how to measure your social media impact and roi - selected findings

How to Measure your Social Media Impact and ROI

OPEN NOW for your selected findings from this new ground breaking report

www.usefulsocialmedia.com/impact

PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies, must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid

An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI

SELECTED FINDINGS

An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROIPLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies,

must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid

Order your copy today, visit www.usefulsocialmedia.com/impact For more information contact [email protected] 2

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It’s the biggest challenge the social media practitioner faces

Working out the ROI specifically, and your impact more broadly, are two of the most critical challenges a social media practitioner faces.

Unlocking the answers to these two long-recurring bugbears could potentially pave the way to lucrative opportunities for your brands.

Fear not. Useful Social Media’s ground-breaking report offers a fresh guide to effectively implementing social media measurement strategy – and measuring the ROI of campaigns.

Practical steps and best practice on assessing impact and calculating ROI – from some of the leading corporate practitioners at work today

The key metrics you need to consider when measuring your social media impact – and benchmark figures from industry leaders

Exclusive Useful Social Media survey data revealing the thoughts of hundreds of stakeholders on their approach to ROI and measurement...

A tailored and exclusive Scorecard you can use to accurately assess your own impact – based on best practice from the leaders

Detail on the key differences between B2B and B2C social media marketing response and impact

Purchase the report today to get...

Who should buy this report?

• ChiefMarketingOfficers(CMOs)

• SocialMediamanagers and directors

• Corporatecommunications professionals

• CustomerServiceprofessionals

• Marketingdepartments withinSMEs

Who wrote the report?Veteran writer and journalist Peter Kirwan has more than 20 years’ experience reporting on consumer, technology and the financial and business markets. After witnessing the web’s early-stage effects on tech publishing during the late 1990s, he launched Fullrun, a subscription-based web site dedicated to analysing the impact of technology on media and marketing in the tech sector. He is also a regular contributor to The Guardian and is a social media enthusiast.

Our methodologyWe interviewed 11 brands including Siemens, Adobe, World Wrestling Entertainment and Hewlett Packard, delving into cross-industry similarities and differences in social media ROI and measurement strategies. An additional six interviews were completed with social media authors and agency contacts.

This was coupled with an industry-wide survey sent to the US, Europe and Asia, aimed at a greater number of brands, and looking at approaches to measurement and ROI, attitudes towards these strategies and what are their prevailing scorecard metrics.




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Exclusive USM data revealed 76% say they are ‘quite relaxed’ or

‘somewhatrelaxed’aboutROImeasurement...

Over50%ofrespondentssaidtheyare‘mildly’or‘verydissatisfied’with

the way in which their organisation undertakes measurement, according

toUsefulSocialMedia’sindustry-widesurvey...

WriterPeterKirwanstatesinhisconclusions:‘Metricsarefundamental

tosuccessinthesocialspace.Theoldsayingthatweoverestimatethe

level of change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term

neverseemedmoreapt.’

Jennifer Vogel, Communications Manager at The Rainforest Alliance,

describesthecompany’sfirststepsinsocialmedia,saying:‘Theevolution

wasoneoffear.Whathappenswhenit'snolongeraone-waydialogue?

Everyonehasthatfear.Butgraduallyit'sjustbecomenormal.’

BethLaPierre,chieflisteneratKodak,describesusingsocialmediaas

amarket research tool: ‘We can understand how customers use the

productintheirlife.There'salwaysgoingtobeavalueandtimeforthat

intheresearchprocess.Whenwe'vegotsomeearlyproductreadytogo,

wegivethemtoheavyusersandgetsomefeedback.’

StefanHeeke’stopUSPofsocialmediais:transparency.‘Socialmedia

forcesus tobecomemore transparent,’ he revealed ‘which is hugely

important for a large corporation because people have suspicions and

fears.Transparencyisahugeleverofgainingtrust.That'simportant.’

SocialmediaspecialistsworkinginAdobe'sbusinessunits‘needtolook

atthedirtylaundry’,saysAdobe’ssocialmediadirectorMariaPoveromo,

inorderto ‘figureoutwhattodoto increaseperformanceorchange

impact.’

Some key statistics, findings and quotes we reveal in the Report:




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Defining Your Impact

Engagement

Engagement is a broad term, wide enough in its meaning to cover a multitude of sins (and virtues). One recent effort to list social engagement metrics unearthed 35 data types, ranging from the obvious (downloads and views) to the not-so-obvious (‘print page’, ‘report spam/abuse’ and visits to a settings page). (Lake, 2009)

Yet we know instinctively what engagement means. And it’s also very clear what Stefan Heeke, director of online marketing at Siemens, means when he suggests that ‘advertising and the whole marketing machine is not very good at engaging people’.

Most advertising is based upon interruption. If engagement isn’t quite the opposite of interruption, it does suggest a willingness on the part of marketers to go with the flow of an existing conversation, to contribute something back to the network.

