That leads me to one question I’ve heard a lot this year, and nothing could make me happier. It goes something like this: ‘Chad, we feel we have a solid analytics and analysis foundation. What’s the next step that will get us X?’ By X I mean any applicable key business requirement critical to the business. In our industry this usually involves increasing onsite consumption or engagement, driving greater loyalty or becoming a stronger top of mind brand for a particular niche. Glad you asked Mr/Ms Media. First, you can ALWAYS improve your analytics and measurement strategy, methods of analysis, adoption etc. I don’t want to minimize that fact by having this discussion.

But, more leading edge media companies are ready and hungry for what I call product agnostic solutions. What does that mean? It simply means using the best combination of products, services and best practices to provide a holistic long term solution to those critical business needs or KBR’s. We need to develop the best solutions that get you to your optimization goals, and increasingly those solutions will be more than just reporting. Analysis is critical to your business, but acting on that analysis and testing the results of those actions in a confidence controlled environment will ultimately move you to a data driven destination. That’s why Omniture has spent so much effort and resources on driving towards an entire optimization suite, not just on SiteCatalyst.

Recently our Test&Target product received a big upgrade that allows it to be a bigger part of product agnostic solutions, an upgrade that was geared specifically for our industry. As a media site, your goal isn’t to efficiently move a visitor through a funnel that leads from landing page to product to shopping cart to purchase confirmation (unless you charge a premium for content-more on that in a later blog post). No, this business requires engagement, and media customers now have engagement specific metrics available in T&T. You can read more about it here. You can now use confidence based testing with truly relevant media metrics such as page views, time on site, and engagement, not just borrowing metrics that apply to other industries.

One media company our consulting team works with has already jumped on these engagement metrics and achieved a “throw an office party” improvement in site consumption. Our consultants introduced this customer to a simple yet powerful testing concept called inclusion/exclusion testing. The idea is to remove individual modules or site functionality from the home page and determine which MISSING modules are most critical to overall site consumption, in this case page views.

A series of testing showed with strong statistical confidence that two page modules had negative impact on consumption when removed, while two others had a positive impact on consumption when removed. In other words the latter two modules caused overall site consumption to go down when they were present on the home page. That represents solid gold information that testing can provide a site experience or content manager beyond the initial analytics analysis. And the best part? This testing concept requires no new creative and minimal technical impact. It’s easy to do!

Change, Change, Change…

But the story doesn’t stop there-and unfortunately this is where many of us would be tempted to declare victory. The next step was to test and implement a more effective combination of modules-to take ACTION using the information. The site utilized an additional series of tests with different combinations of site elements to determine which combinations were most effective together. Again we’re not talking about creating new functionality, just re-considering the existing pieces.

One particular combination, including the modules critical to consumption listed above, drove a 17% documented uplift in overall site consumption. That’s not just click through folks, that’s site wide impact measured in page views!  This media company has a CPM driven model and that uplift means a more compelling story to sell to potential advertisers as well as more advertising revenue. Again, this is where analysis derives its true power, in conjunction with statistically measured and documented IMPROVEMENTS when changes are made. Even further, this information will be used to determine which specific user groups change behavior and can be targeted for even greater long term gains.

This is just one of many tests that can be run. Consider some other possibilities for a moment: page reclamation, layout, content affinity testing. Going back to our “gut feel” statement earlier, is the featured content rotating banner (or your other featured content option) really the best way to increase content consumption? Instead of relying on the conventional wisdom or “everyone else is doing it” you can determine with certainty for your business what the best options are, again using critical Media KPI’s (engagement, consumption, time on site). Or, use the integration with your existing SiteCatalyst implementation to test with a custom engagement metric that you’ve already built. There’s no time like the present to build on your analytics foundation by following the data with meaningful action.

What’s on your mind as a media/publishing site? Send me a comment or email. I’d love to hear about it!

Why CMO Dashboards?

With so many new channels emerging that influence sales, brand perception, customer engagement, etc. executive marketers are left trying to understand their performance across all of these channels individually and in concert with each other. Unfortunately for this audience, there has been no dedicated, on-demand, source for CMOs and executive marketers to see the performance of their marketing campaigns and other associated metrics that drive branding, customer acquisition, retention, satisfaction, competitive intelligence and similar marketing objectives.

A consistent theme in our conversations with our customers and partners is that marketing executives have too much data to consume and have too little time by which to make sense of it. CMO Dashboards will help them to synthesize the data into intelligence that is actionable and can be used to make strategic decisions.

