#048: Social Media Analytics with Hayes Davis

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Tim, Michael, and the occasional guests discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And no, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:24.82 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 48. Have you ever had to measure social media? Yes, I know. It sucked. But you did it anyway and good for you. Do you want to know how to do it better? Well, sure you do. Will you learn how to measure social media better by listening to this podcast? Maybe. So tweet at your Facebook wall and filter your snaps because this is the show about social media analytics. After years of avoiding all things social media, Tim Wilson, my co-host, hello Tim. Hello and under 140 characters, Michael. And myself, Michael Hobling. We needed a real pro, a real ace, a real ninja guru pirate to help us understand this better. So we went out and got Hayes Davis. Hayes is the CEO. of union metrics prior to that he found a liquid communications union metrics works with a lot of companies to solve complex social media problems and analysis so welcome.

00:01:29.82 [Hayes Davis]: Hey guys nice to be here.

00:01:32.77 [Michael Helbling]: It’s a pleasure to have you. And you know, it might be good to get us started since you kind of take that less is more approach to your LinkedIn profile to maybe give you the backstory of where you got into this and sort of where it came from. What kinds of problems were you trying to solve all the way back?

00:01:50.53 [Hayes Davis]: Sure, sure. Yeah, I like to keep it a little mysterious on LinkedIn. It makes it more exciting when somebody finds me and actually gets to talk to me. So, you know, I’m lucky, lucky you guys. So, you know, I will take you all the way back to the dark ages of, oh gosh, I don’t know, around 2008. Facebook had 100 million users. Twitter was just breaking out after South by Southwest in 2007. And I was kind of sick of my job. So I was looking at all of those developments and I said, you know, this is the social space is where I want to be. And so I ended up founding what became Unimetrics with my co-founder who has a PhD in organizational communication and was studying this stuff from an academic background. And so we started this company and we actually started in kind of a different area. We were focused on social commerce actually and we realized pretty quickly that there was no measurement at all. And so we started a product called Tweetreach. It was actually something that I kind of specced out and built pretty quickly to test out some ideas around what does it mean when you have a piece of content that you put out on social media and it actually gets retweeted and amplified and how do you quantify that? And that’s really where Tweetreach came from. And We started to realize there’s a lot of traction around that and that our passion was actually not in the commerce side, but in the measurement side. And so we really began to grow that and we were very, very early to the space, this concept of reach as it related to social. And that was an exciting place to be. And so as we continued to grow the company, We’ve branched out over the years into a full multi-channel analytic suite across Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook and really trying to serve marketers. Helping them make sense of social is a huge task right now. You mentioned that social media sucks when you try to measure it and that’s true to a certain degree but more and more it’s really core to what marketers do and we try to help them with that with our With our products and make it suck a little less.

00:04:11.27 [Tim Wilson]: So how do those how do those different channels like I know Twitter’s API has gone through some evolutions. Facebook’s has gone through evolutions. Is there like a minimum threshold of what has to be available through an API before you can say look there’s enough there that we can actually help out or are there have there been platforms you’re like we’re not going there because there’s just nothing there and we don’t want to get into screen scraping.

00:04:33.20 [Hayes Davis]: Right. Yes and yes, actually. So we, we’ve always taken the approach that our ideal relationship with any platform is, is through, you know, a published API and ideally through a commercial API to be quite honest. That’s how we prefer to get data. There are platforms. You know we’ve seen this evolution repeatedly platform emerges there’s organic engagement on that platform they open their API just a little bit maybe they open it too wide and they pull it back in and they change things and then they try to build a business around it and we’ve seen this happen just. repeatedly over and over and over again. And so what we realized with that is, you know, we need to be sure that if we’re going to do an integration with a platform that we’ve got a great business relationship with that platform that we understand, you know, where they’re headed, they’re mature enough to actually be thinking about this in a way that allows us to get consistent data. So yeah, we’re not going to go.

00:05:28.59 [Tim Wilson]: And yet you’re working with Facebook anyway.

00:05:32.04 [Hayes Davis]: Yes, we are. The 1.7 billion pound gorilla gets to call the shots. So that’s kind of how it works.

00:05:43.57 [Michael Helbling]: And I don’t want to derail the direction of the conversation right away, but maybe let’s bring it back to some ideas or best practices. Like, how do companies, what have you seen work really well for getting consistent data from some of those tools? Because that’s, I mean, honestly, one of the biggest frustrations that a lot of people have is sort of, how do I bring it all together and how do I make sure it kind of is stable?

00:06:09.74 [Tim Wilson]: Companies bring their hand. They wring their hands about tweaking their web analytics platform because then they won’t have historical data. And that’s like, that’s where social, it seems like, shit, by the time you to get year over year, compares means you’ve probably screwed something up because you’re not keeping up.

