These days, when I speak at conferences, or visit with clients – there’s one question I get more than any other:  How can I measure my Social Media efforts? Or, similarly, “How do I know Social Media is worth the effort?”   I’m not alone.   Do a Google Search for “social media measurement” (with the quotes) and you’ll get more than 460,000 results.  But the most interesting thing about that search is the ads.   Of the 11 Google ads (during my search yesterday) eight of them were for “sentiment analysis”, two of them were for basic “listening” tools and one of them wasn’t relevant at all (some online degree thing).

See, the reason that we’re struggling to find an answer to the question of “how we measure social media” is not because the answer is hard.  It’s because it’s the wrong question.

Social Media Isn’t Media

We’ve known for years that Social Media isn’t really media.  It doesn’t have “inventory” and it’s not meant to deliver “ads” like traditional “media”.   As far back as 2008 one of my marketing heroes Jeffrey Eisenberg was saying Social Media Is Not Media.    But for some reason we’re refusing to change the word.

Lately, when someone asks me the question about the measurement of their social media efforts – I talk about how it’s a brand new muscle that our businesses need to develop – and strengthen.   And if we do it well – we make the entire organization healthier.    Or, I’ll say “developing the social web strategy is like butter.  By itself it doesn’t taste very good – but it makes everything else we do as marketers taste better.

And, while they’re both true – both answers are really a cop-out.  They are highly unsatisfying to someone who’s trying to build a business case to spend valuable time and money on a Social Web strategy.

Trying to apply a measurement strategy to the Social Web (see how I’ve changed it mid-blog post) is like trying to ask “what’s the ROI measurement on word of mouth?”  Or, it’s like asking – “what’s the ROI measurement on the telephone system in your business?”    All of these – word of mouth, the telephone system and the social web are platforms by which we share content, and more importantly conversation.

The difference between the Social Web and traditional “media” is that it is NOT a platform for the delivery of an ad or even content.  It’s the platform for a discussion.

Now, to be fair, that discussion may start with the placement of content – or even an advertisement.  The latter, of course, is how you usually get into trouble (as Honda found out the hard way) – but nevertheless a discussion may start.  In short, you can walk into a party and have the first thing out of your mouth be “$5 coupon if you act quickly”.  But the conversion rate is likely to suck pretty extensively.

Measure Content & Conversation

So, how can I get a more satisfying answer to the question?    Well here’s a thought.  Think about your other marketing tactics a moment.   You might be running TV Ads, or Print Ads, Pay-Per-Click Ads on Search Engines, E-mail Campaigns or even Banner Ads.   What’s the ROI on those tactics?   I suspect the majority of you have pretty good answers for that.  If you don’t – well that’s another blog post.

But assuming you do – you most likely measure the campaigns themselves.    And your measurement isn’t whether a particular platform is worthy – it’s whether it’s worthy via the campaign that you’re running and what you’re trying to achieve.  In other words – there are two viable conclusions you can come to if/when you fail at one of those tactics.  Either your creative content was wrong or didn’t resonate (didn’t get the conversions that others got) or the tactic is just too expensive on a cost per-lead-basis for your particular strategy (e.g. you won’t see any Big Blue Moose Superbowl Ads any time soon).   In both cases, we admit that it’s not the platform’s fault.  After all it works somewhere for someone.   We just didn’t put forward the right content – or our goal for that tactic is misaligned.

So where does that leave us?

Well – I suggest you look at the Social Web in the same manner.  To address the first goal – I’d first ask you “what’s your goal with the Social Web?”  Are you trying to drive more leads, or awareness at the top of your sales funnel – or are you trying to stem customer service costs?  Or, are you trying to do all of the above?    Then, I’d ask that you measure the ROI of reaching that goal per the creative conversation and content that you produce to try and reach that goal.

In other words – let’s assume for the moment that our goal for our initial Social Web strategy is to “drive more prospects into our online store”.   In order to do that, we’re going to put together some GREAT free content and conversation to build interest.  That content is going to cost us X dollars to create – and it’s going to cost us Y dollars to distribute through the Social Web.  As we start to try and build a community around that content and that conversation – we should watch our store?  If we start getting more people to come in – that’s measurable.  But to be clear – that doesn’t mean that the Social Web is providing return.  It means our one, GREAT piece of content is providing return.  And our ability to spread it via the Social Web is the telephone system, it is our Word Of Mouth or our “platform” for getting it out there.

