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Measuring
I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.
Assessing necessity
Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.
Defining engagement
Defining what engagement means to you as a brand at the outset is important. Is it having a certain number of comments? Getting people to contribute ideas to a wiki? Making sure they spend x amount of time on a site? It is only later that the ‘how’ of engagement should come into play. The answer to ‘how can we measure the impact of our website/community’ can only be given when you answer ‘what exactly am I looking for’ first.
Areas of engagement
If brands do engage online, where they engage is more important than how many places they are active online. I’d rather pick my battles (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example) and fight them well rather than have my social finger in too many pies (all the above plus MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut etc.) and not be able to have meaningful conversations with anyone. Of course this depends on where your audience is. They could well be in Second Life and Vimeo, and if they are, then that’s where you should be – not Facebook. (more after the break)
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Metrotwin Mumbai is now live!
We've been really busy the last couple of weeks working on a new project for British Airways - a follow-up to Metrotwin, which we created last year.
British Airways wanted to follow up on what Metrotwin started by extending the concept of twinning to their second most popular route after London-New York, namely London-Mumbai. Except we decided to go with a blog this time, for various reasons, the most significant of which is that India’s blogosphere is an extremely active, growing place and a blog would be a great way to document the best of both cities while attracting the right audience at the same time.
We rounded up a group of some of the best bloggers out there, from both Mumbai and London, and the fab folk at Agency.com helped us build the site.
Metrotwin Mumbai will cover the best of what Mumbai and London have to offer. They are both similar in so many ways – both are vibrant, diverse, and have a huge history of art and culture. I often have problems deciding which city I like more. Our bloggers, all talented cityfolk who love their urban surroundings, are going to highlight their favourite things to do and places to see in either Mumbai or London (or both!!). The best places to eat Indian food in London? The best places to hang out after work in Mumbai? What’s the equivalent of London’s Kew Gardens in Mumbai, to soak in some greenery? The answers to all these and more are forthcoming. Just stay tuned to Metrotwin Mumbai.
A huge thank you to everyone involved in this project, especially Julia who came up with the very smart design for the site.
What are you waiting for? Head to Metrotwin Mumbai and check it out!
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More nice words about Metrotwin
Stuart noticed a blog called Digital Strategy where Rob Innes aims to review new sites in digital “intended to inspire thinking by showing how brands are communicating with their customers”.
One of the sites that he’s reviewed is Metrowin - about which he says:
This is a High Design social networking site from British Airways. It links two of the world’s best cities – London and New York and twins establishments from both cities. It’s a gorgeous site with “Huge Design Co Rate Card” written all over it. BA created the environment and then allowed contributors in both cities to take it forward. Despite BA’s obvious interest in the two cities, flying so often between the two (ten flights a day according to the trusty Skyscanner site for a random day in Feb 09), the site does not suffer from commercial over-promotion and the primary content – establishment reviews and city information is very much the focus of the site.
The site does not have an obvious “Christmas” category but it reflects the realities of the contributors, which naturally includes Christmas linked themes – Cozy Holiday Cocktails, for instance. The content is fresh and kept relevant to the community because it comes from the community. Nice job BA.
Thanks, Rob!
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Metrotwin’s in Contagious!
It’s almost the end of the year, and everyone and their sister is bringing out a ‘best of 2008′ list. One of the more interesting ones to read through is Contagious Magazine’s compilation of the Most Contagious things of 2008, spanning 16 categories from technology, entertainment and social media to gaming, viral and mobile.
It warmed the cockles of our hearts to notice that Metrotwin is mentioned in the ‘Most Contagious Social Media’ category. Woohoo!
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What a nice letter about Metrotwin.com
In this week’s New Media Age this week (6 November issue), Steve Richards the MD of Yomega has written a letter titled ‘BA shows brands the way to use social media’. It’s a very nice letter in which Steve says:
“British Airways’ foray into social media underlines the appeal and potential of these channels for mainstream brands. UGC gets its fair share of damaging headlines, but BA’s Metrotwin initiative grasps the value of social media at a strategic level, underlining the BA brand as digitally astute and accessible and instilling a sense of community amongst its customers.”
Thanks Steve. We salute you right back. With competitors like you, who needs friends?
;-)
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Metrotwin Recommends
We’ve been using our new Acts As Recommendable plugin on metrotwin.com and it’s been interesting to see how it’s performing in a real-world situation.
Bookmarks (places) are integral to Metrotwin, and a user can associate themselves with a bookmark by ‘Loving it’, saving it to their profile, or by stating they’ve been there.
So there was potentially a lot of information that could be collected about users preferences from their association with bookmarks. And that information could then be used to improve the overall experience, such as recommending bookmarks to people, and showing similar bookmarks – a great example of a practical application to Collective Intelligence.
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Metrotwin.com err.. “takes off”
Super-exciting news this morning as we’ve finally take the stabilisers off Metrotwin, British Airways’ new social recommendation service that we’ve been working on since March. The site has been in private beta and today we pressed the button and brought the password/log-in screen down to make the site accessible to everyone.
Metrotwin has been a collaboration between Made by Many, BBH and Agency.com. We led the service and interaction design and worked with BBH to create the network of bloggers and online communities who provide the recommendations. The site is a social utility rather than a social networking site: it’s an online community that treats London and New York as a continuum and it’s aimed at anyone living in or travelling between the two cities who’s struggling to navigate the vast volume of web content about these cities. If you’ve ever tried to use the Web to plan a trip to either city you’ll understand – so many web pages, so little time. These must be two of the most written about, blogged about, photographed and videoed pairs of cities anywhere online.
That idea of pairing the two cities has been developed into something that we got really excited about: social twinning. When you listen to people explaining the other city to each other you hear it: “What’s the Harvey Nicks of New York?”, “Shoreditch is kinda like Williamsburg…”. There is a fuzzy, collective understanding about how each city maps on to the other. These are sibling cities – very similar and yet very different. Within this weird love:hate rivalry (always respectful, it has to be said) there is real social currency. The fact is that I have more in common with people in New York City than with the good folks of Dagenham (no offence).
The site you’ll see today at Metrotwin.com is just the beginning. It’s the core. We’re in a good place to push the site in new directions – more social features, like a ‘People’ page and the ability to follow other people; or more playful ways to bring the idea of twinning to the fore; or new ways to visualise the city and to take Metrotwin with you inside an iPhone or printed out on paper; or perhaps a souped-up ‘Neighbourhoods’ view of the site. There are already some very cool features, including ‘Metrotwin Recommends’ – a collaborative filtering tool that looks at what you like and recommends places you haven’t been to yet; and the ‘Metrotwin Index’ – which provides a people-powered view of the best of the long tail of both cities. Who knows? The plan is to watch real people play with it first – we’re going to see what sticks, look at what happens and make changes and new releases based on all of that.
Many, many thanks to all involved – especially everyone at Made by Many and BBH who have worked on it. We’ll be following this post up with some more about the technology used for Metrotwin and the way we’ve all worked together on the project. Tally ho!
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