Social Media Listening Platforms – Plan, Select, Deploy (Part Two – Select)

In Part One, we discussed a range of topics designed to help you plan and define the scope and requirements for selecting and deploying a social media listening platform across your company or organization.  In Part Two, we will use the knowledge and perspective we gained in planning to orchestrate a thorough and effective platform selection process.

Here is a scalable selection process that will help you surface and select the social media listening platform that best meets your unique situation and requirements.

1. Define the individuals who will be involved in the selection process – Inclusion is a powerful card to play here.  Inclusion brings different perspectives together.  Inclusion greatly improves chances for success when it is time to authorize purchase of a platform and get it deployed properly across the organization or company.  Inclusion will increase the likelihood of acceptance and use of the platform across the organization.  Include representatives from the major stakeholder groups identified during the planning process.  You might include someone from your IT department.  You might also include the individuals who must authorize the purchase.  A group of up to ten is most workable.  After ten or so, I believe you will most likely experience diminishing returns on the incremental people added to the process.

2. Develop a list of selection criteria organized by major category – Based on the planning process we undertook in Part One, develop a list of categories that are most important to learn more about.  Here are ten categories you might consider including:

• Content Sources/Types & Aggregation Strategy – What types of social content are brought into the system?  How is the content aggregated (e.g. RSS, crawling, third-party aggregators)?  How often is each type of content aggregated?  

• Data and Search Considerations – How long is content archived, and is back data available?  What data cleansing strategies are in place to address spam, splogs and duplicate content?  Is full Boolean logic available for constructing searches?

• Metrics and Analytics – What specific metrics are ‘standard’ in the system?  Is automated sentiment analysis offered at the brand or post level?  What audience-level data is available?

• Data Presentation  – What dashboard features and functionality are offered?  Can dashboards be customized by user or group?  Are drill-down capabilities available for all analytics on the dashboard?    

• Engagement and Workflow Functionality – Does the platform offer the ability to engage directly with content owners?  Can ‘owned’ content be managed on-platform?  What workflow management and reporting capabilities are offered?

• Integration – What additional types of data may be integrated in the system – traditional media, web analytics, email, call center, CRM, etc?

• Reporting Capability – Does the platform have a report function?  Can reports be customized?  Automated?

• Geographic Scope – What countries and languages are addressed by the system?  Are two-byte languages supported?

• Cost Structure – What is the cost basis – seat charge, subscription, content volume and/or number of searches?  How does pricing vary with increases in the cost basis?

• Value-added Services – Does the listening platform vendor offer system configuration services?  Do they perform analysis and reporting?

Within each major category, list the specific criteria most relevant and important to your requirements.  For example, within the Data and Search Considerations category, you might list ten specific criteria that you want to assess for each vendor:

• How often is Twitter data refreshed?  Can refresh timing be specified?
• How often is new content from other sources crawled/brought into the system?
• How long can each content type be archived?
• Is back data available?  How far back and at what cost?
• What data cleansing strategies are in place?
• Can data be easily exported in CSV/Excel format and is bulk data extraction supported?
• Can users build and customize topics and searches?
• What types of Boolean operators are supported?
• Is proximity search supported?
• Do users have the ability to date-range data for analysis?

3. Develop a scorecard to use in evaluating the potential listening platform vendors/partners – Using the major categories and specific criteria you have defined, develop an overall scorecard to be used in the evaluation process.  Think about creating a weighting system at the category level to help prioritize the importance of each category.  Assign a number of points to each criteria within a given category.  A scorecard might contain ten categories each containing ten criteria.  Begin by assigning a one-point value to each criteria (100 points total) and then apply weighting at the category level.

4. Develop the initial vendor consideration set – List all the social media platform vendors you wish to consider.  Pick ones you are familiar with and have positive experiences with as a starting point.  Talk to colleagues within, and experts outside, the organization to gain their perspective on the platforms that should be considered.  Read blog posts and reviews of the platforms to gain additional outside perspective.  Visit vendor websites and watch demo videos.  Pull it all together and gain consensus amongst your team on the platforms that will be considered.

5. Do some homework and narrow the list to a manageable number (perhaps five to ten)- If your initial vendor consideration set is too large (if it has more than ten vendors it is too large), do some additional homework and narrow your list to a more manageable number.

6. Develop and distribute an RFI based on evaluation criteria – Using the categories and criteria you developed, create a request for proposal, asking the listening platform vendors the questions that are most critical to meeting your requirements.  Specify the format (e.g. PowerPoint, Word) you would like responses to take.  Give the vendors about two weeks to respond.

7. Evaluate and score vendor responses – Once the RFI documents are received, each should be reviewed carefully and scored according to the criteria and weighting decided previously.  Depending on the number of vendors being evaluated and ease of getting the entire evaluation team together, there may be merit in blocking out an afternoon to gather as a group, read through the responses, and decide how each will be scored.  This is a bit of a ‘pulling off the band-aid’  approach that will save time and allow for spirited discussion and consensus scoring.  If this is impractical for whatever reason in your company or organization, assign one of more RFIs to individuals who will then develop the scorecards.  The scorecards may then be reviewed together in a meeting or conference call, and consensus reached on scoring.  Obviously the potential issue with multiple people independently creating scorecards is consistency.  You want the evaluation to be as fair and consistent as possible given whatever constraints you are working under.

8. Develop a short list of vendors – If your number of vendors under consideration is over five, use the scorecards to reduce the list to three to five platforms that will undergo further evaluation.  These are your finalists.  You should always promptly notify vendors not moving forward in the process, and offer to provide feedback via phone or email on why they were not selected to move forward.  This professionalism will be much appreciated by the vendors, and represents a good learning opportunity for all involved if done well.

9. Deploy test scenarios – At this point we have narrowed the list of contenders and are ready to proceed with some specific tests designed to illuminate the real-world capabilities of the platforms.  Here are three possible test scenarios.  You can use all three for a very rigorous evaluation, or just one or two if that fits your needs better.