00:06:27.36 [Hayes Davis]: Well, so there’s a set of things to unpack there. Number one is, and this is a ridiculously self-serving answer, but I would highly recommend that nobody should really be doing this directly against the platforms themselves. And I really do mean that. I was at a conference not too long ago. One of the speakers got up and proceeded to give this 40-slide presentation about how he used all of these tools to build this pipeline at the agency that he works in to process all this data. And he’s like, you don’t need a product to do this. And, you know, I’m sitting there, you know, my jaw is on the floor a little bit, and I admire his tenacity, but I also know that the second one of those platforms changes, that entire house of cards is just going to fall flat. right right that’s that’s yeah and so you know it i consider it one of the things that we do as a as a you know building a product in the space our job is to insulate our customers from all of that shit you know that’s really what we’re what we’re trying to do and so um that said you know you can only you can insulate from api changes and and help to provide you know evolution around that as the api evolves you can add functionality or you can We do a ridiculous amount of work to hide all that complexity. And I mean a ridiculous amount of work. The amount of time our engineering team spends, the amount of code that goes into it, it’s not something, it’s one of those things where you, if you’ve ever written software, you know that you can set up a couple of things and all of a sudden you’re getting data and you’re like, cool, okay, this is great, right? But to actually make that into a production system that’s actually gonna serve a bunch of people, You know that’s the other 99% of the work even though you can in 30 minutes start getting a CSB or some Jason or something like that so now to the question of you know what is this actually look like from a metric standpoint you know how do you bring these pieces together how do you compare across platforms. I think we’re still in the infancy of what social means, and it means so many different things. I’ve seen some interesting ideas around trying to build a taxonomy of social metrics and things like that, but ultimately, There’s a lot of different data sources that words we think mean the same thing like reach and impressions don’t mean the same thing, you know, and that’s something that is is a big challenge. And so one of the things that, you know, we have to work on, I think as an industry is coming to a consensus about what those things mean. And, you know, I think we’re We’re 10 years into this, roughly, a little bit more at this point. And I think if you look back at media measurement in the past for new platforms, 10 years in, a lot of things were still up in the air as well. So that doesn’t make our lives any easier. It doesn’t make the lives of the analysts or the marketers any easier, but I think it’s the reality that we work in today. That said, I think we have to push as an industry to start to get some clear definitions around that. We can’t just throw up our hands and say, okay, well, Facebook gives me a number, and they call it reach, and Twitter gives me a number, and they call it impressions, and we just say, okay, let’s just throw the biggest one in a PowerPoint and show it to a client.

00:09:55.85 [Tim Wilson]: Well, and both, and all those channels are not only competing with each other, so they’re not necessarily incentivized to say, we’re going to make our metrics merge or be comparable, unless they are confident that their numbers are going to look better, but they’re also rapidly evolving the platforms, right? I mean, you’ve got, like every time you turn around, you’ve got, you know, Facebook live stream comes out. You know or you know something like periscope that’s kind of a new it which i always think of that is is. There’s so many things that are moving the number of platforms that are hot with different groups you know and depending on who you’re targeting at the same time that the platforms themselves are evolving to try to capture as much. market and relevance is they can and the consumer behavior is is also like shifting and adjusting and the data that sits on that i mean it does a lot of time seems to me like trying the thing you really can’t do is say we want to we need to figure out what are. KPIs are for this right now and we’re expecting that we’ll revisit them every three years because then you’re just, there’s shit, there could be whole new channels. I was actually at a thing where somebody was saying that we’re working with the four major platforms for us And they said, it was Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And he was like, I can’t remember the, he was having like a Rick Perry moment. And he was like, I can’t remember the last one. I’m like, oh, it’s Pinterest. He was like, no, hell no, it’s like it’s Snapchat. And for their demographic, he was like, yeah, Pinterest, you know, no way. And I have no idea. I assume Pinterest is still growing and is still a big, so you wind up with who’s your audience. And it’s not just like, how’s my website serving this? It’s which of the channels, because every one of them is a big investment to manage, but also to measure and figure out how to get the data.

00:11:43.70 [Michael Helbling]: Right.

00:11:44.32 [Tim Wilson]: And, you know, I think I hate social media. Sorry. Sorry. Was that out loud?

00:11:50.21 [Hayes Davis]: It was. It was out loud. And I can’t say, you know, as somebody who needs to quantify it, I can’t necessarily say I blame you. But I think the way to think about this is that People came into their assessment of social media with, I think, an approach that was based more on a traditional media idea, where the medium itself is fairly slowly evolving. And it’s really about the way you craft the messaging and things like that. You think about radio, TV, print, that sort of thing. The actual medium itself didn’t gain a lot of new features. You just gained different ways of slicing and segmenting audiences by having a million cable channels. So if you happen to be somebody who really wants to watch 36 hours in a row of renovation shows, you can watch HGTV. And they’ve captured an audience there, so you can reach that audience specifically. But then social comes along and that the medium is constantly evolving as well as the messaging for that medium and how those mediums aggregate audiences is involved is evolving so you’re moving along like three different dimensions or as before you were kind of moving more along one dimension that makes sense and so.