And Now, Those Listening Tools Make Sense

When we start looking at it that way – all those “listening”, “sentiment analysis” and measurement tools within Facebook  “likes” and “engagement” and all the rest start to really make sense.  Because now we’re not looking at the Social Web as a graph that must continually go up and to the right.  We save those for the content and conversations we’re having.    We’re rather looking at it like we do our Telephone System or Word Of Mouth.  The platform is an important way that we have to expand our business.  But it’s only as good as we are skilled at any time using it.

And that’s what we should be measuring.

Last week SalesForce.com instantly validated the quite immature Social Media Metrics market when it announced its acquisition of Radian6 – the social media monitoring platform.   This was the largest of several recent acquisitions – namely Lithium’s acquisition of ScoutLabs and MarketWire’s acquisition of Sysomos.   And, what it signals is that – ready or not – measuring Social Media efforts with an analytics tool is coming front and center to your world.

Hit Me Baby One More Time

Remember Hits?   How many Hits did you get?  I got a bunch of Hits.  Before Web analytics really got going in the late 90′s – there was the Hit counter – the little odometers that would sit at the bottom of pages and measure how many “Hits” you got to your site.  But those, of course, weren’t sufficient for any real business – and as the importance of the Web started to grow in the enterprise, so too came the onslaught of  Web traffic measurement software.

There were many to choose from initially.  Anybody remember Analog?  Or AWStats?  Or WebAlyzer?  Oh, how about NetGenesis? It was great.  But then, as marketers were pressured to get “serious” about Web measurement – the market started to consolidate around a few solutions.  And, it’s good to remember just how deathly afraid some of us were to switch Web Analytics vendors.

Believe it or not, all those tools didn’t measure traffic in the same way.  And remember, Google Analytics didn’t even exist (unless you count Urchin the solution it acquired) until 2005.    I used to work with clients who had horror stories of switching from a log-file based installation of, say, WebTrends to the (then) shiny new Google Analytics only to see (about a month or two later) their traffic “drop” off 20%, 30% or even more.

In fact, Google’s rollout of a “Free Business Analytics Tool” was a seminal moment.  It completely changed the game for the methodology and expectations that marketers had for measuring Web traffic.    But even today, differences exist in the way that Web analytics tools count visits and page views.  For example, if you visit a page, close your browser – then open the browser and visit that page again ten minutes later – Google counts that as two visits.  Adobe’s Site Catalyst treats it as one.

But after all of that – all in all – 10 years later – I suspect many of you are like me and aren’t fretting too much about the difference in Web analytics tools.   We’ve gotten over the fact that we’re never going to get a “dedicated analyst” as most experts recommend.   And, with some practice, and a good many over-caffeinated conference sessions we’ve developed our measurement processes, and massaged our dashboards into something that helps us be more successful.  We’re resigned to the fact that we only use about 20% of the reporting capabilities of our analytics package.    In fact a Forrester Report back in 2009 (PDF) found that only 2% of us use more than 90% of our Web analytics solution.  10 years later and none of us use everything Web analytics has to offer.

In short – we marketers never learned to love our Web Analytics system – but we’ve learned how to live with it.

Oh Boy, Here We Go Again

Jeremiah Owyang observed in a well-written report late last year that almost 50% of social media programs today live inside the marketing group.  And, the other half?  Well, they live in the other part of the business (customer service, product development etc..).   Jeremiah’s point is that the social business now needs a dedicated person; a “Social Corporate Strategist”.   And, this marketing person has two basic trajectories.  They can be a “social help desk” lackey or, through proactive strategic business programs, attain “escape velocity” and help the business develop its “social muscle”.

Guess what?  If you didn’t have the juice to get a dedicated Web Analytics person – you’re probably not soon going to have the luxury of a “social corporate strategist” on your next headcount list.   Put on another cup of coffee – and book yourself another conference – because here we go again – you get another hat to wear.

But This Time Let’s Wear Our Hat Differently

Susan Etlinger (also of the Altimeter Group) made a particularly wonderful point in a recent blog post.  Commenting on the Salesforce.com acquisition of Radian6 she said:

“The ubiquity of social data has democratized the practice of data analysis and spread it far beyond highly professionalized groups such as market research.   Today, everyone’s a data analyst”

My only quibble with that quote is that it wasn’t ”social data” – but rather Web analytics data and the necessity of the marketer’s ROI dilemma of the last few years that made “everyone a data analyst”.  The “ubiquity of Social Data” has only exacerbated an existing challenge.  As I’ve said before – marketer’s HATE math.  We didn’t become Google Analytics experts because we wanted to – we did so because we were forced to.   And now we not only have to be number crunchers – but need to be able to discern ROI out of non-mathematical “social” metrics such as “sentiment” and “semantic analysis” as well.   You can add “sociologist” to the ever-increasing skill sets you need to be an effective marketer these days.

