ImpactWatch Blog

This is the roundup from the week of 22 June.

• Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools? – Three Minds

• The Value of PR Measurement – Part 3 - Show me numbers
  

• The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms) – AttentionMax
  

• GoogleReader + SocialMention + PostRank = ORM for free ;-) – PhilGo20
  

• Social Media Measurement, Part 2: What I Really, Really Want - Media Bullseye
  

• Measure the Impact of Blogger Outreach: 9 Key Metrics – Marketing Sherpa
  

• Many PR Pros Are Using AVE’s. Why are we surprised? – Dix & Eaton

• Brand Monitoring: Social Media Monitoring – Why Monitor After All? – Brand Monitoring
  

• Social Media + You – Brand and Reputation Management = Disaster – JMG Galleries
  

• Social Media Research & Measurement Woes – Great Minds
  

• Live from OMMA Social: The State of Social Media Metrics – Search Marketing Sage
  

• Networked Insights makes sense of Internet chatter about brands – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
  

• Introducing Conversation Impact – Social Media Measurement for Marketers – Ogilvy

Slides and Conferences

It’s All In The Numbers – Social Media Measurement – The Agency Blog

Review: First European Summit on Measurement – Communication Controlling

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo Courtesy of Multiple Fragments of Tissue.

• Social Media, Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement – Beeline Labs

Beeline Labs recently conducted extensive research into how major corporations are monitoring, measuring and engaging via social media.

• The Difference Between Value and ROI – Metrics Man

Remember that silly distinction you learned in elementary school?  A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.  ROI is a form of value, but not all value takes the form of ROI.

• Tips to choose an Online Reputation Monitoring vendor – PhilGo20

Before evaluating the solutions, one would need some parameters to do so. Here’s a short list half-mine, half-borrowed

• Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples – Read Write Web

That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it’s a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation.

• No patience for the ROI of Social Media discussion – Buzz Marketing for Technology

And at this point in social media or even in the development of the web – we have plenty of ways to track and measure lead generation coming from Social Media. So much so that I have lost all patience for this discussion.

• Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate – Research Live

Who’s best at sifting through online chatter to find the insights that businesses need? People or computers?

• New technology turns social media into market research – Canada.com

A plethora of free services already exist. Google, for example, can alert a brand manager whenever a brand name is mentioned online. Other services scan Twitter or blogs for keywords. Yet they don’t break down the conversations by demographics or “sentiment” – whether people like or dislike a brand.

• Creepy If You Do, Clueless If You Don’t – The Net-Savvy Executive

Somehow, they’ve developed an expectation of privacy in public communication channels. They’re mistaken. But it’s in your company’s interest to avoid creeping out the customers, anyway.

• Online Reputation Management As Seen From The Outside – Read Write Web

Here, panelist Chris Gatewood, an IP, entertainment, and new media attorney, discusses a few important aspects of social media reputation management as it relates to the wider audience of social media users, not just the “new media gurus” who live online.

• Are You Monitoring Your Online Reputation? – Small Business Update

What this lawsuit shows is the need to be proactive at every turn when it comes to hearing the conversations that are taking place as well as securing your brand early on. Otherwise, you might just find that someone’s been proactive for you.

• Xerox embarks on social media monitoring program – Search CRM

Xerox is now establishing an internal task force to determine how it wants to monitor social media moving forward and whether it needs a single listening platform. It’s a broad group that includes corporate communication, corporate advertising, the vice president of the Xerox.com Web team, and a representative from each of the individual business groups.

• Five Easy Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success – Social Media Club

Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch a campaign. How do you define whether your campaign will be a success or not?

Slides and Conferences

AMEC Measurement Summit – The essence – PR Measurement in Germany

Assessing the assessors at AMEC’s Summit on Measurement – Katie Paine

Review of day one of AMEC and the IPR’s European Summit on PR Evaluation – Metrica

Driving ROI On Twitter – Hubspot

Unlocking Social Media’s ROI Through Monitoring and Participation – AMA Webinar
-

-
See Last Week’s Top Posts
-
Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo couresy of Willrad.