• Test scenario 1: Give each vendor a defined list of search terms (brands, competitors, issues) and the languages/countries you want to evaluate.   You should use search terms that are directly relevant to your company or organization.  Explain what type of analysis you would like performed and ask each to address insight generation.  Platform vendors are given one week to prepare an analysis.  If practical, you could ask each vendor to give a presentation of the results in person.  Alternatively, use a web conference to review the results.
• Test scenario 2: This is a real-time exercise designed to assess vendor data volume by country/language and signal-to-noise ratio of relevant content.  Get on a web conference with each social media listening platform vendor.  Give them a new list of three search terms and ask that they go into their platform, configure the system for the three search terms and then pull in relevant content for the past 30 days.  Once that is accomplished, ask them to export the data as an CSV or Excel file and email you the results while everyone is still on the line.  A more detailed off-line review of the results should be undertaken, including translation of languages, to assess relevancy of the results.
• Test scenario 3: This has been referred to by a colleague as the Dr. Evil test…In conjunction with test scenario two, it may be interesting to ‘plant’ known content that matches the search terms on different Twitter channels, Facebook pages and Forums in each country that is of interest to you.  When you receive your data export, examine to determine if the known content was found.

10. Pick a winner – At this point you have the RFIs, scorecards and test results.  You are ready to make your decision.  Convene the evaluation team, discuss the results and make a decision.  With luck, a clear winner will have emerged from the process.  Contact the winner and negotiate terms of a contract.  Don’t notify the non-winners until after a contract is in place, just in case you need to move to your second choice for whatever reason.

In Part Three, we will discuss how to maximize your potential for success when actually deploying the social media listening platform across your organization.

Social Media Listening Platforms – Plan, Select, Deploy (Part One – Plan)

It is not difficult to find a social media listening platform/tool – there are over 100 to choose from.  What is difficult is to find the right tool.  It takes a keen understanding of your scope and requirements.  It takes an evaluation and selection process that will surface the best platform to fully meet your requirements.  And it takes a well thought-out process for deploying the platform across the organization in an effective and efficient manner.   There are many questions to be asked and answers to be given.  Asking the right questions at the right time is crucial.

It is helpful to think of the overall process in three phases:

Plan – Define requirements, stakeholders, scope

Select – Create a platform evaluation process tailored to your unique requirements

Deploy – The selected platform across the organization with training, workflow and other important issues addressed.

This three-part series will tackle each phase one at a time.  First up – Plan.

In many ways, the planning phase is the most important.  Overlook an important detail here and you may or may not be able to overcome it later.  Here are ten topic areas to discuss within your organization to make sure you are setting yourself up for success.

1. Stakeholders – What are the primary stakeholder groups within my company or organization?  Possible stakeholder groups might include marketing, corporate communications and customer service/care at the macro level.  Depending on the size of your organization, various regions, divisions, groups or product lines may also be distinct stakeholder groups.  Once you have identified the primary stakeholders, set up time to meet with each group.  Understand how they currently use social listening tools and what, from their perspective, are ‘must have’ capabilities versus ‘nice to have’ capabilities in a social listening platform.  Ask each stakeholder group the applicable questions from the list below.
2. Geographic Scope – What languages and countries are stakeholders interested in including in the platform?  Try to understand the relative priority of each country and language.  Also be sure to comprehend future requirements.  For example, if Chinese is not a priority today but will be within two years, you may want to only consider listening platforms that support two-byte languages.  Also probe to assess if social media content will need to be translated into other languages.  This may be primarily an internal workflow issue or outsourcing issue, but might also be a platform consideration.
3. Value-added Services – It is very important to develop a point of view on how monitoring, analysis and reporting will be done within your organization.  Will each stakeholder group be responsible for doing this themselves or will a centralized analytics and insights group be responsible?  In addition to the self-serve approach, you could consider outsourcing this work to your social listening platform vendor or to one of your agencies – PR, digital or advertising.  In my experience, it is easy for a company or organization to underestimate both the skill and time commitment necessary to make the self-serve approach effective.
4. Content/Data Types – Social media listening platform vendors generally include content from the primary social media properties -  Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, YouTube and MySpace (being generous here).  Flickr is also included in many.  Currently on vendor roadmaps are properties like Linked-In and perhaps customer review sites.  Make sure the content types the platform supports meets your stakeholder requirements.  It is also very important to understand how the social content is being aggregated and how frequently (see Reporting for more on latency issues).  The fundamental ways in which content is aggregated in social listening platforms are crawling the web, RSS feeds and third-party content aggregators (e.g. Boardreader for Forums).  Many platform vendors employ a hybrid approach.
5. Metrics and Analytics – Most social listening platforms either have a set group of analytics that deliver specific metrics or they offer configurable analytic ‘widgets’ that may be used to create metrics like share of conversation or volume and tone trend.  Some platforms offer a combination of these two approaches.  Based on your needs and measurement strategy/approach, define the analytics and metrics you would ideally like to see (e.g. volume, sentiment, messages, share-of-conversation, association with key topics).  In the vendor selection phase, this list will be useful to compare and contrast vendors.
6. Keywords and Topics – During the planning phase, it is wise to develop a list of the major keywords and topics you believe will be necessary for the listening platform.  These keywords might include the company name, key competitors, industry issues, market segment names,  brand names, product names, key spokespersons, executives and competitor and industry spokespersons.  Social media listening platforms have varying degrees of sophistication with respect to their search capability.  Some have full Boolean logic, others offer very simple AND/OR logic.  The importance of this difference depends to some degree on you company/brand name as well as the sophistication of the people who will be configuring and maintaining your system.  If, for example, your company name is a common word (e.g. Apple, Visa), you will need stronger logic capabilities that include proximity search.
7. Integration – Integration of varying data types – search, web, social, advertising, customer opinion and others – is the present and future of online measurement.  It is therefore important to understand what capabilities, if any, the social listening platform vendor has to integrate with other data types/streams.  Do they offer the ability to connect with web analytics packages via API for example?  The web/social integration is becoming increasingly common.  If you need to integrate traditional media with social, it might be a nice feature if the social listening platform allows third-party content aggregators like Factiva, Lexis Nexis, VMS or Critical Mention.
8. Reporting – During the planning phase it is helpful to think through a series of questions about reports and reporting.  What type of reports are necessary?  Who will be responsible for their creation?  How often will reports be issued?  Does the system need the capability to automatically generate and deliver reports?  What about automated alerts?  There are quite a wide range of report capabilities represented by the various vendors in the listening space.  One potentially critical area to explore during the vendor evaluation phase is related to report frequency and perhaps to report type (think crisis).  That is how often new content is brought into the system.  Content latency issues may cause real problems during a fast-moving crisis.  Generally, the content latency differs by media type.  Best for Twitter and worst (perhaps) for forums, some of which restrict crawling to no more than once per day.  Within Twitter, the type of relationship the vendor has with Twitter should also be explored.  Not all Firehose arrangements are the same.  While most social media listening platforms claim to be ‘real time’, it is interesting to ask the vendors to define what they mean by ‘real time’.  The answers may surprise you.
9. Access – Discuss who needs access to the listening platform and what they want to see and be able to do once they are in the system.  Do your different stakeholder groups (Divisions, product lines, brands, corporate, marketing, etc.) want or need a customized view of the data perhaps presented on a separate dashboard within the system?  It is also a good idea to have a perspective on who your power users will be versus the casual users.  This distinction applies not only to system access, but also in areas like training.
10. Engagement – Some social media listening platforms support engagement with content owners directly from the platform, others do not.  Some engagement capabilities are elegant, others are rudimentary.  Make sure to explore the engagement needs of your stakeholders and understand how important this capability is to them in the short and long-term.  If engagement capabilities are important, you will also want to explore if the system allows users to tag content, assign content, manage assignments and track workflow.

