Yesterday I’ve been reading Samir Balwani’s great blog post about social media measurement. Reading the post and the comments, I’ve been directed to Jeff Hammonds blog post about social media metrics. And the combination of both posts opened my eyes.

Bandwith indicators are unsuitable for measurement of social media ROI. Bandwith is the indicator of the generation push. Social medias nature is pull. People only listen to thinks they care about. Your bandwith maybe high, your marketing KPI may be great – but your company crashed because nobody cares about your products.

Back to start. The bandwith indicator was made by a few guys. Thier effort was to measure the bandwith of marketing and advertising. They used bandwith as a benchmark and while more and more people used it, bandwith itself became a rule. But that’s a long time ago. It’s time to create new indicators. Free your mind and use a different term. I’ll call them “proxies” or “a proxy”. Proxies because it’s a known word from webtech and it describes what it is: A placeholder.

It’s time to develop social media proxies. These proxies measure “weak values”. This values are not direct bound to your work, the work of your deparment, the work of your company. But used wisely a “weak value” tells a story about the customers conception outside of the circle of control. And it’s nothing else than a placeholder, like bandwith is too. A proxy.

Here’s a wikimap showing social media proxies. Measurement placeholders capturing the social media circles of culture, conversation and commerce. Feel free to edit and update this map. May the bandwith rest in peace!

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About three month ago I’ve posted my first Social Media Sketch. Meanwhile a lot of things happend and so I thought it would be the nice to update my sketch. And if you think you know this one, you are wrong! I’ve improved the colors and the structure but most of all I’ve updated the content. Some weak parts are replaced by more general and systematic information.

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Thanks to my buddy Digitalmind, he send me the link of the Social Colliders website. The service analyzes Twitter and shows a chart based on a keyword and corresponding posts. Here is an image of the output:

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Here the first result from my social media network. On december 29. I’ve published my social media sketch at Flickr.com – today this image has more than 67.000 views http://www.flickr.com/photos/birgerking/3145391821/

Flickr user 802.11 created this visual from the quintessence of my sketch http://www.flickr.com/photos/7372907@N07/3212348947/sizes/l/ Thank you very much 802.11! Great visualization! Please visit her Flickr page an leave a comment for her great work! The visual shows the flow of information between users and the influence of each other. Informations are displayed as water. When users aggregate informations, they steam up and collect as internet-clouds. Growing clouds create energy, the discharging power is displayed as lightning which bleed off on users/socities surface. Examples for energy discharge are Wikipedia or the change of the music industry. Other influences could be discovered with this visual, for example the future of data mining on database layers.

Thank you for every comment, participation and enhancement on this project. We are searching for partners who support the develoment of an interactive visual for touchscreen or iPhone. A skilled 3D-interactive-desigern is already supporting us.

Rgds,
Birger