Why Omniture?

As we have expanded the Omniture Online Marketing Suite, we have become more and more involved in “big picture” conversations with C-Level executives about their strategy to move from traditional forms of marketing such as TV, radio and print to digital marketing. In addition, our agency partners have close relationships with CMOs and have expressed the need to deliver customized dashboards more quickly and easily than ever before given the pace of change in the digital world.

So, with these considerations - I feel strongly that Omniture is the optimal company to deliver the technology for the digital CMO.

• First, we have the “green gold” - the vast amounts of data we collect on behalf of our customers, to the tune of over a Trillion transactions per quarter.

• Second, we are already delivering millions of dashboards to more than 5,000 customers every month. That’s right, I said millions per month.

• Third, we are able tap the expertise and pre-integrated Genesis solutions from our extensive partner community of more than 500 agency partners and 200 Genesis partners.

By creating the CMO Dashboard technology, Omniture answers a significant request from partners (including advertising agencies), and customers to bring together information and present it to marketing executives in a concise format that is easily configurable and available on-demand.

Lots more detail, case studies, and examples are coming down the pike. Stay tuned!

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Sara Ezrin, senior strategy consultant at Experian CheetahMail. Experian CheetahMail provides email marketing and customer intelligence technologies for enterprise clients. As Omniture has partnered with CheetahMail, I wanted to find out what integration means for online retailers trying to keep their email marketing cutting edge.

• Why is integration so important for online retailers today?

Companies are working with fewer resources and are looking to reach higher goals. This, combined with the fast pace of the Internet, makes data integration across channels essential for marketers to make fast and smart decisions. Online data in particular is rich and relevant to customers but it doesn’t wait for us as marketers. If you cannot use that data quickly you may lose the opportunity to capitalize on it within marketing campaigns.

• What would you recommend to a VP of commerce at a leading Internet retailer using both CheetahMail and Omniture? What would be your top priorities with respect to the joint solution?

The easiest first step is to integrate Omniture tags into your email campaigns so that SiteCatalyst can report on click through activity to calculate the revenue lost from email subscribers that are clicking through but abandoning the site or their shopping cart. The Omniture Genesis program offers robust reporting through the integration of Experian CheetahMail data with the online activity post click through. Genesis also offers integration of shopping cart abandonment data with Experian CheetahMail’s trigger messaging and dynamic content features. The automated CheetahMail-Omniture integration increases clients’ ability to contact highly engaged customers with relevant communication at the appropriate time in their lifecycle with their brands.

• How have some of your more innovative customers been using CheetahMail and Omniture to drive increases in marketing performance?

By working with CheetahMail and Omniture marketers have access to powerful data that they can use to inform all of their email messaging, site optimization and customer segmentation. The integrated reporting has helped clients see when there is significant drop off after the initial click through and used landing page testing or page optimization to improve results. I’ve already mentioned that Web data is very powerful. Clients that leverage browse data to inform their email content and customer segmentation see improved results in click throughs and revenue. One example of this is US Auto Parts Network, which integrated Omniture SiteCatalyst with Experian CheetahMail through Genesis. US Auto Parts measured post-email click behavior to learn about purchasing habits of customers. The company also utilized automatically triggered remarketing messages to cart abandoners that reminded them about products still in their shopping cart and offered a discount to complete the purchase. The integration resulted in a 50x increase in revenue per email and transaction rates

• What aren’t digital marketing professionals thinking about today that they should be?

Integrations have taught us that digital data offers insight into the behavior of our customers which leads to lift in conversion more than most data assets. Marketing professionals should be reevaluating their customer segmentation schemas as well as their online and offline campaigns to find the opportunities to leverage the behavioral data available through digital channels. Offline campaigns are much more costly than online campaigns; the models and customer segmentation are outdated in today’s digital environment. For example, marketers are not adding into their customer segmentation models the value of the promoters (referrers) and ambassadors (reviewers) on their file. RFM models still reign. Digital data offers us the ability to see what customers are actually interested in at this moment and how they interact with us on many levels. Marketers need to focus on putting resources behind digital data from their Web site and email marketing - as well as reviews, recommended items, search terms and more - across channels to enhance customer segmentation and to inform the content used in marketing campaigns.

• What cool enhancements might we expect to see from CheetahMail in the upcoming quarters?