In Part Two, we’ll examine a rigorous process for social media listening platform vendor evaluation and selection.

AVEs are a Disease – Here’s a Little Vaccine

One of the truly insidious aspects of public relations measurement is the use of advertising value equivalency (AVEs) or media value to assign financial value to public relations outputs.  It is a highly flawed, path-of-least-resistance attempt to calculate return on investment (ROI) for public relations.   To make matters worse, the practice has clearly moved into social media measurement as well.  For example, research studies that attempt to monetize the value of a Facebook Fan/Liker by attributing a CPM value from the advertising world.  Online media impact rankings also utilize equivalent paid advertising costs to assign monetary value to online news and social media.  AVE is like a disease that has infected and spread throughout the public relations industry.

In June of 2010, the PR industry came together in Barcelona to draft the Barcelona Principles, a set of seven principles of good measurement intended to provide guideposts for the industry.  The principle that has generated the most conversation is this one:

Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is Not the Value of Public Relations

 While many of the Measurati have been preaching against AVEs for years, there now appears to be a critical mass of outrage that may kill the practice in the coming years.  Here are four compelling reasons why I believe we must make this happen – the sooner the better.

1. AVEs Do Not  Measure Outcomes

AVEs equate an article with the appearance cost of an advertisement.  It does not speak at all to the results or impact that the article may have on a reader.  Advertisers do not judge the success of advertising on how much the insertions cost.  Imagine an advertising manager being asked by his or her boss, “How are we doing in advertising this year?”, and them replying, “Great!  We have spent $500,000 so far!  The true value of public relations or social media is not the appearance cost, but what happened as a result of the PR or social media effort – the impact it has on brand, reputation and marketing.  You will note the Barcelona Principles also call for a focus on measuring outcomes and not (just) outputs.  What happened as a result of media coverage is inherently more interesting and valuable than how much coverage was obtained.

2. AVEs Reduce Public Relations to Media Relations

You are, or become, what you measure.  AVEs do not address the impact or value of several important aspects of public relations including strategic counsel, crisis communications, grassroots efforts, viral campaigns or public affairs.  In other words, AVEs reduce PR to just the media dimension by only assigning a value in this area.  If only AVEs are used to assess PR value, the results will understate the totality of value delivered by PR.  AVEs also cannot measure the value of keeping a client with potentially negative news out of the media, yet that may be the primary objective of the PR practitioner.

3. AVEs Fly in the Face of Integrated Measurement                

Good marketing, branding and reputation campaigns have always been integrated to varying degrees.  The digitization of our lives has accelerated integration.

Advertising and PR actually work together synergistically, yet AVEs treat them as cost alternatives.  Studies have shown ads that run in a climate of positive publicity actually receive lift from the PR.  Conversely, ads run in an environment of negative publicity will likely not be successful and/or may be perceived negatively by consumers.  We have seen exposure to brand advertising increases conversion rates in social channels. Integrated campaigns and programs require integrated measurement.  AVEs don’t play well in this world.  They are analog and segregated in a digital and integrated world.

4. AVEs Provide No Diagnostic Value

Too much measurement energy is focused on score-keeping and not diagnostics.  This is one reason why single-number metrics like the Klout score and others have great appeal to many.  However, measurement is fundamentally about assessing performance against objectives with sufficient detail and granularity to determine what is working and what is not.  AVEs fail miserably in this regard.  AVE results can actually be misleading and result in false positives.  AVEs may be trending up while important metrics like message communication, share of favorable positioning and share of voice are falling.  Unfortunately, AVEs provide neither a valid single-number score nor any diagnostic value.

Some have said the Barcelona Principles are the ‘end of AVEs’.  I would agree directionally with that statement with one minor addition, Barcelona was the ‘beginning of the end of AVEs’.  Awareness of the practice and recognition of its flaws are at an all-time high in our industry.  More education and evangelism are required.  Understanding concepts like impact, tangible value, intangible value and (true) return on investment help foster much more sophisticated conversation about the total value delivered by public relations and social media.  AVEs are a disease, education and knowledge are the vaccine.  AVEs won’t die easily.  The momentum generated by the Barcelona event has provided focus and intent.  It is up to all of us to make AVEs a thing of the past.

Social Media Measurement 2011: Five Things to Forget and Five Things to Learn

It has been said that social media came of age in 2010.  Not so for social media measurement.  But the mainstreaming of social media marketing brings with it a heightened call for accountability.  The need to prove the value of social media initiatives has never been greater.  So, perhaps 2011 will be the year that social media measurement matures and comes of age.

As we look to the next year, here are five things to forget and five things to learn about social media measurement in 2011.

