The first ever SWAT Summit kicked off this last week in San Francisco. The aim of the conference was to help advertisers effectively enter and work with social networks.Due to unfortunate scheduling, I was only able to make it for the last half of the one-day event (earlier in the day I was attending PSFK's conference). My friend and colleague, Steve Hall of Adrants, had the honor of speaking at two sessions, one of which was The Science of Measuring Campaign Success (User Metrics and Engagement). The session included Ian Swanson (Sometrics), Kim Kochaver (Federated Media), Troy Young (VideoEgg), and Anna Banks (McCann Worldgroup). Steve grilled everyone on if the case studies they were presenting actually worked at the end of the day, and it was obvious that some of the panelists were agitated by this question.The panelists discussed how demographic targeting/analyzing tools in Facebook were making it easier for clients and ad agencies to measure success in social media. I couldn't help but raise my hand and ask if this was actually considered progress. By these standards, it seems like advertising is making little to no progress by taking the same solution (demographics, impressions, etc.) and trying to force-fit it into a new problem (social media). I've been ranting for a while that demographics are dead. It seems like advertisers are taking the easy way out by using traditional metrics and refusing to spend effort towards educating clients about what is relevant in social media. Additionally, I never once heard the panel mention the idea of building custom metrics based on social media analysis and relevance to the individual project.I think it's important for conferences like SWAT Summit to talk about these issues, but I wish there was more representation from the social media side (for the half of the day I was there, it seemed very advertiser-heavy).
One size does NOT fit all
Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to "managing" various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you've seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.There is definitely an increased need to edit down the information influx we receive everyday via email, IM, web apps, etc. There is also definitely the stress of joining all the new sites your friends keep joining. However, just as a recent blog post pointed out the potential resurgence of separating public and not-so-public content, there is also arguably a need to cater which content resonates most with which audience.A quote from 2006 that I often refer back to and has always resonated with me is "the internet favors infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare".So, why I think one-size-fits-all services like HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Twhirl, and Mahalo Share are missing the mark:SpamThe one-size services assume your followers and friends are only following you on one site. In reality, most of us go between various different sites as much as we would go between kissing partners at a game of spin the bottle (as Sean has stated, I have a non-proprietary crush on Twitter and Pownce). This mass broadcasting may help you spend less time catering to each site, but will end up filling up all your friends' social inboxes two or three times over with the same content. Undoubtedly, this will annoy them - especially if they really didn't need to see that you're broadcasting live on Qik in 3 different places every 5 minutes.RudenessWorse than a wish-I-could-be-there video award acceptance speech, it's centered around broadcasting without valuing interaction. Almost all people I've observed who use these services to cross-post, rarely ever login to the individual sites to see the replies, nor does it seem like they care. As a result, the content suffers significantly - as people learn to not click through or respond to things where they know their opinion won't be heard.Poor CateringIf not interacting with a community and spamming your friends didn't hinder you enough, the services completely overlook the most important aspect: the content. On Pownce, seeing your 5 latest 140 character @ replies you had on Twitter is completely useless, annoying and a total giveaway to the fact that you're probably never going to take the time to send me that new song you like or point me to a video you wanted to talk about outside of the 5,000 YouTube comments it received. As such, I've most likely already stopped following you.To quote myself from 2006 in reference to advertisers, "So what if you reach a larger ... audience? Did you reach the right audience? There's so much talk about demographics, but in the end, people only care about numbers instead of the effectiveness, no less defining effective influence."Have these microblogging sites given rise to an advertising-like mindset of reaching numbers rather than niches?