Social Media Reshaping Politics in Arkansas

The social media are changing the political playing field, and their impact has never been more evident in Arkansas than in recent weeks.

Twitter, Facebook and blogging have allowed anyone with a computer to be part of the political landscape, to immediately respond to events and to throw out facts, conjecture, gossip and innuendo.

Add Private Notes to Tweets and Group Emails with Bccthis

Quick Pitch: Bccthis is an innovative technology that provides new levels of communication for email, micro-blogging and social networking services.

Genius Idea: If you’ve ever worked in an environment that shares a group mailing list, you know that at some point, side conversations about a certain topic start to take place off-list with a number of the participants. Sometimes you might want to add more background details or make clarifications, other times you’re — we’ll admit it — making fun of something the author of one of the threads said.

3 New Ways to Measure the Social Web

When most people think of web analytics, they think about pageview tracking; basically, measuring which pages on a website are being viewed. Pageview tracking is a well-established technology, but it’s no longer meeting the needs of many of the most well-known companies in social media. Companies like Facebook (Facebook), Zynga, Slide, and RockYou are spending tons of resources building their own internal analytics tools.

There’s a reason for this: Social media is highly competitive, and the biggest advantage you can have is data. To improve and grow, these companies need to gather as much information as they can, and they need more than simple pageview tracking.

In the following sections I will cover three of the most important things to measure for social applications.

Seth Godin on Email Marketing

Seth Godin has an insightful blog post up where he very succinctly describes the fundamental difference between spam and permission-based email campaigns.

A spam campaign feels like a smart idea, but over time, the more you use it, the less your brand is worth. A permission campaign, on the other hand, only grows in value, until it gets big enough that you can build an entire business around it.

Earning permission is a long-term, profitable, scalable strategy that pays for itself. Think about how much better off a brand would be if it took the time to make promises, keep them and be transparent about its communications.

Yesterday, Edelman launched it's take on the upcoming decade in a presentation entitled, "Digital Visions: 10 Ideas For a New Decade" 

White House Launches iPhone App

Want to watch President Obama's State of the Union address on the go next Wednesday? The White House has launched a new iPhone and iPod Touch application that will make that possible for some.

In a blog post on Whitehouse.gov, the Obama administration said the application would allow users to check for updates, watch videos and Web chats, and do some research. The blog noted that mobile Internet use has doubled over the last year and has become a more important means to receive information.

HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in your Email Marketing

You’ve most likely had an e-mail newsletter for your company for much longer than you’ve had a presence on social media sites. But now that you do both, the two can go hand-in-hand, with e-mail creating an opportunity to extend your presence on social media sites, and social media sites providing a way to get more e-mail subscribers.

At the moment though, most marketers aren’t connecting the dots. According to a recent study published by eMarketer, 48% of marketers include “forward to a friend” features in their e-mails, but only 13% include features that make it easy to share content on social networks. Here’s a look at how to close the gap, and why it’s so important that you do. 

Facebook Apps Can Now Email You

Just in case you were thinking Mafia Wars or Farmville weren't a big enough part of your daily life, Facebook has followed up on its promise and will now offer email notifications from applications. As we foretold in October, Facebook's roadmap for developers contained several key points that would restructure the ways in which applications would be allowed to contact users.

And the Winner is...Google

There's a pretty good chance that you've already seen evidence elsewhere of the fact that Google is rather thrilled with how aggressively Scott Brown's campaign embraced the suite of Google tools in his win. Google reps are reporting that the campaign dropped $145,000 on a "network blast" that saturated the Internet with Brown ads in the final days of the campaign, and all told the campaign spent some $230,000 on YouTube ads and overlays, visual ads, and in-search advertising. The result? Brown's ads were put in front of the faces of Massachusetts residents 65 million times in the months leading up to the election. A Google rep praised Brown's online ad effort as "very slick, very targeted, and very strategic."

As we noted in our piece on "Big Seed Marketing," a marketing "virus" must infect one or more people. Anthing less than a 100% infection will peter out and eventually die off. As Watts and Perreti note, designing a truly "viral" campaign is almost impossible. Most viral efforts are flukes and exceptions. Better, say the authors, to hit a large swath of people with a message, hope for a decent viral rate and then gather in more people as the message slowly decays back to parity.

Here is an update on a case study I published last week (a petition about an Oprah show), the results we saw from our petition, and how we calculated the "viral" or reproduction rate.

By any measure, the petition has been a success. To date 21,000+ people have signed on. This from a seedbase of no more than 7000 emails. So, what was the viral rate of this campaign? It's more difficult to calculate than you think. First let's set up some definitions:

• General Viral Rate - This is calculated by taking the number of recipients divided by the number of people infected over one generation of the email. So, for example, if I send an email to 10 people and half of those people send it on to one other person then the viral rate is 50%. Without using software such as ForwardTrack this number will be an estimation because we don't know the number of generations that have been processed nor the true number of "opens" and forwards.
• Impression Viral Rate - This percentage narrows our focus to the number of people who have actually opened the email and sent it on to other people who actually opened the email.
• Click-through Viral Rate - Now we're getting down to those who actually clicked through to a landing page to take action.
• Conversion Viral Rate - Lastly, we're looking for the % of people who actually signed on to the petition.

This is a fairly young science and we're treading on new ground here. Some of these rates we can calculate pretty accurately. Others, not so much.

Here are the facts on the ground frame from Phase 1 of our (which ran from 10/3 through 10/9):

At the recent Modern Media Strategies workshop at the Heritage Foundation, Patrick Ruffini focused his entire presentation on the eternal killer app: email (see here).

"Eyeballs" are everything for your online presence. As Ruffini put it: "Email is still the closest thing we have to mass communication on the web." He rightly notes that the famed Dean online revolution actually happened via email.

In May of this year, the Harvard Business Review published an excellent piece by Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti entitled: "Viral Marketing for the Real World". In it they examine the elusive phenomenon where a single email thread or online piece replicates like wildfire across the Internet.

They point out that this type of "viral" event is really accidental, difficult to reproduce, and impossible to predict. Instead they advocate "big-seed marketing." Essentially, big seed marketing:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.

They note that true viral marketing involved a "reproduction rate" of 1 or greater. That is, for every personal that receives the message he or she spreads it to more that one other person, thus leading to exponential growth. As the authors note:

By contrast, viral messages with an R of less than 1 are generally considered failures. That’s because purely viral campaigns, like disease outbreaks, typically start with a small number of seed cases and quickly burn themselves out unless their R exceeds the epidemic threshold, or tipping point, of 1.

Not everyone is into "forwarding like it's hot" (ala Michael Scott). Instead, your email send will slowly peter out to zero generation after generation.

However, the authors tell us that this "failure" can be seen as a boon if the initial seeding is large enough. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 and a email infection rate of 0.5 each generation would pass it on to half as many recipients. The math goes like this 5,000 + 2500 + 1250 + 625 + 312 + 156... After 6 generations your email infection burns out but you've reached an extra 20,000 in the process! Not a failure after all.

The authors note several examples of this type of viral marketing. An excellent read with great advice for any blogging marketeer.