
With eight years social media experience under his belt, Schultze was an early adopter in the space. Considered one of the leading SM thought leaders in the world, his experience is based on enterprise- and government-level social media projects, which led him to the establishment of the international Social Media Academy (a certification course that will be discussed in a subsequent post). Schultze references Confucius in regards to immersion learning: ” Tell me, and I will forget, show me, and I may remember, involve me, and I understand.”
XeeMe is a free service with premium features for brands offered on a subscription basis. Its central focus is to round up one’s social networks and their accompanying profile links on one page. Here you can share your entire social presence with one personalized URL with existing friends, customers, partners and even people you don’t know yet. Mine looks like this:
There are over 300 social networks to choose from, and the list continues to grow daily, with the “johnny-come-latelies” such as Zurker being added to the mix.
For the uninitiated, this short, 90-second video produced by Steven L. Johnson will provide you with overview highlights of the service.
When speaking with Schultze regarding the analytics package that comes part and parcel with his technology, he broke it down into 3 separate areas of value to the user or brand: Network Relevance, Social Traffic & Presence Value.
Network Relevance: This report shows users the most visited networks and indicates the most relevant sites he or she should look out for. Schultze underscores the importance of this tool: “Imagine you assume that all your professional social media activities happen on LinkedIn, but then you learn that most of your contacts actually visit your Twitter profile.”
As you can see from the above example, Axel Schultze is pretty much an “equal opportunity networker,” as his involvement with each network is split evenly across all of his networks.
Social Traffic: This is where you will find the actual number of visits to your XeeMe, month by month. “It indicates how present a user or brand is. Here, the benefit is the same for a brand or individual. However, by managing a business brand presence, the impact of knowing the presence intensity is much more important,” notes Schultze.
Presence Value: PV tracks the number of visits from a XeeMe to the various social networks and platforms from that user. The analytics value is presented as a XeeScore, which is a weighted average from the past 8 weeks. It helps the user to better understand the level of attraction of his or her social presence.
For a brand, Schultze notes the XeeScore is rather different. “The individual Presence Value shows the value of the presence of that individual – the brand Score, however, shows the aggregated value of its team members. This is as close to a social capital analysis as it can get. PV for brands is kind of an invention of XeeMe — there is nobody out there yet doing what we do,” says Schultze.
XeeMe vs. Klout: Many of us follow our influence as tracked by another social tracking service called Klout. Every time an individual or brand creates content or engages, the user influences others. One’s Klout score is then determined from data collected from one’s social networks and measures one’s “true reach,” “amplification,” and “network impact.”
XeeMe, on the other hand, according to Schultze “indicates how important one’s presence is and helps to understand what aspects of the presence are the most relevant.”
XeeMe was created in 2010, went into public beta 2011 and reached 1 million users in Q1 2012. It’s definitely a service and tool that I believe in the days and months ahead will become an essential requirement for anyone who assumes the role of social media manager in a consultancy role or for a brand.
In upcoming posts, I will continue with my interview with Axel Schultze as it pertains to the Social Media Academy and his social media strategy consultancy enterprise Sobizco. Axel can be reached (of course) on XeeMe.
Ron Callari is a VP Business Development for a social media marketing platform for the travel industry. As a well-known social media strategist, he has been interviewed by BBC Radio, was part of a 2011 Chinese Tourism Mission, writes a weekly social media column and is the author of a graphic novel on Facebook.