, at least to some extent? Our collections will inevitably still form a valuable resource for discussion, no matter where that discussion takes place.
Who knows? I think it'll be fun finding out.
I keep meaning to post about Ning. As the post above says, "Ning is not a destination itself–instead, it provides hosted social networking tools for niche sites to create their own destinations."
It could be a useful tool for smaller organisations who want to get into social software but don't have the means to build their hosts or applications, or for small ad hoc team working.
Random quote on archaeology
Via the archaeology section on about.com:
Archaeology is not simply the finite body of artefactual evidence uncovered in excavations. Rather, archaeology is what archaeologists say about that evidence. It is the ongoing process of discussing the past which is, in itself, an ongoing process. Only recently have we begun to realise the complexity of that discourse. … [T]he discipline of archaeology is a site of disputation–a dynamic, fluid, multidimensional engagement of voices bearing upon both past and present.
Berners-Lee attacks "stupid" male geek culture
The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an end to the "stupid" male geek culture that disregards the work of capable female engineers, and puts others off entering the profession.
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Berners-Lee said a culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. "If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level," he said.
Some fairly random links
I've been busy with overseas visitors and preparing for the Life in the UK test – I'm in ur country, working in ur museumz; so this is a fairly random selection of stuff that's caught my eye recently.
A heart-warming story for geeks from the BBC: CAPTCHAs used to decipher digitised historical texts.
"How can you tell if an existing site is on the verge of needing a redesign or has even far exceeded its usefulness? Here are nine questions to guide your decision" in
Does your site need a redesign?
Two unrelated posts I've liked recently, on Navigators, Explorers, and Engaged Participants as user models; and going back to basics for digital museum content:
We don't need new technologies to attract teen audiences, we need, if anything, to revisit how we (and others) interpret our collections and ideas and then decide what new technologies can best convey the information
Some random links…
Two very handy resources when choosing forum software: opensourcecms.com lets you try out various installations – you can create test forums and play with the settings and forummatrix.org helps you compares applications on a variety of facets, and there's a wizard to help you narrow the choices.
Andy Powell makes the excellent point that social software-style tags function as virtual venues:
if you are holding an event, or thinking about holding an event… decide what tag you are going to use as soon as possible. … In fact, in a sense, the tag becomes the virtual venue for the event's digital legacy.
In other news, Intel get into Mashups for the Masses – "an extension to your existing web browser that allows you to easily augment the page that you are currently browsing with information from other websites. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar suggests Mashups that it can apply to the current page in order to make it more useful for you" and the BBC reports on Metaplace, a "free tool that allows anyone to create a [3D] virtual world" and incorporates lots of social web tools.
ENO goes 2.0
The English National Opera's site for their production of Carmen is all 'Web 2.0' – they've made use of 'behind the scenes' video interviews and blog posts and there's also a Flickr group and Facebook profile. It's great to see this kind of experimentation, especially as it helps us all find out if there's an audience for this type of content and level of engagement, how sustainable that engagement is and on which platforms it works best. It also helps us learn how organisations react to this kind of direct engagement with their audiences – the comments on this post show that sometimes this can be a difficult relationship.
Interesource, the company who made the site said:
Carmen also features tagging, user comments and some beautifully rich video and audio that will turn the production inside out to provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes back story. We are also integrating with several external services such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook that provide users with additional ways of participating. We’re going to bring the production to life online using ‘people media’ throughout the Social Web.
According to Merlin on the Web: the British Museum Collection Database Goes Public on the CHArt conference site, the British Museum are putting their entire catalogue online. The evaluation will make fascinating reading and I hope can be made public – I'd like to know who uses it and why, does the variation in detail and 'quality' of records matter to them, how much of the collection is accessed, how many corrections or requests for more information are made, and how public comments work in practice.