KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR SUCCESSMGT 489May 13, 2015

Overview•How do we know whether our strategies and campaigns are working? •What can you measure?•How do you justify your social media actions?

The BIG THREE

•Increase revenue

•Lower costs

•Increase customer satisfaction

How do you figure out if a campaign worked?

• It’s hard to connect the dots between (social media) marketing and the Big Three• Sometimes it’s easy to calculate returns• For instance, @DellOutlet• But these cases are very rare

• Sometimes it’s difficult, but not impossible• For instance, BlendTec’s consumer blenders

•But in a lot of cases, there just isn’t a way to directly calculate returns• For instance, the Pepsi Refresh project

Sometimes a number is just a number

•When it comes to social media, you can measure lots of things and get lots of numbers• Every once in a while, the numbers will be meaningful on their own• If there’s a way to directly connect them back to the Big Three

•But in most cases, your job will be to decide which numbers matter, and which don’t• Your implicit theories of marketing will have to connect the outcome to the Big Three

Goals, again• It is difficult to know which metrics are meaningful without clear goals• But it is also difficult to know which goals are meaningful without clear metrics

•When designing a strategy, think about your goals and their possible metrics simultaneously• This is what separates analysis from pure measurement

What are little goals made of?•While you may have clear end goals, it will take time to see whether you achieve them• Ask “Are we going in the right direction?” rather than “Are we there yet?”• Your data can tell you three things: What, So What, and Now What

• It is often helpful to start out with the main goal of your strategy, and work backwards to set sub-goals• Then set metrics for those sub-goals

•What might this look like?

What were Obama’s social media goals?

•Main goal: Get votes• Sub-goals: Get people registered, get people engaged, etc.• Sub-sub-goals: Get donations, organize events, etc.• Sub3-goals: Get people registered on MyBO, get people signed up for the email list, etc.• Sub4-goals: Get people to become fans on Facebook, get people to watch videos on YouTube, etc.

Social Analytics Framework

ROI

Engagement

Sentiment

Influence

Reach

Reach• It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if no one sees it, it is useless• Your first question: How many people are exposed to your message?

• There are two basic metrics in traditional advertising that can help us think about the problem• Reach is the percentage of a population of people that were exposed to a medium in a given time period• Frequency is the number of times you have produced an opportunity to see your message in a given context

•Defining these for social media is a bit complicated

Measuring your blog audience

Facebook reach

Twitter reach over time

How else might you measure reach?

Reach summary• Step 1: How many people are being exposed to your message?• What are all the different ways people might be exposed to it?• Answering this is part science and part art• In the end, you’ll need to accept that numbers aren’t perfect, and focus on general patterns and broad comparisons

Influence•Reach is important, but in the end you’re running a business, not a popularity contest•Once you know what your reach is, the next step is to measure whether people share your content• Sharing increases the reach of your content

• Sharing also lets you know whether your followers• …read your content• …like your content• …find it interesting or broadly appealing enough to pass on

Facebook influence

Twitter influence

How else might you measure influence?

Influence summary• Step 2: Once you know the reach of your message, you need to measure how influential you are• The more people reference you and share your content, the more influential your message will be• It is often useful to examine the influence of those referencing you (and those who should be)

Sentiment•Reach and influence measure how much people are talking about you• It turns out, though, that having lots of people talking about you isn’t always a good thing

• The next step is trying to measure whether the conversation is generally positive or negative• There are two broad measures of sentiment• Polarity• Intensity

Polarity• I love shopping at Walmart! • Positive!

• I hate Walmart. They destroy neighborhoods.• Negative!

• The nearest Walmart is 3 miles away.• Neutral!

• Target sells higher quality products than Walmart.• Negative! Or neutral! Positive?

Intensity• I’m indifferent to Walmart• I don’t care for Walmart• I dislike Walmart• I hate Walmart• I despise Walmart more than anything else in the world

Tools for textual analysis

Tools for textual analysis

But, a caveat…• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.• I never said she stole my money.

But, a caveat (or two)• It’s not bad.• Two negatives

• I’m not going to say this sucks.• Irony

• The latest episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey is a work of art.• Sarcasm

• The keyboard is impossibly small, but the display is the best I’ve seen.• A combination of polarities and intensities

How else might you measure sentiment?

