Measuring Social Media

Mariah Lincoln Herman

@Marlin23

www.marpr23.wordpress.com

University of Oregon

School of Journalism and Communication

A problem that a lot of companies arehaving right now is measuring the successof social media campaigns. An issue thatmay arise for up and coming publicrelations and marketing professionals isexplaining to a boss that social media isimportant and beneficial to a company. Ihave gathered some information thatmight help if you are asked to explainhow to measure social media and whycompanies should invest time and moneyinto it. Hopefully you will find it helpful.

Intro to Measurement

Why Measure?

“The main reason to measure objectives isnot so much to reward or punish anindividual communications manager forsuccess or failure, as it is to learn from theresearch, whether a program should becontinued as is, revised, or dropped in favorof another approach.”

-James E. Grunig, Professor Emeritus,University of Maryland

If your boss asks you to qualify yoursocial media initiative, you can usemeasurement to concretely show howyour time is being spent and why socialmedia is valuable to the organization.

Getting Started

1. Define your mission and objective. Figure out what it isthat you want to accomplish.

2. Define your audiences and find out what motivatesthem.

3. Define the metrics your company is going to use, thesebecome what you measure (qualitative or quantitative,but preferably both.)

4. Figure out the benchmarks for your data (over time,against competition.)

5. Establish what measurement tools to use.6. Analyze the results. Data are trivial unless you can do

something with it.

In order to be successful in measuring socialmedia there are six essential steps that needto be clearly defined before implementingthe measurement strategy and using themeasurement tools.

What to MeasureWhen implementing a measurement strategy, Katie Paine, expert onmeasurement, explains that it is important to establish what it is exactly thatyou need to measure. To figure this out you need to come up with answers forthe following questions:

Outputs:• Did you get the coverage you wanted?Outtakes:• Did your target audience see the messages?• Did they respond to the messages?Outcomes:• Did audience behavior change?• Did influential members respond?• Did your relationship change?• Did sales increase?

QualitativeIt’s important to determine what you want tomeasure, whether it’s corporate reputation,conversations or customer relationships.These objectives require a more qualitativemeasurement approach. If the objective isto measure ROI for conversations, start bysetting benchmarks with questions like:

• Are we a part of the conversations aboutour product?• How are we talked about compared toour competitors?• Were we able to build betterrelationships?• Were we able to participate in conversations where we previously had novoice?

Quantitative

If the goal is to measure traffic,sales or search engine optimization(SEO) ranking, you can take amore quantitative approach. Lookat how many people join yoursocial network in a given period oftime, how much activity there is inyour forum or what the click-through rate is to your productpages that result in direct sales. Bysearching for keywords in differentonline communities, you cancreate a detailed “blueprint” forengagement, which will be usefulfor demonstrating success to yourboss. The diagram on the right is anexample of Brian Solis and JeffThomas’ blueprint, called the“Conversation Prism.”

Among Many. (2009, April 2 2009) picture posted tohttp://tiny.cc/Map235

To measure how effective a socialmedia campaign is, the company mustobserve, listen and engage.There are a variety of tools availablethat can help your company inmeasuring different objectives andfigure out where your organization isbeing represented.

Explore Tools

The ToolDelicious:Delicious is a bookmarking utility that lets youshare, organize, and save your bookmarks acrossthe web.What should you measureHow many times people bookmark your content

The ToolGoogle Analytics:This will allow you to track your traffic levels and will allow to identify where your traffic is comingfrom.

What you should measure• Overall traffic increases• Where your traffic is coming from, i.e. digg, twitter• Most trafficked key terms or phrases

The ToolFeedburner:Feed burner allows you (and your visitors) to subscribe to your blog via RSS or email.

What you should measure• RSS subscribers• Email subscribers

The ToolBlog comments:Pretty self explanatory, these are just the comments/feedback users leave on your site.

What you should measure• Amount of comments• Quality of comments• Influence of commenter

The ToolTwitter Search/Tweetbeep:Twitter search allows you to search for keywords or phrases in real time, Tweetbeep sends you alertswhen someone mentions your particular keyword/phrase/product/etc.

What you should measure• How many times your product/company/article/etc. is mentioned. Trend this over time to seeprogress.

The ToolGoogle Alert:Google alert gives you email notifications when someone mentions a particular keyword or phrases.

What you should measure• How many times your is mentioned daily, weekly, monthly. Trend this over time to see progress.

The ToolTweetburner:Tweetburner allows you to track how many times people click on the links you share via Twitter.

What should you measure• How many times people are clicking on the links you send out via Twitter.• Track the most popular categories and types of links people click on the most.• Track how active your twitter followers are with you content.

Other sites that are useful:

HowSociable? - Free tool that measures the visibility of abrand on the web across 22 metrics.Technorati - Technorati search page allows you to search forblogs based on tags.Alexa - Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimatedreach, rank and page views.Google Insights - Compare search volume patterns acrossspecific regions, categories, and time frames.Flock- is a web browser that provides social networking andWeb 2.0 facilities built into its user interface. It’s a feedreadersupporting Atom, RSS and Media RSS feeds. Blog editor andreader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog.Bit.ly - URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enablesmeasurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from,conversations around the site etc.Adonomics - Facebook analytics and developer applicationtracks and produces graphs.

