The Social Media Measurement Manifesto Yes we CAN, and already ARE measuring Social Media

Transcription

1 The Social Media Measurement Manifesto Yes we CAN, and already ARE measuring Social Media By Katie Delahaye Paine CEO KDPaine & Partners, LLC Berlin, NH November, 2009 KDPaine & Partners, LLC All Rights Reserved In his paper "Power, Pleasure, Patterns: A Conceptual History of the Mass Media in the United States," Joshua Meyrowitz of the University of New Hampshire suggests that every new medium, from the printing press to the Internet, creates a power struggle over access to wealth, resources, and power. Guttenberg's printing press wrenched the power of the written word out of the hands of the Church. Several centuries later the broadsheet newspaper helped foment the American Revolution. In the 1830s the Penny Press brought the news to the masses and began advertising-based publishing. In 2008 and 2009 Twitter helped spread the word -- if not actually fomenting the revolutions in Moldova and Iran. Every day blogs are wrenching power away from corporations and putting it into the hands of individuals. Each century has seen its media revolution and social media is clearly the media revolution of this new century. Thanks to advances in technology that have made it incredibly easy and virtually free to publish, social media is turning the communications world upside down. To s media environment the inmates are now in charge of the asylum. A new blog is created every minute, and at one point during the recent Iran election controversy 200,000 tweets an hour were being posted to social microblogging site Twitter. People -- your customers, your employees, your stakeholders - are now the media, the editors, and the reviewer re going to let you know what they think by voicing their opinions and changing their behavior. A new mindset is needed From a measurement perspective, this social media revolution requires an entirely new way of thinking about what we do and how we define success. We need to look at these changes as we would an earthquake. The tectonic plates of marketing and communications are shifting. As a result, some institutions will collapse and others will rise from the ruins. The degree to which we can get our minds around these earthquakes will be the degree to which PR and Marketing professionals will survive. There are three dominant areas in which these virtual earthquakes have occurred: 1. Timeliness has been redefined Page 1 of 26

2 2. The role of PR and Communications has been redefined 3. Most definitions of success are irrelevant Necessity #1: The need to redefine Now The most obvious change in how we approach communications today has to do with the definition of timeliness. It used to be that if you got back to an irate customer in a day or two, you would be considered responsive. In social media time, that is simply unacceptable. Back in the day, we at KDPaine & Partners thought it was pretty cool that we could actually deliver reports to our clients within a week or two of the end of the month. After all, in my old company the process took anywhere from 6 weeks to two months. Today a two-week turnaround time looks downright quaint. Look at these examples: To quote Twitterville author Shel Israel, who was commenting on a minor squabble between prominent blogger Robert Scoble and social network Facebook, s yet to be a response fro Domino's communications executives made the mistake of assuming that Friday was the end of their work week. As a result, a revolting video about conditions in one of their restaurants went viral. By the time they responded 48 hours later, millions had already watched the video and sales had already started to plummet. Frank Eliason changed forever the definition of customer service when he launched his Twitter cares. Through Twitter, Comcast can respond instantly to customer complaints or questions. So, when I found myself without cable TV one Friday night in NH, I to see what the pro d checked my service, informed me that it was not an outage or other system problem, and suggested a fix. Exactly eight minutes after my initial tweet, I was watching my favorite program. no shortage of examples of how quickly reputations can be made and s environment. The lesson to be learned is in the redefinition of "timely." I suggest that timely today means you dealt with a problem before it goes viral. Ideally, before more than a few friends of a social media user have seen it. To be effective in the new communications environment, brand monitoring must be at least a daily process, if not hourly. More importantly, if there is a crisis, you must be prepared with a very rapid response. You need to have systems already in place to identify the new brand influencers, you must be aware of the issues and topics they will respond to, and you must have an internal action plan from which to operate. Page 2 of 26