Things to Forget in 2011

1. Impressions

The public relations industry has historically measured and reported success through the lens of quantity not quality.  The most common PR metric today is Impressions.  While it is a somewhat dubious metric for traditional media, it really loses meaning in social media where engagement not eyeballs is what we seek.  Impressions also (greatly) overstate actual relevant audience.   Impressions merely represent an opportunity to see, they do not attempt to estimate the (small) percentage of the potential audience that actually saw your content.

For Twitter, many folks use the sum of all first generation followers as ‘impressions’ for a particular tweet.  The obvious problem here is that the probability that any one follower sees any one tweet is quite small.  I don’t have good data on this (please share if you do), but an educated guess might put the percentage at less than 5%.  Similarly for Facebook, use of impressions as a metric is also problematic.  Facebook impressions do not indicate unique reach and you don’t have any idea who, if anyone, actually viewed the content.

Number of Impressions is a flawed, unwashed masses metric for social media measurement.  Any time you are tempted to use the word ‘impressions’ in social media, think about ‘potential reach’ or ‘opportunities to see’ instead.  Or better yet, concentrate on Engagement and Influence.

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2. Vanity Metrics – Fans and Followers

Most social media measurement efforts place far too much emphasis on Fans/Likers and Followers.  For Twitter, the number of Followers is seen as a key metric, thought by many to relate to potential influence.  For Facebook it is the number of Fans/Likers many companies/brands attempt to maximize.  While these may be the vanity metrics of choice, they fall far short of being adequate for rigorous measurement.  The largest disconnect of course is these numbers really don’t describe potential audience size very well and they have nothing to do with interactions/engagement.

For Twitter, there is a growing amount of evidence (read the Million Follower Fallacy paper) that number of Followers really has little to do with Influence.  Number of Followers may be an indication of popularity but not influence.  Influence talks more to one’s ability to start conversations and spread ideas.  For Facebook, number of Fans bears little semblance to average daily audience size and tells you nothing about engagement of the community.  All Fans are not created equally.  Some are engaged, some never return.  Some are your best customers, others are there only to trash you.

Number of Fans and Followers are metrics you probably should include in your overall metrics set, but should be de-emphasized and not be a primary area of focus.

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3. Standardization

Measurement standardization is always an interesting topic to debate.  On one side you have the folks who believe standards are absolutely necessary for measurement to proliferate, and on the other side you have the snowflake measurement disciples who believe each program is unique and therefore requires unique objectives/metrics.  I fall somewhere between the two extremes.

In June 2010 IPR, AMEC, PRSA, ICCO and The Global Alliance got together in Barcelona for a conference intended to create an atmosphere for measurement consistency/standardization around a codified set of principles of good measurement.  The Barcelona Principles as they have come to be called are basic statements of good measurement practice – focus on outcomes not outputs, don’t use AVEs, etc.  Absolutely nothing to disagree with in the Principles.  However, the heavy lifting of standardization comes at the metrics-level.  Subcommittees have been formed that are taking the Principles all the way down to the metrics level.  I have reviewed the work of the social media committee and believe there is a lot of good work being done.

But in 2011, I expect a lot of debate but not a lot of progress in creating social media measurement standardization.   One to watch is the Klout score for online influencers which is being integrated as metadata in social media listening and engagement platforms.  There are issues with the Klout score (read this post), and I question the type of ‘influence’ it is measuring – there is a big difference between motivating someone to action (e.g. retweeting your content) and motivating someone to purchase which is ultimately the type of influence many companies and brands are most interested in effecting.

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4. Ad or Media Equivalency

One of the truly insidious aspects of public relations measurement is the use of advertising or media equivalency (AVEs – advertising value equivalency) to assign financial value to public relations outputs.  It is a highly flawed, path of least resistance attempt to calculate return on investment (ROI) for public relations.  There are many reasons why using ad equivalency as a proxy for PR value is not advisable.

To make matters worse, the practice has clearly moved into social media measurement as well.  For example, research studies that monetize the value of a Facebook Fan/Liker by attributing an arbitrary $5 CPM value from the advertising world.  Online media impact rankings also utilize equivalent paid advertising value to assign monetary value to online news and social media.  The true value of social media is not how much an equivalent ad would have cost but in the impact it has on brand, reputation and marketing.

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5. Return on Engagement/Influence/etc.

Not a day goes by without someone declaring a new and improved metric for the acronym ROI, or stating that ROI does not apply in social networks.  A recent Google search for “Return on Engagement” returned 192,000 results.  “Return on Influence” returned 68,300.

Most of the folks who use these terms either don’t understand ROI or don’t know how to obtain the data necessary to calculate it.  Many confuse the notion of impact with ROI (addressed in Things to Learn).  Engagement creates impact for a brand or organization, but may or may not generate ROI in the short-term.  Creating influence – effecting someone’s attitudes, opinions and/or actions – creates impact but may or may not create ROI in the short-term.  It often is better to think about measuring impact first and then deciding whether or not you have the means and data necessary to attribute financial value.

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Things to Learn in 2011

1. Measurable Objectives

There are many issues and challenges in the field of social media measurement.  The easiest one to fix is for everybody to learn how to write measurable objectives.  Most objectives today are either not measurable as written or are strategies masquerading as objectives.  (For example, any sentence starting with an action buzzword like leverage is a strategy.)

‘Increase awareness of product X’ is not a measurable objective.  In order to be measurable, objectives must contain two essential elements:

• Must indicate change in metric of interest – from X to Y
• Must indicate a timeframe for the desired change – weeks, months, quarter, year, specific dates tied to a campaign (pre/post)

Therefore, properly stated, measurable objectives should look more like these:

• Increase awareness of product X from 23% to 50% by year-end 2011
• Increase RTs per 1000 Followers from 0.5% in Q1’11 to 10% by the end of Q2’11.

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2. Impact versus ROI

ROI is one of the most overused and misused term in social media measurement.  Many people say ‘ROI’ what they really just mean results or impact.  ROI is a financial metric – percentage of dollars returned for a given investment/cost.  The dollars may be revenue generated, dollars saved or spending avoided.  ROI is transactional.

