The First Place is your home, and the Second Place is your office. You have assigned roles and tasks at each place, and you know nearly all the people in each. The Third Place is where you meet with people you don’t know that well, or maybe at all, and you exchange ideas, learn about other people, and enrich society and yourself.

A great article from Kevin Purdy on Fast Company (Why In-Person Socializing Is A Mandatory To-Do Item) that delves into the very sound reasons that you need to get out more and meet people face-to-face.

In 2012 I am formalising this time on a weekly basis a little more. I already have a couple of Third Spaces (Awesome Foundation Sydney, Vibewire fastBreak) but I will also be looking to make a small portion of this blog dedicated to in-person catch-ups.

Do you have a Third Space? Where is it and how do you use it?

Marketers will want objective, third party measurement. Facebook will not set the benchmarks.

I found the whole of this AdAge article - 2012 Planning: Facebook Survival Guide for Marketers - pretty interesting, so please head over there are give it a read.

The quote I’ve pulled out refers to something I’m especially passionate about, ROI for brands who are involved in social, and more specifically, Facebook.

Facebook Insights: Better, but still not enough

First I want to make it clear that Facebook has certainly upped its game when it comes to measuring what happens on its platform. The new Insights release has given marketers far more quantitative data around the people using their pages.

Trouble is, that Facebook Insights alone are not enough to establish ROI around your pages. It’s crucial that marketers invest time and energy in relating their efforts in Facebook to their core business objectives.

What’s a fan worth?

This question gets asked an awful lot, and the short answer is nothing, at least if acquiring a fan is your objective. What’s important is not how many fans you have acquired, but what those fans are doing to move the needle on your core business objectives:

  • Are they buying your product?
  • Are they referring your product to other people, who then also buy your product?
  • Are they more loyal to your brand as a result of the value you have offered them as a fan?
  • Are they helping you to develop better products and services?

If you haven’t found a way to measure how your fans are moving the needle against any of these objectives, or any others the success of your business is based upon, then you are likely to be struggling to calculate the ROI of your Facebook presence.

Good news, bad news

The bad news is that the connection between your Facebook Page and your core business objectives is not necessarily easy to establish. The good news is that this creative work needs to be done and will be incredibly rewarding once you have shown that investing in social is returning for your business.

Good luck!

Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. The successful companies will be customer-obsessed. Those that master the customer data flow and improve frontline customer staff will have the edge.

Forrester has just released an independent report on Competitive Strategy in The Age Of The Customer.

While it makes sense for social media to sit in specific teams both client and agency side, what this report emphasises is that social is a fundamentally transformative force across every aspect of business.

In this series of posts, Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics, explores some more robust ways to measure the levels of engagement on a Facebook Page: Quantifying Facebook engagement: More than just counting fans and likes Deeper Facebook engagement: Dissecting interactivity Are your Facebook fans real fans? What is clear from these posts - and what almost all community managers working on Facebook Pages already know - is that Facebook’s own Insights platform is still woefully undercooked. My question is how many agencies or clients are currently looking to track levels of engagement to this sort of depth in Facebook? My guess would be very few, but I bet they are all having conversations about engagement.
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In this series of posts, Michael Wu, Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics, explores some more robust ways to measure the levels of engagement on a Facebook Page:

  1. Quantifying Facebook engagement: More than just counting fans and likes
  2. Deeper Facebook engagement: Dissecting interactivity
  3. Are your Facebook fans real fans?

What is clear from these posts - and what almost all community managers working on Facebook Pages already know - is that Facebook’s own Insights platform is still woefully undercooked.

My question is how many agencies or clients are currently looking to track levels of engagement to this sort of depth in Facebook? My guess would be very few, but I bet they are all having conversations about engagement.