00:13:09.02 [Tim Wilson]: And I guess don’t you also have the, with TV, all you could do was buy ads, whereas in social, you’ve literally got your, your owned or your organic or whatever versus your paid and they’re, they’re kind of in the same day overlap.

00:13:24.21 [Hayes Davis]: Right.

00:13:24.37 [Tim Wilson]: Which is also not the case with traditional media.

00:13:28.15 [Hayes Davis]: Yeah. Oh, no, no, you’re absolutely right. I mean, we look at that kind of mutually reinforcing sort of triangle of paid owned and earned, right? And, you know, obviously earned media predates social by a lot or otherwise there wouldn’t be, you know, PR firms. But I think the idea that there’s owned media through channels that is not also paid, that’s something that’s certainly a little bit new. And then being able to combine all of those together through largely the same medium is also kind of different. So that’s to me is what’s exciting about it. It’s a very different, it’s rapidly evolving. And I certainly would rather be involved in this type of world than one that I think where We just all agreed on our measurement uh fifty years ago and we just kind of do the same thing uh day in and day out um i’m looking at you nelson but uh you know so i think that’s the uh i think that’s what’s exciting about it but it is a giant pain in the ass um but i think you know the right way to for marketers to think about it i think is and you kind of alluded to this earlier is you know look at the these networks have i think what we thought originally was that there was sort of one template for a social network and it was like facebook is a social network myspace and facebook friends are that kind of additional like that sort of idea of a social network where we’re just all going to connect with our friends and we’re going to post some stuff and share things and communicate on it and that’s what a social network looks like, right? And so one of the ways that Twitter evolved and was evaluated was kind of under that rubric, which is I would argue one of the reasons why maybe Twitter is perceived to be struggling is because they’re evaluated under the Facebook rubric of, well, you have to have this giant audience of this many MAUs and it has to be growing this way and they have to spend this much time. But what we’ve seen is the emergence of large but still somewhat niche platforms like Snapchat, for example, is humongous, but it is targeted largely to specific demographic. That said, I use Snapchat all the time and I’m not a teenage girl, which is what you kind of think of with Snapchat. It has the potential to be bigger, more broadly spread than you might think. But I guess where I’m going with this is that there’s not a one size fits all. So if you’re a marketer, you need to understand what demographics are there and what the nuances of that network are and decide whether or not you want to invest in it. It’s a new medium. It’s a new channel. And I think the world’s two things are gone now. One is, when you could just invest in one channel and not have to even think about it. And then two, where you tried to be everywhere all the time. So you have to actually go back to basics and think about who am I trying to reach? What are those personas? What are the demographics? What does our market research tell us? And then how do we best use one of these platforms or multiple of these platforms to do that? And how do we create messaging that works on those platforms? But that’s what I see.

00:16:36.58 [Tim Wilson]: It’s interesting, a lot of what you’re talking about, to me, historically falls in the realm of the social media strategist or the community manager or social media manager or whatever, the marketer who’s owning social media and less the analyst. I’m trying to think of examples of where I’ve seen the question of which channel or which strategy or the use of that channel. I feel like I’m much more run into, hey, we have a LinkedIn group and we have a Facebook page and give you some insights from it. And sometimes I think that fundamental question might have been, actually skipped, which is another then challenge for the analysts. There was some sort of surface assumption made that this is the channel that I should be on and it may or may not be right.

00:17:29.50 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s right. And I think there’s a lot of frustration then because it’s not sort of metrics aren’t being used in the way that we use them for other analysis or research to then pursue a better achievement or outcome because there’s no goal or orientation toward a specific objective necessarily beyond sort of let’s get more people who like us or let’s make sure we reach a bunch of people. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe all the analysis should be focused on that sort of how do we best reach the biggest possible audience. And, you know, Tim and I can tell you the story of how we tried to advertise on Facebook.

00:18:08.80 [Tim Wilson]: That was… Boy, did I… We’re not good at… We’re not good at… Or Facebook is every bit… When you’re working with small amounts of money in a very targeted audience, you can see right through the… It might be a scam. Oh crap, that is there. Well, what about so this like there’s measurement. There’s I want to reach the right audience and I want to get scale and I want to shift brand perception or drive consideration or maybe a direct response. I want to drive people to buy how much of what you’re seeing is kind of that world versus Hey, I want to use this as a low latency consumer research or market research tool, or as one of our very loyal listeners out of Perth, Australia, Helen Cripps, as I’m reading some papers she’s written, recognizing that social media for a company can have value just in the fact that it’s enabling their employees to make connections with relevant people to in certain areas that it may not be about large reach or a high number of engagement or scale. Do you guys have ways that you sort of break down the… There’s different things we can do with data from social media and not all of it is measurement or optimization or maximizing the return of the channel in hard dollars of revenue?

