A few people have been asking how we calculate the “visibility score” we assign to a brand.
We introduced the score a few weeks ago to provide a quick way for people to compare the visibility of one brand to another. We decided to take the simplest approach we could think of that would provide useful results…
We took a set of benchmark results using one globally recognised traditional brand and gave it a score of 1000. To ensure that even small, local brands would register we made it a sliding scale. For example, Coca-Cola has around 8,000 times more photos mentioning them on Flickr compared to our company Inuda, but we still get a score of 10 for having some photos rather than getting 0.
It’s very much an experimental feature so the way it’s calculated is likely to change in the future. We’ll probably create some kind of index by benchmarking against the world’s top (non-ambiguous) brands. Please let us know if you have any ideas for how we could improve it.
August 13, 2008 at 3:10 am |
Why not allow users to set their own weights? You can have one standard brand calculator and one personal brand calculator.
I may weigh presence on certain social networks more than others. For example Flickr photos mean nothing to a technology company but technorati, digg, reddit score may have a lot more relevance.
August 13, 2008 at 5:34 pm |
@dorai
Great idea. We’ll certainly consider bringing that functionality in. Adding reddit and digg scores is also a priority of ours!
August 14, 2008 at 1:47 am |
Thanks. This is one problem I find with search engines too. Their concept of relevance while good in general is not sufficient to meet my needs.
Thank you for the response and good luck with the efforts.
August 20, 2008 at 4:26 pm |
[...] have a complex measurement scale and this is described in their blog here but it is hard to come up with a better way of measuring oneself. They do say that not all social [...]
September 2, 2008 at 2:29 pm |
A lot more people will “get” this if you display the score as “[score] out of a possible 1000.”
September 2, 2008 at 2:43 pm |
@Chris unfortunately its not that simple. If you do a search for a technology brand like Google (http://howsociable.com/google) that’s very visible on the web you’ll find they score much more than the ~1000 that Coca-Cola scores.
We know we’ve got some work to do to make this easier to understand and more useful.
September 2, 2008 at 3:48 pm |
Didn’t figure it would be that simple. Would recommend taking off the aggregate “score” until such time as you figure out a good way of contextualizing it. “212 out of {something}” is kind of a let-down.
September 3, 2008 at 2:30 pm |
Excellent concept !
September 3, 2008 at 3:17 pm |
@Chris Thanks for the suggestion but we’re going to keep it for now. We know its far from perfect but we don’t feel we can take away the only easy way people have of comparing one brand to another.
@Fubiz Thank you!
September 3, 2008 at 9:00 pm |
I echo the above comments. Metrics ain’t metrics unless you’re measuring it against something..
September 3, 2008 at 9:14 pm |
Is “recognised” missed spelled? Shouldn’t it be recognized.
September 5, 2008 at 7:14 am |
@Andrea Can you elaborate? We are measuring against something. At the moment it’s one big brand, in the future it will be an index of brands.
@Nick we’re based in the UK and that’s how we spell it here. That said our audience is increasingly US based – maybe we should consider adopting your spelling
September 5, 2008 at 1:57 pm |
Hi,
Great concept. And I agree that it would be difficult to present the score as “X out of 1000″. However, I see the need to show where this score falls in relation to other brands, to give the user a point of comparison. So there may be no absolute limit, but I have no idea if 1538 is a “good score” (in relation to my competitors) or not….
September 16, 2008 at 3:56 pm |
Nothing to do with the metrics question but please keep the UK English spelling… also, I prefer colour over color and centre over center, etc. and I’m Irish
September 16, 2008 at 4:00 pm |
By the way, I’ve already been using this to present to clients. What I’ve been doing is completing a run and saving it. the client then has a measure of visibility prior to starting a campaign and when the campaign is complete I should be able to see an increase.
I’ll let you know how we get on
Cheers
J
October 1, 2008 at 3:08 pm |
Following on from John’s post above, I’ve been looking at ways to use the system to track campaign effectiveness, but finding it hard to the measure impact of a UK campaign on global stats – is there any clever IP stuff to split by region on the horizon?
October 1, 2008 at 3:55 pm |
..and it would be really useful if it included forum posts via Boardreader!
October 21, 2008 at 3:05 pm |
Just getting to grips with this index on behalf of a client. Looks well laid out and fairly easy to follow. Appreciate the methos of calculating the index may change. If nothing else, it is great to come across a site that does use correct English spelling. Change to US spelling at your peril!
January 15, 2009 at 12:46 pm |
i would have thought that the ‘best’ fit with measurement would be to compare like for like. airline v’s airline, soft dink v’s soft drink.
if you allow it to become user generated content then your list of brands and relevant industries will be generated rather quickly.
get some of the other streams that are out there mapped in and it becomes a good tool.
May 4, 2009 at 11:04 pm |
Is this a free service?
June 3, 2009 at 2:31 pm |
How about some sort of widget that can use to track my brand?