Words of inspiration - from Ted Leonsis

This post doesn’t have much to do with Widget Analytics, but it does help shed some light on the inspiration at Clearspring and some of the moments that keep us slogging away to continue to be a leader in the widget space - from every standpoint, including analytics.

I am not one to get sick very often, but last week I was slammed with a head cold that took me down pretty hard. Not much fun to miss work, book club and a girls night out. Those are all repeatable events though that can be made up some time in the future. What I was really bummed about is that I missed seeing Clearspring’s Chairman of the Board, Ted Leonsis, speak in person at our offices here in McLean. I did however listen in via phone for the hour and a half that he spoke and got a lot from his speech. Let me preface this by saying that the man has a very soothing voice which is a pro when listening to someone for that long, but a con when under the influence of Tylenol ‘Severe’ head cold medicine. I found myself dreaming in and out of a few of his anecdotes included in his talk - but I definitely walked away with a few nuggets of wisdom that were truly inspirational. So the three things that I learned:

1. Develop multiple areas of inspiration in your life - Ted really focused on expressing that you can’t just be married to your work, or your family for that matter. You need to develop more than one passion in your life. This may include charity, church or hobby. The bottom line is that to truly be happy in life you must be personally fulfilled - and that includes more than one area of influence in your life.
2. Bad day leads to bad week leads to bad month leads to bad quarter - In business you have to be focused on constantly tracking your progress. A bad year is made up of continuously bad quarters, months, weeks and days. Never let it get out of control and always be pushing for each day to be better than the next.
3. You are building products to help people - Ted connected how when they were building AOL Instant Messenger that they kept in mind that the product was about helping people communicate and connect with each other. We need to be (and we are) connecting that same concept to how we build products here at Clearspring.

It is great to be at a company that has such strong thought leaders on our board and advisory councils.  For me right now this is a moment in time to enjoy the people I work with, the culture that I am fortunate to be a part of and the intersection of market and technology.  The Web 2.0 space is truly evolving quickly all around us.  You can either watch it happen, make it happen or do both!

Social Media Metrics: It’s Time To Tear Down The Wall

Today I published an article via MediaPost for the Metrics Insider newsletter. I write for them once per month and this is my installment for this month. You can check out the entire series of this newsletter or subscribe on their web site. Writers that you’ll see from week to week include Jim Sterne (President of te WAA), Josh Chasin of comScore, Judah Phillips of Reed Publishing and David Smith. The topics vary from week to week, but offer up some good insights as to what is going on in the metrics world. Enjoy!

“SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS” IS A huge buzz phrase lately — but does anyone REALLY know what it means? Can you define it? The social media space covers a broad set of channels: widgets, blogging, social applications, micro-blogging and more. Each one of these segments, and their associated vendors, are reporting on and introducing new metrics associated with their platform, which some Web analytics tools may or may not be able to tap into. This leaves the marketer in the Web 2.0 space struggling to determine how to integrate and correlate (and reconcile) metrics being reported across all of these media. It is time for the walls to come down and transparency to take over.

Today’s Web marketers are expanding their scope beyond the traditional channels (crazy as it may be, I am referring to display and search marketing here). Forays into creating social applications on Facebook and MySpace platforms, launching campaigns via widgets or following customers on Twitter are tactics being tested by organizations large and small. Measuring these efforts is a huge challenge when the currency hasn’t been established and the data sources are disparate and undocumented. Marketers are demanding metrics — as they should — but this results in new feeds of analytics (if available) that need to be integrated into existing dashboards and marketing analyses.

Where do you begin in evaluating what’s possible or impossible to measure? Questions to start with:

1. Is the data available? Almost every social media channel has some set of metrics being calculated somewhere. The real question is whether they are officially exposed or if a cottage industry group of developers is mining the data through a set of scraping scripts. For you ad agencies and corporate marketers, this is probably not going to fly with your “customers.”

2. How do you get hold of the data? Rudimentary ways of retrieving how many Tweets or how many installs of your app or widget are definitely available. Do a Web search on one of these phrases. and a litany of free tools and Web sites will show up in the results. However, the more sophisticated players in the space are offering their analytics via a Web-based interface or an API for their customers to retrieve the data. APIs offer the most flexibility for incorporation into existing dashboards and other systems.

3. How do I interpret this data? Answer: ask your vendor. When I refer to vendor, I do not mean your Web analytics vendor. While some of them are playing in these various spaces, your best bet is to go to the source (if there is one). Ask your widget platform vendor, your account/sales representative from the social network or blogging platform of your choice. The platforms that are evolving the fastest are starting to work together on standards, while those that have a clear monopoly in their space need to (and should) be documenting how they calculate and display their usage metrics. If you aren’t sure, I challenge you to ask them.