00:19:36.18 [Hayes Davis]: Yes, so, and Tim, you and I go back a ways on the ROI question, but I think, so what’s the ROI of a tweet? Well, that’s a stupid question, Tim. No, so I think the… So we see a lot of different use cases and I actually will I’ll give you the framework that we use to think about it which it which maps pretty well I think to our customer base approaches these things so number one I think and I thought I like to think about this is like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All right, so there’s like, this is my hierarchy of social media needs, okay? And so at the base of the foundation for everybody is owned, it’s owned media, right? It’s the stuff I can publish, right? And so everybody’s initial perception of social is, okay, I want to increase my own reach or I want to get more engagement or because these are things that I feel like I have you know, some control over it, right? I can hit that button in Hootsuite that publishes this tweet, right?

00:20:45.32 [Tim Wilson]: You’re broadcasting, you’re controlling, you’re controlling exactly what, when and where, yeah. Right.

00:20:49.97 [Hayes Davis]: Okay. And so the next one that we see is kind of moving up that hierarchy and this hierarchy kind of represents, I think, a level of sophistication and ways in which social actually, you know, starts to more permeate the organization. The next one is campaigns and that can mean paid campaigns or it can mean more in the sense of I’m doing a specific organic campaign trying to get people around, you know, a particular topic and trying to get them to go buy my products or go see my movie or go, you know, or if it’s more of like a branding oriented campaign to, you know, associate my brand with health and fitness or something along those lines, right? And so usually those executions are going to be elements that you control and then the idea with social often is there’ll be some earned media that that comes into that right and those can be paid like I said or or not above and beyond that comes monitoring and so monitoring listening you know whatever you want to call it but generally speaking the idea that I want to know what people are saying about me or about my products and Now, there’s a lot of different kind of offshoots of this. That could mean that I want to monitor social for support reasons. You know, I want to be able to engage with people who are talking about some issue with a product or something like that. It could be that I just want to understand maybe at a high level, even though it’s bullshit sentiment, right? And I might try to tie that back to perhaps some kind of campaign that I ran that improved, you know, how people, you know, perceive my brand, whatever that might be. And that, you know, that concept has been abused in a lot of ways, I think by vendors over time. It’s been, you know, let’s tap into, let’s listen to what people are saying and let’s, you know, show like you have 52% positive sentiment this week and you had 51.6% positive sentiment last week. So you must be doing something right, you know? But there is a lot of value to be gleaned from understanding and seeing how people are engaging and talking about your brand. That is important. It could be at the individual influencer or individual person level. It’s important if somebody who is well-known, well-respected is saying very publicly with their own platform, very bad things about you. You do need to know that because that can shape your strategy, it can shape the tactics that you use. Conversely, if people seem extraordinarily happy with your latest product release, you know, that’s good information as well. So we move up from monitoring to competitive analysis. And with competitive, this is, again, moving to another level of sophistication. I think this is one of those things that is something people talk about and say they do, but not as many people really do it. And I mean a couple of things with competitive. One is really looking at your actual competitors, companies you’ve identified as competitive, understanding how they’re getting engagement, understanding their strategies, keeping tabs on them for when they release new products or new features, those kinds of things, all those things that you might do monitoring your own brand, you can do for competitors.

00:24:07.02 [Tim Wilson]: Is that, is that, is that usually they’re focused on their own channels or is it, it seems like it’d be a hell of a lift to actually go also to their audiences and what they’re saying, like that they released a product and what they’re saying about it versus what other people or is it both?

00:24:20.68 [Hayes Davis]: Well, I think it’s both. I think if you think about competitive analysis, I think you want to know what the competitor is actually doing and publishing and what their owned media looks like, what their campaigns look like, then also what is effectively monitoring them? What are their audiences saying? And then perhaps what are their overlaps between their audiences and my audience? But I would extend competitive out to benchmarking and just industry-wide analysis. I view monitoring and listening as more around my own brand, things like what are people saying, earned media around my stuff. But this next level of analysis is really looking at, okay, what is my share of voice relative to those competitors? What is my share of voice within the industry as a whole? Those kinds of things. And then the very last one, and this is the peak, the tip top of my Maslow’s hierarchy of social media here is that is research. And there’s a tremendous amount of value to be gleaned using social for market research, especially Twitter. Because Twitter has this really unique, Twitter does not get enough credit for what Twitter really is, which is a real time information network where People are sharing constantly things that are important around the world all the time It’s the zeitgeist and being able to tap into that and understand Understand those conversations in a way you really can’t do with any other platform is really powerful. So an example That you know, I’ll talk about that I was I was looking at recently is Being able to use Twitter and say geographic information on Twitter to think about where you might want to deploy product resources. Let’s say you’re a brewery, for example, and you have a seasonal beer that you want to make sure gets in the right hands. You can use Twitter data to say, OK, who’s talking about that style of beer? Where in the US are they talking about that style of beer? What seasons do they talk about that style of beer the most? Does that actually match our distribution network? Do we have a distributor in that state where people are talking about this? And so that’s the kind of thing that you can learn very, very quickly from social that can have a tremendous impact in how you would actually invest your resources as a company. And above and beyond just this idea of, okay, did I get more followers last month than this month? And so that’s where I think you can get into a really interesting ROI conversation if you’re sophisticated about it, is where you can actually change business processes as a result of what you’ve learned from social. And I think that is absolutely within the realm of possibility today and something that we try to help our customers do. But it’s something that I think people can do if they use what’s already available.

