ImpactWatch Blog

This is a little late because, well, I was in Acapulco. But I was thinking about measurement the ENTIRE time. I swear.

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Some question payoff of social media efforts – BtoB Magazine

How to get started in social media – Ragan

Social Media Measurement – Are We Staring at the Stones? – Social Computing Journal

[Social Media] The missing metrics: actions after words – Torley Lives

Assessing free social media metrics tools – iMedia Connections and Rob Gonda’s Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques

When ROI Measurement And Actual Effectiveness Are Mutually Exclusive – Fast Company

Social Media and Car Insurance: A Match Made in Heaven? – Mashable

Who’s Worth Listening to? – Successful Blog

This Machine Eats Tweets: The System Behind @Comcast and Others – ReadWriteWeb – and response from Dave Fleet, Social Media Monitoring -Disturbing Or Useful?

The Obscure Art of Measurement – All About Branding

Share of Voice: A Key Metric That Has Lost Its Place? Marketing Spectrum

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See Last Week’s Top Articles

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of: FoxyPar4

On Sunday I watched the Dallas Mavericks versus the Phoenix Suns game on ABC. Those two teams were fighting each other for the eighth and final playoff spot in the NBA Western Conference so it was a big game. (The Mavs have since clinched that last spot and the Suns are out.)

One thing I found interesting about the broadcast was that sideline reporter Lisa Salters was twittering during the game.  The timing was perfect, the game was a blowout and the announcers were struggling to find anything to talk about except for what was happening on the court. In comes Salters and her tweets with some behind the scenes gems.

i have carlisle at the end of the 3rd — what do you want me to ask him?? since they’re up by 20+, does it really matter 5:14 PM Apr 5th

check this out — i was just told by nba official that there is no ‘end of 3rd quarter intv’ if its a 30 point game 5:18 PM Apr 5th

grant hill told me before the game that the suns WOULD show up today — he just looked over at me from the huddle and mouthed ‘i was wrong’ 5:33 PM Apr 5th

As a basketball fan I think this is just awesome. She’s giving the opportunity for people to interact with her and possibly even contribute to the questions she asks in her interview with the coach. And what are the chances that her interactions with the players and refs would ever see the light of day unless it happens to occur on the rare occassions when the camera is on her?

Ask Twitter fans why the love it and you’ll probably get 10 different answers from 10 different people. But the way that it facilitates quick, off-the-cuff status updates, together with a somebody like Salters who has a unique level of access to share, makes for a pretty interesting combination.

The next step in creating a successful Media Monitoring plan is figuring out the logistics.

We need to determine out how big of a job it is and how it’s going to get done.

What is your budget?

Do you already have a dollar figure per month or year that you are prepared to spend to monitor and measure your media coverage? Try to at least ballpark a number before we determine your actual needs.

How much work is this?

Determine Volume

A giant factor in the scale of your program is your actual volume of media coverage. Go get your media plan handy and:

1. If you get low volume coverage/only care about online – use your tag lists to do some preliminary searches on Google/Twitter/other relevant outlets.

2. If you get high volume coverage/need print or broadcast – send your tag list to potential media monitoring partners or to the content providers directly (Factiva, VMS, Lexis-Nexis) and ask for a monthly volume estimate.

Your volume will of course vary over time, but you want to get a pretty good estimate of how many mentions your company (products/competitors/industry) is getting each month.

Determine Complexity

Next you have to guess how long it will take to analyze the articles. This depends heavily on two factors:

-Technicality/Analyst’s understanding of industry. Articles about cupcakes are usually easier to get through than articles about thermonuclear fusion, even with a specialist reviewing the mentions.

-Number and simplicity of tags. How many different attributes are you looking for in each mention? Are they easy to pick out (product mention) or do they take a little thought (message penetration)?

If you plan to do the analysis yourself, go ahead and do some timed practice. Read through the relevant mentions you found and analyze them according to the tags you selected. How many can you do in an hour?

If you plan to outsource analysis, your potential monitoring firm(s) will create this estimate for you.

Determine Reporting

Time spent creating metrics is really only an issue if you choose a DIY monitoring program. Pretty much all technology solutions will churn those numbers out for you in a blink.

But even then, someone has to read the results, right? How much time will you dedicate to reviewing your coverage metrics and reinvesting that information?

Determine Participation

Another factor that should be included in your media monitoring program’s budget is engagement time. Are you going to respond to customer inquiries/complaints? Comment on blog posts? Think about what actions you will be taking based on your coverage results and create a time estimate.

