Original Post: Nick ONeill, Social Media Today

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals.  Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like  Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure  application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

Are there other metrics you measure that you feel are more important for your company? What tools do you use to measure social metrics? Let us know in the comments.

Original Post: Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics

Klout is a wonderful little tool that measures Klout Score, a proxy for “influence”:

It is easy to understand the market demand to boil things down to one number, but this is perhaps the least useful thing in Klout.

While on the surface they might seem useful, I am always suspicious of compound metrics. They can be subjective, inapplicable to many and efficiently hide the insights you need to understand what actions to take. [See more here for Compound Metrics: Four Not Useful KPI Measurement Techniques]

Mercifully there is so much more to Klout than that.

Klout measures a bunch of lovely metrics, specifically applicable to Twitter, that are grouped into four buckets: Reach, Demand, Engagement (!!) , Velocity.

There are two lovely things about these computations.

1. Joe and team have wonderfully avoided the temptation make these compound metrics (as in Reach = Followers / Total Retweets * Friends + Pixie Dust). The factors used are laid out as individual metrics making it easy for you understand the data and pick metrics that work for you.

2. (My favorite) The metric definitions are not “crap”. This seems like such a low bar to meet, sadly far too often metrics out there (not just for twitter) are just plain shoddy.

For example here are some clean definitions from Klout:

# Engagement

* How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
* Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?

# Velocity

* How likely are you to be retweeted?
* Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

# Reach

* Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
* How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
* Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?

When I use Klout I simply pick the metrics that are most important to my own twitter strategy.

I would suggest that this is very very very very important, pick what is right for you rather then following a lemmings like strategy of “I am going to use metrics Y & Z that someone recommends”.

Here’s an example: I don’t care about Follower/Follow Ratio. I think it is disingenuous to follow everyone who follows you just for appearances sake when you have no intention of reading what they all say. Why be fake?

As you might have read in the new book I like “Message Amplification” in Social Media, and hence I do care a lot about Total Retweets.

[Sidebar: my favorite twitter metric is: # Of Retweets Per Thousand Followers, it's a measure of efficiency and value provided and people voting with their clicks, all rolled into one!]

I care a lot about Follower Retweet % (”Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?”) because I want to appeal to more people than my mom, dad, and best friend!

One of the biggest mistake companies and brands make about Twitter is that they think it is one more “shout channel” like TV and Radio and Magazine ads or Press Releases. Twitter is not that. Twitter is a “conversation channel”, a place where you can find the audience relevant to you (and your company and products and services and jihad) and engage in a conversation with them. It is not pitching, it is enriching the value of the ecosystem by participating.

Hence I like the metric Messages Per Outbound Message , as a primitive measure of the fact that you are participating in a conversation and not just yelling.

With Klout I can choose the metrics that best reflect my personal twitter strategy, I can easily find them and I can monitor my progress (using a handy dandy graph) and ensure my strategy is a success.

Your strategy might be different. Walk up to the buffet and pick the metrics that will help you best measure your own success.

At the bottom of the Stats tab Klout also includes a handy dandy Analysis table with trend indicators. . . .

As an Analyst it might be of some value to look at the trend pointers at the bottom (clearly I am doomed!), it might be cute to put this into a PowerPoint slide for the HiPPO’s who might like the Chinese fortune cookie messages for each metric group.

By Charlene Li: Many companies approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes Social Computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term Social Technographics® to describe a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other companies pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first and then create a social strategy based on this profile.

B2C Profile Tool

Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.

Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation (see short presentation). Forrester Research’s Consumer Technographics® data covers hundreds of brands and behaviors globally — customers of specific retailers and car owners by brand, for example. Work with us to profile your customer base, then develop a social technology strategy.

B2B Profile Tool

Social media give a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot. Forrester surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation.

B2B marketers, eager to know how social media fits into the marketing mix, can use the Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

Original Source: Groundswell

Data comes from the following surveys:

US: Forrester Research’s North American Technographics® Interactive Marketing Online Survey, Q2 2009 (US), 4,766 respondents
Europe: Forrester Research’s European Technographics® Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009, 25,932
Asia Pacific: Forrester Research’s Asia Pacific Technographics® Survey, Q2 2009, 7,652

By Charlene Li: Many companies approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes Social Computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term Social Technographics® to describe a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other companies pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first and then create a social strategy based on this profile.

B2C Profile Tool

Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.

Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation (see short presentation). Forrester Research’s Consumer Technographics® data covers hundreds of brands and behaviors globally — customers of specific retailers and car owners by brand, for example. Work with us to profile your customer base, then develop a social technology strategy.

B2B Profile Tool

Social media give a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot. Forrester surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation.

B2B marketers, eager to know how social media fits into the marketing mix, can use the Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

Original Source: Groundswell

Data comes from the following surveys:

US: Forrester Research’s North American Technographics® Interactive Marketing Online Survey, Q2 2009 (US), 4,766 respondents
Europe: Forrester Research’s European Technographics® Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009, 25,932
Asia Pacific: Forrester Research’s Asia Pacific Technographics® Survey, Q2 2009, 7,652

First off… I don’t like numbers. So, I’m not particularly fond of social media calculators as I believe that the true value in a social media strategy is about building relationships, conversation and influence, and NOT about the numbers. Social media is an investment that has intangible ROI that is not only often difficult to measure, but its value isn’t found in short-term results, but instead in long-term growth. Influence isn’t born overnight, but built over time.

In his article, Social Media ROI Less Accepted Than Traditional Media, Jason Falls has some great suggestions on ways to consider measuring social media ROI for your business:

First, determine what you want to measure, whether it’s corporate reputation, conversations or customer relationships. These objectives require a more qualitative measurement approach, so let’s start by asking some questions. For example, if the objective is measure ROI for conversations, we start by benchmarking ourselves with questions like:

• Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?
• How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?

Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:

• Build better relationships with our key audiences?
• Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?
• Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

There are companies that offer services to assist with this kind of measurement, which requires a great deal of human analysis on top of the automated results to appropriately assess the tonality and brand positioning across various social media platforms. Radian6, Brandwatch, SentimentMetrics, are just a few of the many companies working toward more comprehensive and impactful social media monitoring and engagement metrics.

Sometimes Long-Term ROI Requires Short-Term Tools

However, to get senior leadership to invest in social media, you oftentimes are required to dot the lines between the online engagement to the offline results.  And to say that there is absolutely no costs associated with social media is not only inaccurate, but just plain silly. There’s ALWAYS cost… even if it’s correlating the cost of one employee’s time to manage and implement your social media tactics.

Decision-makers want to know, “If I spend X amount of dollars on social media, what does it get me?” And Twitter followers doesn’t impress them. You can build a business case for building a community of engaged consumers, noting that the lifetime value of a consumer is worth more than one-off sales of your product. But to truly build a vast community of loyal customers that can impact your bottom line in “good ROI” ways takes an investment of both time and resources.

Unfortunately, statistic-based metrics seem to be the primary way communicators feel they can secure approval and budget for these programs from their management teams. If  you’re one of those unfortunate souls who must show monetary benefits to key stakeholders first, then you should definitely check out these tools below:

• Dag Holmboe’s Social Media ROI calculator — an extremely in-depth Excel spread sheet for calculating the Social Media ROI. Identifies 13 parameters that play a role in determining the ROI of Social Media. You pick the parameters that make sense and for each parameter and calculation, determine the offline cost.  Then, compare the offline cost with the estimated cost of gaining the same results (increased revenue, decreased cost, more customers etc) using online Social Media, to determine the ROI.
• Dragonsearch Social Networking Media ROI calculator — Tip of the hat to the Blog ROI piece in Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff – this Social Media ROI Calculator has been extended and modified for all Social Media activities.
• Frogloop – You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

Resources:

• How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business
• Social Media ROI Less Accepted Than Traditional Media
• The Three Dimensions of Social Media ROI

Original Source: Can Social Media Be Measured?, Li Evans, Search Engine Watch

Social media can be measured, but measuring isn’t the same for everyone. Just like there’s no cookie-cutter social media marketing strategy for companies to purchase and implement, there’s no simple off-the-shelf answer for measuring your success with your social media strategy. It can be a combination of numerous measurements, both automated and manual.

Social media marketing strategies are so much more than acquiring traffic and links from “socialized” content that appear on blogs, or videos that appear on YouTube and are promoting on sites like Digg, Mixx, or Reddit.

These are merely tactics. If you don’t have a strategy that includes goals and measurement about these implemented tactics, then it’s as if you’re doing nothing.

However, there are general concepts around social media you can use to come up with measurements and gauge whether your efforts hit the mark. They don’t just revolve around monitoring or just around Web site analytics.

Most of the time it’s a combination of pieces of monitoring data, pieces of Web site analytic data, and a lot of manual data your team needs to collect and put in an Excel spreadsheet.

