Measuring Social Media Efforts
For any of us interested in making social media and social networks a viable part of an organization’s communications and engagement strategy, the question of measurement comes up quickly. It makes sense. In an empirical world, where we want to know about Return on Investment, it’s important to know how spending money on a podcast or paying someone to maintain a Facebook group is actually worth anything to a company. Even as organizations become aware that they “should” take advantage of social media, the question that rushes in behind that awareness is, “How will I know anything is happening?”
There are some really interesting articles and posts coming out about this. For example, paying attention to Jeremiah Owyang on any given day will find you some data on measuring a social media campaign. There’s also the Association for Downloadable Media to consider, as they’re seeking ways to make this all mean more for us. Plenty of people are coming up with their take on how to provide useful measurements on the effects of social media for an organization. My question: are we measuring, or are we mapping?
Measuring vs. Mapping
First off, yes, I recognize that mapping is very empirical in nature, and that geolocative data is a wealth of measurements. But I also know that long before cartography became a far more instrumented science, maps could also mean simply a drawing of the rough way to get from here to there. So, in my explanation, I’m saying that measuring is far more detailed, and that mapping is a little more holistic. Go with me on this, will you?
How Many Whats Equals a Wow?
If I got you 300,000 listeners to your audio podcast, would that be a wow? It would be a wow to most podcasters. But what if you are L.L. Bean? Is that a lot of listeners? And even if it is, so what? What does 300K listeners do to change a metric at the company?
The best example of picking the right measure continues to be Christopher S. Penn and his Financial Aid Podcast. Chris loves every listener he gets, but he MEASURES how many completed loan applications his show drives. Why? Because he works for The Student Loan Network. He’s paid to make his show drive applications and granted loans. If I sent another 300,000 listeners to him, Chris would probably say, “so what?” until he saw how that changed his specific metric of interest.
If you’re working with an organization on a social media strategy, consider what metric might be truly useful. Is awareness enough? Is completed downloads the right measure of awareness? What does a blog do to drive that number? There are tons of ways to consider this. A partial list:
- Actions taken (like Penn’s loan apps completed).
- Links to posts from other blogs.
- Products sold.
- Satisfaction Index raised.
- Customer Service calls lowered (what if you produced screencasts or YouTube videos? to lower this?)
- Mainstream media coverage (conversions from social media to larger media outlets).
- Subscribers / users increased.
Mapping the Territory
I still feel a map is very important. What would the map show? It would show all the various aspects of your social media efforts, your strategy, and it would give the organization you’re working with the larger picture understanding of all the various components of your efforts and how your efforts would reach some desired goals.
Said a different way, it’s great to measure results like mentioned above, but it might also be useful to discuss the larger map of what could/should be accomplished by a social media strategy. For a map, I might create something like this:
- List of the most likely places a human will encounter the media I produce.
- Methods for listening to conversations off-blog and outside my media.
- Touchpoints along the value chain and how my media reaches each one.
- Path back to a central data capture for reporting and strategy monitoring.
- Pinpoints to corrective measures taken from initial strategy path to current efforts.
The more I consider what I’ve written, the more I can see the value in offering both the measurements and the map. The map might not be enough to convince an organization of the value of your efforts, and yet, the measurements won’t truly be valuable without the map of your larger intentions and the strategy you’ve considered.
What’s Your Take?
How have you worked with your clients? Are you a media maker? How do you use your media? To what effect? Is there a value in better understanding the different touchpoints of your strategy, and/or in understanding which numbers matter in what way for your efforts?
Even if you make media strictly for yourself, how does the above change how you look at your efforts?
And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.
Photo credits young einstein and libby
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Chris - the Map is even more crucial in driving home the key to Web 2.0: the options you give the consumer.
When I explain Social Media internally, I need a whiteboard to adequately show all the ways stuff gets into the network, and the myriad of ways it can get pulled out. Obviously, the measurements that are most valuable come at the gates of the smallest of the tributaries. They are most likely to be meaningful is describing the behaviors you’re most interested in.