Further, the democratization of social data has not only made us all analysts – it’s made every software provider an analytics tool. And this, of course, leads to ever more diverse set of methodologies around how we measure our social marketing efforts.   For every Sysomos, Radian6, Buzzmetrics and ScoutMetrics there are ten Hootsuites, Klouts, Twittalyzers, Bitl.lys, SocialToo’s and on and on….

So…. Is SalesForce’s acquisition of Radian6 a similarly seminal moment to Google’s acquisition of Urchin 6 years ago?  Frankly I don’t know.

What I do know is that we’ll fail before we even begin if we jump into tracking Social Media like we did Web analytics.  If we start looking at Klout’s Twitter metrics and wonder if @Windows is really 15% more influential than @Linux because of a 10 point difference in Klout scores we lose.  Is our competitor better than us if they have a higher sentiment analysis?  Really?  No of course not.   Put on another cup of coffee.

Or, worse (and I actually overheard this statement at a recent conference) “Our ‘positive sentiment analysis’ is up 16 points and our Web traffic is up 10%.  Social Media Works”.   Right?  No – Wrong.

This time let’s not set ourselves up for frustration and analytics failure.  Let’s start from the beginning and understand that at the end of the day – it’s not about numbers, or followers, or influence scores or sentiment uplift or any of that.   Just like coordinates on a map – these are all just points on a graph that help us indicate our direction.   Only WE can look around and tell if we’re on the beach or in a hurricane.

The Tool Is Only A Promise That You Have To Keep

The promise of Social Media Analytics to integrate data from our customers’ social graph – and use it to derive insight – CAN no doubt help us iterate our message into more relevant (and successful) efforts.    SalesForce’s acquisition will most likely accelerate this requirement in our business – and push us faster into providing numerical measurement into what we’re doing around our Social Marketing efforts.

But WE will have to make it happen with creativity and insight into WHY it’s important.  And, as we have the luxury of bringing on a “Corporate Social Strategist” – or more likely give this additional hat to our team – or even wear it ourselves – let’s just make sure we don’t set ourselves up for failure by focusing more on HOW our data compares to our neighbor – rather than WHY we’re ultimately gathering it – and WHAT it uniquely means to our business.

So, I got to thinking the other day – what if I was the poor schmuck who got put in charge of stirring the public outrage over privacy online?  What if my job was to make people so angry over the tracking and privacy debate, that it stirred Congress to come up with some “do not track” law currently being recommended by the FTC?

Would it be hard?  How would I go about it?  What would really happen? How would I get people to care?

That last one is important – because you know what – consumers don’t really care at all about their privacy.   In the blink of an eye, consumers will sell their bodies of private information for a lottery ticket or a discount coupon.   And, even in this day and age of over-stimulated, privacy backlash – we continue to share more and more information online than ever before.

So what to do?  Well first, let’s look at the cold-hard challenges.

Consumers Don’t Care

Do you remember in March of 2007, a hacker (or multiple hackers) stole 45.7 million credit cards from discount retailers including T.J, Maxx?  The case at the time was one of the largest such breaches of consumer information ever recorded.  You’d think the backlash would have been horrific. Sales plummet, a boycott of stores, CEO’s resigning, security completely transformed.

Yeah not so much.

The CEO stayed, and two months later, T.J. Maxx reported that its April sales actually increased 2% to $1.28 billion.   Then, they reported a month later that the prior 13 weeks sales were up more than 7%.

Consider a few other lessons from our recent history:

• In a 2002, Consumer WebWatch survey, 93% of e-commerce web site users said it was “very important that sites disclose their privacy policies”.  Yet a Privacy Leadership Initiative survey shows only 3% actually ever read them.
• In the Fall of 2004, Boston University’s College of Communication released a study on Grocery Store loyalty cards.  Their findings:  7 out of 10 shoppers know that grocery stores track what they spend and how they spend it.  Only 16% said they think about this when they used their card.  And 70% of consumers report that despite being tracked “it is worth it” to get the benefits.
• In that same year, a Jupiter research report found that 82% of consumers would give personal information to new shopping sites to enter a $100 sweepstakes.
• And, just last week a new report came out saying that about one in every 700,000 visitors are clicking on the Digital Advertising Alliance’s new ad icon that enables people to opt out of behavioral advertising.