00:27:12.13 [Michael Helbling]: See, besides reminding me of Great Lakes Brewery Christmas Ale, That’s very interesting. And I think that might, that seems like for a lot of analysts, the missing connection between actually doing something with social that is meaningful or impactful, as opposed to just sort of measuring our likes or retweets or whatever.

00:27:34.23 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I feel like that is taking a market research mindset. A lot of times the competitive research or the market research, to me, I don’t think falls in the scope of the assigned role for the analyst. And at the same time, the market research group or department, they’re kind of used to their primary research and secondary research that’s got this weight behind it. If it’s primary research, we’re commissioning surveys of its secondary research, then it’s coming from a well-regarded source. And they kind of struggle with the squishiness of this much kind of messier data, how to even tackle it. And I kind of feel like, so that opportunity just falls in a big-ass chasm between those two mindsets. And there’s a challenge to say, how do you bridge that gap to say, let’s get these groups together, understand what this is, put the number of likes and retweets and screw all that. What is this data source? How could we look at it and get that sort of value out of it? I’m not seeing that happen with the organizations I work with, but it seems like an opportunity.

00:28:43.67 [Hayes Davis]: I think it is an opportunity. I’m speaking from most of our customers that we work with are, I would say, S&V to mid-market. We don’t work as much with big enterprise customers. We have a number of big enterprise customers and You know who you are and we love you. But we do… That’s okay, they’re not listening to us. That was a wasted… Oh, that’s a shame. So we tend to work with smaller teams and often the customers we work with don’t necessarily have an analyst role on staff. They might outsource that or they may… they may make do with what they can. And so I think as you get to a larger organization, organization that has consumer research, that has marketing and the execution around that, that maybe has social as a function under marketing and then has an analyst team that’s supporting that, it’s very easy for this stuff to fall through the cracks because I think people are To a certain degree and I don’t you know, I don’t know if this rings true to the experience that you guys have I’d love to understand is I think that well it kind of brings to mind Do you guys ever read Clayton Christians and stuff innovators dilemma that type of thing?

00:30:00.11 [Tim Wilson]: Absolutely.

00:30:01.03 [Hayes Davis]: Yeah, so not rocket science at this point But one things that has always stuck with me from from his work is that teams are organized around the functional interfaces of the products that they build right and And so one of the things that I think has happened here is that there’s this long-term kind of inertia that’s built around some of these functional interfaces that no longer exist, that research takes inputs in the form of surveys or data that they feel like they can trust from from other parties and produces their analysis which then is in that sort of a functional interface then to marketing and they use that to come up with their messaging and then there’s another interface where marketing is really about the output and then the analysts are about kind of taking that input and then producing some metrics that the marketers can look at. And so this idea of the social channels being both inputs and outputs means that ultimately those functional interfaces are broken down and they’re not in the right places anymore within these organizations. And so I don’t pretend to have the right, I can’t walk into big company X that has these types of interfaces and say big company X, you should tear down these walls and do this sort of thing. But I think that the companies that are able to put Those teams together in a constructive way and realize that the functional interfaces that exist are no longer valid are going to be the ones that are going to be able to do some of the most interesting things by treating social as both inputs and outputs into their process. That’s kind of how I view it. That’s all well and good because I didn’t change a damn thing at any one of these companies. But I think there’s value and there’s wins, significant wins to be had by realizing that some of those dividers now, those interfaces are outmoded.

00:32:03.15 [Tim Wilson]: I’m chuckling a little bit remembering the, my experience I had where we, I was external, it was an agency and the large consumer brand had commissioned us to put a social media command center or social media listening post or something. It was kind of around when the Super Bowl that was Indianapolis and they had a great, I mean, they’re always the pictures of the social media command centers. And I actually thought we were cobbling tools together because there was We were cobbling paid tools together. We weren’t just kind of cobbling together, hooking into APIs and trying to figure out the, how much do we listen for the brand? A lot of what you’re talking about, we were hoping to get, I think, to the top of that hierarchy. There was also a piece of saying, yeah, we need to just manage some metrics too to see if there’s a spike in something. And we do need to take some look at Cinnamon because not that we care whether it went good or bad, but there’s enough people talking about this brand. We can’t read every tweet. So we want to find the ones that had a motion in the tweet. and scan those and see what’s going on and try to put a process around it. But damn, it was resource intensive. I mean, it’s just because it’s the zeitgeist and you sort of have this feeling of you’ve got to be out there engaged in it or listening.

