Thursday, April 11, 2013

Analytics and Crickets

While hanging out at #Sugarcon this week with good friend Stuart Mcintyre we were struck by what we saw as a lack of socialness (made that word up) from the attendees. Granted this is in contrast to the obscenely over the top socialness of my fellow IBM friends which can be zealous in their path to be social.

SugarCRM itself is fairly active as are Larry Augustin CEO and Clint Oram CTO on Twitter. Keeping in mind we can only really see the tweets or posts if #sugarcon was in the tag or discussion. So where is everyone?

In this graphic on the left, courtesy of NextPrinciples, which by the way you can click on and move any of the links and connections, a very nice benefit, you can see who had tweets retweeted or was the primary creator of the original tweets. You can see about 30+ accounts were pretty active although over 700 tweeted something, see Engagement below. If I presume about 1,200 people attended then about 2-3% are active socially. And since I know many of the names, they are business partners. Begging the question, where is the audience? Where are the customers? The lines to the small balls in the graphic are more customers but still the audience was not heavily active. Even at the voting for the AppTakeDown winner it was about 25% that voted. See graphic on the right.

nextprinciples sugarcon2013sugarcon2013
How do we engage people better? Are we happy with this little or this much engagement? 

Let's look at this information, again from NextPriniciples. Keep in mind these are just for the few days of the show and do not imply anything other than what went on at the show. In some cases SugarCRM people themselves or their accounts were excluded in these graphics.

Sugar7 is announced, but no you tube videos for it? Lost opportunity. Customers like videos, social media people love graphics. perhaps they were posted, but just not included in the analytics.

This is hopefully untrue, but only 10 blog posts? I wrote 2 and Stuart 1, but surely there were more. maybe my friends at NextPrinciples can help with this.  A lack of primary bloggers may be hurting. then again, if we look at a week long view, will we see better details? 

The last graphic is probably not as helpful because I do not believe @sugarcon is an account on twitter so it is not surprising that there was no growth in followers.



Large numbers of followers, attendees that are social, bloggers and more all help to provide proper analytics but I was surprised at the details for the conference. If you can't get people excited enough at your annual show, I wonder what the analytics look like during the year.

Now look at  this graphic that shows the top 20 7 Hashtags:

IBM was a Diamond sponsor, no doubt this helped raise the Hashtag, but also many people expressed there impression that IBM was not the older IBM. Nice to see IBM getting that traction and awareness.

We were probably too small to get #sugarcon to trend on Twitter, but then I don't think the keynotes were livestreamed for those that could not attend which could have helped grow more awareness. 

I'd like to see more reach out to the world by SugarCRM. Their product is great, they have a great executive team, they are priced appropriately. How will they reach the goals that Larry Augustin mentioned at the opening keynote? Without leveraging their social customers they are missing a great opportunity to enhance the brand and value of the product.

5 comments:

  1. Great analysis, maybe U Darren and Stuart could do a Collaboration podcast.

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  2. As far as the Twitter engagement goes I believe that is due to the SugarCon app taking the place of Twitter for many users. As of late day 1 the Twitter integration in the app seemed to have gone away. At the very least, it wasn't painfully obvious that there was a way to do this. This caused it to become a walled garden where the rest of the world couldn't be clued into what was going on.

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  3. No podcast.
    Jason, Yeah the app broke, but I never tweeted from it.
    I did not see any analytics from the app, but would love to merge the data.
    I rarely saw much action in the app, but that could be a byproduct of how I used it.
    Personally I think an app just for an event is a bit OTT, but an app that just handles schedules and surveys is a great idea. the rest takes me, the user, out of my comfort zones and in this case to a bad app.

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  4. Keith,

    Thanks for your detailed analysis of the event. You raised many good points, and as per Jason's point above, fragmentation across many channels does not help drive the conversation.

    As you correctly pointed out, these results only reflect what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday. The longer-term results show significantly more blog posts (up to ~50 by now and I expect this number to increase) but still a limited number of videos.

    As per your comment re: the growth rate of of SugarCRM's Twitter followership is based on the @sugarcrm Twitter handle which is the primary handle they used during the event. If you look at the longer term trend, they have been able to grow this by 10%.
    If you go to http://nextprinciples.com/sugarcrm you can now see the longer trend of these analytics.

    Hope this helps.

    Thanks again,

    Ted

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  5. Ted, Thank you for opening up the data further. What I probably should have said was, and I know this myself, bloggers do not always post within a few hours, many take their time and publish on their schedule. So the long tail is a better overview of what is truly occurring.
    I did notice the numbers adjusted and appreciate your feedback. now I have to go get new screen shots and create a "after" post.

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