Online Information 2008 – day two: Measuring Effects
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under web 2.0
Ok, so we heard that we all need to be engaged, to blog, twitter, have profiles everywhere …. This is what you tell companies to do, but tell me why? What is the direct gain? How do you measure this engagement everybody talks about?
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I-Crossing is the company specializing the measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns. Ben Bose opened the talk by explaining various ways to measure engagement on the web (conveniently, their approach is 4 Is – measuring Involvement, Interaction, Influence and Intimacy). Depending on the brand, they claim to tailor a unique measuring metrics.
He focused on two campaigns done for Channel 4 and its effects.
Bow Street Runner
Channel 4 wanted to target young people between ages of 14 and 19, an audience for its educational program, which is why it created a Flash game Bow Street Runner, based on real events from Georgian London (Bow Street Runners are the first police force in London), as companion of the program City of Vice. The key effect they were aiming for was engagement, which was high and unexpectedly, many players came from other countries (outside the interest zone of Channel 4, which airs only in the UK). Regarding interaction, most active players were a part of gaming community, not people looking for expanding their education. As the criteria of intimacy (sentiment around the brand, reviews on third party sites, brand strength reflected in search) was concerned people were dissatisfied as they could not play the game on their X box or on other Flash sites. Influence among gamers was significant, but it missed the target group, which included parents and teachers, who were not included in the creation of the game, which is why they could not use it for educational purposes.
Another example was even less successful (makes me wonder why he used it, if not for “we got it right after this” purposes.
Disarm Britain
Since Britain has seen a huge rise in knife and gun crime in the last few years, Channel 4 organized a Disarm Britain season, a series of programs designed to tackle this problem, as well as panels, chaired by Cherrie Blaire around the country.
As a part of the campaign for the program, profiles on Bebo, Facebook and a blog have been set up. Thing is that discussions on this issue are already present online, which accounts for the lack of impact of Channel 4 in engaging in the already existent conversation. It even created certain negative effects – Bebo page users spoke in slang about the topic, on Facebook members were more dealing with the suitability of Cherrie Blaire to chair these discussions, while a white supremacist website in the US, picked up the campaign, as an example of how high immigration is responsible for the rise of violent crime (all goes to show that you can not really control where the content goes).
What the agency involved with the campaign and Channel 4 learned from these two experiences is that measurement should be included even before creating a campaign, as the chief mistake of these campaigns was that it assumed some kind of novelty and expected that to be recognized, which online usually it is not. Targeted groups should be asked beforehand what kind of engagement would interest them, not assuming that they will flock the social network, once a brand sets up its profile page.
Engagement is usually about depth of conversation, intensity of social links, not the numbers or click throughs. Bose cited the case of Pink Ribbon campaign on Facebook, which has an astounding 4,9 million members, but out of them less then several hundreds have made a significant contribution to the fighting breast cancer campaign, the others feel that it is socially acceptable to support the cause, without actually doing anything (that is not seen on the network, right?). Smaller cancer-support forums or groups have greater degree of user involvement.
Tags: channel 4, measuring engagement, online information 2008, social networking, web 2.0
December 4th, 2008 at 8:13 am
i guess i’m not the target audience, but i enjoyed bow street runner. it’s one of the few games i actually finished. hahaha!
December 4th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
well, they are the one that should worry about the target audience. but these examples sound so familiar ….i heard recently about a social network, set up for a coffee manufacturer in my country. sure, you can make a social network about anything and I am very likely to say on Facebook, I am a fan of this brand of coffee, or I love drinking coffee in this chain, but why would I join a network there. feels like someone in the marketing world told them “facebook is the latest thing, you got to make something similar, you’ll get thousands of users/potential loyal customers”. it is not happening.