The challenge in selling the overall concept is cutting down to the important targets - and comparing your 10,000 What’s to 5 Wows to the 100 Whistles and the 25 WubbaWubbas. All without making things *more* complicated for the Strategy people.
Chris - Nice post. I think you do need post measurement and what you call mapping. If you can truly get a measurement of some desired outcome like Chris Penn can for FAP, that’s probably the best measurement possible. Many of us, though, don’t have such a focused outcome and so we wind up off in the weeds of RSS subscriptions, download counts, etc. All of which are good, of course, but difficult given that the current tools and technologies can only give you imprecise measurements at best. For that, you need your “map” to explain the overall context into which the measurements fit. Anyway, it’s all an important issue, so thanks for raising it on your blog. (You forget to pimp PodCamp Boston 2, where people will undoubtedly be able to hear more on this subject! ;-)
Funny that nobody does an ROI on corporate lawn mowing, business cards, new carpet, new signage, etc.
Some things must be done, regardless of how trackable the results are. A business must first decide, “Do we wish to engage in conversations with our customers & stakeholders? Are we willing to try new ways of communicating and hearing from the public?”
Notice how the corporate emphasis is on “our message” and “our communication strategy”. More vain mercenary fluff.
Emphasis should be on “input from our customers and prospects”. But most companies seem to disregard customer complaints, suggestions, questions.
You can spread out the responsibilities for blogging and other social media community invovlements, if you can’t justify paying one person to do it all.
Social networking should be part of a business model, part of the marketing, sales, and customer relations. But since it’s customer-centric, many firms balk at it.
Seems kind of like mapping is a part of a good marketing plan. Although I like the concept of a visual map as part of the plan.
Remember, I’m not a classically trained marketer. For all I know, I’m out digging up bones that you all know about. I often feel like a guy coming out of a personal jungle and finding Manhattan.
@Justin and Dan- good point. If you don’t have a hard target, it’s harder to consider this all. But then, “should” you? Beats me.
@Vaspers- true. In lots of ways, this all becomes “must do” for lots of organizations. But it’s early still. Remember, you’re a futurist.
@Ike- you’re totally right. Finding the options on the map and killing the dead ends makes sense.
@Darrin- You’ll keep teaching me, I’m sure. : )
Dude, I’d say thank you anyway :-)
Also, I wouldn’t wholly discount those 300K. They may not take out loans, but they might know someone who would. Intangibles count - they’re just hard to measure.
This is freaky. I did a screencast and wiki about social media and web metrics last April. I used that same flickr photo!
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/04/screencast_trea.html
Anyway, did some musings here
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/05/measuring_your_.html
And have been obsessing about it for a few months
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/google/index.html
All this to say, your thoughts here are really helpful and lots to think about … I’m in the process of putting together a workshop on this topic .. so this post is high up on the link list.
B.
Running like a loon and just got to a machine to drop this -
The map is critical. Before you can start a measurement plan you need to define the who/what/where/when/why and how you are measuring.
The nearest I can get my brain around this, it is an open form of pagerank (Google’s algorithm for measuring the value of a webpage by measuring the relationships of other pages to that page through my favorite currency on the web - the link). But with social media its more than just links, its comments, trackbacks, diggs, del.icio.us, rankings, tags.
And don’t get me started on video, audio and photos :)
(favorites, playlists, comments, video comments, rankings, embedded versions of the file).
I’ve been pondering this again this morning.
I think selected metrics for success in the context of strategy is the only way to go. In the nonprofit space, we’ve been having this debate as a result of one blogger challenging key nonprofit tech organizations and bloggers to do a side-by-side comparison in quanticast in the interest of transparency. The conclusion - numbers like this without context do not mean anything. Our nonprofit association did a terrific post sharing their metrics
http://www.nten.org/blog/2007/09/20/measuring-success-do-your-metrics-tell-your-story
What you are describing as a map probably goes one step further — keying the metrics to strategy points. What I would love to see is a real life example of a map and with a key metric. Or maybe just a template. Then, in true social media style, perhaps a blog meme that challenges us to share our maps.
