De-fuzzing social media measurement

In the bath thinking, as one does, of social media it occurred to me that measuring the effectiveness of social media is potentially a very fuzzy activity.

Putting a little structure around it might therefore be of some value.

So I thought – well, there are three main types of measurement you can consider. There’s absolute data – data that measures size.  There is trend data – data that measures change. And there is comparative data – which you could use for benchmarking.

Absolute data is factual – I have 5000 Twitter followers (I wish), or 37 people have commented on this blog post (ditto). Or 6000 people viewed my video on YouTube. Or my brand was mentioned 5000 times in forums. Etc etc. Some of this can perhaps be assigned a value in media terms. And while it isn’t always easy to assign an appropriate value (what is a Facebook fan worth?) at least you can make a start.

Trend data is also factual – but as you are comparing two sets of data, as you can with tools like Alterian’s SM2, the important fact is the change in the data. Thus if there are 10,000 positive mentions of my brand through social media in August that may or may not be good: it’s hard to know. But if there were 9000 in July and 12,000 in September I can be pretty confident that I am going in the right direction and that the value of those mentions in September is 125% of the value in July. (There are some big assumptions being made here, but the principle is I think valid.)

And there is comparative data. I might have 12,000 positive brand mentions in September. But if my competitor got 50,000 that month I’m not looking so bright!

Then there are the results of the social media conversations: these may be conversations, actions or effects. I’ll explain.

Conversations are simply mentions of your brand or your competitors  in various places – forums, blogs, file shares etc. They can be good, bad or indifferent (and you should be measuring that). At its simplest it equates to your PR agency counting the press clips.

Next there are views. Sometimes it’s possible to measure the number of people who have seen some of your social media conversations – for instance by measuring visitor numbers to your blog. You won’t always be able to measure that – but where you can this may be a helpful metric. 

Often these numbers will be small – perhaps too small to be relevant in media terms. But they might not be. If Sony Bravia gets a couple of million views of its ad on YouTube then that’s worth something. Probably more in fact than 2 million OTSs on TV.

Then there are actions. This is when people have done something – taken an action of some kind, perhaps signing up to follow you on Twitter, or responding to a comment you have made in a forum.

Again often the numbers here will be very small – and the real value may not be in terms of media but in  terms of the opportunity they bring to engage with brand advocates.

And then we have effects. This is when you can see that social media activity has had an effect on something else you are doing. For instance, and at its simplest, you could measure the effect (or at least some of the effect) of social media on web traffic by tracking people from appropriate sources such as social networking sites. Some web analytics tools like Coremetrics are able to automate at least part of this.

Other effects might only be measurable through data analysis, for instance identifying links between social media campaigns and calls to a call centre or online sales. This is the sort of analysis that direct response media agencies do all the time for their clients.

Of course the effect might well be softer than a measurable and identifable action. It may be a shift in purchase propensity or brand favourability on the part of people exposed to your social media. That’s harder to measure although not impossible using standard quantitative research techniques. (The branding effects of online display are often measured this way.)

So there you have it. A little 3 by 4 matrix that should help you put some rigour into the process of evaluating social media. It isn’t perfect by any means. But at least it isn’t fuzzy!

I’m not bitter. I’m on Twitter

Several clients have asked me recently about how they can evaluate their social media activity. I’m tweeting like mad, they say, but I’m not sure it’s doing much good. Well, unless they have thought hard about what they want to achieve on Twitter it probably isn’t doing much good. But that’s another story.

What they want (and need) to understand is how they can measure what they are doing and whether it is having any positive effect.

So how can you measure social media?

Well, the simplest thing is to monitor conversations. Personally, I use Alterian’s excellent SM2 tool (www.alterian-social-media.com; it has a great Freemium version) but there are plenty of other tools, some free and some that you have to pay for.

You can use a tool like SM2 a little like a search engine (SM2  “listens” to conversations in social media including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, thousands of blogs, Wikis, product review sites etc) .  Type in a keyword (your brand, a competitor, a concept…) and see how much “noise” it is generating, how many people are talking about it.

SM2 will generate a list of conversations about your brand, as well as letting you cut  the data in various ways such as by location, author, type, time, sentiment, publication etc.

Using this sort of tool you can look at changes in the overall “share of voice” that your brand has in the social media space. Have conversations about your brand increased during your latest campaign? Has the launch of a competing brand reduced the interest shown in your brand significantly?

This won’t provide you with an “absolute” value but it will show you whether the value you are generating is rising or falling.

The difficulty in providing a robust ”absolute” value is caused by the fact that, in most social media conversations you simply don’t know how many people have seen the mention of your brand; you can only measure those people who have actively interacted with it – and these are likely to be the minority. Perhaps though it is justifiable to make an assumption based on the generalities of social media behaviour.Thus if a hundred people have contributed to conversations about your brand it would probably be reasonable to assume that two thoudand people have seen those conversations.

You can also look at the share of voice your brand has compared with competitors. SM2 is great at this but if you just want to look at blogs then blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com) is a brilliant and simple-to-use tool which provides great graphing.

Again this is a comparative tool that won’t give you an answer in pounds, shillings and pence but it will tell you if you are doing better or worse than your competitors.

