I would love to do some formal research on this on the day job, the following is just highlighting a probabble definition and formula, it certainly doesn’t include any formal methodology or practiced process.
There’s been a great deal of talk about ‘virality’ or ‘word of mouth’ but when it comes to measurement, we need something just a bit more substantial.
When I was on the vendor side at PodTech as Director of Corporate Social Media Strategy (client facing), I worked closely with Darold Masaro, VP of Sales. We frequently bantered over new ways to improve measurement as this is important improving existing programs and increasing budgets.
For many of those in the social media space, the goal is to ‘let go’ of your message and let it fly all around the web, getting folks to come to your irrelevant corporate website isn’t the goal –fish where the fish are.
Defining Social Media Velocity: Distance over Time
But how do you measure a distributed web strategy? We looked to one of many attributes called “Velocity”. This is not a new term, in fact, Physicists define this as distance traveled per unit time. As I described to Darold what we should be measuring, he quickly pegged I was seeking the term ‘velocity’, it’s stuck with me ever sense, the credit should go to him. The same applies to the web, and here’s how:
[Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget or other like unit spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy]
Distance: As units (text, audio embeds, video embeds, widgets, memes) spread from one website to another you can track the URLs where they spread to.
over
Time: Depending on how fast a unit moves, it can vary from day to week, or less effective, perhaps a month.
Example:
Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.
Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.
Also, you could look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.
Now here’s how Darold further explains velocity:
“Velocity is the speed, direction, and size of conversations traveling the Internet around our brands. When I talk about velocity it’s from the perspective of a wave. So in that case we need to answer this question…What do markteers and sailors have in common? They should both be concerned about waves. Marketers should think in terms of conversational waves. Conversations are more effective for building brands than buzz, but this requires keeping the conversation alive.”
I asked Darold for just a definition but I see he couldn’t help but share more, I guess his days of getting an MBA just compelled him to think this through further. What’s interesting is Darold is a sailor, no not the cursing, one-eyed patch sailors with a parrot named jenkins, but pilots sailboats in Santa Cruz bay over wine and cheese.
He extends the sailing metaphor further, here’s just a portion of his thesis:
“It’s helpful to understand the four key aspects of a wave in order to gain insight into conversations around our brands. Hey I am a sailor and I see the world as a series of nautical metaphors.
Velocity represents both speed AND direction. This is important to point out as most use the common term of velocity which is just speed. I associate speed with what I hear a lot these days … “I want my campaign to go viral.” Where viral represents speed (how quickly, by how many), but we should also look at who is consuming our messages (direction) and sustaining the momentum. So there is more to velocity than speed and direction, and is important to understand if we are to build sustainable conversations around our brands.
We need to understand amplitude which is the size of the wave (this is equivalent to buzz), and frequency. The IceRocket graph below is an example of amplitude and frequency. The size of the wave is easy to understand, but frequency is less clear. In sailing we replace the word frequency with period. That is how long (in seconds) between the crest of one wave to the next. In the world of sailing the amplitude and period of a wave is very important for understanding the sea state. In marketing we have a sea state around our brand. To often the sea is calm, choppy or pounding with large unsustainable waves that come crashing down.”
If you want to reach Darold he can be emailed at darold@podtech.net
Jeremiah, you’re the best. This is a very interesting concept. Not the first time I’ve heard about it, but you have a way of making things more accessible to creative types like me. One worry I have in all of this conversation: yes, we’re building traffic, we’re building noise. But in the end, if we don’t sell something we can’t support the idea over the long term. That’s why I think the concept of direction is so important. An idea can have a lot of buzz, but if the people doing the talking aren’t the people doing the buying OR influencing the people doing the buying, it’s ultimately going to fail. Right off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of terrific brands with great recognition and buzz in the marketplace, but they’re courting the wrong consumers and their sales are heading south pretty fast. They need to change the direction of the buzz to change the direction of the sales curve.
I don’t want to rain on the parade here because your ideas are always fabulous. So…am I right? Completely and hopelessly wrong? A humble, un-analytical brain is reaching out to all you smart guys for thoughts.
ROI is indeed an important factor, commercial reality dictates this. But seeding the idea in this space as to be seen as a long term aproach as opposed a direct attempt to influence that months figures. You may get lucky but for every lucky result there be plenty of time waiting. There are other routes for immediate ROI.
However velocity as a metric for the social space is a really great attempt at measuring the impact of a brand, idea or product release(widget etc..)
A great KPI for any social exercise…..
I see direction as a classification of negative and positive reaction as opposed a specific social site.
I love these metaphors and there are other analogies that could be used often involving nature – flyfishing for one. great stuff!!
Excellent! it sounds realistic measure of virality in social media.