At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of the scale of your media management program. You know if this is 5 hours a week checking blogs for product mentions or if you’re going to need serious help processing 13k company mentions per month.

Do you need technology?

Using software vastly reduces the man hours required to monitor and measure your media coverage. It:

1. Automatically aggregates your content.
2. Automates a great deal of your tags.
3. Faciliates searching and sorting of content.
4. Allows the creation of digital report templates.
5. Creates instant metrics and analytics.
6. Helps you keep track of reporting/participation actions.

Take a look at your volume and determine if it is reasonable to manage without automation (by using Excel or some other non-specialized program). Software is available at literally every price range, with scaling features, so there is very likely something to fit your workflow and budget.

Who is going to do the work?

Media analysis is a very difficult full-time job unless a large portion is participation. Media analysis is tedious. It takes a lot of concentration and it’s difficult to maintain quality over many hours.

For this reason, I suggest breaking the task up among two or more people if the analysis portion will require more than 4 hours per day. These people can spend the balance of their hours doing reporting/engagement/quality control or working on other tasks.

So, keeping this in mind, determine who at your organization is available to work on your media monitoring program. Do you have the resources available to deal with the volume you determined above?

If you do not have the man power or the skillset necessary, you can also outsource analysis, reporting and/or engagement activities to outside firms. I will cover this in more detail separately, but your PR and media monitoring firms will offer these services by the hour or on a monthly retainer.

How much will it cost?

So, let’s figure out where we are on resources.

[(Coverage volume/mentions processed per hour) x $/hr of analyst(s)] + (reporting/participation hours x $/hr of participants) + software spend + content spend (if applicable) = total cost of media management program

Using your original budget, you can determine what mix of humans and software will fit your needs and how much you have available to spend in each area.

Next, we will go over some software options at different price points.

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Photo courtesy of:  AMagill

Whether you’re a new organization or an established one looking to benefit from social media traffic, I’ve written this guide to make sure you’ve got some basics covered, as well as optimization tips and resources for further reading. Over the coming weeks, this five-installment guide will allow people with only basic internet knowledge to create and manage a social media presence. The pace might frustrate more advanced users, so feel free to skim.

Home URL: You need a website. Period.

These days, the professional standard is a website hosted at a top level domain (such as yourcompanyname.com or .net). There are many ways to go about this, and your needs will dictate what direction I would recommend you pursue. For inexperienced users seeking the best results, paying for a professional web design firm is the way to go. Do research, and shop around. Some things to consider would be how long they’ve been in business, your impressions of their portfolio, pricing, etc. This can be a costly route, but often times you get what you pay for.

Ideally, you’ll opt for a website powered by a content management system (CMS) – this is a system that will make your life a whole lot easier, allowing you to quickly post things to your website, change its settings, etc. without having much coding knowledge. Some examples of content management systems would include Drupal, WordPress, Xoomla, and Typo. There are lots. I’d recommend going with a popular CMS with a historical following – Drupal and WordPress are my favorites.

If you’re on a very limited budget, some web hosting companies offer automatic installs of content management systems; but there are several disadvantages to this. Many times, the installed CMS will not be the current version, and is vulnerable to security holes or other exploits fixed in a more recent release. This approach is also not beginner-friendly; fleshing out a bare content management system into a budding web portal takes time, skill, and knowledge. If you’re completely unfamiliar with these skill sets, I urge you to support your local web design firm.

Use your website to provide your contact information, mission statements, etc. Release company news and announcements on your web portal, and make sure it is up-to-date. Nobody likes getting to websites that haven’t been touched since 2004, and in 2013 they won’t like yours last updated in 2009. If appropriate, blog on your website, but do so cautiously and strategically. Take time to draft and revise posts, and familiarize yourself with good blog authorship practices by reading through tips from seasoned veterans. A Google search is a good place to start.

The quality of your posts will largely determine the return on investment your website shows you. In my experience, the most direct way to increase revenue is to optimize for specific keyword searches, and then post quality, original content that relates to those keywords. Nothing increases consistent, high-quality traffic more than ranking high on search engines and giving people what they are searching for. Depending on your market, this may be relatively easy or extremely expensive. A web firm that offers search optimization services should be able to determine the competition for your strategic keywords.

Next week we’ll take a look at our first round of social media, and begin working with these websites as well as integrating them back into a CMS-based web portal.

Image courtesy of Guoquan.

Lots of good stuff this week. If you have other resources, please leave them in the comments.

