Chantal and Vanessa tweeting from the plenary on Day 1, WCA2009

We’re past midway through the Congress, it’s end of Day 3. The WCA2009 blog is up and running with a variety of posts, lots of photos are available on the ICRAF Flickr photostream, and the @icraf on Twitter has 300 tweets from the plenary sessions and a few side events (and went from 0 to 90 followers in 3 days).

The reporting team embraced the idea of posting informal reports from the sessions and the conversations in the hallways. And even people who had never had the opportunity to blog before posted a few interesting things. In fact, most of the social media team became new users of blogging, photo sharing and microblogging tools.

At the beginning of this buzz-making adventure, we started to promote the use of the #WCA2009 tag. However, the full name of the Congress has been around for a while, so we’re keeping an eye on World Congress of Agroforestry as well.

While it’s early to draw any conclusions on how it’s going based on the numbers, here’s  a list of places I’m keeping an eye on to track how the WCA2009 is doing on the Social Web.

Google Blog Search

The name says it all: it’s Google search just for blogs. Using it to search for full name of Congress.

World Congress of Agroforestry on Google Blogs Search

Socialmention.com

Socialmention.com helps you search selectively on blogs, microblogs, comments, events, bookmarks, videos, Q&As, audio, video. The hashtag and the full Congress name are showing results in real time (a bit contaminated by a concurrent use of the WCA2009 tag for a number of different events).

#WCA2009 hashtag search on microblogs via Socialmention.com

Twitterfall

Real-time tracking and display of whatever you’re keeping an eye on. Here’s the fall this afternoon on the WCA2009 tag. Thanks to @romolotassone for pointing me to this.

WCA2009 on Twitterfall

Tweetgrid

Helps you visualize multiple real-time searches on one screen

Hashtag and Congress name search on Tweetgrid

Backtweets.com

Useful to track the links to the ICRAF site on Twitter, reads ‘through’ short URLs.

Backtweets

What else is out there? If you have tried these approaches before, how do they compare to each other? Any strategy you want to suggest? We’d love to know.

Related posts:

1. Social media at the 2nd World Congress on Agroforestry, Nairobi
2. Tweeting live from WCA2009 opening addresses
3. Social media for science: an interview with Tom Vandenbosch

Source: IMDb - © 2003 - Disney Enterprises, Inc. / Pixar Animation Studios

When I started drafting this post about our traffic trends for the first two quarters of 2009, I thought I’d call it: Six months of social media and how are we doing? But, as I was writing it, I realized that the story I wanted to tell was more about what we’ve learned so far from blogging and increasing the visibility of the ICT-KM Program on the Web than just measuring the impact of social media per se. Of course, the use of social media is part of the bigger picture, but what I had to say had more to do with an organic approach to the monitoring and evaluation of our Web publishing work.

Traffic monitoring and analysis play a big role in gathering insights into what we’re doing on the Web and how we’re doing it. In a previous post about including social media appropriately in a communications plan and measuring its effectiveness, the core message was ‘measure as you go and abandon that which doesn’t work‘. Well, here I attempt to explain what we’re learning from the main ways in which we measure traffic (blog page views and referrers, the two core stats provided by hosted blogs at Wordpress.com) and what we’ve learned so far about blogging.

In January 2009, around the time the ShareFair was taking place, more of us at ICT-KM Program started getting serious about blogging and social media (Simone Staiger-Rivas and Nadia Manning-Thomas had been doing it systematically since 2007). We used different channels to create a buzz about the ShareFair, and then we organized the first Social Media Workshop. By that time, more of us had started blogging, and not only about the Program’s activities. Then we got hooked on Twitter, social bookmarking, pushing stuff out on different networks… and watching the blog statistics as if they were rare fish in a tank!

Seriously, when we started, we aimed to walk the talk, share lessons learned, and increase the reach of our information. To monitor and assess the value of putting so much out there, we began looking systematically at the blog traffic statistics as the key indicators of the increasing visibility of our Program-related activities and several CGIAR initiatives (CGIAR Strategic Communications workshop, CSI 2009 meeting, to name a few).

So, how are we doing at the end of the second quarter of 2009?

Pretty well, thank you!