3 Necessity #2: Redefining PR, Advertising, Marketing and Corp. Comm New decision-making processes are changing the role of marketing and communications, which brings us to the next big required shift in our thought process: Search and reputation-based decision making. The old paradigm we were taught in business school was always: In tod s environment, most decisions are influenced in some way by Google, Yahoo, Bing, or whatever your favorite search engine is. Trying to decide what flat screen TV to buy, where to go for vacation, what movie to see, or where to make reservations for dinner, chances are you ll either ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter for advice, or search on Google for reviews. The new paradigm looks a lot more like this: Searches seldom begin with a brand name, but rather start with a category or a problem that needs to be When you search for a brand or a product, you may pay attention to some paid AdWo ll mostly click on and read reviews by someone whose opinion you respect -a friend, a colleague, or perhaps a brand name media site. ll make a decision, based ve seen the brand, but based almost entirely on the reputation of the source of the opinion. "Is it someone like me with similar needs? Is it a media person or a Twitterer or a Facebook friend that I trust?" As an example, KDPaine & Partners was in the market for an marketing service provider and by reputation, had narrowed our search to Emma, icontact, and Constant Contact. All our research was conducted online and our ultimate decision was based on feedback we heard from customers people like us who had voiced their opinions on blogs and Twitter. We did not speak to a sales person until after we'd made up our minds. This process is being repeated millions of times every day. So if your brand has been talked about anywhere in social media, chances are good that your potential customers are reading about it. What this means for PR and marketing is that communicating to smaller numbers of the right people is far more valuable than reaching millions of faceless eyeballs via advertising. Consequently, the value of advertising is declining, and the value of friendships and contacts and engagement is on the rise. Page 3 of 26

4 Unfortunately, most PR people still envision social media as yet another new medium to address, a new way to scream more loudly at their stakeholders. However, in s role is to reach millions of eyeballs for free (or at least more cheaply than advertising) or to generate quantities of column inches in newspapers is about as useful as a buggy whip. The rise of social media makes the role of public relations more important than ever. PR must do what its name suggests: Nourish and cultivate relationships with publics. In order to encourage those relationships, s role needs to shift to one of listening to the stakeholders, acting as their champion, advising internal decision-makers, and building engagement with the brand. Necessity #3: Changing how we quantify success Which brings us to the final mental earthquake we need to get past: How we define success? For years, marketers have equated success with the number of Impressions or Eyeballs reached. (This was based on evidence that if you reached enough eyeballs you could convince people to buy your product. This practice worked well in consumer packaged goods, and the assumption was picked up by business to business marketers.) So you either bought those Eyeballs via paid advertising, or earned the eyeballs by getting the media to cover your story or brand. And you often judged success by the number of impressions you collected. But in the social media environment, the sheer volume of impressions is no longer what really counts. Social media encourages the development of relationships between people and products and/or organizations. And measuring these relationships, often by assessing engagement, is the key to quantifying success in social media. number of engagements a particular outlet provided. See page?? for our definitions of engagement. The nature of social media means that PR people need to completely rethink their approach: From pitching to listening, and from measuring eyeballs to measuring engagement.which brings us to the new rules for operating in this environment. s about reaching the right eyeballs, not all the eyeballs. For the past few decades, PR was measured by counting the number of eyeballs it earned in the media. There are two problems with this approach. Page 4 of 26

5 Problem #1: There is no market for your message. As David Weinberger told the 2007 New Communications There is no People now have access to so much content, and have so many ways to gather news and information, that the likelihood of your corporate message penetrating the clutter is virtually nil. So t matter how many people you've reached with your message. What matters is what people do if and when they hear that message. If you listen hard enough to learn what the social community is looking for and concerned about, you might be able to persuade them to hear and respond to at least part of your message. Problem #2: The numbers there. We ha s become virtually impossible to accurately count eyeballs in social media. More and more advertisers and media types are realizing that hits really does stand for "How Idiots Track Success." Even unique page views are highly suspect, given the enormous variation in such statistics. Influential blogs do not routinely provide circulation figures or any other data for that matter, on how many people actual s not about how many people visit a particular site, but what they do with that information. If they just read the headline and move on, have you really made an impression? What you want them to do is read it and then pass it on to their friends and colleagues, or comment on it or sign up for something. And those are the things you want to measure. N s worse to not be talked about at all. If your customers are making decisions based on what their colleagues, Tweeps, and Facebook friends are talking about, it may be more harmful to NOT be talked about than to be discussed in negative terms. If someone puts something negative out about you in social media, chances are good that someone else will s actually more damaging to your business if the market is talking about your product category but no one is engaged enough with your brand to care about it. re not part of the conversation, you t participated in the conversation, fewer people will be engaged with your brand. And, if not listening to your market, miss not just the damaging conversations, but the conversations that can give you insight into the minds of the marketplace. So, for example, when I was to decid Lightweight laptop way too many responses. I went to TechCrunch and Engadget, and found a ton of conflicting, inconclusive responses. Instead, I queried my followers on Twitter and my Facebook friends. Three out of four said, Get a Mac 15% said Stick with your Del few said, "I love my Vaio," and there was one vote each for HP and Lenovo. Not a word was said about Acer, Toshiba, Panasonic or any other manufacturers, so it never even occurred to me to look at any of them. Page 5 of 26

