Measurement important to social media

Dave Evans, author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day”, wrote a guest post in ClickZ last week about one of my hobby-horses, the importance of measuring digital media impact.

He says a key point when measuring social content is establishing a baseline. “Before you do anything else, measure what’s happening right now,” he says.

“Quantitatively measuring social content is the simplest, easiest, and lowest risk approach to getting comfortable with the social Web. Once you get a solid handle on the current conversation, you can measure the change in this content over time. This is the most important step toward a defensible ROI.”

But it’s in for a penny, in for a pound. If you’re going to measure, you have to be comprehensive, Evans says. “Sampling a few points on the social Web does you no good. Like a lone fighter surrounded by swordsman, you’ve got to watch them all. You can’t do this without a robust dataset. Sooner or later a comment or some other content will catch you off guard.” He cites the example of Janet at Exxon, someone who posed as an authorized representative for the company on Twitter. Not only was she not an official representative, she may not even be an employee of the company.

Evans points out that “What you learn on the social Web may not translate directly into a marketing campaign. It may, for example, inform future product revisions or your definition of an emerging service. This again shows the important connection between operations and marketing when engaging customers socially.”

He concludes that “Unlike traditional media - where you set the terms of engagement - your customers define the interchanges on the social Web. Operations - including a concerted effort aimed at your own internal behavioral changes, or external (visible) changes to the products and services you offer - effectively influence conversations on the social Web. It’s not what you say (traditional marketing), but rather what you actually do (socially-based marketing) that defines the conversations that enhance or challenge the balance of your promotional and brand-building efforts.”

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Posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 4:45 pm under Marketing, Technology, e-marketing, social media.

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2 Responses to “Measurement important to social media”

  1. Guillaume Says:
    December 16th, 2008 at 12:16 am

    Good post! I agree with the idea that if you do traditional marketing with social media it does not mean you are joining the conversation.

  2. Dave Evans Says:
    December 16th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    Thanks for the really nice write-up. You’ve captured the high points nicely. There is so much happening now in social media — I think that perhaps the economy is driving a very hard look at traditional media as marketers are forced to sort out what works in the current context.

    Let me know how I can help you and/or your readers. Again, thanks for coverage and for your support of social media as an applied discipline.

    D