Prosumer Matrix: Social Media
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The document discusses the evolution and significance of social media, emphasizing its role in consumer empowerment and corporate engagement. It describes the 'prosumer' concept, where consumers actively shape discussions around products and brands, and outlines a matrix of social media stages from simply monitoring brand mentions to proactive customer engagement. Additionally, it highlights various strategies for leveraging social media tools and methodologies to enhance business functions, marketing efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Prosumer Matrix: Social Media
- 1. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 1 Social Media It’s about Social Media. Societies can only be built by Humans, no matter if they are virtual, the important point is that they remain social. They should have the capacity to grow and create value. Value that will matter. Advancement of online Social Networking and the rise in Consumer Generated Media have turned the Business word into its new era, and the said fact is consumers now control the larger end of the stick. At the same time corporate are poring millions of Dollars in understanding and voicing there existence. Today consumer is in control, he speaks about products, he speaks about brands, and is demanding to be heard… Are we listening? This Social Network is inflating with lot of buzzing going round, millions of post are posted every second, listening is important but what? and to whom? matters… In this wide spread spectrum of social networking it is important to have a focus point. The first focus remains the Consumer, and the second the Product (or Brand). These two words give rise to a concept “Prosumer” that is a Consumer speaking about a product and hence “Prosumer Matrix”. A common question can be now asked, Who is a Prosumer? Prosumer is God… He is every where. He is everybody. He knows everything. He can take any Avatar. He is the creator. He is the protector. He is the controller. He is the destroyer. He doesn’t have any boundaries. He exists in this Prometheus virtual world. He has the power of masses. It all started with the media revolution, with the Internet… Almost a decade ago when Internet was only a medium where the consumers could see what is said by the Business world they didn’t had control, the couldn’t interact, but had a global platform where they could only gain knowledge. But soon this was going to be changed, with the concept of peer to peer networking they could now share. It was this same time, instant messaging was also growing popularity. People could communicate with each other instantly. This was the trigger point in technology. It was the epic time when WOM (Word of Mouth) was introduction to Social media, things have changed drastically. This was a trigger where societies became social again and the concept of social network was born. With growing interactions and knowledge it will not take long when this Social Network will be transformed into a Symantec Network. Social Media in it real terms: “Practices and technologies which allow people to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives”
- 2. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 2 Social Media In short, Social Media is… For Participants For Businesses It is a chance to listen, engage and It is a dialogue, mainly between peers… collaborate… Social Media describes a new set of internet tools that enables share community experience both online and in person. People and the role they play in Social Media. Creators o Who creates the main Content, Blog, Video, PPT, Images, Webpage etc. Critics o Who post comments on the content created by Creators Collectors o Who collect the content created by the Creators + Critics through RSS, Alerts, Feeds, tags, bookmarks etc Joiners o Who visit the portal, website, blog, or the content directly and “maintain a profile”. Spectators o Who visit the portal, website, blog, or the content directly but “do not maintain a profile”. Inactive o Non of the above, come to the site, blog, portal and have no interest in it leave without any interactions.
