I first spoke with Erik Ober, CEO of Booshaka, in 2010 because his startup, which started as a search engine for Facebook, had caught my interest. I expressed that while it was great to find out about what people were publicly saying about Samsung on Facebook, it would be great to also know specifics about the engagement in our Samsung USA Facebook page. I really wanted to discover who Samsung USA’s “top fans” were.

Today, Booshaka ranks Facebook pages based on engagement and, as I had hoped, Booshaka identifies your “top fans” and ranks them in a nice leaderboard. You can see Samsung USA’s “Top Fans” on a tab on our Facebook page, and find more details on the Booshaka page for Samsung USA.
Read my interview with Erik below to learn more about the startup, how “Top Fans” works, and where his team is headed.

1. Who is behind Booshaka and what does your “Do the Impossible” tagline mean?

Booshaka is backed by a proven leadership and advisory team with 100+ collective years in social applications, data analysis, algorithms and advertising. Our mission is to help brands and businesses drive engagement and advocacy on Facebook.

From the start, we wanted to create big, meaningful company.  ”Do the impossible” is more of a motto than a tagline and its derived from the Urban dictionary meaning of “Booshaka.” Since naming the company, we’ve been told that all the biggest internet domains have two “O”s in them — Facebook, Google, and Yahoo :)

2. While the site initially started as a way to search on Facebook pages, it is now focused on Facebook Leaderboards based on engagement. Tell me more about this evolution.

The first few iterations of the product were experimental and designed to test how the market would respond to innovations built on Facebook’s Graph APIs.  In August 2010, we launched a version of the site which showed what was trending in different topical categories (ie Sports, Movies, Politics, etc) on Facebook.  We received some great organic press for the app and hundreds of developers and companies reached out to see how they might be able to leverage our technology.

After several months of customer development, we learned two things:

a. Marketers were overwhelmed with the amount of social data and interactions on Facebook and didn’t know how to take advantage of it.

b. Everyone was measuring the success of their Facebook Page(s) in terms of total number of fans / likes.

From our perspective, social media is all about how active your community is, how engaged your customers are, and how much they talk about your brand or business. At that point, we set out to develop technology solutions for the next frontier of social marketing — customer engagement and advocacy.

3. What kind of Facebook pages would benefit from adding a “Top Fans” application?

Most business owners are familiar with the 80/20 rule in which 20% of their customers actually make up 80% of their business.  Given this simple mantra, we believe the “Top Fans” application is instantly useful to any Facebook Page. Facebook Page admins can use the leaderboard to recognize and reward their top contributors and drive business metrics. On average, we’ve seen that effective use of the application will triple engagement in your community.

4. The Leaderboards are based on a point system. What does someone need to do in order to become a “Top Fan” on a Facebook page?

We’ve invested a lot of effort into ensuring that the point algorithm rewards the quality of your participation. Posts, comments and likes are all initially worth 1 point.  Your score is then weighted by higher quality activity (on topic and engages with the community) and will earn you extra points.  Lower quality activity (off topic and spammy) will actually earn you less points. Consistent activity over time is more valuable than repeatedly performing the same action, such as clicking the Like button on every post.

5. Is this all in real-time or does it get aggregated at the end of the day/week/month?

Points and rankings are calculated daily and are aggregated for the current month.  Soon, we will release a Rules Engine which will allow page admins to customize the leaderboard date range.

6. Does Booshaka provide custom development services?

Yes.  Currently, we are busy working directly with partners and customers to build out the platform to suit their needs.

7. Any chance we will see a Booshaka for Twitter in the future?

Possibly :)

8. Do you think Facebook is increasingly becoming a public forum as opposed to a private place for conversations with friends?

Facebook strives to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.  We think they are succeeding at that mission while simultaneously giving people the privacy controls they need.