The ToolYahoo Site Explorer:Yahoo site explorer is a tool created by Yahoo that allowsyou to track links.

What you should measure• The amount of incoming links you receive over time.

1. Traffic: This is one of the more obvious ways ofmeasuring social media. How many peoplevisit your website, Facebook page, uniquevisits, page views, linkbacks, etc.

Measure By using the tools above you can measure a lot of different aspects of your social media initiative. In order to demonstrate, to your boss, the effectiveness and success of your efforts make sure you measure the following aspects:

2. Interaction: Participation is a valuableindicator for many brands. It says somethingabout the kind of traffic you are attracting.Remember that an engaged customer is ahighly valuable one. Interaction can beanything from leaving comments, toparticipating in support forums, to leavingcustomer reviews and ratings. It can happenon your website and on other websites.

3. Search Marketing: A well placedstory/video/image on a site like Digg willgenerate a lot of traffic and a link from Diggitself. Even better it will generate interest frombloggers and major publishers. The more linksand referrals, the better your chance of beingplaced highly on Google, resulting in lots ofongoing traffic.

4. Customer Engagement: Engagement is key toimproving satisfaction, loyalty rates, andrevenue. By listening to customers, and lettingthem know that you are listening, you canimprove your business, your products, and yourlevels of service.

6. Sales: Companies can track sales fromGoogle referrals and monitor customerfeedback through sites like Twitter, aswell as their own website. Dell discoveredthat it made $1m from Twitter in 18months.

7. Retention: A positive side effect ofincreased customer engagement is anincrease in customer retention. Zappos,which is a case study in how to doTwitter, made $1bn in sales, and 75% of itsorders are from repeat customers.

8. Profits: If you can improve customerretention and engage customers moreoften, the result will be that you’llgenerate more business from yourexisting customer base. This reduces yourreliance on big customer acquisitionbudgets to maintain or grow profits. Itmakes for a more profitable and efficientorganization.

One of the biggest worries executive have is negative brand perception resulting from bloggers rants or Tweets.The loss of message and brand control intimidates companies, and often times prevents them from engaging insocial media. Companies need to look at these situations as opportunities to engage their customers andcommunities. By doing so, organizations can turn around negative perceptions and build a loyal following. TakeDell Computers for example. This company has experienced a significant turnaround within the world of socialmedia, transitioning from “Dell Hell” to a very loyal community on its sites.

Four years ago Jeff Jarvis bought a Dell computer and was having a lot of problems and got no response from thecustomer service department. He decided to use BuzzMachine to blast Dell saying “DELL SUCKS. DELL LIES. Put thatin your Google and smoke it, Dell.” His first post generated 93 comments, the next few generated more than 1,000.

Since then Dell has changed some major operational procedures:

• Michae Dell returned to run the company after three years

• Overall quality was improved

• Dell began participating with bloggers and social media experts.

The Dell community has become a strong and loyal forum, and it is working for Dell. The company listens, participates transparently, honestly and openly. They even admit when there is a defect with their products,and allow customers to voice suggestions on Ideastorm.

Statistics:

• At start of program, 49% of blog posts were negative. Today, overall tonality is 22% negative.• Direct2Dell currently ranked about 700 on Technorati, among the highest corporate blogs.• Direct2Dell gets more than 5 million unique views per month.• Over 7000 ideas have been submitted via IdeaStorm.• Studio Dell is gets more than 200,000 views per month.

Success

Measuring and monitoring your social media initiative isan ongoing process. The process has many benefits likelower cost per customer acquisition, because itenables you to be found by customers looking to buywhat you have to sell: It lowers the entire cost of themarketing to sales process. It also lowers the cost ofmarket research; because it enables you to listen in onthe conversations, you can better tailor your productsto what the marketplace wants or needs.

The objective of a social media campaign is toparticipate in the conversation, to enhance yourrelationship with your audiences and become atrusted member of the community that surrounds yourbrand. If you have monitored and engaged in theconversation, then your measures should prove thatyou’ve done those things.

If you follow these steps and continue to monitor theconversation, you should be able to clearlycommunicate the success of your campaign.

Geoliv. (2007, October 23). Dell’s Incredible Turnaround. Message posted to

http://nowisgone.com/2007/10/18/dells-incredible-turnaround/

Macnamara, J. (2009, January 11). Measuring Up: 10 Social Media Metrics.

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McDougall, M. (2009, March 26). How Do You Measure Social Media

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Owyang, J. (2008, October 16). Social Media Measurement: Dashboard Vs. GPS. Message posted

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Patterson, L. (2008, November 18). Measuring Social Marketing and Media.

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Uhrmacher, A.(2008, July 31). How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business.

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Referenced multiple posts from:

Paine, K. KD Paine’s Measurement Blog. Messages posted to

http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/

Sources