metrics

Innovative Use of Traditional Metrics

Here’s an interesting concept: using traditional measurement tactics to determine the success of non-traditional (social media) marketing.

At first, it sounds as though this goes against my persistent encouragement for companies to measure the Return on Relationship rather than just the standard Return on Investment, but actually it doesn’t.

In his July 19 blog post entitled “The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More Than Dollars and Cents”, Forrester blogger Augie Ray introduces the Social Media Marketing Balanced Scoreboard. The key word here is balanced. Although he still uses the phrase “Return on Investment,” what he’s writing is actually about much more than the standard notion of return on financial investment only.

Ray writes, “Facebook fans, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities are not financial assets—they aren’t reflected on the balance sheet and can’t be counted on an income statement—but that doesn’t mean they are valueless. Instead, these are leading indicators that the brand is doing something to create value that can lead to financial results in the future.” In other words, ROR – Return on Relationship!

This Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard encourages “interactive marketers” to measure success across four areas:

  • Financial
  • Brand
  • Risk Management
  • Digital

Notice that the scorecard doesn’t measure only financial success – nor does it measure only brand success. Both are included here.

Bottom line? While we social media marketers tend to be all about innovation, there is still room for some things traditional – when used deliberately and wisely!

Ted Rubin

13 Truths About Social Media Measurement

1. If you aren’t measuring anything else, social media measurement isn’t the problem.

Measurement is a discipline, and it needs to be business-wide. If you’re going to ask about the ROI, value, or impact of social media and how to measure it, I’m going to ask how you’re going about determining those things for other areas of your business, and ask you to translate or adapt some of those practices over to social initiatives.

If you’re not measuring anything else, you’ll have a learning curve. A steep one. It’ll come complete with needing the right tools and platforms to collect data, the right people to analyze it, the buy in from management to spend the time doing all of this, and the commitment to use the measurement as a means to underscore your strategy. The social media data is available for the taking, so that’s not the problem. The *real* issue is connecting the dots. See #4.

2. Measurement is not the goal.

The goal is to derive insights that teach you something of value, and then act on them. Measurement is a waystation, a path, but is not the goal in itself. You don’t get a cookie for measuring.

You probably need to spend three times as much time and effort evaluating and acting on your data than you do collecting and formatting it. Why? Because the analysis is what yields direction, plans, action steps, you name it. You START with the data. You need to end up with a course of action, or the act of measuring (and all the time you spent doing it) is wasted.

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Are You Measuring What’s Important?

We often talk about social media ROI being measured differently. These are different behaviors and we should be applying new and different measurement standards, right? One of my favorite demonstrations of this is K.D. Paine’s legendary acronymn HITS = How Idiots Track Success.

A recent eMarketer article asked Is the Click Still King? To the average user, there are so many ways to engage with a site. So you would think that there would be more relevant and prevalent ways of measuring success. But take a look at the top methods that both the CMO Council and Chief Marketer respondents indicated were important:

Click-throughs and website views. How very 1999.

Although, I will give the CMO Council the edge on this one, with looking at registrations, which tells you a little bit about actions taken and level of commitment to engage. That’s a positive thing. But it seems like we’re still treating the Web like a version of television, where “eyeballs” are what’s important.

Take a look farther down those charts and see some of the interesting ways of measuring success: content download, transactions, engagement (which is a little vague), and increased knowledge. Those are all methods of demonstrating effectiveness that can determine your content strategy and marketing channels moving forward. But ultimately, each time a campaign is launched, the methodology for measurement needs to be customized to the goal at hand. Click-throughs and hits are not a universal metric for every campaign.

Some metrics that might appeal to me as a marketer include:

  • Likelihood of a customer to become an advocate for my brand
  • The spread of information across the Web – especially via social tools
  • Sentiment of comments generated by a post or campaign
  • Effective integration of offline calls to action and online actions

These are just a handful of suggestions for different types of measurement. As I said, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. What are some unique and different measurement standards that you’ve seen evolving?

Scott Monty

Photo credit: raneko (Flickr)

Resisting The Temptation of Meaningless Metrics

With the question of measurable ROI of social media echoing at the financial end of the C-Suite, it is tempting to fall back on the numbers. And while hits, followers, friends and connections are measures to be sure, are they the measure of social media success? (For that matter, are the numbers a smart measure of the potential?)

In a recent roundtable with colleagues, a marketing manager described a campaign designed to do nothing more than exponentially increase hits on a consultant’s blog. The campaign sounded like a radio station-style promotional gimmick with one major exception: the overwhelming majority of those lured to the consultant’s blog were not in any way, shape or form targets for the blog’s content. The goal was simply to achieve thousands of “hits.” The “hook” for the campaign was a blatant example of false advertising, and well over 99% of those hitting the site, left as quickly as they arrived. Any thought that they might one day be an actual target of the consultant overshadowed by the fact that any hope for credibility was forever lost.

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