9. Any advice for marketers trying to increase engagement on Facebook?

Our analysis on Facebook not only goes deep but it also goes broad across the whole network.  With an index of over 2 million Facebook Pages, we’ve gathered a lot of insights into how marketers can successfully drive engagement. We find the most engaged communities are the ones where the advocates have been empowered and motivated to participate. So, build your team of “superfans”.  All of your social customers have the potential to influence their friends, but in fact very few of them do. Once you’ve identified the fans who are the most engaged and strongest potential advocates, use game mechanics such as recognition and reward to nurture and grow their involvement.

At Booshaka, we’ve created new metrics for buzz and community health.  Social data provides marketers the opportunity to measure their success and understand their customers like never before.  Make sure you’re investing your budget and efforts in the right places and that your social strategy is delivering real value.

Find your Top Fans here, browse the most engaged Pages on Facebook here, and feel free to reach us via email: info@booshaka.com.

According to recent eMarketer research, Facebook is the number one seller of display ads in the US. eMarketer expects Facebook to generate $2.19 billion in display advertising revenue this year.

How much is expected for Yahoo? $1.62 billion.

And what about Google? Only $1.15 billion.

We all know that if we want to place text ads on a website or blog, AdSense is the first place to go for revenue. AdSense is great because it delivers ads based on the website hosting the ad. But AdSense doesn’t seem to really know much, if at all, about the audience viewing the ads.

So what about display ads? And what about targeted, relevant display ads?

Everyone talks about targeted and relevant advertising, but no one has been able to deliver this in the way that Facebook can within Facebook.com.

It must be only a matter of time before Facebook decides to add advertisements to the Open Graph.

We already see “Like” buttons everywhere and companies like Amazon, CNN, Levi’s and Huffington Post have done some interesting personalization-like implementations on their sites.

Anyone can add a Facebook plugin in a matter of minutes.

So why not Facebook ads all over the web? Why not a FacebookSense of sorts that would allow both large and small sites to deliver targeted and relevant ads to Facebook users?

Think about. You’re connected to Facebook and happen to stroll away from Facebook for 5 minutes and end up on a sports blog. And let’s say you’re a young woman who recently got engaged. Facebook knows you’re engaged and you’re a young woman who likes to run so maybe it would show you a wedding dress ad and a Nike Women Sponsored Story. It might not be perfect because Facebook wouldn’t know whether you’ve bought that wedding dress yet but it would be a better experience than seeing an ad about muscle gain next to an ad for a questionable dating site, right?

And what about visitors who are not on Facebook or don’t feel like connecting to Facebook at that time? Well, Facebook could deliver ads based on the content of the site itself just as Google AdSense does.

My guess is that a Facebook AdSense coming and it’s coming before 2012. Why before 2012? Well, because 2012 is the alleged IPO year. Oh, and also because 2012 might be the end of the world. And Facebook doesn’t have time to wait until the end of the world.

Michael Jaindl is the VP of Client Services for Buddy Media, a Facebook management system that has been making a lot of news lately. The Buddy Media Platform allows brands, including Samsung (check out our Samsung USA page), to create engaging Facebook tabs, monitor the wall, schedule posts, and more.

b) Motivate your fans to share content:
Brands and agencies need to create interesting content that fans are motivated to share. Facebook users have become very savvy and they realize that there is a negative impact to spamming their network. They can receive a negative comment, be hidden, or worst yet defriended. Just as people understand that forwarding on an email chain letter is spammy they get that sharing boring content can hurt their social cred. Just because there is a share button on a piece of content doesn’t mean that anyone will actually share it. It’s important to create compelling content that your fans are motivated to share.

2. Companies like Zynga and Buddy Media have become an important part of the Facebook ecosystem. How is BuddyMedia enhancing Facebook and the overall social experience?