• Five Things You Should Know About Social Media ROI – Metrics Man

There is another group of online Zen Masters who would have you believe social media ROI is old school thinking and not in tune with social media Zeitgeist.   In that case, I’ll take’ Old School’ for $100, please.

• 6 Directions on Social Media Measurement: How Will We Come Together? – Digital Influence Mapping Project

Still, the question remains – are we better off with this English-garden growth of discussions, forums, white-paper symposiums, or do we need “one ring to bind them all?”

• Social Media Marketing Measurement: Are We More Than 33% There Yet? – Digital Influence Mapping Project

The real power of social media marketing is when it becomes integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing – ALL sorts.

• The Twitter Metrics that will completely change the way you use Twitter – Site Visibility

But for some reason there really seems to have been a perfect storm for Twitter, as already some people have come up with some really valuable metrics to measure how well you are performing on the site.

• Using Cost per Click for Social Media ROI – Page One PR

While I’m not saying social media campaigns should replace advertising, the comparison will be highly useful to marketers attempting to justify spending a portion of limited budgets on social media.

• Social media was made to measure for marketers who know what to look for – Marketing Magazine

Regardless of whether a marketer relies on their own industriousness or a paid product, it is critical that industry executives recognize the importance of measuring social media endeavours. As Fox says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

• The Difference Between Hard and Hard Work - Altitude Branding

Social media and specifically measuring and tracking its impact is not difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s meticulous, and takes thought and insight. But it’s not hard.

• Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell – Andrew Chen

What are your customers measuring? By looking at how they define value, then you get yourself aligned to them as closely as possible. Answering this question sets your company up for value creation, which then unlocks the ability to gain something from that value, then you have to start here.

• The Skinny on Social Media Monitoring – Kuno Creative

If you’re using social media for business, you need a social media monitoring strategy. Period. Here’s why and what to do about it.

• Making Quantitative Sense of the Social Web – Dave Evans

In response to e-mail, this column will address measuring the impact of the social Web on your business and using what you learn to move forward.

• (Social Media) Listening When No One’s Talking (About You, Anyway) – Radian6

Unless you’re in a super-niche or groundbreaking industry, you’ve got competition. You’re likely not the only game in town, so if someone isn’t talking about you, they may very well be talking about your competitors, and you can learn a lot about what they’re saying.

• Nielsen Glitch Focuses Attention On New Online Measurement System, Impact Unknown – Media Post

A transition that would likely have sparked a firestorm of debate in Nielsen’s core medium of television – a complete overhaul of the system it uses to produce its audience estimates – has gone virtually unnoticed in the online industry.

-

Tool Lists

• Paid Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Tools: The (almost) Complete Guide – Creative Traction [Partial list of larger monitoring firms]

-

Slides and Conference Coverage:

• Tales from the Trenches: How Organizations Are Measuring Value in Social Media – KD Paine

• 10 superb social media presentations – eConsultancy

• Tweet this, blog that: PRNews panel explores measuring social media – Communication Ammo

• International leaders in media research come together at the European Summit on Measurement – Valerie Simon

-
See Last Week’s Top Posts
-
Follow Hannah on Twitter.
Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives

The Aberdeen Group’s study Brand Reputation Management: Using Online Monitoring to Protect the Company’s Crown Jewels looks at the effect of social media monitoring on brand management and groups survey respondents into 3 tiers: Best-in-class, Industry Average and Laggards.

With these three designations, the study draws a series of conclusions about what goals and processes lead to successful use of social media monitoring to protect brand reputation.

My main problem with the study is that it was fairly difficult to separate cause from effect. I outline some of those issues below.

