Tracking Social Influence: Razorfish Files Patent For Social Media Action Tag

What Is The Value Of Social Influence?:

Razorfish has been trying to tackle a billion dollar problem: how do marketers identify the key influencers within a social network, and how do you really track and understand how social behavior works?

This problem is especially critical in a recessionary economy when every form of marketing is under scrutiny to prove its ROI.  We think we’ve cracked the code through a data tracking solution that’s going to sound kind of geeky to those of us who don’t measure data for a living, but essential to any marketer who cares about social media: the Generational Tag (AKA Incrementing Action Tag).

My colleagues in our Razorfish Seattle office filed a patent for the Generational Tag on September 30^th, 2008 and we are sharing our findings publicly today.

The Data Problem:

Today social media apps (widgets, applications, viral media, etc.) cannot track or account for unique individuals other than those who download the application and those that download the application from a friend. Couple that with the lack of known quantitative methods for identifying key influencers within a social network in regards to a specific application and you’ve got a big problem for the industry. Some would say a billion-dollar problem, actually.

Core Questions We Tried To Answer:

• What is the value of a key influencer?
• How viral or how many generations has my social media application achieved?
• What is the value of someone who receives a social application from a friend versus someone who receives it via media or a paid seeding strategy?

The Razorfish Incrementing Action Tag Solution:

Our solution is the Incrementing Action Tag which is a set of functions within a social media application that creates a variable that may be read externally based on where the user acquires the application.  When a user downloads the application from the original source, the Incrementing Action Tag notes the source and assigns the downloader the value of first generation (or one). When another downloader obtains the application from somewhere other than the original source (e.g. a friend, other website, etc.), the Incrementing Action Tag looks at the variable (or generation) assigned to the current source and increments it by one; thus making the next downloader generation two or other appropriate generation number.

The Incrementing Action Tag is thus able to identify (via a cookie and unique identifier and not through personally identifiable information) and track social media, identify how far removed (generation) cookies are from the original source of the social media, and identify key influencers (again no PII- see note above) of users of social media.

In essence, this technology enables our agency to create a system that allows us to value and reach key influencers across the Internet, regardless of property.

Here’s an example from a widget we recently tracked:

Successes Thus Far:

We’ve successfully used the action tag in three instances with three different clients.  We’ve seen as many as four generations of pass-along for these social media applications and are now looking  to begin using the Generational Tag on all social media applications so that we can build our knowledge of social media applications.

Thought this is still in its early days, we’ve definitely taken a big step forward towards tracking social influence across the web and maybe, just maybe, starting to crack a billion-dollar problem.

Congratulations to the Seattle team that made this all happen: Marc Sanford, Sandy Schlee, Steve Ebeling, Kelley Maves, David Niffin, Christopher Castle, Frank Kochenash, and Jesse Drogin.

For more on Razorfish’s efforts on Social Influence Marketing check out Shiv Singh’s work on the Going Social Now blog.