Social and viral marketing are all about knowing your audience, especially that most infectious segment of your target that you’re considering your seed vector, and the best way to learn about them is through analytics. I’ve been thinking about analytics for viral marketing for a few days and then I saw a post on Social Media Explorer about analytics for bloggers, which sparked me to write this post. There are 3 stages of usage for analytics in the viral marketing process: research, growth and evaluation. And one sort of theoretical one: testing.

Research

When you’re planning your viral campaign, you should first focus on researching your target audience as I suggested in my checklist. This means not only understanding…

It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.
-Dr House

House often didn’t see his patients so they wouldn’t have a chance to lie to him. People lie, data doesn’t.

The same is true with analytics. Designers, developers and owners lie, statistics don’t. People have ulterior motivations and egos, numbers don’t.

It used to be an easy target to warn against only thinking about search engine friendliness after a site was built, every few weeks another “seo expert” would come out and tell stories of entirely built sites that had to be re-engineered to allow spiders the best possible access to its content. And while, at least in my little corner of the web world, that lesson has been learned and is starting to sound redundant and obvious, those who refuse to learn from past mistakes will repeat them.

These days I’m finding it very common that things like conversion and usability based on real user testing and analytics data are only being thought of after a site is built. Often…

Forrester Research recently released a report, that I’ve been lucky enough to read, entitled Social Technographics that profiles adult US web users and their level of engagement with social media:

“Site features can also influence participation profiles. Not all Social Computing/Web 2.0 sites are created the same — the profiles for MySpace.com and YouTube differ significantly, given the activities available on those sites.”

The report describes 6 levels of web users who engage in social media activities, they’re described as a ladder of increasing involvement, starting with spectators and ending with creators. According to the report, myspace is more popular with the joiner segment and while youtube is more popular with spectators.
This means that sites…

I heard a client say recently that trying to make changes to an established site to increase its conversion rate was just haphazardly guessing, and they were corrected by someone who said that the right way to do it would be to guess and then test with multivariate tests. I disagree.
The scientific method says we should study the subject first, then make a hypothesis and test it. Study the site visitor’s current behaviors first through analytics or user testing/surveys. Then you can begin to make assertions about what problems said site visitors are having on the site and you can make the necessary conversion enhancements and test them.
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