6 Another major reason to pay attention to what people are saying about you in social media is that most journalists today rely on blogs for story ideas, to check facts, track down rumors, and to investigate scandals. If not being discussed, rnalist that you are newsworthy. Finally, there is a growing body of research that shows that those companies that have been most active in the social media space, have, in fact, outperformed their more recalcitrant peers. ( re not in control-- and never have been. The no The nature of social media renders management both impossible t manage what billions of independent, opinionated people are going to say. And woe to those who try; social media can resemble a cornered porcupine, very prickly, when it senses someone trying to control it. s not to say that conversations and relationships on the Internet be influenced, just that it takes a new approach. The old command and control, top-down message delivery is no longer an option. James Grunig's Excellence Model of two-way synchronous communications (Grunig and Grunig, 1992) is the rule of the day. Consumers can now choose to accept or reject your messages, depending on whether they find them useful, interesting, or relevant. And, th ll be more than happy to tell you what they like and like. social media will be met with scorn and derision, and people will soon block those attempts. So knowing all this, how do you measure your social media success? You follow the same six steps that have always been the backbone of a good PR program. The conversation may have shifted, but the rules and fferent. How to Measure It: Six simple steps to a perfect online measurement program The biggest challenge to a researcher on the Internet is the sheer enormity of the task. The good news is that technology can help you find your way, and there are dozens of organizations out there that will be happy to assist you in gathering your data. The bad news is that the data you gather will probably have major gaps in it and may be of questionable validity. Even the most comprehensive search firms can only gather a fraction of what you really want. Automated sentiment analysis is only about 60-70% accurate. Organizations like comscore, Neilsen, Page 6 of 26

7 Compete, and Alexa all have vastly different data. Also be aware that media sites that require subscribers to log on will not be included in most Web searches or in the Impression counts." That having been said, here are six simple steps to a perfect online measurement program: Step 1: Define the goal The first and most important question to answer is: the objective? Why are you starting that blog or Facebook page or on-line community? What problem are you trying to solve: What do you hope to accomplish? And more importantly, what does Senior Management expect social media to do for the organization? If they know why doing it, you implement a measurement program. So you need to define, and management needs to buy into, the expectations and definitions of success. So answer before you do anything, answer the question: How will you define success: Almost all answers will fall into three broad categories: Category 1: Sales or Marketing gains If your answer is r other such quantifiable revenue goals, then you will need a set of measurement rules and tools that emphasize Web analytics. You will need to use unique URLs and some form of statistical analysis of traffic and response data. Category 2: Increase Engagement then you need to establish how you are defining engagement. For some that means click-throughs and downloads, for others it means comments and retweets. For still others, getting the visitor to leave an , register for more information, or sign up for content. Procter & Gamble has challenged the media in which it advertises by indicating it will, in future, only pay for engaged visitors. So you can look forward to more specific definitions of engagement in the future. Category 3: Improve relationships or reputation\ If your answer i mprove/protect our reputation or "increase brand loyalty," then your measurement tools need to include surveys, content analysis and relationship metrics. And if you identify a clear tie between your organization's goals and what you are doing in social media, then stop reading this article. Go learn about measuring more relevant media. As in any communications activity, if it doesn't support a specific corporate goal, why are you doing it? Step 2: Identify your publics and determine how your social media efforts affect them. The first thing I say to clients who ask me if they should worry about Twitter or whatever social media netwo The most important factor in measuring success is the response of your stakeholders and customers. So first identify those specific audiences that you are trying to reach with your program. If there are too many to Page 7 of 26

8 measure all of them, then make a list and prioritize them based on where your organization will see the most benefit. The next step is to make sure you can draw a connection between your efforts and the stakeholders you are measuring. How does your social media program impact them? How does their behavior affect your organization? If, for instance, there is a ban on communications folks talking to customers, going to be hard to make that connection. On the other hand if you are on Twitter and talking to customers on a regular basis, then there will definitely be a link between your efforts and customer attitude and/or behavior. Step 3: Determine the specific KPIs by which you will define success. You become what you measure, so pick your key performance indicators (KPIs) carefully. KPIs, also known as scorecards, dashboards, cockpits, and a host of other buzzwords, are specific metrics by which you will judge your success each week or quarter or month. Because you become what you measure, it is critical to carefully choose the metrics by which you will track your success. Presumably the KPIs you select are the most important metrics for your organization. Again, which metrics you chose should be driven by what goals you established in Step 1: If your measure of success is sales: Sales and donations and memberships are the easiest form of social media measurement. Your metrics should be something like: % increase in conversion rates % increase in click-throughs to a specific URL % increase in conversions % increase in on-line donations % increase in membership signups If your measure of success is brand engagement: Like most other buzzwords, "engagement" has come a long way from its original meaning of "an agreement to marry." Essentially, it started with the notion that a website or a blog was "engaging" enough to get a reader to begin to develop a relationship with the brand. People began to speak of measuring engagement --not just how "sticky" the site was, but the extent to which it enhances the relationship between the user and the brand. Communications professionals and marketers now want to measure a site's ability to create an experience that earns a visitor's loyalty and, with luck, its business. As a result, "engagement" now means everything from the number of times that a visitor returns to the site, to the number of comments on your corporate blog, or the number of retweets of your Twitter stream. Engagement is a way to determine whether you are really having a dialog, or you are just yelling ever more loudly. By measuring activity on a blog or social media website as a sign of engagement, you can predict users' behavior. In other words, if they come back to a corporate blog over and over again they'll Page 8 of 26

