One of my primary goals since returning to Nielsen Online has been the fusing (or smooshing as I like to call it) of BuzzMetrics CGM data and NetRatings audience measurement data. Yesterday at the IAB Forum on Social Media, Jeffrey Graham (of the New York Times, among other places) and I presented on some new research we’ve just completed on this – I was really happy with the results.

The over arching goal was to try to better understand the relationship between inbound links (blogs linking to other information sources) and traffic data. We also hoped to understand what this relationship says about media brands and hopefully build planning/selling metrics that could be used. I think we achieved all three.

Here’s a quick summary of the findings. Within the news category, inbound links and unique audience are correlated at about 0.73. When you add other metrics such as time and visits you can get up to an r-square of about 0.4. Given the less than impressive modeling results, we decided to stick to a simple correlation for this work. We developed a metric we’re calling the “Brand Virality Score.” Although we might need to change it due to a very easy spelling mistake I’m almost certain to make in some incredibly important presentation, the metric is fairly simple:

Inbound Links/Unique Audience = BVS

Our reasoning is that if size and inbound links are so tightly related, if a specific site is overachieving on inbound links it says something about the site itself, more specifically about consumer’s perception of its brand. So we ran the data and here are the topline results:

The New York Times, clearly does very well here. They have both a high BVS and a high UA. Not an easy feat to achieve. Here’s one for financial news sites/sections:

It makes sense to me that niche financial pubs with strong brands do well here. The Economist, Bloomberg and FT all have a tremendous clout in the market; it’s nice to see that reflected here.

Now an excellent question one might have is: “Why the heck should I care about another metric?”

The answer is, the degree to which a mainstream media brand is being linked to relative to its size is a strong measure of its impact within word of mouth marketing. That this media brand is “viral” suggests that it has a very strong brand. Perhaps more importantly though, viral media brands take their advertisers along with them, when they are being pushed out into the blogosphere. For brands or agencies interested in developing viral campaigns (and who isn’t?) we argue that it is important to focus on those media partners that can help distribute your message outward. In many ways this metric, along with UA and time per person form three critical elements of the media planning process – size, engagement (yeah, I should know better) and virality. I’m working on a fourth leg to this stool that will get at clutter. But more on that in later posts.

If you’re interested in hearing more, or want to get a copy of the deck I presented – drop us a line.

A big thanks to John Brauer who was main analyst on this project. He did a heck of a job!

Tags: brand, links, virality