- 3. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 3 Social Media Why bother with Social Media. It’s Huge It’s Trusted It’s Impact is on Global Scale Huge: 2/3 of the global internet population use Social Networking sites or are Socially Networked Total time spent on Social Networking sites is almost 10% It has high volumes o 100 million Blogs and counting o 10’s thousands Discussion Forums o 10’s thousands Online News Portals o Thousands Reach Media Sites o Microblogging. Linkedin etc… Has very high growth rate Trusted: People trust each other Advancement in technology, people have more sharper tools to communicate with each other using social technologies Trust has shifted to the Participants People trust recommendation of other customers Social Media is Democratizing Communications. Impact: People are talking about Products, Brands. Brand no more lives in the voice of PR agencies / PR it lives in the voice of there Consumers It has opened up a new market where consumers can be engaged. This new market is not about saying to people, but listening to them and then engaging them. The future of marketing is about trust, it about “Listening when nobody is Speaking” Social Media usage and Business Functions Sales Internal / External Communications Advertising Marketing Human Resource
- 4. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 4 Social Media Public Relations Collaborative Working Lead Generation Understanding Markets or Market Research Competitive Intelligence Business Intelligence Risk Intelligence Branding Social Media Matrix In Social Media everything can be measured... But measuring the right stuff is important. Quantitative Qualitative Polls Loyalty Satisfaction index Authority News followers Interactions News subscribers Signal Website / Blog visitors Generosity Sentiments Velocity Clout Intensions Psychographics Motives etc The Matrix and its 7 Stages. The First stage of Matrix Stage: There is no Objective at all. Description: There is an organization which has a listening program but doesn’t have any specific objective or goals, and is not using the information gathered in a proper resourceful way. Resources or Tools used : They simply use alerting tools such as Google alerts, Yahoo alerts and other alerting sites (there are plenty of them), they also use the aggregation tools such as RSS feed, Atom feed etc to collect information
- 5. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 5 Social Media What is the Impact: This is the basic level and can only give self awareness and is only used for self awareness. No specific action can be take from this data. The Second stage of Matrix Stage: Tracking of Brand Mentions. Description: This is like traditional clipping service, and is a common practice performed by Organizations, and Public Relations departments. The prime objective is to track mentions in the social space. Besides tracking there is no guidance what to do next. Resources or Tools used: These are hi-end web-based listening platforms with report capabilities based on the Brand, Product, Keyword, etc… Radian6, Visible Technologies, BuzzMatrics, Cymfony Dow Jones, Techrigy and Alterian, etc… are the Providers of these technologies having some differences in each of them. What is the Impact: Improves Self-awareness, huge volumes of data and information can be tracked. Yet most of them lag in complete or in-depth analysis, tonality, sentiments, intentions, coverage, etc… hence there is no complete understanding of Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). The Third stage of Matrix. Stage: Identifying market risks and opportunities Description: This is a proactive process involves manual work, it mostly involves in seeking or tracking out online discussions and communications, comments, that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect or opportunities. Resources or Tools used: In addition to a listening platform there is a dedicated group of people /staff to follow the trends as they occur. These people must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams. Alerting tools, specialized software’s and listening platforms are must / required. What is the Impact: Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, answers to comments, questions can be delivered online, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitor’s customers, or helping binding your existing customers “Competitive intelligence”
- 6. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 6 Social Media The Fourth Stage of Matrix Stage: Improving Campaign / Public Relation / Marketing / Sales etc… efficiency Description: Rather than just measure Campaign / Public Relation / Marketing / Sales etc… effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time value add and improved efficiency Resources Needed: Dedicated resource including Infrastructure to Monitor, Measure and Manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to Campaign / Public Relation / Marketing / Sales etc… effort, and the resources to make course corrections in real-time. Traditional web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics are common used tools along with some advance SEO tools. What is the Impact: Organizations can have a more effective Campaign / Public Relation / Marketing / Sales etc… can Monitor, analyze and effectively handle situations, can also be