We’re doing some social media monitoring for a client who had never done anything in the space before so they had no benchmarks to work from. We didn’t know what a ‘normal’ level of buzz would be and because Twitter data doesn’t go back more than a couple of weeks there was no reliable way to backtrack. I figured the best thing to do was figure out how many active Twitter users there are in Australia and then look at how many of those would be likely to tweet about our client on any given day.

Here’s my working out (bit like a high school maths test really, I sucked at those though). The results are quite important I think, and could be applied to any business:

• There are about 17,000,000 Internet users in Australia (source: Internet World Stats)
• Of those, 13% actively updated their Twitter account (ie. ‘Tweeted’) in 2009 (source: Nielsen 2010 Social Media Report)
• Which is 2.2 million twitter users in Australia (not visitors, USERS, the distinction is very important as not every visitor to Twitter has an account)
• But of all Twitter users, about 50% don’t really update their account very often (source: HubSpot)
• So that’s about 1.1 million Australians actively using Twitter
• There is a widely accepted rule that 1% of any online community will actively contribute to it with gusto and another 9% are likely to contribute from time to time. (source: Jakob Nielsen - he is one of the world’s most respected web usability consultants).
• As Jakob Nielsen writes: “1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.”
• Based on that estimate, there are about 11,000 Australian Twitter users who would be highly likely to update their status to mention any given brand if they had an experience worth mentioning. They’re the same sort of people who would, by nature, actively contribute to other forums as well. As a proportion of the Australian population, that’s  0.04%
• It’s also likely that there are 99,000 Australian Twitter users who would be somewhat likely to update their status to mention any given brand if they had an experience worth mentioning. As a proportion of the Australian population, that’s  0.43%.

So how can you use those figures to benchmark your business? Easy - work out how many products you sell (or services you deliver) over any given time period and you could expect that 0.04% of that figure will mention you and 0.43% of that figure might mention you in Twitter, or on their favourite social network of choice.

Try it, see if it works, I’d be keen to know!

Microsoft have announced they’re running out a social media monitoring tool called ‘looking glass’. They made the announcement at a conferece and posted about it on their blog. Here’s what they said:

“LookingGlass is part of a broader shift under way within the platform strategy group. For the past two years, the group has been driving strategy around how to move marketing and advertising into the software-plus-services arena. “The proof-of-concept we wanted to build was to connect business data with advertising data and bring social media into the equation,” Tisdale told us. That way you can mine social media sites for information and then use that information to act. “If you do that, it settles a hot topic and makes things actionable that weren’t actionable before.”

The first step in making social media data useable is listening to the conversation. LookingGlass, which is built on a number of Microsoft technologies, lets users track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites. For example, the Zune HD marketing team could use LookingGlass to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. Using technology from Microsoft Research, LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.”

It’s no secret that I’m behind a successful Australian social media monitoring tool called Dialogix. You’d think I’d be worried about Microsoft encroaching my space, but I’m not. They’re going to spend money educating the marketplace about the need for social media monitoring. Then they’ll bundle it in with their other products so you need Outlook or something more obscure to use it. They’ll claim they can rate sentiment accurately and they’ll stuff it up. I couldn’t be happier. Good on them though

Typical FMCG brand: Three month chart showing level of news articles, dialogue and sentiment.

I had a ball speaking at Social Media Club Sydney’s measuring social media event last night. I’d describe the sound as shabby, but shabby sounds kind of soft and warm, like a pile of clothes lying next to an over-flowing Vinnies bin. The audience could be forgiven for thinking we were in Town Hall station, or as @leehopkins put it ‘I’ve heard better train announcements’. Nevertheless, the organisers did a great job pulling everything together under trying conditions and it was a pleasure to meet so many wonderful people.

The brief I had was to spend no more than 5 minutes talking about measuring social media in general using a Powerpoint presentation. I’m not sure what the audience was expecting, and I didn’t know what level of knowledge to assume, so I put together a quick presentation detailing how advertising, PR and Digital campaigns have traditionally been measured and how you can apply similar metrics to social media.

Here ’tis.

Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss!

I’ve written a new blog post for Marketing Mag called ‘Every thing you need to know about social media monitoring‘ - I’ve gone into quite a fair bit of detail about a range of tools, including the new social media monitoring tool we’ve been developing. Take a peek if you like, it’s quite a useful article and not overtly self-serving