Posts Tagged ‘social media measurement’
Industry Challenge: can’t measure social media ROI
April 23rd, 2010
Yes I know, social media ROI, a very difficult subject, and I’m actually in the camp that believes social media cannot have an accurate, catch-all, ROI equation, not in the truest sense of either term anyway. So, was the title just an attempt to grab your attention? Maybe, but more importantly it was the industry challenge that Jeremiah Owyang highlighted when launching his new Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics, which he announced yesterday.
Jeremiah has joined forces with John Lovett (ex-Forrester analyst) and Eric Peterson (ex-Jupiter analyst) both from Web Analytics Demystified. The report builds on Charlene Li’s (Altimeter founder and ex-Forrester Analyst) framework, and aims to measure the rapidly changing social media marketing space. A snap shot is included below.
Jeremiah sets the scene with: “Marketers around the globe are ranging from toe dipping to jumping all the way into the social marketing space -yet most lack a measurement yardstick. While experiments can fly under the radar for a short term, without having a measurement strategy, you run the risk of not improving what you’re doing, justifying investments, and the appearance of being aloof to upper management. To be successful, all programs (even new media) must have a measurement strategy, and we’ve done just that.”
The framework shown above includes KPI formulas which are designed to form the basis of internal measurement systems.”
If you are interested in learning more you can review the slide share presentation which is basically the full report, and attend the webinar, which will take place on June 3rd, titled;’ Social Marketing Analytics: A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media.
In terms of social media measurement, this is one of the fullest and most in-depth reports I’ve seen. That may put you off, but don’t think it’s all talk and no action; there are practical insights and relevant rules that any social media marketer will find useful and be able to apply to their specific role or campaign. This isn’t a catch all metric, but a guideline for KPIs.
So, if you truly want to understand the opportunities surrounding social media measurement, don’t try to wrap a traditional ROI model around a social campaign, start by reading this report and open up your understanding.
social media measurement grows up
August 28th, 2009
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.
Will Social Media Measurement be a reality for all in 2009?
February 4th, 2009
2009, the year social media measurement becomes a reality. I believe I may have mentioned that milestone in a number of posts last year, and we’ve certainly seen more good attempts to make it so. However, are we really any closer as we settle into February? Probably not, it’s pretty much as you would expect one month in.
So why the post now? Allow me to explain, my fear is that we are still missing one key ingredient to make social media measurement a reality for all.
Before I continue, let me say that this post isn’t a rant aimed at the great work that many people are putting into social media measurement, some are working on internal projects, others have joined together in groups containing uber brains to sort it out collectively, others still are testing and perfecting on their own terms. We have tried a bit of everything, and are working to build out our own theories and frameworks which are providing great conversation and progress with our partners and clients.
Great, I hear you say, why aren’t you sharing it? Well, there is so much noise going on in this space that I really don’t think another set of projections and pontifications are going to help until we have some fact-based results and evidence, which is what we are working on and will then share.
Back to the missing ingredient, which i believe is this: so many people are still hung up on finding the killer ROI metric or are not confident enough to push back when asked to find it.
I feel I might be repeating myself here, but i think it’s worth revisiting. Simply because we want a score that says ‘this month I’m doing better than last month’, does not mean it is viable measurement. If that was the case we would have all stopped talking about measurement a long time ago.
I see two main problems with the killer metric approach. One, if that one metric really can tell you that your social media campaign is succeeding, can it tell me the same about my campaign? We do have different objectives; different communities and vastly different levels of engagement, but it’ll still work basically won’t it? I doubt it.
Two: Great, so if we improved so much last month, let’s identify the core elements behind our success and evolve our campaign accordingly, what were they? What do you mean ‘not sure but the number went up so it must be good’?
Okay, so that’s a fairly obvious and simplistic view, it’s been said before and it’ll be said again, but my problem is we’re still not moving beyond this discussion quickly enough. The bottom line is some of our clients and bosses demand this ‘killer metric’ and we have to deliver, right? Wrong! That’s exactly why we won’t make social media measurement a reality this year, because we’re too busy defending our ideas and recommendations against the ‘killer metric pushers’.
So, to get beyond this sticking point, and really make all the thinking and discussion work that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, let’s get it out of our systems and stop the rot. If you really have a killer metric that works and can be adapted for multiple campaigns, please reveal all and the prize will be yours.
If not, please stop banging on about it, and get on with the real challenge. Let’s not destroy a reputation that we’re all working so hard to build by claiming that an obsolete model will work in this environment, because when that killer metric fails to deliver it’s going to be the reputation of the industry that suffers.
Can we put our energies into the task at hand and continue developing usable frameworks that we can apply, test and build upon with real examples.
To help you on your way, here’s a link to a post that has one of the best social media measurement resources that I’ve come across, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So rant over, do you agree? Disagree? Is it time we moved on or should I eat my words? I would appreciate your thoughts.