9 eventually buy. So metrics for engagement can be any of the following: The ratio of posts to comments on a blog while some blogs will inform you of the number of readers or site accesses, in reality, a better measure of engagement is the actual number of comments. These can tell you how likely a crisis is to viral, as well as how interested people are in the topic. The number of ratings or comments on YouTube or Flickr i.e. a download is not proof of engagement. You need to determine if they actually watch, rate it or comment on it? The assumption being that they are then more likely to pass it on to their friends and maybe even take some other action as a result. Number or share of brand recommendations -- i.e. the number of times in a conversation, or in a or an out For a property for which you can access the web analytics, measurement maven Eric Petersen suggests: o % increase in unique visitors o % increase in visitors that return more than 5 times o Increase in number of different pages viewed o Increase in number of catalog requests or downloads o Number of sessions that include more than five page views o Number of sessions that are greater than five minutes in duration o Number of visitors that arrive at your site from a Google search, or a direct link from your website o Number of visitors that become a subscriber or provide an address The good news is that many of these metrics can be gleaned from a simple Google search or Google Analytics. The bad news is that the blog traffic data is only available for your own site, and not for your competition. So there is no way to compare your engagement with that of your competition. If your measure of success is "improved relationships" In many ways engagement is just another way to express the improvement in relationships and reputation that is the goal of any good communications program. Improved communications should lead to greater trust, improved satisfaction, and more commitment to the relationship. All of these can be measured through a survey of your audience providing in metrics such as: % more likely to express satisfaction Improvement in willingness to recommend (Net Promoter Score) % increase in trust, commitment or satisfaction score % willing to buy or do business again (renewal rate) Page 9 of 26

10 If you incorporate some sort of relationship metrics into your dashboard, then it makes it much easier to diagnose the underlying cause of problems. Even though Web metrics can track behavior with increasing accuracy, all the Web stats in the world may not answer the fundamental question of "Why?" "Why did they stop visiting your site?" "Why are they spending less time there?" Or, more critically, "Why are they buying less?" So, an understanding of the nature of your relationship with your audiences will allow you to address the cause of behavioral problems you identify. Step 4: Define your benchmarks If I tell you that 35% of the conversations about you are positive, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It could be T care. Or that you just tripled your percentage of positive conversation from 11% the year before. If only 15% of the conversations about your competitors are positive, 35% is a great number. But if you peers are getting scores in the 60% range and you are at 35%, then you have a problem. Since measurement is a comparative tool, you need to figure out what you are benchmarking your results against. It could be a peer organization, or a competitive organization, or whatever keeps your top brass or C- suite up at night. Whether you select competing organizations or peer organizations, try to limit the number of entities in any given study to no more than five. Three is ideal, and anything more than five becomes unwieldy. Step 5: Select a tool In the world of social media no shortage of tools. On average, someone announces a new social media measurement tool every other week. The reality is that many of these "tools" are irrelevant at best and at worse a waste of time and money. The tool you really need de ve set for your program. Which is why we always make selecting the tool the second to last step in the process of creating a measurement program. There are essentially three types of tools that have to be in your measurement toolkit: 1. Web Analytics and Statistical Analysis: The tool to measure financial outcomes If your goal is sales and can be measured by click-throughs and conversions, all you need is Google Analytics. Or if you want greater functionality and sophistication, you can go with tools like Omniture, WebTrends. The key element in measuring contributions to sales is to accurately factor in the cost of that click-through or the cost of the lead. That means you have to factor in your time, agency time, and senior management time, as well as the actual cost of the program. This financial analysis allows you to determine the efficiency of different programs. Just remember to use unique URLs to most accurately measure results of specific programs. For example, suppose it costs you $120 a year to set up a blog and you spend an hour a day on it. If you value your time at $150 an hour, your cost for the year is $54,870. If the blog generates 50 click-throughs Page 10 of 26