As Esther Dyson said famously: “You do a survey and consumers say they are very concerned about their privacy.  Then, you offer them a discount on a book, and they’ll tell you everything.”

You’ve Been Told

Now, as we continue our strategy session for how we’ll get the fire started for this, we come up with another challenge.   See, interestingly, that Digital Advertising Alliance report also found out that only 5% of the users that actually clicked on the icon actually go ahead and opt out.  That means of the one in every 700,000 that actually click on the icon – only 5% then go ahead and opt out.  The technical term for that is “tiny”.  According to Better Advertising (the company that actually served the ads) this suggests that “transparency doesn’t foster opt-out”.

This finding actually aligns extraordinarily well with what Google said earlier this year.  When Google rolled out their Ad Preferences feature, they gave consumers the ability to opt-out of targeted search advertising.  According to Google, of the people who visit the preferences site, 6% opt out. 40% actually edit their attributes to make it MORE accurate.  And more than half do nothing.  So, 94% either just want to be told – or are actually interested in making it better.

And, all of this aligns well with the sane, reasonable approach that the FTC proposed earlier this month.  Two of the three recommended approaches that the FTC is proposing are about just “telling the consumers” how and where their data is being used

Oops My Data Just Got Better

Hmmm… so I started chewing on all this data and a funny thing came to me.  Could Do Not Track actually HELP me both as a marketer and a publisher? Consider a couple of thoughts.

1. If the market really is separated into Activists and Apathetics (those that care deeply and those that don’t care at all) and the rest will just go with the flow – will installing a new browser feature that says “turn off tracking” really be a killer.   Probably not.  In fact, those activists who won’t respond to my advertising (or would pollute it with some plugin that generates random clicks) anyway will now not pollute my sample.  I’ll get less sample, but theoretically better data.
2. As a publisher, I can turn the historically high conversion rate of “opt-in” on its ear and sell that as a premium service to advertisers.  I can use a value statement of – we only serve your ad to those who have “opted-in” to tracking and BOY do we track them.  Disclose away – those that opt in have really jumped in full boat.
3. Not to mention that in order to work across ALL web sites, by default the “Do Not Track” option will have to be made available as a standard across browsers.  In other words, as a publisher you have to TELL ME that you don’t want to be tracked.Assuming this can technically be accomplished – this actually gives me very important information.  The proposals are not saying I can’t look at my Web Analytics to improve my content.    And using my Web Analytics,  I can start to measure Do Not Track visits (see how that works).  That number will become more important to me over time.  And using that tracker – as a publisher – I can serve them MORE ads.  In other words – if you’re using Do Not Track you get pop up ads, general blinky ads, and just annoying stuff altogether.  And if you opt in – you only get targeted, cool slick ads.  That’s hyperbole obviously, but a pretty neat value proposition nonetheless.

Okay…. So, now I’m in a good place.  I’m genuinely happy if Do Not Track passes and I don’t care if it doesn’t.  Both provide me, the marketing entrepreneur with a business challenge and a great opportunity.  In fact, what I have to make sure is that we avoid some lukewarm legislation like what just happened with Net Neutrality.

No – either I want NO legislation, or I want it to be a forced mandate that all browsers have this capability installed.

That means if I’m the guy in charge of marketing this thing and getting congress to pass some law.  Well, I’d mimick what’s happening now.  Avoid those messy things called details, trot out the scary looking nerds with their smug faces, roll the out-of-focus stock footage – and voice it all with those scary Political Ad Guys (“are your children safe”).

Roll it….

So, I think it’s no secret that for Web projects, technical teams and marketing teams tend to have an inherent distrust for one another.  And, as a guy who works in bridging the technical and marketing teams across these types of projects, I have a few rules that I like to set out between the teams.

For the technical teams, at least in the initial concept meetings, the geeks are not allowed to say “why it won’t”.  They can pitch how to solve a challenge, or they can pitch a new solution (e.g. an enhancement) to an existing problem.  In short, they’re not allowed to poke holes and point out why ideas “won’t work”.  That’s for later.

For the marketing teams, they have an opposite rule.  They have to live by the same rules, of course, but in addition they’re not allowed to use the word “just” to open up any idea.  In other words, they’re not allowed to say “just build a Web site feature that makes Unicorns come out of the screen…”

So, here comes the FTC with it’s privacy proposal and the “Do Not Track” issue is becoming hot and heavy. And both technologists and marketers are already talking about how it won’t work, and how it it can “just work”.