Additionally, the study makes several points and recommendations about consumer-generated content and engaging customers, despite a strong emphasis throughout on legal issues such as fraud and trademark abuse. I agree that legal issues can arise through social media monitoring, but believe that the response process, after identification, is far different than for most other media monitoring issues. I think the study might have been improved by treating these functions separately.

Who is Best-In-Class?

The nexus of the study is the definition of their company tiers. “Aberdeen used two key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class (BIC) companies [from the other companies]…These companies experienced the following performance gains over the past 12 months.”

• 95% improved their performance in protecting their online brand reputation
• 75% experienced an increase in shareholder value

But a key conclusion of the report is that “Best-in-Class companies are nearly twice as likely as Industry Average companies and 12.5 times more likely than Laggards to experience year-over-year increases in shareholder value.”

Isn’t that part of what made them Best-in-Class in the first place? Not to mention shareholder value = money = more resources for monitoring/brand intervention.

Do companies that monitor social media increase shareholder value? Or does increasing shareholder value lead to better monitoring programs?

Why Monitor?

Another conclusion is that “40% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 24% of Laggards, see the need to protect online brand reputation as a top-three reason to deploy a social media monitoring solution.” Sadly, “protecting brand reputation” – the raison d’etre of the study – is actually at the bottom of the respondents’ list of reasons to monitor social media.

The study provides the following chart of “Top Two Pressures – All Companies”

• Build Positive Market Awareness – 45%
• Increase return on Marketing Investment – 23%
• Increase Customer Retention – 19%
• Improve Brand Advocacy – 15%
• Increase Customer Satisfaction – 13%
• Protect Brand Reputation – 11%
• Improve Market Research Capabilities – 8%

I’m not even sure what these percentages mean (it’s 134%) but any way you look at it, 11% is not impressive.

If you look at the poll from the conclusion above, the situation gets even murkier.

Best-In-Class companies were the top 20% of 275, so there were 55 of those. According to the conclusion, 22 BIC companies chose “need to protect online brand reputation” as a top 3 reason to deploy social media monitoring vs 20 Laggard companies (30% of 275). That doesn’t seem very significant.

It was also kind of confusing to draw a conclusion from a Top 3 poll and provide a visual of Top 2 responses.

Focusing Social Media Response

That Top Two Pressures chart also got me thinking about who companies are targeting with their social media response strategies. With it’s focus on “brand abuse”, the Aberdeen report is heavy with warning examples of social media shysters spreading vicious rumors about corporations or illegally using their logos.

But the pressures chart shows that companies are focused on improving customer relations, not on targeting brand threats. Maybe that’s exactly what Aberdeen is pointing to as the problem.

In any case, I started thinking about spending time “building positive market awareness” vs “protecting brand reputation”. Reaching out to customers and promoting positive information about the company, instead of tracking down and trying to alter the behavior of brand opponents.

Maybe these companies do have the answer. In social media, maybe it’s more effective to vaccine the population than to quarantine the infected.

What are Best-In-Class Companies Doing?

The study goes on to say that BICs “share several common characteristics with respect to online brand reputation management”:

• 70% have a process for acting upon insights gleaned from social media monitoring
• 70% have dedicated resources devoted to SM monitoring
• 55% deliver info concerning potential threats to brand reputation to key decision makers in real-time or within hours.

So, using the definition of a BIC, we can conclude that:

Companies that are working to improve their online reputation and have money = companies that organize and support their social media monitoring process.

That makes sense.

How do Laggards become Best-In-Class?

Aberdeen has an entire chapter on recommendations and steps for companies to improve their media monitoring and response programs. It’s a pretty good list with explanatory paragraphs for each of the suggestions.

