Perspectives Measuring
Measuring
Implementing a strategy is only an intermediate step of the process incorporating social media as a business practice.  A strategy only lays out the general guidelines of what one wants to achieve with social media in his or her business.  Next comes to the process of measuring and understanding the impact of these efforts so a business can adapt to the feedback that comes through these new channels.
Discounting Follower Inflation with the ClickMarket's TruPop™ Score
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On a near daily basis, I'm getting followers who are following tens of thousands of twitterers.This begs the question, what value is a follower to me if my tweets are buried in a combination of 30,000 other streams?

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Measuring Social Media: An Overview

If you’re like many organizations, personalities or brands, you’ve ventured into social media. You may have already discovered that it can be a huge time investment- but have you figured out the benefits of participating? How are you measuring your social media returns?

Measuring is a tool for decision support, for prioritization, for making patterns and meaning of data—done correctly it helps you decide where to put your energy, where to invest, what’s worth doing, what’s worth putting time into.Is what we’re doing actually working to advance our mission?Is this the optimal place to put our time and money?

 

Why Measuring Social Media is Different

Somewhere between brand advertising (difficult to measure) and direct marketing or SEM (super easy to measure), lies social media. The measurement used in traditional marketing (response rate, cost to acquire a customer, cost per thousand) doesn’t necessarily apply here, and the qualitative or indirect benefits from social media are much higher.These differences are driven by Nature of Engagement and the Impact Horizon.

The Nature of Engagement Differs 

Just Showing Up: Unlike search advertising, where you are in direct response to the almost telepathic inquiry or keyword query, communities and social media encourage and reward those with a steady Ongoing Presence (excluding promotional activity).
Listening: Rather than one directional taking AT a group of people, the nature of community is Interactive.
Give, give and give again: The Contextual Tone is helpful, building and encouraging and supporting other members of the community, and not explicitly self promoting, as in advertising (Chip reminded us of the scene in Miracle on 34th street, where the Macy’s Santa is telling people that they can find things at Gimbel’s, and how that comes back in a virtuous circle- nice example).
Share of mind: Finally, the Cognitive Framework of Social Nets is collaborative, respectful, not emphasizing immediate shop and buy, it’s not the place for hardsell- that’s not the mindset people are in when they are participating.You increase your share of mind, not necessarily your immediate click through.

The Impact Horizon Differs

Now and Later: Social media is a great example of “long tail” content economics. The impact or investment is not necessarily immediate- it is the result of longterm relationship and connection, of interactivity and discovery.Rather than a storm, it’s a lot of steady rain.A single post may continue to get pick ups and click throughs for months after it goes up.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving:Moreover, investing in building community, rather than one off hits, means that you are able to continue a dialogue for a longer time.Rather than one big hit, new community members or followers stay in your circle of concern and attention for a long time. Starting point:
Picking up Steam: Conversely, the timeline of building a social media base is more extended than buying keywords.How effective you will be at building your community or followers depends in large part on whether you are you starting with a natural market, or from scratch, and the overall pool you are swimming in.We allow anywhere between 6 weeks and 6 months to really build community.

How ClickMarkets Measures

With these differences in mind, ClickMarkets has developed WideAngle (tm) Metrics.This online service puts the core indicators of whether your investment is successful or not on a single, expandable page. Our report card outlines whether your work is paying off, and leading to analytics on what can and should be changed in your investment of time and money.WideAngle is currently only available to our services clients, but will be offered as a self service product- your can register here for our invitation based Beta program. Add a comment
 
Measurement Articles We Like
North American Technographics Media And Marketing Online Survey, Q2 2008

Interactive Insights Group

Building Reputation

The Technology Generation Gap at Work is Oh So Wide – ReadWriteWeb 

Social Networks & Blogs Now 4th Most Popular Online Activity, Ahead of Personal Email, Nielsen Reports

“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” says John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online.

  • One in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites.
  • The social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age: the biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites globally came from the 35-49 year old age group (+11.3 million).
  • Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking. Nielsen found UK mobile Web users have the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset, with 23 percent (2 million people) doing so, compared to 19 percent in the US (10.6 million people). These numbers are a big increase over last year – up 249 percent in the UK and 156 percent in the US.

Social Networking’s New Global Footprint

Global Faces and Networked Places

Open Source Measurement Camp

How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business by Aaron Uhrmacher at Mashable.com

Basic but offers some good insight on qualitative measurement plus some validation of quantitative sources (e.g. Xinu)

“Start by benchmarking ourselves with questions like:

  • Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?
  • How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?

Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:

  • Build better relationships with our key audiences?
  • Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?
  • Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?”

5 Terrific Twitter Research Tools by Ben Parr at Mashable.

15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends by Ben Parr at Mashable.

Tweefind Applies Google Magic to Twitter Search by Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

Social Media Monitoring Grudge Match: Radian6 vs. Scout Labs by Jason Falls in Social Media Explorer

Great article by industry user of Radian6

Radian6: There’s tie-in with Google’s social graph API, automated alerts for subjects (giving you Google Alerts on steroids), tagging and activity logging of contact with specific bloggers, a completely mind-boggling integration with Twitter to manage communications with an influencer on that particular network.

Radian6: The reason I say that, however, is that there’s normally just one or two people managing all this for smaller brands and that isn’t their only role. This is a tool best used by teams of communications staffers.

Comparison: Comparing the results, it’s clear that Radian6 has a much more thorough scan of the web. News items posted on WFPL.org, the website for the local NPR affiliate, were not picked up by Scout Labs, showing some apparent holes in their scans. They also don’t do a good job of catching message boards and forums, though I’m sure that will improve over time.

Comparison: Scout Labs uses indexing which, as I understand it, is more nimble and flexible than database-driven information. Radian6 uses a combination of indexing and database technology.

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