It is a long list! We will be launching some really exciting application enhancements covering topics such as competitive data integration to more robust social networking features. We have strengthened our partner program to offer our clients fast and easy ways to use digital and social data in their email programs to realize the goals we’ve been discussing. We are also piloting different initiatives that integrate our Experian data assets and tools to increase conversion both online and offline.

Creative teams should master the broad principles of demand. I know, this is uncomfortable territory for most designers. Creatives don’t like to be put into a box, and they definitely don’t want to be told their ideas aren’t relevant. It’s just supposed to look awesome-right? Unfortunately no, ‘awesomeness’ is just a portion of the recipe.

These principles are important though, and learning to master the art of demand engagement will only increase the quality of work. After all, creative (design and copy) has an influence from awareness through initial response - and these are valuable touches that must be maximized at every opportunity.

While the goal of all creative teams should be to support the Brand to Demand concepts (see Become a ‘Bremando’ and Build Your ‘Bremando’ Army: Real-Time Creative Services), there are some obvious constraints to their ability to really focus on these principles.

The ‘UGG’ and the ‘Really?’

Generally, creative teams support entire organizations. They are often expected to do anything creative; from executive presentations to posters for a contest in finance. This can be a fun, but terribly limiting box in which to find yourself.
One of the biggest challenges-and opportunities-I’ve found is to break my team out of normal boundaries. There is so much green pasture to see, so much to influence, so very many ways to combine great creative, corporate and demand marketing programs together.
Opportunities for learning and growth of your Web teams:

• Become certified in Landing Page Optimization (LPO). Marketing Experiments offers certification programs.
• Master the use of multivariate and A/B testing tools, such as Omniture Test&Target. A must for optimizing creative content.
• Learn what results mean for your organization. Was it the message or imagery that led to those results?
• Test top messages (headlines, subtext and bullets) in a second round of tests with new creative (imagery, buttons of typographic treatments).

Still Uncomfortable?

Well get past it. The future of great Web design will include the principles of online marketing. The ‘box’ can be broken or reshaped however you’d like. Find comfort in the uncomfortable—green pastures lie ahead.

Resolving internal disputes is actually one of the most common reasons I see companies purchasing a testing solution. Somebody has an idea that the article detail page on their media website would help keep customers on the site longer and consume more ads if it just were re-designed in X or Y way. Somebody else hates the new design idea, and thinks it ought to be kept as-is. Yet a third person asserts that both designs are wrong, and she has her own design that she claims is better than either of the other two.

This debate can go on endlessly — for years, literally. Everyone has an opinion…and they are very willing to back up their opinion with lots of squishy assertions, like “everyone hates Flash,” or “we need an extremely bold call-to-action,” or “we don’t need to say ‘click here’ in our links anymore…that’s so 1999!”

While many of those assertions may sound snappy and can really catch hold in your marketers’ minds, they aren’t always true. I know a large technology hardware company that had always debated a simple thing like the wording of their main calls to action in their hero banners on the homepage. The visitor would be clicking through to read the tech spec and purchase the item — should we say ‘learn more’ or ‘buy now’? One camp said that ‘buy now’ was too strong for such a high ticket item, and that a softer pitch would attract more potential buyers into the top of the purchase funnel. The other camp said that ‘learn more’ didn’t adequately call the visitor to action, and didn’t exactly make it clear that the visitor could actually purchase the item by clicking there. Simple solution — run a quick a/b test on your next hero banner promotion. Can you guess the winner? In this case the ‘learn more’ call to action increased conversion by almost 50% for those that clicked. I’ve seen it work out the opposite way for other sites, so you can’t just take this as a general rule — you need to test YOUR customers, not just live off of others’ findings. I ran a similar test on my own site, but with ‘more info - buy now’ as a third alternative. It beat both of the other calls-to-action by almost 30%.

Now, the thing to remember is that when you run tests you are not always going to drive uplift with your new ideas. In fact, failing — and failing fast — can be just as valuable as finding a new design that drives uplift. It saves you from rolling out a potential risk to your existing base of business. And between rolling out an untested alternative, and not rolling out any change at all, I think we’d all say that the latter is less risky.