At the end of the day, we are in the midst of an analytics revolution for measuring social media. The metrics are being defined, some consolidation has occurred and standards will follow. The Web Analytics Association has established a Standards Committee to define terms and definitions for measuring how visitors interact with social media content, but this is just a starting point. The vendors have to be ready to “open the kimono,” if you will. Web analytics practitioners and marketers need to know how the data is collected, how it is filtered and how the metrics are calculated. Until we have transparency in the measurement model, the mother lode of marketing dollars will not follow.

Clearspring raises $18M - widget analytics here we come

Widget Analytics - here we come! Yesterday Clearspring announced a series C round of funding from NEA of $18M. Our team is very excited about this announcement as it reiterates the momentum around widgets and the growing interest and support in the space.

I am personally excited because our team is continuously working to improve and build upon our widget analytics capabilities. There is so much cool stuff we have in the pipeline and I can’t wait for us to deliver it all to our customers.

Thank you to everyone who reads my blog and sends me emails on what you are doing in the space. Our team is on the warpath to deliver you more - better insights and data so that you can make better business strategy decisions on how you deploy your widgets. Keep the communication coming!

You can read the press release here in its entirety:

McLean, Va., May 21, 2008 — Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, has secured $18 million in a series C funding round that includes leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other current investors. The new round will fund expansion of Clearspring’s viral marketing network, which currently serves and tracks almost four billion widgets monthly. It will also be used to extend Clearspring’s reach into international markets and further develop its rapidly growing advertising network and vast data infrastructure and optimization services. Clearspring’s category leadership is well-established — according to comScore’s Widget Metrix report, Clearspring tallied 126 million unique widget viewers in March 2008, making it the No. 1 widget platform in the world.

“No other widget company has the breadth of relationships with content publishers, advertisers, developers and social media, as well as the full suite of widget services including syndication, in-depth analytics and easy-to-use monetization tools,” said Harry Weller, partner at NEA. “Clearspring is the leader in this space, and we look forward to working with the company as it expands its platform and extends its reach into global markets.”

Weller will join the Clearspring Board of Directors, joining, among others, Internet pioneers Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Miles Gilburne. Case, the co-founder of America Online, Leonsis, AOL’s Vice Chairman Emeritus, who recently became Clearspring’s Chairman, and Gilburne are all credited with driving worldwide adoption of the Internet by providing tens of millions of people with their first Internet connection. Also new to the Clearspring board is Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One.

“We are excited about partnering with NEA. This partnership will enable us to enter the next phase of our growth and pioneer the next generation of the Social Web,” said Hooman Radfar, Clearspring co-founder and chief executive officer. “Advertisers and publishers rely on us as a channel to reach audiences on the Social Web, and this funding will enable us to extend our platform and services to continue delivering on that promise.”

Clearspring provides the platform and services connecting widget advertisers and publishers to the evolving Social Web. The company has served more than 33 billion widget views since launching its platform in 2007. Clearspring’s platform enables publishers, developers and advertisers to distribute, track and monetize content as widgets to more than 80 social networks, blogs, start pages, and bookmarking sites — including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, iGoogle, and Windows Vista.

“Clearspring is definitely hitting on all cylinders. A growing list of world-class customers, incredible growth in the usage of its syndication services, and a significant investment from a firm with NEA’s reputation provide validation that we’re leading the charge into the next evolution of the Web,” said Leonsis. “We’re thrilled that Harry Weller and Nigel Morris have joined the board. Harry brings a proven history of guiding early stage companies to success, and Nigel, who while at Capital One unlocked the market value of their data, brings experience that will help us leverage our vast amount of data to deliver the best end-user experience and the most efficient advertising network on the Social Web.”

Marketers who have used Clearspring’s widget network include mass market consumer brands such as Aquafina, Honda, Snapple, Snickers, Sprint and Virgin Mobile. Other customers include movie and entertainment companies like Blockbuster, Disney, Fox Broadcasting, Lionsgate and Sony Pictures, major sports leagues like the NBA, NFL and NHL, major advertising agencies including 360i, Digitas, JWT, Mediacom, MindShare and Universal McCann, and world renowned media firms such as ESPN, National Geographic, NBC Universal, Newsweek, Time-Warner and Washingtonpost.com. Also, top international recording artists including Linkin Park, Madonna, Radiohead and U2 have successfully launched promotions using Clearspring widgets.

Other news links you should also check out are:

CNET

Mashable

DMWMedia

VentureBeat