used for Business Intelligence Optimization, Strategies and Decisions. The Fifth Stage of Matrix Stage: Measuring customer satisfaction and survey, comments, communications. Description: Measuring customer comments, communications, experience in addition to satisfaction, organizations can maintain real-time sentiment analysis or opinion mining or linguistic analysis. as customers interact. Sysomos and Backtype (now acquired by twitter) have focus areas into this space. Resources Needed: Organizational Client Servicing and Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening tools and platform for sentiment analysis, customer intelligence, opinion mining etc… techniques and tools include people and infrastructure. Insight platforms like Communispace few others offer online focus groups solutions. What is the impact: Organizations, Products, Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction. Then identify areas of improvement, engagements, durations and customer lifecycle
- 7. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 7 Social Media The Sixth Stage of Matrix Stage: Responding to customer inquires and understanding customer needs Description: This is about responding, finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions. Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond. Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them. Resources needed: An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock. Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, sentiments, physiographic and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data. What is the impact: Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response. Opportunity not only to serve customers in their natural mediums, but also to offer them a richer experience… regardless of their customer touch points. The Seventh Stage of Matrix: Stage: Being proactive and anticipating customers Description: Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it. By looking at previous patterns of historical data, Organizations can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers his own as well as competitors. Resource Needed: An advanced customer database, high-end tools, customized platforms with predictive application put in place, as well as a proactive team to reach out to customers before an incident has happened. (Haven’t seen any such application yet, will like to make one…) What will be the impact: This tool is to identifying prospects and engaging them before competitors can yield a larger marketing funnel, or reducing customer frustration and fixing problems before they happen. This leads to having a good Business intelligence base, Human intelligence tasks, Customer Intelligence, Strategy and Decisions making, Brand Jacking, etc… Social media is not different to traditional media. Like the traditional media it also broadcasts, but it broadcast brands, image, performance of your company whether it is good or bad. It brings in all the concepts of traditional media, reach, frequency physiographic, demographics, time spend, OTS, and much more…
- 8. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 8 Social Media Social Media, things to do… How? When? What? There are many common things spoken about Social Media, but the uncommon thing is doing it… To be very blunt about it “Social Media is a teenage sex… everyone is very excited about it, few know about it, and very few have actually done it.” Change is about to happen. It’s very important for Businesses to acclimatize to this change and change themselves before change changes them. Things to do… No. Steps Definition 1. Set up alerts Use various services to create tracking and alerts for industry keywords, name, and any other information that is relevant to your research 2. Set up feeds Save yourself some time when researching-instead of occasionally checking for alerts, news, and other pieces of social web information, set up an RSS feed that will collect it for you 3. Filter your feeds Monitoring social media can be time consuming, so set up your feeds to only deliver content that’s relevant to you. 4. Pay attention to Be sure to pay attention to the demographics and the demographics psychographics of the social media users you’re using for and research psychographics 5. Monitor your Researching the social web will allow you to find out when reputation others are talking about you and allow you to respond 6. Use Search site: By adding “site: your social media site of choice,” you can operator delve into the depths of just about any social media site 7. Regularly assess Make sure you’re only following feeds that are helpful to your subscriptions research by doing a review every month or quarter 8. Perform market In Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools, you can research on your turn to your own connections and learn about their interests connections: just by monitoring the videos, images, and information they post. 9. Use a dashboard Create your own social media monitoring dashboard in order to keep all of your research in one place. 10. Seek out On Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, get connected with authorities users who will provide you with excellent information 11. Look beyond Check out your contacts’ contacts to find people that can offer who you already you quality knowledge as well.
