Year round, airlines are in a good position to provide a user experience unlike other services. Some also provide great online user experiences through Twitter, blogging, and Facebook interactions.

Southwest Airlines has been blogging at Nuts About Southwest since April of 2006, and you can read Radian6 case studies about their social media monitoring and also about their coordinated response to FAA inquiries into their safety practices. Their crisis communication team also recently dealt with an angry Kevin Smith blasting his seat policy enforcement situation to 1 million Twitter followers.

Southwest Airlines gets work done in the social media world, no doubt. They’ve risen to multiple challenges. So how do they measure up to another airline on their social media engagement? I compared two Facebook pages of airlines – Southwest on one side, and JetBlue on the other site. JetBlue strikes me as another airline who wants to create a user experience around air travel. Their tagline is Happy Jetting, and they have a blog as well called BlueTales. I let the data collector gather information for about a month, observing interactions on facebook.com/JetBlue and facebook.com/Southwest.

Unlike the last post studying two camera brands, in the case of airline brands, the one who has the most followers also appears to have the most active engagement. Check out these side-by-side comparisons.

There seemed to be a spike in engagement on June 22nd. There were so many posts in the last month on the Southwest Facebook Wall that I couldn’t see what was posted that day in particular. On JetBlue’s Wall they had three posts that day, had quite a few comments (nearly 400) when they asked for feedback on their Cheeps program that offers travel deals to Twitter followers. I believe that a single day of engagement spike is what causes the pie chart to show a higher engagement rate per day for JetBlue.

Technorati Tags: air travel, Facebook, JetBlue, monitoring, social media, Southwest Airlines, travel

This past week or so, we’ve been collecting data through the Facebook API for both the Polaroid Facebook Page and the Kodak Facebook Page. They’re similar in that they both engage with camera and photography enthusiasts. Kodak has over 60,000 fans for their page, and Polaroid has about 44,000 fans. Here’s a screenshot of the LugIron dashboard, showing a membership comparison. In the product, you can see the number of fans when you place your mouse over the pie chart.

But what we found beyond just counting followers surprised us a bit. Polaroid engages more people more often through Facebook. Here are some graphs from the LugIron tool that show the engagement charts since we started collecting data a couple of weeks ago, using the Facebook API. Our definition of Engagements per Day is “An engaged user is any user who posts to the wall, comments on a post, or likes a post.” We’ll also note that the Facebook API only indicates a maximum of three or so users who have liked a post, limiting accuracy.

What caused the Polaroid engagement spike on June 28th, you might ask? It’s so simple it’s laughable, but they asked, “Who is your favorite photographer?” and got 135 responses. The follow-up question posted to their wall the following day simply asked, “Why is that photographer your favorite?” One of my favorite suggestions linked to a street photographer, Sakura Love.

Another observation I found while looking at the two pages, Kodak and Polaroid, is that Polaroid’s default for their page is to go straight to the Wall tab. For Kodak, I was directed to a sweepstakes tab right away when I entered facebook.com/kodak. That difference could also explain the higher engagement rate for Polaroid, but I also think that the community is engaged by enthusiasm for the brand and for celebrities like Lady Gaga being associated with the brand. Any other thoughts on why the two are different, or how Kodak could increase engagement with its large member base?

We’ll continue to search for interesting differences in membership and engagement in communities, and continue to post our observations. Feel free to leave a comment if there are pages of brands you’d like to compare!

Technorati Tags: brand, engagement, Kodak, measure, metrics, Polaroid, social media

However, they’re measuring by followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook. We think a more meaningful measure of engagement is better than just a count of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. In fact, our metrics for Twitter measure it as an “engaged user” who is any person who @ mentions the account (such as a retweet), or any person who sends a direct message to the account. This is more telling than simply counting a follower, we believe.

The winner of the House Democrats competition gets a Twitter bird trophy mount created by staffers (oh, someone send a picture, please!). The real winners are the people who can engage with constituents where they are, when they want, and in a way that meets their needs.

Technorati Tags: engagment, Facebook, fan, followers, politics, Twitter

Also, be sure to read the Social Marketing Analytics report from the Altimeter Group. Co-authored by John Lovett, principal at Web Analytics Demystified, and Jeremiah Owyang. They give a nod to LugIron on page 24 for the the next generation focus group. Louis Marascio offered input from our perspective during the research of the report as well.

We’ve started a Community Analytics group on LinkedIn – please join us. Here’s a description, “Let’s share stories and talk about measuring community efforts and opportunities. Whether you’re a brand community manager, a leader of fanatic fans, or a business development pro who relies on a community collaboration for product development and keeping customers happy, you belong here.”

And, a parting question about community analytics is this: when will Firefox’s web form accept its spelling, by default? I’ve had to Add to Dictionary on every computer I approach. Heh. Looking forward to typing community analytics more often.