ROI is a form of impact, but not all impact takes the form of ROI.  Impact is created when people become aware of us, engage with our content or brand ambassadors, are influenced by engagement with content or other people, or take some action like recommending to a friend, writing a review or buying a product.  Impact ultimately creates value for an organization, but the value creation occurs over time, not at a point in time.  Value creation is process-oriented.  It has both tangible and intangible elements.

Your investments in social media or public relations remain an investment, creating additional value if done correctly, until which time they can be linked to a business outcome transaction that results in ROI.

Most social media initiatives today do not (or should not) have ROI as a primary objective.  Most social programs are designed to create impact, not ROI, in the short-term.  There is also the notion that many social media initiatives are in an investment phase, not a return phase of maturity.

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3. Hypothetical ROI Models

One important step in determining how a social media initiative creates ROI for an organization is to create a hypothetical model that articulates the cascading logic steps in the process, as well as the data needed and assumptions used.  The model is most useful in the planning stages of a program.  It helps address the proverbial question, “If I approve this budget, what is a reasonable expectation for the results we will achieve?”  Let’s take a look at a simple Twitter example:

Program: Five promoted tweets are sent with a special offer to purchase a product on an e-commerce site.

Hypothetical ROI Model:

• (Data)                   Total potential unduplicated reach of the five tweets is 1,000,000 people
• (Assume)            10% of the potential audience will actually see the tweet = 100,000 people
• (Assume)            20% of the individuals who see the tweet find it relevant to them = 20,000 people
• (Assume)            10% of those finding it relevant will visit the site = 2,000 people
• (Assume)            10% of those visiting the site will convert and buy the product = 200 people
• (Data)                   Incremental profit margin on each sale is $50
• (Data)                   Total cost of the social media initiative is $2,400

ROI Calculation: (200 x $50) = $10,000 – $2,400 = $7,600/$2,400 = 3.17 x 100 = 317% ROI

Our model suggests this program will be successful and generate substantial ROI.  If in reviewing a model with someone who needs to approve a program, they conceptually buy into the model but challenge the assumptions, that is a positive step.  Negotiate different assumptions and rerun the numbers.  Hypothetical models help you think through the data requirements your research approach must address in order to actually measure the ROI of the program after implementation.

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4. Integrated Digital Measurement

The definition of public relations is fluid, and rapidly evolving to encompass a much broader and more integrated view of communications and how we connect, engage and build relationships with consumers and other stakeholders.  Digitization in all its forms has driven and accelerated this important change.  Communicators should now take a more content and consumer-centric view of the world, orchestrating all the consumer touch points available in our increasingly digital world.  At Fleishman Hillard, we capture this expanded scope and integration in a model we refer to as PESO – Paid/Earned/Shared/Owned.  Here is how we define the elements of our model:

Paid – refers to all forms of paid content that exists on third-party channels or venues.  This includes banner or display advertisements, pay-per-click programs, sponsorships and advertorials.

Earned – includes traditional media outreach as well as blogger relations/outreach where we attempt to influence and encourage third-party content providers to write about our clients and their products and services.

Shared – refers to social networks and technologies controlled by consumers along with online and offline WOM

Owned – includes all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand including company or product websites, micro-sites, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter channels.

The social media measurement Holy Grail in many ways is to be able to track behavior of individuals across platforms, online and offline, tethered and mobile, understanding how online behavior impacts offline behavior and vice-versa.  We also seek to understand how the PESO elements work together synergistically.  For example, how exposure to online advertising impacts conversions within social channels.  To address this, your measurement strategy should be to take a holistic, integrated approach using a variety of methodologies, tools and data.

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5. Attribution

If you are not already familiar with value attribution models, prepare to hear much more about them in 2011.  Value attribution models attempt to assign a financial value to specific campaigns and/or channels (e.g. advertising, search, direct, social) that are part of a larger marketing effort.  So rather than giving all the conversion credit to the last click in a chain or even the first click, the model attributes portions of the overall value across the relevant campaigns and/or channels.

A simple model might look at the following metrics for each channel:

• Frequency – the number of exposures to a specific marketing channel or campaign
• Duration – time on site for exposures referring to the conversion site
• Recency – credit for exposures ranging from first click to last click, with last click typically receiving more credit.

Value attribution models require human analysis and expertise.  This factor is often cited in studies as the reason more companies do not pursue attribution modeling.

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Here’s wishing you and yours an exciting and prosperous 2011!

How Much Does a House Cost?

I don’t come from the “there are no dumb questions” school.  For example, in an academic environment, I would define a ‘dumb question’ as one in which the answer should be easily known had the student read the assignment or attended the previous class.  There are a lot of dumb questions asked all the time and social media gets more than its share of these.  Many of them are specific to social media measurement/ROI.  For example:

• Which has higher ROI, Twitter or Facebook?
• What ROI should I expect from Twitter?
• How do I measure the ROI of social media?

The flip answer to all these questions is, it depends.  All results are contextual.  Results are also specific.  While industry averages may be interesting, averages mask any real meaning for an individual brand or company.  They result in ‘one size fits none’ thinking.  Let’s go back to our house analogy and bring this to life.  The cost of a house depends on several factors:

• Where is the house located?  You’ll need to know the city and the specific neighborhood.  You may also want to know which block the house is on within a given neighborhood.
• How large is the house in terms of square feet?
• How large is the lot?
• Is the house new or previously owned?
• In what condition is the house?
• What is the level of finish-out?  For example, granite versus tile countertops.  High-end appliances or mid-range?
• What are the desirable or unique features of the house?

In social media measurement we have our own list of questions to ask before attempting to answer generally stated questions about measurement and ROI:

• What brand/company are we speaking about?  The answers for a well-established cult brand will be very different from those of a less well-established brand.  Answers for eCommerce companies will vary from those of B2B companies.  Answers will also vary by industry segment.
• How long has the brand/company been participating in social networks?
• How much investment in social media marketing – time and money – has the brand/company made?  What has been the level of effort?
• What other communications channels (e.g. advertising, direct, search, public relations) are being utilized in parallel with social marketing?
• What is our point of view on the role of social media in the marketing mix?  For example, is the role of social media primarily to drive exposure to content or is the program or initiative designed to drive conversion events through social channels?
• What were/are the specific objectives of the program or initiative?