ICT-KM blog traffic trends since June 2007

Here are some facts and observations based on the traffic statistics of this blog  (our main method of promotion and channel for increased reach):

1. Between January and June 2009, blog traffic was almost double that of the whole of 2008.

2. The top 30 posts (10% of the top post list) cover 54% of the total views. We, too, have a long tail (more on this in the section about search engines below).

3. The referrers (sites or systems from whence traffic comes) tell interesting stories. In general, referrers are a key source of information about what works on a Web site. This is where you should look for the numbers that support a social media strategy, since most social networking or bookmarking sites show up in the referrers.

Our top sources of traffic are the ICT-KM Program site, the Wordpress.com tags and friends’ sites (sites linking to us and our Knowledge Sharing sites: KS Toolkit and ks-cgiar.org).

A special word about Wordpress.com tags. Tags and categories work in a peculiar way on Wordpress.com: they are detected as referrers because Wordpress.com works like a giant, unique platform for all hosted blogs. However, if we look at the actual tags, we will see that these are our own specific tags, such as cgsocialmedia and social media tools. This allows users to discover other content that might be of interest to them. As such, the most clicked tags on our blog are related to internal navigation.

The top groups of referrers indicate that:

• tags are great for the discovery of information (as if we needed this, but it’s always good to see the numbers);
• our plan to bring together the ICT-KM Program site and blog under the same domain, where the tag cloud can become a fixed feature of site navigation, will consolidate traffic and give visitors the option of discovering more interesting information and possibly encourage them to become loyal blog readers/participants;
• creating cross-linkages across the sites in which we participate creates a virtuous circle that benefits all parties (not only do we gain from referrals, but visitors can also discover relevant information in their areas of interest).

4. On the social media front proper, Twitter is doing a good job: page views from the microblogging service went up from 30 in the 1st quarter, when we had been using it for only two weeks, to 109 at the end of the 2nd quarter. And this only takes into consideration the detectable Web-based views: those coming from Twitter in a browser, not the different readers and widgets people use to follow Twitter subscriptions. Hence the requirement for the same URL shortening service to track clicks to specific pages (more below!).

Views generated by the RSS feed, like those generated by Twitter, include only the Web-based readers detectable via the browser. However, the number of RSS views are, for sure, much higher, and Wordpress.com stats distinguish between on-site and syndicated views, a more reliable indicator. In order to collect more information on how many views are generated via the feed, our feed is now available via Feedburner, which allows us to better track the number of future subscribers, at least.

Facebook is not well represented, but we’re not doing much on this network yet.

These numbers are based on the page views of the individual posts, and therefore exclude the views of the home page, where the full posts are featured.

5. In general, the biggest generator of traffic is still email. This is not always easy to see in the referrers (in fact, email-related referrers are only ranked number 8), but the traffic peaks we have had after sending out the email newsletter or ad-hoc announcements are the measure that supports this statement. For example, we broke the page view record on 29th July when the 11th installment in the Social Media Tools Series (Social Media: The Next Revolution) was announced via email. The previous record was set by the ICT-KM newsletter for 3rd quarter 2009 on 6th July. So, yes, email is still the most effective way to deliver information. But to make sure it is not trashed, be careful about the frequency and relevance (see Meena Arivananthan’s post about newsletters as a dying breed and how to save them from ineffectiveness or outright extinction).

What we can’t see from the Wordpress.com stats but would like to see

1. The total number of syndicated views (the posts viewed in newsfeeds readers) versus the on-site views for all the blog posts.

2. The traffic generated by the search engines. It would be nice to know how well the long tail (the broad variety of topics covered by 90% of the top posts for the 2nd quarter, each with a small representation in terms of content produced, that help ensure a long shelf-life for our content), high keyword density and link popularity serve us versus the direct promotion and presence on friends’ sites. We will have this information when we move the blog and site to one platform, on which we’ll unleash Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

3. Any ratio between new and returning visitors. Visitor types, as calculated by most traffic analysis packages, are not available in Wordpress.com. While not as an exact measure as page views,  this indicator could still help us understand those channels that are preferred by loyal visitors and where we should focus our efforts to ensure that people keep coming back (more on traffic quality from Blog Tips).