11 a day or 18,250 a year, your cost per click is: $54,870/(365 x 50) = $3.00. If the objective is not as directly commercial (if, for example, you want to move people along the purchase cycle), you can measure the number of people who click through from a blog to your site. The percentage of all visitors who take action or click through is a fundamental measure of success. The most important part of web analytics is to make sure you are accurately correlating results to activities. Using a tool like SPSS or SAS, you will need to align the timing of activities such as product launches or announcement with the activity on your blog or web site. 2. Surveys: The tool to measure reputuation and relationships As has always been the case, long before social media came along, if you want to measure awareness, preference or perception, you have to actually ask people for their opinion. You do this via a pre/post survey, ideally beginning with a benchmark study BEFORE you implement your social media program, and then conducting a follow up survey 6months or a year after its been in place. Therefore, if your social media goal is improved relationships, you use Drs. Jim and Laurie Grunig's relationship measurement instrument (See Appendix A). It can be conducted by mail, or by an number of free survey tools out there, such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. Or you can use any number of established market research firms that will do the job. 3. Content Analysis: The tool to measure the conversation Think of social media as one enormous focus group, with customers, prospects, employees, and potential employees all constantly sharing their thoughts with the world. Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments is not an adequate metric. While it might give you a good feeling to know that your brand is being mentioned with increasing frequency in social media, it would be highly dangerous to simply assume this to be good news. One only has to look as far as Edelman, Wal-mart, Dell, and Domino's Pizza to know that quantity of conversation may not be a measure of success. Therefore, determine the quality as well as the quantity of the discussion about your brand with a thorough content analysis. Content analysis of social media gives you the opportunity to listen in on conversations. As a result you will gain a much better understanding of how your audiences are responding to your initiatives. The words and thoughts shared in the actual social media conversations are an important source of information, and you should be looking for messages and themes to determine how your customers and constituencies perceive your organization or brand. How does the conversation position your brand on issues like employer of choice, value, or customer service? A good analysis will pull out recurring themes, complaints, and messages and quantify them to determine if they require action or can be ignored. Page 11 of 26

12 Content analysis of social media should look for messages and themes to determine how your customers and constituencies perceive your organization or brand. A good analysis will pull out recurring themes complaints and messages, and then quantify them to determine if they require action or can be ignored. If you are dealing with a blog, you also need to determine whether or not the comments are in agreement or disagreement with the blogger, and what both sides are saying. In essence, each comment needs to be analyzed in the context of the original posting to determine if the position is widely held or just an isolated opinion. Positive or neutral comments are indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his or her audience.. How to conduct a social media content analysis Step 1: Find the content Perhaps the most difficult part of any measurement program is collecting the content. All monitoring services have their own spiders and search engines, but none of them offer any guarantee as to what they collect. There are hundreds of millions of social media conversations going on, so you need to carefully evaluate the claims of the various monitoring services. There are also a host of free monitoring services including Google Alerts and Social Mention. Additionally there are monitoring systems for specific forms of social media, such as Twazzup and Tweetdeck that are specific to Twitter. Step 2: Determine the type of conversation taking place Categorizing conversations by topic enables you to focus on certain conversations and ignore others. Looking at the type of conversations that people become engaged in (i.e. comment on) can quickly tell you the nature of the conversations. By quantifying the percentage of conversation that falls into each category, you efficiently decide best practices in responding to or ignoring different conversations. Based on sociology and communications theory, and on our own empirical research and observation, there are in life and in social media just 27 basic types of conversation: 1. Acknowledging receipt of information 2. Advertising something 3. Answering a question 4. Asking a question 5. Augmenting a previous post 6. Calling for action 7. Disclosing personal information 8. Distributing media 9. Expressing agreement 10. Expressing criticism 11. Expressing support 12. Expressing surprise 13. Giving a heads-up 14. Responding to criticism 15. Giving a shout-out 16. Making a joke 17. Making a suggestion 18. Making an observation 19. Offering a greeting 20. Offering an opinion 21. Putting out a "wanted for free" ad 22. Rallying support 23. Recruiting people Page 12 of 26