This last question is especially important because measurement is fundamentally about assessing performance against stated objectives.  When someone asks you how to measure something in social media your first response should always be this question – What were the specific objectives of the program or initiative?

The question of when to expect a return on social media efforts is also an interesting one.  Brands often expect an immediate ROI on social media efforts.  Social media marketing is a process not an event.  Too often people forget about the ‘I’ aspect of ROI – you usually have to make an investment in resources and time before you can drive a return.  It is wise to listen to social conversations before engaging, and build your presence and trust before trying to drive conversion events.  Listen and learn and then convert.  I would argue the majority of social media efforts today are likely in the investment phase and not the return phase.  It is somewhat unfair in these cases for the social media effort to be held to an ROI standard in the short-term.  Measuring impact rather than ROI is advised.  Perhaps we can add another question to our list of dumb social media ROI questions – ‘What ROI should we expect in the first year of our social media initiative?’

If you are one of the prescient humans who has a crystal ball that enables you to answer the ‘how much does a house cost’ question, I have another question for you, ‘how long is a string?’

Social Media ROI Twitterchat

Yesterday I was the guest on Shonali Burke’s #measurepr twitterchat.  The subject was Social Media ROI.  The conversation was lively and engaging.  I found it exciting and stimulating, and appreciate Shonali letting me share with all of you.  Shonali did a great wrap-up of the session on her Waxing Unlyrical blog.  You can read it here. You can also download a transcript of the chat here:  #measurepr transcript 8.31

Shonali was kind enough to invite me back for another round.  So please join us for Social Media ROI Round II.  The date is September 14.  The time is 12:00 – 1:00PM (Eastern).  DM Shonali (@Shonali) or shoot her an email if you have a question you would like us to address.  You can sign-up for the chat here, or just join us on the 14th. using #measurepr.  Hope you can join us!  – @Donbart

Don’t Let the Tool Tail Wag the Measurement Dog

Social media listening and measurement tools are sexy.  Well, at least to those of us in research and measurement – it’s all relative right?  In the last three years or so there has been an explosion of social media tool vendors and platform choices.  Tools are sexy and important, but in the grand scheme of things are being overemphasized to some degree.  We are letting tools decide what we can measure without giving sufficient thought to what we should measure.  We are letting the tool tail wag the measurement dog.

There are several steps and decisions that should be addressed prior to selecting a tool or suite of tools.  Consider this diagram as a starting point to help you think through these interim considerations and decisions:

OBJECTIVES

Proper social media objectives should be measurable (indicate change in metric of interest and timeframe) and aligned with desired organizational outcomes.  Understanding the social media objectives will suggest broad parameters the measurement program, and ultimately the tool decision, must operate within.  For example, geographic coverage requirements, type of content to be considered and on-platform engagement capability may all be strongly suggested based on a review of social media objectives.

PROCESS

In addition to comprehending organizational or business outcomes, it is essential to understand the business process the social media program will address or drive.  If the program is marketing oriented, the sales funnel process (Awareness/Consideration/Preference/Sales/Loyalty) may be most appropriate.  For a brand-building campaign, the brand pyramid (Presence/Relevance/Performance/Advantage/Bonding) is what you want to measure your program impact against.  Other business processes that are commonly addressed by social media programs include customer service and support, CRM, corporate reputation and lead generation.

METRICS

Understanding the requisite business process the social media program is driving is crucial because each business process drives specific metrics.  For example, the sales funnel drives a specific metrics set:  percentage of unaided or aided awareness; percentage of the target audience who would consider the product/company; percentage who prefer the product/company; incremental sales revenues; percentage who would purchase the product again number or the number/amount of repeat purchases.  For B2B companies, the lead generation process would drive a different set of metrics: number of incoming leads; percentage/number of qualified leads; lead conversion rate; sales revenues generated.  In addition to the business process metric sets, there are other metrics areas like Exposure and Engagement we will want to address.  Reach/opportunities to see, share of positive discussion, comments/post ratio, number of @ mentions and RTs per 1000 followers are examples of ‘standard’ metrics that might be applicable for many social media programs.

Understanding how the social media program drives a specific business process is also important to our ability to describe the impact or, in some cases, return on investment the program has created.

DATA SETS

Each metric has data requirements, usually two pieces of data per metric – a numerator and a denominator.  Examine the set of metrics you have defined for your social media program.  Catalog all the specific pieces of data you need to compute the various metrics.  For example, the data needed to compute the basic sales funnel metrics and some ‘standard’ metrics might include:

• Number of individuals in the target audience
• Number of survey respondents
• Number of respondents ‘aware’ of the product/company
• Number of respondents who would consider/seriously consider purchasing the product/doing business with the company
• Number of respondents purchasing the product
• Amount of sales revenue directly attributable to the program
• Number of purchasers who purchased again
• Total branded mentions
• Volume of positive and negative mentions
• Number of posts
• Number of comments
• Number of RTs and @ mentions
• Number of followers

TOOLS

Armed with an understanding of all the data needed to calculate the metrics required to measure the social media program, you will be able to assess which tools or classes of tools best deliver the data you need.  Pick the best three to five tools for further evaluation.  You most likely will find no one tool can deliver the complete data set you need.  It is common to need two or more tools, e.g. web analytics package and social content analysis platform, in order to fully meet data requirements.  Budgetary constraints may also limit your ability to capture the entire data set required.

By addressing the interim steps leading up to tool selection, you will be able to make a more informed tool decision.  You also will have a much better chance of measuring what you should measure rather than settling for what you can measure.  No tool before its time.  Let the big dogs run.

The Digitization of Research and Measurement

This post first appeared as an agency guest post on Jason Fall’s Social Media Explorer blog.  You can see it here.

