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I use the analogy of measuring car dashboard metrics (social media metrics) vs measuring your GPS (where were you, and where are you going). The latter goals you provide such as leads and awareness are GPS measurements. They matter more as they're aligned with your overall goals for the business.
You're on the right track here. Now, the next step is to align specific formulas for each of the four business goals you met. Each brand can make their own formula. Leads) straightforward 2) Awareness will take some creativity, think: share of voice. 3) Perception may require brand monitoring software, or a lot of manual work 4) support: time reduced supporting, or customer satisfaction.
We can setup a call if you want to dig into this more deeply, but I feel you're on the right track, and could even become a case study of how to do measurement right.
Talk to you soon,
dirk
Good stuff. I have a spreadsheet for calculating the Social Media ROI. It is based on work done by Charlene Li (Forrester) and Bill Johnston (Forum One). It is at http://dagholmboe.wordpress.com. My post for the spreadsheet gives a detailed explanation.
I put on the web about 10 days ago and have had a large number of people downloading it. Take a peak at it and let me know what you think. It might do something similar to what you are looking for.
I look forward hearing from you.
Best,
Dag.
I am downloading it now, kind of sad that i am excited to see what your formula's look like.
Will certainly give you my feedback after reviewing.
Thanks again..
dirk
Well, I know it sounds like a lot of mumble jumble, but let me explain...In our little example, "new leads" is the outcome we seek to achieve. However, this indicator doesn't tell us how to achieve that or how to get there, it's just an indicator that will tell us how we performed, what the outcome was at the end. We must then identify what are the activities that are the drivers of this desired outcome. However, because the organization has never been there before (at the desired outcome) a hypotheses must be formulated to describe how we believe we can get to the desired outcome. In this example, we could safely assume that activities such as "engaging in conversations with thought leaders", "driving traffic to website" and "building brand awareness in new markets" are all activities that combined together clearly contribute to the number of new leads generated (this would be the so called hypotheses I mentioned earlier). Thus, all these activities represent the real drivers of this particular outcome. In addition, these driver activities must be measured too. So, for instance, we could measure the "engagement with thought leaders" with something like "number of engagements with thought leaders" and assign it some target value.
At the same time, driver activities can be influenced by other drivers. For instance, what could produce an increase in the number of engagements? Well, we could increase that number by increasing the number of community reps that engage with these thought leaders. And the number of community reps available depends on the number of capable people we can recruit and train accordingly to become qualified community reps, and so on...
As I mentioned at the beginning, it´s a group of indicators embedded in a chain of cause-and-effect logic. A great every-day example of these chain is the training of people in organizations. We know that better training our people will affect our organization's bottom line in the long run. Yes it will surely do, BUT not in a direct way. In other words, training your people will not produce greater market share instantly. But it ultimately will thanks to the chain of cause-and-effect relationships. Training your people will help them perform their job better, which will allow them to deliver better customer service, which will increase customer satisfaction, which will increase repeated purchases and customer recommendations, which will increase sales, which will increase market share. The beauty of this, is that all the relationships in this cause-and-effect chain are explicit and testable.
So, following this logic, all of the indicators you guys mentioned above are valid ones. However, maybe you should analyze which ones are lag indicators and which ones are drivers. The spreadsheet could be quite handy at this for sure :) The good news is that there already exists specialized software for doing this thing :)
This framework has a number of important implications. First and foremost, it implies that in order to reach the outcomes we want, we must identify and align a series of activities and resources. In other words, we can't expect to have a successful social media strategy without a team of properly trained social media managers and reps. Secondly, we can define hypotheses, test them continually and adjust them as required. Third, this framework shows us WHAT must be done to reach the desired outcomes, but it doesn't tell us HOW. In other words, the specific actions and plans designed to impact the desired outcomes are for the organization to define, which in turn makes the framework very flexible and open to creativity and different ways of implementing it.
Hope this helps!
I am going to see how i might use this framework for social media measurement, excellent idea.
Dirk
No marketing director is going to get approval to suddenly spend 40% of their budget on social media, simply because of its novelty and unproven nature. It's too risky and they would be understandably nervous of whether they could show real results after the spend. Far more realistic to recommend a trial period, with measurements based on social media metrics. Only spend, say, 2% of budget, but aim for more realistic targets that are unrelated to the bottom line, but which are indicators of the success of the approach. If they achieve those targets, that success is evidence that it can be effective. Then we bring in amontero's excellent point about cause and effect, by convincing the client that the trial success (re-tweets, conversations, brand mentions, etc) can ultimately be converted into real, measurable business benefit. You are then in a far stronger position to persuade the purse-holders to take the next step. The point is to separate out the risk, and maybe this is best done by not even trying to talk about lead generation counts at the outset. Warm them up slowly...
I totally agree. Your scenario is exactly how it played out here at Vignette. My early reports focused on things you mentioned like (re-tweets, conversations, brand mentions, etc). Had i not started there i would have never been able to move to the next step.
Thanks for commenting..
Dirk
dirk
Do you want to know what most companies DO, or what's most effective? What seems to be most effective is when you begin with strategy; what's your goal, who is the audience, and how can you engage your audience?
At the same time, you need to be constantly experimenting with your audience. It takes time to figure out what they're doing online, and what they respond to.