I Just Saved You Some Time

So, the Federal Trade Commission’s report is called Protecting Consumer Privacy In an Era of Rapid Change.   I spent a few hours curled up next to a warm fire with all 122 pages of it (aah who am I kidding I downloaded it to my iPad).    Anyway, although it’s worth a read, I’ll save you an hour for now.  Here’s the upshot of the report if somebody asks you what’s in it:

• It opens by saying this report is about educating people – and by people they mean your local Congress critters –  about the dangers of what’s going on.
• They do a quick CYA by saying “yeah, we told everyone this was going to be a big deal”.  Apparently, they told everybody to develop privacy policies (the notice and choice model) and they actually sued a couple of people (the harm-based model).
• It lays out what kind of tracking is going on here – namely tracking for Web analytics, Cookies, Social Networking information and participation, location based tracking via cell phones and information gathering from loyalty shopping cards and warranty cards (those last two seem like the ‘what doesn’t belong’ answer on the SAT Test).

Anyway, it then goes on to propose a relatively sane and well-thought-out proposal “framework” for what might be done to create some transparency and better availability for consumer information/understanding about what’s being tracked.   The three basic components of the framework proposed are:

1. Companies should adopt a “privacy by design” approach – meaning that companies should start thinking about consumer privacy, training employees, assigning personnel to oversee these activities etc…  Lots of detail here – and some historical perspective.
2. Companies should start giving “choices” to consumers about the way their data is handled – basically meaning that companies should take an “opt-in” approach to data collection.
3. Companies should be much more transparent about how data that will be tracked will be utilized.

So, all in all – pretty sane stuff right?  Just put some privacy policies in place, train your folks on what it’s about and just be transparent about how you use it.   Just do it.  Well not so fast….

Just Don’t Track Me

You’d never know this by listening to the main stream media, but the ‘Do Not Track’ stuff, doesn’t even make an appearance until page 79.    And, if you also haven’t noticed from the coverage – details on what the “Do Not Track” solution would consist of are woefully lacking.   Basically, in my opinion, they broke my first rule here by saying “It’s simple, just build a Do Not Track system”.

I agree with Web analytics expert Eric Peterson, when he says here that this is inevitable.  But  he also points out here that this has really lopsided the conversation “in favor of privacy advocates, fear mongers and other worry-warts”.   You simply can’t turn on the TV without some reporter exhorting in that dangerous newsperson voice…. “are the Web sites you use every day stalking your children…” as short, grainy, out-of-focus stock video clips of computer screens play in in the background.

Just know that the actual FTC report actually posts many more questions about “Do Not Track” as a concept than it answers.  And, the key thing of course is that this stupid name is just tailor made for a 24 hour news cycle.  The “Do Not Track” idea resembles the “Do Not Call” registry about as much as a fish resembles a bar of soap.

Just A Little Sanity

All in all, the FTC Framework proposal is a good thing.  It invites comment – and is a reasonable strawman with which to set up a much needed debate about how to really balance the needs of marketers and the fears of consumers and privacy groups.  But the hype won’t help anyone.

For example, the FTC Report points out that

“consumer surveys have shown that a majority of consumers are uncomfortable with being tracked online, although the surveys provide little or no information about the degree of such discomfort or the proportion of consumers who would be willing to forego the benefits of targeted advertising to avoid being tracked”.

This is really interesting – because it points out the obvious which we all kind of know inherently.  Ask the average consumer if they care about privacy they’ll scream “yes” – as they post the latest picture of themselves dancing naked at the office party to their Facebook profile.

So, Just What Should We As Marketers Do?

Here’s the thing…. We Marketing Folk are not evil super villains petting our white cat as we watch unsuspecting consumers browse through our online properties.  We’re trying to figure this stuff out as much as anyone.

And, assuming we’ve all gotten aboard the cluetrain, we recognize that tracking and targeting technology does not necessarily make our marketing or advertising more compelling – it simply makes us more efficient.

So, as all this moves forward in earnest – and as the CEO plops down the USAToday and Wall Street Journal on our desk and asks “where are we on this” – we should be smarter about our own efforts and what we’re doing.   Here’s some suggestions:

Just What *Are* You Tracking?

The FTC Proposal is likely to get a lot more heated in the beginning of the new year – and with it, the questions about your own site.    Take a little time and understand some of the issues (reading the doc is helpful) and start to formulate your own business strategy as it relates to visitor privacy.   For example, the FTC is reasoned enough in the document to recognize that B2C advertising may be different than B2B advertising.

