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Posts Tagged ‘social media 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.


It all starts - or stops - at the top Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

I’ve come across an interesting blog-versation about CEOs who just don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to digital marketing. Mayra Ruiz started the conversation on her Marketing Misfit blog when she asked for some advice about how to deal with a client who wants to turn his website back into a brochureware site, supported by offline-only marketing, because his company’s sales are down and he believes his website isn’t helping. As Mayra explains, the sales problem could have something to do with a change in his sales team. Anyway, she asked for advice via her blog and Twitter, and she’s received plenty of good advice about convincing a CEO to stick with digital. Here are some highlights:

Kari Rippetoe at the Caffeinated Blog writes: “It seems to me that the CEO has the mindset that his product in all its feature-laden glory should be valuable enough for his visitors.  Now, I haven’t seen the website myself, so I don’t know how the product is described; but none of his prospective customers are going to care enough about his product to visit the site more than a couple of times…. Why doesn’t the CEO want his website to be one of those go-to places for research and data related to his product?  Why doesn’t he want his company to be an authority in its industry?  They have an incredible opportunity to build trust and authority around their product through content - they just have to create an effective content marketing strategy and stick with it…. Prospects have to go through the research phase of the buying funnel - they’re looking for the what, when, where, why, and how and gathering as much information as they can (all that “extra stuff”) in order to draw up a well-researched short-list of options…. Prospects expect a website … Offline marketing efforts won’t be nearly as effective on their own without a tandem online strategy to help keep your sales leads warm.  Kill your website, and I guarantee you’ll be killing your new business.”

Jonathon Betts at the Bettsonian Blog writes: “For a company that is marketing software it would seem a tragedy to discard the opportunity offered by web 2.0 tools. They could be used to support a company’s positioning as dynamic, innovative, tech-savvy and responsive…. This also demonstrates the importance of being able to demonstrate return on investment…. Does the CEO really understand what web 2.0 is really about? …the social media “market” has been characterised by hype and fragmentation. This doesn’t present a clear picture to your average business person. A ‘3 minute guide to social media’ to give non-marketing execs a snapshot of what’s going on would be worthwhile….Implement new channels incrementally rather than going for a big bang/all-or-nothing approach. Starting with a blog requires little or no cash outlay. The results from this will then support further investment decisions.”

My own 2 cents: take a look at the company’s marketing strategy and provide simple illustrations as to how a digital strategy can help achieve marketing/sales goals. If the CEO can’t articulate the marketing strategy, then heaven help the business.


But wait, there’s more - predictions and wrap-ups Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

A few interesting links to finish the year:

Feel free to add your own, as well. Happy New Year everybody!


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.”


Social media - the Australian list Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Gotta love the power of social networks! After my post yesterday analysing a list of international social media marketing examples and wondering whether anyone had done something like this for Australian businesses, the compiler of the original list, Peter Kim, has worked his contacts to find one. Here it is: Steven Noble’s Australian Social Media Case Studies. Many thanks, Peter, and good on you, Steven, who is an analyst for Forrester. I will have a closer look and post more about this later, but wanted to get this link up ASAP.


Repeat after me: ROI bad, IOR good Friday, November 28th, 2008

One of my passions has been to ’prove’ the effectiveness of digital media by understanding the ways businesses can measure the impact of their online presence and relate it to the rest of their business (see here, here and here for examples of my academic efforts and blog posts in this area). Lots of pundits have been saying that business needs to move away from trying to relate web activity to traditional performance measures such as return on investment (ROI) and instead look at measures associated with customer engagement.

Well, Kyle Flaherty wrote a post for ZDNet (and re-posted on Social Media Today) last week which I think nails it. He argues against using ROI to measure digital activities such as social media and talks about a new measure called Impact of Relationships (IOR). He writes: “ROI was created by someone who wanted to defend their activities in the scope of the bottom line of their company; they found direct linkage between what they were doing and revenue being brought in and if that number was larger than their salary plus additional costs they were in for a bonus (or at least steady employment). Determining your social media ROI is a means to an end. It allows us to prove a programs worth to our business, which enables you to continue your work with the community, which coincidentally lets you dismantle the importance of ROI internally and start to focus on IOR…Impact of Relationships.

“IOR allows me to detail how a relationship develops with our company, whether they are a customer or not, and how that relationship has impacted the totality of our business. Using many of the same techniques above I also measure the amount of interaction we have with our community. Not to measure against revenue, but to determine what product feature requests this person suggested that made our product better, how many comments they leave on our blog, the number of times they reference us on their Twitter feed and more. We’ve been able to formulate IOR for members of our community, many of them non-customers, based on what they have given back to our company.

“Are each of these elements a pure statistical entity or a dollar value? No. But it is a great additional barometer we have to show the gains made through our social media activities. This IOR data becomes just as valuable to the senior staff of your company, but only because they have already seen some level of ROI data. It is only when we prove the ROI that we can reach towards IOR.”

I’ll be interested to see how this concept works out in practice and how it is monetized.