I’ve found it very difficult to wrap my brain around all this , with so many different metrics to choose from - you can get easily distracted and there’s complexity.
I’m also look at the sublte differences between “measures of success” and “ROI” and exactly how you consider the metrics in either case. Measures of success - are your goals, plus the “evidence” you gather to determine if you’ve been successful. Those numbers do not exist alone, but paint a broader context for improving what you’re doing while it is underway. Some people call this continuous improvement.
The ROI is more about asking questions - did we get our money’s worth? What did it cost us? What did it yield? Of course, as Chris Penn notes there are also the intangibles that lie beneath and are really hard to trace and measure.
Both are valuable to do.
I did a post awhile back riffing on Kaushik’s blog metrics post
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/05/measuring_your_.html — as part of exploring this topic
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/google/index.html
for a screencast on google analytics and some workshops
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/06/new-screencast-.html
All leading me back to your point .. that KEY metrics in the context of social media goals and strategy are valuable to determine the ROI and continuous improvement.
Thanks for thought provoking article …
[...] a good business to the areas of social media. For example, Chris Brogan’s thinking about how to measure social media efforts. That convergence - between social media and business - is important, because it helps legitimize [...]
I always do a “mapping” (if you want to call it that) as a part of the planning process for a social media campaign. The map includes measurable objectives along with appropriate communities in which we will engage. Mapping is equal to the planning process in a public relations campaign GOAL POST.
GOAL (set them)
P ublics (communities)
O bjectives (measurable)
S trategies (how to engage)
T actics (which tools to use)
Brilliant post Chris. I am yet another one of those out there trying to find a way to qualify and quantify what we in social media do. While I’ve had some clear as mud test cases, I’ve found no true measurment (or mapping technique), but that’s because my clients and I have not gone into it with the ideal end result in mind.
This is great food for thought for us and I thank you for it.
I would like to know, however, what you think are strong ways of measuring, say, the success of a blog if the goal is just to engage the greater world about our brand? Is it number or quality of comments, popularity of the blog (Technorati, etc.), product trial conversion (and how the heck do you measure that?) … all nuances we’re trying to figure out.
Thanks for the knowledge!
Chris, good post.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines and I think many people have.
I like the idea of mapping because it gets at the essence that social media needs a different type of measurement. What I’ve been toying around with is that having the ‘media’ label/tag to social media has this new conversational/communication/connection inherit a lot of intrinsic media properties - like an expected amount/traditional value of ROI for the reach, measurement problems, etc.
With a different/new way of brand communicating…this social media/new media grey matter needs different thinking…
[...] from idea to theory to practice. We’ve only just started talking about case studies and measuring campaigns . Let’s not be so quick to stifle ideas before they’ve had a chance to [...]
[...] Measuring Social Media Efforts Social Media Consultant Chris Brogan takes a little different approach as writes about mapping your social media activities to get a handle on the effectiveness of your efforts. The ROI of Social Media An article by Beth Kanter on The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) blog gives a good overview with lots of links and Beth’s typical thoughtfulness and depth on the topics she engages in. Her blog also has a wealth of info about social media ROI. [...]
[...] Measuring Social Media Efforts This post from Sept., almost ancient in the social media analytics lifespan, provides a good overview of factors for consideration in developing your social media analytics benchmarks. [...]
Everyone’s goals are different. The biggest issue is that so many people don’t HAVE goals — they create social media “just because.”
Even if you “have something to say,” or “want to connect,” it still helps to eventually pinpoint exactly WHAT success MEANS for you, so you can then measure the steps taken.
300,000 viewers for Something to Be Desired would be amazing. Would it constitute success, or a percentage thereof? If I don’t know that, I can’t tell if ANYTHING I’m doing is successful…