Sentiment summary• Step 3: Measure the tenor of the conversation• There are many emerging tools to do so• But these tools are imperfect, and are best at detecting and tracking major shocks

• In many cases, a human being is best

Engagement• It is good if people are seeing your message, passing it along, and speaking of you positively•But a true measure of whether your strategy is working is whether your customers are engaged with it• Engagement can be defined as when somebody cares and interacts• There are many ways to measure engagement, depending on the channel being used

Twitter & Facebook engagement•Are people talking directly to you?• @ mentions

•Are people posting on your Facebook wall?•Are people uploading pictures, answering polls, creating lists, etc.?

Facebook Insights

Out of the blue•When measuring the effectiveness of your strategy, don’t focus only on how much people share your content• Track what people say in general, regardless of whether you initiated the conversation

•People talking about you out of the blue is another sign of true engagement• Here is another place where any listening/pretesting that you did at the beginning of the campaign pays off• You have a baseline to use to track changes in the

conversation!

Original content and engagement

How else might you measure engagement?

Engagement summary• Step 4: See how much people talk with and about you• Look to see how many conversations occur between you and your customers• Don’t forget that people can start conversations on their own, too• Look for content they create about you—it shows they

care

ROI• This is the hard part!•ROI is not so much a metric as it is an argument you make to justify what you’ve done or are doing• Remember how it’s hard to tie real-world outcomes to social media?

• The typical formulas you might use to measure it are hard to apply to marketing outcomes

How to calculate social media ROI•Don’t• Choosing what to measure is complicated, and there is no one formula that will work for everyone• Social media is largely branding, and the value of branding is extremely hard to measure• You may not even get direct ROI from branding or content marketing

• Pick a metric, follow that, and don’t worry about costs• Traffic, email list members, time on website, new visitors, etc.,

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 1: Choose a (conversion) goal• One thing to note: ROI is much each to calculate for campaigns rather than channels (or your presence in general)• For example:• A purchase (online, especially)• Fill out contact form• Sign up for newsletter• Download a PDF or other material• Shares, likes, follows, retweets, etc.• Watch a video• Spend time on the website (especially certain parts of it)

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 2: Track those conversions• All of the things we’ve talked about today may suffice• Traffic to your website can be informative• Leads, of course, should be trackable• Customers from those leads, too• Conversion rate per platform

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 3: Assign $ value to each conversion• You can either:• Use historical data (you might know customer lifetime

value, for example• Guesstimate (you’ll probably end up doing this)

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 4: Measure total benefits by channel• Figure out how many conversions came from each social media channel• Multiply that by how much each is “worth”

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 5: Figure out your total costs• Add up costs for each channel (here they will be different)• Don’t forget all your costs• Prizes/discounts• Advertising• Manpower (you’ll want to know your hourly wage for

this)• Platform (do you pay for a publishing tool, analytics,

etc.?)

Calculating ROI in 6 “easy” steps• Step 6: Calculate the results

ROI = (Benefits – Costs) X 100Costs

(500% (5x) is good, 1000% (10x) is better)

Multitouch campaigns•Consumers will typically be exposed to many ads through various channels before making a purchase• One of the biggest questions is how to attribute success to each of the channels• It’s an open question in marketing in general, not just social media marketing

• Firm often use simple heuristics • First touch• Even splits• The last ad gets half the credit, the rest goes to the others

Test and retest!• The only true way to measure value is through controlled experiments•You can also use controlled experiments to optimize content•Online tools make it easier than ever to create experiments•Unfortunately, most firms do not experiment enough

Examples of experiments•Use an AB(A) design to see if a post/campaign/new channel makes a difference• Show the same content to two different groups, see if that matters• Show different content to the same group, see if that matters• Try different materials on different channels (don’t forget your trackbacks)

• (An important lesson here—think carefully about your control group)

Let’s argue for ROI!

Summary• There are a few key metrics to follow to know how you’re doing• They will be support for your case that your social media effort is worthwhile•You can calculate ROI, but it’s likely there will be some guessing involved—learn the best arguments to make•Or, experiment!•Next time: What’s new in social media? What’s fair in social media?

Assignments• Let’s help other social media managers• I’ve compiled some important questions for marketers• We’ll put together a guide to help out small business owners interested in social media

•And after that, presentations!