How to measure traffic from sites and networks not detected in the referrers

Some of our social-media-related work targets Twitter, Yammer, status updates on messengers, and social bookmarks. These systems offer users a range of tools to access and participate, like browser plugins (in the case of del.icio.us), and desktop clients (standalone programs installed on a computer, like in the case of Twitter, Yammer, and instant messengers). These alternative tools are not detected in referrers, even if they do generate traffic. So how can we measure this traffic? Not directly, but via a workaround: using a URL shortener that offers a click counter. That’s the reason why we prefer to use bit.ly to shorten URLs from the blog before promoting them. Bit.ly maintains a count of clicks on the URLs we shorten via our common account on the site. Not sure if it’s totally reliable, but it’s a start.

The 5 lessons learned so far

1. More content, more traffic. Remember the 1990’s mantra of web-savvy people: Content is king? Well, nothing much has changed. Except that visitors have perhaps become even more demanding. Our blog traffic started to increase when both the quantity and the quality of our content went up a few notches. More of us are now blogging, hence more content is available more frequently. The top posts show that our blog visitors prefer ‘original’ content, like the interviews, the Social Media Tools Blog Series, the hands-on practice pieces, and anything related to Google. So, the commitment we have made to write more blog posts is paying off. As the Boagworld post on the harsh truths of corporate blogging says (Truth #2):

‘Building a readership is a long term commitment. It can take months for users to recognise your blog as a consistent source of useful information. Only then will they start visiting it regularly and recommending it to others.

Are we getting there?

2. Create a virtuous circle with friends’ sites. Your partners, whether colleagues or organizations involved in the projects in which you participate, are likely to generate information that is appealing to like-minded people. Start linking to them, add them to your blogroll, mention and review what they’re doing, aggregate their feeds into your public aggregator (if you have one).

3. Promote your content via social media. At the very least, you could consider using social media to increase the visibility and reach of your information. There’s more to social media than just exposure, but it’s definitely the easiest step to take for a start. Consolidate social media practices: open group accounts on Twitter, del.icio.us,  consider a page on Facebook, bookmark your stuff all over the place (to optimize bookmarking, consider an account on ping.fm).

4. Tags work wonders. They provide visual cues on what’s relevant to your visitors, navigation for discovery, description of resources (and outright browsing fun for those who don’t want to think…)

5. Promote email subscriptions. Be it for a newsletter, a special announcement, or RSS feed in an email notification, factor email into your practice. And use it smartly or you’ll be trashed!

Related posts:

1. Social Media: how do you know it's working? (#3 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
2. Coverage of CSI workshop on Twitter
3. Coming soon: Blog series on social media tools

Setting your goal

A good social media strategy should take into consideration goals, target audiences AND technological implications. For example, while it is true to say that most of the CGIAR’s constituents are not even online, many of its strategic audiences, such as donors, researchers and policy makers, will be. The Social Media Strategic Planning Worksheet from We Are Media will help you plan your social media strategy.

Here are some questions you might want to answer as you start to include a social media component in your communications strategy:

• What communications objective do you want to try to support with social media?
• What are the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that a social media strategy might offer?
• What value does your social media strategy provide to your organization and/or stakeholders?
• What type of quantitative and qualitative information do you need to track to measure your success or learn how to improve your social media strategy?

In the Blogging for impact post, you will find a number of reasons for establishing a blog. Some of the key objectives that this social media tool can help your organization achieve include: increased visibility, enhanced reputation, knowledge sharing and audience participation. These objectives don’t just apply to blogging; they can also be extended to many other social media activities such as microblogging.

Introducing a social media component into your communications strategy requires an understanding of your chosen tools and how the network dynamics work. If you are interested in learning more about strategic social media planning and have a project that you want to introduce to the Social Web, you may want to sign up for the ICT-KM Program’s Online Social Media Workshop to be held from May 25 to June 12, 2009.

Measure as you go

It is fairly simple to experiment with social media and throw out an experiment that is not working for you. Think small, low risk, frequent experiments, rather than trying to build “the perfect system” and over-investing in any one tool until you can see its value to your organization.

