Presentation for the live Elluminate session for week two of the BGI (Bainbridge Graduate Institute) course "Using the Social Web for Social Change". Topic "Understanding the Audience", including Goals for Change, Participation, Audience, Google PageRank, Google Analytics, Google Feedburner, Other Analytics, Credibility, Writing for Your Audience

1. Using the
Social Web
for Social Change
Week 5 – Elluminate Session D
October 19, 2009: 7pm PT

2. Quote of the Day
“After teaching 10 years, the only good measure
of student progress I know is the number of open
problems they can successfully characterize.”
— Clay Shirky (via twitter) Clay
Shirky

3. Week 5: Understanding the
Audience – Participation and Analytics
Opening Circle
Review Last Week & Upcoming Week
Our Goals
Participation
Agenda
Audience
Google Page Rank
Other Analytics
Google Analytics & Feedburner
Credibility
Writing for Your Audience

4. Type a sentence into the
chat window about:
Opening Circle how you are feeling
tonight
something about your
BGI Beat blog
something you learned
this week
a concern

5. What have we tagged?
There are 25 students in
Tagging http://delicious.com/network/
ChristopherA/bundle:bgimgt566sx
1132 bookmarks in our
network, up from 786 one
weeks ago
Average 45 bookmarks per
student, up from 33

6. What have we tagged?
There are 25 students in
Tagging http://delicious.com/network/
ChristopherA/bundle:bgimgt566sx
1132 bookmarks in our
network, up from 786 one
weeks ago
Average 45 bookmarks per
student, up from 33
Still 4 people with under 15
bookmarks

7. Week 4
Understanding
the Audience –
Participation and
Analytics

8. Readings & Media
Medium number of readings this
week
Topics are
Participation & Engagement
Analytics
Credibility
Writing for Your Audience
Advanced Blogger

9. Assignments
Decide if you are going to have a dedicated
domain for your blog
Purchase your domain at Google
Add Analytics to Your Blog
Google Analytics
Feedburner
Identify Your Blog’s Peers
Find at least 3 blogs with related subjects and/
or keywords
Subscribe, participate, and comment
Understand their audience
Post
1 thoughtful post, 1 commentary post, 1 link
post, plus 2 comments in other blogs

10. Our Goals
Save the world by getting:
•Participation
•Engagement
•Affinity
•Association

11. Participation:
Participation “take part”
... from latin ‘participare’ meaning
“share in”

12. Engagement:
Engagement “an arrangement to do
something or go
somewhere at a fixed
time”
... from french ‘engager’ meaning
“to pledge”

13. Affinity:
Affinity “a spontaneous or natural
liking or sympathy for
someone or something”
... from latin ‘affinis’ meaning
“bordering on”

14. Association:
Association “a connection or
cooperative link between
people or organizations”
... from latin ‘associare’ meaning
“to unite”

15. Participation

16. Arstein’s
Ladder of Participation
In 1969 Sherry Arnstein wrote an
influential paper on barriers to
citizen participation
She created a model of a “ladder”
that needed to be climbed for higher
levels of participation

17. Davidson’s
Wheel of Participation
I personally find the Davidson’s
Wheel of Participation a better
model
When trying to increase participation
by a community, it is a good tool to
discovering barriers and to choose
appropriate processes
However, the “ladder” metaphor is
more popular

18. Wilcox’s
Ladder of Participation
I also like Wilcox’s Ladder
Stance
Information, Consultation, Deciding
Together, Acting Together, Supporting
Phase
Facilitation, Preparation, Participation,
Continuation
Stakeholders
Residents, Groups, Business, Officers,
Politicians, etc.

19. Forrester’s
Ladder of Participation
Charlene Li, of Forrester Research,
created in 2007 the Forrester Ladder
of Participation
Based on research of the usage
patterns of web users worldwide

20. Forrester’s
Ladder of Participation
Charlene Li, of Forrester Research,
created in 2007 the Forrester Ladder
of Participation
Based on research of the usage
patterns of web users worldwide
Each level has different percentages in
different parts of the world
And different for different sub-
demographics, like women, race, etc.
Useful for mass social marketing

21. Forrester Research’s A free tool to let you examine the social
technographics of different sub-demographics
Social Technographics Tool http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

22. Wolfe’s
Ladder of Disclosure
Phil Wolfe humorously compared the
Forrester Ladder of Participation to
this Ladder of Disclosure
However, it is actually reasonably
facsimile of a range of privacy choices
that users make

23. Mayfield’s
Power Law of Participation
In 2006 Ross Mayfield, founder of
SocialText, a commercial Wiki
company, wrote up this Power Law of
Participation
Basically combines the Long Tail with
Participation Ladder
Key point is that like Long Tail, even
the smallest participation, to read
your a specific web page, has value
Higher levels have higher thresholds
thus require more engagement

24. Ross Mayfield’s Every level of participation has value, but some
Power Law of Participation require increasing levels of engagement

25. Audience
Who,Where, How,
What,Why?

26. “But I don’t have
Who? an audience yet!”
Study your Peers!