Some of the recommendations to improve Social Media Monitoring:

• Prioritize brand threats
• Create threat alerts
• Train employees to engage customers online
• Leverage digital dashboards
• Measure performance over time
• Define best practices
• Identify/measure key influencers
• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Correlate brand protection to financial outcomes

Other Interesting Stuff from the Study:

• Social Media use is increasing: 50% of respondents are increasing investments in social media.
• Nobody’s archiving their data: 55% of BIC and less than a quarter of others have a central repository for SM data.
• Everyone’s getting help: 84% of BIC and almost half of everyone else are using Social Media Monitoring tools.
• People need benchmarks and goals: Only 60% of BIC and a quarter of the rest have defined performance metrics for their monitoring program.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.
Photo courtesy of: Swamibu

• 15 Ways to Measure Return on Engagement (ROE) of Social Media – PR Sarah Evans

• How to NOT calculate Social Media R.O.I. – The Brand Builder

So… Social Media “experts” and measurement “gurus” or whatever you like to call yourselves this week… Stop with the bulls**t. If you don’t know how to calculate Social Media’s impact or its R.O.I., don’t just make something up.

• ROI vs. “Impact on X” – Understanding what Social Media ROI is and isn’t – The Brand Builder

This starts with a basic understanding of what ROI is and isn’t: If you don’t understand what your client or boss is asking for when s/he brings up ROI, you cannot help them. If they repeatedly ask you for ROI and you keep giving them impact on X instead, how disconnected are you? Think about that. Related: Social Media ROI and Impact for Adobe- Jacob Morgan

• Social Media Monitoring: Brands That Listen Make Better Friends – Matt Granfield

• The Fleeting Value Of Social Media Monitoring – Silicon Valley Watcher

I made a point that there might not be much value in the monitoring of real-time online conversations about brands because if those conversations take place in real-time, they are done and dusted by the time a corporation decides to become involved.

Related:
The Real-Time Web – Blink And You Missed It – Silicon Valley Watcher
Who Cares What People Write ? – Mark Cuban
Cuban on Fragmentation & Attention in the Blogosphere (or Why Power Laws Really Do Govern All Media) – The Technology Liberation Front

• Social Media Monitoring for Your Company’s Online “Health” – CMD Agency

What’s worse than no online chatter about you or your company? That’s easy: when the chatter is all about your competitors. Ultimately, both are bad. The former means you might be irrelevant. The latter means your competitors are eating your lunch.

• Social media success doesn’t start with ROI – Social Media.biz

Although, don’t think that not measuring your ROI before you engage in social media precludes you from measuring your social media efforts. You should, and there are tons of ways to do it.

• Measuring Linkfluence and Visual Social Media Monitoring – IStrategy Labs

One tool that is not well know in the US (because it’s a French technology with a limited private beta) is Linkfluence and I think it’s a really unique technology for use in social media marketing campaigns.

• Social Media Cost Per Click Analysis – Social Media Surfer

Over the next few months, I’ll be explaining the Cost Per Click (CPC) of social media campaigns so that they can be compared to the CPC of advertising and email campaigns.

• Social media and the acid-bath of ROI – Business Insight Zone

ROI is a fine thing. It’s fine because it gets at a fundamental, laws-of-Newton relation of business: How much will we spend? And how much will that bring us? Good. ROI works best, though, when we’re using it on known entities.

• How High Should You Set The Bar For Customer Service With Social Media Engagement? -  PR Communications

Is that expectation about the level of customer service response too high, on the part of consumers?

-
See Last Week’s Top Posts
-
Follow Hannah on Twitter.
Photo Courtesy of Evenlynishere

-

• Social Media Measurement, Part One: What I Want, What I Really, Really Want – Media Bullseye

There are two types of horrendous monitoring, one worse than the other. The first is a “clips report” simply regurgitating a bunch of stories without providing any frame of reference to what it all means. Lame.

• Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Efforts – Social Media Exchange

Here are so­­me easy­ (and­ free) way­s to­­ help­ d­etermi­ne whether y­o­­u­r so­­ci­al med­i­a effo­­rts are si­zzli­ng–o­­r fi­zzli­ng.

• Measure Time In Social Media To Determine Engagement Results – PR Communications

Time is the critical factor in social media, the more time you spend on reading, commenting and building a relationship with a colleague the greater the chances that something will happen. You can measure the time it takes to interact with a community member and the results.