Imagine that you’re on a NASCAR pit crew and you need to use a standard monkey wrench to change your car’s tires instead of a power gun. The pit crews using the power gun will have changed all four tires by the time you’ve loosed your first lug nut. NASCAR races are very competitive and won by fractions of a second. A pit crew that uses the wrong tools has no chance of winning the race. Buddy Media offers “power tools” for Facebook through our Buddy Media Platform. The Buddy Media Platform helps brands and agencies amplify word-of-mouth marketing, monitor & moderate conversations, quickly launch/manage shareable content, and track performance through a comprehensive analytics suite. 2011 is going to be an interesting year because a lot of ground, in terms of brand equity, is going to be won and lost based on how effectively brands leverage social media to connect with their customers. If a brand or agency isn’t using the right tools they are going to lose ground.

Brandon Prebynski is an Emerging / Social Media Strategist at FKQ Advertising and Marketing and the host of a live USTREAM show called Web Trends. Brandon is one of the first people I “met” on Twitter; you can follow him @Prebynski.

Brandon and I have a panel proposal with Sarah Austin, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh for SXSW 2011 so please vote for us at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob before August 27th, 2010!

Listen to this entire episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Brandon Prebynski on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Brandon recently joined FKQ so I asked him about his new role as a strategist. “It’s been great because within a set of guidelines I’ve been able to shape what the position is,” Brandon told me. He is helping clients create long-term strategies around marketing, customer service and product development.

He’s also been working on tracking, analysis and metrics. “We have this big myth out there that it’s really difficult to measure social media and there are many who say you can’t measure the results especially when it comes back to revenue, and that you can only look at trends over time, but frankly with the correct tools implemented correctly, you can sometimes measure it directly.”

Brandon and I agree that the best place to start is with the business’ goals and objectives in mind. If you’re already measuring simple things like the number of followers and Facebook ‘likes’ and comments, “you need to see how it helps you meet your objectives.”

While measuring the size of your community and the level of engagement within it is good, “if you don’t determine what your objectives and make your roadmap according to it, you’re going to be measuring engagement without knowing what engagement means.”

“Companies right now have to define what engagement is. Avinash (Kaushik) has said this many times: ‘the word engagement is an excuse.’  So what is engagement? It has to come back to your objectives as well. If you have lead generations as your objective and you have 500 leads generated over 3 weeks as your goal, then you could say that a user submitting their email address is engagement.  If you produce an online video and all you want is brand awareness, then a view can be engagement.

The word engagement overlaps a lot of times with conversion. We had x amount of conversions and that can be revenue, but isn’t always creating revenue; it could be someone submitting their email, loading a page, or making a purchase.”

Engagement is important when building community. iI you’re starting to build an audience that didn’t exist, then you can consider engagement the number of times that people communicate with you and each other within the community.”

The size of a community and the engagement within it build on each other, and they often demand a deep understanding of the context in which such connections and conversations occur in order to really understand what is happening and where people are coming from. The fact is that a lot of the tools available today can get expensive despite the fact that they often provide vague information like 90% neutral sentiment on a sentiment analysis and they often can’t even provide information (such as Twitter ReTweets). So we talked about context.

Brandon told me “thinking of context… if I’m driving down the road and I see a billboard that has a political message and I repeat that or if I even think about it in my head, i could compare it to a ReTweet.  Does that mean that I agree with that message? Do we even have the tools to crack that anywhere outside of social media right now? It’s a huge issue that requires a lot of work.”

Brandon and I talked about several other topics including the end of Google Wave, the rumors about Google Me, and his live show Web Trends (which is coming back to USTREAM soon!) so listen to The Social Nerdia Show! for much more.

Web analytics are cool. If you agree with that statement, there’s a good change you’ve spent some time reading Occam’s Razor, the fascinating blog about web analytics by Avinash Kaushik (author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day).

If you don’t know who Avinash is then just Google “Web Analytics” and you’ll surely find out who he is. I’ve personally  learnt much from his thought-provoking and action-oriented writings, and I’m sure you will too. Below is an interview about some of the hot topics in web analytics today.

1. Tools like Woopra have introduced us to real-time analytics. Is real-time the future of analytics? Why are we not there yet?

