At the recent National Golf Foundation (NGF) Symposium, I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Neely, CEO and founder of Networked Insights (NI), a firm that builds software tools which analyze the social web, helping marketers make better strategic and tactical decisions.
Dan is a smart, savvy, innovative and humorous business strategist who helped launch 40 ebusinesses while with Deloitte, Scient and other firms. His team created esurance, the first online insurance company.
Dan talks about "expressions" as a more relevant and valuable social media measurement, and I asked him to elaborate in this interview.
What do you mean by expressions?
Expressions vs. Impressions. The idea of measuring value on the web by measuring impressions is outdated and the accuracy of that measure is questionable. It's based on the Nielsen paradigm where they think a small sample of set top boxes is representative of a much larger population.
Today, we can get feedback from everyone engaged online and we can measure expresssions -- what those people are actually saying about brands or products on the web. But even at that, we're still only talking about the vocal minority. NI can also measure how people interact with content online to give a complete picture of both what people are saying and what people are doing online.
Why are expressions valuable?
Expressions are valuable because they represent direct, unfiltered and unbiased user feedback. Expressions can be obvious like a post or less obvious like an invite to a video (ala YouTube). We need to start caring about what customers do in addition to what they say they are going to do. So we need to measure the less obvious expressions as well.
How are they more valuable than normal measurements like impressions?
They're more valuable than impressions because impressions are inaccurate. Don't ask how many people might view a page on a website -- users are highly skilled at ignoring the noise on a webpage. Ask how many people are engaged with your content -- that's the real measure. Did they care enough to share it with others? Did they care enough to post a comment? Are they really engaged?
How can an organization or brand measure expressions?
For us the answer is obvious, use Social Sense. It is important not to limit this measure to your actual brand name as a search, but you need to understand the brand attributes your customers associate with your brand. For example, if you are Volvo you don't want to just search for Volvo, you want to search for safety and reliability.
What's the most effective way to sell expressions to management? Measuring expressions gives you an opportunity to reduce guesswork, improve accuracy and measure results in near real-time. This leads to real ROI -- why wouldn't you want that? Thanks, Dan for taking time for this interview and continued success in your valuable social web business. I know our readers will get value from these insights. Check out Daniel's blog for social web strategies and insights.