• 13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools’ – MarketingProfs

• Online Reputation Management: 16 Free Tools – SitePoint

• Digital Media and Traditional Media: Will it Blend? – Chief Marketer

Agencies must continue to innovate to develop more powerful measurement tools, whether that is a tag that can track a single consumer’s behavior across channels or a holistic solution that displays all marketing in one place, along with easy-to-understand graphics and actionable insights.

• Can you measure PR in hits? – Speed Communications

So, here’s the big idea. If the media were to share website analytics such as the number of unique hits each article gained and  how long those visitors had spent reading each page,  PR’s could provide their clients with an accurate number of views for each piece of online coverage.

• How Do you Really Calculate Social Media ROI? – Bella Web Design

Our conversation on The Bella Buzz podcast today is a very important one for business owners, marketing managers, or anyone who is interested in determining how to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) that can be achieved via social media strategies.

• The Web’s Dirty Little Secret: Flawed Measurement – The Media Biz

Nine million or 42 million????? That’s like saying the circulation of the New York Times might be 800,000 or 4 million? You’d think you might pay a different price for advertising, depending on which one it was!

• How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your PR Program – Evan Carmichael

Here are eight things that smart public relations managers and consultants have learned about the use of external measurement to demonstrate the value of their programs in this environment.

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Peasap.

• Dilbert on the Accuracy of Metrics

• How to Use Social Media Metrics – SEO.com

“Social media marketing doesn’t quite lend itself to such metrics. After all, in a world of anonymity, like an online community, how can you really measure engagement or influence? Is there a way to glean useful, objective data?”

• The AVE debate: Measuring the value of PR – Brand Republic

Will this recession finally sound the death knell for the use of ‘advertising value equivalent’ and will other monitoring techniques take its place, asks Cathy Wallace.

• Beyond Clicks And CPMs: A Look At ‘Engagement’-Based Ad Deals – PaidContent.org

CPMs are the default standard for buying display, and paid search ads get measured in clicks. But when it comes to valuing a social-media sponsorship, “advertorial” content on a magazine site or even a virtual-world campaign, there’s a growing consensus that neither of those metrics is good enough.

• A New Formula for Measuring PR Success – Convince & Convert

A conversion rate methodology would put the final stake in the heart of the batch and blast press release era, which emphasizes building media lists, not media relationships.

• Social Media Metrics: Measuring your Campaign – Off Madison Ave

Therefore the real problem becomes how you go about measuring success if not through direct ROI? Answer: By measuring everything else.

• ROI in Social Media: A Look at the Arguments – eModeration

With the publication this month of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ‘Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions’, it seemed a good moment for me to write about the thorny subject, and have a look at some of the controversy around the measurement of ROI in social media.

• Measuring Social Media ROI: A Case Study (Plus: Tweet to Beat Winners) – @tferriss – 4 Hour Workweek

In this post, we’ll look at some real numbers (total capital, conversions, redemptions, etc.) from my latest educational non-profit campaign, the Twitter-based Tweet to Beat.

• The Dating Game: How Do I Pick a Vendor? – The Social Analyst

So let’s say your organization is already on board with this whole social media thing and has given you budget to start monitoring this stuff. Congratulations! but now there is a new challenge, who do you get to do this for you?

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Philo.