I know one retailer that offered a branded credit card. They knew that if someone applied and was accepted for their store credit card, that customer became very loyal and valuable. Debates had raged internally about whether to offer that credit card much more prominently during the checkout process. There were huge proponents of the card offer being an interstitial offer — effectively the acceptance or rejection of this offer was an extra step in the middle of the checkout flow, to ensure that everyone saw the full pitch. Other big retailers did this hard-sell approach, and some retailers had even attributed their profitability to these credit card programs. When this retailer rolled out the interstitial offer it did increase credit card signups — but not nearly enough to compensate for the 5% drop in conversion, which was statistically significant for their traffic size. They quickly pulled the new checkout flow back and shut off the test. It was a very bad decision averted with minimal adverse impact on revenue.

The tough thing with one of these situations is that once you’ve sat in a room and brainstormed creative ideas for how to improve page X or flow Y, your marketers start getting excited about the new approach. They’re emotionally invested. They’re getting stoked. It’s fresh, and it has all sorts of positive arguments supporting it — saying why it could be the next great thing. Folks have made comparisons to other world-class companies that take this same design approach. The designers take a stab, and it looks gorgeous. Now they love it, because it is “such a superior visual design” — and let’s face it, many designers are Picasso at heart. They love beautiful design, sleek design. And revenue performance is often a 2nd (or 3rd, or 15th) priority. You may even have to involve the developers to build new functionality for the new idea, and they invest time & creative juices into it. Everyone is looking at this thing and thinking it really holds potential. And then you roll out the test, and it doesn’t dominate. That’s a harsh moment. But the thing is, you’ve got to help the team realize that failing fast can sometimes be just as useful as driving uplift. They’ve also got to realize that what worked for another site’s visitors may not be the right thing for your visitors. You have to test to know what’s right for yours, and that’s a discipline that will pay off repeatedly over time.

Tune in next time for another installment of When to Test.

- Brig Graff

However, it is always odd to me when I see a company that has found some very compelling insights in their analytics but they have yet to act on it. They may have even done a study to estimate how much money they could be making if they just improved a particular top entry page’s bounce rate, for example, and it could be worth millions in incremental revenue to them to decrease that bounce rate. But months later, they have yet to realize those gains because they didn’t know where to go from there. As a result it can sometimes seem that they are not yet earning the first dollar of ROI on all that effort and expense to do the analysis. That is, until they take action. And if you never take action on your analysis then it may have been interesting, but largely academic. That is what testing and targeting are for – to help you actually earn your ROI, not just forecast it and document it.

I do this all the time on my own website with the Omniture Suite, and I never cease to be amazed at how simple it can be to take action that drives real results fast. In my years at Omniture, and when I was an Omniture customer, I’ve led many initiatives involving analytics, testing, and targeting. So from this experience, I wanted to share the first in my multi-part series called “When to Test and When to Target.” We’ll start with the first item in The 5 Times When You Want to Test.

1. Landing Page Optimization – when you need to optimize beyond the click.

For many years companies have been spending a lot of money on advertising to drive visitors to their websites, but comparatively under-investing to convert that traffic once it arrives at the site.

I know a large business that as recently as last year was spending almost $100MM of their advertising budget in PPC search campaigns. It’s fair to say that they were only spending maybe 0.2% of that to optimize the keywords’ landing page experiences after the clickthrough. I don’t want to make it sound like it has to be a 50/50 split between ad spend and optimization efforts – that’s probably unrealistic. But $500/$2 ratio is quite lopsided toward the ‘spend side’ regardless of who you speak to.

One quote that has always stuck with me comes from a Wunderman executive who “gets it.” He said the following:

“We preach that clients today should be setting aside 15% of their spend for optimization. We believe that the opportunity to improve the performance of the other 85% is that significant, and well worth it.” – Mark Taylor, Wunderman, EVP and CIO

This means that if you have an advertising budget of $500k for a particular “new product release” campaign, you normally might engage your agency to build a flash microsite to capture leads, as well as a couple of different sizes of display banners to put out on publisher sites. Then point them all to the microsite. But if you are looking to maximize the number of leads you get out of this new campaign, you might do the following instead: Ask your agency to use their creative minds to come up with 3 vastly different approaches to the microsite, depending on differing theories they have of what might drive conversion. Then have them do multiple alternative creative approaches to the display ads. Spend the first 15% of your budget to run some tests to find out which combination of ad+microsite is the best performer. It’s the Darwinian concept of letting the first visitors succeed and fail to discover what works and what doesn’t. Because who’s to say that the first microsite idea the agency came up with is going to be the highest-converting idea? Once you know the best performer, push the rest of your ad spend to that experience. At least now you’ve found the least-leaky bucket before turning the water on full volume.

