List of Posts

Posts Tagged ‘measurement’

More on success measurement for social media Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Success measures for online activities is one of my hobby-horses. I’m pleased to report that an excellent article has been published on Econsultancy outlining 10 ways to measure social media success. I suggest you follow the link and read the whole article, but here’s the list:

  1. Traffic
  2. Interaction
  3. Sales
  4. Leads
  5. Search marketing
  6. Brand metrics
  7. PR
  8. Customer engagement
  9. Retention
  10. Profits

Chris Lake writes, “The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement. 

“Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates?

“….Like TV advertising, social media will play a role in moving brand metrics, and perhaps more so (it is easier to make a noise and to be socially active; there’s an anytime, anywhere factor at work here. And hey, shit sticks around longer when you throw it online).”

As always, the comments are just as thought-provoking as the article. They include:

“Engagement is certainly on the lips of every nonprofit digital person; as mission-based organisations that’s supposedly what we exist for. But i’m losing faith with the idea of measuring it. Dare i suggest it’s something that you have to _feel_ …?”

“I’ve often asked industry experts how to measure social and nobody has a compelling answer. The industry as a whole is divided on this. Social media is the new mullet!”

“There’s a contradiction at play. With TV and print, measurement doesn’t seem to be a big deal, despite the fact that they often claim the vast share of ad budgets. However these same people will make demands for ‘a single planning currency’ for online, to ‘improve’ measurement.”

This will become a more salient issue as experience in the medium grows and measurement technology improves. Watch out TV!


The trouble with measuring social media Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Marketing Sherpa’s ‘chart of the week’ this week highlights the perils of trying to measure social media activity:

Excerpted from Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Social Media & Marketing PR report, which is based on a comprehensive survey of Marketing Sherpa readers (marketing and PR professionals), the chart shows an almost inverse relationship between how effective tactics are and how accurately they are measured at present.

Not surprisingly, the report ranks “inability to measure ROI” as one of the most significant barriers to social media adoption.

To cope with this anomaly, Marketing Sherpa encourages marketers to:

  • Measure the value of conversations and relationships gathered by social media qualitatively
  • Not focus on moment-in-time transactions such as traffic ‘hits’
  • Don’t obsess about tracking social media results quantitatively - don’t employ less effective social media tactics for the sake of measurability

Achieving branding goals is most effective use of social media, according to the report, while the second most effective use of social media is increasing web traffic. Meanwhile, the most significant barrier to social media adoption, even in the tough economic climate, is not budget, but lack of knowledge.


Measurement important to social media Monday, December 15th, 2008

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.”