The Four I’s of Social Media Measurement

“Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement” by Brian Haven of Forrester Research identifies four areas of engagement that can be measured. Engagement is the name of the game when it comes to social media and measuring successes and failures.

• Involvement: Just how involved is the community you’re engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
• Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
• Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
• Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

There are many ways to measure the four I’s, such as counting up the number of comments on your blog posts each week and figuring out a ratio that would be “successful,” or tracking how far a link was created and spread through Twitter. (For a more in-depth look at measuring the four I’s take a look at the free white paper by Nan Dawkins of Serengeti Communications.) But you also can’t forget to look at monitoring and measuring data and tie that into the full picture as well.

Web site traffic tells you a piece of the story. For example, asking your customers how they heard about you, your product, or your service when they request information or buy a product is one simple way to track your social media efforts. Although it may not be the most reliable, it will put in place another piece of the measurement puzzle.

Monitoring data can be just another piece. Some monitoring tools, like Techrigy and Radian6, can help you track influencers, as well as the spread of viral media that you might have disseminated to the public. They can help you chart and graph this type of information.

Lastly, don’t forget to tie in your resources and expenditures. Just how much did all of this cost you to implement, and were those efforts worth the success or failure?

There’s no simple solution to measuring success or failure in social media. It requires a lot of understanding of your efforts and how your audience will engage with you.

Don’t limit yourself to counting up links, looking at traffic spikes or looking how many retweets you received — there’s a whole world of metrics. It could be a combination of a few that help you understand just how successful you can be.

Original Source: Social Media ROI and The REAL Social Media ROI – Risk of Ignoring…

Social Media ROI

Social media is intangible – how do you quantify the ROI of online social tools that are based on human networks and one-to-one (micro) interactions?

Vancouver based consultant, blogger and author, Shane Gibson, recently posted a great podcast that discusses 26 ways to measure social media ROI.

The REAL Social Media ROI – Risk of Ignoring…

It seems everyone’s been talking lately about the Return on Investment – ROI – of social media. On the one hand, we have businesses trying to see where they’ll make a profit; on the other we have social media proponents explaining you shouldn’t try to measure social media ROI the same way you would in normal business practices.

But maybe we’re looking at the wrong ROI to start with – instead of return on investment, perhaps we should be more worried about the Risk of Ignoring.

This can work on both levels, personal and business-led, but for the sake of this post, I’m going to stay with businesses.

(If only from the viewpoint that it seems to be businesses more than individuals that are using social media less effectively).

Say the CEO of Company X brings in his sales or marketing director to the boardroom, and tells them he’s heard wonderful things about this “social media craze”. He’s heard that millions of people are using it, and he wants his company to have a bite of the money that these millions of social media users have, just waiting to be spent.

So the sales or marketing director decides to have a look at social media. Perhaps he’s even on Facebook, so he knows what social media is all about. He’s told his CEO not to worry, Company X will soon be rolling in extra cash from all the wonderful sales to be made through social media marketing.

So the director sets up a Twitter account – after all, just look at the conversation going on there. That’s a surefire sales arena if ever there was one! He starts following people left, right and centre and pretty soon he has a sizable following back. Time to start selling Company X to the masses, thinks the director, and starts sending out Tweets and direct messages about how great Company X is and why people should buy from them NOW.

The director has carried out the legwork and now has his message in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Time to sit back and wait for that Holy Grail of ROI to start. Which it will – just not the one that was expected.

This is where the Risk of Ignoring plays its hand.

By ignoring the simple fact that social media is about conversation, the director has completely missed the point. Instead of building up a loyal and quality-led following, all he’s done is build the equivalent of a non-optional email list for a sales pitch.

Now he’s wondering why so many people are un-following him on Twitter. He’s also wondering why no-one has rushed to Company X’s website and bought anything from their online store. Most of all, he’s wondering what he’s going to tell the CEO at the next progress report meeting.

I see this happening all too often with businesses. While originally there may be good intentions for using social media, trying to use traditional sales or marketing tactics will usually backfire. Whereas CEO’s and sales or marketing directors may be used to success with the heavy-handed “shout at everyone” approach, it’s just not going to work when it comes to social media.

You want your business to enjoy success with social media users? Be social with us. Get to know us, and what interests us, and in return I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have the interest you want in you and your product. Because we are actually interested in what you have to say.

Just don’t ignore us.

Original Source: Social Media ROI and The REAL Social Media ROI – Risk of Ignoring…