Returning to the business that spends $100MM on paid search…. The fact of the matter is, in today’s economic climate the VP of Advertising may have his acquisition budget hacked in half. He can’t spend nearly as much just to shove traffic at the site. But, of course, the VP of the .com is probably still held to her same revenue targets from last year. The only logical way for the CMO to make this work is to squeeze much more juice out of the traffic that DOES come to the site. And the way to do that is to constantly be running optimization campaigns on your landing pages. Some of you may be thinking, “That’s great stuff…I wish we could achieve it. But we’re just trying to survive this year.” That’s true – and landing page optimization is your marketing department’s life raft.

Tune in next time when we’ll discuss the second situation when you should test….

-Brig Graff

Having an in-house creative services team has been viewed as a luxury to mid-market companies, or a burden to the enterprise. “Our agency does that…” Right, and you pay for it in money and time. The traditional procedure is to hire an outside agency, or contractor (usually Web first, print second) to handle your creative projects for you. But this model presents a number of challenges.

A Real Need for Real-Time

An in-house team provides you with immediate access, flexibility and an ability to react and optimize in real-time. Even minor changes to a Web site like a banner, a page update or a new offer take several days; as you contact your agency, pay out the wazoo and then wait for them to make the change. Take that time and cost, multiply it over a year, and you’ll end up with a number that you won’t like. You probably would have paid for 2 or 3 in-house people that would have actually gotten the work done on time with less supervision.

Instead of viewing creative resources as a cost-center, there are a number of reasons to change your view to see it as a profit-center, with a potentially high return on investment-if running correctly.

So how do you align your in-house resources to support your direct marketing initiatives? There are a few key areas that will optimize your creative team to become a valuable resource in your marketing programs.

1. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

• Headcount: Invest your headcount by supporting programs that have a tangible impact on your business. It is essential to have someone-in the marketing team-that is managing your Web site. Probably a couple actually.
• Budgets: There are a couple of ways to manage your money. Either to outsource everything to contractors and agencies, do it all in-house, or both. Print is much easier to outsource than Web, though banner production can be shipped out.

2. A Little Help for Your Friends

• Make sure your objectives are aligned with the objectives of the demand team. Objectives should be something like: supporting campaigns and programs, support brand and awareness and general services.
• Teach each member of your creative team demand principles. Guide their solutions to business and creative problems toward improving response either through copy, creative or a combination of the two.

3. Don’t Go Following the White Rabbit

• Focus efforts on demand creative. Prioritize demand-creation projects (offers, landing pages, banners, etc.) over projects that yield lesser tangible results (like t-shirts, or mudflaps for your boss’s truck).
• Avoid distractions. Its easy to get caught up on details, or pining over perfection, rather that getting solutions to market.

4. Nothing Wrong with Cookie Cutters

• Templates are your friends. Banner, headers, guides, whitepapers, product overviews, landing page mark-up and even some email can be outsourced. Original concepts should be home-grown, but all production should be outsourced to allow your designers to move on to the next project.

The desire of our clients to run these tests probably has a lot to do with the state of the economy. It’s no secret that a Flash homepage is much more expensive to maintain and to make changes to. It’s also makes it more cumbersome to make quick updates to the page, or to test new concepts. Don’t get me wrong - no one loves a useful Flash homepage more than I do. But most companies simply don’t have the in-house skills to keep a Flash page updated.

For each of our clients, the tests were very simple. Point 50% of users to the default, Flash version of the homepage, and point the other 50% of users to a static version of the homepage. In both cases, the static version retained much of the functionality of the Flash version; however, the static versions often got users to content faster. For example, on an insurance company’s website, the Flash version played a video when a user clicked on a type of coverage, while the static version took people directly to the coverage page.

In both tests, the business users behind the tests were rooting for the static versions to win. They wanted the ability to update their pages more easily, without having to go through a lengthy production process. Essentially, the original decision to use Flash on their site was taken without a clear business need.

And the results?

For the major insurance company that we worked with, we were able to declare the “static” version as the clear winner. There was no negative impact on leads generated for new policies when serving the static version. More impressively, pageviews to internal site pages increased by more than 40%. This led us to start planning a new test to optimize lead generation from those internal pages.

For the office products supply company, the static version also performed better than the Flash version on all key metrics, although by a smaller margin. However, this test was definitely a win for the client. By moving to a static page, our client now has much more freedom to quickly update the homepage with new content and offers, sparing precious internal resources.