You can also start to measure the “sentiment” associated with the conversations. Are people saying nice or nasty things about your brand? Increases in positive sentiment within conversations is obviously a good thing! 

Measuring sentiment  isn’t an exact science (what does “wicked” really mean?) and ideally you will use a tool that allows you to customise the sentiment measurement, rather than one that is fully automated.

Another very useful tool is Search. Use Google Trends to monitor changes in search activity on particular relevant search terms. If new social media activity coincides with an increase in search terms relevant to your brand  then it is possible that the two are related.

You can start to prove the relationship between social media and search by examining your web analytics.  If you are seeing an increase in website visits you need to look for two things.

First, are the search terms being used to find your site relevant to the conversations going on in social media?

And second, how much of the new traffic is being driven from social media content such as blogs and communities? And is this traffic more (or less) engaged and valuable. 

You may find this hard to measure without the right site analytics tools and processes (but if you haven’t got them right you are probably missing a whole bunch of other stuff too!)

Take care though. It may be easy to see the traffic driven directly to your site from social media as you can see that they are arriving from blog sites etc.  But other traffic will be arriving at your site as a result of your social media conversations, but not necessarily directly from those conversations. In other words social media is probably delivering more than you can see.

Another way of valuing social media is to look at “brand participants“, people who are actively engaged with your brand online. For instance how many followers do you have on Twitter; how many fans on Facebook?

And how many people  have shared or forwarded content your content – e.g. retweeting, email this page, forward this email etc.

It may not be possible to put an exact value on these activities but again comparative values are simple to achieve and with some imagination absolute values can be guesstimated.

At the moment though the only robust way of measuring the effect of social media will be through new research where changes to brand perceptions can be linked to social media activity though the use of quantitative research tools. For instance you may be able to prove a change to ad awareness, especially when a social media campaign has been used to enhance an ad campaign.

It’s early days for social media in marketing. Attrributing accurate absolute values is difficulties and requires many assumptions. And you are as likely to undercount as to overcount! Nonetheless, there are plenty of instances when social media activity has coincided with a rise in sales or brand values. Social media isn’t just about disarming brand critics. It’s about building real brand value. Even if we can’t always prove it!

Will the GSMA’s mobile metrics herald the “year of mobile advertising”?

The GSMA announced the launch of their mobile media metrics tool, delivered by Comscore, at the London Imax yesterday.

It was certainly a popular event, and massively over-subscribed by all accounts. So I went along ready to be impressed.

Well, to their credit, the GSMA have managed to get the five main UK mobile operators, O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK, into one space, sharing usage data to allow robust reach and frequency numbers to be accessed by media planners.

That’s useful. We can see that 16 million people in the UK accessed the web via mobile devices (by which they mean phones – small screens, limited ease of use, but always on and always with you).

And we can see where they go: Facebook, Google, the operators, the BBC… (Actually, when you look at the figures in a bit more depth and examine page views and minutes of use, you find that mobile media is really little more than Facebook Media, but that’s another story.)

And, because GSMA have negotiated a survey of a section of mobile users we can even make some assumptions about the socio-demographics of mobile web site visitors. (Although these are assumptions and I believe will be open to some question.)

But. And it’s a very big but:

There is still no independent data. At the moment all the data comes from the operators. So you buy some media. And the operators will tell you whether or not it has been delivered.

For mobile media to have any credibility (and Michael Smith of the COI was quick to point this out yesterday) we do need to see independent campaign data such as that which is delivered by third party ad servers in “fixed” internet advertising.

Without that (and irrespective of whether you feel the heavy dominance of Facebook is an issue), it will be hard to justify serious spending on mobile media.

iPad – lovely, but it won’t save the newspaper industry

Everyone else is doing it, so I guess I’d better. Here goes…

I’m sure it’s a lovely notebook. Except for the fact that it doesn’t have a webcam; and it can only handle one application at a time; and it can’t handle flash. And it will probably be a rip off price in the UK, like everything else.

But it looks lovely in an Apply sort of way and I’d probably “get” it more if I was given one to play with.

I’m still disappointed though. There was a lot of hype about the iPad being a “kindle killer” and a device that would revolutionise the newspaper industry. I can’t see it doing either of these things.

Unlike the iPad, the Kindle has a very special screen – easy to read in a way that computer screens are not. With a Kindle you feel inclined to read text – not just scan it.

Computer screens are hard to read – hence the need for text to be short and easy to absorb. And because of the way people react physically to current computer screen technology they are never going to be a place where you will comnfortably read long newspaper articles.  Kindle-type screens (sometimes called e-ink or e-paper) might well be. 

Of course the Kindle isn’t ideal for reading a newspaper either. What you really need is a big screen that allows you to “surf” the page in the way that (paper) newspaper readers do, letting their eyes get caught by interesting headlines (not sure the 9.7 inch DX is really big enough to do this, although anything larger might be cumbersome if it didn’t fold).  Oh, and a screen that you can write on (to make notes or fill in the crossword).

The iPad is, well, a bit more than a big iPod Touch. But without an e-ink screen I can’t see it having an effect on the newspaper industry. Because I can’t see many people rushing to access newspapers on an iPad in a way that would replicate their currently established behaviour of paying to access paper based content . The experience would just be too different.

Of course it might well be a different story for magazines…