Archive for November 12th, 2008

I’m a big believer in the primacy of content, but sometimes I have to share some technical details on what kind of typewriters the infinite monkeys in here are using, and I know there are a few techies out there who dig this stuff.

Feeling the need for more mobility in my computing and blogging, I recently bought an Acer Aspire One, a very small notebook computer, what’s often called a “netbook” these days.  It weighs 2.2 pounds and it’s (mostly) brown.  It also runs Linux and has a solid state memory thingy instead of a hard drive, so it boots up and shuts down very very quickly.  Here it is with a Thinkpad T61.  You can compare the Thnkpad’s 14″ not so wide screen (1400×1050) with the Aspire’s 8.9″ wide screen (1024×600) and refer to my earlier rant on wideness.

You can also get a sense of the keyboard and key size compared the Thinkpad’s, which is often considered the gold standard of laptop keyboards.  It takes some getting used to, but I managed to compose and edit today’s post on Social Media Breakfast on it.  It would have been liveblogging if a wireless connection were available at Ryles.  I had to use another computer to wrangle the photos, but only because I haven’t yet installed image editing software on it.

I’m really impressed with the completeness of this product.  The solid state module is only 8GB and the OS and preloaded applications take up more than half of that, but that already includes the OpenOffice suite, Firefox, and a bunch of other apps.  There’s a webcam and mic, three USB ports, external monitor port plus mic and headphones, and a hardware switch for turning off the wifi for in-flight use.  Once I figure out how to add Skype and GIMP, I’ll be able to do almost all my usual computing tasks on the go.

It’s not a MacBook Air in so many ways (the MacBook weighs 3 pounds, for one) but the Aspire One comes in five colors, and you can buy one of each for less than the price of an Air.  For a second or third computer, I was much more willing to take a chance on it.

You can read up on all the technical details elsewhere, but I want to leave you with my favorite part of the user manual, advice on how not to hold the unit in such a way as to crush your own fingers.  Thanks for the warning, guys.

Today’s Social Media Breakfast at Ryles in Inman Square was packed.  Packed with social media types looking for work and some free pastry, but also packed with meatier than usual discussion of ROI.  You can follow much of the live twitter chatter on the hashtag #smb10 even though hashtags are sort of obsolete.

After the schmoozing, Shift’s Robert Collins called the session to order, acknowledged the generosity of sponsor Hubspot, and introduced the topic, social media ROI.  Angst about the return on marketing investment is nothing new, and social media marketing has turned out not to be immune to the question, especially in strummy und drangy economic times.  Maybe it’s a meme I’m not hip to, but the possibly rhetorical question, “what’s the ROI of putting on your pants?” came up more than once.

The first speaker was Hubspot’s Brian Halligan who opened with the point that people are getting better and better at blocking out traditional (and non-traditional) interruptive marketing.  I guess that’s part of why Hubspot sponsors SMB, eh?  In any case, Brian showed how Hubspot uses content creation to bring in web traffic and then organizes that traffic by source into funnels leading down to leads and business.  A refreshingly pragmatic approach, I think.  On the other hand, there is an element of “give away interesting content and they will come” airy optimism here, but he advised us all to ask if we were generating “wonder bread or wheat bread” with traffic from social media sites.  I’m a little skeptical of the “intangible ROI” on one of his slides – if its intangible, is it really Return?

Next up, Matt Cutler of Visible Measures (also a Hubspot customer, hmm) talked about his company’s business of measuring online media, sort of like an Arbitron for the YouTube set.  My favorite factoid from his presentation was that the #1 predictor of the viewership of a given video is if the artist has just come out with another new video.  Apparently, the coattails of a new video, any new video, can carry along older videos by that artist, or – I speculate – other related videos by any artist.  He also pointed out that the “how did they do that?” factor contributes to more views as people watch it again and again to figure it out.

Matt also showed some word cloud analyses that I must blog about separately.  I love the look of word clouds but have some issues about how people are starting to use them more like tag clouds and thereby overestimate the amount of actual information in them.  This vintage limepost tells part of the story.

I also learned from Matt that primetime TV advertising carries a cost in the range of $25 CPM.  Interesting to compare that figure to my guesstimated price of $15 CPM for advertising in my twitter stream.  Hmm, indeed.

The third speaker was Andy McAfee, an HBS Fellow (with an HBS blog) who was the only one presenting without slides.   He began by pondering why you never see ROI figures of less than 100% on those slick documents you get from vendors.   Hmm.  It turns out, to my surprise, that Andy advocates a more realistic and relaxed view of technology (not just marketing, not just social media) ROI.  The says that the chain of cause and effect is so tenuous and attenuated, that it’s an “intellectually bankrupt exercise.”  What you can do, Andy says, is you can measure what you can measure on the Investment side – generally how much money and time you spend -  and for the Return side, you have to use a different method.  You have to tell stories and create scenarios.

McAfee went on to say that conventional “sharp pencil ROI” (the sort Sloanies like me enjoy) is a bit of a lie, and a lie that actually insults people’s intelligence since everybody knows there’s no way those numbers are that accurate.  He suggests that we should come to terms with the possibility that costs and benefits could be comprehended in dissimilar terms.

I like it.  But will the boss buy it? I hope the social media tweeps in the crowd down’t misread Andy’s talk as permission to throw ROI out the window or to stop measuring things.  It’s a call to add some flexibility (agility?) and judgement back into the mix, and I welcome it.

In the Q&A, Sanjay from LuckyCal asked about the relative yield of different media funnels.  Hubspot answered that they see less efficiency in the social media funnels, but much higher volume.  And Hubspot believes that the volume levels in social media might be made even greater with less effort.  Not all web visits are created equal, I guess.

Another Q&A item asked about the valuation of a social media asset, such as a number of facebook friends.  The suggestion was that you could value them by estimating what it would cost you to acquire permission to message those people by some other means.  But remember folks, your facebook friends are not really assets, you don’t own them, you just have the temporary privilege of communcating with them, revocable at any time.

See you next month at Social Media Breakfast 11, which will be about social media in the nonprofit world…

Tags: #smb10, breakfast, cambridge, hubspot, inman square, pants, ryles, social media