social media measurement grows up

August 28th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton

Some how I managed to miss the ENGAGEMENTDB announcement from Charlene Li at Altimeter the first time around, but Antony Mayfield’s post today on the subject has re-ignited the issue, and I’m taking the opportunity to get involved.

Here’s a quick summary: Altimeter, in conjunction with Wetpaint, has released a new research report called “ENGAGEMENTdb“, which looks at how the 100 most valuable brands, as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking engaged in 11 different online social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums.

Here’s the press release for further details. Charlene said they “critiqued the brands on not only their breadth of engagement across these channels, but also their depth, such as whether they reply to comments made on blog posts. Each brand was given a numerical score.”

So what’s so interesting? Well, if the ENGAGEMENTdb site isn’t interesting enough for you (you can rate your own brand as well), the findings of the report: ‘confirm that deep engagement with consumers through social media channels correlates to better financial performance. The ENGAGEMENTdb study showed significant positive financial results for the companies who measured as having the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement. These “Social Media Mavens” on average grew company revenues by 18 percent over the last 12 months, while the least engaged companies saw revenues sink 6 percent on average over the same time period.”

That’s where it starts getting really interesting: ‘The ENGAGEMENTdb study showed significant positive financial results for the companies who measured as having the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement‘

If these results offer evidence of exactly what we’ve been preaching for years, i.e. social media is an organisational change, not a channel, and if the hard data is made public, could we see a real step change? I.e. can we step away from shoe-horning old media ROI scores into a social media environment?

Before, I get slammed for that comment, yes I know there is a lot of work being done on social media measurement and I know there have been successes, but let’s be honest, there’s still a lot of shoe horning being done, and still a lot of shoe horning being demanded.

As Antony highlighted in his post: ‘It will be a tough one to defend in the court of cynicism though, or even against healthy skepticism.’ And I agree this will be jumped on from a great height by the critics, but the movement towards measuring social media success/development by a brand’s commitment to and success in social media at an organisational level, rather than against sales metrics and ROI alone, is very positive in my opinion, or as Antony puts it:

‘It makes sense that the value delivered by social media engagement would be delivered at an organisational level, that it would be meta-value rather than transactional value, trackable only to point where individual interacts with brand. It’s meta-ROI, then?”

We’re not talking about a brand paying some attention to social media by asking the PR/marketing department to get going with a social media campaign, but thinking about how the organisation engages at every level, listening, conversing and evolving to meet the requirements of today’s business/consumer ‘whatever’ environment. Or as Charlene says: ‘social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense - a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.’

Isn’t that what all brands should be looking to achieve? Isn’t that the essence of social media for brands? Isn’t it obvious?

So, if this is a small step/giant leap towards looking at social media and its measurement as the degree to which a brand embraces the cornerstones of social media theory then I’m right behind it. And if this measurement correlates to financial performance, I think ironically…it’s an easy sell.

      

Tags: Charlene Li, ENGAGEMENTDB, Social media, social media measurement

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Blog, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Social media, Trends and research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.