For example, you can create a blog as an alternative to a traditional email newsletter. By creating a central online archive for your news items, you can:

• track traffic to individual posts – find out how many times a blog post has been viewed by using your blog software or a tool like Google Analytics).
• read any comments you might get when you post entries that specifically ask for feedback. People are more likely to respond to open-ended questions.
• monitor incoming links to your newsletter address and individual posts. You can monitor traffic sources (i.e. referrers in your traffic analysis reports) and keep an eye on the sites that link to your blog, simply by leveraging the search engine indexes. For example, you can set up a Google Alert to check who has linked to a specific URL or to your site, as their pages are registered with the Google index. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer to monitor incoming links.
• analyze those blog posts that are more popular and, accordingly, adjust your posting style, choice of topics, areas you want to focus on, etc.

The above approach relies on quantitative metrics. For a great list of other metrics, please see Rachel Happe’s blog post on Social Media Metrics.

Social listening

In the early phases of using social media, you will typically try things out and begin “listening” for the response as indicated by page views, links, responses and actions of your target audience.

Check out Beth Kanter’s blog post about evaluating first projects, where she links to Geoff Livingston’s post called “Getting Social Media Approved By Your Boss,”  in which he talks about organizational culture change and resistance, but with the emphasis on the importance of a proof of concept project. Here’s an excerpt:

First off, we recommend using a pilot project to get through the door. Reticence is often conquered by a win, and the best way to provide a win is via a pilot project. Tips to ensuring you choose the right pilot project:

• Begin with some form of listening or monitoring. You must be in tune with your social web community if you want this to work. Hopefully you are doing this before you begin, but just in case…
• Simple and relatively low cost is good. When there is fear involved, an easy, relatively affordable project is an easy thing to sign off on.
• Short timeframes help, too. You want to make this a quick test.
• Make sure you have a measurable goal. Look at your strategy, it will tell you exactly what to measure. You must be able to attain ROI. That is why attaining something worthwhile is essential, whether it’s micro-donations, market intelligence, feedback on a new product, click-throughs to a store, registrants for a value added webinar, or some other measurable result. You must be able to declare victory.

Social media has been around for a while (social bookmarking was already all the rage back in 2005 when Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us). However, it’s the growth in the adoption and use of social networks that has started to generate increasing traffic to the websites that get bookmarked, shared, commented on, and spread in whatever way through the networks. This is driving the demand for data related to social media: how many people are following us? what topics do they find interesting? who else is in their networks?

The first thing to do, as stated in the excerpt above, is to identify the goal you want to measure and choose the analysis tools that best cater for the job. For example, you can create buzz around an event so you engage participants before, during and after the event, the success of which can be measured in terms of the number of times your event information is viewed. You can also check the spread of an individual message across networks.

A great starting guide for measuring traffic generated by social media can be found at HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics. Another article about reputation monitoring focuses on the tools you might want to set up to find out what is being said about your organisation, project or initiative so that you can participate in the conversation.

Capturing intangibles

Of course, using quantitative metrics is not the only way of evaluating your social media ROI. Successful communications often involves intangibles, like, say, a donor reading a blog post that tells the story of a project and, as a result, begins to engage more deeply to support the work involved. Or it could be about people who start following your Twitter messages and gain a deeper appreciation for, say, food and hunger in the world and start making small changes in their own lives. These things require a deeper listening – such as finding stories, carrying out interviews with people from your target audience, etc. For more on this, here is another blog post from Beth Kanter on intangibles as part of ROI.

As you get a sense of how social media is helping you achieve your communications strategy, you can begin to incorporate social media evaluation into your overall communications evaluation work:

• keep anything that is working
• adjust those aspects that might be working
• stop doing anything that isn’t working

Note: Sometimes, it takes both experimentation and time to find out if something is working. So don’t give up too quickly.

Additional Resources

• Social Media Metrics Superlist
• We Are Media Toolbox on Monitoring and Tracking and Listening
• Is your target audience using social media? Check out this calculator!
• Social Media Campaign ROI calculator
• Social Media Measurement
• ROI of Community managers
• Dutch perspective on ROI
• How to Track Twitter Clicks and Get Conversion Data

About this post. Originally developed by the Social Media Workshop facilitators, expanded by Antonella Pastore, edited by Mary Schneider.

Related posts:

1. Social Media: Are You Listening? (#5 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
2. Social Networks: friend or foe? (#4 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
3. Microblogging (#1 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)