Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

A Framework for Social Marketing Analytics

Sorry, folks - I got a copy of this great report a day early and I'm a few days late in getting it to you. But you'll soon see why. When you get a 20-page report in your inbox with meat on (mostly) every page, you want to take some time before reading it, let alone sharing it.

John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified (who I had the pleasure of joining on a panel recently) and Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group (who's been a friend for years now) released an overview for how to think about finding the right vendor for measuring any of your social media programs.

The report starts in earnest, as far as what really grabbed me, on page 9 in the PDF from Web Analytics Demystified, or on page 10 in the version from Jeremiah below, which I grabbed via his blog

Here, you start to get the four business objectives four measuring social marketing, their key performance indicators, and the vendors to watch. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

This is a area I focus on quite a bit, and it's refreshing to see the objectives so clearly stated here. They're worth enumerating:

1. Foster dialog
2. Promote advocacy
3. Facilitate support
4. Spur innovation

These are all defined in as much detail as anyone should need in the following pages.

The vendors to watch should be taken with a grain of salt. I've looked into most of the vendors listed here, and quite a few that aren't on the list. The report's not meant to be a vendor guide, and it isn't. Some of the best vendors out there aren't included at all in the list, while some mentioned have a long way to go. There's also a big difference often in vendors that can work with large brands vs small businesses.

That shouldn't detract from the real value of the report - understanding social business objectives and how you measure them.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

100 Ways to Measure Social Media: Now in Convenient Presentation Form

I just came back from the Promotion Marketing Association's Blur event in Chicago where I gave a talk in their digital track about metrics. They invited me after I wrote the column on 100 Ways to Measure Social Mediahttp://bit.ly/100ways (also at http://bit.ly/100ways if you ever need to refer back to it). While I only had 30 minutes for it, including Q&A, I was intrigued to see if I could turn this into a presentation. Presentations are, after all, just another way to tell a story - even if this story is a little more dry than others.

Below is the presentation version I gave, which you can even download from Slideshare if you're so inclined. Beyond the 100 ways themselves, there are a number of examples. You won't find all the talking points, but if I get video from the PMA, I'll post that too to add color.

For the record, I even had time for the audience to get a few questions in. Not bad, eh? Oh, and if you want to refer back to it (or even tweet the link directly), I shortened it to http://bit.ly/pmadb.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more coverage of the PMA, check the blogs of Brandon Murphy and Donna DeClemente.

100 Ways to Measure Social Media - Promotion Marketing Association 2010

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.

A Frank Conversation about Social Media Measurement - Director's Cut

This is today's Social Media Insider column, a complete version several hundred words longer than the abridged edition, which you can find at MediaPost. 

The view from the OMMA Social stage

A Frank Conversation about Social Media Measurement

Everything you need to know about social media measurement was covered in 45 minutes at MediaPost’s OMMA Social event in San Francisco last week.

Okay, that’s not entirely true, but the five panelists I had the honor of moderating covered a lot of ground and they probably could tell you everything that matters – if you gave them just a little more time to do so. There is a lot of ground to cover, as you might have inferred from my column on 100 ways to measure social media.

Instead of trying to rehash the session, I’m letting the panelists share their thoughts in their own words. Below are a series of questions that I asked during the session, I planned on asking, or the audience asked. Note that I shortened this version somewhat for readability; the ‘director’s cut’ is on my blog.

The panelists included:

Carla Bourque, VP of Sales and Business Development, Six Apart

Steve Kerho, SVP, Analytics, Media & Marketing Optimization, Organic, Inc.

Amber Naslund, Director of Community, Radian6

Bill Stephenson, VP, Social Media Sales & Client Service, Nielsen Online

Jim Sterne, President, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara

Not everyone was able to get their answers in before the deadline, but Carla, Bill, and Jim have all shared their candid thoughts below.

When a marketer wants to know what the value is of a Facebook fan, a Twitter follower, or a blog commenter, what do you tell them? 

Jim:  It’s much more than a person on the freeway not looking at your billboard or the person in the bathroom while your TV ad blathers into an empty room. On the other hand, once you link reach and awareness to conversion, you can do the math and tell me.

