I spent much of today building out a wiki for an event next week sponsored by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. I want to share the section on Social Media Measurement here:
The information is based on a webinar that Jeremiah Owyang gave last January.
Web Analytics provide traditional attributes of page views, unique site visitors, etc. This alone isn’t adequate anymore because customers are talking to each other (& much of it is not on your site).
Attributes that need measurement:
- Attention = time on website (sometimes it’s not yours)
- Interaction = Click, Comment, or Embed
- Coversation Index: ratio between blog posts and comments+trackbacks
- Velocity * = Distance/Time (Rate of how fast your message is traveling in a given time) Jeremiah defines Velocity with examples
- Sentiment * = tone, opinion
- Qualitative * = What did they say?
- Impacts * = What did they do? (influencers)
* Brand Monitoring Solutions – these are helpful with the last four above
Tracking the tone, perception and nuances within online conversations is getting easier. There are a number of solutions available that monitor discussion of your brand online. They offer options to track & create reports on frequency, influence & sentiment.
There are new places to monitor/measure:
- Social bookmarking sites: Delicious, Magnolia, StumbleUpon, Kaboodle, blinklist, etc
- Aggregators: Digg, Techmeme
- Micromedia: Twitter, Pownce
- Facebook groups, pages, Google & Yahoo groups
- Forums (if password required spyders can’t crawl them)
- Competitor’s sites
Methodology for finding new communities (listening is imperative)
- Find the community & participate
- What tools are they using?
- What are they talking about?
- Who are the influencers?
Examples of things you can measure:
- Using above methodology to find customers & prospective markets
- Listen, understand the conversation, then participate
- Measure the number of conversations
- Monitor the percentage increase of conversations over time
- Measure the reduced buying cycle & reduce support costs my encouraging self-support
- Increased sales due to increased customer satisfaction in product due to involving them in product development cycle
- Increased efficiency in developing products due to customer feedback at various stages
- Minimize brand damage by responding quickly to customer’s concerns online
The Community Manager’s role to listen, participate & track progress
Provide a report on a montly basis
- Ongoing definition of objectives
- Web analytics
- Interaction – Trends in members, topics, discovery of new communities
- Qualitative Quotes – helpful for feedback & marketing
- Recommendations – Based on interactions with the customers
- Benchmark based on previous report
Further reading
- All of Jeremiah’s posts tagged Social Media Measurement – worth browsing
- KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog
- Update Katie Paine recommends her book Measuring Public Relationships (I ordered it!)
- And here’s the wiki I built out on Web 2.0 for the Enterprise with 10 focus areas for the upcoming Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association event. Lots of questions for your org to ask.
Notes from Connie Benson on Social Media Measurements http://tinyurl.com/64yut2
[…] Social Media Measurement | Connie Bensen People often ask us how to measure social media. There’s so much you can measure, but what measure is helpful? (tags: measurement socialmedia marketing) […]
Within the automotive industry, the social channels are quickly becoming a powerful medium.
Car shoppers are telling us (that choose to listen) testimonials, dealer reviews and vehicle reviews are the most trusted forms of communication. Not what the OEM’s are saying and certainly not what the dealers are saying.
They want to hear what others have to say; social networks & social media provides the voice they need.
While it may be overplayed, trasnparency is still huge for the automotive segment. Shoppers are savvy. They don’t just want to see flaming reviews or the sunshine-blowing shill reviews. They want the good with the bad so they know its real. (our conversion rate from sites with both is actually 30% higher than the site average.)
I’m tracking the ROI closely on these initiaves – so far it has proven itself successful.
Excellent post Connie. I feel that the whole question of measurement is not so much “what can I measure”, but “what can i measure and how can i do something with or about it?”
You dont measure a piece of wood unless you are going to fit it into something, and in the social media I feel that the big brands not only need to know what is changing over time, but where these changes take place and how addressing the conversations or influencers can be fed back into other media channels. For example an output of measurement may be to identify not where your company or brand are being discussed, but also where your competitors are being discussed. On the back of this information the brand manager may decide to not only engage with the audience, but promote specifics about their products and services through newly identified channels.
In short, if the measurement can direct investment (time and money) in a more focussed and efficient manner, then it can demonstrate a return on that investment, and that appeals to any brands more than just measuring the social media per se.
btw – I’d be very interested to hear which products you cite as being able to monitor and track sentiment online.
Great post, Connie! I love your “monthly report” list, because it highlights that an effective report is not just a spreadsheet with numbers. Continually articulating (and revisiting as necessary) the *objectives* is key — those should provide a foundation for everything else in the report. And, the qualitative data — good and bad — can really help make the information “real.” Including recommendations? Heck, yeah!
It kills me when I see reports that simply provide tables of numbers and leave the interpretation and context up to the recipient. You’ve laid out a very practical approach to going well beyond that. The entire list does not need to be tackled at the outset — start with what you have and what you can get, and then build over time.
Good stuff!
[…] Bensen has a great post on Social Media Measurement. Some of the content is based on a Jeremiah Owyang webinar from back in January, but Connie extends […]
Good comprehensive overview of social media monitoring and analysis. Our service, SM2, tracks all the sources you mention and offers extensive analysis tools including sentiment, geo-targeting, demographics etc. The big difference from ‘traditional’ search (still getting used to writing that!) is that you need to index social media in real time because trends and conversations move faster than the indexing algos of the search engines.
You can try the service for free…
[…] sent me a good read today regarding Social Media Measurement. It reminded me of the things I was sharing with my Reports post. I wish I had a little more time […]
Great post. I love how you laid it out. Easy to follow and informational. I will get back here and read some more of your posts. I linked this article at my site.
This post is so timely for me! We’ve been trying to wrap our arms around measuring social media as we begin to bring more clients into that space. Thank you for such a thorough exploration of the subject. Breaking down the measurement attributes was particularly helpful. Looking forward to hearing more at the MIMA event on Wednesday.
A big thanks to Chris Brogan for tweeting a link!! (that explains my new set of Twitter friends this morning!) :)
Eric – It’s exciting to hear that you’re applying it to the automotive area. When I was a librarian people frequently wanted the Consumer Reports info on large ticket items like cars, appliances & electronic items. But online interaction takes it WAY further than that – now customers can sit down at home & google away. Eval’s on an item or service are only a click away. The key is – are the companies listening to the conversation? What opportunities for providing their customers with information are they missing out on?
Nickbroom – I love your comment “what can i measure and how can i do something with or about it?”
That’s exactly right! measuring isn’t meant to be busywork for a Comm Mgr who can create so many projects she can’t see straight + try to keep up with requests from the comm :) Yes, that’s me.
It’s about taking that info & repurposing it into useful info for product dev’t, QA, marketing, etc. You have inspired me to take that montly report section & turn it into a post with examples of how that info could be used.
Sentiment – in my mind it can be tracked for anything. ie: 10 people referenced that they found the product helpful; 3 had issues (those issues are where the value lies – the 10 are happy)
Thanks Gilligan! I always appreciate your opinion, Tim! and thx for the link love!
Martin – thanks for pointing me to your service! I’ll check it out. New tools are always good
Thanks for connecting with my Mykl & I’m looking forward to the MIMA event too! :)
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