February just gone was our best month to date on ThePet.net in terms of activity. Things are growing every month - which is great news.
Measurement is a big issue in social media and community building. It is important for us to understand the impact of our marketing and product development activity so we follow a strict measurement process.
We track the following metrics:
Reach
Engagement
Intent
Before we launched, we measured the starting position so we could clearly see the benefit of our activity as time went on.
The main difficulty is benchmarking. How do we know how well we should be doing? How well does everyone else do at this stage in a web start up business? It's the question every client asks me in my other job at social media agency Qube Media. "What traffic can we expect?"
There is little external data available to benchmark against and to be honest every project is different. How much use would it be if we had Facebook's early stats or Flickr's or Tripadvisor's? We ended up making an educated guess based on what we need to achieve to start making money and what we thought (hoped!) was possible looking at market size, internet usage and what we know of comparable sites. We adjust every month based on this.
So far we found it started more slowly than we thought but is now picking up faster than expected.
If you are interested in social media measurement for your business get involved with Measurement Camp. It has regular meetings and lots of resources around this very topical issue.
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Cultivating our new fragile community is the main focus of our activity here at ThePet.net. It's a topic I'm going to be coming back to quite often I imagine.Today I want to talk about our latest venture to reward our community: ThePet.net Awards 2009. With the awards we aim to honour pet friendly businesses putting pets, customer service and value for money first.And it will be the pet owners who will determine the winner of every category by rating the business they believe to be the best on the website.From a community point of view we are looking to grow the number of businesses on the website and encourage them to tell their customers to vote for them on the site.We are very grateful to our main award sponsors The Ultimate Pet Show who are also hosting the awards ceremony at the show to be held at NEC, Birmingham from 2-4 May 2009.The show is packed with animal-themed fun things to do and see, wonderful items to buy, lots of expert advice and helpful tips so should be great fun for animal lovers and families.So if you have a pet or a pet friendly business please get involved now.
The big question on ThePet.net this week is "Are you a Sniffer or a Nibbler?" or maybe a "Scratcher or Pack Leader?"Before you get worried, these are the new labels for status levels on the site. As is common on many social networking websites we have decided to create status levels for users as a reputation management system. To get a higher status level users can earn points by participating in the site. From just logging in to writing a review and completing their profile or uploading a picture of their pet they can earn points and reach new status levels.We are not only rewarding high point earners with higher status we are also offering rewards such as pets gifts and accessories to incentives activity.Why are we doing this? Well, as you might imagine, as a ratings and review based community we rely on our members to write reviews to make the site work. This can take a bit of work to create momentum. Points seems like one solution to this.Having said that Yahoo Development Network section on Reputation suggests that points are best when the community is highly competitive. I'm not sure the pet owning community is highly competitive (but I may be wrong), but before adding the points system, we had a good look round other systems to see how they work. Points seem a popular approach on many sites, not all competitive.But it sounds like there are a few dangers. Caroline Plumb reviewing Community 2.0 writes: " you should be transparent about the factors that you will be taking into account in creating status points but only relying on an algorithm for generating reputation and status allows people to game the system.I've listed a few sites who use points for reputation which we looked at. Pease add others you know as comments and I'll add them to the list. I'd be interested to know what level of success other communities have had with points?Yahoo Answers Xbox Live Gamescorer Ebay Qype WAYN
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Our new PR team are getting things together. My business partner Marc Abraham, who is also a vet, was interviewed on BBC Breakfast last Saturday (27 Dec) discussing the controversial issue of puppy farming. The following clip shows Marc being interviewed as part of the news item. There was also a studio interview which is not shown here (I'm trying to get a link to it) where Marc was also able to talk about how one of the aims of ThePet.net is to use the dog-owning community to provide a list of reputable breeders to help people make the right choice when looking to get a new dog.
Watch Marc Abraham on BBC Breakfast
We recently started the process of looking for investment for ThePet.net. Today I'm off to a seminar run by MDHub in Brighton on just that.
The MDHub is one of those ideas that I never thought would work, but is actually fantastic. It's basically a business club set up to help businesss in Brighton through peer support.
It works by having regular workshops made up of 4-5 MDs from member companies - different each time. In the workshop, the group works together to help each other solve problems and deal with issues.
I couldn't imagine, before I joined, that companies would be open enough about any issues they were having for the group to be of any real use. But having been a member for 3 years it's proved exactly the opposite. Members are very open and helpful. Everytime I go I come away inspired and with new ideas to move forward.
Loads of people at the launch event for ThePet.net kept saying how they'd never been to a website launch before with loads of children and animals. And that they loved it.
But our thinking was it made sense for a pet website aimed firmly at the family market to involve its target audience (and its subject matter). We wanted to use our launch party to illustrate some of our core brand values: ThePet.net is ultimately about putting the pet first and having a great time with them.
We held our launch event at The Milestone Hotel in October just gone - it's a fantastic, if not a little quirky, hotel in the heart of Kensington. And what's great about it is they really love animals.
In fact, it wasn't so much that they didn't object to guests bringing their dogs along, but they that they embraced (not always literally) everything from the giant millipede (longer than your hand) to the armadillo which kept trying to escape to the giant boa which was very popular to have round your neck.
Launching a new website can be quite dry - it's just picture on a screen. So from a networking point of view the children and animals combo really brought people together with loads of conversation points. The excitement of the kids really illustrated what we want the site to be about. Even if it did start getting a bit 'Harry Potter' with the owl.
When I bumped into Gordon, the editor of Brand Republic the other day at the Future of Social Media conference, he told me he had torn up the invite to ThePet.net launch party and chucked it in the bin. A good start I thought...He received the invite from our PR agency - another of many and he didn't really take much interest.It got me thinking about some of the issues we'd had as a start up company working with different partners. It seems that when you start up a business there is a never ending list of people and agencies queuing up to help you 'strategise' and never enough people to help you 'do'. We'd hired a medium sized PR London agency with a great reputation. But as a small start up with corresponding budgets we got lost in amongst all their big clients. Me and my business partner Marc seemed to be doing a lot of doing. Start-ups need doers to get out there and make it happen. We've swapped now to a small but very very active PR agency with more energy that a new-born puppy. And Gordon made up for it by suggesting I do this blog...
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Andrew Seel
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