Five Social Media Measurement Questions I Hope (NOT) To See in 2014

I get asked lots of great questions about social media measurement. Following are five not so great ones I hope not to hear in 2014. 

How do you measure social media?

I get this question quite often and I enjoy it each time because if provides me the opportunity to make an important point about measurement and be a little snarky at the same time. Good stuff! When I get this question, my answer is always the same; “I don’t measure ‘social media’, I measure what you are trying to accomplish with social media.” This may seem like I’m playing semantic games, but the distinction is very important. Measurement is fundamentally about performance against objectives. So, we measure our performance against the objectives established in the social media plan. A lot of what passes for measurement in social media is really data collection – tracking Followers or Likes, blog traffic or consumer engagement on Facebook. Unless you have measurable objectives and targets in each of these areas, you are collecting data not measuring. What do you want to happen as a result of your social media campaign or initiative? Measure that.

How much is a Like worth?

This question doesn’t come up quite as often as in 2012, but it is still asked and, unfortunately, answered largely based on flawed logic and/or research design. You may recall the first two ‘research’ studies attempting to answer this question came up with widely disparate values – somewhere around $3.14 in one case and over 100 dollars in the other. This alone should raise major red flags. Setting the flawed research aside, trying to assign a value to a Like happens because people are desperate to assign financial value to social media and determine ROI. Those are noble things to do, but we need to focus on the other end of the customer journey – have we created engagement, has the engagement changed opinions, attitudes, beliefs or behavior, and how those changes translate to Impact. Unless you understand the Impact created by your social media program you really can’t attribute value properly. I would argue that Likes, which can be bought or gamified, really have no inherent value.

Can I use a banner ad cost to calculate social media AVE?

This question is somewhat related to the ‘Like worth’ question in that it reflects a desire to quickly and easily assign financial value, when in fact assigning financial value is often hard and expensive. In this case, the questioner is attempting to take the highly flawed and discredited concept of Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) and apply it to social media. Where this question typically comes up is in blogger relations where a company/brand/organization has worked with a blogger to earn ‘coverage’ on the blog and wants to assign a financial value to the post. They would like to say that the post is worth X, with X being the cost of a banner ad on the blog (setting aside, of course, that many blogs do not accept advertising). Equating cost with value is comparing apples to oranges. First, a better practice is not to assign value to each post, but to all the posts together in a campaign. Then instead of trying to say the campaign is worth say 14.35 ads, try to explain the actual impact the campaign has created on the target audience – e.g. increase in awareness, increase in purchase intent or, higher propensity to purchase more often. Once you understand the impact, decide if you have the data, time, expertise and budget to assign financial impact to the impact created.

Which social media listening tool do you recommend?

The correct answer to this question is, “it depends.” This is a bad question simply because there is no one ‘best’ social media listening tool for all circumstances and use cases. I believe you should always develop a set of platform requirements driven by the social listening stakeholders in your organization. Once these needs and requirements are understood, develop a custom RFI designed around the specific requirements you have identified. Have each of your potential platform partners respond to the RFI. Have the best respondents given you a platform demonstration according to a custom demonstration script you have developed. Pick the listening tool that best meets your unique requirements. The last three evaluations I have conducted for clients resulted in three different ‘winners’. There is no ‘best social listening tool, so find the tool that meets your requirements the best.

How many Impressions did we get with our latest social media campaign?

This is not a terrible question at all unless it is the only question asked or is perceived to be the key metric for measuring social media campaign performance. Too often, organizations use Impressions as their primary social media metric instead of engagement, influence or action-oriented metrics. Also, keep in mind Impressions represent an opportunity to see content, they are not the actual number of people who saw the content, that number is MUCH lower. Impressions always overstate the actual number of people who were exposed to your content and message.

If you plan to report on campaign impressions, please seriously consider only taking credit for those impressions that are directly against your target audience. If your target is 25 – 34 year old Males, you should only report on the impressions against this target group. Why take credit for 45 – 60 year old Female impressions when the product is not at all relevant to this audience?  Target audience impressions are really what you should be concerned about and what you should be reporting. Many people know and understand this but still persist in reporting all impressions because the number is usually much larger – meaningless but larger.

If you do report on Impressions, please consider using the emerging industry standard definitions developed by The Coalition. This will help ensure we define Impressions consistently and don’t confuse Reach with Impressions.

See things differently? Have your own pet peeve social media measurement questions to share? As always, thanks for reading. All the best in 2014!

@Donbart

Image credit: amasterpics123 / 123RF Stock Photo

Where is Your Organization on the Social Media Listening Maturity Model?