00:33:19.07 [Hayes Davis]: The challenge with Twitter is there’s so much there, and it happens in real time, and some of it is ephemeral, and some of it is important, and sorting through that is certainly non-trivial. But that said, there’s a lot of value in there, both at the individual user level, at the tweet level, and then I think at the aggregate level. And so I think organizations have to make a decision a lot of times. they don’t pick one of those levels to think about. And they try to do all of them at once. And it sounds like maybe in the project that you were looking at, you were kind of like, well, we need to think about this from an aggregate perspective. There’s all these people talking about us. What’s the sentiment of that? And we need to look at that and capture as much data as we can. But then we also need to be able to see individual comments. And maybe we want to respond to those. And then we need to understand whether or not we should respond to this person because this person is important or not by some metric. By the time you do all of that, you’ve gotten yourself into something that is incredibly resource intensive. And only companies with lots of resources can pull it off. And those big companies have been telling stories about how they created some kind of, you know, super sweet social media command post, you know, and everybody wanted to kind of make that happen for themselves.

00:34:37.90 [Tim Wilson]: Well, this may not surprise either one of you that I was, I was the one who was trying to desperately just try to get articulated what the different structure, what the framework was for what it was we were trying to do. And there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in, I was getting looked at like I had three heads, but I was used to it.

00:34:53.64 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, where were you, Tim, when the Oreo Blackout 2 happened?

00:35:01.67 [Tim Wilson]: I had so blissfully moved on from the point where my agency, I needed to sit and, well, this is getting a little close to home because Hayes was involved in earlier versions of that as well. I have been traumatized, two straight Super Bowls, and I have, I don’t never watch them the same again. So what about the other channels? For a while, you guys were pushing, and maybe not pushing, you were kind of heavy into figuring out Tumblr. I mean, you kind of educated me on Tumblr. I still feel like people say, can we get Google Analytics on Tumblr? And I’m like, well, yes, but that’s just the web page interface, and your heavy users of Tumblr are working in the dashboard and then their feed. That seems like a channel that I’ve had clients that flat out do not understand the channel, the medium, even how the medium works, and they want to measure it. Where’s that? Is it on the wane? Is it still growing?

00:35:53.85 [Hayes Davis]: Tumblr has been misunderstood for a long time. It is one of those very powerful parts of the internet that generates so much of what we think of as internet culture, but has not been able to monetize that and be as mainstream as I think there was the intent for it around the time of the Yahoo acquisition. And it’s partly because it’s such a hybrid channel, and people don’t know how to approach it. Do I approach it as a publishing platform, which lets me have a nice blog and a public-facing… a public facing property online or do I view it more like Twitter where most of the activity that actually happens on Tumblr happens logged in on the dashboard where people are scrolling through their feeds and that kind of thing. That dual-sided nature of Tumblr is something that was often really hard for people to get their heads around or has been hard for people to get their heads around. and somewhat harder to sell advertising on from Yahoo’s perspective. People coming at it from the web analytics side of things are like, oh, well, I’ll just put my Google Analytics JavaScript on there, and then I’ve measured Tumblr. Well, you’ve missed the 60-plus percent of activity that happens from the Tumblr social network.

00:37:19.66 [Tim Wilson]: Um, to happen in the, I more often get somebody, some marketer saying, Hey, Tumblr told us we can put Google analytics on it, put it on. And then I go back and forth like, and I’m trying to tell them like, okay, yeah, sure. Great. Good on you. But that’s not where hopefully most of the action’s happening. Otherwise you’re just using it as your content management system for your, for your website. You’re not actually using the channel. Right.

00:37:43.09 [Hayes Davis]: So yeah. And then they’re surprised if they don’t get like, you know, a million reblogs, right? And well, you haven’t actually optimized for that in any way.

00:37:52.40 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. The people who are coming to it are just browsing the web. They don’t know what the little circular arrow thing is up there. Yeah.

00:37:58.14 [Hayes Davis]: And, you know, but I mean, for us, the way I view the channels right now, just in terms of the landscape is Facebook is a must have for almost everybody, unless you’re very much focused on particular niches.

00:38:09.30 [Tim Wilson]: But if you, if you want us Michael, we can check that off. Sweet. We did it.

00:38:13.82 [Hayes Davis]: Yes. Twitter is the other must-have and it is by and large still it is a must-have and you know it’s it’s second to Facebook in that regard but I think for most businesses which we’re talking about here I think they’re gonna want to have a Twitter presence. Instagram is fast becoming a must have though because of Instagram’s, you know, the limitations on the types of interaction you can have with Instagram. The fact that Instagram doesn’t have a native amplification function that you can’t regram as part of the Instagram experience, those kinds of things. It’s still limited in a lot of ways that you can use it. Instagram is not very good right now for direct response. You can’t even have a clickable link in a caption.