Three PR and Social Media Measurement Tips From KD Paine – Hubspot 

Marketers Need Metrics to Integrate Traditional and Digital Media – eMarketer

Measuring ROI Still Misunderstood – That’s the Work of Analysis, not Metrics – Click Insight

Learn to Measure Your Web Presence – TheStreet.com

Moving beyond social media metrics to business outcomes – Dirk Shaw

Social Media Metrics – Measurement, Analysis, ROI – 123 Social Media

Measuring Success in Online Communities – Marketing Mystic

Social Media Marketing Metrics – Folk Media

Social Media ROI – Part 3 – Dag Holmboe

The limits of social media monitoring – Social Media Marketing, Thoughts, Facts & Data

Tangibly Measuring Social Media Success – Microgeist

Social yardsticks: how do you measure social media? – Social Signal

Everything you need to know about social media monitoring – Marketing Mag

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Parksy1964

HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics – Mashable

Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 – ZDNET

Can PR measurement save companies? – Roots PR (Disclosure, we work with this guy’s firm)

Learn to Measure Your Web Presence - Entrepreneur

Spotlight on PR Return on Investment (ROI) – The Cutting Edge

Social Media Measurement is a Must! – Marketing Technology Blog

Make the Case for Social Media through Measurement and ROI – Armory Blog

Metrics, ROI of social media still unclear and Web analytics get social from BtoB

How Many Times Have You Been Favored – Electric Outlet

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter

Photo Courtesy of: Neeta Lind

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “This Machine Eats Tweets” on ReadWriteWeb started an interesting conversation last week by asking if corporate social media engagement is helpful or intrusive.

After a negative experience with Comcast Cable, Marshall wrote a sarcastic tweet about the company’s customer service. He received a message from Comcast on Twitter, asking if Comcast could help.

Seems like a fairly innocent, even positive exchange. But Marshall quickly realizes that Comcast most likely received some sort of automated notification of their company’s twitter mention. He posits that:

• It’s “deeply disturbing” to have a media monitoring or CRM system between customer and company (though he acknowledges that it’s unrealistic for large companies to monitor and respond to social media without technology).
• While an interaction may look like a simple exchange to the customer, the company is collecting and applying information from his/her profile (past interactions with companies,  background, influence, etc).
• Social media monitoring opens the way for marketing/sales attempts through SM platforms.

There are a lot of great comments on the post, many of which address Marshall’s concerns.

• Michael Downs mentions that some companies are using this information as an opportunity to improve customer service.
• Marcel LeBrun points out that the interaction was genuine as (at least in the case cited by Marshall) the company spokesperson has an ongoing presence on Twitter, is available to form a relationship with and personally responded to Marshall’s concern.
• Richard Petersen contributes a great list of ways that companies really can go wrong in social media engagement:

“When the company violates the norms of online social communications – spamming (as you noted); pretexting and/or astro-turfing; outsourcing your identity to others to act on your behalf; selling or upselling instead of offering  help authentically; or violating the network’s terms of service or APIs.”

• Coldbrew suggests that media monitoring tools make it difficult for companies to maintain authenticity.
• Martin Edic gets the gold star for his comment that all of this information is submitted to public forums.  If you don’t want companies to see it, make it private.

Despite the discussion surrounding media monitoring tools, I think Marshall’s main concern in the motivation of companies who engage in social media. They may decide to only respond to influentials’ complaints, or only negative comments, or only to expressions of need/sales opps.

And that’s not engaging in a “real” conversation.

But the probability of a company accidentally stumbling on your Twitter profile and genuinely wanting to have a conversation with you is…well…not very high. That person is getting paid to address your concern, to improve consumer satisfaction, to increase profits. That’s how companies work.

When you call the customer service number of a corporation or send them a help email, you’d better believe that they are looking up how much money you spend with them and how much of a pain in their ass you are, just like service reps on social media are looking at your past tweets and follower count. But maybe Average Joe’s new-found ability to trash a vendor to a few thousand of his closest friends will get him closer to VIP status.

Marshall’s concern about marketing and sales pressure through social media channels is already coming to pass. I see this every day. And sometimes do it myself.

When someone asks how to measure social media, I sent them a link to resources. When someone asks about how to  monitor their media, I answer their question. When someone asks for a recommendation, I introduce our firm.

Everyone will have a different idea of what crosses the line between helpful and intrusive, but I think social media has an advantage in finding its own happy medium – companies are listening.

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of: faeryboots