Quite often I am asked to consult with a company on their social media listening strategy. Their initial question more times than not is about the listening platform they should use. But it is increasingly common for the questions to be more sophisticated and the ambition behind them to be much greater. Companies with experience in social listening know that it is all too easy to focus on rudimentary analysis of brand mentions and topics, Followers and Likes and never get to the truly actionable insights that lead to marketing or business actions. Experience in listening is an important element here but you also need a path to follow. I thought a maturity model approach to social media listening could provide a possible path to consider and would provide a construct that could be used in consulting with a company on their social listening strategy.

Maturity models are sort of hot – there seems to be a proliferation in the last two years or so. One that I find particularly insightful and helpful when thinking about social listening is Forrester’s Social Maturity Model.  Two really important points the folks at Forrester make is that listening is not the goal, social intelligence is, and that social intelligence informs actions taken by marketing or some other area of the business. Action being the operative word here. Social intelligence is a closely related topic to social business, and if social business is more your thing the Dachis Group has an interesting social business maturity model.  Big data more your bag? Check out IBM’s big data governance model. After looking at the models out there, I could not find one specific enough to social media listening so I took a stab at creating one.

Social Media Listening Maturity Model 

There are five stages in the Social Media Listening Maturity Model, beginning with reactive alerts and ending with social intelligence. Let’s take a brief look at each stage and some of the overarching differences or changes one sees with social listening maturity.

Reactive Alerts – Many companies or brands begin by establishing a reactive alert system that notifies them whenever their brand is mentioned or is mentioned with specific keywords. Think Google Alerts. Companies in this stage may only periodically check social media channels to see what may have changed or is new since the last check-in.

Monitoring Social Media – At the next stage, the company has begun active monitoring of all ‘owned’ social embassies. They also are monitoring social media conversations, often focused on trying to detect any ‘bad’ news, mentions or conversations.

Companies in these first two stages generally have a reactive stance toward social media, viewing it as another way to find out about news and circumstances that may harm or otherwise impact the organization. It is common for companies in these stages to use one or more of the various free tools available to gather web and social media data.

Social Listening – The third stage is most likely where the largest percentage of companies reside today. Companies in stage three are listening to social conversations about their company, brands and products. They are tracking mentions of competitors and calculating share of conversation. Many also track issues and topics that are important to their brands/products/company. At this stage many begin to put additional emphasis on ‘who’ is talking (source) not just what is being said (post). Most companies in the social listening phase have transitioned from free tools to paid platforms.

Companies in the first three stages often suffer from having too much data and not enough insights. They are up to their necks in ‘big data’ but lack the experience and expertise to analyze the data and reduce it down to crisp, actionable insights supported by the data. They look for the Insight button on the tools they use but increasingly realize insights are the product of human analysts, not tools or data.

Strategic Listening – The transition to strategic listening brings with it a bias toward ‘listening with a purpose’. I first heard this turn of phrase from my friends at Radian6 and use it often. Listening with a purpose is just that – listening to specific sets of conversations with a specific goal or objective in mind. Often in insight work, the goal or objective may take the form of a hypothesis we are trying to test. Here are a few examples of listening with a purpose:

• Listening for conversations of consumers in a particular phase of the buying decision process
• Listening to customers whose subscriptions or policies are about to expire that are expressing thoughts of changing vendors
• Identifying, tracking and building relationships with key influencers
• Listening for consumer reactions to new packaging or product features
• Mining the emotional content of specific stakeholder groups to determine potential risk around a sensitive issue.

During this phase, an Enterprise listening strategy is often developed and implemented. Some also begin to integrate data from sources beyond social media – search, web analytics and customer data for example.

Social Intelligence – Forrester defines social intelligence as the process of turning social media data into actionable marketing and business strategy. Social intelligence therefore is not about the best times to tweet or whether or not a twitter party would be an effective tactic, it is about informing strategic decisions that impact the company’s success. For me, three concepts are crucial:

1. Action – social intelligence is designed to drive true actions.
2. Integration – although the definition focuses on social media data and insights, the fact is that true insights often require more than just social data. Integrating data from multiple data sources – consumer survey, behavioral tracking, social posts, search analytics, advertising data, customer records, scan/sales data – allows for greater understanding and richer insights. Integration of multiple data types often requires multiple tools and platforms to aggregate and analyze the data.
3. Sharing – For social intelligence to truly take root within an organization, the data and insights should involve cross-disciplinary groups that can look at the data from different perspectives and collectively arrive at better insights than any one group could in a vacuum. The insights then need to be systematically shared broadly across the organization so they may be acted upon in a manner that will create the most impact. Social intelligence can be a catalyst to the silos within an organization tumbling down.

Since the social listening and social intelligence ‘markets’ are relatively immature, this model will continue to evolve and be refined.

Where is your company today on the social media listening maturity model?