4 Easy Steps to Better PR Measurement – David Mullen

Understanding Social Media Metrics: Basic Modeling – Left the Box

How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit – IIG – From the masters of Social Media lists. If you’re not familiar with their resources, check out “Superlists and Top Posts” in the right navigation.

PR Measurement Interview with Katie Delahaye Paine – Top Rank

The Advanced Quick ‘n Dirty Guide to Social Media Monitoring – Social Media Explorer

Using Social Media to Listen to Consumers – Ad Age -  “Know your customers’ social media habits” – yes!

Why Social Media Marketing Fails (and How to Fix It) – Web Expo 2.0 – Session was covered by CRM, Marketing Mystic, ZDNET and Horn Group.

Barry Leggetter: Evaluation Important in Recession – Institute for Public Relations

Social Media and the Cult of Marketing ROI – Scenes from the Superhighway

Experiments in Social Media Marketing: A Recap – PSFK

How to Embrace the Process of Social Media – Social Media Explorer

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Other Cool Stuff:

MediaOn Twitter Database – Growing  (free and online!) database of media contacts by media outlet and twitter ID (courtesy of @prsarahevans, @skydiver, @melissahourigan and @edunigan)
Full Story via @PRSarahEvans blog.

Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music. Still in beta, but neat idea.

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Last week’s top posts.

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo by: Somadjinn

In his latest blog entry, Chris Brogan gave great advice passed along to him via Conn Fishburn (Yahoo):  bring wine to the picnic.

Specially, Brogan is referencing the ‘social media picnic’ most of us attend on a daily basis.  Fishburn wants us to bring something of value to our online peers instead of only self-marketing.  It’s a simple principal, but definitely one that bears repeating.  Many Twitter, Facebook, and other platform users neglect this important aspect of the Internet game.

As a personal example, I have an aspiring DJ friend that wants nothing more than to have his musical creations reach a wide audience.  Any time I have the chance to mention him, I try to provide a little linkage to his music, as I just did.  It’s a small act that can mean a lot to the friend, when done appropriately.    Below, I’ve reprinted Brogan’s 10 Ways to Build Relationships Before You Ask for Anything from his post.  I can confidently say that I agree with all of these.

• Comment on and reply to other people’s observations, posts, and ideas. (Sometimes, just retweeting someone’s status message in Twitter is a gesture that matters to people.)
• Share good information freely, such as pointing to great blog posts or articles.
• Make virtual introductions when you see obvious like-minded people who could do to know each other.
• Create useful media like blog posts or ebooks or videos that help people.
• Find mutual interest points and talk about them. (Bonus points to you if they’re off-topic from your business needs, like talking about the Red Sox or Barbecue.)
• Remember things about the other person, such as whether they have a big meeting on Thursday, and ask them about it on Friday.
• Help when someone is promoting their thing. Spread information for other people liberally.
• Find causes and nonprofit experiences to help out. Showing that you’re not just a capitalist pig goes a long way.
• Reply to people and build conversations.
• Thank people when they’re helpful.

Interestingly, most of these suggestions are things that would be equally helpful for ‘real life’ friendships.  I wouldn’t mind if more of my convos in real life contained valuable information.

The other day Hannah sent me a blog post titled 10 Things to Do Immediately After a Networking Event. There’s a lot of good information in there, and while I agree with most of it I’m going to have to take issue with number 2.

2) Connect on Facebook. My favorite strategy. I look the people up on Facebook using their business cards and add them to my network. Now, I know their birthdays, their occupation, and their day to day status (literally!). Best Rolodex in the world.

I know people use different networking sites in different ways. And I’ve been in a handful of arguments about the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook. But I can say that 99% of those friends are people I have actually hung out with casually outside of a networking event, conference, or business club. I wouldn’t consider somebody I wanted to form a potential new business relationship with as a Facebook friend candidate. It just seems a little too personal.

Then there’s LinkedIn. They don’t even call them friends, they’re “connections.” I consider that more of a professional network than Facebook and that’s pretty much what it’s intended to be. My LinkedIn connections are all people I’ve worked with in some capacity at one point or another, save for a few close friends that going to be connected to me on any networking site that I’m part of.

Last but not least, there’s the Wild West of social networking, Twitter. If I follow somebody it’s because I’m interested in what they have to tweet about. I’m not going to get my feelings hurt if they don’t follow me back. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can be part of the conversation without having to know somebody at all.

Am I alone here? Do you have boundaries for different social network “friends” or is it just a free for all now?