At Kodak, engagement is one of four broad metrics measured by chief listener Beth LaPierre (the others are ‘reach’, ‘impact’ and ‘influence’). If reach involves the total number of eyeballs exposed to a message, engagement focuses on actions that don’t directly result in the achievement of a business objective. LaPierre measures engagement across both kodak.com and the wider web in multiple ways: click-throughs, views, comments, likes and shares.

The potential metrics here are broad: in fact, LaPierre defines engagement as ‘any action that’s different from impact’ (which tends to be an outcome which aligns closely with hard-edged business objectives).

Of the difference between impact and engagement, LaPierre says: ‘It can be fuzzy.’ To illuminate the difference, she refers to Kodak’s recent Father’s Day campaign. This campaign encouraged Facebook users to upload their favourite photographs of their father. The company promised it would publish the ten best photos on its home page and on the Kodak billboard in New York’s Times Square on Father’s Day. Also associated with the campaign was a 20% discount on an electronic photo frame with Facebook connectivity at the Kodak store.

Here’s how LaPierre breaks down this particular campaign’s objectives: ‘One goal is ‘reach’; another goal would be ‘engagement’, in that we want a lot of people to share and talk about it. But the real impact is in how many click-throughs did we get to the product page?’

As you might expect, Avinash Kaushik, the guru of web analytics, detects some challenges with measuring engagement. Specifically, Kaushik has this to say on the subject: (Kaushik, 2010)

‘Metrics masquerading as engagement in the analytics-o-sphere are not really metrics, they are an excuse to (a) not accept the limits of the possible and (b) hide what is actually being measured.’

Furthermore, Kaushik suspects that traditional web analytics can only measure a part of what we think of as engagement. In other words, it can measure the degree of a user’s




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engagement, but not the kind of that engagement. Here’s how Kaushik breaks down engagement into ‘degree’ and ‘kind’:

Degree: the degree of positive or negative engagement lies on a continuum that ranges from low involvement to high. An engaged person is someone with an above-average involvement with his or her object of relatedness.

Kind: customers can be positively or negatively engaged with a company or product. A more in-depth examination of [engagement by] kind would reveal its content, usually a mixture of emotional states and rational beliefs, such as in the case of positive engagement, sympathy, trust, pride and so on.

If these definitions seem overlapping at first, the difference becomes clearer once we start to think of degree as being largely quantifiable and kind as being about largely qualitative judgments.

On the web, engagement by degree can be measured by metrics like frequency of visits, depth of visit, outcomes (a download or full/partial video view). According to Kaushik, measuring engagement by degree involves more complex approaches, including surveys, likelihood to recommend (‘a strong proxy for engagement’) and customer retention over time (‘months of data, segmented for online and offline and for various micro-segments of your online population’.)

Engagement: Some practical lessons

We asked our interviewees how they measured users’ engagement with their social media presence. The answers fell into two categories: those who measured degree of engagement in fairly straightforward fashion; and those who also measured kind of engagement, largely by using offline survey techniques.

-- Stefan Heeke of Siemens: reach and social impressions:

‘We will look at the hashtag usage, how much buzz we’ve created, how many followers, the tonality of it… But I think the only thing you can really measure is reach. We sort of look at social impressions, how many people are posting things, or on Facebook, people putting something in the status. We apply a factor to that.

‘So, for instance, let’s say someone uses an app and then they say, ‘I just used an application’ and they post that on their status or say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I follow this’. This is something that’s public to the friends of the person putting up that status update. So these are social impressions. If 10,000 did that, put it on their status, you can multiply it by 100 -- everybody has 100 friends. So you actually have a reach of 1m by people sharing information.

‘We measure that on a project-by-project basis. So, take the water footprint app, we can see how many people put that on their status.

‘If you just look at the followers, people might say 5,000 followers is small. But if you can say that 10,000 posted content that will travel through the social network… It’s not a hard number, obviously, but it’s argument.’




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Influence

If, as Andrew Bruce Smith suggests, there tend to be two approaches to measuring the output of social media investment -- one derived from web analytics, the other from branding and PR -- the measurement of influence certainly traces its lineage to the PR industry.

In the pre-web era, influencers were easy to spot: they were typically ‘experts’ (academics, financial analysts, business leaders, columnists). It was partly the job of publicists to influence these ‘experts’, whose opinions would subsequently be amplified by mass media and trickle down toward the broader public.

Katie Delahaye Paine, the measurement guru, argues that social media has ‘officially signed the death certificate’ for this model of influence. (Delahaye Paine, 2011)

Elite influencers

No doubt. But the idea of influence isn’t dead. On the contrary, it has persisted online. As early as 2000, the PR agency Burson Marsteller released the first in a long line of reports on America’s ‘e-fluentials’, which suggested that the opinions of the most vocal and influential consumers were greatly amplified by the web. (Holmes, 2001)

‘Representing 8% of the internet population (about 9 million users), this group influences more people on more topics than other online users. And, they are eight times more effective at communicating their views than Roper’s traditional ‘influentials’.’