Remember that a static page by no means implies a boring page, or a page without a lot of great features. In fact, the static versions for our clients often maintain much of the most important functionality of the page.

So, when does Flash make sense for your site? First of all, look at your site from your users’ perspective. Is the Flash serving a real purpose for your users, by adding meaningful functionality? If so, Flash will likely outperform a static version of your homepage. If, however, you’re using Flash for eye candy, or because you’ve been told that everyone is doing it, then a test might be in order. If you can give yourself more control and flexibility without sacrificing performance against key metrics, why not try it?

What is Unified Sources?
Simply put it is a combination of the campaigns report and referrers report, giving you a single report with all your paid campaigns and non-paid campaigns.  The other feature is it grabs the keyword and places it into another eVar for simple keyword reporting.

How is Unified Sources Valuable?
Value is unique to each business and their needs, but let me highlight a couple benefits of the rule.

• Event credit is applied to all traffic sources based on the same rules that apply to campaigns. This allows you to more accurately measure how well each traffic source or campaign ultimately results in conversion.
• The keyword placed into an eVar by Unified Sources is the actual keyword searched for by the visitor. If you are using broad match for your Paid Search and capturing the broad search terms into another eVar (via SearchCenter or otherwise) you can break down the keyword you paid for by the actual keywords that the visitor searched for. Keywords that are performing especially well or poorly can be discovered and your paid search efforts modified accordingly.
• Natural Search terms can be classified for simplified SEO reporting and analysis.

Requirements for Unified Sources VISTA Rule:
This rule requires little to no work for you.  If you are already populating the s.campaign variable or another eVar with your tracking codes then you are all set. The only thing we need from you is to know which eVar you are placing the tracking codes in, whether we should use that eVar or a separate eVar for the main Unified Sources report, which eVar you would like us to place the keywords into and finally we need a list of internal domains.

Internal domains list - The confusing part of the rule:
This is usually the most difficult part to understand when requesting a rule but it really is simple.

If you have one main site and all report suites are based on traffic from the one main site then all you want to do is provide a single list of internal URL domains and you are done.

If you have multiple sites and you want to see how traffic goes from one site to another (ie. consider traffic from one of your other sites as “external” traffic) then you want to provide us with a list of internal URL domains for each of the report suites you plan to put the rule on.

If you need to be able to change the list of internal URL domains for your report suites on a regular basis then we can build another DB table into the Unified Sources VISTA rule that will allow you to upload a new list of internal domains whenever you want.  This does add cost but it will save money if you have to alter your list of internal domains more than twice.

The icing on the cake:
As you can imagine, a single list of all your tracking codes, organic search sites and referring domains will become quite bulky. Once the rule is in place you may want to classify the Unified Sources eVar in ways relevant to your business to take full advantage of one of the most useful solutions Engineering Services has to offer.

If you already have Unified Sources VISTA solutions, how do you use it?

If you don’t then feel free to send me an e-mail ( paurigemma (at) omniture.com)  with questions.  Or contact your Account Manager and they will help you get started.

]]> http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/06/09/unified-sources-the-db-vista-solution-that-makes-other-vista-solutions-cower-in-fear/feed/ http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/06/09/unified-sources-the-db-vista-solution-that-makes-other-vista-solutions-cower-in-fear/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/omniture/blogs/category/Online_Marketing/~3/COBQWlPqtT8/ http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/04/28/social-media-in-30-seconds/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:37:59 +0000 Wes Funk http://blogs.omniture.com/?p=228 If you’ve ever had a hard time explaining “Social Media” to your family (or your colleagues) here’s a little graphic that illustrates the difference between Social News, User-Generated Content, and Networking sites.

UPDATE: You can now click on the image below to download the file. Or find it on SlideShare.

Categories of Social Media:

• Social News sites allow people to post and vote upon news or other content they consider noteworthy.
• Social Networks connect friends to each other with pictures, status updates, and other applications.
• User-Generated Content is found on sites where users can upload content and make it public. UGC also includes formats like comments, ratings and reviews, and other feedback mechanisms.

So here are a couple of overlaps that this graphic illustrates:

• Blogs have strong characteristics of all three of these categories. Their content is generated by users, can have news value, and is often viewed by a network of followers.
• Twitter is a collection of networks that follow each other’s brief status updates, to whom it is considered noteworthy
• RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) allows a network of subscribers to receive new or updated content.

This model was originally presented in a webinar developed with Chris Bennett of 97th Floor, and has slide if you’d like to share it with a friend.