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!
Jeremy Swinfen Green's YabaDabaDoo 