Web 2.0 Metrics

With growing distribution of the social web established press and broadcasting media providers are represented on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Their activities pursue different strategies and take different shapes; but they have in common the search for ways to comprehend the response to their offerings of the audience – which in the social web is not anymore passively receiving, but can get active. Respective indicators and metrics are on the one hand supposed to clarify the development of coverage and on the other hand explain the significance of the individual offering as compared to other providers.

In order to measure the audience’s activities, social web platform offer various publicly accessible indicators (e.g. the number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends or viewers of a YouTube video). Further there are special monitoring services provided either by the platform itself (e.g. Facebook Insight) or third parties (e.g. twazzup.com).

Due to the dynamics of internet-based communication it often remains unclear

• which indices can be meaningfully monitored,
• which type of user behaviour is expressed by a certain indicator,
• how “real time” indicators (e.g. Twitter’s “trending topics”) can be interpreted as compared to cumulated indicators (e.g. number of YouTube channel’s subscribers), and
• how the respective figures should be classified in relation to indicators from different media types.

Against this background the Hans Bredow Institute is working on an expert report, issued by the ZDF, which will classify the communication activities in the social web in a general conceptual background and provide an overview of existing metrics and tools.