Measurement and ROI for Social Media

Many companies are starting to talk about integrating social media into their communications plans, and that is great news for at least two reasons:

1. I actually think that we do care about all the talent and knowledge inside organizations. What happens usually is that if your company is siloed and large enough, you may not meet, nor the company will be able to know about these wonderful internal resources. The use of social media allows you to learn about what you've got internally, gage the level of energy and interest in collaboration across functions and departments and see who's a natural at doing social media. An email thread, as attached as we've become to those, just won't accomplish this. As Jeremy Burton, President and CEO of Serena software says, employees will engage in social media anyway, why not put it out in the open and allow them to contribute to the business with social media? [tip of the hat to Shel Holtz via Twitter]

2. Customers want to know that they've come to right place and they would like to hear it from you. When people talk about authenticity and transparency they don't actually expect you to open your books to them, what they're saying is "talk to us like normal humans do" and "tell it like it is". We've gotten used to cloaking what we do and hiding the payoff behind reasonable empty language, which we keep borrowing from each other. There are ways to tell the truth and still own the ways to make something happen (or fix what is broken) for your customers. Denial or cover up are just that -- retardants and repellents. Dell got the message and is doing something about it. The aim is not perfection, as you might have thought of in a brochure or web site, the aim is listening and responding -- it's open ended and two-way conversation.

It is essential to show tangible value beyond the creation of community and internal engagement. These activities take time and attention away from other pursuits and those are precious assets. Whether ROI equals return on investment, return on involvement or return on influence, knowing the "return" part matters a great deal. We talked about feedback before. Measurement is an important form of feedback.

Geoff Livingston tagged me with this measurement meme along with several other talented communications professionals.

• Kami Huyse, who just presented on the topic and has written extensively about social media measurement before, posted a set of questions on resources and methodologies and asked for examples.
• Connie Bensen wrote a very detailed post on measurement, social media and ROI sharing what she plans to measure in quantitative and qualitative terms and the metrics of the ACDSee blog.

There are several tools that measure different things:

• Traffic (Google Analytics or some other system) -- here you may look at new vs. returning visitors, time spent on the site, number of pages viewed and learn if your social media site is sticky.
  
• Influence as in reach (FeedBurner RSS -- important enough to be considered separately as they go beyond reach, they show the reader is vested in some way with the content).
  
• Influence as in volume (all the social networks, Technorati, company articles submitted to social bookmarking like Digg, del.icio.us, etc.) -- you may know that the inbound links Technorati counts expire every six months. To be counter properly you also need to make sure your domain is mapped correctly.
• Influence (Google Alerts) -- mentioned elsewhere but not linked 

Some of the metrics for Conversation Agent are:

• 25.6% returning visitors and 74.4% new;
• 3:25 avg. time on the site
• 30,520 visits in the last 4 months
• 989 RSS subscribers
• 25 live hits in between 7-12 minutes
• PR6 -- Google PageRank
• 1,904 comments on 375 posts -- 5:1 ratio
  
• 99 trackbacks
• 568 authority or links back to the site in the last six months (Technorati)
• Between 40-45% of visitors find this blog through organic searches and an average of 34% come here from other sites.

These are the numbers and I find both the steady rise in number of subscribers and the number of links encouraging. Numbers are easy. If you dig a little deeper, you may also gain insights into what content and topics are sparking interest, which goes to satisfying what your audience wants to read about and is receptive to. I find that kind of information more exciting than many ratios and statistics.

Let's not forget that ROI is not always about cash. What about another kind of influence? Less directly measurable, yet sometimes more powerful. What actions are people taking as a result of reading or engaging with you? Are they buying your products? Are they telling you about their needs? Are they requesting to speak with someone from your company? Are they willing to provide testimonials and referrals to you?

As for case studies or examples, I have built and maintained this blog to show rather than tell that it can be done, even by one person. When the commitment and the desire to connect are there, the medium is less difficult to get -- social media is mostly about attitude: listening, being open and sincere. Especially in light of what the offering here is -- connecting ideas and people.

This is a meme and I would like to invite other social media practitioners to the conversation on any methodologies they would recommend and of course to share their experience:

• Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing
• Rohit Bhagava, Influential Marketing Blog
• Patrick Shaber, The Lonely Marketer
• David Reich, My 2 Cents
• Greg Verdino
• Marta Kagan, The Secret Diary of a Bona Fide Marketing Genius

What proof of the effectiveness of social media are you providing businesses? How do you measure ROI? Let's continue the conversation.

Comments

[Geoff Livingston]

Thank you for sharing your blogs stats and how you see them working from an influence standpoint. It's interesting to see the discussion about what the right outcome is from blog post to blog post. As you can imagine, it varies greatly by organization and mission.

[Valeria Maltoni]

The reason why I thought it was interesting to share the numbers is because they matter only if you look at reach from a purely dispassionate level. From the figures you may infer that many people find the material here worthwhile to comment on and come back to.

To me a case study would be what has anyone improved, learned, undertaken as a result of inspiration and material read here?