- 9. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 9 Social Media know 12. Just ask Make use of your social media connections, and simply ask the people you know on Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites what you’d like to find out 13. Use “best of” On FriendFeed, you can use the “best of” feature to only check features: out the best posts of the day, week or month, so you can just skip to the good stuff 14 Find out what’s Use social media to track ideas and see what’s going on in buzzing in your your niche niche 15. Check out Use tools that will allow you to see the most popular posts on popular posts the web 16. Research your The social web is a great place to learn about what your competitors competitors are putting out there, and what others are saying about them 17. Stay on top of Use social media research to keep up with the important events breaking news happening in your niche 18 Always check On blogs with a good following, the comments are often as out the valuable as the blog post itself comments 19. Get networked Find out who is talking about issues that are relevant to your niche through social web research Tools / Methodologies / Concepts. Following are the tools or methodologies that should be used in monitoring the digital space. 1. Linguistic Analysis with Latent Semantic indexing / Singular Value Decomposition / Computational Text Analysis (machine learning) 2. Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining 3. Data visualization 4. SWOT Analysis 5. Data Mining. 6. Human Intelligence Tasking 7. Customer Intelligence and CRM 8. Business Intelligence 9. Risk Intelligence 10. Competitive Intelligence 11. Search Term Intelligence 12. Psychographics 13. Sociogram 14. Mashups 15. Scorecards 16. Dashboards 17. Mashboards
- 10. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 10 Social Media 18. Embodied Interactions. 19. Affiliated Partners 20. Crisis Management 21. Business Continuity 22. Astroturfing 23. Brandjacking 24. Comment spam 25. Flog 26. Link baiting 27. Screen scarping 28. Splog 29. Brand and Brand security 30. Empirical Index 31. Constrain Theory 32. Perturbation Theory 33. Theory of Quadrants 34. Placebo effect 35. Neural Programming 36. Neuro-Economics 37. Path and Time to Live 38. Visualization Periodic Table 39. Neuromers 40. Frameworks and Modeling Snapshot of Social Media Landscape Micro Media: Microblogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as text, small photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. The content of a microblog differs from a traditional blog, in that it is typically smaller in actual size and aggregate file size. A single entry could consist of a single sentence or fragment or an image or a brief, ten second video. But, its purpose is similar to that of a traditional blog. Microblog about particular topics can range from the simple, such as "what one is doing at a given moment," to the thematic, such as "sports cars," to business topics. Many microblogs provide short commentary on a person-to-person level, share news about a company's products and services, or provide logs of the events of one's life. Twitter http://twitter.com/ 12 seconds http://12seconds.tv/ Yammer https://www.yammer.com/ Tumblr http://www.tumblr.com/ Qaiku http://www.qaiku.com/
- 11. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 11 Social Media Plurk http://www.plurk.com/ Jaiku http://www.jaiku.com/ Identi http://identi.ca/ Ping http://www.ping.fm/ Posterous http://posterous.com/ Status http://status.net/ Seismic http://seesmic.com/ Social Bookmarking Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy (collaborative tagging). Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content". In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks. Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features. Blogmarks http://www.blogmarks.net/ Delirious http://de.lirio.us/ Delicious http://delicious.com/
- 12. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 12 Social Media Digg http://digg.com/ Feedmaker http://feedmarker.com/ Myprogs http://myprogs.net/ Reddit http://www.reddit.com/ Reader2 http://reader2.com/ Simply http://www.simpy.com/ Comments and Reputation These are sites / search engines to track comments made on a particular topic or a keyword. Disqus http://disqus.com/ Cocomments http://www.cocomment.com/ Intense debate http://intensedebate.com/ Backtype http://www.backtype.com/ Spicecomments http://www.spicecomments.com/ Echo http://js-kit.com/ Satisfaction http://www.satisfaction.com/ My hot comments http://www.myhotcomments.com/ Croudsourced Crowdsourcing is a combination of Crowd and a Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions. Crowdsourcing is a fairly a new concept and is slowly accepted and becoming popular in businesses, authors, journalist, etc. as a short term for trend using web technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific or a known body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group. Other differences between open source and crowdsourced production relate to the motivations of individuals to participate. Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use, or even by businesses.