00:38:55.39 [Tim Wilson]: How much is Facebook, and obviously you have relationships with all these guys, but how much is Facebook kind of pushing them to not kind of to stay off their lawn and stay off the mother ships on, I guess?

00:39:10.48 [Hayes Davis]: Well, I think it’s my perception, and this is my personal perception informed somewhat by conversations, but I think it’s that they won’t Instagram, Facebook obviously is Facebook’s strategy is to acquire a bunch of different endpoints with which people interact with Facebook owned properties and they’ve largely let those properties be themselves. They’ve paid tremendous amounts of money for those properties and still allowed them to be themselves. What’s that? Eighteen billion dollars or whatever it was and Instagram for only a billion dollars, which by the way was just absolute genius acquisition It seemed insane at the time, but that was just genius and so you know Facebook has going back to this idea that I was talking about of these channels having their own you know, identities and their own ways of aggregating audiences. I think for Facebook, Instagram is kind of that brand advertising platform for them. It’s a place for brands to do more of the type of advertising they would do on a visual, like more like TV. kind of medium. Now that said obviously Facebook has been pitching video really really hard but I see Instagram as you know kind of that premium brand content and Facebook proper as more direct response oriented. I think just inevitably because of the way that it works that’s that’s what they’re doing there. So I kind of see it that way I don’t know if it’s a get off my long type situation one way or another but I think it’s I think they’re actually really complimentary and I think if One were to just, if Instagram were to just devolve into basically Facebook with slightly more pictures and a streamlined interface, that doesn’t really benefit Facebook as a whole. Facebook doesn’t really need more MAUs. They need better segmentation of those MAUs out into audiences they can sell to marketers.

00:41:06.56 [Tim Wilson]: MAUs, monthly active users? Yes. What could you drop in some acronyms? Moestly active users. It’s a mouse. That’s not said mouse.

00:41:18.45 [Hayes Davis]: I don’t know. It’s one of those things that you guys would know that probably better than I would. It should be mouse.

00:41:25.26 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. Let’s just say p-tat and see if I throw up in my mouth.

00:41:30.64 [Hayes Davis]: I think it deprecated that metric, by the way.

00:41:33.35 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I know they did. Well, that goes to, that’s the perfect example of one, the main people were on that bandwagon and then they’re like, yeah. You know, there are people realizing that this is completely not a bullshit, so we’re just going to remove it.

00:41:46.25 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, yeah, like the recent video tracking metrics that were recently revealed to be just a little bit different than real life. Got it. Well, anyway, this is a great discussion. And actually, there was a few really good things. I certainly got a couple of really nice things out of it. So I really I think it’s it’s good. We like to do a segment on our show called The Last Call where we just go around the horn and talk about something we found that was interesting in the last couple of weeks. Why don’t you start your one? I would love to. And actually, this last call from me is coming straight from my confirmation bias, which is right where you want it to be. And I ran across an article on Chief Martek, Scott Brinker’s blog about some research done by CEB Global, which is a company I am not familiar with. But they did some analysis of personalization and how companies were successful or not successful. And they found that tools and investment were not the leading indicator of success, but the actual people involved with the personalization program. And it’s like, oh, I’m going to take that study and carry it with me always. People over tools in anything related to those kinds of things. Because I think the same thing is true of analytics. And I think Scott Breaker did a nice job of kind of elucidating on that topic. So good read, something that obviously fits with my views. But I like that article quite a bit. Nice. Hayes, you want to?

00:43:18.83 [Hayes Davis]: Sure. Yeah, I’m going to go deep in the weeds here, I think, because there’s obviously a lot of analysts on here. And so something that I don’t know if I’d call myself an analyst. I dabble in it. I put it that way. But a couple of tools recently that have been really valuable for me in a couple of analytics projects I’ve been doing is something called CSV Kit. comma separated values. It’s a set of command line tools for those of you who like to use command line tools that allow you to do some really, really cool stuff with CSV. So if you’ve ever gotten somebody handing you, I don’t know, let’s say a 10,000 row CSV or maybe a 100,000 row CSV and you didn’t really want to open that up in Excel, you wanted to actually get some data out of it and start looking at that, then the CSV kit is really awesome. for that and I will also say that if you want to pair that nicely with SQLite, which is another nice little easy to use command line database, you can really make CSVs do some crazy stuff without having to resort to, I’ll call it the limitations of Excel. So anyway, something fun if you’re into that kind of thing.

00:44:38.38 [Tim Wilson]: So you’re perpetuating the stereotype of a Silicon Valley CEO dropping the CSVs and SQLite, or maybe you’re busting the stereotype.

00:44:47.55 [Hayes Davis]: Every time I do it, I feel like I should probably be doing something much more strategic, but sometimes, you know, you just got to get your hands dirty.

00:44:56.09 [Tim Wilson]: I’ve been doing some strategic comma separated value file work.

00:44:59.85 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Yeah.