So, as marketers – in preparation for action we may need to take, let’s remind ourselves to be smarter about what we’re doing online:

• How Many First Party Cookies: These are cookies your site sets for the functioning of your site.  They will be set by your site.  They are almost always used to set browsing preferences (e.g. are you logged in?) or maintain things like shopping cart consistency.  These are mostly going to stay regardless  in order to make your site functional on the Web.
• How Many Third-Party Cookies: This is where it, theoretically, gets creepy.  These are the cookies set by third party applications you have running.  These are the ones you really need to know.   Now, there’s some fuzziness here but a great definition of this comes from Microsoft – “a third party cookie either originates on OR IS SENT TO a Web site different from the one you are currently viewing”.My emphasis there is because even if the cookie is set by your domain – if the information is then sent to a third-party (a la Advertising Tracking, Content Targeting, Web Analytics, or other) it might ultimately be construed as a third-party cookie. And First vs. Third is not vendor or even function specific.

  As an example, Google Analytics measuring Goals is considered a First Party Cookie.  But if you’re using Google Adwords Conversion Tracker on your site – you’re using Third-Party Cookies (or more specifically Google is – to give you the report you want).

• Are We Using Web Beacons or Web Bugs: These are typically (although not exclusively) single pixel images that are used to track users across multiple domains.  So, you might be using them to track single users across multiple sites in your company’s network.

Take a moment over the next few weeks to look at, understand, and start to devise a strategy about what you’re tracking and how you’re using that information.  Then, once you know – ask yourself if your organization can stand behind it.   Make sure your management team knows exactly what you’re tracking and how you’re using that information.    This topic is only going to get more heated in the next few months – and if you can answer well – you’ll look like a rock star to your team.

Something is bound to happen here – and most likely it will be a combination of new, entrepreneurial efforts (such as Microsoft’s announcement of built-in privacy features in their new browser) and new companies that will offer compliance related solutions.

In the spirit of my own “concept” meeting – I’m sure a technical solution could exist that would make the “do not track” feasible.   But, I have to say my suspicion is –  that once people really start to understand the technical complexity of the simple statement  “just put in a ‘do not track’ system across the Internet” – that this will go no further than the relatively bad idea it is.

As George Bush Sr. might say… It’s just not prudent at this juncture…….

So, Facebook has just recently changed a whole bunch of stuff… yes again… And now users can “Unlike a page” right from their Home Stream.

The “Unlike” feature has been around for some time now – but it was buried pretty deep in the user’s preferences.  Now, if a user sees an offending post from a Facebook Brand Page, they simply “Click the X” and they get a choice to “Hide the post”, “Hide the brand”, “Unlike the Page” or “Mark As Spam”.    That last one will be really interesting to follow as the months go on.

But it’s Unlike A Dislike

However, much to the dismay of some, the “Unlike the Page” feature only works if you have originally “Liked” the brand.  And, it really can’t go much further – because it doesn’t show up as a News Feed item.  In other words – everyone will know when you “Like” Hello Kitty – yes I know you were just testing out some some of their fun Apps – but no one will know if and when you ever “Unlike” it.

I’ve written before about how making it hard to keep an accurate profile will only hurt Facebook’s accuracy in behavioral targeting.  And, most certainly this change is designed to make it easier for users to maintain their profiles more accurately – and therefore more “relevant” for advertisers.

Also interesting to note is that you have to “Like” a page before you can go get your hate on for a particular brand.  I’m sure Target, Nestle and myriad politicians have seen an exponential jump in “Likes” just prior to their pages filling up with negativity.  Will the new ease of “unlike” better illustrate these patterns to these brands?

For Marketers -Better Insight

One thing is for sure – Facebook is also making better use of the “Insights” platform of analytics.

Yikes - What Did We Publish On The 19th?

Now that “Likes” and “Unlikes” are behaving more like Follows and Unfollows on Twitter – it’s interesting to watch these statistics in your analytics.   I’ve seen a few instances with clients where they can track specific content that they are sharing to a wave of “Unlikes”.  This is great information – and finally living up to Facebook’s name for their analytics system – and can really inform brands about which content is working and which isn’t.

Well if you manage a brand page for a client or for your own organization – do yourself a favor and go check out the new Facebook insights.  Unlike stats are in there as well – and when you map that against your brand posts, you can start to get some interesting data about which posts are most relevant (and resonant) to your audience.