There is more and more real-time data available. Google Analytics is updated, officially, every hour. Then there are cool tools like Chartbeat, etc. My personal perspective on real time analytics is…. if you can’t take real-time action then why do you want real time data?

In 99% of the cases real-time data is not actionable (it is not statistically significant and people jump the gun on the wrong signals), and companies (big or small) can’t actually take any action even if there is an actionable signal (change campaigns, landing pages, stop emails from going out or whatever). Then why do you want the data?

Real-time data becomes an excuse to stare at computer screens or do data puking. It keeps people from doing thoughtful analysis and looking at non-tactical things (and adding value to their employer).

If your organization meets these two rules: a) You have enough traffic / responses on your site to get statistically significant data AND b) You have a capacity to change things (take action), you should seek out real time data and you should make use of it. If you don’t meet the two rules take a long hard look at if you are engaging in any activity that is adding to your company’s bottom-line when you tap into real time data.

2. In 2007, you wrote a post  about “engagement” often being an “excuse,” not a metric. Now that we can measure things like comments, Facebook likes, ReTweets, check-ins, etc., what are your thoughts about the importance of measuring engagement?

My point of view on engagement is simple: What the heck does it actually mean? The answer is? Everything to everyone. Hence my minor displeasure at that metric. I believe in clarity of communication and a razor sharp focus on solving specific problems. Hence precise measurements, and naming metrics for clarity.

Engagement means nothing, hence does not drive action.

My recommendation was that if you are measuring time spent on the site as “engagement” then call it Time on Site. If you are measuring the number of visits by one person as “engagement” call it Visitor Loyalty. Then people know what you are measuring and what to do with the data.

With regards to your point about Twitter and Facebook…. it is very very cool that we can measure new things. The metrics I like (or have formulated) are….

# of Retweets per 1000 followers. I call it Message Amplification.
# of Replies sent & received per day. I call it Conversation Rate.

Both measure “engagement”, but they are called what they actually measure. That’s what I recommend. More here: Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics.

In each new medium (like social now) we’ll get even more opportunities to measure if we are doing this right. Unique metrics for unique “engagement” processes.

3. Today’s tools and vendors seem to still be fragmented so we find separate tools for web analytics, monitoring, and specific insights. Do you see the industry consolidating to provide clients with a super tool that does it all?

Yes, and no.

Yes in the sense that as things get settled you’ll see tools evolving to incorporate that reporting. AdWords reporting used to be all by itself (it was too young, too new and no one new where it was going). It is now standard reporting included in Google Analytics and Omniture and other tools.

In the last couple of years AdSense, TV, Email, Display are all incorporated into Google Analytics, as an example. Or sometimes different vendors merge things together, as it the case with the 4Q voice of customer survey which merges with Google Analytics.

So as digital strategies reach some level of maturity expect tools by Google and Yahoo! and WebTrends and more to incorporate them together.

No in the sense that we live in such an ever evolving space (I think of web analytics today as a toddler, a lot of growth/change is to come and we actually have no idea what it is going to become). So new things will keep coming and they’ll be outside and we’ll have to become comfortable with what I call Multiplicity, the idea that to do your job effectively on the web you’ll have to:

a) Use the right tool to answer the right question, and b) Be very comfortable with managing / learning / using multiple tools at one time

And I’ll tell that that to me that is just so exciting that the world changes and evolves and you can have so much fun. Every day!

4. Bloggers often pay attention to comments and Social Media sharing as a way to measure success. What should bloggers be paying more attention to?

This should not come as a surprise… I have a blog post on Blog Metrics! : ) Here it is: Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success.

It is important to focus on the impact of social media on your blogging success (retweets, likes, replies to you on twitter and facebook to posts about your blog etc etc). But blogging is about more than social media links / clicks. The essence of my blog post about is that you should measure holistic success of your blog. The metrics I recommend are:

1. Raw Author Contribution
2. Audience Growth
3. Conversation Rate
4. Citations / Ripple Index (social media falls here)
5. Cost
6. Benefit ($$)

Taking that view allows you to have a robust understanding of if you are adding value and if you should keep doing what you are doing (or change!). I encourage people to do that beyond simply checking retweets or likes.

