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Hi
3 Juicy Bites this week
- Social Media benchmarking
- How to Make Your Data Pretty - Data Visualization Tools
- Simplifying the Enterprise Social Media Landscape
+ One Self-Promotion
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Browse previous issues of Social Business Bites at this link
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The
Complete Beginner's Guide to Social Media Benchmarks - Kevan Lee
When someone - a staff member, a consultant, a social media services provider, shares some statistic enthusiastically with you, e.g. 1,000 new likes on our Facebook page, how often do you ask, "So what does that mean for
us?"?
In this, another excellent post from the buffersocial blog by Buffer, we get a great little guide to setting some benchmarks to help us ask those questions confidently and know what to make of the answers.
The author acknowledges his source for a four segment benchmarking framework, in a blog post last year by Kevin Shively at Simply Measured. The
segments there are
1. Aspirational Benchmarking: Learning from social leaders.
2. Trended Benchmarking: Setting goals, projections, and standards based on previous activity.
3. Earned Benchmarking: Comparing campaign or promotional efforts against a standard for success.
4. Competitive Benchmarking: Setting goals and baselines for performance and growth based on your direct competitors.
He suggests tweaking the 4th - Competitive Benchmarking - to include Influencers, and calling it Inspirational Benchmarking. A nice bit of tweaking in my book.
He asks and answers a couple of good
questions:
- which stats should we measure?
- what should those stats look like?
Then he goes through each of the 4 segments and shows clearly how to use them.
Well worth a careful read.
How to Make Your Data Pretty? Utilize These Data Visualization Tools
Omkar Mishra
I don't know about you, but I love it when someone takes a complex set of data and presents it clearly in graphical form, so I can see instantly the key connections and possible implications, at a glance.
But what
if we are the ones who have to do the presenting? This post lists and explains an impressive range of tools for the purpose, including infogr.am, easil.ly, visual.ly.
The best of the data visualizations explain something complex in a digestible format and expose something underlying which cannot be visible to the naked eye. Understanding those patterns and observing those trends to make powerful decisions is one of the important functions on choosing the right visualization.
As Big data is accepted across different industries and more companies deal with data explosions across various digital networks, the importance of visualizing the complex datasets will become all the more important.
Tip: don't miss what he says about Google Library, and possibilities with Microsoft Excel. Definitely a useful post.
Conversations with business executives about social media start, all too typically, with them asking questions which can be grouped conveniently as "which platform should we use?": cart before the horse.
This post points to a more productive approach and includes a neat matrix for decision making.
The problem with thinking about social media in terms of specific platforms is that it often leaves companies chasing the latest and greatest features, which are often changing faster than any of us can keep up with. This approach leaves executives constantly playing catch-up to whatever features social media platforms choose to add or remove, rather than getting ahead of these to think strategically about how
to implement them in their business context.
Worth checking out just for the
simple matrix, in a table with just nine cells including the subject line.
Drumroll: My first post on Market Leadership Journal
I'm delighted - and humble about it, believe me - to have been invited to join the group of leadership specialists writing for Market Leadership Journal. In my first post I write about a personal experience that gave me a whole new perspective on styles of leadership.
If you’re employed by a corporation, a not-for-profit, or a government
agency, in whatever role whether executive or not, you’ll know that the leadership style of the person you report to can be crucial to your happiness at work, your productivity and your sense of achievement, perhaps even your sense of self-worth.
So I would not wish on you a fair weather leader.
To find out what I mean by a fair weather leader and a simple but effective way to
reduce the stress of having to work with one - as I have had to do more than once in my career - check out the blog post.