Bill: Placing a specific value on a fan or follower or commenter is a slippery slope.  At Nielsen we believe the best currency to use when valuing fans, followers, commenters, etc, is advocacy.  This is a metric that can be calculated across most social networking sites and one that most large companies can relate to and value based on their unique industry, product, transaction price, etc.   A good social media partner can help their client develop an actionable advocacy metric.

Carla: The "value" of a fan is directly related to the relationship that that fan has with the brand, and with the broader audience of influencers.  Fans may have a certain value today based on their level of engagement (their actions via passed links, demo and psycho data, etc.) but they can be even more valuable if you keep them engaged and leverage them as a source for advocacy.  Engagement, Amplification, and Equity are the three highly-connected measures for determining value. The more relevant content you can give fans to respond to and interact with, the more likely they are to get involved, and their involvement will begin to ripple throughout their network or social graph. At Six Apart, our social publishing heritage has taught us that, the more marketers think like publishers – that is, continually offering their fans content that keeps them engaged in the conversation – the more their audience will respond and share their experiences. Ultimately, it is the quality of the followers and fans, not the quantity, that is most valuable. Interestingly, you can "buy" followers on eBay for less than a penny each (TechCrunch 1/31/10), which begs the question: is everything for sale or, do you get what you pay for?

Do you see attribution models playing a role in social marketing? 

Jim: Absolutely. Marketers need to know if they should invest 30% of their social budget in blogs and 10% in tweets and 50% in Facebook or 10% in blogs and 50% in tweets and 30% in Facebook. Without attribution, there's only deciding by guess, by God and by gut feel. Oh - and by last year's (now useless) results of course.

Bill: The best marketers, and many Nielsen clients, are taking an enterprise approach to measuring social media, recognizing that near real-time, voice-of-the-consumer affects all aspects of the business from customer service to marketing to public relations and corporate communications to design, quality and the retail experience.  Also, the innovative companies are working hard to evaluate social media as they do other types of media.  This is how our best clients leverage the insights available via the analysis of social media.

Carla: Yes. While certain industry segments (Financial Services, Travel, Consumer Electronics, Telecom) are embracing the use of attribution models as a way to measure influential points across advertising channels, the most accurate results have been when attribution models have been applied to the search industry. As these models develop and gain greater adoption, their role in accurately measuring social media will also increase.

Via the audience (Faisal Laljee): With social media, messages and content can spread many degrees from the source. How far can and should marketers track these ripple effects?  

Jim:  As far as you can - within reason. If the seventh forward or retweet brings in buckets of money, that is very valuable to know... unless it costs a ridiculous amount of cash to find out.

Bill: The dispersion of social media about your company, products, executives, issues, etc should be measured continually as it ebbs and flows from one network to the next, from one influencer to the next.  At Nielsen, we’ve seen social media catastrophes start with a decidedly non-influential consumer and then get picked up by an influential blogger or other influencer. It’s important to measure the message and understand which ones are likely to go viral and the circumstances under which issues tend to go viral.  

Carla: Depending on the marketers' objectives, and the type of audience they are trying to reach (early adopters, critics, commenters, etc.) the level of analysis will vary.  Messages and content can spread widely, and often even beyond the proverbial six degrees.  At Six Apart, we think all degrees should be measured because, while some content can dissipate the further from the source it travels, other content can gain momentum as it ripples away from the source. Understanding how and when content dissipates and which forms of content gain momentum can deliver valuable insights to inform a marketer’s publishing strategy.  Ultimately, this insight can improve social media effectiveness. Reference Altimeter's framework by Charlene Li and the value assigned to each type of contributor in their "Engagement Pyramid."

What needs more improvement right now, the technological tools that marketers use, or the way marketers and agencies use them and analyze the information? 

Jim: We have far more technology and waaaaay more data than we know what to do with. What we need is technology that can identify what we should be looking at rather than throwing more reports at us.

Bill: The technology is out there but there is a lag in standard Key Performance Indicators and a common currency that companies across industries can use and leverage.

Carla: Both. The technology and tools are still somewhat nascent, as are the metrics and approaches for utilizing them.  The more marketers and agencies can embrace a "test and learn" approach to social media measurement, the more our industry can adopt measurement standards and best practices.

Via Twitter (smcatl): When is predictive analysis going to become part of social media return on investment (ROI) considerations?  

Jim: ROI is a backward-looking concept and predictive analytics is a forward-looking technique. Predictive methods are being applied by scrappy start-ups as we speak. Stay tuned!!

Bill: Predictive analysis is already part of social media ROI but it’s more of a niche metric because it is difficult to calculate and the data needed to calculate isn’t always easy to get.  

Carla: See above re: emerging metrics – "test and learn." All in good time!

Six Questions for 100 Metrics

What can the scores of social media metrics available really tell you about the success of your marketing programs? It's fitting to start the exploration with a question, since we'll focus on six of them now: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Last week, we looked at 100 ways to measure social media, a master list that's meant to give marketers an idea of all of the metrics they can consider. As many commenters observed, a given marketer may not even need 90% of the list. What matters are the metrics that any marketer is held accountable for, such as sales or customer satisfaction. Just as important in this context are the relevant metrics that either act as proxies for measuring a marketer's core objectives, or that can give marketers a deeper understanding of how effective their efforts are.

A master list of 100 metrics is rather daunting. One way to make it more manageable is to look at which metrics answer which of the six questions posed above. I have to give credit here to my colleagues at my agency 360i, who heavily shaped my thinking around applying these questions. To be fair to them though, they haven't vetted this breakout, so any errors in judgment here are mine alone.

Below is a sampling of how the 100 metrics help answer the six questions. The complete list is available on my blog, and also accessible via the shortened URL bit.ly/whowhat.

WHO - Who interacted? What do you know about these consumers?

·       Fans, followers, friends

·       Demographics of audience reached through social media

·       Social media habits/interests of target audience

·       Customers assisted

·       Attendance generated at in-person events

WHAT - What was discussed? What was shared? What did consumers engage with?

·       Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts or impressions

·       Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)

·       Rate of virality, embedding, or downloading

·       Clicks, view-throughs, interactions

·       Leads generated or products sampled

WHERE - Where were the conversations happening, whether in terms of the social channels or the geography of the consumers reached?

·       Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)

·       Influence of publishers reached (e.g., blogs)

·       Geography of participating consumers

·       Registrations from third-party social logins (e.g., Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth)

·       Registrations by channel (e.g., Web, desktop application, mobile application, SMS, etc)

WHEN - When did the results happen? When did other promotions run that could have had an impact on a social marketing program?

·       Shift in buzz over time

·       Buzz by time of day / daypart

·       Seasonality of buzz

·       Change in virality rates over time

·       Impact of offline marketing/events on social marketing programs or buzz

WHY - Why were consumers engaging or feeling this way?

·       Sentiment by volume of posts or impressions

·       Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs

·       Increase in searches due to social activity

·       Attributes of tags (e.g., how well they match the brand's perception of itself)

·       Customer satisfaction

HOW - How much of an impact did the social marketing have? How do results hold up against benchmarks? How do they translate to brand metrics? How does this add to the bottom line?

·       Brand association, purchase consideration

·       Savings per customer assisted through direct social media interactions compared to other channels (e.g., call centers, in-store)

·       Suggestions implemented from social feedback

·       Impact on online or offline sales, or on other offline behavior

·       Conversion change due to user ratings, reviews

Again, this is meant to be a start -- just one lens for viewing the possibilities of social media measurement. Some metrics can also answer multiple questions. More important is the process of asking the questions, and then figuring out the best possible way to answer them through the ever-expanding possibilities that social media offers.

The Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of the 100 Ways to Measure Social Media

As another way to look at the 100 ways to measure social media, I've broken it out into how the metrics answer six key questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

I welcome your thoughts on this in the comments and look forward to exploring more ways to organize this.

WHO – Who interacted? What do you know about these consumers?

1.  Fans

2.  Followers

3.  Friends

4.  Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends

5.  Second-degree reach (connections to fans, followers, and friends exposed - by people or impressions)

6.  Influence of consumers reached

7.  Demographics of target audience engaged with social channels

8.  Demographics of audience reached through social media

9.  Social media habits/interests of target audience

10.  Languages spoken by participating consumers

11.  Customers assisted

12.  Number of chat room participants

13.  Wiki contributors

14.  Responses to socially posted events

15.  Attendance generated at in-person events

16.  Employees reached (for internal programs)

17.  Job applications received