Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

Just noticed facebook added a feature to allow you to pull other services in (a la Friendfeed).  Check out the screenshot below:

Go to your profile, and click the “Settings” button on your wall

I’ve been managing Kiva’s social media initiatives as part of the community outreach team since Feb, and one of my biggest problems has been tracking metrics.  Sure, “real time” web tools are all the rage, but none of them seem to suit my needs ( I want distributed Google Analytics for social media), so I’ve gone low tech; URL shorteners.

Bit.ly to the rescue!  I didn’t quite understand this before, but a URL shortener like Bit.ly that provides metrics can serve as a decentralized stats tracking tool.  Unlike something like Google Analytics where you have to have access to the site where you are tracking stats, with bit.ly you can release your unique shortened URL and you can track the stats wherever it goes!

I discovered the idea by accident, and posted a quick version of the test earlier, but for this post I wanted something a little more robust.

Starting Point:

Kiva Twitter Accnt (on 6/12/2009) :  5,758 followers

Kiva Facebook Accnt (on 6/12/2009) : 44,039 fans

The Setup:

I was posting a link to the newly released Kiva App Directory and I wanted to track the clicks this link would get on Facebook vs. Twitter to get an idea of how engaging either service is.  To do this I needed to create two different short URLs on services that provide real time link tracking.

I chose bit.ly to generate the link that I would post to Twitter (bit.ly/PdKQ5) and the SnipURL to generate the one I’d post to Facebook (http://sn.im/jzph9).

Results:

Raw Data:

Chart 1:  Day 1 10am – 4:46pm

Continue Reading →

Just posted a link that I shortend with two seperate shortening services to Kiva’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.   Found some interesting stats, and wanted to post them quickly before going back and writing a full post.

Here are the stats after two days:

Bit.ly (posted on Twitter)

SnipURL (Posted on Facebook)

Given that our Twitter account has around 5k followers and our Facebook account has 42k fans, I was surprised how many clicks that I got from Twitter.  I’ve already run more “serious” tests and I’ll post the results.

You probably heard about it through facebook or twitter, but last weekend I participate in the first Kiva Developer Garage.   The idea was to promote the launch of their new API, and get a bunch of new projects kick started.  Though Im not a developer, I attended to motivate, inspire, and provide some ideas on which direction the apps could take.

In short we had 25+ coders show up and we proposed a handful of general projects:

1) Javascript Loan browser – to make the browsing experience sexier

2) iphone App

3) better Facebook app

4) wordpress plugin

5) google friend connect

My main interests where around the Facebook application and the WordPress Widget.  If we can get to the point that every someone Facebook account makes a loan or gets repaid, they post it back to their news feed, we’d be set.  People would learn about the lending and loaning experience through their friends, and would be more comfortable checking out Kiva.org for the first time.

On the wordpress widget, the idea is that many bloggers are out there lending to Kiva and they want to show their kiva street cred.  We want to display our portfolios and our stats to the world in the hopes of challenging more people to get involved.

Both of these projects got off to a good start, and once I track the links, I’ll post them.  In the meantime, here’s the video: