… reading, engagement and social media (BCM2013)

Last week I posted on Social Media use at the BCM World Conference in London, noting that the level of use and interaction was very low. Perhaps this was skewed by only looking at Twitter activity?

This narrow perspective was (pleasantly) highlighted to me when I looked at my blog statistics for the past 2 weeks, with a lot of traffic driven from the BCM Conference postings. Looking at the 2 weeks from 3-17 November the blog had 188 visits and 744 page views which is a massive increase on a normal 2 week period..

The conference posts contributed over 65% of the total traffic, so perhaps we may need to consider a wider definition of Social Media – and that BC folks are consumers of different types of online media – rather than Twitter.

One of the more surprising aspects of the analytics was the number of visits coming from a Facebook page – which I suspect was generated from the BCI’s Facebook page. Surprising (to me) as I don’t expect a lot of professional traffic to flow from Facebook – but clearly needs to be included in analysis of Social Media for BC folk.

For those who are interersted here is some analysis of the blog data. For this I excluded a few pre-conference posts, leaving 481 page views covering a number of general posts about the conference (69%) and three single subject/session posts (31% of traffic).

45% of the single subject traffic was to the Social Media post, which is not surprising as this was promoted by a number of folks on Twitter. (Thank you for the re-Tweets!)

Interesting that the bulk of the traffic came in the week of 11 November, rather than during the week of the conference when these items were originally posted (and promoted on Social Media). The traffic originated from 22 countries – even getting a single hit from Mongolia! (Note to BCI – is there a local chapter there?)

Top 11 locations are shown here – noting that this will be driven by the location of the internet gateway used, so anybody attending the conference and using local services will show as a UK consumer. Despite this still an interesting global representation.

For the technology oriented reader – the bulk of the traffic was from the Safari browser (42%), which I assume would highlight the penetration of iOS devices, with 29% from IE/Windows and Android at 5%. From a practical BC perspective – if you are in the 1% still using Blackberry – make sure you have plans in place for when they collapse or are no longer sustainable.

In the conference feedback forms I noted that the biggest learning I took away was that BC folks do not engage with ideas. Primarily as there were virtually no questions at any of the Thought Leadership sessions. I understand there were more questions in the practical and “How to” sessions, where the engagement is not with ideas so much as recipes and specific practices.

But this blog analysis would re-enforce that BC people are consumers, in this case readers, of content. Despite the much appreciated spike in traffic there was not a single comment or attempt to engage in discussion. Likewise it is rare to see a comment on the BC Eye blog and I trawled thru the BCI Facebook page and there is no comment or discussion in evidence. Several likes, but sorry a single mouse click does not count as engagement.

I wonder what it takes to get BC people to engage in discussion of ideas, rather than “how to”?

Would appreciate any thoughts you can offer.