- 13. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 13 Social Media How does this works 1. The company has a problem / Job / Work 2. The company broadcast it on line 3. Online crowd are asked to give solutions / service 4. Crowd submits solution / services 5. Company rewards solution /service 6. Company get solution 7. Company profit’s Few companies which do Crowdsourcing 1. Innocentive – Created by the pharmaceutical company Ely Lilly with the objective of bringing together companies with specific R&D needs (called seekers) and scientists dispersed all over the world (called solvers). A certain seeker comes to the online platform and describes what problem he is trying to solve, specifying the award he is willing to pay for the answer. Registered solvers are able to read the problem and submit solutions. Should, the seeker find a feasible solution among the submitted ones the person who came up with it receives the award. 2. Cambrian House –“Cambrian House’s mission is to discover and commercialize software ideas through the wisdom and participation of crowds”. Created in the end of 2005 the companies basically collect, filter, develop and implement software ideas. All parts of the process are managed with inputs from the crowds, and royalties are paid whenever someone contributes with concepts or coding 3. iStockphoto – Few years ago if some one needed professional quality photos, they had to rely on professional image banks or image studio and have to spend between $ 50 and $ 200. Today iStockphoto offers a huge collection of images with professional quality for prices as low as $ 1. What is the trick? They enable anyone to upload their own pictures and earn royalties as people or organizations purchase them. The service is also extremely simple and user-friendly: you register up for free, search images by keywords, select the ones you are interested, pay and download them. 4. Mechanical Turk – “Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak”. The Mechanical Turk was created by Amazon.com to link together companies requiring HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) performed and people who have spare time and want to earn some money. The idea is interesting, but it will require some initial traction in order to yield significant results. 5. Trendwatching – the company counts more than 8.000 collaborators (called trend spotters) around the world who are responsible for tracking and reporting any changes in the market place and consumer behavior. After this “trends gathering” process the
- 14. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 14 Social Media firm offers both a free monthly briefing and specific paid services. What the collaborators earn? When they submit trend reports they receive points that can be accumulated and exchanged for prizes such as flash memories, iPods and the like. 6. Threadless – incredibly smart concept. Artists or anyone with some spare creativity can submit their T-shirt designs. The designs get vote by the community. The top rated designs get produced and sold back to anyone interested. 7. John Fluevog – in three words: Open Source Footware. Now that might sound weird, but it is exactly what John Fluevog Boots & Shoes is doing . One can submit his design for a shoe or even only part of a shoe. If the design subsequently passes the voting phase it will enter the production line, the person who came up with the design will not earn royalties on it since we are talking about “open source”, instead he will be able to put his own name on the shoe and be recognized as a contributor for the John Fluevog company. 8. Ninesigma – the business model of Nine Sigma is pretty similar to Innocentive, but instead of focusing exclusively on scientific and research problems they aim for innovation management problems. The demand side can request solutions for problems related to services, information or software, hoping to improve the innovative processes within their organization. 9. Second Life – Linden Lab developed a virtual world completely created and customized by the users. There could be some discussion on whether Second Life represents or not a crowdsourcing company. In one hand it is relying on the work of thousand of people worldwide to build the content and create value for the “game”. On the other, however, there is no clear relationship between the parts involved. Some players create content spontaneously to have fun, others aim to make profits, and so on. 10. Rent A Coder – “Rent a coder is an international marketplace where people who need custom software developed can find coders in a safe and business-friendly environment.” The company basically receives requests for software development and forwards such requests to their pool of coders, which amounts to 150.000 worldwide. The coders, in turn, may decide to answer to a specific request with a proposal. Finally the requester chooses among the received proposals (with the possibility to view the resume of coders) and a contract is established once he finds a satisfactory solution. Blog Platforms Blogging platforms are software or hosting servers where corporate, commercial blogs can be hosted, or kept or created. People then can be invited to write a blog or blogs. These platforms can come along with different features which can then be customized as per the request of the hosting client. These can be hosted on the personal web servers or can be hosted on hires systems or hosting servers or hosting datacenters. These are basically software or set of codes or content management systems.
- 15. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 15 Social Media Wordpress http://www.wordpress.org/ Blogger https://www.blogger.com/start Movable type http://www.movabletype.org/ Drupal http://drupal.org/ Joomla http://joomla.org/ Expression engines http://expressionengine.com/ Square space http://www.squarespace.com/ Lycos tripod http://www.tripod.lycos.com/ Blog communications Blog communications are sites where commercial blogs are written and posted. These are professional blog sites or hosting domains. i.e. sites on which blog platforms are installed. Now a days many businesses corporate, government have there own blogging communications hosted on there own blogging platforms or on hired domains. There atr plenty of these blogging sites Blog communities / aggregators Blog communities are web hosts forming a community like a social network sites with the only motive of blogging (to blog, exchange blog). These are also sites where blogs can be aggregated through RSS or Atom feeds. Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/ My blog log http://www.mybloglog.com/ Blogged http://www.blogged.com/ Shy ftr http://www.shyftr.com/ Rating sites / Web Traffic Monitoring sites What is Web Traffic? Web Traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth. Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site. Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on search engines and through Search engine optimization. Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site. Web traffic can be analysed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically-generated list of all the pages served. A hit is
- 16. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 16 Social Media generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, thus a page with 5 images could generate 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself). A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more. Tracking applications external to the web site can record traffic by inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the web site. Web traffic is also sometimes measured by packet sniffing and thus gaining random samples of traffic data from which to extrapolate information about web traffic as a whole across total Internet usage. The following types of information are often collated when monitoring web traffic: The number of visitors. The average number of page views per visitor – a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site, possibly because they like it or find it useful. Average visit duration – the total length of a user's visit. As a rule the more time they spend the more they're interested in your company and are more prone to contact. Average page duration – how long a page is viewed for. The more pages viewed, the better it is for your company. Domain classes – all levels of the IP Addressing information required to deliver Webpages and content. Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance Most requested pages – the most popular pages Most requested entry pages – the entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which are the pages most attracting visitors Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages may have a popular external link Top paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths identifying the way most customers go through the site Web sites like Alexa Internet produce traffic rankings and statistics based on those people who access the sites while using the Alexa toolbar. The difficulty with this is that it's not looking at the complete traffic picture for a site. Large sites usually hire the services of companies like Nielsen NetRatings, but their reports are available only by subscription. Alexa http://www.alexa.com/ Compete http://compete.com/
- 17. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 17 Social Media Social Networking and Life streams A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes," which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency,. Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of Nodes and Ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and Ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes, research in a number of fields shown social networks operate on many levels, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant nodes between all the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to measure social capital -- the value that an individual gets from the social network. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines. The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe "...a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents --- papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists. Socialthing http://lifestream.aim.com/ Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com/ Orkut http://www.orkut.co.in/ Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ Ping http://www.ping.fm/ Lifestream http://lifestream.fm/ Bebo http://www.bebo.com/ And many more this list is inflating day on day …. The social networking concept is highly complex and each one has some different motive and objective keeping most of it common. One example we can compare with Facebook and Linkedin. Sites like Linkedin are also sometimes known as Niche networks (e.g. ning, plaxo, crowdvine )
- 18. Dr. Anar D. Rupji 18 Social Media Aggregators Videos :: Images :: Documents :: Books :: Music These are sites which a collection is books, Videos, Pictures, etc. for people to explore, share, download upload …. These are social networking sites or libraries. It has multiple use… majority being sharing information but may be used for commercial purpose for marketing for advertising for Public Relations. As these has a vital effect i.e. once uploaded can be reached to millions of people, groups, networks, etc… these sites are termed as viral marketing or viral PR or Viral Advertising. There are thousands of such sites and inflating at a very rapid rate. Youtube Google viseos Wikipedia Revver Biip.tv Weshow Google docs Slideshare Social banks These is a new concept growing up in social media where community networked together can borrow and lend money on the network. Though this is not widely accepted and also has issues many countries government policies. ZOPA http://uk.zopa.com/ ZOPA is a marketplace where people lend and borrow money to and from each other, sidestepping the banks. Zopa launched in the UK in March 2005 and is run by a small team drawing experience from a range of industries including financial services. The team is backed by experienced investors, such as Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, Wellington Partners, Tim Draper and The Rowland Family. Zopa is a term taken from business theory. It stands for Zone of Possible Agreement and is the overlap between one person's bottom line (the lowest they're prepared to get for something) and another person's top line (the most they're prepared to give for something).