13 24. Showing dismay 25. Soliciting comments 26. Soliciting help 27. Starting a poll If you are analyzing YouTube and other videos, you may also want to categorize them as one of the following: 1. Advertisement 2. Animation 3. Demonstration 4. Event/Performance 5. Fiction 6. Film 7. Home Video 8. Instructional Video 9. Interview 10. Lecture 11. Montage 12. Music Video 13. News Broadcast 14. Promotional Video 15. Sightseeing/Tour 16. Slide show 17. Speech 18. Television Show 19. Video Log Step 3: Determine the visibility of your brand A key element in determining whether the discussion about your brand will be remembered and/or passed on is the visibility of your brand. Therefore you need to determine where in the post or video or conversation was your organization mentioned? Was it the focal point, or was it mentioned only in passing? Is the post entirely about your brand or only partially about the brand. Here are some standard guidelines. Dominance: The extent to which a company or brand is the focus of an item. Dominance is broken down into four categories: Exclusive: The company is the only one mentioned in the item Dominant: The company is the main focus of the item, but not the only company mentioned Average: The mention of the company is one of many integral parts of the story or is equal to other parts. Minimal: No one would miss it if the mention of the company were gone. Prominence: The extent to which your brand is going to be remembered as part of the discussion by classifying the item in terms of prominence, i.e. The location of the first mention of the company within an item. The more prominent a company name is in an item, the more likely a consumer is to remember it. Prominence is measured differently for print items and video items. For print items prominence is categorized as follows: Photo The company name is first found in a photo or in a photo caption Headline The company is first mentioned in the headline Top 20% - The company is first mentioned in the top 20% of the item body. Bottom 80% - The company is first mentioned in the bottom 80% of the item body. Page 13 of 26

14 For video items prominence means: Page 14 of 26 Video Start The company is first mentioned or shown at the start of the video (first 1% to 25%. Video Middle The company is first mentioned in the middle of the video; (26% to 75%) Video End The company is first mentioned at the end of the video (76% to 100%) Step 4: Determine who, if anyone, was quoted in the item? If you are conducting a thought leadership program, tracking the presence or absence of your thought leaders is critical. It is equally important to know what they are, or are not saying..therefore you need to determine where any of your leadership team or thought leaders are mentioned and if they are mentioned did they convey a key message or positioning point? Step 5: Determine tone, sentiment, and/or presence or absence of recommendations commendation Sentiment scoring in a content analysis can be seen as a substitu in essence you are determining whether consumers are recommending your brand. However, sentiment analysis is also an issue of some debate, because many companies claim they can automatically code for sentiment. In our studies we find them to be about 60% accurate. For instance, when a person from New England wicked good a computer will no doubt consider that negative. Similarly aw the movie uter will assume it is a recommendation for the book, not a panning of the movie. Therefore, we strongly recommend human coding for sentiment. Typically tone should be coded on a 4 point scale as follows: 1. Favorable or positive tone is defined as leaving the reader more likely to do business 2. Negative items leave the reader less likely to do business with the organization. 3. Balanced items have both negative and positive sentiment expressed 4. Neutral items convey no sentiment at all. Step 6: Determine what, if any, messages were communicated? Assuming your organization has key messages it would like the marketplace to know, you need to determine if they are in fact being picked up by consumers. Since it is highly unlikely that consumers will pick up your messages in their entirety, you need to categorize any discussion of your messages as follows: 1. Amplified message -- Writer communicates your key message and builds on it or amplifies it with photos, description or recommendation 2. Full message communicated -- All aspects of the message were included 3. Partial message communicated Only part of your message was included 4. No message communicated 5. Incorrect message communicated

15 6. Negative message communicated (writer says the opposite of your desire message) Positioning on key issues or battles: Sometime an organization may not have specific messages, but rather is engaged in battles of ideas. This too can be tracked in social media. You must analyze the content to determine how the organization (and its peers) po effective or Are you mentioned as an employer of choice, and/or as delivering good value? A good analysis will pull out recurring themes, complaints, and messages and quantify them to determine if they require action or can be ignored. Step 7: Quantifying the Authority of the writer or poster. Ever since the first A-list blogger was crowned and Technorati put out its rankings, PR people have been begging for a way to measure authority. The most common practice is to count the number of links and comments, and roll them up into a ranking or authority index. The simplest thing to do is to look up the URL of the blog on Technorati and see what the rank is. Be aware that Technorati's ranking have received some criticism, and they not offer rankings in the future. A step up from that is a nifty little Technoratibased widget on the Kineda site that will tell you instantly if a given URL is an A-, B-, C-, or D-list blog ( There are also a number of businesses such as HubSpot ( ) that have created products or services around the need for measuring authority. Another approach is to look at the specific industry and/or market and design an authority index around your particular business or market. This requires more in-depth bespoke research up front, but will yield more useful results in the long term. Defining/categorizing the author: In traditional media you may have reporters, editors, producers and commenters. Similarly, social media contributors can also be classified according to the role they play in social media: Social media classifications are not mutually exclusive and can vary by media usage. i.e., a person can be many types of users at the same time. Someone may create original content on their own blog, making them a creator. That same person may be classified a respondent on other blogs when they comment on subjects. Also, that person may be a participant on Facebook (they have an account and profile), but maybe they only view content on MySpace and have no account, which would make them a spectator. Someone can even be a creator and publisher even within the same post, then that person would be a creator and publisher. We recommend using the following definitions: CREATORS: Creators make social content go. A social media creator is someone that produces and uploads their own original social media content. The creation can be in any format, whether it be text, audio, video, photo or any other medium. If a person is listed as an author or creator of Page 15 of 26