It sounds like you were experimenting in the beginning - which is great. You have to do it. What did you learn from it? My guess is that the insights you gained from focusing on social media metrics at the beginning, will carry you toward making effective choices as you begin focusing on business outcomes.
It sounds like you're doing exactly what you need to do: Research, identify what resonates with your key audience, and now tie that in with strategies for meeting business outcomes.
Have you seen this video of Obama's New Media Manager and how they put strategy over tactics? Same idea, but with a proven track record behind it.
http://tr.im/k6uo
I think this evolution in thinking is simply where most went wrong. Social Media didn't create new results, it created new methods of reaching a result. To many professionals simply failed to realize the goal of measurement was to produce the same result they have been working on for twenty years.
If you are looking at specific campaign and project methods, you need to accept that each tool (in this case, Twitter/Youtube/Blogging - etc) has benchmarks for "critical mass" and producing a desired effect.
Another point in this analysis scenario is that "social media" is a HUGE term. If I walked into a CEOs office and said "here is your communication numbers..." he would ask "what does this include?"
I would say something insane- "It includes every conversation, every phone call, your business cards, the phone book, every Marcomm advertisement you bought this year (TV, Radio, Print, Web), your entire public relations effort, the evening you spent at your daughter's Christmas show and said the business name, and that truckload of pens you bought for the charity marathon."
Failing to educate decision makers on the vast number of things being analyzed creates an assumption that apples are equal to oranges.
Totally agree social media is a huge term and educating execs on the number is essential.
Thanks for sharing..
dirk
Unfortunately it seems that most B2B companies start by measuring social media activity and never get past that. But the real power is in measuring it by how it is contributing to business goals.
Social media activity vs. contributing to business goals is like the difference between activity and productivity. One can stay very busy without being productive. It seems to me that lots of B2B marketers are very busy with social media, but are not productive in contributing to their companies' bottom lines.
Dirk, showing how your work contributes to your company's sales success is the key to a bigger budget, more staff, and maybe even a promotion and a raise.
Mac McIntosh
www.sales-lead-experts.com
This is fantastic stuff. I think the superficial nature of measuring social media activity is easier and more straightforward, so it tends to be somewhere that companies start. But as you've recognized, the deeper you get into this world, the more you realize you need to be measuring against goals because that's the only way you can quantify the impact of those activities on your progress as an organization.
Thanks for continuing that important discussion, and we're looking forward to working with you at Radian6.
Cheers,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@AmberCadabra
Companies implementing secure, private social media, e.g., employee communities, only need to worry about measuring the social activities. The assumption is that, for those types of communities, the desired business outcomes occur as a natural result of the social activities. In my experience, that assumption is correct... but it takes time.
What both groups often fail to grasp is the importance of having a sound strategy for a) driving adoption, b) initial engagement through value that's immediately obvious, and c) metrics and reports that support those two things. Prior to even launching such a community, a solid set of objectives and well-designed underlying platform are essential.
Sometimes, those of us who spend lots of time every day in social media and have "grown up with it" forget that a large number of people, maybe even a majority, have yet to understand the meaning of words like 'Follow' as it applies to social media. Until they internalize how social media works and what its benefits are to them personally, the out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem is the one we must chip away at daily.
I engaged in a Twitter Chat on Sunday night, #BlogChat. The topic was "How would you convince your boss (company/sr. management) to start using social media?
Summary posted here: (http://www.theviralgarden.com)
I think the main conclusion that we all found out was that social media really needs to align to the goal of the business. What is the bottom line.. what are you trying to achieve? And you need to prove that to your boss; that is aligns with the new business strategy.
In measuring social media, I wouldn't measure JUST # of followers and retweets without knowing who they are. It's like signing up for an e-mail newsletter that I don't read.
But I feel you are spot on. What I would measure is WHO (company, position, type of engagement with others) is following and can I qualify them as leads or industry leaders that are truly interested in my postings after engaging in the conversation.
Numbers can only go so far.. you need to know that those numbers align to the overall business goals. Are they attainable? Are they sustainable and cost effective? What changes to strategy need to be made; is there a process in place for that paradigm shift once you realize your position and acceptance?
Also comes down to educating the shareholders (another conclusion from #blogchat). As you stated - we are in the trenches and understand SM.. but the shareholders are most likely not there, and don't' get it. They need to know where, who, and when people are talking about the business for the buy-in and acceptance of measurement.
Thanks for posting - first time I've visited.
Thanks for the comment. Educating stakeholder is a key and many of them get educated quickly when they see positive business results.
Thanks for the comment..dirk
I can tell you that at Synthesio, being a company that specializes in concretizing social media interactions for business intelligence purposes, the community management goals that we have set have been focused on business outcomes from the very start. While certain spaces, such as MySpace and Facebook, are being left to the back burner for now (MySpace probably forever..), we monitor Twitter to stay on top of what is being said about us, our competitors, our key words, etc. and actively engage the community, but we also use it to generate leads and the like.
With regards to the majority of companies, many of them do not even start in social media themselves, rather, the social media comes to them. Internet users talk about positive and negative experiences that they have had with companies, brands, etc. whether encompassed within a company community created for that purpose or (usually) not..
Thanks again for the entry and we look forward to hearing more from you.