The field of public relations has undergone two major revolutions in the past 15 years or so.  The advent of the Internet represents the first revolution.  This revolution primarily impacted the way content was created, distributed and consumed.  It also fundamentally changed the nature of communication – remember email became the first killer app of the Internet revolution.  The second revolution is social networks.  Again content creation was impacted, led by consumer generated content in multiple forms.  Perhaps more importantly, peer-to-peer communication between consumers, and two-way communication between consumers and brands/companies, have been enabled and are having a profound impact on the way companies are organized and behave.  The worlds of marketing and public relations have made an analog to digital conversion.  And with it, we are in the midst of the digitization research and measurement.

New Models, New Metrics

Communication models are a linear representation of how a communication process works and are important in providing a framework for evaluation and measurement.   The Outputs – Outtakes – Outcomes communication model often used in public relations today has two primary deficiencies in the era of digitization and social networks – clarity and relevance. 

• Clarity: The model is difficult for many to understand and apply.  Public relations practitioners regularly get Outputs confused with Outtakes or Outcomes.  Outtakes are not often used in the U.S. – they seem much more prevalent in Europe.  The overall taxonomy can be confusing and is defined in different ways by different practitioners or organizations.  Further compounding the confusion is the fact audiences we present our results to rarely understand the terms and have trouble relating to them.  In short, the terms are too much ‘inside baseball’.
• Relevance: The model was developed when communication was media-centric.  Digitization, consumer-generated content and social networks have shifted communication from a media-centric world to a content-centric world.  How receivers of communication engage and are influenced by content has fundamentally changed.

What is needed is a metrics taxonomy that is easier to explain, understand and apply.  Ideally one that is applicable for traditional and social media.  Here is the model we apply at Fleishman Hillard.

With the new model comes new metrics primarily driven by social media/networks.  Exposure  includes traditional metrics like Impressions and Message Delivery, and digital metrics like Search Rank, Twitter Reach and Average Daily Visitors.  Engagement includes traditional metrics like Readership, but adds new metrics like Subscriptions, Repeat Visitors and Follower Mention %.  Influence in the model refers to influence of the target audience, not who has influence in social networks.  Influence metrics range from increases in Brand Consideration to changes in attitudes and opinions to changes in online click behavior.  Action metrics can range from event attendance to voting for/against legislation to buying a product.

New Data, New Places

Public relations research and measurement has historically been driven by content analysis.  As content increasingly became available in digital form, the techniques of research and measurement didn’t change so much as the way content was aggregated and delivered for analysis.  Then web-based platforms became available from a variety of vendors to digitize and automate content analysis while the metrics being measured – article counts, impressions, message uptake and sentiment for example – basically remained constant with previous, more manual, methods.  Today, the digitization of research and measurement has broadened from this predominately singular focus to include data and interactions from three distinct regions or zones of research and measurement as shown in the figure below.

As company websites, e-Commerce sites and other forms of ‘owned’ media proliferated, web analytics software provided an explosion of data and new metrics like unique visitors, page views, click through rates, duration, referring sites and conversions become widely used and reported.  We became over-served with data and underserved with insight.

The exponential rise in popularity of social networks in the last five years raised the bar again and presented new challenges in digital research and measurement.  Now we were faced with measuring conversations and not just clicks.  Measuring engagement became more important than measuring eyeballs.  The frontier in social media measurement is evolving toward measuring both the conversations and behavior patterns occurring within social networks, and understanding and connecting the underlying influences and motivations for the online behavior.

The third area of interest is in all the real-world, offline interactions and transactions. Scan and other digital sales data is important to understanding, tracking and connecting online and offline behavior and actions.   Connecting mobile transactions, online and offline behavior and WOM is a significant challenge.

Although we have attempted to define three distinct ‘zones’ of digital research and measurement necessary to address the full spectrum of social media and marketing impact, a robust measurement strategy should take a holistic, integrated approach using methodologies, tools, data and metrics from all three zones.  The goal is to be able to track the behavior, interactions and transactions of individuals across all three zones, across multiple platforms and physical locations, understanding how online behavior impacts offline behavior and vice-versa.

New Scope, New Integration

Today at Fleishman Hillard, we recognize the very definition of public relations is rapidly evolving to encompass a much broader and more integrated view of communications and how we connect, engage and build relationships with consumers and other stakeholders on behalf of our clients.  Digitization in all its forms has driven and accelerated this important change.  While public relations has traditionally been oriented toward ‘earned media’ – gaining placements of client stories in print and broadcast media based on the strength of the story and quality of the pitch – today’s content-driven world demands much more.  The scope now must include all the consumer touch points available in our increasingly digital world.  We capture this new scope and integration in a model we refer to as PESO – Paid/Earned/Shared/Owned.  Our PESO model predates the similar Forrester model (Paid/Earned/Owned) and is different in an important way.  We created two categories, Earned and Shared, where the other model has one – Earned.  We believe this better comprehends strategies like blogger outreach and other proactive efforts undertaken by practitioners as ’Earned’,  distinct from efforts that may be passive or reactive.  Here is how we define the elements of our model:

Paid – refers to all forms of paid content that exists on third-party channels or venues.  This includes banner or display advertisements, pay-per-click programs, sponsorships and advertorials.

Earned – includes traditional media outreach as well as blogger relations/outreach where we attempt to influence and encourage third-party content providers to write about our clients and their products and services.

Shared – refers to social networks and technologies controlled by consumers along with online and offline WOM

Owned – includes all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand including company or product websites, micro-sites, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter channels.

The enhanced scope and integration represented by the PESO model drives a corresponding broadening and need for integration in digital research and measurement.  One can easily find themselves attempting to measure a highly integrated program that includes the awareness created with paid media, the relevance and information delivered via owned, the credibility delivered by earned media and measuring the conversations and interactions occurring in shared media.  Just from a metrics perspective, the PESO model requires a significant broadening in thinking as shown in the matrix below.

Digitization has changed what we need to research and measure, where we find data and how we perform analysis.  The future will bring more data, better tools and improved methodologies.  Sifting insights from the mounds of data will remain a major challenge.  The intersection of marketing, privacy concerns and research must be navigated.  The constant in all the change brought by digitization is who – human analysts and research.  Discovery and insight, like it was 15 years ago, remains fundamentally a human process.  It remains the analog constant in a world of digitization.