16 social media content and there is no reason to believe they are not the content maker, then they are classified as a creator. COLLECTORS: Collectors organize content for themselves or others using RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites like Digg.com There are two types of social media collectors, first, someone that gathers and organizes their social media content through RSS feeds, social bookmarking sites, and/or aggregator sites. Or, someone that uses social media sites to manage their online content, e.g., bookmarks, favorites, etc. A person can be classified as a collector by signing up on a bookmarking site or signing up for RSS feeds to social media content. PUBLISHER: platform. They take someone e similar practices. This can be taking content from traditional media and formatting it to social media or taking content from the Internet or social media sites. Publishers are identified by the sources they site or other identifiers that signal content reproduction. If a blog post sites that the post comes from another source, or if it is a twitter retweet, or any other indication of content reproduction. RESPONDENT: A respondent is someone that responds to social media content by commenting on blogs, replying to forum threads, rating videos or responding in some way to social media content. Respondents can communicate positively, negatively, or neutrally. A respondent is different from a publisher because they are directly responding to previously posted social media content. You can be a respondent and not be a participant on some sites. Some sites only allow comments from people with profiles, while others allow comments by anyone. Respondents are identified simply by their commenting, rating, or replying to some other social media content. PARTICIPANT: A social media participant is someone that is officially signed up with an official login and user profile on a social media site. Examples are people signed up on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter or other similar sites. Having participant status can vary by media type. A person may have a MySpace account and be considered a participant, while at the same time they look at Twitter, but are not signed up, making them a Spectator. Only people with active profiles are considered participants. A profile is deemed active if it has been used in at least the past six months. SPECTATORS: Social media spectators are people that browse at content on social media sites, but are not officially logged in or signed up on that site. In cases where a user has an account e.g., YouTube, but they view content without being signed in, they will be considered spectators. A person is only considered a participant when they are viewing content and are signed in with their official profile. To track this metric would require analytics that could show you all of the people that visit a social media site and then tell you whether they are logged in and participating or if they are not logged in and are sampling browsing. Page 16 of 26

17 Step 8: Analyze results, make recommendations, do it again The most important element in any mea big spike in positive conversation in June the question is, what caused the spike? Ideally you would use a good statistical analysis package such as SPSS or SAS to determine correlations between conversations what is. Look first for weaknesses, analyze the competitive results as well. Where is the competition leading, where are you winning? What do you do with the data once you have it? The most important part of any measurement program is teasing insight from the data and drawing actionable conclusions. Then look at trends over time. What happened yesterday or last week is important, of course, but what you need to do is to see if complaints are going up or down over time, or if your relationships are getting better or worse over time, or if the ranks of complainers are growing faster than the ranks of supporters. About negative comments: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT go into crisis mode the first time you see negative comments. Do a bit of research first. Read the blogger's prior postings. See how many links and comments he or she has. If it's one or two, don't do anything, but watch the numbers, if they start to grow quickly, you may have an emerging crisis. If it's already in the hundreds, and/or if this blog is one of the top most influential blogs in your industry, then you need to come up with a response. If someone who has written hundreds of postings, received zero comments and does not appear on anyone's rankings, then you can probably ignore it. If it's not a crisis, but there is someone who is consistently writing negatively about you, take the waitand-see attitude. Evaluate the bloggers authority. See what kinds of comments are made, and how the blogger responds. Then start a dialog. Offer information, a perspective or new information. Finally, keep close track of the activity to your website and correlate that activity against the various postings in the social media that mention your brand. Making Social Media Measurement fit your budget While this may all seem overwhelming, there are a number of ways to make sure measurement fits into your budge. The easiest one is to make yourself a research project for a local university or research class. Many educational institutions are frequently looking for case studies. Another cost-saving approach is to random sample your content. Random sampling is a research technique that has been used for years in polling and survey research. More recently it has gained widespread acceptance in content analysis in resource-constrained environments. Assuming you are looking at a file of thousands of blog postings or tweets, you can take a random sample i.e. -- one out of every ten items, and conduct a thorough analysis of that sample. We recommend sampling by either media or by organization. In other words if you are analyzing conversations about 5 different companies in your industry take a random sample of postings about each Page 17 of 26

