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Croll & Power's Communilytics Master Class
Social Media Analytics
- By
- Alistair Croll, Sean Power
- Publisher:
- O'Reilly Media
- Released:
- February 2010
- Run time:
- 3 hours 29 minutes
This three and a half-hour social media analytics class is packed with real-world examples and expert advice. The densely packed session covers a wide range of community-related subjects, leaving you with a solid foundation for social media campaigns and an invaluable list of tips and tricks you can apply immediately.
The field of web analytics tries to tie visitor behavior to business outcomes, so you can understand what makes people do the things you want them to on your website. But today, you have to look beyond your own website to your entire presence online, tracking interactions from a first impression to a successful transaction. That means monitoring the social platforms and online communities where your customers, prospects and partners hang out, and where your market forms its opinions.
There are plenty of reasons to monitor your online presence. Communities let you engage your customers better, detect nascent problems before they become web-wide disasters, mine buzz and build word of mouth, make sure new products are designed properly, and generate new leads. The challenge is tying all of these benefits to hard data so the rest of your organization cares about them.
Authors Alistair Croll and Sean Power are longtime proponents of this holistic approach to web monitoring. In this Master Class, Alistair shows you how to apply the measurement techniques and quantitative methods of web analytics to online communities. You ™ll learn how to try unique, memorable campaigns; how to measure their effectiveness in ways that make them relevant to the business; and how to learn from the results.
This three and a half-hour social media analytics class is packed with real-world examples and expert advice. The densely packed session covers a wide range of community-related subjects, leaving you with a solid foundation for social media campaigns and an invaluable list of tips and tricks you can apply immediately.
The field of web analytics tries to tie visitor behavior to business outcomes, so you can understand what makes people do the things you want them to on your website. But today, you have to look beyond your own website to your entire presence online, tracking interactions from a first impression to a successful transaction. That means monitoring the social platforms and online communities where your customers, prospects and partners hang out, and where your market forms its opinions.
There are plenty of reasons to monitor your online presence. Communities let you engage your customers better, detect nascent problems before they become web-wide disasters, mine buzz and build word of mouth, make sure new products are designed properly, and generate new leads. The challenge is tying all of these benefits to hard data so the rest of your organization cares about them.
Authors Alistair Croll and Sean Power are longtime proponents of this holistic approach to web monitoring. In this Master Class, Alistair shows you how to apply the measurement techniques and quantitative methods of web analytics to online communities. You ™ll learn how to try unique, memorable campaigns; how to measure their effectiveness in ways that make them relevant to the business; and how to learn from the results.
-
1.
An Introduction to Communilytics
8 minutesIn the first section of the Masterclass, we look at the emerging discipline of community analytics, or communilytics. We show how communities first emerged online, and underscore the importance of linking community activity to business metrics. -
2.
Why Care About Online Communities
23 minutesIn the second section, we look at the many business reasons why companies need to engage with their markets online. If you're trying to build a business case for community engagement, or want to be sure you're taking advantage of all that communities have to offer, this section will help you evangelize internally and justify the effort. -
3.
The Anatomy of a Conversation
9 minutesAll communities, online and offline, can be thought of in terms of three questions:- Who's talking: The participants in a conversation define it. Whether it's a one-sided debate between a blogger and their readers, or a flat, open conversation within a "walled garden" social site, you need to understand who's talking and what kind of influence they hold.
- What they're talking about: The topics of a conversation help you find and join it. They might be about you, your products, or your competitors. Or maybe they're just about things your target market finds interesting.
- Where they're talking: There are thousands of social networks. Some, like Twitter, are wide open. Others, like mailing lists, are closed to only participants. This part of the class looks at these three elements, how to classify conversations your market is having, and tools you can use to find, target, and join them.
-
4.
The 8 Community Archetypes
18 minutesWhile there are thousands of social and community platforms on the web, they're broken into eight distinct types. We cover each of them, the differences between them, and how these differences affect your ability to monitor them and engage with their members. -
5.
The Bigger Picture: What Analytics Can Teach Us
51 minutesArmed with the fundamentals of online communities, we can start to look at the analytics involved in tracking them. Analytics isn't a new subject, and there's lots to learn, so in this section we'll cover the elements of web analytics that are relevant to community managers. We'll look at how different types of websites have distinct goals, and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter to various online businesses. We'll also look at other kinds of visitor monitoring that can affect a site's goals. -
6.
What is Communilytics?
23 minutesKnowing about communities and analytics, we're ready to tie them together into Communilytics. We'll look at new KPIs that apply to communities - such as reach and virality - and how to build them into "long funnels" that combine community metrics with web analytics. We'll also consider the "new economies" of reputation and attention that matter online, leading to a triple-bottom-line approach of measuring success. -
7.
Case Study 1: Strangeloop Networks (Free Preview)
10 minutesWe'll now look at how to get a useful message out to a large number of people using community tactics. In this case study, we'll review how we helped Strangeloop Networks share research data with the world, how the information spread, and how we tracked it. We'll also show what didn't work, and lessons we learned. -
8.
Case Study 2: Beers4Canada
19 minutesNow we look at nonprofits soliciting donations, through a campaign we ran for Visible Government that lasted just one day. We'll build a Long Funnel from the first Tweet until the end of the campaign, covering the planning, execution, and follow-up. And we'll look at what we'd do differently. -
9.
Case Study 3: TechCrunch50
6 minutesThe third case study looks at how we used communilytics tactics to find the right communities to seed an article that we'd published. We used real-time tools and encouraged others to break the story for us, ultimately resulting in increased visibility and traffic. -
10.
Communilytics "top 10 list" (advanced tricks)
15 minutesNow that we've seen some examples of communilytics in action, we'll review our top tricks for community managers hoping to analyze and engage their online audiences. We'll cover "stalking effectively", tracking messages across many networks using Google Analytics and URL shorteners, and more. -
11.
The Road Ahead
10 minutesThe field of community monitoring is changing rapidly, with new technologies and changes in the landscape of community platforms. We'll end the masterclass with a quick look at some of the changes that are coming and how they'll affect community managers and analytics professionals. -
12.
Final Q&A;
10 minutesWe end the masterclass with an open Q&A from the audience.

- Title:
- Croll & Power's Communilytics Master Class
- By:
- Alistair Croll, Sean Power
- Publisher:
- O'Reilly Media
- Formats:
-
- Safari Books Online
- Video
- Video Release:
- February 2010
- Run time:
- 3 hours 29 minutes
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