It was a very late night (or early morning) effort ;-) I would love to hear from frequent readers. Has the content kept up with quality and impact to them?

This is a relevant discussion for the reasons I listed up front. When embraced, these tools can really help get everyone talking and sharing.

[Marta Kagan]

Thanks, Valeria, for the invitation to contribute to this discussion. There's such confusion—and in many cases, resistance—to implementing social media campaigns, that I feel the effort to demonstrate ROI is vital to successful adoption.

Take for instance a recent study by TWI Surveys, Inc. (on Behalf of Society for New Communications Research) which surfaces the following interesting data points:

- 70% of mar/comm professionals are currently spending 2.5% or less of their communications budgets on conversational marketing
- Two-thirds plan to increase their investment in conversation within the next twelve months
- 57% project that in five years they will be spending more on conversational marketing than traditional marketing

Clearly, the medium is still in its infancy.

But there are some who've been diligent about measuring its impact—like the pros referenced in this posting. Another great player in the space worth a look is BzzAgent (www.BzzAgent.com). Not only do they have case studies and a great white paper on measurability of their WOM marketing efforts, but they're walking their talk: Their "90 Days" blog project (http://90days.bzzagent.com/) blows the roof off the idea of "transparency".

Finally, consider implementing the Net Promoter Score as a means of measuring social media campaign impact. Strictly defined, NPS is "% of Promoters - % of Detractors". It's not a pure ROI calculation, but it gets to the root of whether a customer/reader/community member would recommend you—or not—as a percentage of the total activity on your social media platform.

Keep the dialogue going! Let's blaze some new trails...

[Kami Huyse]

From a personal blogging standpoint these are interesting figures. What do you learn from these stats and what changes have you made because of them.

For instance, awhile back I moved my subscribe option to the top right of my blog and saw my susbscriptions double in just a month.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Thank you, Marta. And welcome to the conversation with such a rich array of resources to add to the topic. The interesting thing is that some companies are scurrying to figure this social media thing out. As reported in the ST:

"American Express has sent groups of employees to "Cool School" seminars run by digital strategy agency Electric Artists. Employees spend the day visiting companies like IAC/Interactive Corp and discussing trends like social networking and virtual worlds. Cool School sessions cost between $30,000 and $75,000 a day, says Marc Schiller, founder of Electric Artists, of New York."

So those of us who have learned how to do this should (notice the conditional) get an audience ready to learn. The truth is that companies -- and many marketing managers -- are hard pressed to figure out where it fits and because of non advertised ROI many do not get buy in from management.

I'll look into the Net Promoter Score, good tip!

[Valeria Maltoni]

Kami:

I made the subscribe widget bigger as well as enabled it at the footer of each post with feed flare. I had noticed that I had a hard time finding the subscribe button on blogs authored by other people and ended up bookmarking them, which of course is not as efficient.

For plug and play I made a change in the layout going from one long sidebar to the right to two shorter sidebars to the left. This makes my blog friendlier to read on small screens for right handed people -- we can zoom in the body of the post more easily. In addition to the friendlier sidebars, I wanted to give people more clues on what I was reading and why. So I split the long blogroll into shorter and topical (to my focus and that of readers who come here) sections. That also makes it easier for people to connect with others they may not know from the same category. Which is in line with the offering in my tag line.

The third major change I implemented (that led to increased page views) was shorter posts more often and breaking up longer posts better visually. Especially now that I view the blog from a bigger screen, I can see how I challenged my readers visually.

[Greg Verdino]

Thanks for the tag Valeria - I'll respond in kind over at my joint next week. G

[David Reich]

You've given me something to think about...I'll let you know when I post my response at my 2 cents in the next few days.

Regards, Valeria.

[Roger von Oech]

Interesting takes all around.

As I've said on another forum, all those metrics are fine but for me personally the most important number is my Google Page Rank (which for me is a 6). I found that when my GPR went from a 5 to 6 last February, my number of visitors went up significantly.

I tend to pay less attention to Technorati. One's T'rati score can easily go up a 100 (or more points) simply if your on a list that's going around the web. That reminds me of high school popularity contests.

Since I celebrated my one-year anniversary last September, I've tried to think a lot less about the metrics. This has helped make blogging more fun. After all, it's all so ephemeral!

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Greg -- I look forward to reading your take, and to meeting in NYC in the not too distant future.

@David -- likewise, I am very interested in your approach.

@Roger -- well, I must say I have not really seen any appreciable traffic increase from PR6 yet. It may be too soon to say. The ROI exercise here was more to demonstrate the value of blogging and social media to organizations. If I'm here every night after a 10-hour work day, I clearly see value in being here ;-)

[Tom O'Brien]

I agree that measurement is crucial for the development of all of these social media tools. Our (MotiveQuest) own approach to social media measurement is called the Online Promoter Score - a measure of people's willingness to advocate for or recommend your brand/product in online conversations (forums, blogs, newsgroups).

More here:

http://humanvoice.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/social-media-measurement/

Tom O'Brien