18 company. Alternatively you can take a random sample by channel i.e. one in ten Tweets, one in ten blog postings, one in ten videos. A final word on ROI i.e. staff time+agency time+executive time+ hard costs. Subtract the I from the R and you have ROI. And, while pulling together the costs is relatively straightforward, calculating the actual revenue is anything but. We see five 1. Sales This is obviously the most direct and simple definition of ROI. If you are like Southwest airlines, you can use your web analytics and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to tie actual sales to social media activity. This works well if you are selling tickets, or are managing an online sales site. It also works well for non-profits where the goal is to increase donations. 2. Cost Savings More and more organizations are using social media for recruitment or customer service. By carefully listening to the conversation they are able to identify better candidates, or more quickly solve customer problems. For example, food service company Sodexo calculated a $300,000 savings in recruitment costs after it began using Twitter to aid recruitment. 3. Paid vs. earned search rankings Most companies are spending significant funds on services such as Google AdWords to ensure that when customers search for their products, their brand shows up high up in search results. One of the benefits of a proactive social media campaign is that it makes your brand more current and more relevant two criteria that determines how high up in a search your brand will appear. Many companies that have active social media campaigns find that they can drop their paid search ads altogether and still receive very high rankings in search. 4. Cost avoidance Any brand has the potential to be caught in a crisis. Whatever the nature of that crisis, good relationships can help mitigate its extent and duration. The best way to calculate the value of that mitigation is to examine what happens to competing organizations in your marketplace. Compare the money spent on legal fees for a crisis with social media to one handled without the benefit of social media. 5. Social Capital -- There has been extensive research done by Robert Putnam and others on the value of social capital and social networks. His work shows that, for an individual, the more relationships you have, the better your life is, the longer you live, and the healthier you are. For a company, good social capital means that information flows more easily, innovation and efficiency increase, and legal costs go down. You can extend this concept to social media. If a blog is generating favorable comments, engaging employees or customers in the business of Page 18 of 26

19 Page 19 of 26 the organization, and disseminating information quickly and accurately, it is contributing to the social capital of your organization. In this case you will need tools to both monitor and analyze the conversations, as well as data from other parts of your organization on business processes such as customer turnover rates, employee turnover rates, legal costs and productivity scores (typically measured in revenue per employee).

20 Appendix #1 Glossary of Measurement Terms Over time, researchers and measurement experts have developed their own terms that can frequently be confusing to the person who is new to the measurement process. This Glossary has been adapted from the Institute for Public Relations Dictionary of Measurement Terms, edited and compiled by Dr. Donald Stacks of the University of Miami, and fully dow s website, Italic terms in the definitions indicate cross references. Baseline or benchmark: An initial measurement against which subsequent measures are compared. Benchmarking or benchmark study: measurement technique that involves having an organization learn something about its own practices and/or the practices of selected others, and then compares these practices. Research that establishes a benchmark. AdWords: Google's program of pay-per-click search page advertising. Authority: The ability of a blog to command respect, and to influence, thought, opinion, or behavior. Blog: Short for "Web log," an online journal generally updated very often. In order to be considered a blog, the site must allow comments. Click-through: An online behavior metric representing an individual responding to an ad or link by clicking on it. Circulation: Number of copies of a publication as distributed. Not usually the same as the number actually read, but as a practical matter, synonymous with opportunities to see, impressions, and reach. Column inches: The total length of a printed article if it were all one column, measured in inches. Content analysis: An informal research methodology and measurement tool that systematically tracks messages (written, spoken, broadcast) and translates them into quantifiable form by defining message categories and specified units of analysis. Conversion: When a prospective customer takes the marketer's intended action. For a website, a conversion might be making an online purchase, or submitting a form to request additional information. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the conversion action. Dashboard: A technique for simplifying data reporting by displaying a small number of important summary measures together in one location. Like an automotive dashboard, a PR dashboard includes only those measures most critical for assessing the progress or health of a program or company. editorial or earned media -- (1) The content of a publication written by a journalist, as distinct from advertising content, which is determined by an advertiser; (2) An article expressing the editorial policy of a publication on a matter of interest (also known as a Leader or Leading article); (3) Space in a publication bought by an advertiser that includes journalistic copy intended to make the reader think it originates from an independent source (also known as an Advertorial). Engagement Meaningful connection or interaction between a consumer and a website, organization, product, or brand. Focus group methodology: Informal research technique that uses a group discussion approach to gain an indepth understanding of a client, object, or product; is not generalizable to other focus groups or populations. Page 20 of 26