Measure the Puzzle Not the Pieces

A while back, I remember someone posting a question to a Linked-In discussion group along the lines of, ‘I just got my client a hit in USA Today.  How much is that worth?’.   More recently, ADWEEK ran an article entitled, Value of a Fan on Facebook: $3.60, citing an attempt by Vitrue to essentially assign a media value to a Facebook Fan.  (Sidebar: Is a Liker worth as much as a Fan?).  Setting aside an argument of the value attribution methodology used by Vitrue (I’m not a fan, or a liker), the fundamental issue I have with each example is the same, they are trying to measure the pieces and not the puzzle.

A media hit, a tweet, gaining a Fan/Liker, or obtaining a Follower are all pieces to a larger puzzle called a social media/business campaign, initiative, effort or program.   For simplicity, let’s refer to them as programs henceforth.  Programs have, or should have, objectives.  Done correctly, these objectives are measurable.  Good measurement practice suggests you assess performance against stated objectives.  Sure, it is also important to assess performance of program strategies and tactics – primarily as a diagnostic – but ultimately we must measure performance against objectives.  This is a base condition for accountability.

Gaining media coverage, sending tweets or getting others to tweet about you, creating Likers or gaining Followers should be thought of as strategies or perhaps tactics.  Objectives are what you want to happen as a result of the combination of strategies and tactics.  Programs are not made of single media hits, tweets, Likers or Followers.  They are longitudinal, holistic and integrated.  Successful programs might generate hundreds of media hits, scores of blog posts, and thousands of Likers or Followers.  Orchestrated correctly, all these strategies and tactics should help us achieve our overall program objectives.  The reality of the situation is any one discrete result of a campaign – a hit, Liker or Follower for example – usually has a very small overall impact.  The impact most likely would not be measurable, and if it was, it would not likely be meaningful.  They are just pieces of the overall program puzzle.

Let’s conclude with a simplistic Facebook program example.  Your tactic is to gain more Likers that meet a certain demographic profile.  Your strategies are to create an engaged brand community in Facebook, and to encourage online and offline WOM about the brand.  Your objective is to increase brand preference from 17% to 21% in the next 12 months.  Measure this objective, and if you want to do value attribution and calculate ROI, figure out how much each 1% increase in brand preference is worth in incremental sales.  That’s a puzzle worth solving.

Photo From liza31337

Relief from your Social Media ROI Angst

Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the most discussed and agonized-over topics in social business today.  However, much of the discussion around social media ROI has been simply confused, confusing or misguided.  There have been posts on large, well-known blogs (riff on ways to prepare potatoes) that are incredibly naive in their discussion of ROI.  In some circles there is endless philosophic debate bounded on one side by the Puritans who believe ROI is an old/incorrect way to think social business and on the other side by the Analyticans who seem to believe you can always determine ROI with a web analytics package.

The net-net of all this is a lot of frustration, even angst over how to think about ROI and social business.  We’re here to help.  Take two deep breaths and read these four points.  You’ll feel better soon.

Point Number One:  As a practical matter, the majority of social business efforts will not result in true ROI (in the short term).

In fact, I would guess far less than half will.  Maybe less than 10%.  But that doesn’t mean the social business effort was not successful, or did not create significant value for the brand or organization.  It simply means the primary objectives of most social business efforts are centered on concepts like community-building, engagement, listening, and participating in conversations.  It is difficult and expensive to attribute financial value to these areas.  To use the old saying – the ROI on these sorts of ROI efforts is not good.  Traditional public relations, branding and reputation programs suffer from some of the same challenges.  So when a study like the one published by e-Marketer* suggests ‘only’ 16% of social business programs are measuring ROI, while many are surprised it isn’t higher, it actually sounds a little too high to me.   I wonder how respondents were thinking about and defining ROI.

Point Number Two: Loose use of the term ROI is a major cause of angst.

ROI is not synonymous with results, KPIs or value.  ROI is not the only or perhaps even the most relevant way to define success in social business.  ROI is a financial metric.  ROI can only be measured in terms of revenue generated, cost savings or costs avoided.  It is transactional in nature.   There is ample evidence on twitter, blog posts and in blog comments that many people say ROI when they really mean results or value.

Many of the well-intentioned but misguided attempts to rename or reinvent what ROI means in social media – return on influence and return on engagement probably getting the most play – seem to be the result of an inability to distinguish value creation from ROI.

Point Number Three: Understand the difference between value and ROI.

Social media efforts may create financial impact (ROI) and/or non-financial impact. Engagement and Influence are examples of non-financial impact.  Other non-financial impacts like increased brand awareness or purchase consideration may eventually result in ROI at a point in the future when a financial event occurs.  Try to be explicit as to whether the social business program is designed to generate non-financial impact or true financial ROI, and make sure the people writing the checks understand the difference.  Show how the effort is linked to one or more business processes and how it will deliver value by helping to drive the desired business outcomes.

We know social networks have the ability to create value through customer engagement and community building.  However, ROI can only be measured by their ultimate impact on downstream metrics like sales, employee retention and customer loyalty/repeat purchase.  Many social business efforts are in an investment phase.  The value is largely intangible.  Some may eventually become transactional and result in true financial ROI.

Point Number Four:  ROI in social business has a time dimension.

Value may be created in the short-term and longer-term.  Social business campaigns utilizing channel-specific URLs and ecommerce landing pages are an example of easily measured short-term ROI (setting aside last-click attribution issues).  Longer-term value is much more difficult to quantify.  There are some similarities between social media and brand in this regard.  Success in each is a process and not an event.  You may have ongoing activities that sustain the brand/social business program and brand building events or campaigns that provide short-term spikes in awareness and engagement.  Managing and measuring your social business effort properly requires thinking about the value you are creating in the short and longer-term.

Your investments in social media or public relations remain an investment, creating additional value if done correctly, until which time they can be linked to a business process transaction that results in ROI.  Calculate ROI whenever you can, but also try to articulate the value your programs will be creating, and how this value aligns with, and contributes toward, achieving one or more desired business outcomes.

If you are not feeling better already, please leave a comment and let us know why.

*Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, Social Software in Business, September 8, 2009