Technorati Tags: analytics, business goals, communilytics, community, kpi, metrics

Behaviors are exactly what we want to drive with web technology, though, as the web matures. As an example, let’s say that personalized recommendations can increase the final value of what’s put into an online shopping cart. That personalization directly affected a behavior that wasn’t just a view, comment, link, or share. It was a purchase.

Community and social behaviors go beyond just what you can monitor through web tools, though. Reciprocity, for example, cannot be measured just in link for link, comment for comment counting. Community members helping other community members may be evaluated in terms of response times, the number of trusted relationships formed,  and the tightness of the interlinks between members. Interactions with each other should be studied differently from interactions with web content, like comments, links, photos, videos, and so on.

I’m confident that web content and social content have a happy relationship in their future, whether their blending is bold and contradictory like chocolate and peanut butter or delicate and harmonious like vanilla and almond. We’re working on the right blend, and we think it’s pretty sweet.

We won’t lose sight of the humor of trying to fit human behavior into web forms and links. If Facebook was in real life, and an old “friend” really came to your door and poked you, well, it might go a little like this. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: comments, community, community analytics, Facebook, real life, social media, Social Media Metrics, web analytics

Ithinkhesaurus.

It may be nearsighted to look at online, interactive campaigns through the lens of just web analytics. You might need more information, since web analytics do not tell the whole story.

This week Google Analytics informed the world through its blog that they’re offering an opt-out capability – which means website visitors may fly under the radar on purpose. To quote the Google blog entry, they plan to “develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics”  and release it “in the coming weeks.” Users avoidance of collection techniques isn’t new, but it seems like Google is going to make it within reach of normal people rather than those who like to dive three layers into Options dialog boxes. It’s configured on a browser, so I imagined that if an entire company did not want their employee’s web browsing tracked, they could install it on the desktop image that goes with each company-issued computer.

Here at LugIron, we think  that web analytics can only get you so far in gaining insights into what customers are doing on the web. Page views, amount of time on a page, and link attribution for a conversion, these are web analytics. Social analytics or community analytics can help you realize where conversation and dialogs are happening. You should get more insights into what interactions were influenced by Twitter or Facebook interactions.  How can you cull information using multiple listening tools at once unless you have a social platform that lets you do so?

While talking about measurement and analytics, you try different lenses to make sure the data is telling you what you think it is. You might need to squint a bit to get the right social, instead of web-based, insights, but we think its worthwhile.

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, social media, social metrics, web analytics

If you’re interested in talking more about measuring social media send me an email. Also, make sure you sign up for our beta so you can check out what LugIron has to offer.

Technorati Tags: LugIron News, social media analytics, sxsw, tired, video

To borrow from a SXSW Interactive presenter’s phrase, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if…” We think it would be awesome if you could get actionable insights from what people are doing on the social web. We believe social data is different from web data. We think it would be awesome if everyone could measure social stats as well as measuring web stats. We seek the relationships between social data points that make social things happen.

Sign up now to be on the invitation list and fill out a short five-question survey. We want your input to answer the question, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if…”

Measuring everything is a cultural norm in some organizations. Apparently Google even puts its designs to the test constantly, asking for proof of the effectiveness of 3 pixel border  or a 4 or 5 pixel border. Considering Google’s business value comes from analytics, it’s not surprising that they land in Camp Mustbecounted.

In a comment on his own post on Econsultancy titled 10 ways to measure social media success, Chris Lake points out, “It is a cultural thing almost, within an organisation, as to whether or not you need to measure everything to the Nth degree.”  That comment was a year ago, but I believe it holds true still, that the culture and environment in an organization can tip the tendency to measure more or less.

Camp Yacantbuyluv may protest such measurements for certain applications such as feelings, emotional responses, and so forth. But even fuzzy senses like love, loyalty, or leadership have tangible attributes like showing up when you sign up for something, giving something the time and attention it deserves, and a ensuring a lack of lies.

We say, measurement helps more than not measuring at all. A nice representation of this sentiment comes from Tom Gelb, an engineer who develops software inspection processes. He says “Anything can be measured in a way that is superior to not measuring at all.” What camp to you want to attend this summer?

Technorati Tags: measure, metrics, ROI, social media

When it comes to ads, web designs, and even text color, everyone has an opinion from the guy in the corner office across the building to the highest paid executive. When you think of all the opinions people bring to a comparison, you can always backup your opinion with data, and if your data proves your point, your design wins. That’s why I titled this post “Data versus Goliath” and included slingshot beer. Data is a powerful but sometimes overlooked part of social media monitoring.

We’re fortunate in the web world that you can collect all sorts of data about actions online. There’s even the ability to get either the person’s first visit attributed to the action or their last visit (Google Analytic’s default setting). As I learn more about web analytics I’m excited about what we can learn and act upon, using data as our guide. What are some of your favorite insights using data lately?

Technorati Tags: analytics, business, google, kpi, measure, measurements, ROI, social, social media