27. Peers
Your blog peers are:
Those with similar topics
Those who use related keywords
Those with an affinity to you
Those whom you have an affinity to

28. Google’s BlogSearch is a good tool for finding
Google’s BlogSearch top sites using same keywords as you do
blogsearch.google.com

29. Technorati allows us to see blogs that are
Technorati.com related to the topic of “climate change”
and their relative authority

30. Or we can examine the recent authority of a
Technorati.com specific blog – decays faster then PageRank

31. Google
PageRank
A measure of your web sites
authority

32. Google Search on When you do a Google Search, there are
many results. The top results come from
“Dunbar Number” sources with higher Google PageRank

33. Google will not tell you your page rank, but
PRchecker.info there are many tools that will give it to you.
Wikipedia’s page rank is very high, a 9

34. My blog posts at Life With Alacrity were
PRchecker.info listed next, because I have Page Rank of 7

35. PageRank is not linear, it is a logarithmic scale:
Google Page Rank 5 is roughly 10 times as authoritative as a 4.
Average is 3 to 5.

36. Google Page Rank
Proprietary algorithm, but we know
some (in rough order of priority):
Quality inbound links
Quality outbound links
Good neighborhood
Good traffic
No broken links
Pages added frequently
Pages updated frequently

37. Google Page Rank
Google is very sensitive to abuse
Bad inbound links
Link spamming
Bad content
Good traffic
Lots of broken links
SEO tricks
Blackhat tricks
Algorithm changes regularly
My page rank has ranged from 5 to 7
Be careful of SEO

38. rel=“nofollow”
There is a special link tag
rel=“nofollow”
<a href=“http://domain.com”
rel=“nofollow”>link</a>
Links to sites marked as nofollow are
not indexed by Google, and page
rank is not affected
Use it on links to sites that you don’t
want to give page rank to
Don’t overuse

39. You can make some guesses of why my
SmartPageRank.com page rank is good by looking at page
ranks of websites that link to my website

40. Other
Analytics
Other sources of website
data and analytics

41. Great tool to see trends in keywords you care
BlogPulse.com about. For instance, “climate change” had a big
jump on October 15th.

42. Another useful tool is QuantCast, as
QuantCast.com they can make good guesses on
traffic and demographics

43. typical community unhealthy
rpg.net obesityhealth.com
site community
(data from quantcast.com)
QuantCast is also a great tool for
QuantCast.com measuring community participation

44. When you use Delicious advance search, you can
Delicious Tag Statistics get keyword trends, and related words

45. You can also do a reverse lookup of
Delicious Site Tags everyone who has tagged a particular
site, to discover how others have tagged it

46. click
here
Google Reader can tell you how people are
Google Reader subscribed to a blog using Google Reader

47. Your Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Feedburner

48. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool for
discovering
who is reading your blog
where do they reside
how did they discover you
what terms they used to find you
With some additional work, you can
also discover
why people read your blog
how to more effectively engage users to
take action

49. Google Analytics
<script type="text/javascript">
You may not have sufficient var gaJsHost = (("https:" ==
information in 3 months to be hugely document.location.protocol) ?
"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
valuable, but it is good to start now document.write(unescape
If you are going to have a dedicated ("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
domain for your blog, do that first "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/
Signup for free Google Analytics script%3E"));
account </script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Paste javascript snippet into your try {
blog template var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker
("UA-11183169-1");
More detailed instructions in course pageTracker._trackPageview();
plan } catch(err) {}</script>

50. Google Feedburner
Blogs can be read offline, so Google
Analytics doesn’t get all your
information
FeedBurner takes your default RSS
xml file and rewrites it
You need to point your users to
Feedburner now, if they use default
RSS they you will not get results
from old users (a problem with Life
With Alacrity).

51. Google Feedburner
ORIGINAL:
Again, if you are going to have a
dedicated domain for your blog, set http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/
index.rdf
that up that first
Signup for free Google Feedburner FEEDBURNER:
account and claim your feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/
Configure your blog to use the LifeWithAlacrity
Feedburner RSS feed rather then the
default RSS feed
More detailed instructions in course
plan

52. Credibility

53. Credibility
One of the biggest obstacles to
participation is credibility
What people say they trust:
Identity, Advertising and
Sponsorships, Customer Service,
Corrections, and Privacy
What they actually trust
Design Look 46.1%, Information
Design/Structure 28.5%, Information
Focus 25.1%, Company Motive
15.5%, Information Usefulness 14.8%

54. Credibility
Make it easy to verify your accuracy
Show that there is a real person
behind your blog
Highlight your expertise
Show that honest and trustworthy
people are support your blog
Make it easy to contact you
Make the design professional, easy to
use, useful, and error-free
Update regularly
Use restraint on promotion

55. Writing for
Your
Audience

56. Cultural References
“Think about how the trendy, jargon,
national, and regional references you
use in your blog may be
misunderstood or even confuse your
blog readers. It’s critical for bloggers
to be “understood”, so take time to
look at what you write and how your
writing may create a disconnect with
your readers.”
– Lorelle VanFossen

57. Writing for the Future
“One thing we should keep in mind when
writing here or in any online forum is that
we are writing not only for the present,
but for the future. Our words may well be
read many times, even far into the future.
They are recorded in public and private
archives and will be available indefinitely.
Given the likely increase in future levels of
intelligence and attention, it may even turn
out that more eyes see our writings in the
far future than in the near present.”
– Hal Finney

58. Questions?
Feedback?
ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com
Next: Elluminate Session F
Social Video,Viral Media & Memetics
October 26, 2009: 7pm PT