From the mid-noughties onward, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, the ability to identify and sell stories to an influential elite of bloggers became a selling point for many PR agencies. (Gladwell, 2001)

In 2006, Technorati, the blog search engine, struck up a partnership with Edelman, the PR agency. On the basis of this exclusive arrangement, Edelman promised to guide its clients through ‘a chaotic world of continuous discussion, learning from the crowd and remixed media where companies must cede control to gain credibility’. (Edelman, 2006)

Much of Technorati’s data focused on the growth of blogging as a phenomenon. Accompanying efforts to identify ‘top 10’ or ‘top 100’ lists of bloggers were intended to showcase the idea that PR agencies were in a good position to master the dynamics of conversational marketing. Subsequent efforts at measurement attempted to blend this focus on elite bloggers with some acknowledgement of the rapid rise of Facebook and Twitter (frequently referred to at the time as a form of ‘microblogging’). (Brain, 2007)

Efforts such as these, which attempt to measure elite influentials, have been repeatedly criticised over the years. Yet this is a meme that persists: Technorati is no longer measuring blog-based influence, but its descendants like PeerIndex have adopted a more sophisticated approach to the same challenge, measuring elite influencers across multiple social channels. (Reichenstein)

Watts vs Gladwell: Elite influencers vs random effects




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By the time Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point, the notion of influencers as a driving force behind the adoption of memes had been around for 50 years or so. In his book, Gladwell dusted down the ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment conducted by the sociologist Stanley Milgram in 1967 and contextualised them for a new audience. (Gladwell, 2001)

In that experiment, Milgram gave letters to 160 people in Nebraska, and told them to try to send the letters on their way to a stockbroker in Boston with whom they had no personal connection, by sending them to a colleague socially closer to the target. Famously, most of the letters arrived at their destination after passing through the hands of six intermediaries.

What Gladwell noticed was the way in which half of Milgram’s letters were delivered to the stockbroker by the same three friends. These individuals were described by Gladwell as ‘connectors’. The rest of us, he argued, are ‘linked to the world through these special few’.

Gladwell’s book itself exerted a powerful influence on the way in which marketers started to think about influence at the dawn of the social web. Yet it has also been criticised repeatedly by researchers like Duncan Watts, director of the Human Social Dynamics Group at Yahoo! Research.

Watts has argued that Gladwell attributes far too much power to connectors or influencers. Instead, Watts’s experiments emphasise the apparently random way in which memes spread through networks. ‘If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one -- and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,’ Watts has said.

As the journalist Clive Thompson noted in 2008, the irony of Watts’s findings is that ‘since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible -- and not waste money chasing ‘important’ people’. (Thompson, 2008)

For marketers, this raises multiple questions. One of the most important, in the social realm, is this: should marketers place their faith in what Sinan Aral, an assistant professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, calls ‘active personalised messaging’ or ‘passive broadcast messaging’. The former, says Aral, ‘requires more effort and time, which may curtail their use’. The latter ‘may reach more people but may be less persuasive’. (Aral, 2010)




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Chapter 1 – Social Media: An Introduction1.1 Howmanycompaniesuseit?

1.2 Whatdotheyuseitfor?

1.3 Socialmeasurement:oursurveyresults

Chapter 2 – Defining Your Impact:2.1 Engagement

2.2 Influence

2.3 Advocacy

2.4 Sentiment

2.5 Equivalence

2.6 Casestudyfromaleadingpractitioner

Chapter 3 – Measuring Your Impact (Social Media Metrics)3.1 How do leading companies measure against the metrics

theyhavesetthemselves?

3.2 DefiningthevalueofaTwitterfollower/Facebookfan

3.3 Paidvsfree

3.4 Casestudiesfromleadingpractitioners

Chapter 4 – Industry Comparables4.1 Investmentandreturns:Whatarecompaniesspendingandgetting?

4.2 Staffandbudget

4.3 Differencebetweenb2b/b2c

4.4 Casestudiesfromleadingpractitioners

Chapter 5 – The Useful Social Media Scorecard5.1 TheUsefulSocialMediaScorecard

5.2 Questionstoasktoassessyourownsocialmediaimpact/ROI

Chapter 6 – Conclusions

The Full Table of Contents

What the report covers, in detail:

• References

• Contents

• Tableoffigures

• Executivesummary

• Introduction




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Key Information: The Report in numbers

To pick up your copy of this critical business intelligence report, go to www.usefulsocialmedia.com/impact

Remember, buy your copy before August 26 and save $300!

Pages:

168 30+ July 25, 2011

Charts: Release Date: