Visible Measures

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation by UPS's Debbie Curtis-Magley at Tuesday's Blogwell in San Jose. Her topic was social media monitoring, and her team's experiences watching conversational media for UPS-related traffic. Keen to learn what tools they used, and with what success, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that social media tracking is still a matter best left to humans -- tools not yet being able to capture conversations accurately and automatically. What eavesdropping tool would know, as she cited to pointed laughter, that push ups and sit ups bear no relation to pick UPS, the company's tagline?!

While UPS seemed to be tracking conversations as well as we consumers track UPS, conversational marketing and monitoring is still in its infancy. The great difficulty of tuning your tools to the tone of conversation (I like Radian6 and Visible Technologies), the challenge of reading the sentiment and gist from between lines kerned 140 characters wide (Twitter), not to mention spotting influencers and mapping their networks, all suggest that this is a job for specialists. Thankfully, the particular skill involved comes naturally to all of us: it's conversation.

According to Debbie, UPS tracks about four topics over time, with other short-term issues identified as they come up. Her company has established goals and objectives that include an interest in learning from its customers, identifying pain points, and reputation topics, all with the interest of refining corporate and brand messaging. Writ large, they are "using monitoring to learn about the topics that matter to the brand," and are tracking how their brand is being talked about, to "learn how to better provide information to customers."

Several things struck me about UPS. Clearly, the team gets the importance of listening. And in fact Debbie's collaboration with customer service resources was testament to that (all important) insight. UPS, too, is making creative use of internal "driver" blogs, and extending the relationship between its truck drivers and auto-racing drivers (UPS is a NASCAR sponsor, though I suspect their track vehicle of choice is not a van, and operates with its doors closed) with racy first-person narratives. So it has both an internal and public commitment to the medium. It clearly gets the value of watching conversations for customer complaints, and is engaged in ways of addressing and redressing, dare I say re-packaging, customer dissatisfaction.

What I liked the most about the UPS approach was that it emphasized the importance of listening. So much social media marketing still emphasizes the talking. Brands are used to packaging their messages, and deliver them to audiences at great expense. So no, it's not surprising that in social media monitoring they hope to track results. But by viewing the medium as yet another distribution network, they risk missing its greatest strengths.

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This week at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, a variety of companies either demo'ed their service or provided a variety of business updates. If you are in the NYC tech or media scene, this might be the best monthly meetup to attend.

Here are the presenters:

1. Hulu - Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales (our coverage)
2. Move Networks - Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD
3. Boxee - Avner Ronen, Co-founder & CEO
4. MediaMerx - Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO
5. Visible Measures - Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics (our coverage)

If you want to jump around in the video, click play, then pause and wait for the loading bar to finish, then you can jump, jump around.

MediaPost is reporting that Brightcove will announce a partnership this week with video analytics firm, Visible Measures. So this is a callout to all companies doing video sharing.... get analytical. We already know the page view is dead, actually its ultra dead for video sharing.

Clearly stats about how many plays you have are meaningless and dead as well. Where, who, when, how are the questions we need answered. Where was the video played, who watched it, when did they view it and how must be shared with us - especially those of us who are in this for business.

Eric Elia, Brightcove's vice president of programming and design said, "One of the key pieces that's broken in traditional TV is the reporting and analytics."

Brian Shin, CEO of Visible Measures, said the analytics product allows publishers to track not only videos on their own site, but when their videos are embedded and streamed elsewhere.

"What we're trying to do is create an objective set of metrics that apply in terms of audience engagement, video virality, the distribution of video as it's embedded throughout the Web--if it's watched on a blog or on Facebook, we want to be able to track all of these things," he said.

I love analytics and will be watching this closely.