For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!

At the end of December Wordpress 2.9 was released with newly added support for comment metadata. We though it would be great to build a plugin that utilized this new feature and it also happened that a client of ours needed a plugin that that used comment meta data, everyone is a winner.

The resulting plugin is called Sentimeter. In the words of Steve the plugins main author (and lead developer here at Nizomk):

This plugin allows users to express sentiments (a la getsatisfaction.com, e.g. happy, neutral, outraged etc.) through the WordPress commenting system. Users can also associate their comment with a pre-defined ‘topic’. Overall sentiment, and comment topics, can be viewed as pie charts in the admin system, within a user-defined date range. Additionally, comments (along with their sentiment, and topic, if specified) can be exported as a CSV for further offline analysis.

You will need to update your templates a bit to utilize the plugin but it is written in the traditional Wordpress ‘loop’ style so it should slot in easily. Check out the plugin homepage for the detailed instructions. As the blurb says, the admin panel allows you to view how your users are feeling via a couple of pie charts, these are rendered in pure HTML using the fantastic gRaphaël javascript library.

We still have a bit of work to do to make the plugin easily customizable (which is still possible if you dont mind getting your hands a little dirty) so look out for updates in the near future. In the meantime, grab the code from here, follow these instructions to install the plugin and get Sentimetering!

Do you have a project that you would like to discuss with us? Or perhaps you know someone who is thinking about how to implement their digital strategy for 2009 and could do with some useful, actionable input and direction?

If so, we are running a limited edition special offer to help you shine online.  Check it out.

If we can’t be of assistance or if you are not satisfied with the results then we will send you a delicious cake from the lovely Brighton cake boutique Choccywoccydoodah.  Mmm, how can you refuse such a tasty proposal?

“And if you want to know a little bit more about our practice areas and service offerings then check out our “What we do page”.  This will give you guys, the wonderful NixonMcInnes audience, a little more information about the kind of work we are helping folks with.

Just so you know in case it is still not clear; we are a full service agency; this means that not only can our skilled social media consultants help you apply social media to your marketing strategy and help you use this medium to plan specific campaigns, but the consultants are backed up by a fully formed delivery team made up of talented developers and designers able to make your ideas for websites, widgets, applications, blogs, social media press rooms and anything else web wise a reality. You can even get to know the team in advance.

So go on, book your conversation with us now, we are ready, poised to listen to your challenges and lend a hand; guaranteed!

Just e-mail or pick up the phone:

ruth@nixonmcinnes.co.uk

01273 648315.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks to EpicFireworks for the image.

The background

Traditional digital marketing has been around for at least 10 years now. During that time benchmarks and standards have built up around this form of promotion. We have tried and tested techniques to measure and apply best practice to this area. At present, no such principles and values exist in relation to measuring social media and online PR. Queue MeasurementCamp.

MeasurementCamp was born on a rainy mid-February evening in London as a result of a Chinwag event dealing with the subject of Measuring Social Media where our MD, Will McInnes was invited to be a panel member.

It became clear to Will on the night that what was needed was an open source set of agreed measurements for social media. This was confirmed by the feedback of the various audience members after the event. So what started as an off-the-top-of-the-head suggestion by Will quickly became a journey to devise a set of standards (using the Creative Commons model who work to ‘offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their work while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved’).

An open forum was proposed, it was named MeasurementCamp. It may have first been suggested by Will however the idea does not belong to him, nor to us here at NixonMcInnes or the funkalicious digital, social media crowd that was present that evening. The web belongs to everyone, so whilst Will may have laid down the gauntlet for such a movement, he can’t take all the credit for it. It was formed from a discussion, a debate and most importantly the natural inquisitive nature inherent in us as a human race, the need to justify and measure things. Some might call it progress or at least a way to kick it off.

The audience

Come one come all. The event is open to everyone who has an interest vested or otherwise in measuring social media. You might be from a social media or digital agency, you might work in an organisation dealing with analytics or you may be an all important client who has a digital brand. At MeasurementCamp you will meet all three types of breed. There are peeps from the agency world such as Hotwire or Dare, representatives from the world of analytics such as Onalytica and Nielsen Online. Last but not least there are representatives from the client side; people like Bauer, University of Southampton, Make Your Mark and Hyperlaunch; individuals who are buying this social media shizzle from people like us, individuals who work in marketing and are obliged as part of their role to prove ROI.

The purpose

The purpose is continually evolving, however at the core is the desire to create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.

What is understood is that you and a lot of people like you have to prove that social media works in the campaigns that are being devised. We don’t really know how to do this yet. However we’ll certainly give it a blooming good bash.

The manifesto

All good movements have a manifesto, something for the audience to get behind. A municipal declaration of the principles and intentions allayed to the purpose of the assembly. In other words a set of values that can be worked to and from by the group that help them focus on the task in hand.

The citizens of MeasurementCamp believe:

1. that social media are about relationships and language. This makes conversations difficult to ‘measure’ by existing metrics
2. measurement is important and we strive to find clarity in and derive better insights from the work that we do
3. technologies to measure will probably be proprietary but that to use these technologies effectively we as a community can help one another to develop understanding and resources to fill the yawning gaps in our own education and knowledge
4. whatever we produce together should be freely available for others to use and improve, and that together we are stronger than apart
5. whilst every case is different and unique, there are benefits to common standards and approaches around the world and across regional boundaries

What we have learnt so far

MeasurementCamp is not aiming to develop a ‘one-size fits all’ approach. The development of the project is based on an understanding that measures will vary greatly on a client-by-client basis and the network in which we are communicating/participating. We are consistently learning, we do not profess to have all the answers, yet!

