Pictured left to right: Denise Offutt, Kathleen Buczko, Jim Fetig, Danielle Brigida, and Antonia Antonopoulos
My various companies and I started measuring social media back in the days of Usenet groups. Since then, we’ve had the privilege of working with many, many Measurement Mavens. It just so happens that many of them have done groundbreaking work for new social media platforms.
For this month’s Measurement Maven award, we’ve chosen five data-informed communicators who stand out both for their innovative communications measurement programs and their early adoption of new technologies:
Denise Offutt and Kathleen Buczko of Epson were, back in the early 2000s, the very first to monitor conversations on the printer user groups for mentions of their brand. We were able to help them demonstrate that user reviews had a greater impact on store traffic and demand than product reviews in traditional PC publications!
Jim Fetig, who was Vice President of Communications & Marketing for Georgia Tech, hired us to monitor Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. We were also responsible for doing a competitive analysis of his institution compared to eight of his peers. That lead to our identification of the 27 types of conversations and the astonishing discovery (at the time) that Second Life wasn’t worth it.
In 2009 we ran into Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation at the famous SXSW Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam. There she described her efforts to measure social media in perfect Edgar Allen Poe rhyme. We took her efforts up several notches by helping her become one of the first people to integrate social, digital, and traditional media into a single integrated report that eventually won an AMEC award. She’s now pushing for similar measurement progress at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
And finally there’s Antonia Antonopoulos at UNICEF, for whom we did one of the very early custom engagement indexes. It demonstrated the difference in messaging effectiveness between celebrities, including Mia Farrow and David Beckham. In this case, Mia’s fans were far more devoted to the cause of children, whereas David could attract attention to an issue, but not necessarily drive high-level engagement.
Congrats to Denise Offutt, Kathleen Buczko, Jim Fetig, Danielle Brigida, and Antonia Antonopoulos!
(Click here to view the entire roster of our fabulous Measurement Mavens.) ∞
