Omniture Developers Drive Social Media Measurement

With the release of our Genesis APIs last year, Omniture put the power to build innovative extensions and integrations for our products in the hands of individual developers. Through this effort we expected to speed up innovation and broaden customers’ ability to measure and optimize across both existing and emerging channels in the ever-changing online marketing landscape.

It’s very satisfying to see developers in action, fulfilling that platform promise. One great example of this has been the social media extensions that the Omniture developer community has created. Social media has emerged as a critical channel for brand development and awareness. We all know the social media marketing mantra… you don’t control your brand anymore… consumers do. As a result, companies are struggling to understand exactly how their brands are performing across the social media universe.

Omniture’s developer community has created an interesting set of apps to respond to this growing need. Omniture’s own Adam Greco created a Twitter tracking application that was released at our 2009 summit. Egbert Corporation created an application for tracking page-level statistics on a variety of social media platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn. Omniture built a Sitecatalyst extension that enables developers to track the performance of their applications on Facebook. Recently we’ve seen more evolved, feature-rich social media brand tracking applications based on Adam Greco’s original Twitter Tracking work. Hila Strong and Jason Thompson from Spark Networks created a rich new set of reporting features with their Twitter brand tracking extension. Earthbound Media Group, an Omniture partner, took things one step further by introducing brand tracking for both Twitter and Technorati, providing coverage for both the micro-blogging and traditional blogging universe.

From a platform technology perspective, one of the cool things about many of these social media extensions is they represent the first generation of organic Omniture API-to-Third-Party API integrations. The brand tracking apps pull brand mentions from the APIs of Twitter, Technorati, etc and send them to SiteCatalyst Report Suites using Omniture’s Data Insertion API. This type of data aggregation is the foundation of the future of interactive marketing. In the future, marketers will rely on this kind of centralized data store to sense and respond to marketing activity from a comprehensive array of sources. For example, as more companies actively engage and make investments in the social media channel, they’ll want to know the value derived from their efforts and be able to answer questions such as:

Do brand mentions generate lift to my website traffic?

What impact do brand mentions have on customer acquisition costs for my search, display, and other online channels?

Do brand mentions affect my website conversion rates?

Initially, these questions will be answered through human driven analysis of the metrics gathered by applications such as the Twitter + Technorati tracking application. Over time, more sophisticated algorithmic-driven analytics and optimization will be available to help marketers understand the cross-channel impacts of their various campaign activities. It’s an exciting future to contemplate and one wholly different from the fragmented world marketers live in today. Omniture is poised to sit at the center of this new world, as the only company in the industry with measurement capabilities that touch every stage of the online marketing funnel. Our Developer Community’s social media extensions are a reflection of this centrality and our platform’s ability to quickly adapt to emerging trends in the online marketing industry.

• Jeff Minich
• 0 responses
•  Marketing Integration

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