5. Your 10/90 rule is great because it focuses on people, not tools or technologies. With that rule in mind, what advice would you give to young people getting started in marketing research and analytics?

Learn to try new things and play in the real world. There is no better medium in the world for you to try anything you want, all by yourself without the need to rely on your employer to empower you. Tools are free or cheap. Platforms are free or cheap. All you need is a pinch of effort and a dash of desire to learn in the real world. If you do that no one will refuse to hire you because you’ll actually know what the heck you are talking about. If you don’t do that… well…. life will be tougher.

Here is a blog post that outlines how to do that, at least for Web Analytics: Web Analytics Career Advice: Play In The Real World.

6. Your books “Web Analytics 2.0″ and “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” have not only helped many people, but also created excitement around web analytics. Did you ever think you would one day be the closest thing to an Analytics Rock Star?

There is no such thing as a Rock Star. From dust to dust. :)

But I did want to share that I feel incredibly blessed that blogging and engaging in social media allows me (and anyone else!) to simply do what I am passionate about (writing and analytics), and have something come of it. My blog is responsible for Wiley contacting me and requesting me to write a book and things kept evolving like that. All I did is focus on writing things people would find to be “incredible” and “of value” (my two mantras for blogging).

As you know, all my proceeds from both my books are donated to charity (Doctors Without Borders, The Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya), and in around two years that amount is over $100k. I am astounded at that outcome.  More than anything it shows how “powerful” each and every one of us can be when we leverage the beautiful internet and focus on adding value through our passion.

Viva la web!

Have you ever wanted to see who is on your web site at any given time? I’m not talking about the number of page views that your web site got this month. I’m talking about now, right now. Well, Woopra might be able to help.

Last night, on The Social Nerdia Show! live podcast’s 27th episode, I had a conversation with John Pozadzides, the CEO of iFusion Labs, the parent company of Woopra, an innovative web analytics application that lets you see who your visitors are and what they are doing, in real-time.

You can listen to the entire conversation with John about blogging, analytics, marketing, social media, and much more, on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to all our shows on iTunes, stream it from a mobile phone on Stitcher, and listen to it LIVE on Thursday nights on blogtalkradio.

Enter Woopra

Woopra makes me very excited about the future of real-time because real-time is how the web should be. It’s what the web needs to be. I’ve done my share of waiting, refreshing, and reloading, and if 2010 is not the year for the real-time web to explode and break out of the tech bubble and into the mainstream, then I’m going to hang out in real-time in real-life with actual friends under the real-time sky drinking some real-time water. So take note Google. And take note everybody else. Anyone creating online products and services has a bit to learn from the accomplishments of the FriendFeeds, FourSquares, Radian6s, and Woopras of the world.

I first heard about John P. and Woopra at WordCamp Dallas. I must admit that I did not realize what Woopra was at first. The words “live” and “real-time” simply did not sink in. But once installed, I was able to see who was visting socialnerdia.com at that point. I was used to getting some of this info from Google, but Google Analytics always provided it a day too late. Woopra is about the now, and that adds a whole new layer of meaning to how we measure the web.

“When you’re looking at Woopra, you’re actually seeing visitors live on your web site and you can watch them move from page to page and see how long and how many times they’ve been on your web site,” John explained about what Woopra does.”We have one section called ‘live’ and one section called ‘analytics.’ You can combine historical information with live information,” he added.

Taking on Google aka “Goliath”

“Woopra takes it to the next level,” John said about his company’s application compared to the widely used Google Analytics. “Instead of looking at what happened yesterday, we’re looking at what’s happening now.” Of course, Google’s “yesterday” might not remain that way, so I asked John about what how he feels about competing with Google . “This is truly a David vs Goliath kind of competition. Google has enough money to do whatever they want tomorrow.”