SES social media measurement round up
August 22nd, 2008
This will be my last post for a while, as i’m off to get married and then away on honeymoon, so for my final entry as a single man I thought I would look into the noise coming out of SES San Jose this week, specifically focused on social media measurement…and there’s plenty of it.
As you may have seen, there are a whole host of informative posts on the measuring success in a web 2.0 world and social media and analysis sessions, which both took place earlier this week. My favourite posts can be found via the online marketing blog, which gives a step-by-step rundown of the sessions and valuable learnings.
Both sessions involved Marshall Sponder, senior web analyst for Monster.com. Marshall’s presentation can be seen here.
There are two things that I would like to pick up on specifically.
First a good point from the measuring success in a web 2.0 world session, where Marshall Sponder confirmed that as well as understanding that social media measurement is about conversations, we will only get to the next level of measurement if we treat visitors from Twitter for example, differently than visitors from forums, and then differently again from direct visitors. Without measuring the conversation, and the outcomes of that conversation, we are missing a huge chunk of useful data.
The online marketing blog listed the key takeaways from the social media and analysis session as:
1. There is no killer metric
2. Track anything possible to glean insight
3. Social media is not just about numbers
4. It’s all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)
5. Measuring social media does not + ROI for social media
6. View monitoring social media as a Social Intelligence programme, involving the world’s biggest focus group
So the key learnings for me are there is no holy grail of measurement in terms of a catch all metric, and to get the most out of measurement data we need to re-evaluate the data sources and begin evaluating conversations from their point of origin.
Finally, I should point out that the panel for the social media session included Edmund Wong, VP Strategy iCrossing and that iCrossing is a client of ours in the UK. This post is in no way meant to promote our client, it’s simply a review of two very useful sessions, one of which happens to include iCrossing.
Making an impression on social media measurement
August 15th, 2008
On our quest for social media measurement knowledge, we’ve come across a range of intelligent and well presented arguments. One such post comes from Jason Falls over at social media explorer, which contains a veritable feast of information and insight into the issues of a client-based query on measuring social media impressions. The post also contains additional comment from K.D.Paine at KD Paine & partners. If you’re not familiar with KD Paine & partners, they specialise in PR and marketing measurement, having developed global measurement systems for the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Proctor & Gamble and Mastercard, so certainly worth paying attention to.
The post details Jason’s conversations as he answers the point on measuring social media impressions, which he argues is not possible to achieve. In fact, K.D. Paine confirms “The only way to accurately calculate impressions for blogs is to ask each blogger whose site your brand appears on and how many unique visitors he/she gets in a month. And even then, you’re assuming they’ll tell you the truth.”
There are many more pearls of wisdom in the post, which i’ll leave you to digest at your leisure, but it also got me thinking about how we are sometimes tempted to apologise for social media and its measurement, as it does not/cannot utilise traditional measures, such as impressions.
Just yesterday i was sitting in a meeting discussing a client’s experiences on Twitter, and as soon as we switched the conversation away from how Twitter can be utilised in a traditional sense to its values in the social media framework, everything clicked into place for the client. So, should we apologise that social media measurement won’t always equate to traditional measurements? No, we need to help our clients, colleagues, whoever to understand that the rules have changed, and previous measures of success simply won’t always be useful. This shouldn’t be a scary issue, as measurement must move on, just as the communications landscape has moved on. Furthermore, if we are truly embracing a social media-based approach, measurement around conversations, sentiment and tone will ultimately be more useful to our objectives than mere impressions alone.
It may sound obvious, but standing fast and explaining the reasons we cannot provide traditional measurements in the face of a results-focused query, really is the only way to move the measurement discussion forward.
The Triad takes on social media measurement
August 5th, 2008
We came across an interesting post earlier in the week at Liberate Media, and as the focus of my new blog is measurement, i won out in the race to post about it.
The Triad mention in my headline is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the idea behind Kami Huyse’s Triad of Measurement analogy, which is adapted from Avinash Kaushik’s strategic concept of Trinity and Katie Paine’s idea of measuring Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes, is far from it.
In fact, it’s one of most simple, and therefore potentially powerful, measurement ideas that we’ve come across, and we really like it.
It’s based on three key measurement points:
Interest: How interested are people in x
Attitude: What attitudes do people hold about x
Action: What actions, that matter from a business perspective, do people take as a result of x
Kami has broken down the theory further using Marc van Bree’s (The Dutch Perspective) ‘measuring results‘ post that defines measurable attributes, which in turn uses the Dow Jones’ whitepaper titled: ‘Tracking the influence of conversations’ - don’t you just love collaboration!
Between these three ideals, i think Kami has come up with a usable and realistic framework, and will be expanding on it in a series of ‘how to measure each part of the Triad’ posts over the next week or so.
Thanks Kami, I’ll certainly continue to track your recommendations.