One of the best things about having marketers as my target market is that I personally benefit from thought leaders I get to work with to offer my audience valuable content.  And this blog is a great way for me to share some of the best of the best.  When it comes to social media measurement, I find that Katie Paine offers some great perspectives because measurement is her passion and she does a nice job of zeroing in on the practical and achievable.

One project we worked on together this year was a webinar produced by the American Marketing Association that we then had transcripted and summarized in a conclusions paper called “Five Best Practices to Get the Most from Social Media Measurement.”  I re-read it this week and found that the essence of the message might make a good blog post, so here is a summary.

Katie holds that conversations have always been going on – around the water cooler, in front of the television set, in the aisles of your grocery store and just about anywhere else.  What’s changed is that social media is the new water cooler with a twist - now the transcripts are splashed on a billboard 24 x 7 x 365, so the stakes are quite different.  What’s also changed is we now have the capability to measure, track and even show the ROI with analytics because social media is both electronic and digital.  Best practices have emerged, and here are the five that Katie laid out to get the most out of social media measurement:

1. Consider all the ways social media can impact profits.

Social media as a channel tends to be most strongly aligned with marketing or marketing communications, but its impact ripples across the enterprise. Many different groups have a vested interest.  The key is to create business processes whereby information from social media is translated into action wherever it can be taken because to the customer, it's all one company or brand.

2. Clarify what you want out of social media.

Define the R in your ROI. To be able to prove the ROI, you have to have a tangible business goal to begin with.  So questions to ask include what return that you’re hoping to deliver? Why are you doing this? What is the problem you are trying to solve?

Identify the audience. Who are you really trying to reach? Make sure you’ve defined your target audience well and that you’re really reaching them.

Establish benchmarks. Start by analyzing your competition – your peers. With sentiment, use analytics to go beyond merely measuring your positive sentiment and find out your share of the positive sentiment out there.

Nail your Kick Butt Index. This one is pure Katie – she says to find out what management considers “kicking butt” and aim for that. Focus on things that cause them to say “Congratulations, you are really kicking butt out there,” or “Hey, we’re really getting our butt kicked.” What are those metrics?

3. Make it a two-way conversation.

Marketers have to adjust to the give-and-take nature of social media, which is quite different from traditional outbound marketing. As online conversations about your business are happening, you need engage people in two-way conversation and not simply talk about you.  It’s no longer entirely about your message – it’s really about the conversation and how your message fits into it.

4. It's all about engagment - not impressions and hits.

Katie says that for too long, we have been focused on counting eyeballs, and there is no way to count eyeballs effectively, consistently, or accurately in social media – so just give it up.  Many Twitter followers are robo-followers, and on Facebook, you may know how many people like your Facebook page, but how many are paying any attention to what you post there? Even the sites/services that track hits, visitors and impressions are doing it inconsistently.

As an alternative, she defined a five-level hierarchy of measurements, with each tier involving progressively more engagement – a more meaningful measure of how well you’re doing with social media.  Each level has its own indicators of success, culminating with purchasing your products and recommending to others.  The key is to set management expectations appropriately so they support the time and effort required to build up to the highest levels of engagement.

5. Blend social media data with internal data.

Carpe data! Effective business strategy has bottom-line impacts when fueled by informed decisions. So the biggest opportunities with social data come from how they can be analyzed with other data to get a better handle on leading indicators. Using analytics, you can confidently drive improvements with a richer  understanding of the customer based on correlations between data from social media, contact center, surveys, customer service and billing records, online chat, emails and any other source of relevant customer interactions.

-------

In summary, the underpinnings of these five best practices is that for businesses, the advent of social media presents both risks and opportunities that compel attention.  It’s a business issue that’s eminently manageable with the right framework and the analytics to ensure accurate and relevant measurement and ROI.  For additional details, please register for this whitepaper or the webinar featuring Katie Paine discussing these topics:

Whitepaper: Five Best Practices to Get the Most from Social Media Measurement
Webinar:  Marketing Measurement:  Less Talk + More Action = Better Results

In the meantime, let me know what you think.  Have you seen any of these five practices in play?  If so, how are they working?  Thanks again for following!