Woopra began John’s partners realized that they could try to solve a problem with web analytics applications. They were not trying to take on anyone.  Regarding whether he thinks that Google is coming after them to crush them, John responded “I don’t think the folks at Google are like that. If they see an idea they really like they make an offer.” The Woopra team is trying not to focus on the competition, but on their product and their customers.

In addition to real-time, Woopra also differentiates itself with a “chat (that) enables you to take action on what it is that you’re seeing” and with notifications about ecommerce activities.

Getting on everyone’s radar with social media

The product itself is what has created buzz online for Woopra. “We had a unique service offering that was of real value. We were very clear about the features of that offering.“  Now, listen to these numbers: 6 employees working on Woopra, and 100,000 web sites using it. Obviously, there is something in Woopra that people see valuable, including people like Leo Laporte.

And excitement becomes buzz. Woopra has received some attention from major blogs and podcasts, even though no money has ever been spent on marketing. “Our savior has been social media. Our users have been the ones driving our success. We genuinely listen to them and we love them, and they return the favor. That has been the engine.”

John thinks the corporate world may need to adjust its mindset towards social media. “The world is changing and people like Gary V. or Cali Lewis can instantaneously sway opinions by leveraging social media. Conversations are taking place… the only question is whether you choose to ignore them or fight the fight.”

While there is a risk involved in entering the transparent, honest, and authentic environment created in social media, John believes that it might be more risky to be afraid of making mistakes. “People will forgive you for making a mistake but they will not forgive you for ignoring them… Companies are going to make mistakes. The way you get forgiven is by having a broader, stronger relationship so people can see beyond it.”

We briefly discussed Apple and I’ll just go ahead and say that I’m skeptic of Apple’s ability to stay quiet online for much longer. And I think John, a recent Mac convert, agrees.

On blogging and specialization

John’s personal blog has been used for a lot of the Woopra demos so I had to ask John about his blogging philosophy.  The slogan of One Man’s Blog is ‘Specialization is for insects.’ He asked out loud, “why limit yourself to one particular thing? Back in the 17th century and 18th century, the people that were really admired were the ones that were very well-rounded. Somehow in our modern society we have moved away from that. We tend to specialize in everything.”

Woopra’s blog has a similar approach, bringing up various topics that are relevant to the community it is trying to reach, instead of just pushing out a lot of info about web analytics.

“Design may play some small role, but it is not the most important thing,” John told me about the importance of emphasizing content. “Unique topics and interesting stories will attract readers.”

The future of analytics

As I said before, I’m quite excited about all things real-time on the web. Traditional media has been unable to capture real-time information about its viewers/listeners/readers. I mean, you can’t know exactly how and when anyone is listening to a radio show. “The big problem with media in general is that we don’t truly know how many people are participating at any given time.” Woopra is working on ways to capture the information we need for various forms of web media, including podcasts and videos. That won’t solve Channel 8′s problem, but if we think of the internet as a new delivery mechanism.. then we’ll be able to use innovative technologies to solve some of those lingering traditional problems.”

And what about sharing the information that Woopra provides on a web site? John said that they are already working on this and are polishing it so that anyone can show off their live statistics as a widget. “It’s in the lab, and when we do have it ready, we’ll make it available.”

I told John that one thing I feel continues to be missing in web analytics is a means to understand what all the data means. If an application like Woopra could tell its users to Tweet more or less often, or chat with users in Madagascar, or add more advertising, then we could not just have a lot of fascinating raw data, but also get help on how to use it. “Today, we provide data. Ultimately, it would be very interesting if Woopra had an intelligent aspect to provide Predictive recommendations.”

Analytics going social?

We ended the conversation talking about adding social to the mix. I was wondering if we could compare things like our page views with Woopra’s billions of aggregated page views to get some social insight, and John gave me a hint about where Woopra could be headed for. “You can keep an eye out for some very social functionality down the road to allow you to do some comparison between the things you’re seeing and what the community is seeing,” he said, and I’m looking forward to it.