00:45:01.22 [Hayes Davis]: We we didn’t put in your bio that you’re a growth hacker and a data scientist so yeah And a data scientist as we all know is what you call an analyst if they live in California, so yes I am I am one of the finally I may be using that in an upcoming presentation I stole that I stole that from somebody.

00:45:20.80 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t know it’s not mine It’s very true, though. It’s very true. All right, Tim, what’s your last call?

00:45:27.75 [Tim Wilson]: So mine, since we’ve talked about a bunch of different media, I’m going to endorse an entire site, which would be medium.com, which I just vaguely became aware of it. And I think it was maybe when Blair Reeves was on, and he was like, I’ve basically been blogging on medium.com. I finally sort of figured out that, oh, it’s this kind of centralized thing where I wouldn’t create an account. What struck me is that I get my little daily digest and it is like interesting little nuggets that I probably, when it comes into my inbox, so it’s back to email, so oldest digital media out there, but it winds up having stuff that piques my interest. And just to be a little specific, just one very recently or a month or so ago based on time-shifting. There was an article by a guy named John Saito, I don’t know, SAITO. And it was, is this my interface or yours? Where he just riffs for a little bit about if you start looking at all your applications and you’re looking at your space or my space and how there’s just not consistency. If you’re in Google Drive, it’s my drive. But if you’re in Amazon, it’s your account. And he kind of steps back and sort of evaluates what’s that mean and what is the mindset of the product developers and the use of your versus mine. It was kind of made me stop and think, say, hmm, hadn’t really noticed that, but that’s kind of interesting. So it seems to be kind of wide ranging for whatever reason, I spent five minutes setting up my profile and it seems to drop stuff in that more often than not actually find kind of intriguing. And so that’s a plug for medium.com.

00:47:00.65 [Michael Helbling]: Nice. Well, look at that. Some quality last calls. Well, again, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Hayes, for coming. If you’ve been listening and have questions or have comments about what we didn’t get to or cool things you’ve been doing, please send your question along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to PO Box. I mean, you know, no, hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. Wouldn’t we need to get a P.O. Box just so that we could do that? Because that would be amazing. P.O. Box 1212, Burbank, California. But we do. We’ve got our Facebook, we’ve got Twitter, and we’ve got the Measure Slack, which we didn’t talk about as social media, but there’s certainly a social community there in the Measure Slack, so join that and get all your questions and comments answered. Anyways, thanks once again, Hayes, for coming on the show. It’s been a pleasure. For my co-host Tim Wilson, keep analyzing.

00:48:09.28 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter or Measure Slack Group. We welcome your comments and questions.

00:48:17.59 [Announcer]: Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:48:32.21 [Tim Wilson]: Okay, we’re gonna manage to get this started in the under.

00:48:35.50 [Michael Helbling]: I gotta re-whip this whole thing. Never mind. That’s it, this is all.

00:48:41.55 [Tim Wilson]: Well, the company’s doing well, right?

00:48:43.67 [Michael Helbling]: And the baby is alive, so I feel like… So really, if you look at your two primary KPIs, you know, that’s pretty darn good. You know, we’re big into social media measurement. I don’t know if… So I’ve got a lot to say about that haze. Okay, alright. So, no, I don’t.

00:49:06.75 [Hayes Davis]: I thought this was a politics podcast.

00:49:08.82 [Michael Helbling]: Hey, let’s turn it into that just to avoid this topic. Oh my gosh, how great would that be?

00:49:16.20 [Tim Wilson]: I realized what that was gonna sound like as it was coming out of my mouth.

00:49:20.25 [Michael Helbling]: I’ll tell you what, this pocket thing is really paying off. Is that a social app?

00:49:25.01 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I’m looking at my pocket. The last like 17 things are all are related. And what? Cowplot arranged a lot of two figures in a grid.

00:49:35.95 [Michael Helbling]: You know, one thing that can’t be said of YouTube is that you lack focus. We’re not even connected on LinkedIn, Ace. I’m going to fix that right now. All right. I think right now we are friends.

00:49:48.80 [Tim Wilson]: You know, we do half of it. You’ll have to see what the hell happens.

00:49:51.18 [Michael Helbling]: Well, yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see how this goes. Yeah. Well, I’m willing to take that risk. I’m putting myself out there.

00:50:01.33 [Hayes Davis]: You know, this is the first time.

00:50:04.00 [Michael Helbling]: Really?

00:50:04.74 [Hayes Davis]: Yeah.

00:50:04.90 [Michael Helbling]: Because I literally think about that every time I hear your name.

00:50:10.32 [Tim Wilson]: Well this should be a fun conversation.

00:50:21.98 [Michael Helbling]: It’s a redditor. It’s a redditor Tim. What? That’s a thing. They’re not a reddit. They’re redditors.

00:50:29.13 [Tim Wilson]: No, where does reddit? Okay, I’ve never been a reddit user. A reddit tool. Okay, yeah, see, clear. He just don’t want to say it. A Redditor Rock Flag and Social Media

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