Resources

In true social media style a wiki has been created as a central resource where the pioneers of MeasurementCamp (and actually anyone who chooses to) can collate their findings and gather together a pool of resources to help develop clarity around ‘what’ to measure rather than ‘how’. These resources may not be measuring devices themselves. They may come in the form of information as guides, a framework, suggested units of measurement, icons, basic software or tools, or other stuff entirely.

What next?

Does this sound good to you? Do you want to immerse yourself in the challenge? Check out the MeasurementCamp wiki and get yerself along to the next event. You never know you might have some valuable contributions to add to the melting pot. Together we are powerful, get involved!

MeasurementCamp would be nothing without the commitment from people to provide their valuable time and contributions. Particular thanks goes out to Helen Lawrence – Dare Digital, Flemming Madsen – Onalytica, Robin Grant – 1000heads, Sam Michel – Chinwag, Lauren Fisher – Propellernet, Adrian Moss – BottlePR/Focus, Simon Quance – Hyperlaunch, Robin Wilson – Bite PR, Giles Palmer – Brandwatch, Daljit Bhurji – PR & Social Media Consultant, Jonathan Hopkins – Bite/Shed/middledigit.net, Tim Hoang – Rainier PR / New Media Knowledge, Jenny Brown – jenny-bee.net, Ged Carroll – Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Kelvin Newman – SiteVisibility, Craig Hepburn – STA Travel, Dan Thornton – Bauer, Mark Rogers – Market Sentinal, Chris Reed – Fishburn Hedges, Drew Benvie – Hotwire, Helen Aspell – Univeristy of Southampton, Luke Hay – Wired Sussex, Dom Whitehurst – Hotwire, Richard Bagnall – Metrica & Measurement Matters, Karl Havard – Propellernet, Jason Ryan – iCrossing, David Hughes – iCrossing, Tim Callington – Edelman, Simon Collister – Edelman, Drew Davis – Chameleon Net, Katie Barber – Digital Outlook, Rachel Clarke, Chris Applegate – Outside Line, Anjali Ramachandran – http://www.one-size-fits-one.blogspot.com/, Alex Burmaster – Nielsen Online, Katy Howell – Immediate Future, Michael Blowers – Media Evaluation Research, Ben Bland – Ryan MacMillan, Damien Mulley – Mulley Communications and Aliya Zaidi – e-Consultancy.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacesuitcatalyst/536389937/

The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.

Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.

Benefits of the new implementation include:

• More reliable tracking capabilities
• Lighter code
• Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
• New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
• Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25

The basic Google Analytics setup has the following features and benefits:

Statistical Analysis

Google Analytics helps you incrementally measure and improve visitor experience by tracking how users arrived at your website and how they navigated through the pages and then providing statistics about those visits. These include:

• Absolute Unique visitors
• Page Views
• Average Page Views
• Time spent on site
• Bounce Rate
• New Visits
• Geo-location
• Visitors browser and operative system

Each statistic can be drilled down and segmented. Different time periods can be compared to show the website’s progress (January 2007 against January 2008, for instance).

Keyword and Campaign Comparison

Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links and keywords on Google and other search engines.

Custom Dashboards

No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that you can email to others or schedule to be sent automatically.

AdWords Integration

Buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business.

Trend and Date Slider

Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long-term trends.

Site Overlay

See traffic and conversion information for every link as you browse your site (no download required).

Email reports

Schedule or send ad-hoc personalised report emails that contain exactly the information that you want to share.

Geo-Targeting

Find out where your visitors come from and identify your most lucrative geographic markets.

Additional benefits can be reported by Google analytics when setup correctly. These are:

E-Commerce Tracking

Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics and identify your revenue sources.

Funnel Visualisation

Find out which pages result in lost conversions and where your would-be customers go – great if you need an answer to these questions:

• What is the rate between visits and purchases
• How many transactions were made? How often?
• What is the average order value?
• How many products were purchased?
• What is the average number of product sales per order?
• Which are the top revenue products?

The image below represents the Google Analytics eCommerce overview panel displaying these benefits:

Google Analytics Funnels are steps the users take to achieve a specific goal, tracking a user’s page by page path on the website. Provides insight to:

• How many users achieved the goal?
• What pages have they visited to get to the goal?
• How many users left the website on which page? Understanding why reviewing these will help improve your site’s performance over time.

Here is an example of a goal called “Search to Purchase”:

The advantages are clear and provide answer to the following questions:

• Where do users leave the site via external links?
• Are the users having problems going through the checkout process?
• Which page in the checkout is has the highest “abandon” rate?
• Which are the most profitable products?
• Which segment (region, affiliate) is most profitable?

In practice

We recently completed the build of an eCommerce website that is now hosted on our staging server, pending final data and client approval.

It is running the latest Google Analytics code and it is exciting to see the test results showing up every day and to know that our client will have the advantage of knowing exactly how their online business is performing.

The website was developed using the following open-source applications:
• Joomla content management system
• VirtueMart, a Joomla eCommerce plug-in
• Google Analytics Tracking Module, a plug-in compatible with VirtueMart
• External Link Enhancement plug-in to track external links (exit points) on your website

Note:

Watch out! The old code is not compatible with the new one, so make sure you only install one of them on your website.

Old code will be supported for the next year but after that will cease to work. Best to take advantage of Googles’s innovation sooner rather than later – if you need a hand we’ll be happy to help.

For further details on what metrics to track and why, check out our latest ebook Chapter 6: Essential Web Analytics.

Read the latest chapter in our ebook series and find out how you can make sense of the endless stream of data generated by your web analytics package. Define the numbers that matter and use them to generate actionable insights for you and your colleagues.

Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.

‘Essential Web Analytics’ is part of our FREE e-book – “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.

This is a user-friendly, no-jargon guide with great examples and useful tips of how to use the latest digital techniques to make your online campaigns successful. Essential reading for marketers.